We're talking about the music download market, not the player market here.
Parent seemed to think the two were linked, but assuming you're right and we're just talking about music downloads, then I don't see how Apple's DRM is a problem. After all, you can buy music from Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo, et al and play it on your computer, right? PlayFair has nothing to do with other music stores, any more than Windows Media keeps users from using iTunes.
Good gawd. Half a dozen people outside Apple have actually had their hands on an iPhone, yet everyone is an expert on whether the device will succeed or fail. Stories like this are a great way to pump readership, though.
A few thoughts:
Apple can change the price. It's not carved in stone.
A consumer survey of the price is like asking Web users what they like in a website. Compare what they say to what they actually do, and you'll see that the two results are wildly different. I'm not saying that people will snap up iPhones, but the survey is worse than useless.
Nobody will really know how useful the iPhone is until they get to test one, or at least see someone else using it in the real world.
I thought the Newton rocked. Never wound up buying one. I initially thought the iPod was a completely brain-dead move by Apple. We now have four of 'em in the house.
All signs are that Apple is moving aggressively to refine the iPhone. Don't be surprised if Apple iterates nearly as quickly with the iPhone as they have with the iPod.
Is the world becoming so serious -- or so frightened -- that fantasy is no longer allowed?"
With one caveat. If it involves wealthy actors who play married hitmen trying to kill each other with everything from knives to rocket launchers, it's ok. Same thing with movies depicting armies systematically destroying each other with machine guns, bombs, flamethrowers, etc. Basically, the bigger the magnitude of the killing, destruction, and carnage, the more acceptable. The smaller the scale, the more freaked out people get.
The marijuana prohibitions started because hemp competed with other rope and paper making trades.
Yep. That's domestic politics. I was merely pointing out that the parent was wildly off base in his string of assumptions. As for whether pot is legal in the US or not, that's a separate issue. Personally I think it should be legal. From what I've seen, it is far less harmful than cigarettes or alcohol, and it is only a "gateway drug" because it and other much more harmful substances are lumped into the "forbidden fruit" category.
If the US stopped meddling in other people's affairs, other people would still keep klling each other, but they wouldn't have any reason to attack the US in the process. (Unless it's a case of "you promised to protect us in this war, but you didn't, you bastards!")
Perhaps. Then again, they might still find the US a convenient target. I think the parent assumes that *all* reasons for attacking the US are rational. I'm not so sure.
The war on drugs is about ensuring that citizens are addicted to indigenous drugs, and that the profits are centrally controlled.
That doesn't explain why the US government has so aggressively gone after marijuana cultivation here in the US. It also doesn't explain why the extremely powerful tobacco lobby keeps losing in court battles, or how these profits are "centrally controlled."
That's why it's OK for Americans to be addicted to cigarettes and alcohol but not cocaine or crystal meth.
Umm... you do know that crystal meth is produced in the United States, right? You seem to also imply that the only reason cocaine is illegal almost everywhere stems from the fact that coca leaves don't come from the United States. Perhaps that's right, if you assume that cocaine is a benign substance, and there's a globe-spanning conspiracy to keep this beneficial substance from citizens everywhere.
Having everyone addicted to cocaine is a threat to national sovereignty.
By that logic, the fact that so many Americans can't do without coffee should be serious cause for alarm. Time to crank up the Blackhawks, bring the SEALs down to Columbia, and lets take control of those coffee fields!
Having them addicted to meth is a threat to profits.
Is that because meth-addicted people will buy less alcohol and cigarettes?
The free market would have everyone buying cheap meth or homemade shine, or addicted to foreign produced coke.
That would be swell. I like that idea. More addiction for everyone!
As it stands now, they're buying whiskey, cigarettes and cough syrup, which is just the way those on top like it.
Yes, because The Sinister Cabal that runs America has made it so. The tobacco lobby is totally unrelated to the fact that in many southern states, the biggest cash crop is tobacco. Voters there probably don't want to promote the interests of tobacco growers. They've been forced to do so by The Man. Likewise, the alchohol distributors have effectively maintained a monopoly by keeping foreign-supplied beer, wine, whiskey, and every other form of alchohol out of America. Oh, wait. They haven't.
