While I agree that cutting off his hand, etc., would be considered censorship, I do think that Rob not posting Katz's articles is also a form of censorship, albeit a much more benign form. Every newspaper/website cannot publish anything and everything that a writer wants them to publish. Those things must fit in with the editor/publisher's vision of the paper/website. This leads to them filtering out the things they don't want and including those they do. It's their paper, they are allowed to do this. They aren't preventing us from reading something, they just aren't facilitating it.
Real censorship, in the form that we are most commonly opposed to, involves the government or other high authority stepping in and telling us that we cannot read or view something, or that we cannot buy or sell some work of literature or art.
Mr. Katz, perhaps you could practice what you preach and take some children to this movie and watch it, in it's entirety with them.
Shouldn't that be up to him? The mother of the children wanted them to be able to watch the movie? She is responsible for them. Perhaps she's watched the TV show with them and is comfortable with them watching the movie. Why shouldn't she be allowed to escort them to the movie, buy the tickets, and pick them up when it's over? He simply helped her get past the red tape that the government is busy wrapping the country in, and helped her to do what she should have every right to do in the first place; to take her kids to a movie that she approved of and let them watch it. Perhaps she was one of those cluefull adults that knew what the message of the movie was. Perhaps she wanted them to see it so that they could talk about it later. The point is that it doesn't matter what the reason was... she is the parent here.. not the ticket guy.. not the manager.. not the government. She has to raise those children and be responsible for them. To tell her that she can't raise them the way she wants to raise them is to take the control, and hence the responsibility, away from her.
The government has obviously decided it wants to play parent to the children of this country. I personally don't think many of the people running the government are fit to be role models, but I'm sure they would disagree and get the IRS after me. The government simply panders to the whims of the knee-jerk moralists of this country (when it comes to decisions about parenting, obscenity, etc..), who in turn look for any oportunity to forward their own agendas at the expense of the rights of others. Why do these people feel they have the right and obligation to tell the entire country how to raise their children? Granted that many parents aren't fit to be parents, but telling good parents what they can and cannot do isn't going to change the bad parents or their children. They can't blame bad parenting though... that might not win them the next election. No, instead they blame the media, religion (or lack thereof), video games, Canada, etc...
BTW, I enjoyed SouthPark. It wasn't a model of class or style, but it was funny and it had a good message. That's more than a whole lot of other movies can say.
Actually, he was talking about adding different distributions of the same OS. You're talking about adding 3 different OSes together. His statement is a lot closer to what the other poster was talking about when he added in the academic version and the VPC than yours is.
I'm telling you: This is a very important election cycle. We had better make sure that the public understands the issues, and that the politicians disclose their positions... and then vote!
Ok. I'll agree with you on this. Now, how do you propose we do this?
How do you go about explaining these issues to people without sounding like a conspiracy nut?
How do you get "the people" to pay attention to something they don't really understand.
How do you give them a reason to pay attention? Probably 70% will be happy if the government "cracks down on crime" and "stops violence in our schools," and/or "saves social security" or "ensures good health care for HMO members." None of which they are likely to really do, but they will claim they did, and people will believe that.
Then there's the problem of getting ANY politician to state his/her position on things that they don't even want to admit are issues. They don't want this stuff to be public usually. If it does go public, they have to seriously oversimplify it and then spout some cheesy rhetoric that will make people nod their heads and think they understand what's going on.
Most likely, though, they don't even have a position. In that case, it is likely that they will just go along with the people who are funding their campaign rather than doing what's in the long-term best interests of all of us. This can be applied to all tech-related issues really. That's why I'm asking these things. It's not just the things you mentioned in your post, but many other issues as well. The decisions they make aren't just going to be policies that can simply be changed later. They have a lot of real world changes that will cost a lot of money to make, and even more money to change again later. It's rather important to get it right the first time.
Finally, who do we talk to about all this? Who are the top geeks that have the ear of Congress and the other various government bodies? Do such people exist? Are they trustworthy? Are they reasonable? Will they listen? I'd like to do something besides just talk about it on/., you know? What I'd like to find out is where I should expend time and energy to make the most impact. Anyone have any ideas about this? I'd like to see the government start doing things right with regard to technology, for a change.
