No, its usually about twice that, with the rest in subsidies from the EU. But, the power of a co-op should not be underestimated. Since they can both do work and grant land (cheaply).

And when I check speedtest net, they list an average of $3.52/MBps which would give a much higher cost for 100/100. This article from the BBC also lists much higher prices; $90 for speeds over 45 Mbps on average. (Granted it's two years old).

Now, that rural infrastructure is subsidised is no surprise. Everyone does that, even you. Only problem is you only do it for phone service, which used to be important. We've said that internet service is equally important, while you don't. That's the gist of the problem.

And that's where your regulatory capture comes in. There have been numerous stories here on slasdot on states that have explicitly forbidden local municipalities to be involved in fibre/broadband, instead legislating that that can only be done by corporations. Who then don't actually deliver any infrastructure. Municipalities or co-ops are in most of these cases banned by law from addressing the problem. If that's not regulatory capture, I don't know what is...

Yes, sorry I meant co-op. As in "cooperative".

And of course I meant "oligopoly"...

And the subsidies are mainly EU, subsidies. Not Swedish per se. (And they're for rural areas. In the cities we have competition, which makes the market work.)

Myself, I pay $50 or so for 100/100Mbps including IP telephony. Fibre in an open city network (laid down by one of the utilities, district heating in my case), with my choice of ca eight different ISPs. I paid nothing for installation, but a more reasonable price would have been around $2500, which is what most people pay these days. In a rural setting you get about as much extra per drop in various (EU) subsidies.

Yes, that is true. However, even these parts of the country, at least in Sweden, have good broadband access. It's actually cheaper and easier for them than more urban areas, since there's more farmland/forest where digging is cheaper and easier. They're using national government money/legislative support to get a feed and then create co-ops to do the actual installation. It's been quite a thing for the past decade at least. (As a case in point a friend just got fibre to his farm, where his nearest neighbour is a kilometre away, at about the same time that his house, much more urban, was hooked up. Co-op in the country, and ISP in the burb.)

Now, when it comes to urbanisation, I would have always thought that the US was more urbanised than Sweden in particular (we're still in the process of urbanising), but according to Wikipedia you're less urbanised, by one measure at least. However, not by a lot. I'd say that the differences in degree of urbanisation does not explain the majority of the large differences in broadband access or price. My money is on other factors, chiefly unhampered oligopoly in the market combined with regulatory capture. Both of which we lack. (We even got the former government telecom company to start installing open fibre networks, i,e. where you have your choice of ISP, rather than being tied to just them. And we didn't even have to legislate, just compete... People realised a bad deal for a bad deal.)

(Interestingly Norway is much worse off, relatively speaking. Mainly due to a lack of government support. Instead choosing to leave it to the market, which means the telecom incumbent(s). Guess what the results are? Yepp, much more like the US. Lack of access, and where you can get it, more expensive.)

While I agree that places like Hong Kong are an anomaly, you also lag countries like Sweden and Finland...

Well, I wasn't the one using it, but in late 1998, I was working at a printer -- a big industrial one, with huge lithographic presses. The prepress department there was transitioning to using Macintosh G3s for DTP work, and I was there to help with that. The reason for the transition was that their old DTP needs had been served by some sort of DEC minicomputer.

It was about the size of a fridge, with dual 8" floppy drives, so I'm hoping it was a MicroVAX, but I don't recall. Each workstation wired into it had a VTerm, as well as a Barco graphics monitor and a mouse. You'd type in commands to their DTP software on the VTerm, then view the work as a line drawing on the Barco (all it was capable of -- photos had to be pasted in by hand) and adjust it with the mouse.

They'd been using the thing since the early 80s, but apparently it was breaking down and they were having trouble pulling people out of retirement to fix it, and that, plus the new digital press they were building, forced the transition to Macs.

The company got bought some years later, but is still in operation, so I guess things more or less worked out.

You make a lot of interesting points, the intersection of contracted forces and pregnancy is an interesting one that I haven't put much thought into, but I'd thought I'd just limit myself to this one point.

