I suppose you sit around waiting for reruns of television episodes?
If you have already seen it, why in the world would you want to pay money to see it again? I haven't seen many movies that I would want to see more than once in a single year.
There is no "price point" - free is the only price that matters. Content producers cannot compete with free, pirated content. There is no question of quality or of anything else - they are competing with themselves and one side is giving it away vs. the other charging an utterly outrageous amount of money for it. By outrageous I mean that $0.10 is outrageous when the only other price is $0.00.
There is no effective "law" against murder today. 9 out of 10 people are not convicted, so the law is hardly a deterrent.
Copyright law was respected when mass redistribution was not possible. In 1960 copyright violation was virtually unheard of by individuals. It was extremely difficult to copy a 45 record to give to 12,000 of your friends. Or a paperback book.
Today, there will never be "respect" for copyright law as long as mass redistribution is as easy and convenient as it is today. It will always be cheaper and easier to get a copy a some digital file from someone else than it will be from the creator. So copyright is effectively dead.
Is education the answer? Why do you believe your right to live is any better than someone's right to kill you? Could it be that you were taught from early childhood that killing people was wrong? Could we do the same thing with copyright to instill in people that the creative act deserves some kind of respect? Today, I doubt it.
How about if I get a ship with a nice Liberian flag registration and park it about 20 miles off the coast of California. Run a microwave or fiber optic link to shore for Internet access. Several connections might be necessary for backup and greater bandwidth.
As I doubt Liberia has any intellectual property treaties with anyone, this should be able to be a source for downloads according to whatever rules are determined by the Ship's Captain.
That would of course be $0.01 per GB of source material. So, if there were 1,000 GB of Sony-owned copyright music the payment would be $10. Once. Seems pretty fair.
Movies would be compensated at the same rate.
Software would be compensated at the same rate as well.
Upon payment of a one-time registration fee of $100 you would be able to download everything.
All of this would be conforming to the treaties for Intellectual Property of the nation of registry and done in conformance with additional rules, regulations and agreements with the Ship's Captain.
Tell that to the WTO. If the US attempted to tariff outsourcing or imports of foreign-made goods we would see immediate retalitory action. Remember the bit of a row over steel imports? The US had to back down and accept foreign imports without tariffs, regardless of what it did to US industry.
I do not believe there is an easy way out of this mess. Just saying that the Bush Administration isn't doing their job by not raising tariffs is ignorant. I suspect the US would have equal luck with labor regulations as well.
Most people I know (of those with broadband Internet connections) prefer free downloads. Buying a CD is about the last thing they would do. iTunes is way, way too difficult to mess with but I am sure if free dried up they would switch to iTunes or some other online store.
No, contracts are whatever the parties agree to. For example, if you are renting an apartment from anyone other than an individual owner your ability to "negotiate" the terms of the lease are zero. Try it sometime - just say that you find the clause about "no commercial use" oppressive and want it struck out.
Your ability to negotiate the terms of a loan contract are similarly zero. There is no "give and take" and the relationship where one side has all the power and the other none is quite standard.
You really should understand what is and what is not a contract.
If you look at other countries there are interesting forms of rationing of healthcare that do not exist in the US. If you are old, you are going to die. Everyone knows this. Nobody likes it. In the US you can get treatment that might extend your life a year. In most other places in the world you go to the hospice or are just "made comfortable" at home.
You can say this is a "better outcome" because in some ways it leads to better care for the younger. It also leads to a somewhat longer average lifespan because some younger people get to reach an older age than they would otherwise. It is a simple trade between 30 years for a younger person vs. 1 year for an older person.
Unfortunately, the older people are allowed to vote in the US and they like the idea of living. They will do anything, including joining organizations with specific political agendas, to get to live another year or so.
Until you fix this problem, US healthcare isn't going anywhere.
The problem is that it doesn't work in the US. In the US the tax money would all be spent on people that are dying anyway. So when the sick 30-year-old gets to the hospital they are told there isn't any more "tax money" for them.
So you then need to tax 50-60% of working people's wages to cover the dying. So the sick 80-year-old gets to make it to 81 instead of dying at 80. To them (and to you, when you're 80) it is worth anything to get that last year.
The first step to fixing the health care system is to tell all the people over childbearing age that when they get sick they are going to die. Period. Sorry, but that's how life ends. In the rest of the world, that is pretty much how it is. In the US around 90% of healthcare money is spent on people nobody else would even bother treating.
If you can find a politician that can sell that, good for you. It isn't going to sell. Ever. Without a basic change in attitude, the US healthcare system is going to be different and cost more than anywhere else on the planet.
