So many talented doctors here on Slashdot.... <grin>

Great...another opportunity for the Supreme Court to FURTHER expand on the insanity of the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision. Like my mom says: "We need that like a hole in the head."

That makes no sense. $25k is nothing to either Google OR the FCC and wouldn't impress any legislator responsible for approving FCC budgets. The fines probably go into some general government pool that wouldn't affect their resources.

What makes more sense is the FCC did this to give other corporations the message that they need to come clean about what they've done and not drag their feet providing subpoenaed information.

No, because the delay was separate from their declaration of innocence. They impeded the government's investigation by not providing the court subpoenaed information relevant to the investigation in a timely manner. When investigations go on longer than necessary it increases the workload for the investigators and their assistants and results in increased the costs to the taxpayer.

That sounds pretty cloudy to me.

>Google’s P3P policy is actually a statement that it is not a P3P policy.

As Rene Magritte would say: "Ceci n'est pas une politique P3P."

I think I'll wait a while until the processing hardware is working perfectly, the power is stable, the factory is fully purged of airborne particulates, etc. Until then I'll let someone else do the QC testing.

I've used it with a few friends. Until both mail client software and popular webmail services implement PGP and make its use trivially easy then email encryption will remain a rarity.

So you ask if I blame America for being cynical then you blame America for lacking ambition, correct?

If you live in the sticks then Internet shopping, high transportation costs and the massive economies of scale offered by larger specialized vendors have already priced most local small mom-and-pop franchises out of business.

I remember when I was a kid a bakery truck used to drive through our neighborhood every weekday and offer fresh baked goods. That business model collapsed with the growth of supermarkets, just as the dairy farm down the street where I used to get our milk closed when the owners decided they could make more money selling the property for housing development. I preferred buying groceries from the bakery truck and the local dairy, but that didn't keep them from going out of business.

So why is it that Germany is doing so well and we're doing so poorly?

Fry's Electronics demonstrates the direction that Radio Shack could have taken to survive...hell, Tandy's failed Incredible Universe store in San Diego was purchased and converted to a very successful Fry's store. To be successful Radio Shack would have had to be run by people who understand the needs and desires of today's techno-geek. Like most older technology companies Radio Shack came to be run by people who neither understood how to satisfy this niche market nor had the desire to do so. Instead they tried a "me too" strategy to sell small, high volume, high profit items. Of course there's a lot of competition for that market and RS had no competitive advantage over the competition.

America has become cynical about educating their future generations. We need to expose them early on to good teachers and engaging media that shows them how stuff works and how things are made. This will go a long way towards getting young people interested in science and engineering and provide them the supplies and other support to nurture their curiosity.

Somebody mod this comment "Insightful" please.

On the other hand, do remember that a gramme is better than a damn.

Wow...this story became a non-story tout suite!