Seems to me that the situation should be handled similarly to the way the police deal with someone who left their car open with the keys in the ignition because they "just had to run in and drop something off real quick." When their car gets stolen, the police will do what they can to find the person who did it and punish them, but the person who was dumb enough to leave the thing wide open gets a ticket for that as well. Consider it a ticket for negligence that costs taxpayers money by unnecessarily inviting crime. People shouldn't make things so easy for criminals. This aplies to everyday security, and should obviously be taken much more seriously by individuals and companies with more to lose than a car.
They won't lose marketshare unless people really believe they are doing something wrong and that their software is not the best available. That won't happen as long as Microsoft is allowed to continue blaming everyone else for their own security problems. Microsoft is a big respectable corporation. They wouldn't lie about this, right? They'd get in trouble if they did, right? The government looks out for consumers on stuff like this, right?
The only way to expose them is to take them to court and win. That is probably what it will take to wake up the PHBs of the world.
How about that? We all saw the news reports about how much it was costing companies for downtime and cleanup. It is a direct result of Microsoft's poor attention to even the most minimal security. The numbers are big enough to warrant a suit. Companies everywhere (except software probably) would probably like to see Microsoft's products held to the same standards for safety and fitness for purpose that their products are. They would probably like to see that Microsoft can't get away with making fraudulent claims in marketing materials anymore. Anyone else think it could work?
Since the government/police/other agencies are going to use these methods to watch us anyway, maybe we should just make it all legal. They can try to watch us... we can try to watch them... and we can both use whatever technical means we have available to avoid being watched. What other solution is there that's even marginally fair given the information we have that says that the police aren't obeying the current laws anyway? Why have the laws restricting us then?
and it's not hidden away surreptitiously like BO2k.
Umm.. SMS can be hidden too. It's not hard.
It consists of a lot more than just remote control
Just because BO2K doesn't do everything that SMS does, it's not legit?
You could, with effort, seperate the remote control component out and use it alone, I guess, but it would be difficult to use without the entire SMS infrastructure.
What difference does it make. Microsoft could sell all the components together or separate. It wouldn't matter. The remote component obviously doesn't NEED an infrastructure to work properly, or BO2K wouldn't exist. It's just a matter of how they coded it. MS doesn't know how to make anything that works independently anymore. All products must be tied together.
Again - the difference is obvious to any but the most hardened anti-MS nerd.
Oooh... nice one. Back up flimsy argument with an ad-hominem for good measure. Maybe this'll scare you off:
If you don't agree with me then you are obviously an MS apologist with less mental capacity than my cat.
They aren't doing it to "beat" Microsoft. They are exploiting the security problems in the OS in an effort to get Microsoft to fix them. In this case the whole analogy goes out the window since they aren't out to kick the goats off the mountain. I dunno. This analogy didn't really work well for me. Basically I agree that Microsoft has long ignored their security problems and will not even admit to having them in most cases. Given that degree of denial, I don't see any other way this group of people could influence Microsoft to fix the problems.
The problem here in America is that the government no longer represents the poeple. It just intends to control them. Unfortunately, with the massive amounts of media avialable to people today, they don't seem to have the attention span to think about anything so mundane as what's happening in Congress. Why watch CSPAN when they can just hit the clicker and watch David Hasselhoff and Pam Anderson running in slow motion down the beach?
The problem isn't that Americans care about things that they shouldn't care about... it's that they don't care about things that they should care about. You seem to think that it doesn't matter if some government worker can punch your SSN into a computer and find out what you had for breakfast, what videos you rent, where you go on vacations, what you purchase with your credit cards, what websites you frequent, what your political beliefs are, etc. I say it's none of their damn business! Why do they need this info? Why should they be allowed to have it or use it? Who will own the info? Will the government sell it to anyone with the cash to buy? Do enough people in this country still have the mental capacity to oppose this with enough unity and vehemence to keep the government from doing what they damn well please whether we like it or not?
Those are my questions. Anyone have the answers?
Maybe someday we'll realize that career politicians are a bad idea.
Maybe the sponsor wants to make employing people without a social security number illegal?
Isn't it already illegal? Don't you have to show your social security card when you fill out a W-4 or I-9? Since they tax your income, they need your SSN. Seems like you shouldn't be able to have any job other than possibly mowing yards or a lemonade stand without having a SSN, at least not legally.
He did a bad thing. He should be arrested and barbecued for his blatant attempt to take that which most definitely did not belong to him. What's to stop someone from doing the same thing with proprietary software? They hire a bunch of programmers and make a real product. After a year or two, people trust them. Then he goes and sticks in his little back door and nobody knows about it... not even his own programmers. This is why we have laws. It has nothing to do with open/closed source. It has to do with malicious intent.
