I think it'll be more like a creepy stalker in terms of how much personal info it knows about you.
"Facebook, order me a box of Doritos."
"I've placed an order for a box of Doritos, Cool Ranch style as is your preference. Your party photos show you usually drink IPA beer with Doritos, and I've also noticed it's been a week since you last ordered a case of beer. You usually go through about a case a week. Would you like me to add a case of IPA beer to the order?"
"..."
or
"Facebook, how's the commute to work look?"
"Traffic is light, and weather is 73 degrees and partly cloudy. You should expect a commute time of 27 minutes. According to your phone location logs, on Fridays you usually head to your girlfriend's house after work. Have you thought of popping the question? I've noticed that several of her searches this week have been 'how long do people date before a marriage proposal.'"
"Are you seriously giving me unsolicited dating advice?"
"I thought it was warranted since she also visited sites detailing condom failure rates, and the accuracy of pregnancy tests. You may be forced to make a decision one way or another rather soon."
"..."
I don't see aluminum soda can pop-tops from the 1970's on the ground anymore (kids, those used to be everywhere there were people).
AFAIK, the pull-tabs were only on tin cans. When aluminum cans were introduced, it was concurrent with the introduction of stay-on tabs. (For those of you too young to remember pull tabs, the scene in Jaws where Quint crushes his can with a single hand is a pretty amazing feat of strength. That's not an aluminum can. The beer cans back then were strong enough to support your weight when empty.)
No, all those pull tabs didn't break down naturally. They're magnetic, so relatively easy to separate from dirt and rocks; and they're fairly valuable (second-most valuable after aluminum). In fact recyclers still use a magnet to separate them (and tin cans) from other recylables.
I think there needs to be a recycling tax (on everything) to mitigate this new disaster.
Possibly. But good luck getting a recycling tax passed in China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Egypt, Malaysia, South Africa, India, and Algeria. They are by far the biggest source of the problem, accounting for nearly 90% of the plastic dumped into the oceans. Tightening up plastic waste disposal in other countries is largely ineffectual because even if you completely eliminated plastic use in the other countries, it would hardly affect the problem.
"Almost none"? Not even remotely true. Not the majority but we certainly contribute plenty. We are in the top 20 as far as plastic polluting countries go so, let's not get too proud of ourselves for not being the worst of the worst.
Adding up the "Marine Debris" column in your source, the U.S. is responsible for just 1.00% - 1.04% of the ocean plastic produced by the top 20 nations. If you include the rest of the world rather than just the top 20, it's almost certainly less than 1%. Considering the U.S. represents 4.3% of the world's population, I'd say we're doing a pretty good job. You'll notice that the "% mismanaged waste" column in your chart puts the U.S. at only 2%, while most of the others are up around 80%-90%. So basically the reason the U.S. makes the top 20 is because of it's the third-most populous country on the planet, not because it's a prodigious contributor to plastic waste in the oceans (measured either by tons or kg per capita).
Your reasoning (and mine) is probably that hydrogen is the simplest atom, and you need hydrogen to fuse inside stars to form helium. Ergo there should have been lots of hydrogen around to form H2 before helium showed up.
But double-checking the cosmology, apparently there was enough energy in the big bang to form substantial amounts of helium along with the hydrogen. So the two atoms existed together before stars began forming. And the bonding energies mean HeH was easier to form in that environment than H2 or He2.
For a lot of the people doing stuff like this, if they can't brag about the crime, there's no point doing it. It's not really anarchy or revenge that they seek. They're attention whores. They thrive on the publicity and praise/criticism they get. For them, pulling a stunt like this without recording it (and distributing the recording) is like the proverbial tree that falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear. In their minds, it's indistinguishable from the tree never falling / them never having committed the crime.
AT&T and Time Warner are, for the most part, orthogonal. Most municipal governments have granted a cable monopoly to a single company. So there were very few areas where AT&T (U-verse cable, not phone/DSL) competed with Time Warner. Whereas Sprint and T-Mobile (and Verizon and AT&T) are direct competitors almost everywhere.
This argument is a bit weakened since AT&T owns DirecTV. But IMHO that merger was the one which should never have been allowed since (1) DirecTV competed with every cable company, and (2) the fact that DirecTV and Dish competed with every cable company was the entire basis of the previous ruling that local cable monopolies were OK. The cable companies successfully argued that they weren't really monopolies because satellite TV competed with them. By that reasoning, the moment AT&T bought DirecTV (which had bought a chunk of Dish), every cable monopoly contract in the country should have been invalidated and all those local governments forced to allow at least two cable companies to compete.
I'm for this merger BTW (disclaimer: I'm on Sprint). I don't see four cellular carriers as realistic - Sprint has been on life support for close to a decade. I only see two realistic outcomes here.
Sprint and T-Mobile merge and we have three reasonably strong cellular carriers.
Or they block this merger, Sprint goes bankrupt a few years later. Verizon and AT&T (being in the financially stronger position) buy up most of what used to be Sprint. And we end up with two cellular behemoths and a struggling T-Mobile.
You do NOT want the second one. Most of the discount MVNOs are using Sprint's network (part of the reason why Sprint regularly finishes last in speed tests - Sprint went for quantity over quality). If Sprint goes bankrupt, all those MVNO network contracts will be invalidated. Prices on all those MVNOs will go up as they have to negotiate new contracts.with the remaining three carriers. With a merger, the new Sprint/T-Mobile will still be legally bound to honor those old MVNO contracts.
It's required by regulation. California has a ZEV mandate. California's Air Resources Board (CARB - they set California's air quality standards) requires each automaker to sell a certain percentage of ZEVs (zero emissions vehicles) and PZEVs (partial zero emissions vehicles - i.e. hybrids). The program began in 2009, and each year the percentage increases. The formula combining these two is a bit complex, but for 2018 the requirement was 4.5% combined ZEVs, and 2.5% total ZEVs (battery EVs and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles). By 2025 it will be 22% combined ZEVs, with 8% total ZEVs.
If an automaker fails to meet this percentage, they must buy credits from an automaker who exceeded it. This is why Musk started Tesla - he realized that with the ZEV mandate, even if he lost money on each EV he sold, he could remain profitable by selling the ZEV credits to other automakers. I also suspect this is why Tesla has been so slow to ramp up Model 3 production. It is beneficial to Tesla to try to delay those sales until later years when the ZEV mandate percentage is higher, and there is more demand for the ZEV credits. Right now most of the automakers are managing to hit the requisite percentage on their own (of the major brands, only Honda and Toyota missed the target last year, and had to buy credits).