The war on terror, on the other hand, is easy to fix.
Of course it is. Whenever the world is binary, the solution is obvious.
Keep your military and your CIA at home, and there will be no terrorism.
Absolutely right. It wasn't until the US pulled out of Northern Ireland that the terrorism there and in the UK stopped. The Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction were terrorizing Italy and Germany until the US military left Europe. The Basque ETA. The Pakistani groups operating in India. Abu Sayyaf. All of these groups obviously will disappear as soon as the CIA disappears and the US military ends all its foreign presence.
The terrorists are after vengence because they have been and continue to be systematically wronged. By Americans.
Again, you see through the nuance quite clearly. There are no opportunists in the world of terrorism. These are all idealogically committed individuals, ready to give their lives for higher principles. Certainly none of them are using terrorism as a vehicle to further profiteering or mere power grabs. I think we can all agree that any problems that occur anywhere in the world are the result of America's negative influence.
Well, it might be too late now. I imagine there are a lot of orphaned children who aren't going to forget what was done to them.
You're right. All of the Shia children whose parents were killed by Sunnis, and all the Sunni children whose parents
Microsoft's chief executive said the company's partnership with Novell, which it signed in November 2006, "demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open-source world."
On other words, "We paid money to Novell, therefore there is value in what we paid for."
I feel the same way. I paid a guy on the street $800 for a pair of old moldy basketball shoes. The guy assured me it was the first pair Michael Jordan wore when he played for the Bulls. This proves that there is clear value in moldy old basketball shoes. At least, for the guy who sold 'em to me.;-)
Ballmer once again misses the mark by a mile. There IS and has always been value in intellectual property in the open source world. Open source licenses RELY on copyright law, in fact. Merely because MS paid money to Novell doesn't mean that the intellectual property they paid for was Novell's to give out in the first place, or that it has any real value. I can sell you the broadcast rights to a short story I wrote in the 3rd grade, but that doesn't mean it is worth anything.
I was wondering about that too. They either are so desperate for a merger that they'll take their chances with the FCC, or they've already talked with Martin and convinced him that it won't be anticompetitive.
Who knows, they may succeed in framing the competition issue as one applying to the streamed audio market, which encompasses radio, Internet radio, and sat radio. When discussing broadband, the FCC frequently defines the market rather broadly, incorporating dish access into the discussion, as if it is a serious market participant. Given their generally broad interpretation of communications markets, they (or at least Martin, Tate, and McDowell) may buy the argument.
Exactly. It's interesting, if you could only judge by the "hardcore" mainstream gaming media, the Wii has never done well, will never do well, can never do well. The same litany of GameCube criticisms comes pouring out--too focused on children, not enough brutal online competition, graphics fall short. The Wii adds the "it's a gimmick!" to that list.
So true. The danger of being inside a community of like-minded masters of the universe is that you can't see beyond the bubble you're in. Enterprise IT pundits didn't see Linux until it had already infiltrated the enterprise. They'd all been too busy talking about "soup to nuts solutions" to read the writing on the wall. The same thing is happening with games.
Hardcore gamers don't realize that their pastime is mainstream now. Just look at the term "games." When I was a teenager, "gamer" meant someone who carried the DMG, the Players Handbook, and the Monster Manual in his backpack at school. Now pencil and paper games have gone mainstream in the form of console and PC games. Adults play these games. Females play these games. It is madness! The inner sanctum has been breached!
Wii is doing great, and it will continue to rack up impressive sales, until eventually even gamer media will adapt their thinking and broaden the appeal of their own offerings.
He is defending his actions that caused him to get fired.
The point of an unlawful termination suit is to show that the employer broke the law. In raising that claim, he is opening himself to attack from the defense, which will point out the legality of their actions by showing that homeboy was doing things he wasn't supposed to be doing.
As long as they were within their legal rights in firing him, the fact that he was traumatized in the Vietnam War or has an addiction to porn don't really matter. My understanding is that they only matter if he can prove that he was fired because he had these problems, not because of their effect on his work.
the polarization of US politics leads me to hope that it is at least theoretically possible to have a sharp decrease as well, even if partisanship can't be eliminated.
