Sorry, but you can't stop the movement of labor out of the US to cheaper places.
The WTO (that the US signed on to) will block any attempts to put tariffs or protectionist surcharges onto any sort of outsourced labor. Trying to make foreign-made products more expensive isn't going to work - Bush tried that move once and got slapped for it. Obama can't do anything about it either.
The choices for the US are pretty limited at this point. The people aren't going to stand up and say they want to pay more for US-produced items - they are going to buy the cheapest stuff they can. Maybe some rich people can choose stuff based on quality or customer service, but the rest of the people are going to use the Internet, find the lowest price and buy the cheap, Chinese made stuff. We can't pass laws blocking imports of cheap stuff made with outsourced labor or cheap stuff made in Chinese factories. Even discounting the fact that China owns the US now, there is that little thing called the WTO that we signed onto. Sorry, it is free trade all the way to the bottom.
So what happens to all the unskilled labor in the US? Well, they aren't going to have any jobs, that much is clear. There is no room in the economy for these workers anymore. We have probably 30% of the people now without jobs and without any hope of ever getting a decent paying job ever again. Is the government going to just support these people? That is something that is going to have to be addressed sooner or later.
As for stuff that can't be outsourced right now, well, every move that is made to give more and more capability to the foreign factories means fewer and fewer jobs in the US for what today isn't being outsourced. And all that means is a bigger pool of workers that the government has to pay forever. No, the jobs aren't coming back. Outsourcing is here to stay because nobody in their right mind wants to pay more than they have to whether it is for labor or finished goods.
Remember, China pretty much is the owner of the US today. Should they choose to exercise their power the US only has the options of fighting them off militarily, trying to negotiate a settlement and utter capitulation. My vote right now is that we end up negotiating and have China replacing a good part of the Federal Government with some new unelected "ministers".
Certainly, China can get whatever legal changes they want made right now.
OK, here's one for you. My guess is that if the Therac-25 were open-sourced there are a number of Chinese companies that would be happy to build it and sell it. As long as the network was sufficiently robust and isolated behind perhaps a couple more disfunctional countries, the actual manufacturer would be pretty much free and clear.
Of course, this was the machine that rather famously had a little software bug that killed people. Of course, hundreds of people were helped by the machine so why wouldn't it be reasonable to open source it and see what could be done?
Except the cheap way to go would be to just start building them again and using the same code - which is expensive to produce. The hardware is cheap, comparatively.
What you need is a separate router that grabs a separate IP address from the provider. Then your personal use can be segregated from the "public" use that you are offering.
Without that everything appears under a single IP address. Which means that someone posting 100 bogus reviews has their (your) IP address logged and you find out about it when you find you have been banned. With separate IP addresses none of this really affects you personally.
Of course, when you want to download kiddy porn you just switch over to the "public" router and have a perfect defense.
There would absolutely be no problem if in order to share your bandwidth and access someone needed to come to your house and do whatever they were doing in front of you. Natual prohibitions against doing bad things would work fine and for the most part, people are pretty decent when someone is watching.
The problem is, that isn't the way it works. They can sit somewhere in complete privacy believing that everything they do is unobserved. Quite a lot of people are nice and decent when someone is watching but when they believe they are unobserved they do all sorts of nasty things. Things that might be risky or damaging for others - after all, who's to know? If people believe they can do something that can never be traced back to them, it opens doors to many things.
The end of this is very simple. If you think you should "share", you can expect to have all of the hassles of an ISP with none of the control. You will more than likely be abused in one way or another. If your ISP has bandwidth tiers and charges more for increased use, you will pay. If you get throttled down by your ISP if you exceed certain limits, likely you will experience this as well. You may get to take the credit for whatever is associated with your IP address on various forums and public sites. And you have no control.
This makes no sense at all. If you want to provide a public service, you need to at least be able to control how much a service you are providing and to separate your "public service" from your own personal use.
Understand that today there are a significant number of people that the police come into contact with that believe two things:
They have no rights, being criminals
The police are out to kill them
This pretty much means that they have nothing to lose by responding to any interaction with the police with gunfire.
