Carriers are watching a new world unfold in front of their very eyes where they are reduced to the status of a utility company. You pay them for access - period - and all the value-added services are provided by network companies like Google. As anyone who has followed utility regulation knows, there is little or no money to be had as a plain-jane utility. Any company with shareholders is going to try and rig it so that they remain a company with value-added options that make it vastly more money than simple access fees. Once that second tier is officially created, perhaps even using the altruistic rhetoric that the carrier wants to ensure that video doesn't crowd out other traffic, then they will use that new tier to place all their own services in the upper tier and all the network services in the lower tier. This artificially 'rigs' the competition so that the public will be forced to choose the carrier's services if they want anything that works worth a damn.
This isn't going to help, though. Once WiMax firms up, ISPs could set up city-wide networks for almost nothing, relatively speaking, and relying on cable or telephone networks already laid down will be unnecessary. Non-profits, small businesses, municiple governments - anyone with arond 50K to spend on antennas - could have their own city-wide network. As they will buy directly from the tier1 providers, they will buypass the current crop of incumbent ISPs altogether. Unless the incumbents can show how their existing network can overcome the large benefits of a city-wide wireless network in some fashion, their days are numbered.
I've heard this argument many times among my friends who claim I'm a utopian and, thus, readily dismissable because utopia's supposedly can't exist in this 'real world' you cite.
If there is one truth, it is that the world of man is constantly changing and if it is capable of change, then it is capable of being changed. Changing it may require enormous effort and conviction, but changing it is definitely possible and the fact we are typing this correspondence on a computer rather than scratching it on a rock with a stick is testament to the amount of change is possible. My question to you, then, is this:
"If the world is capable of being changed and our actions each help affect that change... then what world is it that you are helping to build?"
Ideals have made as many changes to the world you live in as have more commonly cited social forces like greed. We have a more or less egalitarian society because folks with ideals hit the streets to fight for civil rights, women's rights, worker's rights, gay rights, etc. Without those very idealistic people, our world would be extremely different than it is now. Don't deride Stallman for having a utopic vision for us all, deride the folks who believe that the 'real world' doesn't involve ideals and striving for betterment for us all. Their apathy is what keeps the struggle hard.
Geez, all this doom and gloom! WiMax is around the corner, folks, and you can already buy WiMax cards on the market now. The infrastructure cost for my local cable provider to wire up my city was hundreds of millions of dollars. The cost to set up a handful of WiMax antenna's to do the same thing wirelessly would have to be less than 50K. To the banks, this is a *small* business loan. This could even be done by a non-profit organization such that the cost of administration is averaged per user. This would give a strong incentive to sign customers up as the cost/user would go down with increased users on the network. The more the merrier.
As per Amnesty International, China executes the most prisoners every year. Who is number two? The USA, ahead of Iran, Saudi Arabia and a whole host of de facto dictatorships. Democracy or not, there are certain points of the human rights debate that the US and China are actually a lot closer than one might assume. Both China and the US maintain secret prisons. Both detain people without a proper trial, legal representation or access to aid groups like the Red Cross. Both censor information that reaches the public, China overtly and the USA covertly. China makes it nigh impossible to find certain facts, the US just makes it require effort - you can't just turn on the TV and get the 'truth', so to speak. Both advocate torture, again with China doing it overtly, but with the US doing it covertly under a host of euphemisms and legal hijinks. To me, they aren't opposites. China is just further down the road that the USA seems to want to travel on.
I have a subscription with Audible and each month I can download two audio books for approx. 21 USD. In one month, I got two books that would have cost me over 60 USD on iTunes to get. If MS and MTV keep up that idea with subscription pricing, i.e. cheaper than if you bought the products a la carte, then it might actually be a good idea.
Of course, that would just leave them the difficult task of coming up with something I want to order in the first place. More top 40 stuff like there is today and no amount of money will entice me to the service.
why the company's machines were even used in the first place. The minute he announced his very partisan feelings on the election, his machines should have been instantly pulled as suspect. It should have been up to Diebold to prove they were secure and accurate instead of up to the public to prove that they weren't.
"Affect", as it is used in psychology, is a noun. When we refer to someone's mood, we refer to their "affect". You can, in this sense, affect an effect on an affect.
