I prefer one of my old professor's re-wording: "All models are wrong. Some are useful."

I agree, it sounds like an intractable problem to me. But Apple and a few other on-line retailers manage to do it. So it is possible. I wonder how complicated and expensive Apple's tax service is.

Not all of us. IMHO, native code in the browser is still a bad idea and an unnecessary one at that, regardless of who is doing it, Microsoft or Google. The state of the web is progressing very nicely without introducing potential security problems and platform dependencies. And yes, Google Native Client is platform specific to both hardware and OS. There are a few potential hiccups looming with (the language formerly known as) HTML5 and standard technologies like video codecs. But I'd still rather go that route than just go native.

I am a Mac-head and even I agree that the Macbook Pro is too pricey. But...

$399 laptops are pieces of crap. There, I said it. The material costs alone preclude building anything of quality at that price point. Why do people always bring up the absolute lowest possible price products when comparing to Apple? You could make the same point much better by comparing them to decent, average price laptops and still have a valid argument that the Macbook Pro is too expensive. I grit my teeth every time the topic of Apple laptops is brought up and someone makes the inevitable comparison to something that can barely play a Youtube video.

USB was an obscure curiosity when Apple aggressively adopted it in the original Bondi blue iMac. I clearly remember watching the market for USB peripherals be completely driven by demand from iMac (and then other Apple model) owners at a time when PC users stayed away from the technology because it was incompatible with all their PS2, serial and parallel port peripherals. Often the place to find USB equipment was in the Apple section in stores.

This one I remember very well. Apple spearheaded the consumer wireless market with the introduction of the $299 Airport "UFO" wireless hub. I had wanted wireless for a while but couldn't afford it. The only other options were all so far above that first Airport price point that it was a shock to the market. The other thing Apple did to lead in consumer wireless was to make it an option in all their computers, especially in laptops, and then a standard option that you had to de-select and finally as an unremovable feature.

Maybe so, but no sane PC user did back in those days. The floppy ruled the PC data storage and transfer world well past the point when Apple users had moved on to other technologies. It took forever for PC USB boot support to be common enough to supplant the ubiquitous PC admin's emergency boot floppy.

Everything you have said is technically true but misses the whole story. Sure, Apple didn't invent the technologies you mention but Apple's influence was instrumental in getting early adoption going and building markets for them.

It took me a lot of thinking to come around to the idea of a prebate being a good idea. As a check from the government, it echoed in my mind with the concept of "welfare check" with all its attendant welfare state issues. I had to work through the process of realizing that a prebate, like an income tax refund, is just giving people back their own money that was taken in the form of a tax, rather than giving them someone else's money that was redistributed through taxation. All you're doing with the prebate is acknowledging that there is a minimum level of living below which it is just plain immoral to tax. And since everyone gets the prebate, it is agnostic to income level in that everybody, whether wealthy or poor, gets a pass from taxation on basic necessities. I really like the fairtax.org idea but I doubt it will ever get passed in the US. Far too many monied and powerful interests like the current broken system for the ways in which it can be manipulated.

The fundamental definition of "poor" is that most of their spending is non-discretionary: food, clothing, shelter, medical care, etc. The defining aspect of "not poor" is having money left over after the necessities are covered, discretionary money that can be invested for the future. Basically, your argument here is that the poor should stop being so poor.

I agree, individuals who "waste" such opportunities rather than investing bear the responsibility for poor choices. I can only say that it can be hard to fight the natural tendency to want to enjoy temporary unexpected gain while it is there.

All it takes is one catastrophic medical problem to put you right back down there, irretrievably. Yes, lower economic status people can tend to make poor economic decisions. But the number 1 primary cause for individual bankruptcy in the US for a number of years has been catastrophic medical bills. Maybe instead of sneering at all those lazy and stupid poor people, you should be a little more thankful that your health and native abilities gave you the necessary tools to allow your hard work to pay off. It is good that you were able to better yourself but your attitude could stand for some considerable improvement.

A policy has to be auditable for it to be valid and PCI compliant. A PCI audit will be considerably more involved than just browsing through your gmail inbox. The audit will cover network communications, hardware, software, change processes and accountability and access controls. Anybody in human resources, finance or accounting who doesn't already know this needs to be fired.

And don't forget HIPPA, SOX and a host of other rules and regulations involving the handling different data that can so easily slip into email. Add in legal liability from privacy breaches and a whole lot of other concerns which make some kinds of data processing and storage outsourcing difficult there days.

