Since when does the US military give up ANYTHING? They won't even give back the land they took from Japan and Germany during WWII, what makes you think they would give up something as valuable as radio frequencies.?
Then how do you account for all the spectrum that Verizon bought but never used? Last I heard, they were in negotiations with t-mobile to sell some of it, but I bet Verizon still makes a profit on the sale, for doing nothing more than hoarding spectrum
LTE's coverage has little to do with the LTE technology itself, and more to do with the very high frequencies that are usually used for LTE, because the lower frequencies were already in use (the higher the frequency is, the shorter the range and wall penetration will be)
Once the older technologies like EDGE and HSPA are deactivated, it will free up the lower frequencies for LTE, and LTE's range and wall penetration ability will automatically improve
Many phones already support this, it's called VoLTE. However, it also requires support from the network itself as well, I think at&t and verizon support it, I know t-mobile doesn't.
Now that Google has made their fiber expansion plans public, I expect to see laws drafted (that may or may not pass) in every one of those cities blocking Google fiber in order to protect the existing monopoly/cartel.
If you want to get fiber into a city, you have to sneak it through without the local telco or cableco knowing, otherwise they will spend every last penny (of their customers money) on lawyers and "campaign donations", in order to prevent new competition
I have yet to hear of a single fiber rollout (other than fios) that hasn't been challenged in court at least once
Dr Who isn't made by netflix, and the fact that netflix carries it has nothing to do with the production of the show
Dr Who is created using a third method that you completely glossed-over, which is government aid for the arts.
The BBC has been making great entertainment and news programs since the early days of radio, paid entirely by every Americans favorite dirty word: TAXES
Why do people blame Obama for this? It's not his fault that the rich bankers built themselves a house of cards. He isn't the one who invented balloon payments, or gave home loans to people who clearly couldn't pay them back.
The only thing he did wrong was trying to bail out the banks instead of just letting them fail
Was this boss from India by any chance? I have worked for Indians, and they tend to be both micro-managers and slightly crazy/delusional. (Not trying to be racist, this is just my personal experience)
The Papa John's Pizza franchise in Minnesota (PJCOMN corp) would pay it's general managers (GMs) a salary based on a 40-hour work week, but required that all GMs schedule themselves for a minimum of 50 hours per week.
At the store I worked at, 2 of our shift leads quit at the same time, leaving only the GM and one shift lead to run it for over a month. This meant that both of those people were working 60+ hours a week. Because shift leads are paid hourly, and GMs were paid fixed-salary, the shift lead ended up making more than twice as much per week as the GM.
In other words, people on salary who work more than 40 hours a week are simply being taken advantage of by their employer, and the employer loves it when you work 60 hours for 40 hours worth of pay
It's not "going somewhere," unless that somewhere is an off-shore bank account.
The company isn't going to spend more than it absolutely has to on wages and overhead. The surplus money goes into stock dividends, executive bonuses, political contributions, and (anti-)competitive acquisitions.
Trickle-down economics didn't work in the 80s, and it doesn't work today either.
In the longer term, competition will drive out the crazy profit margins and goods will just be fantastically cheap
Your assumption is that those crazy profits won't be used to stifle competition, which is exactly what DOES happen right now.
Company A makes some product with a 50% markup, while Company B makes the same thing at a 20% markup. Your assumption is that people will start buying from company B, and the price of the product will drop. What happens in reality is that Company A feels threatened by this competition and uses all the profit from their 50% markup to either buy Company B outright (forming Company AB with a 50% markup), or if that isn't possible, Company A will use those profits to bribe politicians into making company B illegal (which is happening right now in Utah with Tesla Motors)
We have unequal distribution of resources because of greed and opportunism, not because of scarcity.
There is more than enough food and energy for everyone, but there are too many powerful people trying to convince us of scarcity, in order to artificially deflate perceived supply and inflate demand to maximize profits.
Comcast internet is a perfect example of this. They claim that there is a very limited supply of bandwidth, and that is the reason for low speeds and high prices, but then they put a lie to that claim by turning home routers into wifi hotspots, using the bandwidth that they claimed doesn't exist.
People aren't starving in Africa because there is "not enough food", people are starving because it's more profitable to sell that food to someone else.
Cable franchises don't work anyway. No matter which company the city chooses, the major player in the region will just buy-out whoever won the franchise. This happened twice in my city, the city gave the franchise to a small local company, then that company was immediately bought by charter. When that franchise contract ended, the city choose another small local company, which was again immediately bought by charter.
Even if the city did allow multiple redundant networks, all of those networks would eventually end up being owned by a single corporation.
