The question to ask is since it is proven that people will pay $30-60 a month for Internet service, why would Google offer it for free? Just to build market share? I doubt it.

Google is getting compensated in some manner. Now the first thing that comes to mind is they are avoiding paying someone else to deliver their exclusive content - plenty of places are waking up to the fact that Google is making billions off of delivering ads to people with the local cable company picking up the tab for the delivery of that content. It isn't common in the US (yet) for high-volume content providers to be paying for delivery but things are changing - look at what Netflix is doing.

Another thing is Google makes money from selling demographic and marketing information, not just delivering ads. So if you are using their Internet connection they obviously know the most popular Internet sites for your connection. Aggregated with all your neighbors gives them the information of what is popular for your zip code and that is saleable. How much monitoring and tracking are you comfortable with? Google will push that envelope as much as they can and will make billions doing it.

Excuse me, but have you tried a Roku box? Or Apple TV? You can subscribe to services for live sporting events without having cable TV.

Unfortunately, it isn't free, but I'm sure someone is figuring out a way to pirate those services.

Oh that is pretty funny. You seem to think that once the physical plant is in that is the end of the matter.

Well, there is this little thing called maintenance. If you don't maintain the physical plant, it goes to crap in a short period of time. Copper rusts. Coax deteriorates in other ways. Every connection point is a risk factor, and every box with some electronics in it is vulnerable to failure. Pretty much that means line crews are out at least five days a week and they need some coverage 24x7. The maintenance costs are high.

Cable companies generally farm out the installs to other companies but keep the hardline and node maintenance to themselves. Fiber has its own set of problems with physical damage but every connection point has a bunch of electronics that is subject to failure, so while the problems are different there is still a heavy maintenance requirement.

No, these folks aren't just sitting there and letting the system rot around them. Well, not if it is working. There is nowhere near as much profit as you seem to think in running the system.

If only it could be outsourced to someplace with cheap labor. Sadly, in Arizona they can't use cheap illegals because of the training and turnover requirements. Obviously, the cheaper illegals are used anywhere they can be.

Copyright doesn't affect anyone's right to view something, only to distribute it.

So you can view anything, but you may not have the right to copy it and post it somewhere else. Especially if you claim to be the author of it.

Obviously the only control you have over preventing people from viewing something is to restrict access or not post it to begin with.

Build some train tracks? Sorry, the land has been used up with houses and highways. To build a rail system some houses are going to have to be torn down - and they way we have been building in clustered houses it would mean tearing down whole communities.

Buses might stand a chance, but the US has had such an incredibly bad history of bus transportation that nobody expects it to ever work.

Not building power plants? Heck, we haven't been building big power plants since the 1970s and we are just about out of the cushion that was built in the 1950s and 1960s. We so vastly overbuilt that it has taken us 40 years to fill the capacity that we built. Of course the trap we constructed is deep and wide because there is no way to build suffficient capacity in the next ten years that we will need in the next five. Electric power is going to get a lot less stable and a lot more expensive in the next few years.

It isn't just the evil corporations. The problem with labor is that we have had cheap labor for so long that nobody understands how to function with expensive labor and all we have in the West today is expensive labor. So cheap labor is going to get used, no matter where it is. Sure, we could pass laws making it illegal to import goods manufactured with cheap labor, but that wouldn't solve the problem. Trying to make labor expensive in developing countries is unlikely to fix the problem either, again because we are so familiar with cheap labor. It would exist somehwere and it would be found and used.

Probably the worst thing that could happen would be a flexible humaniform robot that could perform menial labor.

Well, it would seem obvious to anyone that lived through the 1950s and 1960s that we need to get out of the bottle and make use of some other bottles.

Failing that, humanity will die drowning in their own wastes. We can grow or we can die, there is no "sustainable". This is easily seen with any lifeform. If humanity doesn't grow beyond the current container it is in, it is doomed just as a bacteria colony in a petri dish.

There was no effort to identify who Jammie Thomas uploaded files to, only that she made the files available from her computer for others to download. I don't see that changing anytime soon, so identifying who the downloader might be is unimportant, only that there are files being offered for download.