If an automaker fails to buy enough credits to meet the required percentage, they are banned from selling cars in California. And since about a dozen states representing about a third of the U.S. population automatically adopts CARB's guidelines, the automaker would be banned from selling cars in those states as well. No automaker wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S. market. So they're all busy rolling out EVs to comply with CARB's ZEV mandate. Towards the end of the year, if it looks like they won't sell enough EVs, they start slashing the prices, even selling/leasing them at a loss to try to meet the percentage. This is why all the great EV deals were only in California - only EVs sold/leased in California counted towards the mandate (that is changing - starting this year EVs sold in other states will count as well).
I'm not saying there isn't demand for EVs - there almost certainly is. But the growth in EV sales is not an indicator of organic market demand. The growth is mandated by regulation, so it's the tail wagging the dog. In a free market manufacturers sell the vehicles at a modest profit, and the price determining demand. But the current situation with EVs is that the manufacturers drop the price (even selling EVs at a loss) until there's enough demand to meet the ZEV mandate percentage for the year.
The key difference OP is pointing out is that if Manning cracked the secrets and gave them to Wikileaks, then Assange is in the clear. Manning is the discoverer of the secrets, Assange is the journalist relaying the secrets to the public.
But if Assange participated in cracking the secrets, then he is no longer functioning entirely in the capacity of a journalist (publicizing important information). Actively participating in cracking the secrets is espionage, and goes beyond journalistic license.
I suppose if Assange could show that he had proof or strong reason to believe there was evidence of crimes being hidden by the government, and cracking the password was necessary to expose that evidence, then he could justify participating in cracking the password (similar to how the government has to get a warrant before searching for evidence). But cracking government passwords just to go on a fishing expedition looking for crimes is not protected by journalistic license - it's still hacking and espionage.
Back in the '90s, a TV reporter in Los Angeles registered to vote in multiple precincts, just to show how easy it was to commit vote fraud. On election day, he went to each of those precincts, got a ballot, and pretended to vote. Before dropping each ballot into the ballot box, he snapped a picture of his unmarked ballot, torn in half so it would not be counted. In his aired TV report, he explained everything he did, showed the photos, and described how easy it was because the government has nothing in place to prevent it. He was publicizing a legitimate problem with the government. But what he did was still voting fraud, and he was prosecuted for it (using his own report as evidence). He ended up serving a few months in prison if I recall. (That he made sure the ballots weren't counted wasn't enough. Part of the registration process is signing a statement swearing that you have not registered to vote elsewhere.)
If he had found someone else who did the vote fraud on their own, and his report had been interviews with the person and photos of the person dropping in multiple ballots, then he would have been in the clear as a journalist. But being a journalist is not a "I can commit crimes without repercussion" card. By doing the vote fraud himself, he still committed a crime, and was prosecuted and convicted for it.
I own one of the affected VWs and have been keeping tabs on this in owners forums. The inside scoop came out within just a few months of the scandal breaking. Basically Winterkorn didn't want to pay licensing fees to Mercedes for its DEF technology. So he instructed his engineers to get the TDI engines to meet emissions standards without DEF while maintaining power output, or else. When the engineers determined it was impossible, they did the only thing they could to keep their jobs - they cheated.
The VW engineers actually came remarkably close to succeeding. Here are the NOx emissions for the TDI vehicles before and after the fix. The pre-fix NOx emissions for the 2015 TDI engines are actually compliant with EPA limits (0.2 g/mi), and just barely above CARB's limit (0.04 g/mi). (The pre-2015 TDIs remain above CARB's limit after the fix. CARB covers this in their FAQ.)
The moon isn't so bad - the light pollution is limited to just the moon's surface. This idea of lit cubesats in orbit pollutes a huge swath of the night sky, interfering with astronomy all around the globe. To put it in terms marketers might understand, it's like if someone drew lines across every ad on every medium all across the globe. It's an incredibly disruptive and monumentally bad idea, almost sure to result in government regulation of objects put into space much like the government regulates radio transmissions.
The economics still favor negative reviews being more likely to be genuine. Most products have dozens if not hundreds of competitors. Someone trying to hype up their product pays for one fake review, and gets one fake positive review impression per buyer. Someone trying to bring down their competitors' products needs to pay for dozens or hundreds of fake negative reviews to generate a single fake negative review impression per buyer.
Also, if you actually read reviews (instead of just glancing at the scores), the negative reviews usually mention specific issues. You can judge for yourself whether they're something that won't affect you, or you can address on your own, or if they're likely to be fake based on other reviews or things you know. e.g. One negative flashlight review I read said it got too hot to touch when used with lithium batteries, when the manufacturer clearly stated in the product description that it was not designed to be used with lithium batteries.
We have an entire branch of the Federal government with 17,000 employees dedicated to fighting wage theft. You can argue they're not doing a good enough job, or that the victims aren't reporting the crime enough. But it's hardly unaddressed.
Also, your source seems to have cherry picked specific robbery statistics to try to push their narrative. According to the FBI, robberies cost $465 million in 2016, nearly double the wage theft your source specifies.
Can't comment about porch pirates in particular. But I manage a commercial building in a strip mall, and set up video cameras to help fight robberies of our tenants. I got high-resolution 4k+ cameras, and positioned them so they can easily read license plates of passing cars. When there's a robbery, we turn the license plate numbers over to the police. Most of the time it turns out the vehicle was stolen. One time the thieves had put paper dealer tags (the kind you get with a new car before it's issued a license plate) in place of the license plates (either that or they'd stolen a new car off a dealer's lot).
In other words, right now porch pirates probably drive their own vehicle because there's very little risk of them being caught. If police start to crack down on them using things like license plate readers, they'll adapt and start doing their crime with a stolen vehicle, or a vehicle dressed up to look like it's new so it doesn't have plates yet. I'm doubtful even a GPS locator will help, since that will just make them open the package inside the car instead of at home. Cameras to get a clear image of their face would seem to work, but at our building I've noticed they know where the cameras are and take care to hide their face (usually a hat, sunglasses, bandanna, or coat pulled up over their face).
So there's no simple one-shot solution to catching the crooks. You'd be entering a protracted arms race, where each side will try to one-up each other to catch / avoid being caught. The simpler solution would seem to be one-way drop-doors like you find in mailboxes. The package deliveryman and just drop the package inside, and it'll fall into your garage or (for an apartment) a holding room.
