[Rant deleted.]

Ad homenim. I win. B-)

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...

FWIW, I'm not a member of the community. I play Wesnoth off and on for a few weeks every couple of years. I also like the random element and don't much care about characterization, world-building, lore or storytelling. Not that I don't like those things, just that Wesnoth is more of an occasional light diversion for me, so those things don't mean much.

I wish I could be shocked at this behavior but this is standard operating procedure in America. The government has long been owned by the corporations, stuff like this just removes all doubt.

In the executive branch this has also changed - and not for the better - recently.

One of the biggest political machines in the US is that of Chicago. Chicago is utterly corrupt. But it's also the "City that Works" (according to one of its slogans), because ANYBODY can bribe the relevant officials, for sums that are within reach. The result is not pretty (and never has been). But it is thoroughly entrenched. How it operates is well known throughout the region.

Obama is a typical Chicago machine politician, as are his associates. Those of us familiar with Chicago's politics warned that, should he be elected, the likely result would be the Federal Government's executive branch would be run like Chicago's political machine.

And that's exactly what has happened. The Congress, with its slow turnover, is still largely in the pocket of the same corporate interests as before - but the Executive Branch changes more rapidly and is currently being run on Chicago's political-machine model, top to bottom. (It's usually largely in the hands of organized crime, and has been since the Nixon-Kennedy election - which was substantially a battle between two Mafia "families".)

If you wonder at the odd foreign policies (or lack thereof) of the current regime and their blatant extra-legal use of government agencies to suppress political enemies and promote the interests of arbitrary groups with no obvious ideological connection between them, try thinking of it as a corrupt big-city political machine and see if it makes more sense.

Passing laws which make lobbying a criminal offence would seem to be a good start ...

It would also be unconstitutional.

The Right to Petition IS the right of lobbying, and is constitutionally protected. (That's why anti-lobbying laws keep getting struck down when challenged.)

In the US it's part of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people ... to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." You'll also find it in Article 44 of the EU's Charter of Human Rights, Germany's 1949 Fundamental Law, England's Bill of Rights of 1689, Petition of Right of 1628, and Magna Carta (1215).

It's a fundamental part of Western Law: ANYBODY gets to ask their legislature to adjust the law to make it better for them (if they can get the legislators' attention) and not be penalized for doing so.

It's also a REALLY BAD IDEA to try to interfere with this fundamental right (and also with the fundamental right to support the political candidates of one's choice). The big money / big power people can always find ways to influence and finance the politicians of their choice. The only thing such laws do is make it harder on the "big mass of little guys". So they institutionalize elite-class favoritism and corruption, rather than retard it.

If you want to attack corruption the place to do it is the selection of the officials: Elections, and exposure of malfeasance to the electorate.

Sure, it does, which is why managers convert such things into spot bonuses -- which are generally several thousand dollars.

The downside of rewarding primarily with peer bonuses is that it might create a culture of doing good stuff for peers in order to collect peer bonuses rather than doing good stuff for peers because it's abstractly good to do good stuff for peers. I don't know how real it was or was not, but I have heard that some obnoxious Googlers with special skills or access or knowledge made a habit of demanding multiple peer bonuses before being willing to do some task for some other team that needed it. The "one bonus per" rule pretty much eliminates that because -- to people as well-compensated as Googlers -- a single $125 bonus isn't worth the overhead of negotiating; it's much more effective to just be "nice" and do stuff for people who need it, gathering the occasional peer bonus and lots of kudos, as well as building the network of people who will offer support at promotion time and/or help you out when you need it.

The effect is the same: it incents employees with special skills or access or knowledge to help their peers, but makes it more of a "gift economy" where everyone tries to be helpful to others in expectation of eventual good karma coming back to them, rather than one of barter and bargaining in which people jealously protect their advantages.

"One front-line manager" != "management". The latter implies higher levels of company leadership.

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.

My attitude on the whole H1B visa thing is that you need to require that they pay them... lets say 20 percent more than the going rate for domestic labor of the same kind.

In particular, employers of H1Bs are not required to contribute to SOME of the social programs they aren't eleigble for. Part of any H1B reform should be a requirement that they pay them at LEAST as much more as the difference in government fees saves them. Otherwise there is a strong financial incentive to use H1Bs in preference to citizens.

(An additional complication is that the employers often put the H1Bs to work on things above their official job title and its resulting pay scale.)

