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1. Mr. Strat

   Junior Member

   Joined: Jan 2002

   -10
   01/25, 11:58pm | report spam | (2 replies) close | reply

   STOP SPENDING!!

   Is that all the Narcissistic Community Organizer can do is spend money that the country doesn't have? Next thing He'll tell us is that the Internet is a right.

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1. bmmp

   Forum Regular

   Joined: Aug 2003

   -5
   01/26, 12:13am | report spam | (2 replies) close | reply

   Hmmm

   Yeah, I guess I sort of agree.
   I mean out of all the problems the President could be addressing, broadband shouldn't be one of them. If we want broadband we'll pay for it ourselves.
   
   

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1. Fast iBook

   Fresh-Faced Recruit

   Joined: Mar 2003

   +17
   01/26, 12:20am | report spam | (1 reply) close | reply

   Mr. Strat.

   I hope you're joking.
   
   You cannot make money without spending money. You cannot make money as a government initially without taxes.
   
   I really don't understand why people cannot equate taxes with civil order and having bridges and roads and stuff that works, including the national electrical grid, and telecommunications.
   
   The problem here is people want to pay no taxes, and have this idea that freedom means they can do whatever they feel like doing and not have to pay for it. Freedom means taking responsibility for your actions, limiting some things so that you can have others.
   
   What do you drive? How would you feel if gas was 10 dollars a gallon tomorrow? You want to stop spending, then let's start with the billions wasted on widening roads. You wanna ride on your road, then you pay for your road directly via gas tax.
   
   - A

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1. candez

   Fresh-Faced Recruit

   Joined: Jul 2008

   +10
   01/26, 01:29am | report spam | (1 reply) close | reply

   @bmmp - Yes and No

   One of the things that governments do pretty well is create infrastructure, which in turn facilitates trade. 100 years ago, infrastructure meant roads, rail and telegraph; 30 years ago it meant roads, rail, airports and telephone; now it means roads, rail, airports, telephone and broadband. These are things that are necessary for commerce and can be difficult to coordinate on a large (interstate) scale without government involvement.
   
   Like with telephone service (and electricity as well), private companies can easily build the infrastructure for broadband in highly populated areas, but the rural areas are left out because in areas with low population density your cost per hookup is much, much higher. Private companies won't spend $100,000 to string the phone lines (or electric lines or fiber-optic cable...) to serve one or two households that will bring in $50/month. Their shareholders would string them up.
   
   So either someone (nearly always the taxpayers) subsidizes the cost of extending that infrastructure to rural areas or the rural areas never get that particular service. (Oh, and before someone comes back with the "they chose to live in a rural area..." argument, you're right. But I can't grow your food very well in the middle of the city. Some businesses have to be located in BFE.)
   
   Of course, once the infrastructure is built, the rural folk pay the full rate for the service like everyone else.
   
   All in all, I have mixed feelings about this plan. Like you, I think there are a lot of other things our government could be focusing on. But on the other hand, I do feel that basic infrastructure to facilitate commerce is one of those classic jobs that really is best done by the government, and I think that broadband has become basic infrastructure needed for facilitating commerce.

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1. samirsshah

   Fresh-Faced Recruit

   Joined: Oct 2010

   +2
   01/26, 02:13am | report spam | close reply

   I wish my government was

   this proactive (India) at the highest level with our Prime Minister taking active interest in National Broadband Plan like what your president is doing, Yes, in some cases Indian government is being proactive. But what US and Indian government share is delays and delays. In India, 3G could have come a year earlier, Mobile Number Portability also could have come a year earlier.
   
   At least there is no question in my mind about my government spending on MOBILE INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE (I think the back-haul, National Broadband Plan). It is one of the best things that happens to India.
   