I know several people like this guy. In the case of my friends, they're not exploitative - they're incredibly nice people who pay and treat their employees well. They just happen to be very hard-working and dedicated to their jobs. The most successful one runs a multi-million dollar company. He described his workday to me once and he's basically constantly glued to a screen reading up on any new news that may be relevant to his business sector. Even during meals he'll be reading up on something. He typically goes to sleep past midnight, and wakes up around 4:30. His wife tells me that when they're on vacation, she has to constantly pull tablets and the phones out of his hands because he'll try to sneak in some work, rather than enjoy the vacation and time off. (After she confiscates his phone and locks it in the hotel room safe, he tries to steal his kids' phones so he can do more work.)
Anyhow, people tend to imagine that everyone else is like themselves. And workaholics tend to assume that everyone else could work as hard as they do, not realizing that most of us aren't blessed to be doing jobs that we love enough to want to spend most of our waking moments doing it.
"230 is a gift to them, and I don't think they are treating it with the respect that they should," she said. "And so I think that that could be a question mark and in jeopardy.... For the privilege of 230, there has to be a bigger sense of responsibility on it, and it is not out of the question that that could be removed."
Apparently she thinks that putting up a bulletin board that anyone can tack messages onto is a privilege which must be granted to you by the government. How absolutely backwards. The people grant government the privilege to restrict things the people think might need restricting, not the other way around. 230 was never a right given to the people. The people already had the right. 230 was just a reminder to the government of that fact, so that it wouldn't try to do something silly like infringe on it, forcing the people to go through a lengthy multi-year court battle before the SCotUS would finally reaffirm that The People have a fundamental right to freedom of expression without government interference. 230 exists for the same reason as the Bill of Rights - not because some law gave people those rights, but as a reminder to government not to try to infringe those rights.
You say you wanted freedom of expression. You got it. If this unfiltered view into what people are really thinking and saying makes you uncomfortable, that's your problem not theirs. Hiding it by contravening 230 is the technological equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. All the stuff that you dislike may disappear from your sight, but it hasn't actually gone away - it's still there, in people's minds, being spoken in private, and posted on non-major sites. If you feel these thoughts are wrong and need to be corrected, the proper fix is to educate and convince people so they agree with you and no longer think that way. Not to sweep it under the rug to make yourself feel like the house is cleaner because you can't see the dirt anymore.
This is a long-standing flaw in copyright law (and related laws like the DMCA). The law outlines penalties for violating copyright, but none for overreaching copyright claims. For a protective law to work, there has to be penalties for abusing that protection. You can call the police for protection if your house is being burglarized. But if you call them too often when there's no burglar, they'll charge you with filing a false police report to make you stop.
If you look at the U.S. traffic fatality rates (orange and red graphs are the relevant ones), the recent big decreases in fatality rate coincided with:
Making seatbelts mandatory equipment on all vehicles (1968).
Decrease in travel due to the Arab oil embargo and recession (1973-1975).
Decrease in travel due to the recession following the housing bubble burst (2008-2009).
Since 1995, if you factor out the 2008-09 recession, there's been a continued slow decline in fatality rate. The dip during the 2008-09 recession also seems disproportionately large compared to past recession-linked dips. The 1973-75 recession happened at nearly 2x the fatality rate, so you would expect its dip to be 2x as large. But the 2008-09 dip is nearly the same absolute size. (The post-recession rebound after 1973-75 is nearly 2x as large.)
NHTSA has been claiming credit for this decrease, citing improved crash safety testing and standards. But I wonder if it's more the effect of GPS becoming commonplace to where it's now ubiquitous in all new cars, and people whose cars don't have GPS navigation just use their phones. In the days before GPS, it was common to drive with a folded map on your steering wheel, trying to figure out where you were and how to get to your destination. Way more dangerous than texting while driving IMHO.
And that year-over-year revenue increased by 9% (10% in the U.S.), which is far above the rate of inflation. So it isn't just a case of DVD/Blu-ray buyers switching to streaming. Their increase in steaming revenue exceeds what you'd expect if disc-buyers had simply switched to streaming.
Only insomuch as Evers is unable to immediately rescind Walker's deal ($4.5 billion in incentives and subsidies according to TFA).
You see, when you raise taxes, you're making a trade-off. You're deciding that the programs you need to fund with those taxes will benefit your society and economy more than the businesses that you're going to scare away with your tax increase. That is, the tax increase has the benefit of improving government services. But has the negative of hurting your economy by scaring away businesses from setting up or expanding in your jurisdiction. By supporting the tax increase, you are making a tacit admission that you believe the benefit of improved services outweighs the loss of business caused by the higher taxes.
So either you believe the tax increase is justified and thus should apply to all companies. Or you look at the possibility of a company like Amazon or Foxconn setting up shop in your jurisdiction, and decide the tax increase does more harm than good, and you keep taxes lower for all companies. You don't get to pick and choose who has to pay a high tax rate and who gets to pay a lower tax rate. Scaring off one Amazon with your tax increase has the same economic effect as scaring off several hundred small businesses with your tax increase. So it's all or nothing - either the tax increase is worth it, or it isn't.
So unless you believe all companies should get a similar tax break, supporting these one-company deals expose you as a hypocrite. If you truly believe that your economy can be improved by offering a company such a deal, then you are implicitly admitting that your current level of taxation is too high, and your economy could be improved by lower taxes for all companies. Offering such a deal to attract a single company, while refusing lower taxes for all other companies means you are a hypocrite. That's the situation New York City found themselves in with Amazon, and whether deliberately or by accident, they ended up making the philosophically self-consistent choice and scaring Amazon away from the deal.
Walker is (was) in a different position though. He likely felt the state's current level of taxation was too high, and genuinely believed the state's economy could be improved by offering a lower tax rate to attract more business. He probably wanted a more broader tax decrease but was unable to get enough support for it; but was able to get enough support for the Foxconn deal. So his offering Foxcon tn the deal was likely consistent with his economy philosophy. And tucking control over it into the WEDC was just a way for him to keep it alive for 9 more months after he left office.
Evers' position is more untenable. If he thinks the state's current level of taxation is the right amount or too low, then philosophically there is only one justifiable choice for him to make - kill the Foxconn deal and rescind all the tax breaks and incentives (basically what NYC did to Amazon). So he shouldn't care at all Foxconn says it'll do, since in all likelihood they'll pull out when he kills the deal. Attempting to keep the deal fully or partly alive just exposes him as a hypocrite. You can only support such a deal while remaining philosophically self-consistent if you also support similar tax breaks and incentives for everyone.