I'd never thought of it that way, but perhaps you're on to something. Maybe there is a way to see the glass as half full.
So? If people want those services, they should either pay what it costs for them, OR, they should move closer to where they can get them.
That's great, if you assume infinite mobility. You seem to be assuming that there is no friction involved in economic choices, and that people make economic choices in a vacuum, moving freely from one part of the country to another with regard only for economic choices. There are other factors at work here.
I'm a strong advocate for free enterprise, but I also believe that we are still members of a community, and we should support certain basic standards for health, access to education, and access to infrastructure. There are many reasons why people don't live in urban areas. For example, farmers, miners, and other people who are an important part of the economy can't do their work in cities. Should they be denied access to what is fast becoming part of the nation's core infrastructure? What about minors who live in these places not by choice but because their parents chose to live there?
Why should I pay someone else's cost of obtaining a modern convenience?
Indeed. Why should the state fund roads? Why should we send men to the moon. Why should we have a standing military? I don't think broadband is a luxury. If we don't make sure we all get it, we'll all suffer economically, even those of us who already have broadband. I liken it to schools. Sure, why should I be concerned about schools in Iowa? I'm concerned because although I live in California, the nation's economic health, and its ability to provide me with opportunities, will suffer.
if the telcos didnt find it profitable to roll service out to the rural areas, then either a)a smaller more agile firm would've started up to do it, or b)new technology would've been invented or utilized (think microwave/shortwave etc) to deal with this problem.
Nope. It doesn't always work that way. See the definition ofmarket failure. The smaller, more agile firms have been boxed out by FCC rules promulgated by the big telcos. They simply cannot enter the markets, even when the big telcos aren't providing service. You might argue that this is precisely your point. The FCC shouldn't be regulating. But if you want to see what telecommunications would be like if completely unregulated, just look at the early days of radio. The FCC came about precisely because radio was completely hosed. Stations stepped on each other constantly, some stations hogged up huge chunks of the spectrum, there were all kinds of dirty tricks, etc. The real answer is to get the FCC to stop kowtowing to the big incumbent telecos. As for microwave/shortwave, right now dish Internet access accounts for less than 1% of all access in the US, is prohibitively expensive, and suffers lag that renders it unusable for many of the applications that make broadband so attractive.
I agree that we don't have a free market situation wrt broadband. I should have put "free market" in quotes.
I also agree that a confused jumble of government regulations and big business buying legislation are to blame. However, I don't buy the argument that lack of government regulation is the way out. If you live in rural America, the very fact that you have phone service is because of government regulations. Not all regulations are created equal.
All we have is the honor of being home-port to a bunch of large multinational corporations
Unlike the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Korea...? I don't get how your diatribe against globalism has anything to do with whether there is an "America" or not. Is Japan not "Japan" because it sells most of its goods overseas, and built its post-war economy around American industrial economic principles? Because the UK liberalized its economy during the Thatcher era to open up more foreign investment and spur growth, is the UK now less "British?"
We're a market for goods and capital, and a source of lawyers, marketers, and middle-managers.
Again, this is unlike other countries with modern economies in what respect? You seem to be implying that being a market somehow makes us *only* a market and nothing else. Oh, right, we also provide lawyers, marketers, and middle-managers. I'll tell that to all of the programmers and entrepreneurs I know. They'll be startled to find out they don't exist.
And "intellectual property," which the rest of the world could quickly decide to do without, if it wanted to.
Intellectual property is not a purely American concept. America actually had to modify its copyright laws to join the Berne Convention. The fact that as soon as you create a work it has copyright attached to it is a product of the Berne Convention, which was first established in 1886 by Europeans, not Americans. Check out the Paris Convention as well, which covers patents. I know it's all the rage to blame America for the poor state of the intellectual property regime, but it can't be gotten rid of quickly or easily, as you imply. Americans aren't the only ones with a vested interest in it.
