Actually the US government spent quite a lot on the infrastructure. Around '97, I moved from Sweden to the US, after running an ISP there since '93. Since it was an obvious concern I checked and the US was pumping in slightly more per capita, while being ~40% more population dense. So no problem (I thought) - if anything speed and availability will rocket up faster here. However, back there the government kept control of the lines (not entirely unlike US telecom). Net neutrality was kind of a given - obviously the government can't (at least without massive legal changes) give preferential speed to some peoples information directly (i.e. blatant censorship - if you're a private enterprise you can limit stuff like that, not so much if you're the govt). Back home things rolled along swimmingly, the same crew I ran with back then are still online, some of them whining that they haven't pulled gigabit fiber into their areas and have to settle for 100 megabit symmetric. Even before the millennium 10 Mbit symmetric fiber was becoming pretty normal all the way into residences. No one really pulled copper wire for comm anymore really, if a new line went in, fiber. Need to redraw power lines? Throw in fiber. Water? Fiber. Just dug up a sewer line? Throw down some fiber, you never know..
Here? I can get 20 Mbit (5 down) in a fairly large town. Some cities have more, but I've seen none where 50 or 100 Mbit symmetric is considered the sort of "lowest tier" broadband (kind of like "at least it's not dialup"). For only 2-3x the price. Why? Because no one with the peoples actual interest kept the reins, they just handed shit over to the six majors and told them to get building. Why would they, when they're already competing against no one but themselves? Cuts into profit, stuff like that.. So you get to pay more in tax dollars for it, more for the service itself and it's way slower. The same seems to be true for korea (et al, the other fast nations), they're not spending more, they're just negotiating harder with those contracted to build it. Now, Sweden is talking about selling it off (since the whole place is shifting right). Predictably, prices are going up and speed increase is stagnating. Idiots, all of them. The free market rocks for optimizing low entry threshold fields and optimizing already existing solutions. It's horrible at things that are mostly infrastructure based, with high cost of entry and nearly all costs being in fixed infrastructure improvement chunks. Highways, telecom, power, water, etc all work the same - if you want to run them free market style, prepare to suffer until you decide to simply join forces and run it jointly without a profit goal bidding it out in small enough chunks to make actual competition possible.
If the user kept the secret key, that's not much of an online wallet - you might as well just use your secret key at home and send it directly yourself. They could encrypt it with a password or a pin that isn't saved on their site so that you would have to enter it to decrypt the secret key. That still counts on the site not just lying and keeping it or you getting it keylogged or otherwise compromised on your side. Many online wallets do nothing of the kind, they simply have the secret key and use it to send. Someone with your password or access to the site could do the same. It's the same as a normal bank really, you have no physical/technical control over what they or someone who snuck into the bank does. You can control your access credentials (passwords, cards, account numbers, ID info, etc) and that's good and well, but there's nothing preventing it from disappearing on their side besides what they (not you) do for security.
You'd imagine so. It wouldn't be legal though since modern.ie is for testing purposes only. Though I highly doubt anyone much would care if someone ran vitualbox and a copy of XP/Vista or something.
I suppose in a sense it becomes a bit of a worry if you run too lightweight on the VM which after all will have to contain your banking credentials (sort of the opposite of firing up a VM when you're doing something that feels too sketchy to run on the main system).
It would be useful in part because another surgeon can assess how well he is doing before actually stacking up enough bad/good statistics to notice. It's also useful for training, just like watching yourself swing a golf club or a baseball bat or rereading your old code can help you, with the aid of others, see what you could improve on. Doing the wrong thing over and over in a vacuum doesn't make for much learning..
Well, there's no particular reason that part couldn't be swapped too, sort of like swapping the motherboard in a PC and then connecting everything else you already had. Yes, that would be essentially upgrading to a "new" phone but if the standard held you could still use the screen, camera, memory and so forth which isn't possible now (potentially later upgrading those bit by bit as need be).