But not for widely-used software. If the government is paying for the cost to develop, manufacture, and provide a material product to the public, then it's not free. It's being paid for by taxes. And because it's being given away by the government without charge, there's no way to tell if the government's product or a commercial product is cheaper or more cost-effective. The government product will always be able to undercut the commercial product based on price, even if it's less cost-effective for the economy (i.e. costs more in taxes than if the users had simply bought the commercial product). So it makes sense to keep the government out of manufacturing.
Software is different though - it has essentially zero cost of duplication and distribution. That's the entire premise behind the open source movement - leveraging that zero cost of duplication and distribution to maximize benefit to society. Essentially you can view what the IRS is doing as hiring a few people to write tax software for them (so, maybe $200k in development costs), then duplicating and distributing it to everyone for free. Even if the IRS charged double their development costs for it, I doubt Intuit and H&R Block could compete with that price (e.g. if they sell 10 million copies, then each copy should be priced at less than 4 cents).
In other words, for a material product, the bulk of the cost is in the materials, manufacturing, and distribution. The engineering and design work is (for something which will be used by hundreds of millions of people) negligible. For software though, the materials, manufacturing, and distribution cost is nearly zero. And when you amortize the engineering and design costs over hundreds of millions of people, it becomes negligible. So the optimal solution in fact does become for the government to pay for it and give it away for free.
(Incidentally, I've used H&R Blocks tax software to file my taxes for close to a decade. Mainly for their guarantee against errors, and hotline where I can talk to an accountant if I have any obtuse tax questions. Those are the types of features and services they need to promote to distinguish themselves from the free IRS tax software.)
That actually sounds pretty typical for photographic/typographic work. The license fee depends on the number of copies you print out. Back in the print newspaper/magazine days, the license fee for a photograph depended on the page it would be used on (cover was most expensive, pages near the front were more expensive than ones near the back), coverage (full page was more expensive than half page was more expensive than quarter page), and number of copies which would be printed.
For online sites, that last one would correspond to the number of page views. Not saying it's right or the best way to do it. Just that their license is pretty much a direct transferal of print license contract to online use.
So if your surveillance detects that some kid has managed to hack their device so they can use it to watch movies in class without it triggering any alarms, but oddly their grades have not fallen, do you:
A. Suspend the kid and call in the cops because you suspect he hacked his grades.
or B. Send him to a different class teaching advanced computer science since he's clearly got talent for something outside the regular school curriculum.
That is, are you trying to create an educational program which generates cookie-cutter kids, even if it means pounding square kids into round holes to force them to become round? Or is your educational program designed to allow each kid to explore, discover, and improve their unique talents and abilities? Is the surveillance for the benefit of the state (making life easier for teachers and administrators), or for the benefit of the students (expanding their future job opportunities)?
When A is correlated with B, there are three possibilities for causation (well, a fourth is that it's just a coincidence but ignore that).
A causes B
B causes A
Some other factor C causes A and B
Everyone is trying to spin this as the first or second depending on whether they're pro-theater or anti-theater. When it's intuitively obvious that the actual relationship is the third. People who like to watch movies often go to the theater, and also subscribe to Netflix.
Trying to glean if there's a secondary effect of Netflix increasing or decreasing theater attendance is complicated by that being a time comparison - how did these people behave before they got Netflix, versus after they got Netflix? Unfortunately, the number, type, and quality of movies has changed over time. So unless someone comes up with some really clever method to control for those changes, you won't know if people's theater viewing behavior changed because of Netflix, or because movies changed.
This is a Hollywood requirement, not a Netflix requirement. Netflix (and Hulu, and Amazon Video, etc) would love nothing more than to let you stream anything to anywhere. It would be a lot simpler for them.
The Hollywood movie studios are the ones requiring the streamed movie be locked down . Hollywood's fear is that if an unencrypted video stream is ever exposed, that you'll just capture the stream to make a copy of the movie. So they require the stream to remain encrypted all the way from Netflix's servers to the final display device.
If it's a dedicated video playback device, then the device (and playback software like the Netflix app) has to be submitted to Hollywood for approval. That's why the Netflix app showed up on iPhones first, then on the different Android handsets one at a time. Netflix had to submit their app on every single hardware device to Hollywood for their approval. The iPhones were first because approving them meant the most people could get Netflix for the fewest models needing approval. Then the more popular Android handsets, followed by the lesser-known Android handsets. Every streaming device has to go through the same approval process - smart TVs, Blu-ray players with streaming capability, PS4, Xbox, etc.
For general purpose computing devices (i.e. PCs), Hollywood requires the video stream be decoded inside an encrypted virtual machine, which then sends the decoded video directly to the GPU for display. This is why you needed Flash or Silverlight installed on your browser in the pre-HTML 5 days. Those were the only technologies allowing the construction of a virtual machine. And decoding the video in a virtual machine precludes using the hardware decoder in the GPU, which is why you used to need at least an i3 to decode streamed 1080p video, while the puny little SoC on your phone could also stream it (the phone wasn't considered a general purpose computing device, so it could get Hollywood's approval for the entirety of the phone hardware, allowing it to use the GPU to decode the stream).
This is why the Netflix app won't run if your phone is rooted. Hollywood considers that to be converting your phone from a dedicated hardware device to a general purpose computing device. So if the Netflix app detects your phone is rooted, it invalidates itself and won't play. (You can get around it by hiding root from the Netflix app.)
Since Hollywood's approval was only for Airplay to certain Apple devices, opening up AirPlay violates Hollywood's terms of approval. So Netflix is forced to discontinue support for AirPlay, unless they want to go through the trouble of submitting every possible display device you can connect to using AirPlay.
It does not stop there: The implementation of the PIN code on Credit and Debit cards that was available in the rest of the world was done badly and late.
That wasn't because the U.S. is backwards third-world country (well, the sign instead of PIN part was, but not the slow rollout of chipped cards). The rest of the world got to do it better because the U.S. did credit cards first. So the rest of the world got to see all the problems with magnetic swipe credit cards before implementing their credit card systems. The U.S. by virtue of being the first adopter, has to deal with the additional overhead of replacing a much larger legacy system, instead of just implementing a clean system mostly from scratch. Virtually every merchant in the U.S. already had credit card readers which weren't capable of reading chipped cards, so the transition to chipped cards took a lot longer here than in other countries where merchants hadn't widely adopted credit card readers.
