I think the Big Dig experience kind of makes tunnels a bit more susceptible to stuff falling out of the ceiling.
Not to mention tunnels are a bit expensive. Like $500 million or more per mile. Tunneling from LA to New York City (2462 miles by plane) would be a minimum of $1.2 TRILLION dollars.
And what happens if a train stalls? The whole system backs up... No thanks, I'll stick with the planes, thank you (and I fly around 200,000 miles per year).
I'm in Shanghai, too (spend about 40% of my life here). On another forum today there was an article about China blocking Google searches regarding the Dalai Lama. The comments were amazing about how bad China was.
So I fired up the 'puter, opened Google and typed in "Dalai Lama". And guess what? All the links you could want. Even could get to his Nobel and Wikipedia pages without a problem...
I wonder how often the real cause is a single individual having a connection problem and freaking out about GeGe controlling everything?
Oh, and I fully concur about politics and economics. Talk about them all the time, with local friends, even in public, on the subway, etc. Usually positive, because a lot of pretty important changes are occurring here. Like I'm even looking to finally buy an apartment here, now that foreigners AND citizens can actually own property...
I'll fully grant that China isn't as open as the US, but in reality no other country is. But China's not nearly as repressive as many think, and as it was 15-20 years ago. The China of today is not the China of 1988...
Those cities are hooked up. You can get fiber if you want. In fact, the entire LA and Orange Counties are covered with FiOS from Verizon.
Want WiMAX? Well, Clearwire is available in most cities now, and while it's not quite ultra-high-speed, you can get several Mb/sec from it, and it covers entire cities, letting you roam.
What most people complain about is cost; we don't subsidize your high speed internet, like most countries. But everyone pays. Like "free" healthcare in Canada, cheap Internet is subsidized via taxes, so consumers are paying for it whether they use it or not.
Evidently they don't teach history outside the US, either... Considering that 31 Japanese cities were over 50% destroyed by US bombing. And that those 31 cities comprised half the Japanese population. I'd say that 50-99% destruction qualifies as leveled. Tokyo over 50% destroyed. Reduced to nothing but rubble.
Also interesting to note that Hiroshima and Nagasaki's atomic bombing caused LESS infrastructure damage than that delivered to Toyama or Tokushima, in terms of percentage of city destroyed.
Maybe because it's not bullshit? New York has fiber available. Chicago has fiber available. You can get FiOS fiber from Verizon in all of LA and Orange counties. Fiber's available, if you want it.
Oh, you mean cheap fiber? Yeah, we have this little thing in the US about free markets and really only forcing certain utilities via taxes, unlike most countries. Our utilities are typically private companies, or managed as such. Means that rather than getting taxed $100 per month and "paying" $30/month for your fiber, like in Japan, we'll just bill you straight up for the $130/month thankyouverymuch...
But dumb people like you immidiatly take it as an excuse, oh the US has some remote locations therefore big population centers can't have fiber. This offcourse perfectly explains sweden, again a country with far better connections then the US AND a far lower population density. They are however not dumb americans and decided that they would install fast connections were people live.
Which is of course, completely wrong... It's not the density that matters, it's how that density is distributed.
Sure, Sweden has 22 people per square kilometer, and the US has 27 (that's not a "far lower" density for Sweden, but Sweden does have fewer people on its 410,000 square kilometers). What you're ignoring is the fact that 45% of all Swedes live in Stockholm, Malmo, and Goteborg. And to get 45% of the US population you'd have to add the populations of California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Washington together. That 45% in the US is spread over a LOT more land per person than in Sweden.
Even though the US has a few high density cities, by far away the vast majority of the population - like 90% - lives in what would be called "low" density housing or cities, as would be defined by most countries. My little subdivision has everyone on 1/4 to 1/2 acre lots. And it was platted in 1963, as a suburb of Seattle. Where I was raised, in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, the ratio of houses to apartments was 50:1, and still is nearly that. Houses on individual lots, with 10+ meters between homes, and 1/8 acre lots the norm.
Look at entire neighborhoods in LA, or New York, or Tampa. Individual houses on large lots. Occasional dense areas with apartment buildings (maybe 4-5 stories tall, not 12-25 story buildings like where I live in Shanghai). The density in the US is rarely like that you find in most cities around the world.
Inside the large cities, you can get fiber. New York City, Los Angeles and Orange counties, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, etc. It's available if you want to buy it, in the big cities. Just don't expect it everywhere, because our population density IS really low compared to most other places.
Because it's the distribution of the density that matters...