Yep, but that doesn't explain why other countries that are even more decentralized are kicking America's ass. There is no appreciable statistical correlation. Plus, even if there were a correlation, the excuse that America is diffuse is a pretty weak excuse for the technological and economic backwardness we're exhibiting with broadband.
America's broadband failures shouldn't be news to anyone who has been paying attention. Several reports have gone into extensive detail on this over the past few years. Check out Broadband Reality Check II (PDF) for a solid analysis of where the US is in broadband, and how the FCC has its head in the sand.
We've been giving the phone and cable companies a free ride, buying their arguments that free enterprise is working efficiently. It isn't. These massive companies have managed to keep all other entrants out of their markets by manipulating the FCC and getting the Supreme Court to buy their argument that there's a free market for broadband. There isn't. We have the worst of both worlds: Government protection of an oligopoly comprised of regional duopolies (one cable company and one DSL provider in most markets), and tremendously high barriers to entry, without at least the broad reach that a government-controlled system would have. We need a truly competitive marketplace, or we'll keep languishing.
Fiscal conservatives and small government types have always been the black sheep in the Republican party.
I always thought Reagan was essentially a "return to the roots" of Republicanism, a sort of clearing the decks after decades of Democrats leading the show with the continuation of New Deal policies under other names. To me Reagan's cleverest stroke was to turn the Republicans into the party of strong military defense, but I assumed his harangues against big government were just a more skillfully delivered version of the Republican mainstream agenda.
Would you say that in the 20th Century (to keep the scope of discussion manageable) the Republicans were primarily motivated by social conservatism, rather than fiscal conservatism and desire to limit the role of government?
the government should get its nose out of the business of people who are doing things I approve of, but spare no expense stopping people from doing things that make me feel uneasy.
Nicely put.
Political parties are the problem. Hamilton was adamantly opposed to them, even when one was forming around him in opposition to the Jeffersonians. Perhaps he was on to something. Line up behind a party, and you have to do a lot less thinking for yourself. But of course, how are you going to stop people from organizing into political parties? It is human nature to form into groups, for better and for worse.
What ever happened to the party of "less government interference?"
That's right, I remember now. It was the Unholy Alliance that did in the fiscally-conservative, small-government Republicans. Now the Republicans seem to be the party of fiscally-unrestrained big government. I find it rather humorous that during the Bush Years the FCC has steadfastly held to its notion that the free market will provide us all with speedy, cheap broadband and all kinds of broadcast diversity, yet one tit shows up on the Super Bowl and suddenly the FCC stirs into action. The FTC is an entity often decried for its meddlesome consumer protection activities, but throw up the hue and cry of "think of the children!" and suddenly the FTC is a useful government agency.
It seems the party now stands for individual freedom to make money, government money to spend money, and meddlesome interference into matters of so-called morality. Perhaps the theory is that if you can't make government work more efficiently, you may as well try to make it an extension of the church.
Here's the conundrum: Even if it was lawful, was it "good?"
I believe the more power and control of capital a company acquires, the more difficult it is for the company to examine its own behavior under the lens of ethics. In time all decisions become decided on the basis of whether they are legal or not, which is a completely different calculus. A company can scrupulously follow the law and still act unethically.
The "do no evil" mantra might help Google employees feel like they're not actually working at a tremendously powerful publicly-traded company, and it probably still has a lot of influence on decisionmaking at the company. But I have a hard time believing that we won't be reading more and more stories of questionable ethics at Google as their power grows. I commend the leadership at Google for attempting to buck the forces at work here, but power still corrupts; it's the nature of the beast.
Either speech is free or it isn't, no matter what convenient label you want to put it under.
That's an easy position to take, because it is the expression of an ideal. In the real world, rights clash all the time. The rights of Individual A, when they come into conflict with those of Individual B, or of society at large, can't be absolute.