N-acetyl carnosine drops have been used with good success for a while. Bought them for my grandmother in law. Over the course of a couple of years it halted and mostly reversed her developing cataracts. Can get them from multiple sources.

Good information - especially while we're waiting for this stuff to become available.

I note, though, that:
  - This newly-identified material substantially clears cataracts in six days while N-acetyl carnosine takes four months for significant improvement to show.
  - This newly-identintified material appears to be what the eye normally uses in a specific mechanism to prevent/repair cataracts, while N-acetyl carnosine appears to have more generic antioxidant and chelation properties. (It's a modification of carnosine to a form which can penetrate the tissues of the eye and is converted back to carnosine within them. Carnosine is great for retarding several ageing mechanisms but it looks more like a generic helper than a specific repair-mechanism component or trigger for cataracts.)
  - The discovery of this new stuff occurred by identifying what was missing in people with a genetic early-cataract problem. If this is necessary for cataract prevention/repair and its production declines (but doesn't fully stop) with age, N-acetyl carnosine might not work for people who don't make it at all.

So though N-acetyl carnosine looks good, this looks great and specific. (And I don't see any reason to stop the former even if taking the latter. Unless some specific interaction issue shows up I'd expect them to work well together.)

Okay then...

...fixed the original post.

Is it okay now ?

Depends, if he lives in Europe: nearly every single last one of them, specially the asian no-name brands.

The practice of Microsoft regarding PlaysForSure in the US is an entirely different matter.

The bullying was done as part of the PlaysForSure program.

That was microsoft's attempt to counter music stores like iTunes and co. They had a platform for selling DRM-ed music in WMA format. OEMs had to undergo a certification to be able to advertise "Microsoft PlaysForSure". That mandated certain formats (support for DRM, support for WMA). It was worded in such a way that it basically forbid manufacturer to put any other codec on the device (see the "Criticisms" section. According to MS that was due to a junior employee who wrote it. Yeah. Sure.). It think the controversy was talked about back then here on /.

My opinion is that this probably started as an attempt to initially close loop-hole to avoid consumer playing non DRM-ed / unlicensed music (i.e.: pirated), but at the hand of MS executive quickly evolved as a way to attempt crushing competition.

That severly limited the spreading of non-WMA formats (free like Vorbis or FLAC. Or alternative licenses like Sony's ATRAC, etc.) because OEMs probably feared that including extra formats would exclude them from WMA certification and they would lose market share to manufacturer who didn't.
(Specially since back then, Vorbis didn't have any markets, it was mostly used for higher quality home rips. Whereas WMA had Microsoft's store and OEMs were hoping to have something against the iTunes behemoth).

Or mostly so in the US.

The rest of the world didn't give a damn fuck about microsoft's market (was is even available outside US ?) nor play for sure. People wanted mainly MP3 because that was the most widespread format, and adding extra formats was a way for OEM to put more tick box on their feature list. As such adding Vorbis was a win-win: it doesn't cost anything (and even had a BSD licensed integer implementation for embed available for free) and was one extra feature that they'll advertise to gain attraction. Every single asian no-name manufacturer did add it.

In Europe nearly every player I've seen in store did have Vorbis support.

That explains the dual ROM:
- one ROM to placate microsoft to get access to PlaysForSure in the US market.
- one ROM with as many features as possible cramed in to gain visibility everywhere else.

More than one way to do thing with compression.

Yup, your hand is tied behind your back, but just as you try to work anyway, standing in another corner there's this other guy with an hindu name asking you if you need a hand. or six.

It might not work as efficiently if you try to achieve the exact same thing but are restricted in the methods you use*. But you can obtain very efficient result if you try something completely different. Then the patents won't even matter.

The realm of DCT it a patent mine field? Try something else.

Dirac/Schroedinger by BBC has show that you can use wavelets instead.

Daala by Xiph is on the way of showing that lapped transforms + perceptual vectors + range coding work too.

----
*:And even then in that situation, there might be efficient way to do the same thing while doing it differently enough to not be patented.
On2/Google/Xiph have repeatedly shown that with the various VPn codecs being close to the MPEG/H26x, with the patended bit swapped out.

Total number of lawsuits lost by Xiph for Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, Tarkin, Theora, etc.: 0

Yes, lawyer won't stop simply because it's different. They would dream to lawsuit Xiph into the ground. But so far they haven't found anything on any of the other technologies developed or taken over by Xiph.

The people at Xiph know their shit and if they say that a codec is using a non patented alternative technique, it is non patented.