Achilles was killed by a cowardly arrow in the heel,
What's cowardly about that? Jeez... if it's the only spot that'll do the trick, I'd say it was a pretty darn smart arrow. Doesn't seem like Achilles was all that brave himself. Charging into battle isn't such a big deal when you're invincible.
I'd almost like to see this one go to court. After Microsoft somehow managed to win the Bristol case (I still can't understand how the jury came to that conclusion), It'd make me feel better to see them get themselves into another case where they'll end up looking stupid. cDc makes a pretty good argument on their website. It's amazing the lengths MS will go to to avoid having to admit that their programs have bugs.
I think he meant that it was harmless since it had to be executed by an Office app before it could do damage. If Microsoft Office didn't have such a moronic setup, it wouldn't have been able to do any damage. They default it to run macros automatically? That seems extremely stupid. If the user doesn't know enough to be able to turn them on or off or use some other setting, then he probably has no business running macros in the first place. He'll just get into trouble, as the whole Melissa episode proved.
Defaulting to run macros automatically, just because it makes it easier for a user to run things without knowing what they do sounds like poor reasoning to me. It's kind of like putting a sensor above your front door to automatically open it whenever someone walks up to it. If people value their machines and data, you'd think that they might want to learn a thing or two about how to keep them safe.
Most people really don't have a clue about what their computer does. It's hard to be sympathetic when we've had to deal with a new virus popping up every couple months for years and people still don't think to do anything to prevent things like this from happening. Are any of these people complaining to Microsoft about it's incredibly poor security? Nope. They will just continue to whine about the nasty hackers who crash their computers. It was a freaking macro virus that any 12 year old could write that simply exploited an idiotic flaw in Microsoft's software! If we don't take steps to at least create minimal security for our computers, then we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
That's the problem. I don't have a clue when/if I will be able to get any kind of broadband service whatsoever. Being over 33,000 feet from the central office, I don't have a prayer of getting DSL anytime soon. One of the reps said that they were going to be getting "new DSL services" that might help me out somehow. I don't know what these services are or if they will be viable considering my distance. Even if they are, when I asked the rep when they would be available, she said "there's a chance they'll be available by the end of the year.. but don't quote me on that." Hmm... optimism abounds. Realistically, if the past is any indication, it will be at least a year before they get these services out anywhere near me. Whether they are useable for me is another question altogether. They haven't even checked my line quality yet.
How do you think they got rich in the first place? Because the government gave them all kinds of breaks and exclusive privileges. That ended up screwing consumers in the long run since there was no competition and rates just keep going up. Now the government has every right and even the obligation to do what's necessary to fix the problem. That means opening things up for competition without giving the incumbents leverage over the newcomers. They're gonna have a hard enough time as it is. Technical issues are another matter. That's something for the experts to deal with. I don't know how they will do it, I just know that without competition, consumers will continue to get screwed by the cable companies.
I won't be convinced by sketchy claims that don't do much to support your argument anyway. So what if a couple areas out of the entire company have a competing company trying to do some business? Overall, the deregulation has failed since the incumbent companies don't have to let the new companies in unless the local government makes them. So, in the end, it comes down to government intervention. They created the problem and they have an obligation to fix it.
My point wasn't that they should get subsidies too. My point was that it was a bad idea in the first place and that the government should be doing something to bring competition back in a way that it actually has a chance. They deregulate cable. Are there any new companies in my area? Nope. Are there any moving into any other areas? Extremely few. Simple deregulation doesn't work. Those networks that the government helped them build should be open to all for competition. If the existing company provides the best service and prices, then fine, customers will stay with them. If not, then at least the customer can choose another company.
You still don't get it. These companies never took any risk. They got it all laid out for them by the government and have been making fat profits for years and years. It's time for their free ride to end. Just as with the Bells and the electric utilities, the grid should be made available for competion to provide service. Why should new companies have to make the investment in running new lines without the same guarantees and priviledges that the government gave to the existing companies?
So? I don't see you even bothering to look for it. If there does happen to be an anomoly or two, that still doesn't change things for the rest of the country and it doesn't make your argument any stronger. Who knows what will happen to the competing company in a year or two. Maybe they won't be able to recoup the initial investment and will end up bankrupt.
