Almost anything could be hiding there and given the volume, the folks at Wikileaks don't even know what all they have. This could easily trigger a major war, if not WW III.
Diplomatic communications that are supposed to be secret but are revealed can have some pretty severe consequences. If it was disclosed that the US was actively threatening Israel if they didn't back off on Iran might actually trigger an attack. To Israel it is almost a lose-lose proposition, so launching their attack might seem to be the only way out for them.
What about the Polish missle defense system? What really happened there? If Russia made it plain, but secretly, that such a thing would never be tolerated it could lead to almost anything. What about Poland being brought back into a Warsaw pact status? Would NATO allow this or go to war over it?
Maybe it is clearly known in diplomatic circles that Iran is going to take over Iraq as soon as the US troops leave. What if Obama is just fine with that as long as the US isn't blamed. Would revealing this force the US to prevent such a takeover by any means necessary?
Come up with your own scenario and see how scary it might be. We could have a very hot war of very big proportions in a couple of weeks because of this and the Wikileaks people would be just fine with that. This sort of thing is incredibly dangerous.
The big problem right now is that billions were spent on getting the scanners that nobody wants to have used on themselves. So we have an "enhanced pat down" which primarily serves to push people into the scanning booth. Still, people are voting to have their children felt up and various body parts manipulated rather than getting scanned.
If they try to walk away from the billions spent on the scanners taxpayers (like me) will rightly be rather angry that this much was spent on something utterly unsuitable for the job and they are just walking away from it.
The only winning hand here is for them to convince the flying public that the scanners are the right way to go. Which is exactly what you can expect in the coming months.
Yes, you probably would require several different licenses. For a sailing vessel you are going to need a master's license that allows you to operate the sailboat in coastal and international waters. This might not apply to a 10-foot sailboat, but I don't think you are going to sail one of those around South America.
You may need several other licenses, including a license that covers the toilet on board because without that you would be polluting without a license. Polluting with a license is fine, but you gotta have that license.
Got a radio? You will need a license for that.
You can probably think of several more things that are going to need a license as well. Anyone that thinks there is an insufficent amount of regulation in the US is just plain nuts.
I believe that the FAA and EPA both have to license a launch. EPA is pretty nasty to get through because all those chemicals involved. Obviously, anything using chemicals might be hazardous to the environment.
Sounds like they managed to get a launch license, so that seems pretty good.
Unfortunately, when I was in Chicago I never saw anything except tickets being available from "brokers" and people that somehow thought they needed to stand in line at 3:00 AM to try to get tickets. The brokers always had a service charge which would jump the face value of the ticket 2 or 3 times but you always knew you could get the tickets without standing in line at 3:00 AM.
I don't believe there is a practical way to get event tickets other than from broker these days. And these folks are just as bad as the folks outside the event trying to sell tickets in terms of cost except the brokers are legal and the folks outside the event aren't.
Google can't charge anyone for customers using their services - they are actually selling access to customers and raking in billions doing it. If they said to Cox that Cox had to pay or they would be cut off their advertising revenue would fall and their ads would be far less valuable.
And as many others have said, Google isn't paying for bandwidth. Infrastructure? Sure, they are paying for the servers and power, but not bandwidth.
So Google is in a hard place really. If there was a united front of ISPs saying that Google had to pay to access customers it is likely they would do so if the price was right and they could afford it.
Of course, Google's move might be to buy out a few key ISPs instead. This would be interesting as it would put a substantial portion of the Internet and Internet traffic under the control of a single company.
Today I have a connection from Cox. It is advertised as something like 20Mb/sec - which is a burst capacity not anything you can rely on continuously. The rate I pay has nothing to do with actual costs but instead is geared to increase market share because in the ISP business it pretty much costs the same to have 1 user in a suburb as it does to have 80,000. So it behooves the ISP (cable, DSL or whatever) to grab as many customers as they can.
Hence we have things like the $14.95 DSL offerings.
As you might guess, even after they have the customers they can't jump the rates up. Business users pay 2-3 times as much for exactly the same service because they aren't competing for the customers in the same way.
So the ISP is now looking for how to actually get paid for their costs. They can't raise prices because that would just drive customers away without decreasing their costs at all. We've tried the "government subsidy" in the US and that didn't work so it is unlikely to work in the UK.
Maybe they can create a new class of service "really fast" and price it 3 times as much as the "pretends to be kinda fast" service that exists today. The difference would, of course, be simply slowing down the current tier and leaving the new service alone.
The other alternative is to get someone else to pay. Google, perhaps?
In Vietnam it was common to have children carry bombs to blow up troops. Pathetic, but common.
At Israeli checkpoints it is not unheard of to have children carrying bombs or to have explosives strapped to them.
There is no question that the scenario you have presented has already happened and needs to be dealt with in some manner.
The problem is that it isn't being dealt with in an effective manner because to be effective you would have to involve profiling and really delaying people while they were interviewed.
You could eliminate the "radical Islam threat" by simply having a guy with a plate of bacon at the checkpoint - you eat or you don't fly. The rest you could probably eliminate by checking luggage - they aren't looking for suicide just mayhem.
Re:What's the deal with the rush of TSA stories re
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TSA Pats Down 3-Year-Old
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You opt out of the enhanced pat-down by going through the scanners. The scanners are unpopular enough that they added the embarassing pat-down to try to push people to go through the scanners.
If they don't do this they will have wasted millions on the new scanners because nobody will go through them.
The problem is now that while the new scanners will detect a ceramic knife taped to someone's leg, they will not detect a "butt-bomb" stuffed up someone's butt. You could easily cram enough C4 there to bring down an airliner and failing to recognize this until it happens is the hallmark of the FAA and airline industry in general. So of course it applies to the TSA.