The question is whether you should. No one who divides their attention among multiple tasks does as well on those tasks as they do when they do the tasks one at a time. No one. Not even a gamer, does as well with divided attention. Sure, some gamers can juggle things better than most, but why would you make a concious decision to perform worse than you could at a very important and possibly life-threatening skill? We all get upset at inattentive or distracted drivers and with good cause - they have our lives in their hands and they aren't giving those lives the respect they are due. So... why would you do the same in return?
I brought this exact scenario to the attention of Lavalife when I was doing some research on online dating. I found that many women specifically mentioned a minimum height restriction in their ads, but other forms of overt discrimination (race, income, etc.) were monitored and generally curtailed by the Lavalife staff. I asked the customer service rep why they allowed women to make openly discriminatory and sometimes insulting statements about male height when they more or less monitored and filtered other discriminatory behaviour. I offered up several examples that I had found in my sample, including the beauty "you must be taller than this line to ride this ride".
He forwarded me to a supervisor, who explained that they monitored 'socially-unacceptable' behaviour and while this type of entry was insulting and directly compared smaller men to children, it was considered socially acceptable to discriminate based on height. I was actually grateful for the conversation, because it led me to a new research project where I studied height descrimination in North America (worse here than anywhere else in the world) and I used that research for my masters thesis. Small men face virtually identical obstacles when it comes to promotions and pay to what women see, for example. I would have never known that if I hadn't been curious.
You are right that the per channel price will go up if a successful a la carte cable service comes into existence. Most broadcasters offer more than one channel and all who do give the cable and satellite providers deals if they buy all the channels the broadcaster carries. If customers demand a la carte ordering, then the cable and satellite providers will be forced to do a la carte ordering from the broadcasters, driving the per channel price up for everyone. No one gets a bulk deal, in effect.
That being said, the overall cost for the services people want will likely go down. My personal tastes run to about ten channels on the entire lineup my cable company offers. My current providers works out to 0.66 CAD per channel per month, but I have to order 85 channels in order to get the ones I enjoy with their current packaging scheme. The cost of the ten I enjoy could increase to 5.00 CAD per channel per month and I would still come out saving compared to what I pay now overall and the perceived value *to me* would be considerably higher. I would love to support the channels I enjoy with my money instead of propping up a bunch of channels I consider inane so that the masses can have their Survivor.
It depends greatly upon who your shareholders are. Most large scale investors like mutuals, banks, venture capitalists, etc. are all aimed towards getting as much profit as possible and they will lean on the company to do such, regardless of the lofty goals the company has set. As long as the company is successful, they can fend some of that pressure off, but wait until Google isn't the media darling and money is in short supply. Then, they will be a lot more attentive to the needs of their shareholders because they will need their support to secure the share price and thus obtain further loans.
Furthermore, none of those investors created the company out of thin air and so don't have a proprietary sense of ownership like the founder will. If Google sells a great enough percentage of its shares off, then that group looking for money only will begin to have more influence and will start to affect company policy.
With cable and telephone network owners leaning towards hobbling or curtailing competitive services that use their lines, I think it is high time that governments get involved to guarantee their citizens access to vital services without the inherent filtering the current ISPs will use to promote their own services. Removing the Internet in a country would likely collapse their economy at this point, which indicates exactly how much of a vital service it is, and that it should be treated as a utility as a result.
Re:Disappointed by Mac Mini as entertainment cente
on
Mac mini, Apple DVR?
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· Score: 1
I echo your complaints, but will add to them...
DVI is already disappearing from TVs I see sold at electronics retailers in favour of HDMI. I know there is an adaptor to convert DVI to HDMI, but if what you want is top-notch video quality, then some kludgy adaptor isn't going to give it to you. I'm also afraid that with the shift to HDMI, that an independent audio cable (Toslink or SPDIF) will disappear, making it more difficult to wire up systems exactly the way you might wish to.
What I would like to see is HDMI plus an optical output for 5.1, enabling me to run audio and video to the TV for general viewing, but also allowing me to run surround sound to a receiver for when I want the extra oomph over the TV speakers.