Same thing happened with digital cell phone service. The U.S. already had an extensive analog cellular network, so was slowest to transition to digital cellular. The cost to implement digital cellular was the same here as in other countries, but the marginal gain was less because the gain in the U.S. was analog to digital cellular, while the gain in other countries was from no cellular to digital cellular. Consequently there was less market pressure to roll out digital cellular, and it progressed more slowly than in other countries. Likewise, the standard electrical socket and plug in the U.S. is the worst-designed, because other countries to got see the problems with the U.S. design and got to implement designs which fixed those problems as their standard, before they rolled out electricity in their countries. (e.g. Ground wire connects first; and live wires are covered before they're connected so you can't accidentally touch wires carrying current.) The U.S. was saddled with the inertia of that initial socket design being standard, and has never managed to overcome it and replace it with a newer, better socket design.
So these problems aren't because the U.S. is some backwards third-world nation. it's because the U.S. is the world's spearhead - the trailblazer and first adopter. And the first attempt at implementing something is almost never the best way to do it. Other countries get for free the lessons learned from the suffering and pain of trial and error that the U.S. had to go through. Mocking the U.S. for it just means you're an ungrateful prick.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it'll be more like a creepy stalker in terms of how much personal info it knows about you.
"Facebook, order me a box of Doritos."
"I've placed an order for a box of Doritos, Cool Ranch style as is your preference. Your party photos show you usually drink IPA beer with Doritos, and I've also noticed it's been a week since you last ordered a case of beer. You usually go through about a case a week. Would you like me to add a case of IPA beer to the order?"
"..."
or
"Facebook, how's the commute to work look?"
"Traffic is light, and weather is 73 degrees and partly cloudy. You should expect a commute time of 27 minutes. According to your phone location logs, on Fridays you usually head to your girlfriend's house after work. Have you thought of popping the question? I've noticed that several of her searches this week have been 'how long do people date before a marriage proposal.'"
"Are you seriously giving me unsolicited dating advice?"
"I thought it was warranted since she also visited sites detailing condom failure rates, and the accuracy of pregnancy tests. You may be forced to make a decision one way or another rather soon."
"..."
AFAIK, the pull-tabs were only on tin cans. When aluminum cans were introduced, it was concurrent with the introduction of stay-on tabs. (For those of you too young to remember pull tabs, the scene in Jaws where Quint crushes his can with a single hand is a pretty amazing feat of strength. That's not an aluminum can. The beer cans back then were strong enough to support your weight when empty.)
No, all those pull tabs didn't break down naturally. They're magnetic, so relatively easy to separate from dirt and rocks; and they're fairly valuable (second-most valuable after aluminum). In fact recyclers still use a magnet to separate them (and tin cans) from other recylables.
Possibly. But good luck getting a recycling tax passed in China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Egypt, Malaysia, South Africa, India, and Algeria. They are by far the biggest source of the problem, accounting for nearly 90% of the plastic dumped into the oceans. Tightening up plastic waste disposal in other countries is largely ineffectual because even if you completely eliminated plastic use in the other countries, it would hardly affect the problem.
Adding up the "Marine Debris" column in your source, the U.S. is responsible for just 1.00% - 1.04% of the ocean plastic produced by the top 20 nations. If you include the rest of the world rather than just the top 20, it's almost certainly less than 1%. Considering the U.S. represents 4.3% of the world's population, I'd say we're doing a pretty good job. You'll notice that the "% mismanaged waste" column in your chart puts the U.S. at only 2%, while most of the others are up around 80%-90%. So basically the reason the U.S. makes the top 20 is because of it's the third-most populous country on the planet, not because it's a prodigious contributor to plastic waste in the oceans (measured either by tons or kg per capita).
Your reasoning (and mine) is probably that hydrogen is the simplest atom, and you need hydrogen to fuse inside stars to form helium. Ergo there should have been lots of hydrogen around to form H2 before helium showed up.
But double-checking the cosmology, apparently there was enough energy in the big bang to form substantial amounts of helium along with the hydrogen. So the two atoms existed together before stars began forming. And the bonding energies mean HeH was easier to form in that environment than H2 or He2.
For a lot of the people doing stuff like this, if they can't brag about the crime, there's no point doing it. It's not really anarchy or revenge that they seek. They're attention whores. They thrive on the publicity and praise/criticism they get. For them, pulling a stunt like this without recording it (and distributing the recording) is like the proverbial tree that falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear. In their minds, it's indistinguishable from the tree never falling / them never having committed the crime.
This argument is a bit weakened since AT&T owns DirecTV. But IMHO that merger was the one which should never have been allowed since (1) DirecTV competed with every cable company, and (2) the fact that DirecTV and Dish competed with every cable company was the entire basis of the previous ruling that local cable monopolies were OK. The cable companies successfully argued that they weren't really monopolies because satellite TV competed with them. By that reasoning, the moment AT&T bought DirecTV (which had bought a chunk of Dish), every cable monopoly contract in the country should have been invalidated and all those local governments forced to allow at least two cable companies to compete.
I'm for this merger BTW (disclaimer: I'm on Sprint). I don't see four cellular carriers as realistic - Sprint has been on life support for close to a decade. I only see two realistic outcomes here.
You do NOT want the second one. Most of the discount MVNOs are using Sprint's network (part of the reason why Sprint regularly finishes last in speed tests - Sprint went for quantity over quality). If Sprint goes bankrupt, all those MVNO network contracts will be invalidated. Prices on all those MVNOs will go up as they have to negotiate new contracts.with the remaining three carriers. With a merger, the new Sprint/T-Mobile will still be legally bound to honor those old MVNO contracts.
It's required by regulation. California has a ZEV mandate. California's Air Resources Board (CARB - they set California's air quality standards) requires each automaker to sell a certain percentage of ZEVs (zero emissions vehicles) and PZEVs (partial zero emissions vehicles - i.e. hybrids). The program began in 2009, and each year the percentage increases. The formula combining these two is a bit complex, but for 2018 the requirement was 4.5% combined ZEVs, and 2.5% total ZEVs (battery EVs and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles). By 2025 it will be 22% combined ZEVs, with 8% total ZEVs.
If an automaker fails to meet this percentage, they must buy credits from an automaker who exceeded it. This is why Musk started Tesla - he realized that with the ZEV mandate, even if he lost money on each EV he sold, he could remain profitable by selling the ZEV credits to other automakers. I also suspect this is why Tesla has been so slow to ramp up Model 3 production. It is beneficial to Tesla to try to delay those sales until later years when the ZEV mandate percentage is higher, and there is more demand for the ZEV credits. Right now most of the automakers are managing to hit the requisite percentage on their own (of the major brands, only Honda and Toyota missed the target last year, and had to buy credits).