My right to defend myself does not give me the right to shoot someone in the head when they try to pick my pocket. My right to own property doesn't mean that I can drill down and inject anthrax into the groundwater. My right of free speech doesn't mean that I can spam millions of email users without consequence. It also doesn't mean that I can advertise Fruit Loops cereal as a cure for cancer. In Abstract World it sounds great to let the buyer beware, but just imagine how much of a drag that would be on society. Transaction costs would go up, because much more due dilligence would need to be done, just to conduct a simple purchase. Those with more free time and more resources would be able to conduct due dilligence. Everyone else would be put at a substantial disadvantage. That's a perversion of free speech, which is designed to protect political speech, not the fleecing of other citizens.
As a side note, your slippery slope argument may apply in some countries, but not in the United States.I don't know how it is elsewhere, but in the United States, commercial speech has been granted more 1st Amendment protection over the past few decades, not less.
Slashdot Mirror
We're talking about the music download market, not the player market here.
Parent seemed to think the two were linked, but assuming you're right and we're just talking about music downloads, then I don't see how Apple's DRM is a problem. After all, you can buy music from Napster, Rhapsody, Yahoo, et al and play it on your computer, right? PlayFair has nothing to do with other music stores, any more than Windows Media keeps users from using iTunes.
Good gawd. Half a dozen people outside Apple have actually had their hands on an iPhone, yet everyone is an expert on whether the device will succeed or fail. Stories like this are a great way to pump readership, though.
A few thoughts:
Because the DRM locks people into iTunes + ipod, and locks out competition. Why do you think they're keeping it?
If that were true, eMusic wouldn't be so successfully riding on the iPod's coattails, would it?
I always wondered where all the Bush voters came from.
Is the world becoming so serious -- or so frightened -- that fantasy is no longer allowed?"
With one caveat. If it involves wealthy actors who play married hitmen trying to kill each other with everything from knives to rocket launchers, it's ok. Same thing with movies depicting armies systematically destroying each other with machine guns, bombs, flamethrowers, etc. Basically, the bigger the magnitude of the killing, destruction, and carnage, the more acceptable. The smaller the scale, the more freaked out people get.
The marijuana prohibitions started because hemp competed with other rope and paper making trades.
Yep. That's domestic politics. I was merely pointing out that the parent was wildly off base in his string of assumptions. As for whether pot is legal in the US or not, that's a separate issue. Personally I think it should be legal. From what I've seen, it is far less harmful than cigarettes or alcohol, and it is only a "gateway drug" because it and other much more harmful substances are lumped into the "forbidden fruit" category.
If the US stopped meddling in other people's affairs, other people would still keep klling each other, but they wouldn't have any reason to attack the US in the process. (Unless it's a case of "you promised to protect us in this war, but you didn't, you bastards!")
Perhaps. Then again, they might still find the US a convenient target. I think the parent assumes that *all* reasons for attacking the US are rational. I'm not so sure.That doesn't explain why the US government has so aggressively gone after marijuana cultivation here in the US. It also doesn't explain why the extremely powerful tobacco lobby keeps losing in court battles, or how these profits are "centrally controlled."
Umm... you do know that crystal meth is produced in the United States, right? You seem to also imply that the only reason cocaine is illegal almost everywhere stems from the fact that coca leaves don't come from the United States. Perhaps that's right, if you assume that cocaine is a benign substance, and there's a globe-spanning conspiracy to keep this beneficial substance from citizens everywhere.
By that logic, the fact that so many Americans can't do without coffee should be serious cause for alarm. Time to crank up the Blackhawks, bring the SEALs down to Columbia, and lets take control of those coffee fields!
Is that because meth-addicted people will buy less alcohol and cigarettes?
That would be swell. I like that idea. More addiction for everyone!
Yes, because The Sinister Cabal that runs America has made it so. The tobacco lobby is totally unrelated to the fact that in many southern states, the biggest cash crop is tobacco. Voters there probably don't want to promote the interests of tobacco growers. They've been forced to do so by The Man. Likewise, the alchohol distributors have effectively maintained a monopoly by keeping foreign-supplied beer, wine, whiskey, and every other form of alchohol out of America. Oh, wait. They haven't.
Of course it is. Whenever the world is binary, the solution is obvious.
