Stop right there. Analogy fail. When you worked on a farm, you almost certainly did a bunch of different things. Sure, you might have worked a long day, but you spent a little while gathering the eggs, a while milking the cows, a while cleaning out the horse stalls, and I'm sure you did some fun stuff in there, too.
In the business world, most people do not work on a farm. Most people milk cows. They do a single, fairly narrow task over and over. Imagine if you had to do ten hours of nothing but walking back and forth to the chicken coop to collect eggs and bring them inside. You'd be bored out of your freaking mind, and after four or five hours, you'd be moving pretty slowly, dropping eggs, and in general, screwing up constantly.
Also, on a farm, you manage the workload. You don't go down to the store and buy a bunch more chickens if you don't think you can handle the extra workload. You're in charge. In the business world, you're not. If you did not say "no", management would gladly take 24 hours per day, 7 days a week from you. That's why people go home after eight hours. Limiting their work hours is the only tool that workers have at their disposal for limiting the number of chickens that management throws at them.
In a general sense I agree that people who think that short work days are the most productive are probably not the kinds of workers who work hard and throw themselves into their work.
Short workdays are provably more productive. This has been shown in study after study. It's not the workers. It's the work. Even if you made the work more interesting by adding more projects, longer hours might be more productive in the short term, but as those multiple projects began competing for your time, work would become increasingly stressful, and eventually you'd be back to burning out after five or six hours. The core of the problem comes down to feeling like you're doing the same thing over and over with no regular transitions to radically different projects, coupled with stress caused by management that can't seem to figure out that you can't triple the workload without increasing staffing and expect things to get done.
I have a great deal of respect for someone who works hard and doesn't just up and leave work in the middle of a job because they've put in their eight hours.
I don't. Those folks tend to die of congestive heart failure at 50 because they gave and gave until they couldn't give any more. It isn't healthy to spend ten and twelve hours per day sitting in front of a computer. In fact, it's downright dangerous.
If I won the lottery today...I'd likely not even bother to come back to gather my stuff at my desk....
Even most people who like their jobs would not continue to put in a full 40-hour workweek if they won the lottery. A standard workweek leaves far too little time for anything else but work and recovering from work. Although I've worked for longer than that on occasion, it is always for a very short time while doing something really cool.
On an extended basis, there's no amount of money you could pay me that would cause me to work a 60+ hour week... unless it was enough money that I could do it for a year and retire, in which case I would do it for a year, tell you to get bent, and retire, leaving you with all the expense of finding some other sucker to do the job for a year, rinse, repeat.
I would have to give them up if I worked 100 hour weeks at google.
You would give up a lot more than that if you worked a 100-hour week. That's about 14 hours and 17 minutes per day, even at seven days per week. Add in even a few minutes of travel time back to your house, time to shower, time for eating food, and time for getting to bed, and you basically can't get a healthy eight hours of sleep. Anywhere near that level of work is considered a serious health hazard.
What we need most is for people to stop calling meetings for announcements and other things for which actual discussion is expected to be minimal. An email message can convey the same material in less time, with better retention, and more importantly, with the ability to go back and consult it later. Meetings should be reserved for situations where there is disagreement. Send the email first, and if there is disagreement, then call a meeting to discuss it. Otherwise, there's no reason to call a meeting.
Even better than a regular status email is keeping that information on a wiki status page, coupled with an email that says the status page has changed. This has the same advantages as an email message, but with the ability to delete the email and *still* go back and consult it later.:-)
Either one is preferable to a meeting. With a meeting, you have to sit there through the whole thing even if you only care about three minutes worth. With a meeting, you have to interrupt what you were doing, no matter how important it might have been, to go there at a particular time. In short, meetings should be reserved for situations where there is expected to be significant value to engaging in discussion. Sadly, the lack of such self control causes some companies try to encourage 12-16 hour workdays to make up for the loss of efficiency.
Re:Yes, except the cutting edge always becomes nor
on
When Flying Was a Thrill
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· Score: 4, Insightful
That bit was the build up to the punchline sort of pointing out how the cutting edge always becomes normal.
That's not it. The reason we are no longer impressed by it is not that merely that it has become normal. Even when the shuttle program eventually got scrubbed, you can't tell me that anyone in those record crowds watching the last few takeoffs thought of it as normal. Even the folks who live down there were always impressed.