You misunderstand consumer electronics. Person buys phone and wants to use it with Verizon. Verizon is a CDMA carrier, not GSM. The phone will never work with Verizon. Do you feel like you would like to be the support person explaining this on the phone to the customer that just bought a $500 paperweight and believes it is his right to have the phone work for him?
So then the guy goes down the street to T-Mobile (a GSM carrier) and gets a SIM card. The phone now works. But the really nifty voicemail feature doesn't work. Neither is there a button on the phone that works with the voicemail features that T-Mobile has. Would you like to be the support person at T-Mobile or Apple that gets to explain this? Again, the customer just spent around $600 for something that does not work completely.
People want things that work 100% and aren't going to like it much when the spend lots of money and can only be told that 98% of what they bought will work. And absolutely nothing can be done about it.
If you've been reading, AT&T included special features not available with any other phone or on any other network. None of this is going to work on a different network. It is not in Apple's interest to have significant features (voicemail, for one) not work on their phone.
Will you be able to put a different SIM card in eventually? Probably. But not right away.
Will other carriers pick up the feature set? Probably not.
Those bugs (or missing features) may not affect you. If they don't, that's great. If they do, then you are beholden to Apple to fix them. If the iPhone were an open platform, you could either fix them yourself or get someone else to fix them for you.
Oh come on. Any software developer that has any real experience with large-scale development efforts knows that is isn't quite that easy. I assure you that upon being presented with any project which has over 100,000 lines of C/C++ code nobody on the planet could find and fix a single non-obvious bug without understanding the code.
Understanding the code takes time. Lots of time, usually. More time than anyone in their right mind would want to spend fooling with a phone with probably a lot closer to 1,000,000 lines of code in it.
The idea that "anyone can look at it" is bounded by a number of things so it isn't just "anyone". How long would someone take to be an "expert" on the internals of the iPhone software? A year or two is probably a reasonable guess, although you might be able to get by in six months of effort to add a feature or two. Fixing non-obvious bugs would likely take longer.
Then we have the development/debug environment. Do you believe Apple engineers just use some sort of emulator on a Mac? Maybe for some trivial stuff but anything complicated that involves the hardware inferface is going to require a debug platform. We are probably talking about a separate piece of hardware with a JTAG port that was left off the consumer version to save $0.12. That is pretty much what Sony did for PS1. So then you need the special phone and a pretty expensive system to connect to it.
Open? I don't see any "open" here, nor do I see anything that even smells like "freedom". Consumer electronics aren't cheap to develop for, even if you are trying to do it on the cheap. I strongly suspect Apple didn't design the iPhone to have a cheap development environment but enabled their engineers to turn out a quality product that has very few mystery bugs left in it.
How fast can WiMAX run? Let's say that it (or a replacement in the near future) can consume an entire OC3 (48Mb/sec) and provide service for 1,000 homes in a narrow geographic area. That works out to about 48Kb/sec per home at one connection per home.
Why would anyone purchase "broadband" Internet service with a guaranteed speed of 5Kbps? Because that is about all that can be actually promised and delivered 24x7x365,day in and day out.
Why? Because DSL and cable do not deliver "guaranteed" bandwidth. They deliver access to a shared resource. I believe Verizon FIOS delivers access to shared bandwidth as well. None of these can make any absolute guarantees as to what is actually available at any point in time other than taking the total available and dividing it by the number of customers. If everyone is trying to use the maximum possible bandwidth at any one time, this is all everyone is going to get.
Trust me, this is a lot less than the 12MB that some cable systems are advertising that your speed can be "up to". Way less. So much less that dial-up seems to be pretty attractive because you are very likely to get your full 28.8Kbps. Anything over that is in reality a digital connection that is once again shared bandwidth.
If what you want is bandwidth guarantees, you are looking at a complete teardown of the infrastructure that has been built. None of what is considered "residential" connections today provide any guarantees whatsoever.
The reason that other countries spend significantly less on health care is really pretty simple. The common view is most of the world is that at some point in your life you will get sick and die and nothing can change that. In the US this belief is not widely held. So we spend and spend trying to put off what the rest of the world considers inviteable. Not only inviteable but there is no question in their minds that it is going to happen. Even that it should.
Until you change that view in the US, people here are going to spend more on health care than the rest of the world.
The principal problem in the US is the way that "health" in general is dealt with.
Please do not take this as disagreement with the US attitude towards health. In general it is what I consider to be "right" and most other countries to be "wrong". Dead wrong, as you will see.