Absolutely right. It wasn't until the US pulled out of Northern Ireland that the terrorism there and in the UK stopped. The Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction were terrorizing Italy and Germany until the US military left Europe. The Basque ETA. The Pakistani groups operating in India. Abu Sayyaf. All of these groups obviously will disappear as soon as the CIA disappears and the US military ends all its foreign presence.
Again, you see through the nuance quite clearly. There are no opportunists in the world of terrorism. These are all idealogically committed individuals, ready to give their lives for higher principles. Certainly none of them are using terrorism as a vehicle to further profiteering or mere power grabs. I think we can all agree that any problems that occur anywhere in the world are the result of America's negative influence.
You're right. All of the Shia children whose parents were killed by Sunnis, and all the Sunni children whose parents
On other words, "We paid money to Novell, therefore there is value in what we paid for."
I feel the same way. I paid a guy on the street $800 for a pair of old moldy basketball shoes. The guy assured me it was the first pair Michael Jordan wore when he played for the Bulls. This proves that there is clear value in moldy old basketball shoes. At least, for the guy who sold 'em to me. ;-)
Ballmer once again misses the mark by a mile. There IS and has always been value in intellectual property in the open source world. Open source licenses RELY on copyright law, in fact. Merely because MS paid money to Novell doesn't mean that the intellectual property they paid for was Novell's to give out in the first place, or that it has any real value. I can sell you the broadcast rights to a short story I wrote in the 3rd grade, but that doesn't mean it is worth anything.
I was wondering about that too. They either are so desperate for a merger that they'll take their chances with the FCC, or they've already talked with Martin and convinced him that it won't be anticompetitive.
Who knows, they may succeed in framing the competition issue as one applying to the streamed audio market, which encompasses radio, Internet radio, and sat radio. When discussing broadband, the FCC frequently defines the market rather broadly, incorporating dish access into the discussion, as if it is a serious market participant. Given their generally broad interpretation of communications markets, they (or at least Martin, Tate, and McDowell) may buy the argument.
So true. The danger of being inside a community of like-minded masters of the universe is that you can't see beyond the bubble you're in. Enterprise IT pundits didn't see Linux until it had already infiltrated the enterprise. They'd all been too busy talking about "soup to nuts solutions" to read the writing on the wall. The same thing is happening with games.
Hardcore gamers don't realize that their pastime is mainstream now. Just look at the term "games." When I was a teenager, "gamer" meant someone who carried the DMG, the Players Handbook, and the Monster Manual in his backpack at school. Now pencil and paper games have gone mainstream in the form of console and PC games. Adults play these games. Females play these games. It is madness! The inner sanctum has been breached!
Wii is doing great, and it will continue to rack up impressive sales, until eventually even gamer media will adapt their thinking and broaden the appeal of their own offerings.
He is defending his actions that caused him to get fired.
The point of an unlawful termination suit is to show that the employer broke the law. In raising that claim, he is opening himself to attack from the defense, which will point out the legality of their actions by showing that homeboy was doing things he wasn't supposed to be doing.
As long as they were within their legal rights in firing him, the fact that he was traumatized in the Vietnam War or has an addiction to porn don't really matter. My understanding is that they only matter if he can prove that he was fired because he had these problems, not because of their effect on his work.
the polarization of US politics leads me to hope that it is at least theoretically possible to have a sharp decrease as well, even if partisanship can't be eliminated.
I'd never thought of it that way, but perhaps you're on to something. Maybe there is a way to see the glass as half full.
So? If people want those services, they should either pay what it costs for them, OR, they should move closer to where they can get them.
That's great, if you assume infinite mobility. You seem to be assuming that there is no friction involved in economic choices, and that people make economic choices in a vacuum, moving freely from one part of the country to another with regard only for economic choices. There are other factors at work here.
I'm a strong advocate for free enterprise, but I also believe that we are still members of a community, and we should support certain basic standards for health, access to education, and access to infrastructure. There are many reasons why people don't live in urban areas. For example, farmers, miners, and other people who are an important part of the economy can't do their work in cities. Should they be denied access to what is fast becoming part of the nation's core infrastructure? What about minors who live in these places not by choice but because their parents chose to live there?
Why should I pay someone else's cost of obtaining a modern convenience?