The police don't like this situation, but really can do nothing to change it. Most of these people are into the meth scene in one way or another - if they aren't using the stuff they are making it. Nothing is going to change the mind of a meth user and the folks making it have to be crazy because it is such an incredibly risky process. So on pretty much a daily basis the polce are already dealing with people that are going to shoot first and ask questions later. The only way to survive in that environment is to make sure they have absolute control over any situation they enter. Hence the rather abrupt, controlling and even property-damaging way they respond. They know that it is their lives on the line if they do not.
There is no such thing as a calm interaction with the police today. Around 50 police officers are shot every year just at traffic stops, and most of those are where they did not take immediate control of the situation - basically, they ignored their training.
How would you expect them to deal with a public that wants to kill them?
What profits? Netflix does not get a dime from an additional platform. They might get a few subscribers but people that watch full-length movies on phones are probably not their target market.
Now, if they charged on a per-view basis it might be different. The big difference is that they wouldn't have anywhere near as many subscribers. Their service is practically free today.
Similarly, if there was a player for Android it could be assumed that the new subscribers would be negligable but the network loading would be considerable. All cost and no revenue. Doesn't sound like a good idea at all.
You have to remember there are two rather different Blackberry implementations: one for "Internet" email and one for BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server).
Nobody really makes all that big a claim about the security of a Blackberry that isn't on a BES server. There are some encryption options, but nothing all that secure. And yes, RIM probably does own the keys to that.
The BES server is a whole different story. When you install the software on the server it generates a unique key. It is not under any control of RIM. Your phone makes a direct connection to the BES server without involving any RIM-owned server at all. Yes, this is pretty secure compared to anything else.
What RIM did was provide a way into Internet email services, which would have been accessible to anyone anyway.
Fermilab has been producing intermittent neutrino streams from their accelerator for some time now. Thatis probably a really good signaling device as they can be detected even with our current technology. The problem for us detecting something like that now is that we don't have directionality with existing neutrino detectors and imparting that might be rather challanging.
Certainly LHC is going to be producing more neutrinos as well.
VLA is being shut down soon, I think sometime in 2012 . It is perhaps going to be replaced by an array in Chile.
Aricebo is being shut down as well.
Sort of makes sense that we wouldn't build a real replacement in the US an even if we did, it would get shut down as well.
Frankly, nobody is all that interested. There are much more interesting things to spend money on than science, things that people watching American Idol want to hear about. The few people that might be interested in science, well, they are just nerds anyway and don't count.
You seem to think that the government of Iran has a goal of helping the people living there. From what I understand the government of Iran is there to have power and to control a country. The fact that there are other people living in that space is relatively irrelevant.
This is the principal danger in an Iranian nuclear arsenal. MAD doesn't work when you don't take an interest in the civilian population. Clearly from the last round of elections there are a lot of people the Iranian leadership wishes would just go away. With the leadership in a bunker a nuke in Tehran might just take care of future election problems.
Sanctions aren't going to do anything. The population isn't going to be able to overthrow the current leadership because they are willing to pull out all the stops and do whatever it takes. Unless the US and UN want to have another Libya on their hands.
You forget that there are people that respond to anyone coming to their front door with gunfire.
You may not run into that much. I do not suggest trying to sell Girl Scout cookies to the guy with the neighborhood meth lab, or any house with really odd smells coming from it and lights on all the time.
Unfortunately, the police do run into that a lot. Like every week. So they are trained that every confrontation can turn deadly in an instant.
Yes, but the problem is today you have the guy dealing in kiddy porn who also has a PCP habit. Knock on the door triggers panic attack for which the response is to shoot everything in sight.
The police deal with these types of people every day and if they don't assume every encounter is potentially deadly they end up dead. Nobody died because the police aren't there to shoot people but they are going to control the situation completely. And every cop today is trained that the only way to control a situation is to never, ever be outgunned or surprised by a weapon.