The main difference between police and fire fighting I would say is that the former has physical requirements they're based on a situation that will never arise. I.e. police (like most soldiers to tell the truth) train and prepare for a situation that will never come. The overwhelming majority of police never draw their service weapon in the line of duty for example. And comforting crying children after a traffic accident, or filling in the umpteenth burglary report can of course be fulfilled with a minimum of physical prowess. (OK, most uniformed police in "outer" service do a bit of impromptu wrestling during their stint, so there's that. But we also know that this is where WPCs fair the worst. And in Sweden we've seen an up-tick in police brutality reports as we've had more WPCs. They have to go for the Mace/pepper spray instead of wrestling...)

With fire fighting it's different in that they actually train for what they'll do. Fire fighting does actually involve the hard physical work that the requirements are put there to ensure that they can perform. OK, they don't do a lot of dragging their downed comrades to safety, but there's plenty of other stuff (i.e. smoke diving) that actually is as tough as it looks.

So with that in mind, it's not at all surprising that we'll see more female police than fire fighters. The jobs are different in that with police you can get away with skirting requirements due to whatever pressure or other consideration as those requirements are there to ensure performance during an emergency. In fire fighting, those requirements are there to ensure you can manage to do your regular duties.

So, it depends on whether you're training to train, or training to fight...

P.S. In the Swedish army we were taught that the Israeli experience was that while women soldiers in combat postings did fine, the men around them didn't. The "cave man reflex" (not my terminology) made men expose themselves far to much when women were in danger, to the detriment of the mission. But perhaps that's the sort of macho behaviour that training and indoctrination can deal with, and I don't know how large this effect was in either case. It's just a point of interest.

While that is a laudable sentiment, and one that I can get behind, don't be surprised if you end up with approximately no women in your battalions.

We've seen the exact same thing happen in Sweden. Female fire fighters (well, not necessarily them per se, but other's speaking for them) complained about the macho culture that prevented women from being fire fighters. The had the numbers to support their arguments, there were very few females that were deemed to pass muster.

So, instead of the somewhat arbitrary previous hiring process, that did contain standards but also left room for judgement, quite a lot of work was put into defining what the actual requirements that had to be met to be a passable fire fighter were researched, tested and put into practice in the major fire departments in the larger cities.

The results were quite telling. At the smaller departments that kept the old process in the interim, the same abysmally small number of female applicants were hired, but in the cities, with their brand spanking new, objective, doesn't-leave-anything-to-subjective-judgement, not a single female fire fighter was hired after. Not one. *)

And if you look at the statistics that's not really that surprising. When you have strength, endurance, and psychological requirements that only a relatively small portion of the male population can pass, the number of females who could pass it in the general population becomes close to zero to begin with. And when you combine that with the small number of women who could see themselves in that line of work and even apply, it becomes a once-in-a-blue-moon even that the stars have aligned so that you will get a woman who both can pass the requirements, and would be interested and willing to do so.

*) A few years after two women actually managed to pass the physical requirements test by having been coached specifically. So out of 1000 fire fighters in my city there are now two women that are qualified for actual fire fighting (including "smoke diving"). The first time they tried coaching four women from neighbouring cities that already worked as fire fighters, but none of them passed... And just for reference, the physical requirements aren't completely over the top: Being able to run 3000 meters below 13:15, 30 kg bench press 35 times in under one minute, or lifting a 15 kg bar to the chin 40 times, etc. etc. These are requirements I myself would have had a shot at 25 years ago before I got old, slow, weak and fat, and I was no prime specimen of the male gender, far from it.

The physical differences between the sexes, at least in modern societies, are just that large. And if you say that "Women are OK, but you know, given the requirements there won't actually be any women," have you then actually opened up the position to women?

It gets even better. In project management terms we also actually try and quantify the "unknown unknowns", not just the "known unknowns". Rather, at the outset we try to get a feel for the risk that things will crop up that we didn't or couldn't foresee or plan for. This is based on things like; Have we done something similar in the past? (i.e. our degree of experience) What is the state of knowledge in the world about this task? What's the state of science? How good have we been at dealing with unforeseen consequences in the past? Can we limit the impact of any unknown unknown to a part of the system/project? (i.e. were are the risks the largest, can we do without those parts in a pinch?) etc. etc.