Cellular networks do not share the same frequency limitations as radio. In radio, a single frequency will be used to cover a range of 100 miles or so. This is a natural range, so that you can cross a city and continue to listen to the same station. However, you will eventually lose the station. Cellular networks are fundamentally different, in that you can regularly jump between towers (changing frequencies, as it happens) and still maintain the phone call. It's possible to drive vast distances and maintain a single phone call, while using many, many towers in the process.

The whole reason it's called a "cellular" network is because they are "cells" - one for each tower (give or take multiple carriers sharing a tower). These cells overlap, and operate in different parts of the frequency spectrum. The important point about understanding this "cell" nature is that there is no reason a cell in rural Kansas has to be the same size as a cell in downtown NYC. In fact, they generally aren't the same. That's related to why they previously prohibited (and how they now can technologically allow) cell phones on planes - there is a "femtocell" placed on the plane so that cell phones use their minimum power. The use of higher power levels can cause an overlap of a flying cell phone with multiple distant cells (using the same frequency) on the ground... and cause a whole chain of confusion (for a system effectively designed to be 2-dimensional).

You make it out like additional bandwidth (in the form of more parallel downloads) is not an economic problem. Additional bandwidth has a cost: More tower density (or at least more radio antenna if you can mount on existing buildings) using smaller cells, and that's absolutely an economic problem. (It's also a permitting problem, and in suburban areas likely a ditch-digging problem, both of which are likely worse than buying the equipment)

A few other notes:

You need to calculate 3X/Y, not X/Y, as 4G Cell towers will likely use Tri-sectored directional antenna. It's widely deployed in 3G environments, and is basically a requirement in any dense area (and also facilitates cellular 911 location when more accurate location isn't available)

There are also additional technologies that could be deployed that change the rules of spectrum usage. MIMO comes to mind. (The major problem of MIMO is much like other things in the cellular world, in that signal reflections (and interference in general) are somewhat of a royal pain and the resulting demand of processing power makes the basestations and phones infeasible to deploy at this time.)

Net is that smaller cell sizes and using additional technologies could absolutely reduce congestion, but the expense in doing so is enormous. It doesn't really change why the cap needs to exist at some level (they are up against wall, even if a financial loss wall rather than a physics wall), but we're nowhere near the fundamental laws of physics.

Have you ever tried to generate the view of what a proposed communications tower would look from your back yard? I have. While Google Earth was useful, It took me a lot of time modeling tree heights from pictures, GPS coordinates (of photo locations) and pacing.

I don't know if their algorithm/data takes in account height, but if it does, or if they add it (and it wouldn't be hard at this point), it would be ENORMOUSLY useful in my opinion. It gives resources to the population to get an accurate rendition that isn't limited to the two or three (very carefully chosen) views that have to be provided by the owning company in the permitting process.

Articles VI and VII of The Treaty disagree.

Which - for reference - is different from the law of the sea.

I agree with you there, but...

As maiden_taiwan so eloquently replies, that's a fine opinion, but the data don't agree with you.

Besides the research results, there are the sheer numbers. I can't remember the last time I saw someone eating or applying makeup while driving, but I swear every third bonehead in an SUV has a phone surgically implanted to the side of their head. When the car in front of me slows down to 10 MPH below the the speed limit, I can guarantee that he is dialing his phone rather than reaching for a Big Mac and heaven help anything in front of him while he's at it.

The students agreed to a certain limits when they enrolled in the school, and committed that they would NOT cheat. That should be sufficient to impose punishment if those limits are unreasonably breached.

The behavior that is being discouraged is not sharing work. The behavior that is being punished is unreasonably breaching an agreement. The real world also has that type of limit. Most companies have some form of code of conduct. Part of that is likely to avoid breaking laws.

As a specific example from the 'real world', look at what SAP did with Oracle's code. It would be a breach of section 1 of SAP's Employee Code of Conduct. Seems that creativity will result in something between $40 million and $1.6 billion in punishment. That's not creativity, it's illegal.

The fact that the limits may be at different points (one set by a student's contract with the school, the other set by law) doesn't mean they shouldn't be enforced as written.

Repeat after me: an alcoholic is not someone who drinks a lot of alcohol, an alcoholic is someone who can't control their behavior when they do drink. That's why there is no "safe" level of consumption for an alcoholic. And the general population of alcoholics is so diverse it is difficult to make sweeping general statements like "Most alcoholics tend to be thin". The truth is that alcoholics vary about as much as the general population in most factors with the exception of their inability to control their behavior with regard to alcohol consumption.