If you haven't noticed, it is a war out there. The criminals don't have much to lose and figure on taking a few cops out with them. This turns everything into an armed response. The silly thing is that conviction rates for most violent crimes are really low - like 10-20%. So even if you are caught the chances are you aren't going to do serious time. And yet, we have the folks with meth labs assuming in their whacked-out little minds that they have to kill anyone that comes to their front door.
The end result is that it is a shooting war and right now the cops aren't really winning.
The problem is today there are clearly two kinds of people: nice, friendly civil people that lethal force is not required to approach and the other kind. If you talk with police much you find out that "the other kind" are responding to a knock on the door with shots fired through it. There may also be various things in the house that can be quantified as high explosives used in the production of meth amphetamine drugs.
When your ordinary police officer spends half the day serving an arrest warrant on someone operating a meth lab in their house and meets armed resistance to anyone approaching the house can you really blame them for being a little cautious about how the other half of the day goes?
I assure you that your "castle defense" approach would be met with unlimited firepower. If there is one thing that the police learned in the 1930s was that they never, ever want to be outgunned again. Every day they are going up against criminals that believe they have nothing to lose by going toe-to-toe against the police with everything they can lay their hands on. The effects of drugs like meth and PCP are well known to the police and they have been trained (and shown by example) that failure to treat every situation as deadly will simply result in their being killed.
Remember Ruby Ridge and Waco? The assumption is that they are going to be met with automatic weapons fire, potentially from multiple locations. The majority of criminals today do not trust the police and assume they are there to kill them. They figure they might as well take a few down along the way. A significant number of citizens also do not trust the police and assume every encounter is going to escalate into a Ruby Ridge type shootout.
The end result is that every interaction with the police is assumed to be potentially deadly. Because that is how the world works today.
Scenario 1: Preserve life on Earth. Population being preserved is Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison and the last 12 Playboy centerfolds. Add a few Arab sheiks and Russian bosses.
Scenario 2: Colony on Mars. Population being preserved is a collection of adventurers and scientists.
So, which one do you think is best for the human race?
Then you run into the problem of people saying that cell phone towers cause cancer, impotence and all sorts of other things.
You can't just put up cell sites everywhere - people notice, get petitions together (real paper ones) and present them to the city to block construction. Mostly, the cities have no choice but to block the addition of more cell towers.
The result is that it takes years and lawsuits just to build one tower or to attach some antennas to a building.
There is a fundamental problem with "upgrading the network" - there is a limit to the density of cell towers. There is the pure physics of it that you can have just so many competing radios per square mile and there is also the problem of locating these cell sites.
Just putting up towers is somewhat of a problem because most businesses do not want the hassle. Having a cell tower attached to your building means that you will get at least one complaint a day from someone that believes all they read on the Internet about radiation, cell phones and brain cancer. You can't put them in parking lots or residential lots either. So there aren't too many places where they can put up new towers.
Back to the first problem, even if you could have a cell site on every block the cell protocols weren't designed for high-density handoffs. PCS was designed for that, but not GSM. I don't know about the new 4G protocols but I suspect they weren't designed for microcells either like PCS was. So there is a real limit to density.
The real problem is going to turn out to be that cell networks simply cannot support everyone having two or three cellular communication devices turned on all the time and trying to exchange data. Funny, WiFi can't handle that many users either.
No it is far closer to say that if you need to pay taxes and instead you pay a guy on the streetcorner that says he will take care of everything for you... well, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
At the very least some people should have checked up on what was going on. Apparently, the people paying SWCast didn't check to see that they were actually legitimate. They were not, so anyone that trusted them got screwed.
A T1 link doesn't have the bandwidth required for HD streaming. At 1.5Mb/sec it is about half of the lower boundary.
With a box with a hard drive (Boxee?) you might be able to buffer enough that it wouldn't matter but I don't think anyone is thinking along the lines of handing connections that are too slow for real streaming right now.
I have a Roku XDS. It is really nice for movies from Netflix and (Prime member) Amazon which are all covered by buying the box and paying a really cheap $9.99 a month to Netflix.