I highly disagree. Add a Mac Mini, a couple of extra HDD units made to match from any of a number of manufacturers, then route everything into something classy and small like a Cyrus system. Not all A/V units are big and black.
they want us to concentrate on what they can do (and are doing) instead of what they can't? I would be upset if the BBC wanted to interview me about my blog and all they could talk about was my country's politics, especially if my blog was about something completely unrelated.
I can see the logic in the argument.
on
The Demise of IP?
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· Score: 1
It is flawed, though.
In essence, they claim that if we standardize on something like OpenOffice, then *all* we will use for public documents will be OpenOffice. There won't be competition for that standard, essentially, and so the standard will wither without competition to drive it forward. You need competition to bring new products to market that don't work on established lines of reasoning, and they don't feel that there will be enough incentive for that creative thought without protecting IP.
The flaws are twofold. One standard for open documents is coming forward now, but that doesn't mean that it will be the only one. Assuming the current status quo will be how it will be forever is guaranteed to be a wrong guess. The second flaw is that humans get motivated by lots of things, not just profit. Taking the guaranteed profit of protected IP out will just change the type of people bringing new products to market - the products will still keep coming. You won't see suits, but inventors themselves, and many of them doing it for professional recognition more than the cash.
I am concerned for your mental health as I have been tracking the growing battle between the RIAA and its member companies and the nefarious 'downloaders' they seek to curb. I envision countless stressful budget meetings, security meetings and reactionary meetings whenever a new DRM method is cracked or discovered like Sony's. The legal budget alone to push record company friendly legislation through in every country you operate in, the necessary 'bribes' to get this to pass, along with the legal funds necessary to enforce these laws and punish offenders must be considerable.
Have you ever thought that perhaps all this money the battle is costing you is... too much? Would the money you lose by 'giving in' be offset by the great sum of money you are spending to curb a worldwide phenomenon that shows no signs of stopping? Perhaps instead of fighing downloaders, you should recruit them. Find out from them exactly what they would like to see with their downloads (security, high bit rate, different bands, etc.) and then get in the game yourselves. Charge $5 a song, but give the downloader lifetime rights to copy, backup and re-use the contents of the file to his or her heart's content in exchange for this price. Let them choose the bitrate and file type of their download to maximize their possible usage. I know that you miss the days where we bought seven copies of the cassette because they wore out long before our love of the music wore out, but those days are gone and never to return.
You'll make more than a download at iTunes, would embrace a new technology that you should have embraced a long time ago, would save on that giant legal budget and get the rest you most certainly need and deserve. What price is peace of mind?
I keep saying it, hoping Apple will listen. Move the optical drive out of the unit and drop down to an 8" LCD tablet that is pen driven, but runs a normal copy of OSX. Ship it with a docking station that supports DVI, digital audio, USB 2.0 and Firewire 800. Support Airport Express and Bluetooth on it and I would have everything I need to replace two desktops (work and home), my iPod and my cell phone. I could carry the computer, a portable keyboard and mouse, the power adaptor and another battery in the same space my 12" Powerbook takes up now, but with half the weight and half the hassle as far as connections go.
You are right, history was worse than what we have now, but I can see where the previous poster was coming from. What we have is in decline, not in growth.
Sure, I can vote, but my vote means nothing when those voting machines can be tapped into from some back room and manipulated without any paper trail to ensure my vote is counted and counted fairly. Where ever Diebold machines were used, there were statistically anomalous results, most of which are impossible to explain through sheer chance. I never thought I would live to see the day of rigged elections, secret prisons and government accepted torture in the US... but they are here, nonetheless.
Sure, I have an Internet connection, but my broadband provider is telling me which services available on the Internet I can use to their potential and which they will hobble because they disagree with them. I could go to another provider, but they are all considering something similar in my area. I pay twice as much as a Frenchman for 1/4 the speed and I'm supposed to think this is a good deal.
Yes, I can post angrily on Slashdot, but only under a pseudonym. If someone discovers who I am, then the flood of angry "take it or leave it" emails start pouring in, along with the death threats, badly spelled insults and racial slurs that seem to pop up when you disagree with the religious right. My neighbours will start to slander me for being unpatriotic because some jacknut on Fox News told them that the only way to be patriotic is to goose-step like good little soldiers and they can't see it any other way.