Not listing cell phones anywhere - even online - means there is no way to find the phone number of someone without a landline. As people continue to figure out the relability difference between a cell phone (very, very unreliable) and a landline (very, very reliable) and move to cell-only they drop out of any directory.
So, how do you find the phone number of your child's 3rd grade teacher? In 1960 you used the phone book. In 2010 you don't, period. People are now unreachable unless you have a prior relationship and they expect you to call them.
How do you find the phone number of your neighbor with a spotlight aimed at your window at 2:00 AM? You don't. You can either call the police or walk over there and hope they are receptive. Maybe they have a "shoot first and ask questions later" policy so the phone would be much, much better. The police would probably ignore you as a crank anyway.
When a cell phone was an unimportant adjunct and very, very costly it made sense not to have them in any sort of directory. In 1987 or so you could run up a charge of several dollars for someone by calling them. 23 years later it might not make sense to not have these phone numbers listed.
You aren't going to get that when people vote for bread and circuses, which is exactly what happened in 2008. In 2012 there is unlikely to be any thinking going on either because the two sides will be represented by an incumbent that has failed to produce (or perhaps more accurately an incumbent that hasn't been allowed to produce, depending on your viewpoint) and someone unlikely to be very good as president.
The "anybody but Obama" (ABO) movement will have taken root but might not be able to really carry the day. Nobody with any leadership is going to ever be elected president again because the social committment is just too great. Who are you going to find that wants their previous life put under a microscope? So far, the answer seems to be nobody of any significance.
The people can only elect whom is put up there by the parties, and nobody currently in power wants to really see anything remotely like "leadership". So things are unlikely to really change until something very, very bad happens.
The problem with an Iran-Israel war is that both sides have treaties and obligations with other countries. Countries with established nuclear arsenals.
If Iran was to attack Israel, the US would be obligated if not legally committed to attack Iran in retaliation. While I don't believe Russia has a binding treaty with Iran you can believe that if they were attacked by the US Russia would come into the fray on Iran's side and likely retailiate against the US.
This brings us to WW III with the US and Russia duking it out with at least a limited nuclear exchange. At that point if any Arab states get into it seeing a great opportunity to further destroy Israel you probably have the whole of the Middle East fighting on various sides. I do not believe the results would be controllable and I'd bet Pakistan starts throwing nukes around as well.
I would offer that Iran is politically and religiously committed to attacking Israel the moment it becomes physically possible to do so. It is therefore in every human's interest on the face of the planet to ensure that it never, ever becomes physically possible. Failure to prevent Iran from having this capability ensures that the world will be irrevokably harmed by a nuclear war.
We are currently looking at perhaps 5% of the sky where objects could be on an intercept course for Earth. Admittedly, this is the 5% with a pretty good chance of finding something in the plane of the eliptic but if something were to come bounding in at a 90 degree angle to the plane of the eliptic, we wouldn't stand a ghost of a chance of seeing it, possibly until it hit.
You don't fix problems like that. A boxcar size object hitting anywhere on the planet has the capacity to destroy all life within a couple of years. You don't get to "fix" that.
An object impacting the Sun could throw up a flare that would roast half the planet. Mars might not even be far enough away and given its lack of a strong magnetosphere it might be worse there.
You see, there are plenty of things that can affect the whole human race that there are no fixes for and nothing that we can do now or in the foreseeable future that would have any impact on it whatsoever.
There is possibly enough resources and wealth to make something like this happen within the next few years. After we get on a real social program kick - which is certainly where things are headed - we will not have anything to spare. We can certainly elevate all of humanity from poverty and eliminate the use of carbon as a energy source, but it will require either massive population reduction or everyone living as people in Bangladesh do today. This hasn't been a popular political topic so nothing has been done in this direction so far. Cap and trade, which would absolutely make a few rich at the expense of everyone else is likely to remain a dream for those few.
But, the idea of raising the standard of living for everyone by simply taking some from the richest (i.e. Westerners) is incredibly seductive. Of course, most people on Earth today would hate the Westerners for attempting to circumvent the natural order of their societies but we could do it. Just like we have eliminated hunger in Africa with massive aid programs. Except we haven't and have arguably made things worse by introducing aid. But still the siren song of helping fellow man sings on and some are captivated by it.
The problem is that if we embark on a social program course there will be nothing left over. Nothing for he future and certainly nothing for exploration. So we need to decide on this course really soon. It isn't going to wait until after all the problems on Earth are somehow fixed - they cannot be "fixed" without requiring poverty of everyone. And that is a one-way trip in itself.
What you are missing is that today the entire engine and transmission is treated as a drop-in component from outside manufacturers. They aren't going to make the electric motor either, so it is nearly a wash between putting in a gasoline engine and an electric motor. Both need fuel supplies, both need all of the other things that make a modern car usable - lights, wipers, seats, etc.
Back in the 1950s a single plant might be making the car - all of it - from raw materials. This was changed in the 1980s following a more Japanese model. The end result was a more streamlined manufacturing plant and far more use of automation. The parts assemblers got a lot more complicated with making things like seats, engines and transmissions which might have been made by the primary car manufacturer on-site before.
Considering there are comments from people on the Engaget article that say pretty much this exact thing, I believe you are quite correct. They allow a memory expansion but it is not treated as an external storage device but as additional memory that becomes part of the phone.