In most other countries, from what I have read and seen in quite a bit of travel, it is assumed that you will at some point in your life get sick and die. This is viewed as a natural event that cannot be altered, stopped or even delayed. You are born, you live and then you die. Period. Immutable.
In the US things are a bit different. It is assumed that when you get sick that you can be cured. Period. Again, immutable. The exception is that in some cases, after spending unbelievable amounts of money, you might die because the "cure" fails. Everyone is sad because of this "failure". Dying is not assumed to be something that is going to happen and that life should be allowed to "run its course" but, barring failure, something that can be put off indefinately.
Do you understand the difference? This difference makes it almost pointless to compare European medical systems with those in the US. It makes for US-culture people standing around in non-US hospitals wondering how "this dying" can possibly be tolerated and "why isn't someone doing something about this terrible situation?" Where as the non-US person is wondering what all the fuss is about.
The question is would the US population ever accept the attitude that prevails elsewhere? I doubt it. Until people get their heads around this basic difference in attitudes, comparisons are pointless. Spending in the US is going to be significantly more than anywhere else based on this attitude difference. And, as long as this attitude prevails in the US there is no way to change it.
Please. The courts got out of the insurance game a long time ago. If you are involved in an accident with an insured driver, the two companies fight it out with arbitration. No courts involved.
If you don't think you got the settlement you think you deserve, you can try suing your insurance company, which doesn't get you very far usually.
Sadly, the big awards from auto claims generally come from faked injuries and colluding doctors. And generally there is just your own insurance that you are trying to scam. The civil court process got out of the picture in around 1975 or so.
Riot? In response to something happening that is perceived to threaten the lives of everyone in the US if not the planet? Are you kidding?
In 1970 there might have been a riot. By 1980 you start seeing people being rather self-indulgently restrained worried about how this would affect their future as a lawyer or CEO if it ever came out. That was pretty much the end of it. Were there massive protests against the Iraq war? Not really. Were the police called out in riot gear with people being beaten and arrested? No.
Nobody is going to do anything like "riot". They will sit at home just as they have been trained and keep reading dailykos and other stuff like it and let the world go on around them. Yes, they will be angry and write some really scathing posts for firedoglake but nothing else is going to happen.
Backbone? Commitment? Resolve? Naaa. What we have is a nation of sheep that are being directed by a few sheepdogs. Some of the sheepdogs want to control things through large businesses and some of the sheepdogs want to control things through government. Some confused sheepdogs seem to want to control people through both, even though they are diametrically opposing forces. The problem is that most people can't even identify a sheepdog when they are in their presence, much less knowing when they are being led by one.
Most people seem to want a government that is run by poking fingers in the air and seeing which way the wind is blowing today. Take a poll before any decision. Let the "voice of the people" tell them what to have for breakfast. This doesn't look good because nothing is ever finally decided. If the morning poll says "Raise taxes" and the afternoon poll says "Spend less" government grinds to a halt. In some ways that is a good thing because a uniformly undirected government isn't going to accomplish anything at all, least of all something bad.
Scenario: your child has a problem for which requires a stay in a 24-hour care facility. The paperwork they have you sign is a contract and it is with a corporation. Therefore, by your rules this contract should be public so the world will know what your child is being treated for and thousands of other little facts you might want to keep private.
Still sounds like a good idea?
Oh, maybe you meant just contracts between two corporations? Well, obviously that loophole would be exploited to the hilt, rendering the entire idea pointless.
It would be nice if banks agressively prosecuted credit card and other banking fraud.
But it doesn't work for them. It is extremely expensive to do this and the evidence may be very questionable for criminal prosecution. With any online activity it is next to impossible to prove who was behind the keyboard so without a huge pattern of receiving goods and services from credit card fraud there isn't going to be a conviction.
There is also the question of deterrent value. Right now, the security people will say there isn't any at all so spending 10x the loss on prosecuting someone is pointless. Of course, this comes after 40 or 50 years of non-prosecution which the people committing the crimes know all about. So any prosecution would come as a complete surprise.
You aren't allowed to discrminate against people. Even those with felony convictions.
Besides, if the US tried to deport everyone with a felony conviction that was here illegally, it would take far too long. They can't be deported or blocked from returning to the US - it would break up families and deprive them of income. It would be cruel to do this.
So the "catch and release" game continues where a legal US resident driver gets pulled over for DUI gets jail time. Illegal, undocumented drivers getting pulled over get told to get lost because they can't deal with the city mandates not to harass illegals.
Lots of people do not have sufficient identification to just walk down and get a passport.
Do you have a certified copy of your birth certificate? Most people do not. Do you know where you would get one if you needed one? And, most importantly, could you get one in a month if you had to have it?