Any project manager that doesn't deal with the unknown and unknowable unknowns isn't doing their job. Its called risk management...

And neither do you. And that's my main point.

You then go on about avoiding a well known danger and how GM might be safer in that respect.

But that's not the point. It's the unknown unknown, that's the danger.

And with GM you open up whole vistas of unknown, unknown. The computer analogy is very apt. Even in the "deliberately designed world of computer programming" we can't foresee the consequences, and our experience is quite clearly on the side of outright manipulation being more dangerous than random chance change. The risks from the known unknown is readily dealt with in both situations, you have to check for known dangerous compounds using both methods, so your "you can be certain since you didn't fiddle with that" (paraphrase) doesn't fly in that case either. (Also a well known result from the complex systems that are computer programmes, "But that couldn't possibly affect that..." Famous last words.

But in either case, your characterisation of mine in particular, and our in general, concerns aren't about "unsafe" GMO's in the sense of knowingly "directly harmful to humans", it's "letting known psychopath organisations play with fire". We, well I specifically, don't distrust science and technology, we distrust you (in the "ya'll" sense of "you"). We didn't trust Dow Chemical when they said "trust us, our chemicals are completely safe", and we don't trust Monsanto now, when they're doing and saying the exact same thing. And the risk isn't really that we're afraid that they'll poison us outright (not that we hold them above such behaviour, just witness the British when they realised that scrapie had jumped the species boundary to cows and decided against saying anything lest they harm the British beef industry), we believe them to be smarter than that, no, its basically everything else, including the rest of the ecosystem, economy, and laying their grubby hands on a strategic resource...

Note that here in Sweden we don't just ban GMO, we also ban Belgian Blue, because we don't believe in the concept of breeding for what is a genetic disorder in animals just to make beef $0.10 cheaper by the pound. Banning the use of artificial growth hormones in animal husbandry, and the use of antibiotics to promote growth in same, is just plain common sense (esp. the latter).

We note that you don't care one way or the other about any of these. So that you don't care about GMO, and the risks with said, isn't surprising in the least, but also not very much of an endorsement... Especially since our farmers, even though we've "hamstrung" them instead of letting red blooded american capitalism be our guiding star, still manage to overproduce themselves into an unsustainable market situation, almost just as bad as yours. We don't actually need them to be more efficient, and we can't afford them to be anyway...

You were the one who claimed that most would-be pirates were discouraged from doing it prior to the invention of the printing press. Guess what? The high cost of making copies (and the relative lack of literate people to share them with, assuming that the author himself was even literate) discouraged authors from writing things down too.

Wrong. You're conflating authors with their works. The only sure way an author could prevent Alexandrians from copying their works was to not create works in the first place.

If they created works, even if they were not written down, nothing stopped someone else from writing it down. (For example, Socrates never wrote anything; what we know of him comes primarily from the writings of his student, Plato; Another example is from the days of Elizabethan theater, when printers would have people dictate the scripts to plays, sometimes actors who had memorized the lines, sometimes just people with good memories who had been in the audience)

If works were created, written down, and shared with anyone, there was absolutely nothing that could keep the scrolls from getting copied or moved. Consider Virgil, who wrote fanfic (The Aneid) based on the epic poems of Homer (The Illiad and The Odyssey), but wanted all the copies burned; this was ignored, and the world is better off for it.

Fundamentally, it's the same issue with secrets, or any other information. The only way to control the spread of it is to either convince other people to respect your wishes (which they may or may not do according to their own self interest, and other factors), or to never tell anyone.

I don't think we can credit copyright with the increase in the number of works in existence in recent history, as compared with ages past. The real credit is probably owed to increases in literacy, improved artificial lighting, the development of printing (as well as improved paper and ink to support it), greater leisure time available due to a variety of technological and social advances, increases in the internal stability of much of the world (hard to sell books when bandits rob every wagon, or war ravages the country), etc. Copyright can be nice, but it gets way more credit than it deserves.