Yes, I'm not starving, but plenty of people in the States are every day and that number is growing all the time. Every company that ships their operations overseas to the cheap labour is another nail in the coffin of the middle class and when that is successfully killed off by the elite here in the west, we'll have nothing but low paying service jobs to cling to. Most Wal-Mart employees have to use food stamps to get by if they have a family. That's our future as a nation.
I like what I have now and it is better than any time in history, but the powerful always want more and that will come at my expense unless I defend what I already have. I don't like the slide I'm seeing at all.
a) reducing the language barrier to entry opens up the works to generations that struggle to understand a modern novel, let alone one written in archair Middle English and in verse. Without intense instruction, how many of the leetspeek folks would actually understand Hamlet? If they can't understand it, they can't enjoy it and if they can't enjoy it, they can't take that next step to learning it in the original text and if they don't do that step, and this is key, then they can't preserve it and teach it to generations down the road.
b) The English language is wonderful in its complexity and Shakespeare's age is arguably when it was at its most florid. A "dumbing down" of the literature of this period, regardless of the author, can only ever lose some of that. If part of what makes it a classic is the use of the language, then how can reducing that language to leetspeek possibly retain those qualities that make it a classic? A classic like Hamlet is much more than simply an interesting plot and the wonderful interplay between the characters, the puns, the double entendres and social references will all be lost in the translation. So will the incredible use of the language. It is as if someone was taking a beautiful, hand-carved chair from the height of the Rennaissance, converting it to a modern IKEA chair, and passing it off as the classic with a new twist to help new folks understand the genius of the chair. I'm sure they'll get the gist in ten seconds flat, but that gist isn't the most important part of that chair, is it?
The country that spends more on its military than the rest of the world combined gets to run the Internet. Wait, it gets better. That same country just invaded a sovereign nation that had not attacked it first using dubious and, dare I say, deceptive reasoning to justify it. Oh, ho! They even operate a system of secret CIA gulags in eastern Europe to keep prisoners without legal representation, access to the Red Cross or any semblance of legal status. I'm rolling in the aisles, here. They even have an entire prison housing people called 'enemy combatants' because those pesky Geneva Conventions mean that actual prisoners of war have to be treated with certain minimum standards, and those minimum standards just won't do! Heck, who needs International agreements at all, they say, and back out of virtually all their commitments made before this administration. Nukes? Hell, yeah. Land mines? Keep 'em coming. Chemical weapons? We can use 'em, but no one else can. International Court? Don't get me started - we wouldn't commit war crimes... no, never.
The capper is that they ship people off to get tortured for them in client states under a program of 'extraordinary rendition' because both International law and US law says that torture is illegal... but they still really want to do it, anyway. Their own Senate tries to curb that nasty behaviour but the President threatens to veto their attempt and the Vice President works around the clock to get exemptions for the CIA. I guess there is too much of an investment in those gulags to give up without a fight.
The Project for the New American Century, indeed! I just wonder what kind of century it will be...
I've ran the numbers for solar cells and windmill generators and can't see the overall savings.
I may sound petty, but you are comparing century old industries to two that have been in the field for less than 30 years. In that period, the KwH cost for wind, for example, had dropped from many times that of gas to only twice as high. Give both wind and solar the same 100+ years to work with, and they will eventually go lower, guaranteed. In addition, don't discount opposition from the existing fuels and how that can add to your cost. Your home comes with a furnace that uses existing fuels automatically. You don't have to add it, licence it with the city, install it, etc. Solar and wind are always added on after the fact at your cost and to an existing installation, which is always more expensive than building it in from the start. If solar and wind take off to the point where they are generally accepted like gas or coal, then cities will set bylaws so that you can add a wind tower below x feet without consulting them. As it is now, you have to apply to even put it in. When was the last time you applied to put in a gas furnace?
Yeah, and the current US government's trend of legitimizing torture, avoiding their obligations under the Geneva Convention, backing out of every nuclear treaty they've signed in the past 50 years and creating a system of hidden gulags around the world where they can keep people without scrutiny is extremely comforting. Given that the US has shown that they will actually pre-emptively invade a country and has more military spending than the rest of the world combined, the rest of the world should be right in taking something of such importance as the Internet from those bozos. Get someone sane in office and the rest of the world will back off, trust me.