Worse, if everyone was getting a passport instead of the incredibly small fraction of people that actually do have one, how would the overwhelmed State Department validate all those birth certificates and such? Easy answer - they wouldn't.
Why they wanted to make Driver's Licenses "validated" was to farm the work out to the states and hope for the best. Today just about anybody can get a state photo ID card that says almost anything they want it to. Legal or illegal means nothing. Don't speak English? Here is the card in Spanish, Polish, Russian and a few other languages.
Unfortunately, right now there is nothing that is a valid piece of identification in the US that most people have. A Driver's License is a joke. Nobody has a passport.
How would you suggest identifying someone that is not hear legally?
Green card? They are sold on street corners in Phoenix and Tucson, as well as Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. Done fairly well also so identifying a "fake" one isn't trivial.
Birth Certificate? Maybe. Do you carry yours? Neither does anyone else. Also pretty easy to fake unless it is verified.
Drivers' license? Illinois now issues them without anything more than a note from the Mexican consulate. I believe California does something similar. A driver's license today is not really any form of identification other than showing your picture. Maybe verifying age, but that is just a maybe.
As an employer, I am specifically enjoined from attempting to validate any form of identification presented to show the person has the right to work in the US. They can present something drawn in crayon and I have to accept it. This was part of the 1986 amnesty deal.
Today, there is no mechanism in place that would allow a cop on the street to identify a person as being not in the US legally. Not only that, but Los Angeles officially declared the city as a safe haven for illegals. Other cities are that way as well, perhaps less formally. The INS has difficulties establishing if someone is here legally or not because about all they can do is say the person has no documents. If INS was to start cracking down we would end up with a lot of US citizens in Mexico trying to get home. Nobody carries around "sufficent documentation" to prove they are a legal resident in the US. Most people don't even have it at home.
Your point about NZ is well taken. A right-thinking person would assume that they might get caught if they overstayed their visa. The truth in the US is that nobody ever "gets caught" and there is nothing anywhere that would let the INS, police or any other agency track down people that overstay their visa. With the "no validation" provisions of the 1986 employment verification law it is a joke that we don't allow illegals to hold jobs.
If the 1986 law was recinded and employers had to submit documents to government validation or get a hefty fine most of the illegals would leave all by themselves. The idea of deporting 12 million people would never happen - they would return to their homes by themselves. Instead, we are holding the door open for them with the certain knowledge that they can indeed have jobs here.
I vote for letting the Mexicans (and everyone from Central and South America along with them) in. Yes, absolutely eliminate unskilled labor in the US except as something Spanish and Portuguese speaking people do. Anyone without a college degree in a non-outsourcable field is on welfare, permanently.
Obviously, the US economy will collapse as a result of this. No more cheap stuff from China because nobody is buying it. China needs to find new markets and probably suffers from a pretty big economic collapse as well.
10 years later somebody will want to build a factory to make something. Maybe there is a real need after all the Mexicans go home. But it isn't allowed to tariff imports because of the WTO agreements. So now it is absurd to think of building a factory in the US. The only chance then is the Federal Government says "Nuts to you, WTO!" and takes the US out of the G8 and WTO.
The US gets a manufacturing base and doesn't import anything anymore - obviously everyone hates the US and once we have nothing won't be wanting anything to do with the country ever again. Maybe the US figures out that not everyone can be a "knowledge worker" and there might actually be a need for low-skill people in a manufacturing economy. The education system gets reformed as well then.
Unlikely? Maybe. But the way things are now, it isn't going to get any better, ever.
Sadly, the WTO might not let the US go. If the US were to decide to withdraw unilaterally it might mean war. Certainly China isn't going to want to see their economy tank as it certainly would if we imposed reasonable tariffs on imports. Such tariffs are illegal today - remember the issue over European steel imports a while back? Would China threaten to use nuclear weapons to keep the US in the WTO?
Because the Internet means immunity to lots of people.
Let's see what it would take to actually prosecute someone for "cyberbullying", shall we... The forum or IM server has a log with an IP address of where this came from. The can look up in about 10 seconds what ISP or other provider owns the IP address. The ISP has logs (for dynamic addresses) and customer records. The account holder (with the ISP) has an agreement that pretty much says whatever is going through that connection they are responsible for. End of story.
Except it doesn't work that way. The forum operator decides it would be better for anonymous users if they didn't keep logs. The ISP that owns the IP address decides to protect their customers regardless of the legal and social implications. The account holder agreement does say they are responsible but only up to a point - after all, it could have been anyone in the family or even a friend or neighbor. Layers and layers of people are protecting illegal acts on the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose you sit around waiting for reruns of television episodes?