Authors really just don't engage in self-censorship as a means of control. Copyright, from an author's point of view, is a way to recoup their investment. If they can't do that, they have to have other jobs that take time away from creating. Potentially, those jobs take away all their time from creating, so they don't create. It's rare as hell to find someone who is interested in creating works, has the financial means to do so without having to worry about the cost (and opportunity cost), yet refuses because they're a control freak. I'm confident that the sorts of authors you've identified are so rare as to not be worth concerning ourselves with.

As for the purpose of modern, authorial copyright (as opposed to the old stationers' copyright), you're almost entirely right: I'd only say that mere access is not enough. Rather, copyright is intended to provide an overall benefit to society by increasing the number of works which are created and published, while imposing the fewest and shortest restrictions on the public. It operates by providing some temporary benefits (whose actual value is determined by the market) to authors, but this is merely a means to an end, not an end in itself. If copyright were actually meant to benefit authors, it's clear that it has never done a good job of it at all. The stereotype of the starving author exists for a reason.

Personally, I would drop terms to a year, with numerous opportunities for renewal, but with overall maximum lengths that were still quite short (probably no more than 20 years or so, and less in the case of some types of works, such as computer software). The reason is that when we had renewal terms, many rights holders failed to renew, evidencing a lack of desire for longer copyright on their part, and getting works into the public domain faster through their inaction. Since everyone winds up as happy as they wanted to be in that scenario, I see no reason not to return to it.

Regarding maximum lengths, you may be interested to read the following paper on the subject: http://rufuspollock.org/papers...

What the hell are you talking about?

Unauthorized copying was absolutely standard practice everywhere in the world until the 18th century, and most places until well into the 19th and 20th centuries. Hell, some places, like Alexandria during the days of the famous library, made it government policy; any books that entered the city had to be turned over for the library to make copies of, if the librarians wanted.

And it's a good thing too, since every written work we have from antiquity which wasn't carved into stone or clay survived only thanks to unauthorized copying -- often many generations of copying, by many different copyists. Even then, we've lost a tremendous amount of material.

As for the difficulty of copying books by hand, that was equally difficult for everyone, whether authorized or not, so it didn't deter piracy.

Copyright originated because publishers printed books (often without authorization; the authors had no rights) but didn't like to compete amongst themselves. So the publishers set up a cartel whereby they would agree which of them had the right to print a particular book. The author had no real say. And the government cooperated so long as they could censor anything they didn't like. It wasn't until substantially later that this system fell apart -- because people didn't like the monopoly -- and a replacement based on authors getting the rights was suggested. (And then the publishers fought that when they were unable to fully control it in the way that they had before, and even now publishers are the real powers behind and beneficiaries of copyright; authors need publishers far more than publishers need authors)

That's true. The problem you face, however, is that the social norm concerning creative works appears to be that it's perfectly okay for ordinary people to do things that constitute copyright infringement, at least if they aren't doing so for direct financial gain (i.e. if they aren't selling the copies). If the law were to reflect this social norm, copyright would not be as interesting an issue as it has become in the past 30-40 years. Instead we see copyright holders suing individuals, and trying to control the Internet so as to indirectly control individuals by limiting their options, so as to preserve the laws that enable a particular market, regardless of whether or not they conform to social norms.

And it looks as though even for a sort of infringement that most people would agree should be illegal, the copyright maximalist faction is still going overboard. I certainly would agree that professional, profit-oriented copyright infringement ought to be prevented, but I would not go so far as to say that it would ever be appropriate to put someone in jail for as much as ten years over it; it's just not that important. Punishments should not be so draconian, especially given that it seems unlikely that it will accomplish a damn thing. A better solution would be to reform copyright so that there's less of a point in engaging in professional, profit-oriented infringement, rather than the current strategy which is to simply make it high risk, high reward. For example, just as repealing Prohibition undercut the mafia, and just as drug legalization and decriminalization undercuts criminals in the drug trade, legalizing some copyright infringement by people acting not for profit, and thus able to act openly, could undercut professional infringers.

Well, I'd point out two things here. First, there are pre-existing incentives that act independently of copyright; in many cases, copyright is not the primary incentive, and in many cases copyright is not even a necessary incentive.