There are tradeoffs with this, but with some phones hiding the card under the battery (RIM Curve for one), it makes a lot of sense to have the card just be integrated and not treated in some special way. Obviously, this is going to place requirements on the card that other devices do not have - putting the "wrong" sort of card in is going to cripple memory access on the phone completely. But the advantage for the user is a simple way to expand the "memory" on the phone in a seamless way without any artificial divide between internal device memory and a memory card.
Now, if the card slot was on the outside of the phone and didn't require opening the device to insert a card this might be a whole different sort of thing.
Clearly it is a different usage model for phones but up until this time it has been somewhat rare that people would pull a memory card out of a phone to print pictures and the like. And using the card to introduce additional files and/or software into a phone is even rarer. There may be some room for this kind of a usage model, but it is a pity that it wasn't a lot clearer about what sort of use they were making of a card. And what exactly it is good for.
It is not creativity and the unleashing of it that is going to cause problems. It is the uncreative copying of things others have created (in physical or digital form) that causes problems.
If you have a 3D printer that you use to make original things that you design, nobody is going to care and you will likely be able to be compensated for your creativity and real costs.
On the other hand, if you have a 3D printer and use it for duplicating what others have done - mostly to their detriment - you will have problems.
I don't see where the problem is what that at all. Creativity should be rewarded. Collecting/hoarding copies of works, destroying someone else's revenue, just generally being a jerk should not be rewarded at all. Sure, if you want to have a collection of every movie ever made that is fine with me. If you then want to make sure that you can give these to everyone on the planet I don't see that as fine.
Personally, I would like to see what happens if a 3D printer or other device came along that was suitable only for making small coins. No other usable function, just making coins. Now that would be interesting. I think you could shut down a significant portion of a country if you could make US quarters for less than 1 cent each.
I suggest reading "Venus Equilateral" by George Smith. In these stories a replicator is produced and the people that made it end up in court. The main engineer responsible for this device decides it would be fun to replicate the Judge's antique watch. He turns out a dozen copies rendering the rare antique watch essentially valueless, thus earning the wrath of the judge. It doesn't go well for them.
We are a long, long way from discovering an economic system which could handle some kind of replicator. We have not figured out how to manage an economy where two countries have vastly different views on human rights, pollution and such as well has having widely disparate wages.
Long before we can handle unlimited production of goods at low cost we need to figure out how we are going to deal with a non-working population because most of the people in such an environment aren't going to be working. Is it the responsibility of the working citizens to support (and entertain) the non-working ones? Or do we push real hard on some real Darwinism and Malthusian ethics and cut the population enough such that there simply aren't any people sitting around idle?
Just MAC and SSID? Well, you might be interested in the fact that the MAC is pretty much a vendor-specific ID, meaning that in most cases you can correlate the MAC to a vendor and model. What this means is that by collecting MAC addresses you can build a database of router vendors and models.
Manufacturers and retailers will then beat a path to your door to buy that database for marketing purposes. That is the true value of collecting that information.
Absolutely Google sells data like this and makes plenty from it.
The point of copyright is control and revenue. Give up control and you give up the revenue and allow someone else to decide if and how much to charge for access.
Copyright was unnecessary and pointless a few hundred years ago because most works were done under a patronage system. The patron (rich old white guy) paid the artist, composer or author to produce something they liked. If they didn't like the result, they didn't pay. See Mozart for more references on this effect.
The result of this for the most part was 500 years of utter stagnation in the arts. Rich old white guys paid for what they wanted and they were not interested in "innovation". They got it and the world got 500 years of "classical" music and "classical" art. After patronage ended, we had significant change and a much wider variety of works being produced. For example, Mary Shelly would never have gotten anyone to pay for the production of Frankenstein but book publishers were happy to pay her and print books on the speculation they might sell. They did and we have Frankenstein because of it. Unfortunately the works of Abner Sheckelstein did not receive the critical acclaim that Frankenstein did and his works are long forgotten - regardless of their quality.
So we have two different systems, one relying on copyright and control and the other relying on rich people. In both cases we have people that fall out of the system: Mozart starved to death and Abner Sheckelstein died an unknown pauper.
I don't think you can eliminate copyright without bringing back patronage one way or another. And patronage is such an abhorrent concept that I can't imagine anyone willing deciding that would be something good.
The point of piracy is to remove the revenue component from creative works. If I pirate a book the author doesn't get paid. If I enable 10,000 people to pirate the book (i.e. The Pirate Bay) I make sure that author will never get another dime. It is in the power of individuals and small groups to do this today. The result is that no new author will ever get a book published - the publishers aren't going to make any money at it, so they will not take on the risk of publishing a book that might be pirated. So Stephen King gets published but nobody else.
If you like the idea of publishers taking on risk by promoting new authors, new musicians and such then you have no choice but to support copyright with all of its flaws. If you prefer patronage, you need to think it through some more because masses of people will not be the judge and the patron - rich old white people will be the patrons and works will be done to their specifications. It is those specifications that should drive fear into your heart. I hear Bill Gates really likes the group Wham! and some of their contemporaries.
There is also this small matter of revenue. When someone copies my book or software without paying and gives it to 100 of their friends I lose something directly. The fact that not all 100 of their friends might have paid for the same thing is irrelevent. The decision of whether or not to pay was removed from their hands and put in someone else's.
This is similar to someone in an apartment building with a neighbor that plays music very loudly. And they only thing they listen to is Herman's Hermits with their favorite being Henry the Eighth. Endlessly. Obviously, your rights are such that you do not have to listen to their music but it is there no matter what. Your decision in the matter of whether or not to have this music played has been removed from your control - it is being played. You can listen or not, it doesn't matter. The inescapable logic of this is that if it is played loudly enough you and your other neighbors are subjected to the side effects of someone exercising not their rights but their capabilities. Piracy is very much like that.