The reason we are no longer impressed with most technology like airplanes and cell phones is that we have come to depend on it, and it has let us down. When airplanes were relatively rare, you didn't have people depending on them for most of their travel. People drove cars. An airplane was an exotic experience because you didn't have to depend on it to get you somewhere that you had to be. In much the same way, nobody cared about dropped calls in the early days because they weren't using them for the bulk of their communication. It was too expensive.
As soon as any piece of technology becomes a regular part of your life, however, anything that goes wrong becomes a road block for you. Now that people depend on air travel for much of their work and pleasure travel—now that people have grown to depend on being able to readily go long distances for work and vacation—the delays and other problems have more of an impact because they don't build in that extra day to accommodate things going wrong. Similarly, now that many people use cell phones as their primary means of communication, dropped calls are a frequent hassle that bothers people more.
If you want people to be impressed by something that they actually depend on, you have to do the right thing every time. It has to "just work". Every time. As soon as that consistency starts to falter, people quickly lose patience. And for good reason. A flight delay can cause them to miss the next flight, which puts them stranded in an unknown city halfway across the country from home. That didn't happen nearly as much in the early days of flying, back when on-time performance was less important than getting you there. If your flight was late, to the extent possible, they held the next leg. Now, on many airlines, they're forbidden to do so, and as a result, there's a lot more uncertainty about the ability of air travel to get you where you're going, so when things go wrong, people get edgy. In short, people can't count on the airlines to do the right thing every time. Ditto for the cell phone companies who frequently seem to be in a battle to see who can screw the customer hardest while making it as hard as possible to get justice when they do so (with mandatory binding arbitration clauses, for example).
And this, in a nutshell, is why technology ceases to thrill—not because it has become commonplace, but because what was once optional has become essential, and because the companies that provide the technology invariably take advantage of that fact to let them get away with poorer service, poorer quality, poorer longevity, etc.
Trains are great for short runs. What's missing are the high-speed long-range runs, e.g. San Francisco to Chicago. That route takes a little more than two days. The only way it isn't faster to fly is if you decide to fly to Hong Kong on the way. Twice.
Trains are inefficient because there are too many stops, and the longer the trip, the more obvious that inefficiency becomes. For rail travel to be efficient, you really need are two separate trains for each route: a slow train that picks up passengers along the way and carries them to specific pick-up points along the route, bouncing back and forth between those pick-up points, combined with a high-speed train that runs much more frequently and stops at only a handful of stops, all timed precisely so that a high-speed train arrives just a few minutes after the slow train arrives.
This is important even for short runs, if you want to compete with cars. Average travel time from San Jose to San Francisco ranges from about 45 minutes to an hour, depending on traffic. By train, it takes anywhere from 59 minutes for the bullet train (limited stops), up to an hour and 31 minutes if it isn't—twice the commute time by car. Once you factor in travel time at the other end, even the bullet train isn't all that efficient, and the normal train is horrible. The only reason anybody takes either of them is that the SF Bay Area has a lot of tech folks who can work during their commute (and, to a limited degree, because parking fees in San Francisco are extortionate).
1. A church can't offer free wifi at church, but block porn sites which you shouldn't be viewing while in church
Wrong. A church is not an ISP, nor is a business who is allowing you to use their Internet connection for free, nor a library, nor any other person or entity that isn't charging you for use of the service. These rules do not apply to them.
2. Companies can't offer tiered access plans. 1 Mb for $20/month, 10 Mb for $30/month, etc, etc
Wrong again. The actual rules are fairly straightforward and easy to understand. The first rule is that the company must be transparent about its network management policies. The second is that it may not block anything, and the third is that it may not give anyone preferential treatment. None of these things prevent a company from cutting off your service when your contracted coverage runs out.
3. A company can't offer network access that only allows you access to their sites, such as Apple allowing access to the genius scheduling area of their website. Instead, people in all the local stores could piggy-back on Apple's wifi for their internet access rather than paying for it themselves.
See also #1.
There are ways of preventing AT&T/Comcast, etc from censoring the internet- they're called competitors. I understand where the net-neutrality rules come from- I really hate the idea that a service provider would this to me.
Ah, now we get to the point—the magic libertarian theory that competition will somehow fix censorship. Here's the reality:
People don't want companies digging up their land every three months to run a cable for a new competitor, so they pass laws limiting the number of utilities with public utility franchise laws.