If we both have 100,000 square acres of land, and I have 100 people and you have 200 people, I have less density than you.
Now, if my population all live in a 50 square acre area, and yours lives in a 1000 square acre area, your distribution of density is a lot wider. It's easier to wire you than to wire me.
For example, Sweden. 9 million people spread over 410,000 square kilometers for a density of 22 people per square kilometer. The US has 300 million people spread over 9 million square kilometers, for 27 people per square kilometer.
However, Sweden has 18% of its total population living in Stockholm alone. Between Stockholm, Goteborg, and Malmo you have nearly 4 million Swedes - 45% of the population. In the US you have to take STATES to get that kind of density. Like all of California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Washington to get the same coverage.
Face it - the US is simply huge, and we're spread out a LOT more than most countries. Sure, we have cities, but we have a LOT more empty space to spread out those cities. Our populations are a lot less concentrated, even if we have less "total land" per person than some countries.
of "we have a branch there?" offices. Considering Microsoft's revenues are about 1.8 times higher than the entire GDP of Ecuador, it probably doesn't rank really high on the list of priorities, all in all...
Great, so we'll blame Diebold for the COUNTY elections office's screwup, lack of following their own procedures, and failing to back up equipment. And then for telling Diebold "we're all done, thanks do with them as you will".
Look, I'm not absolving Diebold of any of their other screwups, but this one gets laid squarely at the feet of the elections officials. It was their responsibility to govern, control, and retain the voting records. It was their responsibility to make sure any and all records were kept for the legal duration. They chose to use Diebold equipment - warts and all - and they sent that equipment back with instructions that the machines were no longer needed, and could be wiped. How this is Diebold's error I simply cannot fathom.
Shame on Diebold. Why did they ALLOW them to send back the machine before things were taken care of. Why did they ERASE the machines before things were taken care of?
And I assume that you, of course, never wipe any machine you ever touch. Even if it's a production machine that needs to be updated, you keep everything on it forever even when your client - the machine's owner - tells you they have everything they need and that you can wipe and reinstall...
Only if those extensions and add-ons are released under the GPL. There's nothing to stop Novell from releasing them as binaries only, binaries that check/confirm what distro they're being used with.
If the iPhone is used with ANY OTHER CARRIER, that recurring income goes away. If all iPhones are used on networks other than AT&T, then Apple loses that $108 million a year. Suddenly those tech support costs go completely into the red.
The biggest reason Apple would want to lock you down to AT&T is the fact they get a residual every single month. They would have to have support folks for the iPhone regardless of the carrier; those are fixed costs you have to bear. The fact they get extra revenue from AT&T that they would not get from T-Mobile or any of the other carriers means it's extra profit above and beyond the baseline.
Apple makes money monthly for every iPhone on the AT&T network. Apple probably doesn't care about the profit on the phone, considering the $3/month they make for every AT&T subscriber with an iPhone. And an additional $8 for every non-AT&T subscriber that switches over to an AT&T iPhone. Sell 3 million iPhones, you're making $108,000,000 a year.
Note that this is pure profit for Apple; they have zero costs in receiving this revenue! AT&T pays for the wireless network and its maintenance. Apple just gets the "royalty", so to speak. One hundred million dollars a year in gross profit.
The iPhone isn't revolutionary because of its form factor or UI. It's revolutionary because for the first time in the US a cell carrier is sharing monthly revenue with a phone manufacturer. That's never happened. And the rumors are that Verizon and T-Mobile rebuffed Apple over this very sharing. Which is why Apple partnered with AT&T.
It's the backend royalties where the big money is. Considering cell phones are kept for 2 years on average in the US, that means Apple makes at least $72 additional on every iPhone (this is $72 in PROFIT, not just revenue) that sticks on the AT&T network.
No, there's a huge incentive to keep the iPhones firmly in the grasp of AT&T...
in any case, a monopoly is no guarantee of what you propose (just look at what microsoft has done with the user interface in the latest office version).
Yes, look at the change in Office 2007. EVERY single button icon is the same as since Windows 95. Groupings are different, but the icons are the same. For 14 years, those icons have been the same. THAT is the standardization of UI that's needed, and short of a monopoly will never happen.
I'd say let's acknowledge the de-facto standard that is Windows. It's so pervasive and so dominant on the desktop that to try to push away from it is a very big waste of time and energy. Could we push away? Sure, but it's going to be VERY expensive in terms of time, money, and energy.
