If you look at the health insurance system that existed in the past this was not as big of a problem. Initially you had most health insurance being provided by mutuals where they did not have concepts like preexisting conditions. But what happened was these non-profits were soon getting dominated by for-profit health insurers. Not because these private insurers were more efficient, but rather because they invented concepts like preexisting conditions and did a lot to limit the pool of people they insured. This let them offer lower prices and seem like a better deal until you got sick and they upped your rates or got rid of you all together.

This got an order of magnitude worse as some of these private insurers became publicly traded companies. Not only did going public give them more capital to work with to further undercut competitors, but it also created a necessity of every increasing profits on a quarterly basis. That means they have to continually find ways to screw the insured.

So no, it wasn't always this way, but it definitely is now.

In places where photo enforcement is used, the laws are generally adjusted to implicate the person who registers the vehicle, and the license plate does tie directly to the vehicle registration. Your crime is not "running a red light", it is "allowing your vehicle to be used by some unknown person to run a red light". If your car was stolen, you can defend yourself using the police report to that effect. Otherwise you are SOL.

Does any of that amount to $700M?

No.

Trademark law forces trademark holders to litigate at the slightest hint of dilution. If they don't do it, then they won't have standing to file suit later when it's more serious. Don't blame Wikipedia, it's how the law is written.

This is why rail works in the DC/Baltimore/Philly/NYC/Boston corridor. Regional rail is perfectly reasonable. I don't expect to see NY to LA anytime soon.

Aside from regional intercity rail, however, there still exists the problem of what to do once one gets there. I live in metro-NYC and frequently work in metro-DC, but I drive. I can get to Penn Station in NY very easily, and then get to Union Station in DC, but I can't get from Union Station to Northern Virginia beyond the beltway easily at all. Rail doesn't help me until I can get from Union Station to Herndon or Reston efficiently. In all these areas that developed after 1950 or so, the business destinations were spread out on the periphery - probably to avoid the taxes of the cities. It is really difficult to serve an area like Houston with subways/buses/light rail.

You are correct to a point. The Windows OS family has had a lot of attack vectors that don't require user intervention - worms and such - as well as many many vulnerabilities in tools like the default browser and email client. Mac and Linux systems have had far fewer of these vulnerabilities. A reasonably hardened XP system with the firewall turned on, various services turned off, and using Mozilla products instead of IE and Outlook Express is reasonably secure.

Indeed, but ultimately it requires government to step in and take control. It's not government regulation that created the problem, it's the lack of it that created the problem.

The problem is that there's a natural monopoly because of the physical impediments to connecting a dwelling to the network. I have three wires coming into my home:

1) Power line
2) Cable line
3) Phone line

It would be prohibitively expensive to set up the infrastructure to connect me to yet another line and that's what would be necessary to have true competition.

To understand the problem, compare what we have in broadband service to the way that dial-up worked. In the dial-up market there were thousands of competitors because while local phone carriers provided the phone line, they had no control beyond the last mile. You could connect to compuserve, AOL, or hundreds of independent ISP's. The result was increasing speeds (within the physical limits of the phone wires) and declining prices.

With broadband, you have the cable companies who have monopoly control over their wires and you have the phone company that has an effective monopoly. Yeah, I can get DSL from other providers, but the phone company deliberately interferes with this and because of their control of the local pipes, can generally offer cheaper service. So while you have competition, in theory, between DSL and cable, as a practical matter it's nonexistent.

There's potential for competition from wireless and that's somewhere the government can do a lot to help. However, wireless will always be slower than a wired connection, and ultimately if I want wireless I'm looking at the same companies who currently provide DSL service (AT&T, Verizon, etc).

Hmmmm... Good point. I'll need to think about that a bit. I'm not sure how much of that would go on, but it's definitely a concern. Showing that their vote had been counted wouldn't be of that much value though.

Start with the iPhone/iPod Touch's design, and scale it up to about 10x7, the same size as a typical large format paperback like an O'Reilly book. Aside from built in WiFi and BlueTooth, he device includes an Express Card slot and several USB ports, so that it can accommodate the broadband network cards offered by both the HSDPA and EvDO providers. The underlying specs will be closer to a MacBook or MacBook Air.

In iTouch mode, it will be able to do all the things the iTouch does, as well as connect to the 3G cell phone networks with the appropriate adapter. Email, web browsing, etc. are all there. This mode will operate in a low power mode.

One of the "applications" available in the iTouch interface will be an option to boot a full os, which can be some combination of Mac OS X and Windows via bootcamp. Now it becomes a full laptop. A keyboard and mouse can be connected via USB or BlueTooth. An external monitor can be connected via a mini-DVI adapter.

In my view, this would work very well for digital nomads and road warriors. The small device would fit easily into almost any bag, and wouldn't require a true laptop bag. It could be used on a plane or a park bench. It could be whipped out at a moments notice and immediately be useful. At the same time, it is easy to throw a keyboard and mouse into a bag with clothing for a business trip, and have a nice environment to work on documents and presentations at the hotel. When visiting a client, it could be plugged into a projector and run the presentation just as well as a typical laptop.

The problem with this scheme is that the price point wouldn't be anywhere close to the netbooks. This would be a $1,500 machine that would compete with ultra-portables, potentially remaking that segment. I can imagine that the technology could quickly trickle down, however.