Yeah, that list of facist states like Sweden, Finland, France and the UK is pretty long, too. Everyone wants the US to relinquish control to an international body, not just the true fascist states. With the US looking more and more like a radical theocracy each day, I would be leary of them having control over a key part of my banking infrastructure, too.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't going to help, though. Once WiMax firms up, ISPs could set up city-wide networks for almost nothing, relatively speaking, and relying on cable or telephone networks already laid down will be unnecessary. Non-profits, small businesses, municiple governments - anyone with arond 50K to spend on antennas - could have their own city-wide network. As they will buy directly from the tier1 providers, they will buypass the current crop of incumbent ISPs altogether. Unless the incumbents can show how their existing network can overcome the large benefits of a city-wide wireless network in some fashion, their days are numbered.
If there is one truth, it is that the world of man is constantly changing and if it is capable of change, then it is capable of being changed. Changing it may require enormous effort and conviction, but changing it is definitely possible and the fact we are typing this correspondence on a computer rather than scratching it on a rock with a stick is testament to the amount of change is possible. My question to you, then, is this:
"If the world is capable of being changed and our actions each help affect that change ... then what world is it that you are helping to build?"
Ideals have made as many changes to the world you live in as have more commonly cited social forces like greed. We have a more or less egalitarian society because folks with ideals hit the streets to fight for civil rights, women's rights, worker's rights, gay rights, etc. Without those very idealistic people, our world would be extremely different than it is now. Don't deride Stallman for having a utopic vision for us all, deride the folks who believe that the 'real world' doesn't involve ideals and striving for betterment for us all. Their apathy is what keeps the struggle hard.
Geez, all this doom and gloom! WiMax is around the corner, folks, and you can already buy WiMax cards on the market now. The infrastructure cost for my local cable provider to wire up my city was hundreds of millions of dollars. The cost to set up a handful of WiMax antenna's to do the same thing wirelessly would have to be less than 50K. To the banks, this is a *small* business loan. This could even be done by a non-profit organization such that the cost of administration is averaged per user. This would give a strong incentive to sign customers up as the cost/user would go down with increased users on the network. The more the merrier.
As per Amnesty International, China executes the most prisoners every year. Who is number two? The USA, ahead of Iran, Saudi Arabia and a whole host of de facto dictatorships. Democracy or not, there are certain points of the human rights debate that the US and China are actually a lot closer than one might assume. Both China and the US maintain secret prisons. Both detain people without a proper trial, legal representation or access to aid groups like the Red Cross. Both censor information that reaches the public, China overtly and the USA covertly. China makes it nigh impossible to find certain facts, the US just makes it require effort - you can't just turn on the TV and get the 'truth', so to speak. Both advocate torture, again with China doing it overtly, but with the US doing it covertly under a host of euphemisms and legal hijinks. To me, they aren't opposites. China is just further down the road that the USA seems to want to travel on.
Of course, that would just leave them the difficult task of coming up with something I want to order in the first place. More top 40 stuff like there is today and no amount of money will entice me to the service.
why the company's machines were even used in the first place. The minute he announced his very partisan feelings on the election, his machines should have been instantly pulled as suspect. It should have been up to Diebold to prove they were secure and accurate instead of up to the public to prove that they weren't.
"Affect", as it is used in psychology, is a noun. When we refer to someone's mood, we refer to their "affect". You can, in this sense, affect an effect on an affect.
The question is whether you should. No one who divides their attention among multiple tasks does as well on those tasks as they do when they do the tasks one at a time. No one. Not even a gamer, does as well with divided attention. Sure, some gamers can juggle things better than most, but why would you make a concious decision to perform worse than you could at a very important and possibly life-threatening skill? We all get upset at inattentive or distracted drivers and with good cause - they have our lives in their hands and they aren't giving those lives the respect they are due. So ... why would you do the same in return?
He forwarded me to a supervisor, who explained that they monitored 'socially-unacceptable' behaviour and while this type of entry was insulting and directly compared smaller men to children, it was considered socially acceptable to discriminate based on height. I was actually grateful for the conversation, because it led me to a new research project where I studied height descrimination in North America (worse here than anywhere else in the world) and I used that research for my masters thesis. Small men face virtually identical obstacles when it comes to promotions and pay to what women see, for example. I would have never known that if I hadn't been curious.