How about trying to work with Microsoft, in terms of applications and extension of the platform? Cede the desktop, because for all the "wins" announced on/. it's still years and years away from any significant changes. Right now, the ISO, the entire IT world is so rife with partisanship that I don't think the best standards are approved WITHOUT a strong political bent. Witness the cults that spring up around MS or Linux or Mac. No, there's a de-facto standard, and to ignore that is at best arrogance, at worst folly.
Personally, J6P just wants a system that works, with an interface they recognize, that the computer geek down at the local superstore can help them troubleshoot. Intuitive interfaces, something that runs any of the software they can buy at that superstore, and works with the other consumer electronics products that they buy.
If F/OSS folks want to make inroads into the consumer market, then give up trying to overthrow MS - it's a battle that's going to probably never be won, and is going to consume immense resources. Rather, focus on making a new version of Office, or an integrated media player that's seamless with hardware and whatever media source you've got.
And give it a UI and connectivity to other applications that fits in with what J6P understands and is used to. New for new's sake is a paradigm that's great for pushing the envelope, and even better at making companies disappear...
Now imagine a world where you could click any one of those OS choices and be confident your data would be usable, that you could connect to any network you needed to, that your investment in software would be portable. A world where you could choose your OS based on price, performance and personal taste, not on format lockin and obfuscated communication protocols.
Great, when you can find me that version of Alibre 3D design software that runs on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu, let me know... Heck, when you find a common version of a spreadsheet program that runs on those three platforms let me know!
I know this is/. and hating MS is de rigeur, but in some cases having a monopoly platform is what enabled the explosion in IT and the penetration of computers into the corporate and home worlds. I remember the way things were back in the late 70s and early 80s. I remember headaches trying to get a Wang document to translate to an Osborne CP/M system.
Having a common platform, and for some applications a completely common interface, is really a good thing. Think cars, road dimensions, and gas nozzle sizes. Standardizing is the important thing here - your car can pretty much drive on any road, and stop at any gas station because of these standards.
If you want to do the BEST thing for the consumer world, don't push to add lots more choices to the OS platform; that's going to end up with the BlueRay/HD-DVD issue where J6P doesn't know what to buy, so chooses not to participate. Push to get a stable, common API exposed on that platform - whoever supplies it - and go from there.
Push to standardize the meanings of common icons - file save/open/new; copy/cut/paste; help/e-mail/launch web; and other common tasks. So that J6P can sit down in front of your application and intuitively know what to do.
Otherwise you'll always end up with people sticking with what they know. Because the reality most people simply want to do the task at hand with the least amount of effort - INCLUDING effort to learn a new application interface. If they're familiar with the Excel interface, then getting them to change to something else is near-Herculean.
Choice is only useful to those who understand their choices; to the rest, it's needless obfuscation, anxiety, and yet another barrier to entry.
The neighbor of my house here in the US just subdivided and is building another home (1 acre lot) behind his house. Price to pull the electric line was around $4,000. And we pay $0.078/kWh. Natural gas runs $1.25 per therm, so it's a bit less expensive for heating, which is what I have (gas heat and has hot water heater). But it's awfully hard to beat those costs with PV, or your own generation...
Funny, I thought the sanctions were the UN, and that the reason there's an oil for food scandal is because the other members of the Security Council - who voted for the sanctions - were secretly breaking the embargo...
as much as it is a race to see if someone else can become second to get there. Sorry, the gold medal's already claimed, and if the US makes it there again before anyone else, well that doesn't change the order now, does it?
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Not to mention tunnels are a bit expensive. Like $500 million or more per mile. Tunneling from LA to New York City (2462 miles by plane) would be a minimum of $1.2 TRILLION dollars.
And what happens if a train stalls? The whole system backs up... No thanks, I'll stick with the planes, thank you (and I fly around 200,000 miles per year).
All tools are hammers except chisels which are screwdrivers.
Try more cheese and beef. That should help plug you up and break your connection with the john...
So I fired up the 'puter, opened Google and typed in "Dalai Lama". And guess what? All the links you could want. Even could get to his Nobel and Wikipedia pages without a problem...
I wonder how often the real cause is a single individual having a connection problem and freaking out about GeGe controlling everything?
Oh, and I fully concur about politics and economics. Talk about them all the time, with local friends, even in public, on the subway, etc. Usually positive, because a lot of pretty important changes are occurring here. Like I'm even looking to finally buy an apartment here, now that foreigners AND citizens can actually own property...
I'll fully grant that China isn't as open as the US, but in reality no other country is. But China's not nearly as repressive as many think, and as it was 15-20 years ago. The China of today is not the China of 1988...
They've got a bigger budget than Interpol...