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While I agree that cutting off his hand, etc., would be considered censorship, I do think that Rob not posting Katz's articles is also a form of censorship, albeit a much more benign form. Every newspaper/website cannot publish anything and everything that a writer wants them to publish. Those things must fit in with the editor/publisher's vision of the paper/website. This leads to them filtering out the things they don't want and including those they do. It's their paper, they are allowed to do this. They aren't preventing us from reading something, they just aren't facilitating it.
Real censorship, in the form that we are most commonly opposed to, involves the government or other high authority stepping in and telling us that we cannot read or view something, or that we cannot buy or sell some work of literature or art.
Mr. Katz, perhaps you could practice what you preach and take some children to this movie and watch it, in it's entirety with them.
Shouldn't that be up to him? The mother of the children wanted them to be able to watch the movie? She is responsible for them. Perhaps she's watched the TV show with them and is comfortable with them watching the movie. Why shouldn't she be allowed to escort them to the movie, buy the tickets, and pick them up when it's over? He simply helped her get past the red tape that the government is busy wrapping the country in, and helped her to do what she should have every right to do in the first place; to take her kids to a movie that she approved of and let them watch it. Perhaps she was one of those cluefull adults that knew what the message of the movie was. Perhaps she wanted them to see it so that they could talk about it later. The point is that it doesn't matter what the reason was... she is the parent here.. not the ticket guy.. not the manager.. not the government. She has to raise those children and be responsible for them. To tell her that she can't raise them the way she wants to raise them is to take the control, and hence the responsibility, away from her.
The government has obviously decided it wants to play parent to the children of this country. I personally don't think many of the people running the government are fit to be role models, but I'm sure they would disagree and get the IRS after me. The government simply panders to the whims of the knee-jerk moralists of this country (when it comes to decisions about parenting, obscenity, etc..), who in turn look for any oportunity to forward their own agendas at the expense of the rights of others. Why do these people feel they have the right and obligation to tell the entire country how to raise their children? Granted that many parents aren't fit to be parents, but telling good parents what they can and cannot do isn't going to change the bad parents or their children. They can't blame bad parenting though... that might not win them the next election. No, instead they blame the media, religion (or lack thereof), video games, Canada, etc...
BTW, I enjoyed SouthPark. It wasn't a model of class or style, but it was funny and it had a good message. That's more than a whole lot of other movies can say.
True, but they share a lot more in common than DOS, Win98 and WinNT.
Actually, he was talking about adding different distributions of the same OS. You're talking about adding 3 different OSes together. His statement is a lot closer to what the other poster was talking about when he added in the academic version and the VPC than yours is.
I'm telling you: This is a very important election cycle. We had better make sure that the public understands the issues, and that the politicians disclose their positions... and then vote!
Ok. I'll agree with you on this. Now, how do you propose we do this?
How do you go about explaining these issues to people without sounding like a conspiracy nut?
How do you get "the people" to pay attention to something they don't really understand.
How do you give them a reason to pay attention? Probably 70% will be happy if the government "cracks down on crime" and "stops violence in our schools," and/or "saves social security" or "ensures good health care for HMO members." None of which they are likely to really do, but they will claim they did, and people will believe that.
Then there's the problem of getting ANY politician to state his/her position on things that they don't even want to admit are issues. They don't want this stuff to be public usually. If it does go public, they have to seriously oversimplify it and then spout some cheesy rhetoric that will make people nod their heads and think they understand what's going on.
Most likely, though, they don't even have a position. In that case, it is likely that they will just go along with the people who are funding their campaign rather than doing what's in the long-term best interests of all of us. This can be applied to all tech-related issues really. That's why I'm asking these things. It's not just the things you mentioned in your post, but many other issues as well. The decisions they make aren't just going to be policies that can simply be changed later. They have a lot of real world changes that will cost a lot of money to make, and even more money to change again later. It's rather important to get it right the first time.
Finally, who do we talk to about all this? Who are the top geeks that have the ear of Congress and the other various government bodies? Do such people exist? Are they trustworthy? Are they reasonable? Will they listen? I'd like to do something besides just talk about it on /., you know? What I'd like to find out is where I should expend time and energy to make the most impact. Anyone have any ideas about this? I'd like to see the government start doing things right with regard to technology, for a change.
Seems to me that the situation should be handled similarly to the way the police deal with someone who left their car open with the keys in the ignition because they "just had to run in and drop something off real quick." When their car gets stolen, the police will do what they can to find the person who did it and punish them, but the person who was dumb enough to leave the thing wide open gets a ticket for that as well. Consider it a ticket for negligence that costs taxpayers money by unnecessarily inviting crime. People shouldn't make things so easy for criminals. This aplies to everyday security, and should obviously be taken much more seriously by individuals and companies with more to lose than a car.