Today, it is completely within the ability of a single person or small group to utterly and completely remove the revenue from anything that can be represented digitally. Nobody I know pays for music anymore - the only people buying CDs at WalMart are those that do not have high speed Internet connections at home or have no knowledge of piracy techniques. The public schools today are fixing the latter problem and the requirements of daily life are probably fixing the former.
One of the primary tenets of any civil service system is that when it is time to promote someone to a management position, a management position must exist or be created for them to move into. Failure to do this is a violation of all sorts of rules and regulations.
So of course you have managers managing nobody at all or only a single person. What else do you do when you have to promote someone because of the rules?
This happens in all civil services organizations since the idea of "civil service" was invented in China. I am sure they had managers of nobody in Rome 2,000 years ago. We certainly have them in the US today.
For the most part, if you tell people they have to give up 50% of their income so that people down the street that aren't working won't starve the response you will get is something like "So?" This isn't just in the US, it is everywhere.
However, if you tell people that they are being taxed to support the fire, police, defense and many other things at 50% they are fine with that idea. And, if the people down the street that are out of a job, then fine, support them as well.
Where many people have a problem is that there are people that would work for nothing to have something to do, but there are almost an equal number that would do nothing at all if they could get away with it. Prior to WW II there wasn't any economic way that people could do that - so you had disabled people working in factories because they had to eat. Since WW II with a larger working population and significant improvements in productivity, it was possible (just barely) to support a small fraction of the population that was unable to unfit to work. Of course, there are plenty of people that would like to be included in that small fraction thus making a much larger fraction.
Welfare as a permanent support program was pretty much eliminated for non-disabled people during the 1990s. There are a lot of people that would really like to see complete support for non-working people come back, and unfortunately given the employment situation I suspect we are going to have as much as 30% of the population of the US on permanent government support. Because there will never been the number of jobs there were again, not like it was in the 1990s. We have moved the bulk of mass-employment factories and such out of the country because of labor costs. The workers have effectively priced themselves out of the market. The end result will simply be that there is no other course of action other than for the government to give these people money in some fashion. Government-provided work would likely be little more than slavery where you got your food ration and housing directly from your employer and is unlikely to ever happen.
Whether people like it or not, the working are going to be paying the non-working. Soon. The idea that they should just go out and get a job instead of sitting and watching TV will be realized as a 1990s fantasy that the world has moved on from. Sure, I'd like to think that people should work for their own support - so do a lot of other people. Unfortunately, the way things have turned out we are all going to be dependent on the government for housing and many dependent on the government for handouts.
US health care is centered around one thing and one thing only: living as long as possible, no matter what. This means putting 80-year-old people through incredible surgery and treatments which allow them to live for a few more months while spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.
As most doctors and they will tell you that it is pointless as these last few months will not be all that pleasant. But still it is done to stave off the spector of "death", a foe to be fought until the very end.
You can't "reform" the US health care system until you change this attitude. Attempting to do so will either bankrupt the country as a whole or force the use of what Sarah Palin called "death panels". Because the only way to squeeze the money out of the system where it is spent now is to simply allow old people to die quicker rather than trying to prolong the inevitable.
The "reform" provisions in the new laws haven't really kicked in yet, and the side effects (companies dumping health care, for one) have just begun to show up. Should we continue down this course, the government will be paying for all health care, whether they planned to or not. And the financial aspects of it will become clear to whoever is in charge at the time, be it republican or democrat. You will absolutely see some changes in Medicare like nobody over 65 gets any treatment at all, because it is all being spent on younger people that can contribute to the tax base. A 70 year-old contributes only by dying with their "final contribution" also known as estate taxes.
This has nothing to do with profits and everything to do with attitudes. The US attitude towards health care and death is different than the rest of the world and comparing US costs to those of other countries is almost pointless. Without a huge attitude change - such as letting the dying die - the US is going to continue to spend twice as much as the rest of the world on health care and spend it all in the last year of a person's life.
Excuse me, but this isn't 1995. Once you have the connectivity to the homes, what the heck do you need an ISP for? Providing email services? I don't think so. Hosting web content? Not any more.
The problem with the idea of leasing the infrastructure back is there is no defining purpose for which an ISP would be created to do the leasing. Nobody needs that function anymore. So the builder can't lease it to anyone because there is no profit to be made. Just costs.
This puts the infrastructure maintenance fully on the shoulders of the municipality and they don't want it. I live in Arizona and both Tempe and Chandler had "municipal WiFi" projects. Both failed because the company that was going to manage the system decided (correctly) there was no profit to be made there. The infrastructure sits and blasts out an SSID 24x7 but it isn't connected to anything because there is nobody to pay for it.
The problem is that infrastructure is expensive to maintain and there is no profit to be had in just maintaining the infrastructure.
The US doesn't have government owning much infrastructure at all. Nobody seems to want that level of involvement by the government, probably for good reasons.
Some, but not all, dams are owned by the government. The Interstate highway system is apparently owned by the states but has a lot of federal laws imposed on it. Most bridges appear to be owned by either states or the federal government. I guess you could say the national laboratories are owned by the federal government and leased out to various operating companies. Aside from this, I don't know of much that is owned by the government that isn't military.
I don't think the government has done a good job with the highway system, bridges or dams. The national laboratories are mostly a financial disaster either currently or around the corner. So far, government ownership seems to be pretty much a receipe for failure.
Why would you want local, state or federal government to own anything else and screw it up? Unless you know of something else the government owns that works. NASA maybe?