I also tend to agree that No Good Can Possibly Come From Piracy. I have seen plenty of justifications like the studios are making plenty of money as it is even with rampant piracy and the Star Trek justification - if we get rid of revenue everything will be free. Unfortunately what we are seeing is the "early adopter stage" still with piracy. It is somewhat more mainstream than it was five years ago but overall Internet speeds are increasing worldwide and that makes piracy faster and easier. We are educating children that there is no need to pay for anything on the Internet and I think the lessons are taking hold. This means we will see piracy being more and more mainstream. So when do studios decide there is no longer enough revenue to even bother with digital distribution? As a bulk of the material on The Pirate Bay is digitally recorded OTA and satellite broadcasts, what happens when it is decided there just isn't any point in putting this stuff out for the pirates to grab? I think the point comes when broadcast ad revenues drop to the point where it is clear that "popular" does not result in revenue - just pirate viewers.

Is the answer to this that the Internet comes with a fee for getting access to all that content from studios? I don't think so - because the Netflix model doesn't begin to compensate studios as is easily seen by the Netflix content selection. Nobody is giving Netflix anything that could have any other revenue stream associated with it - Stars pulled out because even as a cable channel they were getting more than Netflix could cough up. No, a subscription fee isn't going to cut it. And comparing it to the media tariff is pointless because none of that has ever been distributed to anyone.

Since 1980 people have pretty much consistently voted for more government benefits, bigger government programs and whatever else the government says it needs to increase payments to people. We have gotten ourselves into a financial mess with a president promoting lower taxes and a Congress that spends as much as possible to keep the gravy train going.

Sure you would. No more searches at airports would mean the instant revocation of insurance coverage for airlines - remember, they proved they can't handle the security screening. No foreign military bases would mean all the cheap stuff from China and South Korea would disappear in a blinding flash. North Korea is just waiting for the US to give up on the South so they can walk in and take over. We could probably give up bases in Europe now, but in a lot of ways these bases are a net gain for everyone's economy.

Foreign wars? Sure, I suppose. Today we are trying to follow a "You broke it, you own it" philosophy and it is taking time - because the countries are far less stable than either Germany or Japan were at the end of WWII where we had to follow a similar course. Unfortunately some bright folks thought we could do this on the cheap and not bother the people about it. I'd say a much better course would have been to sell bonds to support the effort and maybe a special "war tax". We could have actually seen if Congress would have gone along with that. I suspect they would have. Afganistan was a pretty popular engagement.

At a Federal level the IRS has no "statute of limitations" on unpaid taxes, which is what this is. If they suddenly discovered that your great-great-grandfather didn't pay some taxes that were owed in 1930 they would be able to collect them - likely as not through attaching his estate and tracking that down through all the decendents until they found some cash.

I was subject to this sort of confiscation and they went back 10 years to decide that a tax shelter that was approved by the IRS had suddenly become unapproved and now taxes from 10 years ago were now owed, with interest for the 10 years they weren't paid. Some folks in the program had bills in the six and seven figures.

Basically, once you understand that the IRS has their own police force and their own court system you can see there is nothing they can't get away with. California is a small-time player and just copying what the IRS has done for a long time.

No, I am sure there is no appealing this.

Just to annoy here, I'd say that someone struck with a degenerative disease that makes it necessary to depend on others for life means that person has a pretty low quality of life. Are you sure life is worth living under those circumstances? I'm not. Being forced to be utterly dependent on other people for life can be OK but it can also be a living hell.

However, one thing I am not in favor of at all is giving the state and/or their appointed representatives, the power to decide that my life isn't worth living any longer and to take steps. Once you are spending the State's money on continuous care, it becomes the State's obligation to make sure its money is being well spent. And that does absolutely mean they get to decide if your life is worth living - worth it to them.

That is one big problem with state-funded healthcare. It becomes the state's business whatever your health (or lack thereof) is. If you have an STD and they are paying for treatment it behooves the state to find out how you got it and make sure it is less likely to reoccur. If you smoke, it becomes the state's obligation to get you to stop, whatever that entails, even up to preventing the sale of all smoking materials. If you are overweight, you are going to cost more money for healthcare in the future and therefore need to have the state step in and help you with your diet.

Remember, all the healthcare privacy in the world doesn't help because there is always the exception for the payer, be it the insurance company or the state.