I am planning on dropping the movie channels from cable, but will keep the "basic" (non-premium) cable connection as well as (of course) the Internet connection. You need 3-5Mb/sec bandwidth pretty continuously in order to get any streaming to work.
Roku does not offer much in the way of playing movies from a local source, however. There is a "channel" called PlayOn which lets you connect up a PC as a web server to the Roku box and some people have this working pretty well, others have had plenty of problems with it - mostly, I believe due to networking configurations.
Now for the bad news. This isn't going to last very long. The current cable infrastructure in the US simply cannot provide 3-5Mb/sec dedicated bandwidth to every home. It wasn't designed to do that and no matter how many promises the cable companies make about 20Mb/sec connections, this is bursting only. The bottleneck isn't the cable to the home, it is the fiber to the neighborhood node where it is converted from from a fiber link to coax. Once the neighborhood node gets saturated, the performance of any streaming service will suffer significantly.
One possible solution is for the local "streaming box" to simply buffer lots and lots of content using whatever bandwidth it can get. Then you can watch from the local buffer, whether it is disk or flash based is immaterial. Roku has only a small RAM buffer today but future devices could include a hard drive. Certainly no Blu-Ray player or TV solution is going to be as flexible. Boxee from what I have heard is having a terrible time getting their act together but once they do this might be the better way to go.
For now, I have a $99 Roku box and it is working. Maybe in a year or two I will need to replace it with something with more buffer space. For $99 I figured it was worth it for a couple of years of service.
Yes, that would be possible. It is how the human-operated VASCAR system works.
But the systems being used are using radar because it can be automated. You can today buy a module which does radar speed calculations across multiple lanes on a roadway and gives back digital speed information. Eliminates all that photo comparison stuff.
Now the system in question here sounds like it is screwed up in some manner. As someone who has seen the little flashing things go off multiple times while driving I can certainly attest to their being reasonably accurate in the places where I have encountered them, but that doesn't mean you can't screw one of them up. Certainly it will be a revenue-generator if you have one that produces tickets for non-offenders.
But in the US I struggle to imagine anyplace in the country that would need to do this. I've lived in a goodly number of places across the country (Conneticut, Ohio, Chicago, LA, Phoenix) and I've never been anywhere where there was a shortage of speeding. So why someone would feel it necessary to create a speed camera that wasn't accurate utterly mystifies me.
You see, in Stallman-world there are two kinds of citizens: full citizens and half-citizens. A full citizen has all his or her rights and is able to exercise them because they understand computer programming languages and can use them. A half-citizen cannot program for themselves and has to rely on other full citizens to exercise his or her rights.
Once you understand this about open source stuff a lot of things become clear.
Oh come on. If Saddam had actually said "No we don't" when asked about having WMDs, the whole thing would have evaporated. Instead, he said he did have them. Insisted rather pointedly that they were there and ready to be used against his neighbors.
Part of the problem was that he was faced with something that Type-A Arab males can't deal with: a woman. We sent a woman as the negotiator before Desert Storm and he basically told her to go back home and bring a man next time. We sent a woman to talk about WMDs and he laughed at her and made it into a proclimation designed to strike fear in to the hearts of his neighbors. It was all posturing and the US government should have (a) SENT A MAN and (b) figured it out as mere posturing.
There are many cultures on this planet that have very prescribed roles for women and negotiating with important leaders isn't one of them. If any Western country wants to be taken seriously and have negotiations that aren't filled with posturing and playing to an audience they need to understand that these cultures do not respond well to women in decision-making roles. They will assume the woman is not a decision maker, has no authority and can be ignored. This is exactly what happened with Desert Storm - Saddam refused to accept that April Glaspie could actually be taken seriously. She was a woman and in Iraq women do not negotiate with men, they take orders and are subservient.
Can women hold positions of power? Sure. They just cannot represent powerful interests to cultures that do not believe that women should hold such positions. They will not be taken seriously.
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Sorry, but you can't stop the movement of labor out of the US to cheaper places.