Indeed. Why should the state fund roads? Why should we send men to the moon. Why should we have a standing military? I don't think broadband is a luxury. If we don't make sure we all get it, we'll all suffer economically, even those of us who already have broadband. I liken it to schools. Sure, why should I be concerned about schools in Iowa? I'm concerned because although I live in California, the nation's economic health, and its ability to provide me with opportunities, will suffer.
if the telcos didnt find it profitable to roll service out to the rural areas, then either a)a smaller more agile firm would've started up to do it, or b)new technology would've been invented or utilized (think microwave/shortwave etc) to deal with this problem.
Nope. It doesn't always work that way. See the definition ofmarket failure. The smaller, more agile firms have been boxed out by FCC rules promulgated by the big telcos. They simply cannot enter the markets, even when the big telcos aren't providing service. You might argue that this is precisely your point. The FCC shouldn't be regulating. But if you want to see what telecommunications would be like if completely unregulated, just look at the early days of radio. The FCC came about precisely because radio was completely hosed. Stations stepped on each other constantly, some stations hogged up huge chunks of the spectrum, there were all kinds of dirty tricks, etc. The real answer is to get the FCC to stop kowtowing to the big incumbent telecos. As for microwave/shortwave, right now dish Internet access accounts for less than 1% of all access in the US, is prohibitively expensive, and suffers lag that renders it unusable for many of the applications that make broadband so attractive.
Hopefully, this statement will be enough to put those SCO-induced conspiracy theories to rest.
Yes, because as we all know, proof of a lack of conspiracy stops conspiracy theorists dead in their tracks!
Now please excuse me. The Illuminati are after me and I have to change identities.
I agree that we don't have a free market situation wrt broadband. I should have put "free market" in quotes.
I also agree that a confused jumble of government regulations and big business buying legislation are to blame. However, I don't buy the argument that lack of government regulation is the way out. If you live in rural America, the very fact that you have phone service is because of government regulations. Not all regulations are created equal.
All we have is the honor of being home-port to a bunch of large multinational corporations
Unlike the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Korea...? I don't get how your diatribe against globalism has anything to do with whether there is an "America" or not. Is Japan not "Japan" because it sells most of its goods overseas, and built its post-war economy around American industrial economic principles? Because the UK liberalized its economy during the Thatcher era to open up more foreign investment and spur growth, is the UK now less "British?"
We're a market for goods and capital, and a source of lawyers, marketers, and middle-managers.
Again, this is unlike other countries with modern economies in what respect? You seem to be implying that being a market somehow makes us *only* a market and nothing else. Oh, right, we also provide lawyers, marketers, and middle-managers. I'll tell that to all of the programmers and entrepreneurs I know. They'll be startled to find out they don't exist.
And "intellectual property," which the rest of the world could quickly decide to do without, if it wanted to.
Intellectual property is not a purely American concept. America actually had to modify its copyright laws to join the Berne Convention. The fact that as soon as you create a work it has copyright attached to it is a product of the Berne Convention, which was first established in 1886 by Europeans, not Americans. Check out the Paris Convention as well, which covers patents. I know it's all the rage to blame America for the poor state of the intellectual property regime, but it can't be gotten rid of quickly or easily, as you imply. Americans aren't the only ones with a vested interest in it.
a large part of the population is decentralized.
Yep, but that doesn't explain why other countries that are even more decentralized are kicking America's ass. There is no appreciable statistical correlation. Plus, even if there were a correlation, the excuse that America is diffuse is a pretty weak excuse for the technological and economic backwardness we're exhibiting with broadband.
America's broadband failures shouldn't be news to anyone who has been paying attention. Several reports have gone into extensive detail on this over the past few years. Check out Broadband Reality Check II (PDF) for a solid analysis of where the US is in broadband, and how the FCC has its head in the sand.
We've been giving the phone and cable companies a free ride, buying their arguments that free enterprise is working efficiently. It isn't. These massive companies have managed to keep all other entrants out of their markets by manipulating the FCC and getting the Supreme Court to buy their argument that there's a free market for broadband. There isn't. We have the worst of both worlds: Government protection of an oligopoly comprised of regional duopolies (one cable company and one DSL provider in most markets), and tremendously high barriers to entry, without at least the broad reach that a government-controlled system would have. We need a truly competitive marketplace, or we'll keep languishing.