Source Code got a little confusing in that if you buy into multiple universes being split up, how do you have communication back from an alternate to the "original"? That was how it ended and clearly the phone calls from the alternate universe had an effect on the original. That requires some very twisted causality that isn't generally explained by the quantum multiverse concept.

Let's see, might China have an incentive to make some changes so they could listen in on all communications with BlackBerry phones in use by the US government?

Gosh, I suppose the might.

As BlackBerry is the only certified secure phone presently, having the company in the hands of a pretty much hostile trading partner might just be a bad idea for both US and Canada.

We have beem stamping out risk from health insurance for 20 years or so. When you eliminate risk calculations you don't have insurance, you have a savings account. When you build a huge group with their savings pooled, you will find that there isn't enough savings to go around.

That will force single-payer and it will let the government regain control over what is actually spend. Unfortunately, that means a lot of people will simply be without health care - because the provider pool will shrink and there will be severe rationing. But we will have single payer.

The fair way to do this is make it illegal to pay for care. Then anyone with money will leave and most of what we consider first-world will consist of a shrinking middle class and the poor.

Consider the view that if nothing is done about population, immigration and entitlements the first world nations are going to bankrupt themselves supporting the "safety net" that will be supporting the 99% as they become more and more dependent. How we get there is just keeping on keeping on, adding more and more government heft and weight. Programs like a feel-good health care "reform" that doesn't reform anything at all except getting more people into the system with no visible means of paying for them is just more keeping on as well.

I suppose the idea that fiat money really is imaginary could take hold, but it would trigger the same kind of collapse that people think the 1% or the Republicans want. Sure, when we picked up the pieces there might be a new way that was better, but how long would it take and how many would die in the interim? One way out is a lot smaller population, but 20 years of chaos while the rich stand by and watch doesn't seem like the ideal way to get there either.

We have a huge problem today - many jobs open to people with symbol manipulation skills and few, if any jobs for people that can't handle such abstractions. Today a cashier in a store can't rely on everyting being a concrete object they can touch and move - sometimes someone hands them a piece of paper that represents 1000 products and mishandling the abstract paper will absolutely mean they get fired. Previously there were many jobs for people like this and studies in education indicate that at least 25% of the population can't handle much abstraction. So what do we do with them? Right now, they are sitting at home hopefully collecting unemployment forever. How long is that going to work?

By the way, the idea of retraining people into new jobs sounds appealing but it doesn't work always. Yes, you can take the loading dock worker and train them to be a drone on an assembly line. But the problem with abstract symbol manipulation is that it isn't a learnable skill - either your brain it wired to be able to do it or it isn't. If you learned algebra and differential equations you have the ability. If you never "got" these things and likely dropped out of high school because you couldn't seem to understand how this worked, you likely do not have the ability. No amount of training or remedial education is going to help. Read up on it if you don't understand. It is a real problem and it isn't going to get any better.

We need to squash the idea of the "knowledge economy" where everyone is using or programming computers. It isn't going to happen.

Also, we are currently importing thousands of low-skill workers every month. They were at the bottom of the employment food chain in their own country which is why they are being exported. It doesn't matter much if the guy mowing the grass can do algebra or understand using a computer to control a machine, but their job prospects are very limited. How many landscapers do we really need? Why are we going to make them all permanently our responsibility? Well, we are. And like it or not, they likely can't be trained to do something their brain isn't wired to be able to do.

Maybe there should be a slightly different attitude towards breaking into computer systems, or attempting to break into them. However, it needs to be mentioned that if you are learning to skydive the first lesson isn't "what if you chute doesn't open." Similarly, the first project in a chemistry class isn't making dynamite.

What this case showed was a student with some skills could break into a university system. Great. One problem is that the student had little grounding in what consequences might pile up if this skill was used. Like the chemistry student making dynamite the knowledge might be there but no judgement about what to do with that knowledge.

Unfortunately, I don't think the proper response is for companies to hire people like this. They need a lot more work before they really can be expected to use their skills in a responsible manner - and today's corporate environment is hardly the place where people are going to get that. Would a person with the skill to break into computer systems and zero reasons not to do so willy-nilly (especially at the direction of lower level management with all kinds of reasons of their own) be a quality employee? More importantly, would such skills misused result in a good reference on down the road?

We are setting these people up to be unemployable in the future, right after they are exploited.