No sex in Asia, that can't be right! How else do you get 1.3 billion Chinese and 1 billion Indians?
Want WiMAX? Well, Clearwire is available in most cities now, and while it's not quite ultra-high-speed, you can get several Mb/sec from it, and it covers entire cities, letting you roam.
What most people complain about is cost; we don't subsidize your high speed internet, like most countries. But everyone pays. Like "free" healthcare in Canada, cheap Internet is subsidized via taxes, so consumers are paying for it whether they use it or not.
Also interesting to note that Hiroshima and Nagasaki's atomic bombing caused LESS infrastructure damage than that delivered to Toyama or Tokushima, in terms of percentage of city destroyed.
I'm glad the US hasn't spent trillions of dollars on the Iraq War too...
Oh, you mean cheap fiber? Yeah, we have this little thing in the US about free markets and really only forcing certain utilities via taxes, unlike most countries. Our utilities are typically private companies, or managed as such. Means that rather than getting taxed $100 per month and "paying" $30/month for your fiber, like in Japan, we'll just bill you straight up for the $130/month thankyouverymuch...
Which is of course, completely wrong... It's not the density that matters, it's how that density is distributed.
Sure, Sweden has 22 people per square kilometer, and the US has 27 (that's not a "far lower" density for Sweden, but Sweden does have fewer people on its 410,000 square kilometers). What you're ignoring is the fact that 45% of all Swedes live in Stockholm, Malmo, and Goteborg. And to get 45% of the US population you'd have to add the populations of California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Washington together. That 45% in the US is spread over a LOT more land per person than in Sweden.
Even though the US has a few high density cities, by far away the vast majority of the population - like 90% - lives in what would be called "low" density housing or cities, as would be defined by most countries. My little subdivision has everyone on 1/4 to 1/2 acre lots. And it was platted in 1963, as a suburb of Seattle. Where I was raised, in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, the ratio of houses to apartments was 50:1, and still is nearly that. Houses on individual lots, with 10+ meters between homes, and 1/8 acre lots the norm.
Look at entire neighborhoods in LA, or New York, or Tampa. Individual houses on large lots. Occasional dense areas with apartment buildings (maybe 4-5 stories tall, not 12-25 story buildings like where I live in Shanghai). The density in the US is rarely like that you find in most cities around the world.
Inside the large cities, you can get fiber. New York City, Los Angeles and Orange counties, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Philadelphia, etc. It's available if you want to buy it, in the big cities. Just don't expect it everywhere, because our population density IS really low compared to most other places.
If we both have 100,000 square acres of land, and I have 100 people and you have 200 people, I have less density than you.
Now, if my population all live in a 50 square acre area, and yours lives in a 1000 square acre area, your distribution of density is a lot wider. It's easier to wire you than to wire me.
For example, Sweden. 9 million people spread over 410,000 square kilometers for a density of 22 people per square kilometer. The US has 300 million people spread over 9 million square kilometers, for 27 people per square kilometer.
However, Sweden has 18% of its total population living in Stockholm alone. Between Stockholm, Goteborg, and Malmo you have nearly 4 million Swedes - 45% of the population. In the US you have to take STATES to get that kind of density. Like all of California, New York, Texas, Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Washington to get the same coverage.
Face it - the US is simply huge, and we're spread out a LOT more than most countries. Sure, we have cities, but we have a LOT more empty space to spread out those cities. Our populations are a lot less concentrated, even if we have less "total land" per person than some countries.
of "we have a branch there?" offices. Considering Microsoft's revenues are about 1.8 times higher than the entire GDP of Ecuador, it probably doesn't rank really high on the list of priorities, all in all...
Look, I'm not absolving Diebold of any of their other screwups, but this one gets laid squarely at the feet of the elections officials. It was their responsibility to govern, control, and retain the voting records. It was their responsibility to make sure any and all records were kept for the legal duration. They chose to use Diebold equipment - warts and all - and they sent that equipment back with instructions that the machines were no longer needed, and could be wiped. How this is Diebold's error I simply cannot fathom.
And I assume that you, of course, never wipe any machine you ever touch. Even if it's a production machine that needs to be updated, you keep everything on it forever even when your client - the machine's owner - tells you they have everything they need and that you can wipe and reinstall...
Geez, the level of basic science knowledge here at /. is downright scary...
Only if those extensions and add-ons are released under the GPL. There's nothing to stop Novell from releasing them as binaries only, binaries that check/confirm what distro they're being used with.