   

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1. chefpastry

   Mac Enthusiast

   Joined: Nov 2005

   +5
   01/26, 02:55am | report spam | (1 reply) close | reply

   Additions

   1. May as well make everything fiber.
   2. Stop ISPs from moving to consumption based pricing.
   3. Stop ISPs from throttling.
   4. End the "zoning" for cable companies and truly open up all markets to all ISPs. Competition will drive costs down.
   5. PLEASE DON'T MAKE ME PAY FOR IT. It might be cheaper to move people who don't have internet access to a location that does. If they add a "wiring entire US" tax, it will be something that will never be removed. Even after every square foot of the US is wired and the amount will increase every year. If the people who don't have internet don't want to move to a location that does, they don't want internet that bad anyway.
   6. If this doesn't pan out, try buying everyone an iPhone.

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1. AllanCook

   Fresh-Faced Recruit

   Joined: Jun 2006

   +1
   01/26, 08:33am | report spam | close reply

   Free Wi-Fi

   Nationwide for everyone!

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1. tfmeehan

   Fresh-Faced Recruit

   Joined: Mar 2009

   -3
   01/26, 09:56am | report spam | close reply

   RE: Hmmmm

   "I mean out of all the problems the President could be addressing, broadband shouldn't be one of them. If we want broadband we'll pay for it ourselves."
   
   I'm sorry, I must have missed the part in this article that stated that this was the only thing the President is working on.
   
   And as to paying for it ourselves, that's a blindly arrogant and elitist attitude that actually leads to increased costs for everyone...inadequate or nonexistent healthcare for the poor, substandard education, deteriorating low income housing, increasingly marginalizing a growing lower class (yes, this includes availability of things like broadband access). These things will cost us way more later than if they are addressed now.
   
   As a society, our bottom line is not profit margin, but a standard of living for ALL members.

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1. Nate83

   Fresh-Faced Recruit

   Joined: Jan 2010

   +5
   01/26, 10:41am | report spam | (1 reply) close | reply

   comment title

   "As a society, our bottom line is not profit margin, but a standard of living for ALL members. "
   
   So someone that chooses to live off welfare and food stamps should have a similar standard of living to someone that works 40+ hours a week and actually pays taxes?

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1. testudo

   Forum Regular

   Joined: Aug 2001

   +1
   01/26, 12:45pm | report spam | close reply

   and....

   I want Apple to make a low-priced mini-tower. Just because someone, even the president, says they 'want' it, doesn't mean it will happen.

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1. tfmeehan

   Fresh-Faced Recruit

   Joined: Mar 2009

   -1
   01/26, 05:35pm | report spam | close reply

   @Nate83...

   The simplemindedness of your reply is typical knuckledragger fare. Unfortunately it displays the ignorance that informs too many of the electorate.