I just read that section, and from what I understand, ANY ship leaving from the US would be under US control for eternity, even if it came back to earth and landed/took off from a different country.
Sounds like a convenient loophole giving the US permanent ownership of every man made object on the moon (including the habitats), as long as it originally left from the US.
I'm pretty sure the outer space treaty DOES bar NASA from regulating moon mining. According to the treaty, nations are expressly forbidden from claiming natural resources on the moon, and if you forbidden from claiming it, then you are also forbidden from regulating it (you can't regulate something that isn't yours)
US government agencies have no authority outside US territory, and the moon is definitely NOT US territory. While NASA would be within it's rights to regulate space travel that leaves from, or arrives in, the US, it has no authority over space itself.
Why should someone run expensive servers for stuff they paid for, if they think they won't make money from it?
Because we tell them to? Companies don't pay a minimum wage because they WANT to, the do it because we (the whole country) forced them to do it. The same could be done with OTA. All the FCC would have to do is tell the TV stations that if they want to keep their OTA license, they have to provide that same OTA broadcast over the internet. I can't imagine a streaming service costs very much when compared to a million-watt transmission tower
This happened with Comcast. They had a combo deal for internet and basic cable that was cheaper than internet alone, so we signed up for basic cable but never actually hooked it to a TV (we already had DirecTV)
It seems backwards to subscribe to a service that you never use, just to save money.
One of the smaller cable companies should offer this as a service. You pay a small monthly fee to the cable company in order to be just enough of a customer to get access to legal streaming sites like discovery.com and NBC.com, without paying for actual cable TV service. It costs the cable provider nothing (other than basic accounting costs) and it gets them additional revenue from customers all over the country.
You want to get all grammar-nazi on me? I can play that game too:
The word "America" is supposed to have a capital first letter, because it's a proper noun. The present-tense form of the word "corrupt" is "corrupt", not "corrupted".
Slashdot Mirror
Since when does the US military give up ANYTHING?
They won't even give back the land they took from Japan and Germany during WWII, what makes you think they would give up something as valuable as radio frequencies.?
Then how do you account for all the spectrum that Verizon bought but never used?
Last I heard, they were in negotiations with t-mobile to sell some of it, but I bet Verizon still makes a profit on the sale, for doing nothing more than hoarding spectrum
LTE's coverage has little to do with the LTE technology itself, and more to do with the very high frequencies that are usually used for LTE, because the lower frequencies were already in use (the higher the frequency is, the shorter the range and wall penetration will be)
Once the older technologies like EDGE and HSPA are deactivated, it will free up the lower frequencies for LTE, and LTE's range and wall penetration ability will automatically improve
Many phones already support this, it's called VoLTE. However, it also requires support from the network itself as well, I think at&t and verizon support it, I know t-mobile doesn't.
Now that Google has made their fiber expansion plans public, I expect to see laws drafted (that may or may not pass) in every one of those cities blocking Google fiber in order to protect the existing monopoly/cartel.
If you want to get fiber into a city, you have to sneak it through without the local telco or cableco knowing, otherwise they will spend every last penny (of their customers money) on lawyers and "campaign donations", in order to prevent new competition
I have yet to hear of a single fiber rollout (other than fios) that hasn't been challenged in court at least once
Dr Who isn't made by netflix, and the fact that netflix carries it has nothing to do with the production of the show
Dr Who is created using a third method that you completely glossed-over, which is government aid for the arts.
The BBC has been making great entertainment and news programs since the early days of radio, paid entirely by every Americans favorite dirty word: TAXES
it's invested in low-risk, high to moderate-liquidity investments.
So it's just like a bank account, except they get MORE money than what they put in?
Stock dividends are capital gains, which are taxed
Capital gains taxes go down every year, and are now lower than the income tax rate
Even if it's shipped offshore, it can be taxed if there is political will to do so.
There doesn't seem to be "the will to do so" in Ireland, Bermuda, or the Cayman Islands, which is where most of these offshore account are.
Not sure if trolling.....
In my 20 years in the workforce (mostly service jobs) I have NEVER had even a single day of paid vacation.
Why do people blame Obama for this? It's not his fault that the rich bankers built themselves a house of cards. He isn't the one who invented balloon payments, or gave home loans to people who clearly couldn't pay them back.
The only thing he did wrong was trying to bail out the banks instead of just letting them fail
Was this boss from India by any chance? I have worked for Indians, and they tend to be both micro-managers and slightly crazy/delusional.
(Not trying to be racist, this is just my personal experience)
The Papa John's Pizza franchise in Minnesota (PJCOMN corp) would pay it's general managers (GMs) a salary based on a 40-hour work week, but required that all GMs schedule themselves for a minimum of 50 hours per week.
