I was quoting the facts stated in the Youtube video (the TV series is called QI (Quite Interesting) which is broadcast in the UK on BBC and hosted by Stephen Fry)
A quick Google found me the webpage that was probably used to generate the statistics:
As per QI:
"1% of American adults are in prison (2.3m people)
No society in history has imprisoned more of it's citizens than the United States of America
1 in 30 men aged 20-34 are in prison
1 in 9 black males are in prison
There are more 17 year old black people in prison than in college.
Prison labour produces 100% all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet proof vests, id tags, and other items of uniform
93% of domestic produced paints, 36% of home appliances and 21% of office furniture. This allows the US to compete with Mexican labour - because the workers cannot refuse to work for 25 cents per hour. "
I wonder how much money a single inmate could earn to offset their $453,00 "rehabilitation" bill. It's no wonder the sentances are so harsh.
YouTube clip of QI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E7wgFcCefE
My full time job is working for a small hotel group (5 hotels) and I run their IT, and I was going to reply with the exact same argument as you - why not also charge for the utility services such as electricity, water and heating if you're going to charge for WiFi.
Our WiFi is free to use, with no encryption or password protection. What we are thinking of doing is implementing some sort of version of Chillispot which will ask the guest if they mind submitting their email address for our marketing purposes, with incentives such as winning a free or meal during their stay. Or they can choose to skip the submittion form, either way they will be authenticated after hitting our splash page first.
In my experience people don't mind getting "spam" from us if they willingly opt in and are getting something for it.
Yeah I went to look around at what Bing offered and I tried the Bing Visual Search.. and it prompted me to download the Silver Light installer. My insta-knee-jerk reaction was to click cancel since I didn't specifically ask to download something. I'd like to think more and more casual users are getting better at not installing random crap from websites now that they've spent the past few years having their computers infected and it costing them real money and time to have it fixed.
If I was looking for something, and the idea of a Visual Search seemed like a good idea - I wouldn't want to then start installing additional software. I want my results! I've obviously got a goal which is to find information, not to spend time installing stuff. I'm likely to go elsewhere.
From a "I'd like to know what Microsoft are up to here!" angle, the Visual Search seems like a 2 pronged attack - 1) Google by offering a different search product and 2) to increase it's market share against Adobe Flash player.
A couple of my friends work in school IT departments, and I've always argued with them the pointlessness of trying to filter the internet usage in schools.
- It doesn't prevent the dangerous stuff like kids being groomed by weirdos on the internet
- It's not perfect in terms of banned websites or URLs. False positives occur and how are you supposed to deal with kids aged from 11 through to 18 and all of their learning requirements/subjects, including biology?
- Kids run or install proxies which route through the filtering proxies and they get on MSN and other sites they want to get to anyway. Only the "good guys" lose out
- When they get home they can do whatever the hell they want anyway. If you've been on the internet, you cannot unsee some websites and images!
All it does is give the teachers and parents (who don't know any better) a false sense of security. They get to accuse the kid of hacking or breaching yet more rules and regulations by viewing "banned" websites. The school teachers are absolved from any responsibility and can show that they at least made an effort to stop little Jonny from browing sites he shouldn't.
The only possible solution for kids to be allowed on the internet, is for them to have 100% supervision. Their parents should keep an eye on them and educate them on why supervision is required. The teachers should educate them on the dangers. A portion of their curriculum each year should be whats going on on-line and why they should pay attention.
Then when they are old enough or responsible enough - the kids should be told by their parents that they've reached a responsible age, and now it's up to them to look after themselves and not be manipulated, conned or ripped off. Coming of age and maturity.
There is no other alternative. Letting youths onto the 'net I can only compare to letting them out into cities at night unsupervised. They are exposed to danger which could ultimately become a physical threat to them.
So are seedboxes going to cause entire data centers or hosting providers to be disconnected? Users in the closed tracker communities pay for seedboxes at remote hosting facilities to help boost speeds and their ratio and they could single handily cause down time or disruption to 1000s of users if this laws consequences was applied to them.
My guess is that if this law goes through then seedboxes would become even more popular. Seed from the remote box, and VPN between the box and the home user. It has to be a much safer option already... bandwidth is cheap and disk space is always getting cheaper.
What about public WiFi projects and airports, hotels etc? As usual there are some fringe cases where this law just doesn't work.
I can completely agree about both the N95 and the N97.
For me the N95 broke new ground and really was an impressive device when it was released. The fixes did a lot to help usability and stability.
The N97 is the Nokia device which has pissed me off so much - that I've become stuborn and vowed to never, ever again own another Nokia Symbian device. It's a complete disaster, even with the much anticipated v20 firmware.
I get a free company phone of my choosing, and I could've taken the iPhone at various times but I stood my ground on the principle of it being a "more free" device in terms of application choice. Now I'd be happy to give all of that up just to have a device which has a slick UI, does the basic functions perfectly and isn't so frustrating that I want to smash the device into the floor or throw it out of the car window.
Nokia really have to improve - they have no other choice - otherwise I believe they will lose the smartphone market.
As good as the N900 is or promises to be - I refuse to believe the hype or to be an early adopter. I'd have to see the phone in action in Real Life first before even considering another Nokia product.
The N97 is the single worst mobile phone I have ever owned.
I made a devastating mistake choosing to get one through my work contract over an iPhone and I so wish I hadn't done so. The latest v20 firmware promised to fix a lot of the problems.. which it addressed... but failed... and the N97 is still a million miles away from the competition such as the iPhone 3GS and HTC Hero in terms of interface usability and slickness.
Now Nokia are focused on the N900 and Maemo so they aren't going to be bothered trying to fix the Symbian OS, which I think is the route cause of all of the N97s problems.
I'll never own another Nokia again after this disaster
What if everyone uses Cloud hosting?
The Cloud works for some customers because they are depending on under-utilization of the available resources. If all the news agenices, Twitter and Facebook all used Amazon then perhaps it would create the same melt down.
iPhone owners will love Nokia N95 users then. I could set my phone as a WiFI access point and iPhone users could make Skype calls through my data plan.
So annoying to see technology come so far and then the next logical step be crippled.
Being sat on the tube/metro with my iPhone/N95 and wifi + bittorrent would enable huge amounts of data exchange while I'm commuting to work.
Music concerts and festivals could allow the audience to bluetooth or wifi their music to the DJ, allowing him to queue it up, vote on the next track, allowing him to mix it live. As people come and go, so does their music collection, tastes and interests.
Apparently that wouldn't be good for society though. It'd be better to lock everyone down and charge them like a wounded rhino.
Just give them your forwarding address:
John Doe #93254
Bunk 3
Cell 4562
Guantanamo Bay
Cuba
According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless.