If you have already seen it, why in the world would you want to pay money to see it again? I haven't seen many movies that I would want to see more than once in a single year.
There is no "price point" - free is the only price that matters. Content producers cannot compete with free, pirated content. There is no question of quality or of anything else - they are competing with themselves and one side is giving it away vs. the other charging an utterly outrageous amount of money for it. By outrageous I mean that $0.10 is outrageous when the only other price is $0.00.
There is no effective "law" against murder today. 9 out of 10 people are not convicted, so the law is hardly a deterrent.
Copyright law was respected when mass redistribution was not possible. In 1960 copyright violation was virtually unheard of by individuals. It was extremely difficult to copy a 45 record to give to 12,000 of your friends. Or a paperback book.
Today, there will never be "respect" for copyright law as long as mass redistribution is as easy and convenient as it is today. It will always be cheaper and easier to get a copy a some digital file from someone else than it will be from the creator. So copyright is effectively dead.
Is education the answer? Why do you believe your right to live is any better than someone's right to kill you? Could it be that you were taught from early childhood that killing people was wrong? Could we do the same thing with copyright to instill in people that the creative act deserves some kind of respect? Today, I doubt it.
How about if I get a ship with a nice Liberian flag registration and park it about 20 miles off the coast of California. Run a microwave or fiber optic link to shore for Internet access. Several connections might be necessary for backup and greater bandwidth.
As I doubt Liberia has any intellectual property treaties with anyone, this should be able to be a source for downloads according to whatever rules are determined by the Ship's Captain.
That would of course be $0.01 per GB of source material. So, if there were 1,000 GB of Sony-owned copyright music the payment would be $10. Once. Seems pretty fair.
Movies would be compensated at the same rate.
Software would be compensated at the same rate as well.
Upon payment of a one-time registration fee of $100 you would be able to download everything.
All of this would be conforming to the treaties for Intellectual Property of the nation of registry and done in conformance with additional rules, regulations and agreements with the Ship's Captain.
Sounds pretty fair, wouldn't you say?
Tell that to the WTO. If the US attempted to tariff outsourcing or imports of foreign-made goods we would see immediate retalitory action. Remember the bit of a row over steel imports? The US had to back down and accept foreign imports without tariffs, regardless of what it did to US industry.
I do not believe there is an easy way out of this mess. Just saying that the Bush Administration isn't doing their job by not raising tariffs is ignorant. I suspect the US would have equal luck with labor regulations as well.
Most people I know (of those with broadband Internet connections) prefer free downloads. Buying a CD is about the last thing they would do. iTunes is way, way too difficult to mess with but I am sure if free dried up they would switch to iTunes or some other online store.
Free is very, very difficult to compete with.
No, contracts are whatever the parties agree to. For example, if you are renting an apartment from anyone other than an individual owner your ability to "negotiate" the terms of the lease are zero. Try it sometime - just say that you find the clause about "no commercial use" oppressive and want it struck out.
Your ability to negotiate the terms of a loan contract are similarly zero. There is no "give and take" and the relationship where one side has all the power and the other none is quite standard.
You really should understand what is and what is not a contract.
Yes, but...
If you look at other countries there are interesting forms of rationing of healthcare that do not exist in the US. If you are old, you are going to die. Everyone knows this. Nobody likes it. In the US you can get treatment that might extend your life a year. In most other places in the world you go to the hospice or are just "made comfortable" at home.
You can say this is a "better outcome" because in some ways it leads to better care for the younger. It also leads to a somewhat longer average lifespan because some younger people get to reach an older age than they would otherwise. It is a simple trade between 30 years for a younger person vs. 1 year for an older person.
Unfortunately, the older people are allowed to vote in the US and they like the idea of living. They will do anything, including joining organizations with specific political agendas, to get to live another year or so.
Until you fix this problem, US healthcare isn't going anywhere.
Ah yes, the "European" solution.
The problem is that it doesn't work in the US. In the US the tax money would all be spent on people that are dying anyway. So when the sick 30-year-old gets to the hospital they are told there isn't any more "tax money" for them.
So you then need to tax 50-60% of working people's wages to cover the dying. So the sick 80-year-old gets to make it to 81 instead of dying at 80. To them (and to you, when you're 80) it is worth anything to get that last year.
The first step to fixing the health care system is to tell all the people over childbearing age that when they get sick they are going to die. Period. Sorry, but that's how life ends. In the rest of the world, that is pretty much how it is. In the US around 90% of healthcare money is spent on people nobody else would even bother treating.