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Almost anything could be hiding there and given the volume, the folks at Wikileaks don't even know what all they have. This could easily trigger a major war, if not WW III.
Diplomatic communications that are supposed to be secret but are revealed can have some pretty severe consequences. If it was disclosed that the US was actively threatening Israel if they didn't back off on Iran might actually trigger an attack. To Israel it is almost a lose-lose proposition, so launching their attack might seem to be the only way out for them.
What about the Polish missle defense system? What really happened there? If Russia made it plain, but secretly, that such a thing would never be tolerated it could lead to almost anything. What about Poland being brought back into a Warsaw pact status? Would NATO allow this or go to war over it?
Maybe it is clearly known in diplomatic circles that Iran is going to take over Iraq as soon as the US troops leave. What if Obama is just fine with that as long as the US isn't blamed. Would revealing this force the US to prevent such a takeover by any means necessary?
Come up with your own scenario and see how scary it might be. We could have a very hot war of very big proportions in a couple of weeks because of this and the Wikileaks people would be just fine with that. This sort of thing is incredibly dangerous.
The big problem right now is that billions were spent on getting the scanners that nobody wants to have used on themselves. So we have an "enhanced pat down" which primarily serves to push people into the scanning booth. Still, people are voting to have their children felt up and various body parts manipulated rather than getting scanned.
If they try to walk away from the billions spent on the scanners taxpayers (like me) will rightly be rather angry that this much was spent on something utterly unsuitable for the job and they are just walking away from it.
The only winning hand here is for them to convince the flying public that the scanners are the right way to go. Which is exactly what you can expect in the coming months.
Yes, you probably would require several different licenses. For a sailing vessel you are going to need a master's license that allows you to operate the sailboat in coastal and international waters. This might not apply to a 10-foot sailboat, but I don't think you are going to sail one of those around South America.
You may need several other licenses, including a license that covers the toilet on board because without that you would be polluting without a license. Polluting with a license is fine, but you gotta have that license.
Got a radio? You will need a license for that.
You can probably think of several more things that are going to need a license as well. Anyone that thinks there is an insufficent amount of regulation in the US is just plain nuts.
I believe that the FAA and EPA both have to license a launch. EPA is pretty nasty to get through because all those chemicals involved. Obviously, anything using chemicals might be hazardous to the environment.
Sounds like they managed to get a launch license, so that seems pretty good.
Unfortunately, when I was in Chicago I never saw anything except tickets being available from "brokers" and people that somehow thought they needed to stand in line at 3:00 AM to try to get tickets. The brokers always had a service charge which would jump the face value of the ticket 2 or 3 times but you always knew you could get the tickets without standing in line at 3:00 AM.
I don't believe there is a practical way to get event tickets other than from broker these days. And these folks are just as bad as the folks outside the event trying to sell tickets in terms of cost except the brokers are legal and the folks outside the event aren't.
Google can't charge anyone for customers using their services - they are actually selling access to customers and raking in billions doing it. If they said to Cox that Cox had to pay or they would be cut off their advertising revenue would fall and their ads would be far less valuable.
And as many others have said, Google isn't paying for bandwidth. Infrastructure? Sure, they are paying for the servers and power, but not bandwidth.
So Google is in a hard place really. If there was a united front of ISPs saying that Google had to pay to access customers it is likely they would do so if the price was right and they could afford it.
Of course, Google's move might be to buy out a few key ISPs instead. This would be interesting as it would put a substantial portion of the Internet and Internet traffic under the control of a single company.
Today I have a connection from Cox. It is advertised as something like 20Mb/sec - which is a burst capacity not anything you can rely on continuously. The rate I pay has nothing to do with actual costs but instead is geared to increase market share because in the ISP business it pretty much costs the same to have 1 user in a suburb as it does to have 80,000. So it behooves the ISP (cable, DSL or whatever) to grab as many customers as they can.
Hence we have things like the $14.95 DSL offerings.
As you might guess, even after they have the customers they can't jump the rates up. Business users pay 2-3 times as much for exactly the same service because they aren't competing for the customers in the same way.
So the ISP is now looking for how to actually get paid for their costs. They can't raise prices because that would just drive customers away without decreasing their costs at all. We've tried the "government subsidy" in the US and that didn't work so it is unlikely to work in the UK.
Maybe they can create a new class of service "really fast" and price it 3 times as much as the "pretends to be kinda fast" service that exists today. The difference would, of course, be simply slowing down the current tier and leaving the new service alone.
The other alternative is to get someone else to pay. Google, perhaps?
In Vietnam it was common to have children carry bombs to blow up troops. Pathetic, but common.
At Israeli checkpoints it is not unheard of to have children carrying bombs or to have explosives strapped to them.
There is no question that the scenario you have presented has already happened and needs to be dealt with in some manner.
The problem is that it isn't being dealt with in an effective manner because to be effective you would have to involve profiling and really delaying people while they were interviewed.
You could eliminate the "radical Islam threat" by simply having a guy with a plate of bacon at the checkpoint - you eat or you don't fly. The rest you could probably eliminate by checking luggage - they aren't looking for suicide just mayhem.
You opt out of the enhanced pat-down by going through the scanners. The scanners are unpopular enough that they added the embarassing pat-down to try to push people to go through the scanners.
If they don't do this they will have wasted millions on the new scanners because nobody will go through them.
The problem is now that while the new scanners will detect a ceramic knife taped to someone's leg, they will not detect a "butt-bomb" stuffed up someone's butt. You could easily cram enough C4 there to bring down an airliner and failing to recognize this until it happens is the hallmark of the FAA and airline industry in general. So of course it applies to the TSA.