The WTO (that the US signed on to) will block any attempts to put tariffs or protectionist surcharges onto any sort of outsourced labor. Trying to make foreign-made products more expensive isn't going to work - Bush tried that move once and got slapped for it. Obama can't do anything about it either.
The choices for the US are pretty limited at this point. The people aren't going to stand up and say they want to pay more for US-produced items - they are going to buy the cheapest stuff they can. Maybe some rich people can choose stuff based on quality or customer service, but the rest of the people are going to use the Internet, find the lowest price and buy the cheap, Chinese made stuff. We can't pass laws blocking imports of cheap stuff made with outsourced labor or cheap stuff made in Chinese factories. Even discounting the fact that China owns the US now, there is that little thing called the WTO that we signed onto. Sorry, it is free trade all the way to the bottom.
So what happens to all the unskilled labor in the US? Well, they aren't going to have any jobs, that much is clear. There is no room in the economy for these workers anymore. We have probably 30% of the people now without jobs and without any hope of ever getting a decent paying job ever again. Is the government going to just support these people? That is something that is going to have to be addressed sooner or later.
As for stuff that can't be outsourced right now, well, every move that is made to give more and more capability to the foreign factories means fewer and fewer jobs in the US for what today isn't being outsourced. And all that means is a bigger pool of workers that the government has to pay forever. No, the jobs aren't coming back. Outsourcing is here to stay because nobody in their right mind wants to pay more than they have to whether it is for labor or finished goods.
And in the US every single one of those says it is not an employment contract.
You aren't going to get an employment contract in the US today.
Remember, China pretty much is the owner of the US today. Should they choose to exercise their power the US only has the options of fighting them off militarily, trying to negotiate a settlement and utter capitulation. My vote right now is that we end up negotiating and have China replacing a good part of the Federal Government with some new unelected "ministers".
Certainly, China can get whatever legal changes they want made right now.
OK, here's one for you. My guess is that if the Therac-25 were open-sourced there are a number of Chinese companies that would be happy to build it and sell it. As long as the network was sufficiently robust and isolated behind perhaps a couple more disfunctional countries, the actual manufacturer would be pretty much free and clear.
Of course, this was the machine that rather famously had a little software bug that killed people. Of course, hundreds of people were helped by the machine so why wouldn't it be reasonable to open source it and see what could be done?
Except the cheap way to go would be to just start building them again and using the same code - which is expensive to produce. The hardware is cheap, comparatively.
What you need is a separate router that grabs a separate IP address from the provider. Then your personal use can be segregated from the "public" use that you are offering.
Without that everything appears under a single IP address. Which means that someone posting 100 bogus reviews has their (your) IP address logged and you find out about it when you find you have been banned. With separate IP addresses none of this really affects you personally.
Of course, when you want to download kiddy porn you just switch over to the "public" router and have a perfect defense.
There would absolutely be no problem if in order to share your bandwidth and access someone needed to come to your house and do whatever they were doing in front of you. Natual prohibitions against doing bad things would work fine and for the most part, people are pretty decent when someone is watching.
The problem is, that isn't the way it works. They can sit somewhere in complete privacy believing that everything they do is unobserved. Quite a lot of people are nice and decent when someone is watching but when they believe they are unobserved they do all sorts of nasty things. Things that might be risky or damaging for others - after all, who's to know? If people believe they can do something that can never be traced back to them, it opens doors to many things.
The end of this is very simple. If you think you should "share", you can expect to have all of the hassles of an ISP with none of the control. You will more than likely be abused in one way or another. If your ISP has bandwidth tiers and charges more for increased use, you will pay. If you get throttled down by your ISP if you exceed certain limits, likely you will experience this as well. You may get to take the credit for whatever is associated with your IP address on various forums and public sites. And you have no control.
This makes no sense at all. If you want to provide a public service, you need to at least be able to control how much a service you are providing and to separate your "public service" from your own personal use.
This pretty much means that they have nothing to lose by responding to any interaction with the police with gunfire.
