I won't be surprised if they are just fishing for "green" subsidies to pay for the new infrastructure they're going to build anyway. Why pay for it if you can trick the government to giving you other people's money to do it?

This must be the reason that why FoxConn has a gross margin of 2.8% (previously 6.6% before the suicide workers scandal) http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-08-31/hon-hai-foxconn-international-tumble-after-earnings.html, while Apple has a margin of 41% http://finapps.forbes.com/finapps/jsp/finance/compinfo/Ratios.jsp?tkr=AAPL, because Foxconn has control of manufacturing and therefore has all the power.

Having this power, FoxConn can "lock" Apple out of its factories and Apple will do absolutely nothing instead of shifting production to any number of interchangable factories not just in China but anywhere in the world. And of course, since FoxConn has all the power, if they end their partnership with Apple they will be able to sell fake Apple products because they will magically have the Apple brand and distribution channels in the West (which is still where a great deal of the money is). And using their enormous leverage of selling products at a 2% margin FoxConn will be able to attract the engineering and design talent that will come up with the next product that will render current Apple products completely obsolete.

Get over yourself. Manufacturers in China have no power unless they are actually able to sell their products for a reasonable profit, and they have even less power because they are competing in a commodity market where one manufacturer is no better than the other and only have direct access to the Chinese marketplace (which has nowhere near the amount of money as the West). Companies in the developed world, on the other hand, have direct access to rich consumers and can draw on talent not just from the advanced nations but anywhere in the world. And this will remain so, as long as the companies in the West stay ahead do not become complacent (like the American auto industry in the 80's). If the Chinese do catch up, then all the better, competition is always good. Witness how the rise of Japan, Taiwan and Korea has made electronics much, much better during the 80's and 90's.

On the other hand, a small Learjet that crashed in central Mexico City set a street on fire:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mexico_City_plane_crash

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pWTqZDYrvo

Granted, the chances of something like this happening is low, but the amount of damage and terror that happens when it does means that the possibility cannot be ignored.

Don't quite agree with this. If the terrorists were able to detonate a cellphone bomb while the airplane was on approach to an airport over a city, not only would it have caused the deaths of the people on the plane but also untold damage on the ground (zoning laws that prohibit dense development around airports would reduce casualties, but major airports are still close enough to major cities for the risk to be non-zero). And the terror value of a flaming airplane exploding in a huge fireball in a city would be much, much higher than even the Mumbai attacks, even if the death rate turns out to be lower.

The same reason why you get charged for manslaughter if you run over someone with a rented car: you were driving.

The problem with threatening people with death for their crimes is that they compensate by making sure that their crimes are big enough to warrant the risk of losing their life. Killing some executive does not kill the company and its drive for profit, and the one that replaces him will just commit a bigger crime that is worth the risk of being killed. And since corporations will always be driven by profit, the only real way to prevent such negligence from happening again is to make it such that such negligence that leads to damage to other people's livelihoods is _not_ profitable. Then it's in their interest not to screw up.

I don't even understand why this needs explanation. We all travel forward through time, and no-one needs an explanation of why we don't phase through the planet as time moves forward. Yet somehow traveling through time in a different direction (or at a different speed) will somehow cause you to end up in space. What needs asking is what does a time machine look like to the people in "normal" time when it is traveling backwards through time.

Or you shift your manufacturing base into making more complex products such as computerized machine tools, specialized electronics, aerospace and defense products, which can only be designed and manufactured in a country with a sophisticated technology base, and then sell those (at a very high margin of course) to all the other countries that are producing high-volume, low margin products. Oh wait, that's right, you're already doing that. It is only if you want to continue making cheap, low-margin goods that you have to compete with all the other countries that do.

Unless of course the additional complexity causes everything to fail even with smaller data because you didn't have enough time or manpower to properly test it. Or that you spend so much time building the complicated system that your startup/project group runs out of money and folds/is disbanded. Starting small and engineering it so that it can be migrated easily to the next level works a lot better that designing a system for a worst case that may never come up in practice.

The main problem about advertising "truthful" data rates is that the internet is best-effort. It's impossible to guarantee any data rate on the internet when congestion is involved. Car analogy: it's like buying a Lamborghini because it can go up to 200mph, but then complaining that you can't go above 30 during rush hour traffic. When your ISP gives you a 10mbps router when you're paying for a 20mbps connection then you can complain. Otherwise, just deal with it, it's how the internet works. Or use DSL instead of cable, as many others here have mentioned.

Thank you for proving your point by using the command line. Since, you know, _everybody_ knows which one of the thousands of commands to use for an install.