If you can find a politician that can sell that, good for you. It isn't going to sell. Ever. Without a basic change in attitude, the US healthcare system is going to be different and cost more than anywhere else on the planet.
You misunderstand consumer electronics. Person buys phone and wants to use it with Verizon. Verizon is a CDMA carrier, not GSM. The phone will never work with Verizon. Do you feel like you would like to be the support person explaining this on the phone to the customer that just bought a $500 paperweight and believes it is his right to have the phone work for him?
So then the guy goes down the street to T-Mobile (a GSM carrier) and gets a SIM card. The phone now works. But the really nifty voicemail feature doesn't work. Neither is there a button on the phone that works with the voicemail features that T-Mobile has. Would you like to be the support person at T-Mobile or Apple that gets to explain this? Again, the customer just spent around $600 for something that does not work completely.
People want things that work 100% and aren't going to like it much when the spend lots of money and can only be told that 98% of what they bought will work. And absolutely nothing can be done about it.
If you've been reading, AT&T included special features not available with any other phone or on any other network. None of this is going to work on a different network. It is not in Apple's interest to have significant features (voicemail, for one) not work on their phone.
Will you be able to put a different SIM card in eventually? Probably. But not right away.
Will other carriers pick up the feature set? Probably not.
Oh come on. Any software developer that has any real experience with large-scale development efforts knows that is isn't quite that easy. I assure you that upon being presented with any project which has over 100,000 lines of C/C++ code nobody on the planet could find and fix a single non-obvious bug without understanding the code.
Understanding the code takes time. Lots of time, usually. More time than anyone in their right mind would want to spend fooling with a phone with probably a lot closer to 1,000,000 lines of code in it.
The idea that "anyone can look at it" is bounded by a number of things so it isn't just "anyone". How long would someone take to be an "expert" on the internals of the iPhone software? A year or two is probably a reasonable guess, although you might be able to get by in six months of effort to add a feature or two. Fixing non-obvious bugs would likely take longer.
Then we have the development/debug environment. Do you believe Apple engineers just use some sort of emulator on a Mac? Maybe for some trivial stuff but anything complicated that involves the hardware inferface is going to require a debug platform. We are probably talking about a separate piece of hardware with a JTAG port that was left off the consumer version to save $0.12. That is pretty much what Sony did for PS1. So then you need the special phone and a pretty expensive system to connect to it.
Open? I don't see any "open" here, nor do I see anything that even smells like "freedom". Consumer electronics aren't cheap to develop for, even if you are trying to do it on the cheap. I strongly suspect Apple didn't design the iPhone to have a cheap development environment but enabled their engineers to turn out a quality product that has very few mystery bugs left in it.
How many people do you live near?
How fast can WiMAX run? Let's say that it (or a replacement in the near future) can consume an entire OC3 (48Mb/sec) and provide service for 1,000 homes in a narrow geographic area. That works out to about 48Kb/sec per home at one connection per home.
You want to call that "broadband"?
Why would anyone purchase "broadband" Internet service with a guaranteed speed of 5Kbps? Because that is about all that can be actually promised and delivered 24x7x365 ,day in and day out.
Why? Because DSL and cable do not deliver "guaranteed" bandwidth. They deliver access to a shared resource. I believe Verizon FIOS delivers access to shared bandwidth as well. None of these can make any absolute guarantees as to what is actually available at any point in time other than taking the total available and dividing it by the number of customers. If everyone is trying to use the maximum possible bandwidth at any one time, this is all everyone is going to get.
Trust me, this is a lot less than the 12MB that some cable systems are advertising that your speed can be "up to". Way less. So much less that dial-up seems to be pretty attractive because you are very likely to get your full 28.8Kbps. Anything over that is in reality a digital connection that is once again shared bandwidth.
If what you want is bandwidth guarantees, you are looking at a complete teardown of the infrastructure that has been built. None of what is considered "residential" connections today provide any guarantees whatsoever.
The reason that other countries spend significantly less on health care is really pretty simple. The common view is most of the world is that at some point in your life you will get sick and die and nothing can change that. In the US this belief is not widely held. So we spend and spend trying to put off what the rest of the world considers inviteable. Not only inviteable but there is no question in their minds that it is going to happen. Even that it should.
Until you change that view in the US, people here are going to spend more on health care than the rest of the world.
The principal problem in the US is the way that "health" in general is dealt with.
Please do not take this as disagreement with the US attitude towards health. In general it is what I consider to be "right" and most other countries to be "wrong". Dead wrong, as you will see.
