The brazilian branch of Volkswagen already gave a ticket to a suborbital flight earlier this year (through Space Adventures). The winner is a 24-year old woman. Links:
here [www.spaceadventures.com] and here [www.vw.com.br]. I remember the promotional TV spots were very cool, and almost made me wish to buy a VW car.:-)
I am sure other companies worldwide will follow suit.
You're actually suggesting a government monopoly in Internet service? We had a telecom monopoly in my country, until about ten years ago. The resulst? You either had to wait for *years* to get a phone line, or pay a couple thousand dollars in the black market, and put up with shitty service and piss-poor lines.
Government jobs usually have guaranteed job security, and little to no correlation between employee productivy and wages (raises being usually based on years of service). Not to mention the constant strikes they think they are entitled to.
About profit vs wages, again, look at the actual company statements and check for yourself that it isn't that simple, and companies have a far lower profit margin than the general public believes.
Why do you think not-for-profit = cheaper? Prices are usually cost+margin, and cost is related to efficiency, and state-owned businesses are well-known for being inefficient if not downright corrupt. It's wishful thinking to believe that government ISPs would be cheaper, unless they are run at a loss (so the other taxpayers would be paying for your internet access).
If your friend is getting much better service than you than either your infrastructure just isn't there yet, and you'll have to wait until the Toronto ISPs manage to drive their costs down to the level of the Aurora ISPs, or there is some regulation at work. You could check the net profit margins of your ISPs, if they are publicly owned, I pretty much doubt you'll see abusive margins.
Downtown in brazillian cities are chock full of people selling pirated CDs of software, games and music, one guy every block, sometimes several. A pirated software is about US$3, music is even cheaper, you can get it for a dollar. And there's a pretty good reason for the increased piracy: a copy of photoshop, for example, is two months of wages for an average graphical designer. A copy of Visual Studio, or Delphi, is from two to six months of wages for a programmer, depending on the version. And Brazil is by far not the poorest contry of the third world.
Many programmers try to push open-source alternatives in their companies, but if the company standardizes on Microsoft, and you want to train at home with the same tools you use at work, you either blow up months, possibly years of savings for that copy of Visual Studio, only to have to upgrade in another couple years, or pirate.
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...welcome our new System-on-chip Linux running embedded computing overlords.
The brazilian branch of Volkswagen already gave a ticket to a suborbital flight earlier this year (through Space Adventures). The winner is a 24-year old woman. Links: here [www.spaceadventures.com] and here [www.vw.com.br]. I remember the promotional TV spots were very cool, and almost made me wish to buy a VW car. :-)
I am sure other companies worldwide will follow suit.
For the same people who drink Smirnoff Ice, sweet wine, and spoil good scotch with Red Bull. Real men shouldn't touch this stuff with a 10-foot pole.
You're actually suggesting a government monopoly in Internet service? We had a telecom monopoly in my country, until about ten years ago. The resulst? You either had to wait for *years* to get a phone line, or pay a couple thousand dollars in the black market, and put up with shitty service and piss-poor lines.
Government jobs usually have guaranteed job security, and little to no correlation between employee productivy and wages (raises being usually based on years of service). Not to mention the constant strikes they think they are entitled to.
About profit vs wages, again, look at the actual company statements and check for yourself that it isn't that simple, and companies have a far lower profit margin than the general public believes.
Why do you think not-for-profit = cheaper? Prices are usually cost+margin, and cost is related to efficiency, and state-owned businesses are well-known for being inefficient if not downright corrupt. It's wishful thinking to believe that government ISPs would be cheaper, unless they are run at a loss (so the other taxpayers would be paying for your internet access).
If your friend is getting much better service than you than either your infrastructure just isn't there yet, and you'll have to wait until the Toronto ISPs manage to drive their costs down to the level of the Aurora ISPs, or there is some regulation at work. You could check the net profit margins of your ISPs, if they are publicly owned, I pretty much doubt you'll see abusive margins.
Downtown in brazillian cities are chock full of people selling pirated CDs of software, games and music, one guy every block, sometimes several. A pirated software is about US$3, music is even cheaper, you can get it for a dollar. And there's a pretty good reason for the increased piracy: a copy of photoshop, for example, is two months of wages for an average graphical designer. A copy of Visual Studio, or Delphi, is from two to six months of wages for a programmer, depending on the version. And Brazil is by far not the poorest contry of the third world.
Many programmers try to push open-source alternatives in their companies, but if the company standardizes on Microsoft, and you want to train at home with the same tools you use at work, you either blow up months, possibly years of savings for that copy of Visual Studio, only to have to upgrade in another couple years, or pirate.