If an automaker fails to buy enough credits to meet the required percentage, they are banned from selling cars in California. And since about a dozen states representing about a third of the U.S. population automatically adopts CARB's guidelines, the automaker would be banned from selling cars in those states as well. No automaker wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S. market. So they're all busy rolling out EVs to comply with CARB's ZEV mandate. Towards the end of the year, if it looks like they won't sell enough EVs, they start slashing the prices, even selling/leasing them at a loss to try to meet the percentage. This is why all the great EV deals were only in California - only EVs sold/leased in California counted towards the mandate (that is changing - starting this year EVs sold in other states will count as well).
I'm not saying there isn't demand for EVs - there almost certainly is. But the growth in EV sales is not an indicator of organic market demand. The growth is mandated by regulation, so it's the tail wagging the dog. In a free market manufacturers sell the vehicles at a modest profit, and the price determining demand. But the current situation with EVs is that the manufacturers drop the price (even selling EVs at a loss) until there's enough demand to meet the ZEV mandate percentage for the year.
The key difference OP is pointing out is that if Manning cracked the secrets and gave them to Wikileaks, then Assange is in the clear. Manning is the discoverer of the secrets, Assange is the journalist relaying the secrets to the public.
But if Assange participated in cracking the secrets, then he is no longer functioning entirely in the capacity of a journalist (publicizing important information). Actively participating in cracking the secrets is espionage, and goes beyond journalistic license.
I suppose if Assange could show that he had proof or strong reason to believe there was evidence of crimes being hidden by the government, and cracking the password was necessary to expose that evidence, then he could justify participating in cracking the password (similar to how the government has to get a warrant before searching for evidence). But cracking government passwords just to go on a fishing expedition looking for crimes is not protected by journalistic license - it's still hacking and espionage.
Back in the '90s, a TV reporter in Los Angeles registered to vote in multiple precincts, just to show how easy it was to commit vote fraud. On election day, he went to each of those precincts, got a ballot, and pretended to vote. Before dropping each ballot into the ballot box, he snapped a picture of his unmarked ballot, torn in half so it would not be counted. In his aired TV report, he explained everything he did, showed the photos, and described how easy it was because the government has nothing in place to prevent it. He was publicizing a legitimate problem with the government. But what he did was still voting fraud, and he was prosecuted for it (using his own report as evidence). He ended up serving a few months in prison if I recall. (That he made sure the ballots weren't counted wasn't enough. Part of the registration process is signing a statement swearing that you have not registered to vote elsewhere.)
If he had found someone else who did the vote fraud on their own, and his report had been interviews with the person and photos of the person dropping in multiple ballots, then he would have been in the clear as a journalist. But being a journalist is not a "I can commit crimes without repercussion" card. By doing the vote fraud himself, he still committed a crime, and was prosecuted and convicted for it.
I own one of the affected VWs and have been keeping tabs on this in owners forums. The inside scoop came out within just a few months of the scandal breaking. Basically Winterkorn didn't want to pay licensing fees to Mercedes for its DEF technology. So he instructed his engineers to get the TDI engines to meet emissions standards without DEF while maintaining power output, or else. When the engineers determined it was impossible, they did the only thing they could to keep their jobs - they cheated.
The VW engineers actually came remarkably close to succeeding. Here are the NOx emissions for the TDI vehicles before and after the fix. The pre-fix NOx emissions for the 2015 TDI engines are actually compliant with EPA limits (0.2 g/mi), and just barely above CARB's limit (0.04 g/mi). (The pre-2015 TDIs remain above CARB's limit after the fix. CARB covers this in their FAQ.)
The moon isn't so bad - the light pollution is limited to just the moon's surface. This idea of lit cubesats in orbit pollutes a huge swath of the night sky, interfering with astronomy all around the globe. To put it in terms marketers might understand, it's like if someone drew lines across every ad on every medium all across the globe. It's an incredibly disruptive and monumentally bad idea, almost sure to result in government regulation of objects put into space much like the government regulates radio transmissions.
The economics still favor negative reviews being more likely to be genuine. Most products have dozens if not hundreds of competitors. Someone trying to hype up their product pays for one fake review, and gets one fake positive review impression per buyer. Someone trying to bring down their competitors' products needs to pay for dozens or hundreds of fake negative reviews to generate a single fake negative review impression per buyer.
Also, if you actually read reviews (instead of just glancing at the scores), the negative reviews usually mention specific issues. You can judge for yourself whether they're something that won't affect you, or you can address on your own, or if they're likely to be fake based on other reviews or things you know. e.g. One negative flashlight review I read said it got too hot to touch when used with lithium batteries, when the manufacturer clearly stated in the product description that it was not designed to be used with lithium batteries.
We have an entire branch of the Federal government with 17,000 employees dedicated to fighting wage theft. You can argue they're not doing a good enough job, or that the victims aren't reporting the crime enough. But it's hardly unaddressed.
Also, your source seems to have cherry picked specific robbery statistics to try to push their narrative. According to the FBI, robberies cost $465 million in 2016, nearly double the wage theft your source specifies.
Can't comment about porch pirates in particular. But I manage a commercial building in a strip mall, and set up video cameras to help fight robberies of our tenants. I got high-resolution 4k+ cameras, and positioned them so they can easily read license plates of passing cars. When there's a robbery, we turn the license plate numbers over to the police. Most of the time it turns out the vehicle was stolen. One time the thieves had put paper dealer tags (the kind you get with a new car before it's issued a license plate) in place of the license plates (either that or they'd stolen a new car off a dealer's lot).
In other words, right now porch pirates probably drive their own vehicle because there's very little risk of them being caught. If police start to crack down on them using things like license plate readers, they'll adapt and start doing their crime with a stolen vehicle, or a vehicle dressed up to look like it's new so it doesn't have plates yet. I'm doubtful even a GPS locator will help, since that will just make them open the package inside the car instead of at home. Cameras to get a clear image of their face would seem to work, but at our building I've noticed they know where the cameras are and take care to hide their face (usually a hat, sunglasses, bandanna, or coat pulled up over their face).
So there's no simple one-shot solution to catching the crooks. You'd be entering a protracted arms race, where each side will try to one-up each other to catch / avoid being caught. The simpler solution would seem to be one-way drop-doors like you find in mailboxes. The package deliveryman and just drop the package inside, and it'll fall into your garage or (for an apartment) a holding room.