The police don't like this situation, but really can do nothing to change it. Most of these people are into the meth scene in one way or another - if they aren't using the stuff they are making it. Nothing is going to change the mind of a meth user and the folks making it have to be crazy because it is such an incredibly risky process. So on pretty much a daily basis the polce are already dealing with people that are going to shoot first and ask questions later. The only way to survive in that environment is to make sure they have absolute control over any situation they enter. Hence the rather abrupt, controlling and even property-damaging way they respond. They know that it is their lives on the line if they do not.
There is no such thing as a calm interaction with the police today. Around 50 police officers are shot every year just at traffic stops, and most of those are where they did not take immediate control of the situation - basically, they ignored their training.
How would you expect them to deal with a public that wants to kill them?
What profits? Netflix does not get a dime from an additional platform. They might get a few subscribers but people that watch full-length movies on phones are probably not their target market.
Now, if they charged on a per-view basis it might be different. The big difference is that they wouldn't have anywhere near as many subscribers. Their service is practically free today.
Similarly, if there was a player for Android it could be assumed that the new subscribers would be negligable but the network loading would be considerable. All cost and no revenue. Doesn't sound like a good idea at all.
You have to remember there are two rather different Blackberry implementations: one for "Internet" email and one for BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server).
Nobody really makes all that big a claim about the security of a Blackberry that isn't on a BES server. There are some encryption options, but nothing all that secure. And yes, RIM probably does own the keys to that.
The BES server is a whole different story. When you install the software on the server it generates a unique key. It is not under any control of RIM. Your phone makes a direct connection to the BES server without involving any RIM-owned server at all. Yes, this is pretty secure compared to anything else.
What RIM did was provide a way into Internet email services, which would have been accessible to anyone anyway.
Fermilab has been producing intermittent neutrino streams from their accelerator for some time now. Thatis probably a really good signaling device as they can be detected even with our current technology. The problem for us detecting something like that now is that we don't have directionality with existing neutrino detectors and imparting that might be rather challanging.
Certainly LHC is going to be producing more neutrinos as well.
VLA is being shut down soon, I think sometime in 2012 . It is perhaps going to be replaced by an array in Chile.
Aricebo is being shut down as well.
Sort of makes sense that we wouldn't build a real replacement in the US an even if we did, it would get shut down as well.
Frankly, nobody is all that interested. There are much more interesting things to spend money on than science, things that people watching American Idol want to hear about. The few people that might be interested in science, well, they are just nerds anyway and don't count.
Science just isn't all that popular.
You seem to think that the government of Iran has a goal of helping the people living there. From what I understand the government of Iran is there to have power and to control a country. The fact that there are other people living in that space is relatively irrelevant.
This is the principal danger in an Iranian nuclear arsenal. MAD doesn't work when you don't take an interest in the civilian population. Clearly from the last round of elections there are a lot of people the Iranian leadership wishes would just go away. With the leadership in a bunker a nuke in Tehran might just take care of future election problems.
Sanctions aren't going to do anything. The population isn't going to be able to overthrow the current leadership because they are willing to pull out all the stops and do whatever it takes. Unless the US and UN want to have another Libya on their hands.
You forget that there are people that respond to anyone coming to their front door with gunfire.
You may not run into that much. I do not suggest trying to sell Girl Scout cookies to the guy with the neighborhood meth lab, or any house with really odd smells coming from it and lights on all the time.
Unfortunately, the police do run into that a lot. Like every week. So they are trained that every confrontation can turn deadly in an instant.
Yes, but the problem is today you have the guy dealing in kiddy porn who also has a PCP habit. Knock on the door triggers panic attack for which the response is to shoot everything in sight.
The police deal with these types of people every day and if they don't assume every encounter is potentially deadly they end up dead. Nobody died because the police aren't there to shoot people but they are going to control the situation completely. And every cop today is trained that the only way to control a situation is to never, ever be outgunned or surprised by a weapon.