Second, I agree that copyright is useful, but we ought to regulate how much copyright we have, and for how long it lasts, with an eye toward its utility. I'd bet good money that adding a ten year sentence for certain copyright infringements, and even enforcing it, will have zero meaningful effects on how well copyright serves society. Therefore, such punishments are inappropriate. Indeed, we ought to pare copyright down to the point where it has both the fewest restrictions on the public with the greatest incentivizing effects. Given the economics of the various copyright-related fields, I think you'll find that this would involve no criminal punishments, minimal civil penalties, minimal restrictions on individuals, and copyright terms of far shorter length than we see now.

I don't think that's true. Sure, I know about the lifestyle of someone like Kim Dotcom, but he's something of an outlier. Benny Glover made some money, but I don't think you'd say it was a lot.

Making counterfeit anything, and selling it to someone who knows it's counterfeit, only makes sense if you sell it for a very substantial discount below the legitimate price. The negative effect on the legitimate supplier, if there's any at all, is going to be far greater than the positive effect for the counterfeiter.

Not really. You see, random mutation from radiation is a fact of nature, and it's been going on for a long time. It's a sledge hammer approach and most mutations will result in a non-viable seed. It's a method that's limited in power and hence risk.

The chances of being accidentally clever on purpose is essentially zero with a random mutation approach. You're basically just speeding up nature. Can that result in dangerous crops? Sure, but experience tells us that to really screw up you need to add intelligence into the mix. The risk of tomatoes all of a sudden sprouting fish genes that might code for a fish protein that could kill those allergic to fish is as near to zero as damn it, with the random approach to "genetic engieering". With GMO the chances of success are several orders of magnitude higher.

I think of a car analogy off the top of my head, but in my own field, computer security/safety the examples abound. Even though the safety/reliability field is a difficult one, we can at least reason about it, because the insults to those systems follows the laws of nature and are amenable to statistical analysis. Not so with security. There we have an intelligent attacker that can change things, not at random, but at will. That means that a small software or hardware flaw that, statistically speaking, could never hurt us, can become our undoing each and every time. Those completely improbable circumstances that need to arise by chance for the danger to be realised, can be put in place by the intelligent attacker at will.

So, you can't really even begin to compare the power of random genetic mutation as a tool for changing DNA to (more or less, well "less" but still) being able to edit that DNA as you please. They're not in the same league, and hence while restricting Monsanto to the former is a cause for concern, giving them access to the later is a cause for abject terror. It's the difference between them having access to a hand grenade and a nuke...

P.S. And they know it. If they were of equal power and utility, they would just abandon GM as not being worth the bother and press on with random mutation. But they are different, and that's why they're not happy being restricted to the much less powerful of the techniques.

I don't know about "much harder". It was a help that's certain and they provided a few insights, but if Turing's biography is anything to go by, it wasn't crucial. Turing and his ilk did most of the work esp. when it came to automating the process. And it's the automation that made the process quick enough to be of practical value.

At the onset of serious illness often the answer to that is "yes". And that's a good thing. Because the "symptoms" can kill you. A common fever from an infection can kill you, even in cases where the actual infection can be cleared by the body itself is short order. The same with anaphylaxis. The allergic reaction as such won't kill you, it's the lack of breath from your throat swelling shut, or precipitous drop in blood pressure, (with heart failure) that kills you. Treating those symptoms is 99% of "curing" the underlying cause. The body will take care of that in short order as well if it survives that long, that is.

And yes. Seizures aren't exactly healthy either, with many serious complications, including death, so even if you don't do anything else to the patient, you damn well try and control the seizures first. Everything else comes second.

The diseases are after all divided into two major groups, the self healing and the incurable. HOWEVER, that's not to say that there aren't a few very important cases in the middle. Scraping away a melanoma before it's gone too far definitely "cures" you and isn't "treating the symptoms". Even so, and in all cases first you treat the (serious) symptoms, then you see if you can stop them from recurring.

Many serious diseases, including but not limited to, having no kidney function at all, can now be managed, by "treating the symptoms" of having no kidney function. Even if we "fix" that condition by transplanting a new kidney; guess what, we then have to treat the rejection symptoms by suppressing them. And people get to live long and productive lives that they wouldn't have been able to, just a few short years ago.

By always treating the symptoms.