I know several people like this guy. In the case of my friends, they're not exploitative - they're incredibly nice people who pay and treat their employees well. They just happen to be very hard-working and dedicated to their jobs. The most successful one runs a multi-million dollar company. He described his workday to me once and he's basically constantly glued to a screen reading up on any new news that may be relevant to his business sector. Even during meals he'll be reading up on something. He typically goes to sleep past midnight, and wakes up around 4:30. His wife tells me that when they're on vacation, she has to constantly pull tablets and the phones out of his hands because he'll try to sneak in some work, rather than enjoy the vacation and time off. (After she confiscates his phone and locks it in the hotel room safe, he tries to steal his kids' phones so he can do more work.)
Anyhow, people tend to imagine that everyone else is like themselves. And workaholics tend to assume that everyone else could work as hard as they do, not realizing that most of us aren't blessed to be doing jobs that we love enough to want to spend most of our waking moments doing it.
Apparently she thinks that putting up a bulletin board that anyone can tack messages onto is a privilege which must be granted to you by the government. How absolutely backwards. The people grant government the privilege to restrict things the people think might need restricting, not the other way around. 230 was never a right given to the people. The people already had the right. 230 was just a reminder to the government of that fact, so that it wouldn't try to do something silly like infringe on it, forcing the people to go through a lengthy multi-year court battle before the SCotUS would finally reaffirm that The People have a fundamental right to freedom of expression without government interference. 230 exists for the same reason as the Bill of Rights - not because some law gave people those rights, but as a reminder to government not to try to infringe those rights.
You say you wanted freedom of expression. You got it. If this unfiltered view into what people are really thinking and saying makes you uncomfortable, that's your problem not theirs. Hiding it by contravening 230 is the technological equivalent of sticking your head in the sand. All the stuff that you dislike may disappear from your sight, but it hasn't actually gone away - it's still there, in people's minds, being spoken in private, and posted on non-major sites. If you feel these thoughts are wrong and need to be corrected, the proper fix is to educate and convince people so they agree with you and no longer think that way. Not to sweep it under the rug to make yourself feel like the house is cleaner because you can't see the dirt anymore.
This is a long-standing flaw in copyright law (and related laws like the DMCA). The law outlines penalties for violating copyright, but none for overreaching copyright claims. For a protective law to work, there has to be penalties for abusing that protection. You can call the police for protection if your house is being burglarized. But if you call them too often when there's no burglar, they'll charge you with filing a false police report to make you stop.
Since 1995, if you factor out the 2008-09 recession, there's been a continued slow decline in fatality rate. The dip during the 2008-09 recession also seems disproportionately large compared to past recession-linked dips. The 1973-75 recession happened at nearly 2x the fatality rate, so you would expect its dip to be 2x as large. But the 2008-09 dip is nearly the same absolute size. (The post-recession rebound after 1973-75 is nearly 2x as large.)
NHTSA has been claiming credit for this decrease, citing improved crash safety testing and standards. But I wonder if it's more the effect of GPS becoming commonplace to where it's now ubiquitous in all new cars, and people whose cars don't have GPS navigation just use their phones. In the days before GPS, it was common to drive with a folded map on your steering wheel, trying to figure out where you were and how to get to your destination. Way more dangerous than texting while driving IMHO.
And that year-over-year revenue increased by 9% (10% in the U.S.), which is far above the rate of inflation. So it isn't just a case of DVD/Blu-ray buyers switching to streaming. Their increase in steaming revenue exceeds what you'd expect if disc-buyers had simply switched to streaming.
Only insomuch as Evers is unable to immediately rescind Walker's deal ($4.5 billion in incentives and subsidies according to TFA).
You see, when you raise taxes, you're making a trade-off. You're deciding that the programs you need to fund with those taxes will benefit your society and economy more than the businesses that you're going to scare away with your tax increase. That is, the tax increase has the benefit of improving government services. But has the negative of hurting your economy by scaring away businesses from setting up or expanding in your jurisdiction. By supporting the tax increase, you are making a tacit admission that you believe the benefit of improved services outweighs the loss of business caused by the higher taxes.
So either you believe the tax increase is justified and thus should apply to all companies. Or you look at the possibility of a company like Amazon or Foxconn setting up shop in your jurisdiction, and decide the tax increase does more harm than good, and you keep taxes lower for all companies. You don't get to pick and choose who has to pay a high tax rate and who gets to pay a lower tax rate. Scaring off one Amazon with your tax increase has the same economic effect as scaring off several hundred small businesses with your tax increase. So it's all or nothing - either the tax increase is worth it, or it isn't.
So unless you believe all companies should get a similar tax break, supporting these one-company deals expose you as a hypocrite. If you truly believe that your economy can be improved by offering a company such a deal, then you are implicitly admitting that your current level of taxation is too high, and your economy could be improved by lower taxes for all companies. Offering such a deal to attract a single company, while refusing lower taxes for all other companies means you are a hypocrite. That's the situation New York City found themselves in with Amazon, and whether deliberately or by accident, they ended up making the philosophically self-consistent choice and scaring Amazon away from the deal.
Walker is (was) in a different position though. He likely felt the state's current level of taxation was too high, and genuinely believed the state's economy could be improved by offering a lower tax rate to attract more business. He probably wanted a more broader tax decrease but was unable to get enough support for it; but was able to get enough support for the Foxconn deal. So his offering Foxcon tn the deal was likely consistent with his economy philosophy. And tucking control over it into the WEDC was just a way for him to keep it alive for 9 more months after he left office.
Evers' position is more untenable. If he thinks the state's current level of taxation is the right amount or too low, then philosophically there is only one justifiable choice for him to make - kill the Foxconn deal and rescind all the tax breaks and incentives (basically what NYC did to Amazon). So he shouldn't care at all Foxconn says it'll do, since in all likelihood they'll pull out when he kills the deal. Attempting to keep the deal fully or partly alive just exposes him as a hypocrite. You can only support such a deal while remaining philosophically self-consistent if you also support similar tax breaks and incentives for everyone.
But not for widely-used software. If the government is paying for the cost to develop, manufacture, and provide a material product to the public, then it's not free. It's being paid for by taxes. And because it's being given away by the government without charge, there's no way to tell if the government's product or a commercial product is cheaper or more cost-effective. The government product will always be able to undercut the commercial product based on price, even if it's less cost-effective for the economy (i.e. costs more in taxes than if the users had simply bought the commercial product). So it makes sense to keep the government out of manufacturing.