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1. facebook_Satish

   Via Facebook

   Joined: Jan 2011

   -1
   01/26, 08:23pm | report spam | close reply

   Sputnik Moment

   Obama referred to a "Sputnik moment" for America due an educational challenge from China and India. But hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Indians make a beeline to American universities every year for higher education and India's education minister has been trying hard to bring American universities to India and was stopped only by me. India may produce more than half a million engineering graduates a year versus seventy thousand for the United States but four hundred thousand of these Indian engineering graduates will be hired just this year to work as software coolies for the United States. This is the problem with having a person of color as president; white Americans know Indians and Chinese are their slaves but not this president; a person of color cannot be the Americans' legitimate president.
   The Indian government has sought "diplomatic immunity" from the United States for minister Kamal Nath from court summons in a case filed in the United States for his participation in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in India. This means the Indian government is conceding that other Indians who do not have diplomatic immunity can be summoned by United States courts for alleged crimes committed by them in India and thus is giving the United States imperial authority over India and surrendering India's sovereignty to the United States. Indian government officials take an oath to uphold India's sovereignty and, by thus surrendering India's sovereignty to the United States, are guilty of treason and must be dismissed from office and prosecuted for treason. The Indian officials guilty of this treason include Manmohan Singh.
   I am India's expert in strategic defence and the father of India's strategic program including the Integrated Guided Missile Development Program and in my blog titled 'Nuclear Supremacy for India Over U.S.', which can be found by a Yahoo search with the title, I have said force is the foundation of sovereignty and justice. Around 1989, when the United States invaded Panama and brought its head of state Manuel Noriega in chains to the United States for alleged drug crimes committed by him in Panama, I recounted in a letter which appeared in News India, New York saying in a telephone conversation with Mrs. Imelda Marcos of the Philippines when she and her husband, the president, were being prosecuted in a U.S. district court in New York for alleged corruption in the Philippines that 'These are Europeans who have usurped the land of other people and committed genocide on them. ... Each time we buy anything from the United States, we pay taxes that are being used to commit crimes all over the world by the C.I.A.; we have the right to arrest president Bush and the entire American government and try them under Indian law' and said ' It is not the law, the problem is enforcement -- who has got the guns. There is an American saying that 'If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns'; these (the Americans) are the biggest outlaws in the world and they've got the guns -- nuclear weapons -- and they would like to keep it that way'. Recently there was much to do about the Indian ambassador to the U.S. having been searched at a U.S. airport but, as I have described in my blog, when George W. Bush came to India as president, U.S. security men searched Manmohan Singh who was waiting to receive him at the New Delhi airport, as an Indian TV channel reported and Vajpayee tried to excuse that by saying 'Atithi Devo Bhav' (a guest is God); this invader of Afghanistan, that is Indian subcontinent -- that is India -- is God to India's traitor prime ministers and Manmohan Singh told him Indians "deeply love" him; see my blog for "Source of Manmohan Singh's 'deep love' for Bush" in the genocide the British committed on Indians, killing over ten million in the ten years after 1857.
   I said in my Press Release dated August 14, 2008, included in my blog, that "The criminals of the Supreme Court, loyal as they are to the firangis (above), could not give a hoot for India’s sovereignty and they show it in their behaviour. India’s Parliament, from the Speaker to individual MPs, has also shown its indifference to India’s sovereignty. The surrender of India’s sovereignty by the Executive is known to everyone. India’s sovereignty rests only in me. I am India’s sovereign." India's sovereign lives in poverty in the United States and treated as a slave by Americans (while the Indians, including Indian courts, treat a white woman as their empress who lives and travels in royal splendor at public expense and is above the law, as I showed in a press release dated January 9, 2011 and cannot even be probed for her role in a crime unless she invites a probe): "In my blog titled 'Nuclear Supremacy For India Over U.S.', which can be found by a Yahoo search with the title, I have described how the C.I.A. keeps India poor, weak and enslaved. "India's greatest scientist and greatest living Indian publicly tortured in Harvard seminar, systematically and totally starved for up to 3 weeks at a time, made semi-starved and homeless and even blind for years, kept under 24-hour audio and video surveillance as well as surveillance of communications and electrical typewriter and computer use, document creation and photocopying, etc., by satellite for more than past 3 decades, systematically harassed and in poverty and neutralised and robbed of his work at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per year, robbed of crores in his money and property in India by C.I.A.-RAW, forced back into exile in the U.S., all with full cooperation and participation of India's RAW and India's C.I.A.-RAW-controlled prime ministers, politicians and media -- to keep India poor, weak and enslaved" and how this means the nuclear destruction of New Delhi and then the coast-to-coast destruction of the United States."
   After I wrote above that "I am India's sovereign", the above white woman gave "Republic Day celebrations a miss" on the pretext that she is "running a fever since Tuesday" because of fear that, like the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, she might be killed by the soldiers taking part in the parade; a request that the soldiers in the parade march with the firing pins removed from their firearms was rejected by the armed forces.
   
   Satish Chandra
   

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1. Nate83

   Fresh-Faced Recruit

   Joined: Jan 2010

   0
   01/27, 11:32am | report spam | close reply

   @tfmeehan

   Please, enlighten me with your superior intellect rather than resort to personal attacks.

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1. techweenie1

   Dedicated MacNNer

   Joined: May 2001

   0
   02/01, 01:48pm | report spam | close reply

   but...

   he only wants 50% of us to pay for it..