They won't lose marketshare unless people really believe they are doing something wrong and that their software is not the best available. That won't happen as long as Microsoft is allowed to continue blaming everyone else for their own security problems. Microsoft is a big respectable corporation. They wouldn't lie about this, right? They'd get in trouble if they did, right? The government looks out for consumers on stuff like this, right?
The only way to expose them is to take them to court and win. That is probably what it will take to wake up the PHBs of the world.
How about that? We all saw the news reports about how much it was costing companies for downtime and cleanup. It is a direct result of Microsoft's poor attention to even the most minimal security. The numbers are big enough to warrant a suit. Companies everywhere (except software probably) would probably like to see Microsoft's products held to the same standards for safety and fitness for purpose that their products are. They would probably like to see that Microsoft can't get away with making fraudulent claims in marketing materials anymore. Anyone else think it could work?
Since the government/police/other agencies are going to use these methods to watch us anyway, maybe we should just make it all legal. They can try to watch us... we can try to watch them... and we can both use whatever technical means we have available to avoid being watched. What other solution is there that's even marginally fair given the information we have that says that the police aren't obeying the current laws anyway? Why have the laws restricting us then?
Huh? Couldn't such a sicko just go sit in the park to watch kids? Or watch Sesame Street? How is having the web page open an invitation to sickos?
It's not just the president.. it's the vast majority of people in office.
and it's not hidden away surreptitiously like BO2k.
Umm.. SMS can be hidden too. It's not hard.
It consists of a lot more than just remote control
Just because BO2K doesn't do everything that SMS does, it's not legit?
You could, with effort, seperate the remote control component out and use it alone, I guess, but it would be difficult to use without the entire SMS infrastructure.
What difference does it make. Microsoft could sell all the components together or separate. It wouldn't matter. The remote component obviously doesn't NEED an infrastructure to work properly, or BO2K wouldn't exist. It's just a matter of how they coded it. MS doesn't know how to make anything that works independently anymore. All products must be tied together.
Again - the difference is obvious to any but the most hardened anti-MS nerd.
Oooh... nice one. Back up flimsy argument with an ad-hominem for good measure. Maybe this'll scare you off:
If you don't agree with me then you are obviously an MS apologist with less mental capacity than my cat.
They aren't doing it to "beat" Microsoft. They are exploiting the security problems in the OS in an effort to get Microsoft to fix them. In this case the whole analogy goes out the window since they aren't out to kick the goats off the mountain. I dunno. This analogy didn't really work well for me. Basically I agree that Microsoft has long ignored their security problems and will not even admit to having them in most cases. Given that degree of denial, I don't see any other way this group of people could influence Microsoft to fix the problems.
The problem here in America is that the government no longer represents the poeple. It just intends to control them. Unfortunately, with the massive amounts of media avialable to people today, they don't seem to have the attention span to think about anything so mundane as what's happening in Congress. Why watch CSPAN when they can just hit the clicker and watch David Hasselhoff and Pam Anderson running in slow motion down the beach?
The problem isn't that Americans care about things that they shouldn't care about... it's that they don't care about things that they should care about. You seem to think that it doesn't matter if some government worker can punch your SSN into a computer and find out what you had for breakfast, what videos you rent, where you go on vacations, what you purchase with your credit cards, what websites you frequent, what your political beliefs are, etc. I say it's none of their damn business! Why do they need this info? Why should they be allowed to have it or use it? Who will own the info? Will the government sell it to anyone with the cash to buy? Do enough people in this country still have the mental capacity to oppose this with enough unity and vehemence to keep the government from doing what they damn well please whether we like it or not?
Those are my questions. Anyone have the answers?
Maybe someday we'll realize that career politicians are a bad idea.
Maybe the sponsor wants to make employing people without a social security number illegal?
Isn't it already illegal? Don't you have to show your social security card when you fill out a W-4 or I-9? Since they tax your income, they need your SSN. Seems like you shouldn't be able to have any job other than possibly mowing yards or a lemonade stand without having a SSN, at least not legally.