Fiscal conservatives and small government types have always been the black sheep in the Republican party.
I always thought Reagan was essentially a "return to the roots" of Republicanism, a sort of clearing the decks after decades of Democrats leading the show with the continuation of New Deal policies under other names. To me Reagan's cleverest stroke was to turn the Republicans into the party of strong military defense, but I assumed his harangues against big government were just a more skillfully delivered version of the Republican mainstream agenda.
Would you say that in the 20th Century (to keep the scope of discussion manageable) the Republicans were primarily motivated by social conservatism, rather than fiscal conservatism and desire to limit the role of government?
the government should get its nose out of the business of people who are doing things I approve of, but spare no expense stopping people from doing things that make me feel uneasy.
Nicely put.
Political parties are the problem. Hamilton was adamantly opposed to them, even when one was forming around him in opposition to the Jeffersonians. Perhaps he was on to something. Line up behind a party, and you have to do a lot less thinking for yourself. But of course, how are you going to stop people from organizing into political parties? It is human nature to form into groups, for better and for worse.
What ever happened to the party of "less government interference?"
That's right, I remember now. It was the Unholy Alliance that did in the fiscally-conservative, small-government Republicans. Now the Republicans seem to be the party of fiscally-unrestrained big government. I find it rather humorous that during the Bush Years the FCC has steadfastly held to its notion that the free market will provide us all with speedy, cheap broadband and all kinds of broadcast diversity, yet one tit shows up on the Super Bowl and suddenly the FCC stirs into action. The FTC is an entity often decried for its meddlesome consumer protection activities, but throw up the hue and cry of "think of the children!" and suddenly the FTC is a useful government agency.
It seems the party now stands for individual freedom to make money, government money to spend money, and meddlesome interference into matters of so-called morality. Perhaps the theory is that if you can't make government work more efficiently, you may as well try to make it an extension of the church.
Here's the conundrum: Even if it was lawful, was it "good?"
I believe the more power and control of capital a company acquires, the more difficult it is for the company to examine its own behavior under the lens of ethics. In time all decisions become decided on the basis of whether they are legal or not, which is a completely different calculus. A company can scrupulously follow the law and still act unethically.
The "do no evil" mantra might help Google employees feel like they're not actually working at a tremendously powerful publicly-traded company, and it probably still has a lot of influence on decisionmaking at the company. But I have a hard time believing that we won't be reading more and more stories of questionable ethics at Google as their power grows. I commend the leadership at Google for attempting to buck the forces at work here, but power still corrupts; it's the nature of the beast.
Either speech is free or it isn't, no matter what convenient label you want to put it under.
That's an easy position to take, because it is the expression of an ideal. In the real world, rights clash all the time. The rights of Individual A, when they come into conflict with those of Individual B, or of society at large, can't be absolute.
My right to defend myself does not give me the right to shoot someone in the head when they try to pick my pocket. My right to own property doesn't mean that I can drill down and inject anthrax into the groundwater. My right of free speech doesn't mean that I can spam millions of email users without consequence. It also doesn't mean that I can advertise Fruit Loops cereal as a cure for cancer. In Abstract World it sounds great to let the buyer beware, but just imagine how much of a drag that would be on society. Transaction costs would go up, because much more due dilligence would need to be done, just to conduct a simple purchase. Those with more free time and more resources would be able to conduct due dilligence. Everyone else would be put at a substantial disadvantage. That's a perversion of free speech, which is designed to protect political speech, not the fleecing of other citizens.
As a side note, your slippery slope argument may apply in some countries, but not in the United States.I don't know how it is elsewhere, but in the United States, commercial speech has been granted more 1st Amendment protection over the past few decades, not less.
More targets.
You must be kidding.
Is any person capable in all areas or incapable in all areas? Is any company?
What do you think of the XBox? Is it a seaming piece of crap?