Not listing cell phones anywhere - even online - means there is no way to find the phone number of someone without a landline. As people continue to figure out the relability difference between a cell phone (very, very unreliable) and a landline (very, very reliable) and move to cell-only they drop out of any directory.
So, how do you find the phone number of your child's 3rd grade teacher? In 1960 you used the phone book. In 2010 you don't, period. People are now unreachable unless you have a prior relationship and they expect you to call them.
How do you find the phone number of your neighbor with a spotlight aimed at your window at 2:00 AM? You don't. You can either call the police or walk over there and hope they are receptive. Maybe they have a "shoot first and ask questions later" policy so the phone would be much, much better. The police would probably ignore you as a crank anyway.
When a cell phone was an unimportant adjunct and very, very costly it made sense not to have them in any sort of directory. In 1987 or so you could run up a charge of several dollars for someone by calling them. 23 years later it might not make sense to not have these phone numbers listed.
You aren't going to get that when people vote for bread and circuses, which is exactly what happened in 2008. In 2012 there is unlikely to be any thinking going on either because the two sides will be represented by an incumbent that has failed to produce (or perhaps more accurately an incumbent that hasn't been allowed to produce, depending on your viewpoint) and someone unlikely to be very good as president.
The "anybody but Obama" (ABO) movement will have taken root but might not be able to really carry the day. Nobody with any leadership is going to ever be elected president again because the social committment is just too great. Who are you going to find that wants their previous life put under a microscope? So far, the answer seems to be nobody of any significance.
The people can only elect whom is put up there by the parties, and nobody currently in power wants to really see anything remotely like "leadership". So things are unlikely to really change until something very, very bad happens.
The problem with an Iran-Israel war is that both sides have treaties and obligations with other countries. Countries with established nuclear arsenals.
If Iran was to attack Israel, the US would be obligated if not legally committed to attack Iran in retaliation. While I don't believe Russia has a binding treaty with Iran you can believe that if they were attacked by the US Russia would come into the fray on Iran's side and likely retailiate against the US.
This brings us to WW III with the US and Russia duking it out with at least a limited nuclear exchange. At that point if any Arab states get into it seeing a great opportunity to further destroy Israel you probably have the whole of the Middle East fighting on various sides. I do not believe the results would be controllable and I'd bet Pakistan starts throwing nukes around as well.
I would offer that Iran is politically and religiously committed to attacking Israel the moment it becomes physically possible to do so. It is therefore in every human's interest on the face of the planet to ensure that it never, ever becomes physically possible. Failure to prevent Iran from having this capability ensures that the world will be irrevokably harmed by a nuclear war.
We are currently looking at perhaps 5% of the sky where objects could be on an intercept course for Earth. Admittedly, this is the 5% with a pretty good chance of finding something in the plane of the eliptic but if something were to come bounding in at a 90 degree angle to the plane of the eliptic, we wouldn't stand a ghost of a chance of seeing it, possibly until it hit.
You don't fix problems like that. A boxcar size object hitting anywhere on the planet has the capacity to destroy all life within a couple of years. You don't get to "fix" that.
An object impacting the Sun could throw up a flare that would roast half the planet. Mars might not even be far enough away and given its lack of a strong magnetosphere it might be worse there.
You see, there are plenty of things that can affect the whole human race that there are no fixes for and nothing that we can do now or in the foreseeable future that would have any impact on it whatsoever.
There is possibly enough resources and wealth to make something like this happen within the next few years. After we get on a real social program kick - which is certainly where things are headed - we will not have anything to spare. We can certainly elevate all of humanity from poverty and eliminate the use of carbon as a energy source, but it will require either massive population reduction or everyone living as people in Bangladesh do today. This hasn't been a popular political topic so nothing has been done in this direction so far. Cap and trade, which would absolutely make a few rich at the expense of everyone else is likely to remain a dream for those few.
But, the idea of raising the standard of living for everyone by simply taking some from the richest (i.e. Westerners) is incredibly seductive. Of course, most people on Earth today would hate the Westerners for attempting to circumvent the natural order of their societies but we could do it. Just like we have eliminated hunger in Africa with massive aid programs. Except we haven't and have arguably made things worse by introducing aid. But still the siren song of helping fellow man sings on and some are captivated by it.
The problem is that if we embark on a social program course there will be nothing left over. Nothing for he future and certainly nothing for exploration. So we need to decide on this course really soon. It isn't going to wait until after all the problems on Earth are somehow fixed - they cannot be "fixed" without requiring poverty of everyone. And that is a one-way trip in itself.
What you are missing is that today the entire engine and transmission is treated as a drop-in component from outside manufacturers. They aren't going to make the electric motor either, so it is nearly a wash between putting in a gasoline engine and an electric motor. Both need fuel supplies, both need all of the other things that make a modern car usable - lights, wipers, seats, etc.
Back in the 1950s a single plant might be making the car - all of it - from raw materials. This was changed in the 1980s following a more Japanese model. The end result was a more streamlined manufacturing plant and far more use of automation. The parts assemblers got a lot more complicated with making things like seats, engines and transmissions which might have been made by the primary car manufacturer on-site before.
Considering there are comments from people on the Engaget article that say pretty much this exact thing, I believe you are quite correct. They allow a memory expansion but it is not treated as an external storage device but as additional memory that becomes part of the phone.