He did a bad thing. He should be arrested and barbecued for his blatant attempt to take that which most definitely did not belong to him. What's to stop someone from doing the same thing with proprietary software? They hire a bunch of programmers and make a real product. After a year or two, people trust them. Then he goes and sticks in his little back door and nobody knows about it... not even his own programmers. This is why we have laws. It has nothing to do with open/closed source. It has to do with malicious intent.
Achilles was killed by a cowardly arrow in the heel,
What's cowardly about that? Jeez... if it's the only spot that'll do the trick, I'd say it was a pretty darn smart arrow. Doesn't seem like Achilles was all that brave himself. Charging into battle isn't such a big deal when you're invincible.
I'd almost like to see this one go to court. After Microsoft somehow managed to win the Bristol case (I still can't understand how the jury came to that conclusion), It'd make me feel better to see them get themselves into another case where they'll end up looking stupid. cDc makes a pretty good argument on their website. It's amazing the lengths MS will go to to avoid having to admit that their programs have bugs.
I think he meant that it was harmless since it had to be executed by an Office app before it could do damage. If Microsoft Office didn't have such a moronic setup, it wouldn't have been able to do any damage. They default it to run macros automatically? That seems extremely stupid. If the user doesn't know enough to be able to turn them on or off or use some other setting, then he probably has no business running macros in the first place. He'll just get into trouble, as the whole Melissa episode proved.
Defaulting to run macros automatically, just because it makes it easier for a user to run things without knowing what they do sounds like poor reasoning to me. It's kind of like putting a sensor above your front door to automatically open it whenever someone walks up to it. If people value their machines and data, you'd think that they might want to learn a thing or two about how to keep them safe.
Most people really don't have a clue about what their computer does. It's hard to be sympathetic when we've had to deal with a new virus popping up every couple months for years and people still don't think to do anything to prevent things like this from happening. Are any of these people complaining to Microsoft about it's incredibly poor security? Nope. They will just continue to whine about the nasty hackers who crash their computers. It was a freaking macro virus that any 12 year old could write that simply exploited an idiotic flaw in Microsoft's software! If we don't take steps to at least create minimal security for our computers, then we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
That's the problem. I don't have a clue when/if I will be able to get any kind of broadband service whatsoever. Being over 33,000 feet from the central office, I don't have a prayer of getting DSL anytime soon. One of the reps said that they were going to be getting "new DSL services" that might help me out somehow. I don't know what these services are or if they will be viable considering my distance. Even if they are, when I asked the rep when they would be available, she said "there's a chance they'll be available by the end of the year.. but don't quote me on that." Hmm... optimism abounds. Realistically, if the past is any indication, it will be at least a year before they get these services out anywhere near me. Whether they are useable for me is another question altogether. They haven't even checked my line quality yet.
How do you think they got rich in the first place? Because the government gave them all kinds of breaks and exclusive privileges. That ended up screwing consumers in the long run since there was no competition and rates just keep going up. Now the government has every right and even the obligation to do what's necessary to fix the problem. That means opening things up for competition without giving the incumbents leverage over the newcomers. They're gonna have a hard enough time as it is. Technical issues are another matter. That's something for the experts to deal with. I don't know how they will do it, I just know that without competition, consumers will continue to get screwed by the cable companies.
I won't be convinced by sketchy claims that don't do much to support your argument anyway. So what if a couple areas out of the entire company have a competing company trying to do some business? Overall, the deregulation has failed since the incumbent companies don't have to let the new companies in unless the local government makes them. So, in the end, it comes down to government intervention. They created the problem and they have an obligation to fix it.
My point wasn't that they should get subsidies too. My point was that it was a bad idea in the first place and that the government should be doing something to bring competition back in a way that it actually has a chance. They deregulate cable. Are there any new companies in my area? Nope. Are there any moving into any other areas? Extremely few. Simple deregulation doesn't work. Those networks that the government helped them build should be open to all for competition. If the existing company provides the best service and prices, then fine, customers will stay with them. If not, then at least the customer can choose another company.
You still don't get it. These companies never took any risk. They got it all laid out for them by the government and have been making fat profits for years and years. It's time for their free ride to end. Just as with the Bells and the electric utilities, the grid should be made available for competion to provide service. Why should new companies have to make the investment in running new lines without the same guarantees and priviledges that the government gave to the existing companies?
So? I don't see you even bothering to look for it. If there does happen to be an anomoly or two, that still doesn't change things for the rest of the country and it doesn't make your argument any stronger. Who knows what will happen to the competing company in a year or two. Maybe they won't be able to recoup the initial investment and will end up bankrupt.