At the store I worked at, 2 of our shift leads quit at the same time, leaving only the GM and one shift lead to run it for over a month. This meant that both of those people were working 60+ hours a week. Because shift leads are paid hourly, and GMs were paid fixed-salary, the shift lead ended up making more than twice as much per week as the GM.
In other words, people on salary who work more than 40 hours a week are simply being taken advantage of by their employer, and the employer loves it when you work 60 hours for 40 hours worth of pay
It's not "going somewhere," unless that somewhere is an off-shore bank account.
The company isn't going to spend more than it absolutely has to on wages and overhead. The surplus money goes into stock dividends, executive bonuses, political contributions, and (anti-)competitive acquisitions.
Trickle-down economics didn't work in the 80s, and it doesn't work today either.
In the longer term, competition will drive out the crazy profit margins and goods will just be fantastically cheap
Your assumption is that those crazy profits won't be used to stifle competition, which is exactly what DOES happen right now.
Company A makes some product with a 50% markup, while Company B makes the same thing at a 20% markup. Your assumption is that people will start buying from company B, and the price of the product will drop.
What happens in reality is that Company A feels threatened by this competition and uses all the profit from their 50% markup to either buy Company B outright (forming Company AB with a 50% markup), or if that isn't possible, Company A will use those profits to bribe politicians into making company B illegal (which is happening right now in Utah with Tesla Motors)
We have unequal distribution of resources because of greed and opportunism, not because of scarcity.
There is more than enough food and energy for everyone, but there are too many powerful people trying to convince us of scarcity, in order to artificially deflate perceived supply and inflate demand to maximize profits.
Comcast internet is a perfect example of this. They claim that there is a very limited supply of bandwidth, and that is the reason for low speeds and high prices, but then they put a lie to that claim by turning home routers into wifi hotspots, using the bandwidth that they claimed doesn't exist.
People aren't starving in Africa because there is "not enough food", people are starving because it's more profitable to sell that food to someone else.
What is wrong with a world where people don't work? Since when is slaving all day for someone else's benefit a good thing?
If your basic needs are taken care of, it frees you to do what YOU want, instead of doing what someone else wants.
Cable franchises don't work anyway. No matter which company the city chooses, the major player in the region will just buy-out whoever won the franchise. This happened twice in my city, the city gave the franchise to a small local company, then that company was immediately bought by charter. When that franchise contract ended, the city choose another small local company, which was again immediately bought by charter.
Even if the city did allow multiple redundant networks, all of those networks would eventually end up being owned by a single corporation.
I just read that section, and from what I understand, ANY ship leaving from the US would be under US control for eternity, even if it came back to earth and landed/took off from a different country.
Sounds like a convenient loophole giving the US permanent ownership of every man made object on the moon (including the habitats), as long as it originally left from the US.
I'm pretty sure the outer space treaty DOES bar NASA from regulating moon mining.
According to the treaty, nations are expressly forbidden from claiming natural resources on the moon, and if you forbidden from claiming it, then you are also forbidden from regulating it (you can't regulate something that isn't yours)
US government agencies have no authority outside US territory, and the moon is definitely NOT US territory. While NASA would be within it's rights to regulate space travel that leaves from, or arrives in, the US, it has no authority over space itself.
Why should someone run expensive servers for stuff they paid for, if they think they won't make money from it?
Because we tell them to?
Companies don't pay a minimum wage because they WANT to, the do it because we (the whole country) forced them to do it.
The same could be done with OTA. All the FCC would have to do is tell the TV stations that if they want to keep their OTA license, they have to provide that same OTA broadcast over the internet. I can't imagine a streaming service costs very much when compared to a million-watt transmission tower
This happened with Comcast. They had a combo deal for internet and basic cable that was cheaper than internet alone, so we signed up for basic cable but never actually hooked it to a TV (we already had DirecTV)
It seems backwards to subscribe to a service that you never use, just to save money.
One of the smaller cable companies should offer this as a service. You pay a small monthly fee to the cable company in order to be just enough of a customer to get access to legal streaming sites like discovery.com and NBC.com, without paying for actual cable TV service. It costs the cable provider nothing (other than basic accounting costs) and it gets them additional revenue from customers all over the country.
There is nothing wrong with my English.
You want to get all grammar-nazi on me? I can play that game too:
The word "America" is supposed to have a capital first letter, because it's a proper noun.
The present-tense form of the word "corrupt" is "corrupt", not "corrupted".
Socialism (as Marx envisioned it anyway) is the exact opposite of self interest.
More than once have I seen a parent thread modded -2 (offtopic or trolling), with valuable and interesting child threads below it modded +5