There are tradeoffs with this, but with some phones hiding the card under the battery (RIM Curve for one), it makes a lot of sense to have the card just be integrated and not treated in some special way. Obviously, this is going to place requirements on the card that other devices do not have - putting the "wrong" sort of card in is going to cripple memory access on the phone completely. But the advantage for the user is a simple way to expand the "memory" on the phone in a seamless way without any artificial divide between internal device memory and a memory card.
Now, if the card slot was on the outside of the phone and didn't require opening the device to insert a card this might be a whole different sort of thing.
Clearly it is a different usage model for phones but up until this time it has been somewhat rare that people would pull a memory card out of a phone to print pictures and the like. And using the card to introduce additional files and/or software into a phone is even rarer. There may be some room for this kind of a usage model, but it is a pity that it wasn't a lot clearer about what sort of use they were making of a card. And what exactly it is good for.
It is not creativity and the unleashing of it that is going to cause problems. It is the uncreative copying of things others have created (in physical or digital form) that causes problems.
If you have a 3D printer that you use to make original things that you design, nobody is going to care and you will likely be able to be compensated for your creativity and real costs.
On the other hand, if you have a 3D printer and use it for duplicating what others have done - mostly to their detriment - you will have problems.
I don't see where the problem is what that at all. Creativity should be rewarded. Collecting/hoarding copies of works, destroying someone else's revenue, just generally being a jerk should not be rewarded at all. Sure, if you want to have a collection of every movie ever made that is fine with me. If you then want to make sure that you can give these to everyone on the planet I don't see that as fine.
Personally, I would like to see what happens if a 3D printer or other device came along that was suitable only for making small coins. No other usable function, just making coins. Now that would be interesting. I think you could shut down a significant portion of a country if you could make US quarters for less than 1 cent each.
I suggest reading "Venus Equilateral" by George Smith. In these stories a replicator is produced and the people that made it end up in court. The main engineer responsible for this device decides it would be fun to replicate the Judge's antique watch. He turns out a dozen copies rendering the rare antique watch essentially valueless, thus earning the wrath of the judge. It doesn't go well for them.
We are a long, long way from discovering an economic system which could handle some kind of replicator. We have not figured out how to manage an economy where two countries have vastly different views on human rights, pollution and such as well has having widely disparate wages.
Long before we can handle unlimited production of goods at low cost we need to figure out how we are going to deal with a non-working population because most of the people in such an environment aren't going to be working. Is it the responsibility of the working citizens to support (and entertain) the non-working ones? Or do we push real hard on some real Darwinism and Malthusian ethics and cut the population enough such that there simply aren't any people sitting around idle?
Just MAC and SSID? Well, you might be interested in the fact that the MAC is pretty much a vendor-specific ID, meaning that in most cases you can correlate the MAC to a vendor and model. What this means is that by collecting MAC addresses you can build a database of router vendors and models.
Manufacturers and retailers will then beat a path to your door to buy that database for marketing purposes. That is the true value of collecting that information.
Absolutely Google sells data like this and makes plenty from it.
The point of copyright is control and revenue. Give up control and you give up the revenue and allow someone else to decide if and how much to charge for access.
Copyright was unnecessary and pointless a few hundred years ago because most works were done under a patronage system. The patron (rich old white guy) paid the artist, composer or author to produce something they liked. If they didn't like the result, they didn't pay. See Mozart for more references on this effect.
The result of this for the most part was 500 years of utter stagnation in the arts. Rich old white guys paid for what they wanted and they were not interested in "innovation". They got it and the world got 500 years of "classical" music and "classical" art. After patronage ended, we had significant change and a much wider variety of works being produced. For example, Mary Shelly would never have gotten anyone to pay for the production of Frankenstein but book publishers were happy to pay her and print books on the speculation they might sell. They did and we have Frankenstein because of it. Unfortunately the works of Abner Sheckelstein did not receive the critical acclaim that Frankenstein did and his works are long forgotten - regardless of their quality.
So we have two different systems, one relying on copyright and control and the other relying on rich people. In both cases we have people that fall out of the system: Mozart starved to death and Abner Sheckelstein died an unknown pauper.
I don't think you can eliminate copyright without bringing back patronage one way or another. And patronage is such an abhorrent concept that I can't imagine anyone willing deciding that would be something good.
The point of piracy is to remove the revenue component from creative works. If I pirate a book the author doesn't get paid. If I enable 10,000 people to pirate the book (i.e. The Pirate Bay) I make sure that author will never get another dime. It is in the power of individuals and small groups to do this today. The result is that no new author will ever get a book published - the publishers aren't going to make any money at it, so they will not take on the risk of publishing a book that might be pirated. So Stephen King gets published but nobody else.
If you like the idea of publishers taking on risk by promoting new authors, new musicians and such then you have no choice but to support copyright with all of its flaws. If you prefer patronage, you need to think it through some more because masses of people will not be the judge and the patron - rich old white people will be the patrons and works will be done to their specifications. It is those specifications that should drive fear into your heart. I hear Bill Gates really likes the group Wham! and some of their contemporaries.
There is also this small matter of revenue. When someone copies my book or software without paying and gives it to 100 of their friends I lose something directly. The fact that not all 100 of their friends might have paid for the same thing is irrelevent. The decision of whether or not to pay was removed from their hands and put in someone else's.
This is similar to someone in an apartment building with a neighbor that plays music very loudly. And they only thing they listen to is Herman's Hermits with their favorite being Henry the Eighth. Endlessly. Obviously, your rights are such that you do not have to listen to their music but it is there no matter what. Your decision in the matter of whether or not to have this music played has been removed from your control - it is being played. You can listen or not, it doesn't matter. The inescapable logic of this is that if it is played loudly enough you and your other neighbors are subjected to the side effects of someone exercising not their rights but their capabilities. Piracy is very much like that.