If you haven't noticed, it is a war out there. The criminals don't have much to lose and figure on taking a few cops out with them. This turns everything into an armed response. The silly thing is that conviction rates for most violent crimes are really low - like 10-20%. So even if you are caught the chances are you aren't going to do serious time. And yet, we have the folks with meth labs assuming in their whacked-out little minds that they have to kill anyone that comes to their front door.
The end result is that it is a shooting war and right now the cops aren't really winning.
The problem is today there are clearly two kinds of people: nice, friendly civil people that lethal force is not required to approach and the other kind. If you talk with police much you find out that "the other kind" are responding to a knock on the door with shots fired through it. There may also be various things in the house that can be quantified as high explosives used in the production of meth amphetamine drugs.
When your ordinary police officer spends half the day serving an arrest warrant on someone operating a meth lab in their house and meets armed resistance to anyone approaching the house can you really blame them for being a little cautious about how the other half of the day goes?
I assure you that your "castle defense" approach would be met with unlimited firepower. If there is one thing that the police learned in the 1930s was that they never, ever want to be outgunned again. Every day they are going up against criminals that believe they have nothing to lose by going toe-to-toe against the police with everything they can lay their hands on. The effects of drugs like meth and PCP are well known to the police and they have been trained (and shown by example) that failure to treat every situation as deadly will simply result in their being killed.
Remember Ruby Ridge and Waco? The assumption is that they are going to be met with automatic weapons fire, potentially from multiple locations. The majority of criminals today do not trust the police and assume they are there to kill them. They figure they might as well take a few down along the way. A significant number of citizens also do not trust the police and assume every encounter is going to escalate into a Ruby Ridge type shootout.
The end result is that every interaction with the police is assumed to be potentially deadly. Because that is how the world works today.
Scenario 1: Preserve life on Earth. Population being preserved is Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison and the last 12 Playboy centerfolds. Add a few Arab sheiks and Russian bosses.
Scenario 2: Colony on Mars. Population being preserved is a collection of adventurers and scientists.
So, which one do you think is best for the human race?
Profit-minimizing companies are also known by the term "bankrupt" and "closed".
If you aren't maximizing your profits, you are indeed minimizing them and it will shortly cease to matter.
Then you run into the problem of people saying that cell phone towers cause cancer, impotence and all sorts of other things.
You can't just put up cell sites everywhere - people notice, get petitions together (real paper ones) and present them to the city to block construction. Mostly, the cities have no choice but to block the addition of more cell towers.
The result is that it takes years and lawsuits just to build one tower or to attach some antennas to a building.
There is a fundamental problem with "upgrading the network" - there is a limit to the density of cell towers. There is the pure physics of it that you can have just so many competing radios per square mile and there is also the problem of locating these cell sites.
Just putting up towers is somewhat of a problem because most businesses do not want the hassle. Having a cell tower attached to your building means that you will get at least one complaint a day from someone that believes all they read on the Internet about radiation, cell phones and brain cancer. You can't put them in parking lots or residential lots either. So there aren't too many places where they can put up new towers.
Back to the first problem, even if you could have a cell site on every block the cell protocols weren't designed for high-density handoffs. PCS was designed for that, but not GSM. I don't know about the new 4G protocols but I suspect they weren't designed for microcells either like PCS was. So there is a real limit to density.
The real problem is going to turn out to be that cell networks simply cannot support everyone having two or three cellular communication devices turned on all the time and trying to exchange data. Funny, WiFi can't handle that many users either.
No it is far closer to say that if you need to pay taxes and instead you pay a guy on the streetcorner that says he will take care of everything for you... well, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
At the very least some people should have checked up on what was going on. Apparently, the people paying SWCast didn't check to see that they were actually legitimate. They were not, so anyone that trusted them got screwed.
A T1 link doesn't have the bandwidth required for HD streaming. At 1.5Mb/sec it is about half of the lower boundary.
With a box with a hard drive (Boxee?) you might be able to buffer enough that it wouldn't matter but I don't think anyone is thinking along the lines of handing connections that are too slow for real streaming right now.