Software is different though - it has essentially zero cost of duplication and distribution. That's the entire premise behind the open source movement - leveraging that zero cost of duplication and distribution to maximize benefit to society. Essentially you can view what the IRS is doing as hiring a few people to write tax software for them (so, maybe $200k in development costs), then duplicating and distributing it to everyone for free. Even if the IRS charged double their development costs for it, I doubt Intuit and H&R Block could compete with that price (e.g. if they sell 10 million copies, then each copy should be priced at less than 4 cents).
In other words, for a material product, the bulk of the cost is in the materials, manufacturing, and distribution. The engineering and design work is (for something which will be used by hundreds of millions of people) negligible. For software though, the materials, manufacturing, and distribution cost is nearly zero. And when you amortize the engineering and design costs over hundreds of millions of people, it becomes negligible. So the optimal solution in fact does become for the government to pay for it and give it away for free.
(Incidentally, I've used H&R Blocks tax software to file my taxes for close to a decade. Mainly for their guarantee against errors, and hotline where I can talk to an accountant if I have any obtuse tax questions. Those are the types of features and services they need to promote to distinguish themselves from the free IRS tax software.)
That actually sounds pretty typical for photographic/typographic work. The license fee depends on the number of copies you print out. Back in the print newspaper/magazine days, the license fee for a photograph depended on the page it would be used on (cover was most expensive, pages near the front were more expensive than ones near the back), coverage (full page was more expensive than half page was more expensive than quarter page), and number of copies which would be printed.
For online sites, that last one would correspond to the number of page views. Not saying it's right or the best way to do it. Just that their license is pretty much a direct transferal of print license contract to online use.
That is, are you trying to create an educational program which generates cookie-cutter kids, even if it means pounding square kids into round holes to force them to become round? Or is your educational program designed to allow each kid to explore, discover, and improve their unique talents and abilities? Is the surveillance for the benefit of the state (making life easier for teachers and administrators), or for the benefit of the students (expanding their future job opportunities)?
Everyone is trying to spin this as the first or second depending on whether they're pro-theater or anti-theater. When it's intuitively obvious that the actual relationship is the third. People who like to watch movies often go to the theater, and also subscribe to Netflix.
Trying to glean if there's a secondary effect of Netflix increasing or decreasing theater attendance is complicated by that being a time comparison - how did these people behave before they got Netflix, versus after they got Netflix? Unfortunately, the number, type, and quality of movies has changed over time. So unless someone comes up with some really clever method to control for those changes, you won't know if people's theater viewing behavior changed because of Netflix, or because movies changed.
This is a Hollywood requirement, not a Netflix requirement. Netflix (and Hulu, and Amazon Video, etc) would love nothing more than to let you stream anything to anywhere. It would be a lot simpler for them.
The Hollywood movie studios are the ones requiring the streamed movie be locked down . Hollywood's fear is that if an unencrypted video stream is ever exposed, that you'll just capture the stream to make a copy of the movie. So they require the stream to remain encrypted all the way from Netflix's servers to the final display device.
If it's a dedicated video playback device, then the device (and playback software like the Netflix app) has to be submitted to Hollywood for approval. That's why the Netflix app showed up on iPhones first, then on the different Android handsets one at a time. Netflix had to submit their app on every single hardware device to Hollywood for their approval. The iPhones were first because approving them meant the most people could get Netflix for the fewest models needing approval. Then the more popular Android handsets, followed by the lesser-known Android handsets. Every streaming device has to go through the same approval process - smart TVs, Blu-ray players with streaming capability, PS4, Xbox, etc.
For general purpose computing devices (i.e. PCs), Hollywood requires the video stream be decoded inside an encrypted virtual machine, which then sends the decoded video directly to the GPU for display. This is why you needed Flash or Silverlight installed on your browser in the pre-HTML 5 days. Those were the only technologies allowing the construction of a virtual machine. And decoding the video in a virtual machine precludes using the hardware decoder in the GPU, which is why you used to need at least an i3 to decode streamed 1080p video, while the puny little SoC on your phone could also stream it (the phone wasn't considered a general purpose computing device, so it could get Hollywood's approval for the entirety of the phone hardware, allowing it to use the GPU to decode the stream).
This is why the Netflix app won't run if your phone is rooted. Hollywood considers that to be converting your phone from a dedicated hardware device to a general purpose computing device. So if the Netflix app detects your phone is rooted, it invalidates itself and won't play. (You can get around it by hiding root from the Netflix app.)
Since Hollywood's approval was only for Airplay to certain Apple devices, opening up AirPlay violates Hollywood's terms of approval. So Netflix is forced to discontinue support for AirPlay, unless they want to go through the trouble of submitting every possible display device you can connect to using AirPlay.
That wasn't because the U.S. is backwards third-world country (well, the sign instead of PIN part was, but not the slow rollout of chipped cards). The rest of the world got to do it better because the U.S. did credit cards first. So the rest of the world got to see all the problems with magnetic swipe credit cards before implementing their credit card systems. The U.S. by virtue of being the first adopter, has to deal with the additional overhead of replacing a much larger legacy system, instead of just implementing a clean system mostly from scratch. Virtually every merchant in the U.S. already had credit card readers which weren't capable of reading chipped cards, so the transition to chipped cards took a lot longer here than in other countries where merchants hadn't widely adopted credit card readers.
Same thing happened with digital cell phone service. The U.S. already had an extensive analog cellular network, so was slowest to transition to digital cellular. The cost to implement digital cellular was the same here as in other countries, but the marginal gain was less because the gain in the U.S. was analog to digital cellular, while the gain in other countries was from no cellular to digital cellular. Consequently there was less market pressure to roll out digital cellular, and it progressed more slowly than in other countries. Likewise, the standard electrical socket and plug in the U.S. is the worst-designed, because other countries to got see the problems with the U.S. design and got to implement designs which fixed those problems as their standard, before they rolled out electricity in their countries. (e.g. Ground wire connects first; and live wires are covered before they're connected so you can't accidentally touch wires carrying current.) The U.S. was saddled with the inertia of that initial socket design being standard, and has never managed to overcome it and replace it with a newer, better socket design.
So these problems aren't because the U.S. is some backwards third-world nation. it's because the U.S. is the world's spearhead - the trailblazer and first adopter. And the first attempt at implementing something is almost never the best way to do it. Other countries get for free the lessons learned from the suffering and pain of trial and error that the U.S. had to go through. Mocking the U.S. for it just means you're an ungrateful prick.