Today, it is completely within the ability of a single person or small group to utterly and completely remove the revenue from anything that can be represented digitally. Nobody I know pays for music anymore - the only people buying CDs at WalMart are those that do not have high speed Internet connections at home or have no knowledge of piracy techniques. The public schools today are fixing the latter problem and the requirements of daily life are probably fixing the former.
One of the primary tenets of any civil service system is that when it is time to promote someone to a management position, a management position must exist or be created for them to move into. Failure to do this is a violation of all sorts of rules and regulations.
So of course you have managers managing nobody at all or only a single person. What else do you do when you have to promote someone because of the rules?
This happens in all civil services organizations since the idea of "civil service" was invented in China. I am sure they had managers of nobody in Rome 2,000 years ago. We certainly have them in the US today.
For the most part, if you tell people they have to give up 50% of their income so that people down the street that aren't working won't starve the response you will get is something like "So?" This isn't just in the US, it is everywhere.
However, if you tell people that they are being taxed to support the fire, police, defense and many other things at 50% they are fine with that idea. And, if the people down the street that are out of a job, then fine, support them as well.
Where many people have a problem is that there are people that would work for nothing to have something to do, but there are almost an equal number that would do nothing at all if they could get away with it. Prior to WW II there wasn't any economic way that people could do that - so you had disabled people working in factories because they had to eat. Since WW II with a larger working population and significant improvements in productivity, it was possible (just barely) to support a small fraction of the population that was unable to unfit to work. Of course, there are plenty of people that would like to be included in that small fraction thus making a much larger fraction.
Welfare as a permanent support program was pretty much eliminated for non-disabled people during the 1990s. There are a lot of people that would really like to see complete support for non-working people come back, and unfortunately given the employment situation I suspect we are going to have as much as 30% of the population of the US on permanent government support. Because there will never been the number of jobs there were again, not like it was in the 1990s. We have moved the bulk of mass-employment factories and such out of the country because of labor costs. The workers have effectively priced themselves out of the market. The end result will simply be that there is no other course of action other than for the government to give these people money in some fashion. Government-provided work would likely be little more than slavery where you got your food ration and housing directly from your employer and is unlikely to ever happen.
Whether people like it or not, the working are going to be paying the non-working. Soon. The idea that they should just go out and get a job instead of sitting and watching TV will be realized as a 1990s fantasy that the world has moved on from. Sure, I'd like to think that people should work for their own support - so do a lot of other people. Unfortunately, the way things have turned out we are all going to be dependent on the government for housing and many dependent on the government for handouts.
US health care is centered around one thing and one thing only: living as long as possible, no matter what. This means putting 80-year-old people through incredible surgery and treatments which allow them to live for a few more months while spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.
As most doctors and they will tell you that it is pointless as these last few months will not be all that pleasant. But still it is done to stave off the spector of "death", a foe to be fought until the very end.
You can't "reform" the US health care system until you change this attitude. Attempting to do so will either bankrupt the country as a whole or force the use of what Sarah Palin called "death panels". Because the only way to squeeze the money out of the system where it is spent now is to simply allow old people to die quicker rather than trying to prolong the inevitable.
The "reform" provisions in the new laws haven't really kicked in yet, and the side effects (companies dumping health care, for one) have just begun to show up. Should we continue down this course, the government will be paying for all health care, whether they planned to or not. And the financial aspects of it will become clear to whoever is in charge at the time, be it republican or democrat. You will absolutely see some changes in Medicare like nobody over 65 gets any treatment at all, because it is all being spent on younger people that can contribute to the tax base. A 70 year-old contributes only by dying with their "final contribution" also known as estate taxes.
This has nothing to do with profits and everything to do with attitudes. The US attitude towards health care and death is different than the rest of the world and comparing US costs to those of other countries is almost pointless. Without a huge attitude change - such as letting the dying die - the US is going to continue to spend twice as much as the rest of the world on health care and spend it all in the last year of a person's life.
Excuse me, but this isn't 1995. Once you have the connectivity to the homes, what the heck do you need an ISP for? Providing email services? I don't think so. Hosting web content? Not any more.
The problem with the idea of leasing the infrastructure back is there is no defining purpose for which an ISP would be created to do the leasing. Nobody needs that function anymore. So the builder can't lease it to anyone because there is no profit to be made. Just costs.
This puts the infrastructure maintenance fully on the shoulders of the municipality and they don't want it. I live in Arizona and both Tempe and Chandler had "municipal WiFi" projects. Both failed because the company that was going to manage the system decided (correctly) there was no profit to be made there. The infrastructure sits and blasts out an SSID 24x7 but it isn't connected to anything because there is nobody to pay for it.
The problem is that infrastructure is expensive to maintain and there is no profit to be had in just maintaining the infrastructure.
The US doesn't have government owning much infrastructure at all. Nobody seems to want that level of involvement by the government, probably for good reasons.
Some, but not all, dams are owned by the government. The Interstate highway system is apparently owned by the states but has a lot of federal laws imposed on it. Most bridges appear to be owned by either states or the federal government. I guess you could say the national laboratories are owned by the federal government and leased out to various operating companies. Aside from this, I don't know of much that is owned by the government that isn't military.
I don't think the government has done a good job with the highway system, bridges or dams. The national laboratories are mostly a financial disaster either currently or around the corner. So far, government ownership seems to be pretty much a receipe for failure.
Why would you want local, state or federal government to own anything else and screw it up? Unless you know of something else the government owns that works. NASA maybe?