In most other countries, from what I have read and seen in quite a bit of travel, it is assumed that you will at some point in your life get sick and die. This is viewed as a natural event that cannot be altered, stopped or even delayed. You are born, you live and then you die. Period. Immutable.
In the US things are a bit different. It is assumed that when you get sick that you can be cured. Period. Again, immutable. The exception is that in some cases, after spending unbelievable amounts of money, you might die because the "cure" fails. Everyone is sad because of this "failure". Dying is not assumed to be something that is going to happen and that life should be allowed to "run its course" but, barring failure, something that can be put off indefinately.
Do you understand the difference? This difference makes it almost pointless to compare European medical systems with those in the US. It makes for US-culture people standing around in non-US hospitals wondering how "this dying" can possibly be tolerated and "why isn't someone doing something about this terrible situation?" Where as the non-US person is wondering what all the fuss is about.
The question is would the US population ever accept the attitude that prevails elsewhere? I doubt it. Until people get their heads around this basic difference in attitudes, comparisons are pointless. Spending in the US is going to be significantly more than anywhere else based on this attitude difference. And, as long as this attitude prevails in the US there is no way to change it.
Please. The courts got out of the insurance game a long time ago. If you are involved in an accident with an insured driver, the two companies fight it out with arbitration. No courts involved.
If you don't think you got the settlement you think you deserve, you can try suing your insurance company, which doesn't get you very far usually.
Sadly, the big awards from auto claims generally come from faked injuries and colluding doctors. And generally there is just your own insurance that you are trying to scam. The civil court process got out of the picture in around 1975 or so.
Riot? In response to something happening that is perceived to threaten the lives of everyone in the US if not the planet? Are you kidding?
In 1970 there might have been a riot. By 1980 you start seeing people being rather self-indulgently restrained worried about how this would affect their future as a lawyer or CEO if it ever came out. That was pretty much the end of it. Were there massive protests against the Iraq war? Not really. Were the police called out in riot gear with people being beaten and arrested? No.
Nobody is going to do anything like "riot". They will sit at home just as they have been trained and keep reading dailykos and other stuff like it and let the world go on around them. Yes, they will be angry and write some really scathing posts for firedoglake but nothing else is going to happen.
Backbone? Commitment? Resolve? Naaa. What we have is a nation of sheep that are being directed by a few sheepdogs. Some of the sheepdogs want to control things through large businesses and some of the sheepdogs want to control things through government. Some confused sheepdogs seem to want to control people through both, even though they are diametrically opposing forces. The problem is that most people can't even identify a sheepdog when they are in their presence, much less knowing when they are being led by one.
Most people seem to want a government that is run by poking fingers in the air and seeing which way the wind is blowing today. Take a poll before any decision. Let the "voice of the people" tell them what to have for breakfast. This doesn't look good because nothing is ever finally decided. If the morning poll says "Raise taxes" and the afternoon poll says "Spend less" government grinds to a halt. In some ways that is a good thing because a uniformly undirected government isn't going to accomplish anything at all, least of all something bad.
Scenario: your child has a problem for which requires a stay in a 24-hour care facility. The paperwork they have you sign is a contract and it is with a corporation. Therefore, by your rules this contract should be public so the world will know what your child is being treated for and thousands of other little facts you might want to keep private.
Still sounds like a good idea?
Oh, maybe you meant just contracts between two corporations? Well, obviously that loophole would be exploited to the hilt, rendering the entire idea pointless.
It would be nice if banks agressively prosecuted credit card and other banking fraud.
But it doesn't work for them. It is extremely expensive to do this and the evidence may be very questionable for criminal prosecution. With any online activity it is next to impossible to prove who was behind the keyboard so without a huge pattern of receiving goods and services from credit card fraud there isn't going to be a conviction.
There is also the question of deterrent value. Right now, the security people will say there isn't any at all so spending 10x the loss on prosecuting someone is pointless. Of course, this comes after 40 or 50 years of non-prosecution which the people committing the crimes know all about. So any prosecution would come as a complete surprise.
You aren't allowed to discrminate against people. Even those with felony convictions.
Besides, if the US tried to deport everyone with a felony conviction that was here illegally, it would take far too long. They can't be deported or blocked from returning to the US - it would break up families and deprive them of income. It would be cruel to do this.
So the "catch and release" game continues where a legal US resident driver gets pulled over for DUI gets jail time. Illegal, undocumented drivers getting pulled over get told to get lost because they can't deal with the city mandates not to harass illegals.
Lots of people do not have sufficient identification to just walk down and get a passport.
Do you have a certified copy of your birth certificate? Most people do not. Do you know where you would get one if you needed one? And, most importantly, could you get one in a month if you had to have it?