I have a Roku XDS. It is really nice for movies from Netflix and (Prime member) Amazon which are all covered by buying the box and paying a really cheap $9.99 a month to Netflix.
I am planning on dropping the movie channels from cable, but will keep the "basic" (non-premium) cable connection as well as (of course) the Internet connection. You need 3-5Mb/sec bandwidth pretty continuously in order to get any streaming to work.
Roku does not offer much in the way of playing movies from a local source, however. There is a "channel" called PlayOn which lets you connect up a PC as a web server to the Roku box and some people have this working pretty well, others have had plenty of problems with it - mostly, I believe due to networking configurations.
Now for the bad news. This isn't going to last very long. The current cable infrastructure in the US simply cannot provide 3-5Mb/sec dedicated bandwidth to every home. It wasn't designed to do that and no matter how many promises the cable companies make about 20Mb/sec connections, this is bursting only. The bottleneck isn't the cable to the home, it is the fiber to the neighborhood node where it is converted from from a fiber link to coax. Once the neighborhood node gets saturated, the performance of any streaming service will suffer significantly.
One possible solution is for the local "streaming box" to simply buffer lots and lots of content using whatever bandwidth it can get. Then you can watch from the local buffer, whether it is disk or flash based is immaterial. Roku has only a small RAM buffer today but future devices could include a hard drive. Certainly no Blu-Ray player or TV solution is going to be as flexible. Boxee from what I have heard is having a terrible time getting their act together but once they do this might be the better way to go.
For now, I have a $99 Roku box and it is working. Maybe in a year or two I will need to replace it with something with more buffer space. For $99 I figured it was worth it for a couple of years of service.
Yes, that would be possible. It is how the human-operated VASCAR system works.
But the systems being used are using radar because it can be automated. You can today buy a module which does radar speed calculations across multiple lanes on a roadway and gives back digital speed information. Eliminates all that photo comparison stuff.
Now the system in question here sounds like it is screwed up in some manner. As someone who has seen the little flashing things go off multiple times while driving I can certainly attest to their being reasonably accurate in the places where I have encountered them, but that doesn't mean you can't screw one of them up. Certainly it will be a revenue-generator if you have one that produces tickets for non-offenders.
But in the US I struggle to imagine anyplace in the country that would need to do this. I've lived in a goodly number of places across the country (Conneticut, Ohio, Chicago, LA, Phoenix) and I've never been anywhere where there was a shortage of speeding. So why someone would feel it necessary to create a speed camera that wasn't accurate utterly mystifies me.
You see, in Stallman-world there are two kinds of citizens: full citizens and half-citizens. A full citizen has all his or her rights and is able to exercise them because they understand computer programming languages and can use them. A half-citizen cannot program for themselves and has to rely on other full citizens to exercise his or her rights.
Once you understand this about open source stuff a lot of things become clear.
Oh come on. If Saddam had actually said "No we don't" when asked about having WMDs, the whole thing would have evaporated. Instead, he said he did have them. Insisted rather pointedly that they were there and ready to be used against his neighbors.
Part of the problem was that he was faced with something that Type-A Arab males can't deal with: a woman. We sent a woman as the negotiator before Desert Storm and he basically told her to go back home and bring a man next time. We sent a woman to talk about WMDs and he laughed at her and made it into a proclimation designed to strike fear in to the hearts of his neighbors. It was all posturing and the US government should have (a) SENT A MAN and (b) figured it out as mere posturing.
There are many cultures on this planet that have very prescribed roles for women and negotiating with important leaders isn't one of them. If any Western country wants to be taken seriously and have negotiations that aren't filled with posturing and playing to an audience they need to understand that these cultures do not respond well to women in decision-making roles. They will assume the woman is not a decision maker, has no authority and can be ignored. This is exactly what happened with Desert Storm - Saddam refused to accept that April Glaspie could actually be taken seriously. She was a woman and in Iraq women do not negotiate with men, they take orders and are subservient.
Can women hold positions of power? Sure. They just cannot represent powerful interests to cultures that do not believe that women should hold such positions. They will not be taken seriously.