The biggest reason Apple would want to lock you down to AT&T is the fact they get a residual every single month. They would have to have support folks for the iPhone regardless of the carrier; those are fixed costs you have to bear. The fact they get extra revenue from AT&T that they would not get from T-Mobile or any of the other carriers means it's extra profit above and beyond the baseline.
Note that this is pure profit for Apple; they have zero costs in receiving this revenue! AT&T pays for the wireless network and its maintenance. Apple just gets the "royalty", so to speak. One hundred million dollars a year in gross profit.
The iPhone isn't revolutionary because of its form factor or UI. It's revolutionary because for the first time in the US a cell carrier is sharing monthly revenue with a phone manufacturer. That's never happened. And the rumors are that Verizon and T-Mobile rebuffed Apple over this very sharing. Which is why Apple partnered with AT&T.
It's the backend royalties where the big money is. Considering cell phones are kept for 2 years on average in the US, that means Apple makes at least $72 additional on every iPhone (this is $72 in PROFIT, not just revenue) that sticks on the AT&T network.
No, there's a huge incentive to keep the iPhones firmly in the grasp of AT&T...
Yes, look at the change in Office 2007. EVERY single button icon is the same as since Windows 95. Groupings are different, but the icons are the same. For 14 years, those icons have been the same. THAT is the standardization of UI that's needed, and short of a monopoly will never happen.
How about trying to work with Microsoft, in terms of applications and extension of the platform? Cede the desktop, because for all the "wins" announced on /. it's still years and years away from any significant changes. Right now, the ISO, the entire IT world is so rife with partisanship that I don't think the best standards are approved WITHOUT a strong political bent. Witness the cults that spring up around MS or Linux or Mac. No, there's a de-facto standard, and to ignore that is at best arrogance, at worst folly.
Personally, J6P just wants a system that works, with an interface they recognize, that the computer geek down at the local superstore can help them troubleshoot. Intuitive interfaces, something that runs any of the software they can buy at that superstore, and works with the other consumer electronics products that they buy.
If F/OSS folks want to make inroads into the consumer market, then give up trying to overthrow MS - it's a battle that's going to probably never be won, and is going to consume immense resources. Rather, focus on making a new version of Office, or an integrated media player that's seamless with hardware and whatever media source you've got.
And give it a UI and connectivity to other applications that fits in with what J6P understands and is used to. New for new's sake is a paradigm that's great for pushing the envelope, and even better at making companies disappear...
Great, when you can find me that version of Alibre 3D design software that runs on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu, let me know... Heck, when you find a common version of a spreadsheet program that runs on those three platforms let me know! I know this is /. and hating MS is de rigeur, but in some cases having a monopoly platform is what enabled the explosion in IT and the penetration of computers into the corporate and home worlds. I remember the way things were back in the late 70s and early 80s. I remember headaches trying to get a Wang document to translate to an Osborne CP/M system.
Having a common platform, and for some applications a completely common interface, is really a good thing. Think cars, road dimensions, and gas nozzle sizes. Standardizing is the important thing here - your car can pretty much drive on any road, and stop at any gas station because of these standards.
If you want to do the BEST thing for the consumer world, don't push to add lots more choices to the OS platform; that's going to end up with the BlueRay/HD-DVD issue where J6P doesn't know what to buy, so chooses not to participate. Push to get a stable, common API exposed on that platform - whoever supplies it - and go from there.
Push to standardize the meanings of common icons - file save/open/new; copy/cut/paste; help/e-mail/launch web; and other common tasks. So that J6P can sit down in front of your application and intuitively know what to do.
Otherwise you'll always end up with people sticking with what they know. Because the reality most people simply want to do the task at hand with the least amount of effort - INCLUDING effort to learn a new application interface. If they're familiar with the Excel interface, then getting them to change to something else is near-Herculean.
Choice is only useful to those who understand their choices; to the rest, it's needless obfuscation, anxiety, and yet another barrier to entry.
The neighbor of my house here in the US just subdivided and is building another home (1 acre lot) behind his house. Price to pull the electric line was around $4,000. And we pay $0.078/kWh. Natural gas runs $1.25 per therm, so it's a bit less expensive for heating, which is what I have (gas heat and has hot water heater). But it's awfully hard to beat those costs with PV, or your own generation...
Funny, I thought the sanctions were the UN, and that the reason there's an oil for food scandal is because the other members of the Security Council - who voted for the sanctions - were secretly breaking the embargo...
as much as it is a race to see if someone else can become second to get there. Sorry, the gold medal's already claimed, and if the US makes it there again before anyone else, well that doesn't change the order now, does it?