Worse, if everyone was getting a passport instead of the incredibly small fraction of people that actually do have one, how would the overwhelmed State Department validate all those birth certificates and such? Easy answer - they wouldn't.
Why they wanted to make Driver's Licenses "validated" was to farm the work out to the states and hope for the best. Today just about anybody can get a state photo ID card that says almost anything they want it to. Legal or illegal means nothing. Don't speak English? Here is the card in Spanish, Polish, Russian and a few other languages.
Unfortunately, right now there is nothing that is a valid piece of identification in the US that most people have. A Driver's License is a joke. Nobody has a passport.
How would you suggest identifying someone that is not hear legally?
Green card? They are sold on street corners in Phoenix and Tucson, as well as Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. Done fairly well also so identifying a "fake" one isn't trivial.
Birth Certificate? Maybe. Do you carry yours? Neither does anyone else. Also pretty easy to fake unless it is verified.
Drivers' license? Illinois now issues them without anything more than a note from the Mexican consulate. I believe California does something similar. A driver's license today is not really any form of identification other than showing your picture. Maybe verifying age, but that is just a maybe.
As an employer, I am specifically enjoined from attempting to validate any form of identification presented to show the person has the right to work in the US. They can present something drawn in crayon and I have to accept it. This was part of the 1986 amnesty deal.
Today, there is no mechanism in place that would allow a cop on the street to identify a person as being not in the US legally. Not only that, but Los Angeles officially declared the city as a safe haven for illegals. Other cities are that way as well, perhaps less formally. The INS has difficulties establishing if someone is here legally or not because about all they can do is say the person has no documents. If INS was to start cracking down we would end up with a lot of US citizens in Mexico trying to get home. Nobody carries around "sufficent documentation" to prove they are a legal resident in the US. Most people don't even have it at home.
Your point about NZ is well taken. A right-thinking person would assume that they might get caught if they overstayed their visa. The truth in the US is that nobody ever "gets caught" and there is nothing anywhere that would let the INS, police or any other agency track down people that overstay their visa. With the "no validation" provisions of the 1986 employment verification law it is a joke that we don't allow illegals to hold jobs.
If the 1986 law was recinded and employers had to submit documents to government validation or get a hefty fine most of the illegals would leave all by themselves. The idea of deporting 12 million people would never happen - they would return to their homes by themselves. Instead, we are holding the door open for them with the certain knowledge that they can indeed have jobs here.
I vote for letting the Mexicans (and everyone from Central and South America along with them) in. Yes, absolutely eliminate unskilled labor in the US except as something Spanish and Portuguese speaking people do. Anyone without a college degree in a non-outsourcable field is on welfare, permanently.
Obviously, the US economy will collapse as a result of this. No more cheap stuff from China because nobody is buying it. China needs to find new markets and probably suffers from a pretty big economic collapse as well.
10 years later somebody will want to build a factory to make something. Maybe there is a real need after all the Mexicans go home. But it isn't allowed to tariff imports because of the WTO agreements. So now it is absurd to think of building a factory in the US. The only chance then is the Federal Government says "Nuts to you, WTO!" and takes the US out of the G8 and WTO.
The US gets a manufacturing base and doesn't import anything anymore - obviously everyone hates the US and once we have nothing won't be wanting anything to do with the country ever again. Maybe the US figures out that not everyone can be a "knowledge worker" and there might actually be a need for low-skill people in a manufacturing economy. The education system gets reformed as well then.
Unlikely? Maybe. But the way things are now, it isn't going to get any better, ever.
Sadly, the WTO might not let the US go. If the US were to decide to withdraw unilaterally it might mean war. Certainly China isn't going to want to see their economy tank as it certainly would if we imposed reasonable tariffs on imports. Such tariffs are illegal today - remember the issue over European steel imports a while back? Would China threaten to use nuclear weapons to keep the US in the WTO?
Because the Internet means immunity to lots of people.
Let's see what it would take to actually prosecute someone for "cyberbullying", shall we... The forum or IM server has a log with an IP address of where this came from. The can look up in about 10 seconds what ISP or other provider owns the IP address. The ISP has logs (for dynamic addresses) and customer records. The account holder (with the ISP) has an agreement that pretty much says whatever is going through that connection they are responsible for. End of story.
Except it doesn't work that way. The forum operator decides it would be better for anonymous users if they didn't keep logs. The ISP that owns the IP address decides to protect their customers regardless of the legal and social implications. The account holder agreement does say they are responsible but only up to a point - after all, it could have been anyone in the family or even a friend or neighbor. Layers and layers of people are protecting illegal acts on the Internet.