This is really the major issue. "Growth" in the sense of "increase in actual production" is going terrific (granted, mostly by virtue of "Copper is practically the new oil - reserves, especially easy to access them" matters). What isn't going so great is the second part of "We should be careful with that and funnel it back into the national economy. Pay to play - the copper and other metals are only there once and we know what they are worth".
You can't really grow forever, but you can still grow and they do. But this is sort of like the early oil rush in the midwest. Oh wow, holy crap, people will give us 25 cents a barrel for crude! And we don't even have to dig it up, they'll even come over and do it! How cool is that?!? Uhh, not that cool when you were sitting on top of oil reserves the size of saudi arabia that are now all but bone dry with some entrepreneurial farmers pumping up a few barrels for a slight short term profit.
The main law that seems to be missing everywhere is "X amount stays here. No really. Invest whatever you want, but a certain part of the gained value is stuck in the local economy and another chunk is paid to locals because OUR HOUSE".
This was an actual challenge at a hack-a-thon I was at way way back (I'm guessing around '92). The total instructions were pretty much "(best game category) build a pac man variant", the restriction to pac man only mostly there to render quite a bit of the prior-to-the-event design less useful when it was announced. It was over 48h though. There were some pretty creative entries. I built one with more ghosts (increasing per level) with generated mazes, but from a predetermined per-level seed so that level 1 was always level 1, but there were still infinite(ish) levels (I was in a kind of Elite phase again after Elite II). Didn't even end up entering, I'd had a HD crash a few days before so I didn't even have my normal go-to bag-o-tricks in terms of stuff to render, time, do controls, etc and did it from scratch. By deadline it worked "almost some" but not enough to really be playable.
That's the "use it to buy things" which isn't utility. The laptop I'm typing on will not be worth more later. Ever. This very second is as much as it'll be worth, which is perhaps half of what I bought it for a year and a half ago. But I bought it, because I need a laptop. I fully expect it to be continually worth less, just like the couch I'm sitting on, the watch I'm wearing, the table I keep the laptop on, etc. But I put up with that because I'm using them. Bitcoins are useful for these things, but that's not utility - you don't buy a bitcoin and (supposing they dropped heavily in value year after year) shrugged and said "Oh well, I need this bitcoin for this so I'm keeping it even if I get very little in return for it in five years when I craigslist it as '1 used bitcoin, still in pretty good shape'".
Yahoo has been in it's death throes for quite a while. I'm sure they'll survive in a sort of AOL sense, but they are quite desperate to stay relevant. News is likely their last outpost and even that is starting to slip very fast.
It's sad to see, what used to be a crack directory, social hub (besides AOL one of the first true social networks), email, map and IM providers is now barely an afterthought and throwing the next cool "stand back I got this" manager to the wolves. But I can understand the frustration. Google and Apple both would have been happy to snap it up at one point, but it's too late and there is zero value left in the company besides the really nice Yahoo! name, and there's no big name to sell it to beyond perhaps AT&T or someone else that may want the infrastructure for something.
Here? I can get 20 Mbit (5 down) in a fairly large town. Some cities have more, but I've seen none where 50 or 100 Mbit symmetric is considered the sort of "lowest tier" broadband (kind of like "at least it's not dialup"). For only 2-3x the price. Why? Because no one with the peoples actual interest kept the reins, they just handed shit over to the six majors and told them to get building. Why would they, when they're already competing against no one but themselves? Cuts into profit, stuff like that.. So you get to pay more in tax dollars for it, more for the service itself and it's way slower. The same seems to be true for korea (et al, the other fast nations), they're not spending more, they're just negotiating harder with those contracted to build it. Now, Sweden is talking about selling it off (since the whole place is shifting right). Predictably, prices are going up and speed increase is stagnating. Idiots, all of them. The free market rocks for optimizing low entry threshold fields and optimizing already existing solutions. It's horrible at things that are mostly infrastructure based, with high cost of entry and nearly all costs being in fixed infrastructure improvement chunks. Highways, telecom, power, water, etc all work the same - if you want to run them free market style, prepare to suffer until you decide to simply join forces and run it jointly without a profit goal bidding it out in small enough chunks to make actual competition possible.