That being said, the overall cost for the services people want will likely go down. My personal tastes run to about ten channels on the entire lineup my cable company offers. My current providers works out to 0.66 CAD per channel per month, but I have to order 85 channels in order to get the ones I enjoy with their current packaging scheme. The cost of the ten I enjoy could increase to 5.00 CAD per channel per month and I would still come out saving compared to what I pay now overall and the perceived value *to me* would be considerably higher. I would love to support the channels I enjoy with my money instead of propping up a bunch of channels I consider inane so that the masses can have their Survivor.
Furthermore, none of those investors created the company out of thin air and so don't have a proprietary sense of ownership like the founder will. If Google sells a great enough percentage of its shares off, then that group looking for money only will begin to have more influence and will start to affect company policy.
In other words, it is only a matter of time.
With cable and telephone network owners leaning towards hobbling or curtailing competitive services that use their lines, I think it is high time that governments get involved to guarantee their citizens access to vital services without the inherent filtering the current ISPs will use to promote their own services. Removing the Internet in a country would likely collapse their economy at this point, which indicates exactly how much of a vital service it is, and that it should be treated as a utility as a result.
DVI is already disappearing from TVs I see sold at electronics retailers in favour of HDMI. I know there is an adaptor to convert DVI to HDMI, but if what you want is top-notch video quality, then some kludgy adaptor isn't going to give it to you. I'm also afraid that with the shift to HDMI, that an independent audio cable (Toslink or SPDIF) will disappear, making it more difficult to wire up systems exactly the way you might wish to.
What I would like to see is HDMI plus an optical output for 5.1, enabling me to run audio and video to the TV for general viewing, but also allowing me to run surround sound to a receiver for when I want the extra oomph over the TV speakers.
I highly disagree. Add a Mac Mini, a couple of extra HDD units made to match from any of a number of manufacturers, then route everything into something classy and small like a Cyrus system. Not all A/V units are big and black.
they want us to concentrate on what they can do (and are doing) instead of what they can't? I would be upset if the BBC wanted to interview me about my blog and all they could talk about was my country's politics, especially if my blog was about something completely unrelated.
In essence, they claim that if we standardize on something like OpenOffice, then *all* we will use for public documents will be OpenOffice. There won't be competition for that standard, essentially, and so the standard will wither without competition to drive it forward. You need competition to bring new products to market that don't work on established lines of reasoning, and they don't feel that there will be enough incentive for that creative thought without protecting IP.
The flaws are twofold. One standard for open documents is coming forward now, but that doesn't mean that it will be the only one. Assuming the current status quo will be how it will be forever is guaranteed to be a wrong guess. The second flaw is that humans get motivated by lots of things, not just profit. Taking the guaranteed profit of protected IP out will just change the type of people bringing new products to market - the products will still keep coming. You won't see suits, but inventors themselves, and many of them doing it for professional recognition more than the cash.
I am concerned for your mental health as I have been tracking the growing battle between the RIAA and its member companies and the nefarious 'downloaders' they seek to curb. I envision countless stressful budget meetings, security meetings and reactionary meetings whenever a new DRM method is cracked or discovered like Sony's. The legal budget alone to push record company friendly legislation through in every country you operate in, the necessary 'bribes' to get this to pass, along with the legal funds necessary to enforce these laws and punish offenders must be considerable.
Have you ever thought that perhaps all this money the battle is costing you is ... too much? Would the money you lose by 'giving in' be offset by the great sum of money you are spending to curb a worldwide phenomenon that shows no signs of stopping? Perhaps instead of fighing downloaders, you should recruit them. Find out from them exactly what they would like to see with their downloads (security, high bit rate, different bands, etc.) and then get in the game yourselves. Charge $5 a song, but give the downloader lifetime rights to copy, backup and re-use the contents of the file to his or her heart's content in exchange for this price. Let them choose the bitrate and file type of their download to maximize their possible usage. I know that you miss the days where we bought seven copies of the cassette because they wore out long before our love of the music wore out, but those days are gone and never to return.
You'll make more than a download at iTunes, would embrace a new technology that you should have embraced a long time ago, would save on that giant legal budget and get the rest you most certainly need and deserve. What price is peace of mind?
Sincerely,
Empty Yo
forces their IT folks to wear clothes. Shouldn't the fur be enough?
I keep saying it, hoping Apple will listen. Move the optical drive out of the unit and drop down to an 8" LCD tablet that is pen driven, but runs a normal copy of OSX. Ship it with a docking station that supports DVI, digital audio, USB 2.0 and Firewire 800. Support Airport Express and Bluetooth on it and I would have everything I need to replace two desktops (work and home), my iPod and my cell phone. I could carry the computer, a portable keyboard and mouse, the power adaptor and another battery in the same space my 12" Powerbook takes up now, but with half the weight and half the hassle as far as connections go.
Sure, I can vote, but my vote means nothing when those voting machines can be tapped into from some back room and manipulated without any paper trail to ensure my vote is counted and counted fairly. Where ever Diebold machines were used, there were statistically anomalous results, most of which are impossible to explain through sheer chance. I never thought I would live to see the day of rigged elections, secret prisons and government accepted torture in the US ... but they are here, nonetheless.
Sure, I have an Internet connection, but my broadband provider is telling me which services available on the Internet I can use to their potential and which they will hobble because they disagree with them. I could go to another provider, but they are all considering something similar in my area. I pay twice as much as a Frenchman for 1/4 the speed and I'm supposed to think this is a good deal.
Yes, I can post angrily on Slashdot, but only under a pseudonym. If someone discovers who I am, then the flood of angry "take it or leave it" emails start pouring in, along with the death threats, badly spelled insults and racial slurs that seem to pop up when you disagree with the religious right. My neighbours will start to slander me for being unpatriotic because some jacknut on Fox News told them that the only way to be patriotic is to goose-step like good little soldiers and they can't see it any other way.
Yes, I'm not starving, but plenty of people in the States are every day and that number is growing all the time. Every company that ships their operations overseas to the cheap labour is another nail in the coffin of the middle class and when that is successfully killed off by the elite here in the west, we'll have nothing but low paying service jobs to cling to. Most Wal-Mart employees have to use food stamps to get by if they have a family. That's our future as a nation.
I like what I have now and it is better than any time in history, but the powerful always want more and that will come at my expense unless I defend what I already have. I don't like the slide I'm seeing at all.
b) The English language is wonderful in its complexity and Shakespeare's age is arguably when it was at its most florid. A "dumbing down" of the literature of this period, regardless of the author, can only ever lose some of that. If part of what makes it a classic is the use of the language, then how can reducing that language to leetspeek possibly retain those qualities that make it a classic? A classic like Hamlet is much more than simply an interesting plot and the wonderful interplay between the characters, the puns, the double entendres and social references will all be lost in the translation. So will the incredible use of the language. It is as if someone was taking a beautiful, hand-carved chair from the height of the Rennaissance, converting it to a modern IKEA chair, and passing it off as the classic with a new twist to help new folks understand the genius of the chair. I'm sure they'll get the gist in ten seconds flat, but that gist isn't the most important part of that chair, is it?
The capper is that they ship people off to get tortured for them in client states under a program of 'extraordinary rendition' because both International law and US law says that torture is illegal ... but they still really want to do it, anyway. Their own Senate tries to curb that nasty behaviour but the President threatens to veto their attempt and the Vice President works around the clock to get exemptions for the CIA. I guess there is too much of an investment in those gulags to give up without a fight.
The Project for the New American Century, indeed! I just wonder what kind of century it will be ...
Yeah, and the current US government's trend of legitimizing torture, avoiding their obligations under the Geneva Convention, backing out of every nuclear treaty they've signed in the past 50 years and creating a system of hidden gulags around the world where they can keep people without scrutiny is extremely comforting. Given that the US has shown that they will actually pre-emptively invade a country and has more military spending than the rest of the world combined, the rest of the world should be right in taking something of such importance as the Internet from those bozos. Get someone sane in office and the rest of the world will back off, trust me.
Yeah, that list of facist states like Sweden, Finland, France and the UK is pretty long, too. Everyone wants the US to relinquish control to an international body, not just the true fascist states. With the US looking more and more like a radical theocracy each day, I would be leary of them having control over a key part of my banking infrastructure, too.