People want their cell phone calls to go through. This means that you have to have regulation over the cell phone spectrum because it is a scarce resource.
Even if we could somehow change the laws about the first two without hopelessly breaking things, the tremendous overhead of setting up a new service, coupled with the near-complete lack of overhead faced by the incumbent provider, means that it is almost never financially viable to do so.
The libertarians aren't willing to do what is necessary to fix these problems—creating government-run nonprofit corporations that license access to a single set of cellular towers or underground cables—because that would be government interference.
Instead, I offer a competing proposal- information. If you required ISPs to declare what filtering they are doing so that people would know what's going on, then they can put pressure back on those companies or find alternative companies.
What an amazing coincidence. That's the first of the three FCC net neutrality rules. Unfortunately, information doesn't help when you're outside DSL range. In most places, your only remaining options are cable (from a single cable company) or a dedicated trunk line. You cannot usefully have a free market when the cost of infrastructure is so high that the market naturally degrades to a monopoly. So you have two choices: liberate all the telephone, cable, and fiber lines and lease them back to any ISP for a line rental fee plus the cost of running a trunk line and dropping a router into the government-owned central office, or regulate the commercial entities so that they cannot screw the customers. Those really are the only two options that can actually work.
Uh, you may not have control over tsunamis, but you certainly have control over whether you put your nuclear reactors along the coast, and, for that matter, whether you allow nuclear reactors within a few hundred miles of an active fault....
It *seems* to offer more at first glance, but it's only a false hope, and results rapidly go random again. The ONLY time a multi-word search actually works properly on Amazon is when the words match a product name exactly. All other uses are broken in varying degrees, and only occasionally return something moderately sensible.
Ah, but when Amazon does eventually return the right result, it tells you the actual price instead of half the time claiming that a $2,000 printer costs $1.39 because some reseller also sell reams of paper on the same web page. And when the content is sold by Amazon itself (as opposed to a reseller), you can search in categories and get sorting of similar products by price, etc.
In the grand scheme of things, correctness is far more important to the shopping process than ease of searching. Getting better search results from a database is relatively straightforward. The hard part is getting the data into the database to begin with, and if your strategy involves spidering a bunch of e-commerce sites, you'll never be better than half-assed.
When it comes to product search, Google is screwed. It's only a matter of time. Their entire approach is just too completely wrong. It used to work moderately well when it was just a handful of computer product sites getting spidered by sites like pricewatch, but it doesn't generalize very well.
Yup. Are you saying you think this company just put that $500 in a bank account? Companies don't usually do that with their cash. They either spend it or they invest it. So what bank accounts or other guaranteed investments pay is not a relevant question for whether the company should have to pay a higher interest rate on that money.
Sure, if they had pulled this stunt two years ago, that answer would have been different. That isn't relevant. They didn't do this two years ago. They're doing it now.
I'm crazy, not nuts. The point is that there are things you could reasonably have done with your money (and that I've been encouraging my friends to do for many, many years) that would have done far, far better than 5% per year, and that letting this company off by refunding your money with only 5% interest means that if they had even remotely competent financial advice, they made a profit on the deal (ignoring, for the moment, any costs that they incurred for providing the service). Even just playing the NASDAQ composite over that time period would have netted them a solid 6% APY. And that's without doing anything overly risky like playing the options market, high frequency trading, etc.
On the other hand, if you put $500 into Apple stock six years ago (somehow purchasing approximately 9.427 shares), you would now have $5091, or about 47% APY. Just saying.
I wouldn't say aspie either, more like "miser" or "tightwad". Most people would probably figure they got more than $500 worth and move on with life.
$500 for 6 years of service comes out to about $6.94 per month. That isn't a particularly good deal. In fact, it's actually pretty darn expensive when you put a pencil to it. Much cheaper than their current hosting plans, mind you, but compared with the competition, it's highway robbery. For comparison, two bucks more per month from Dreamhost (in two-year blocks) or nearly a buck less from HostGator (in three-year blocks) gets you unlimited web storage (versus 2 GB), unlimited monthly bandwidth (versus 20 GB), unlimited databases (versus 20), and unlimited hosted domains (versus 15).
No, this isn't $500 worth. It's maybe $150-200 worth at best.
Don't know why anyone would even want "lifetime" hosting, as they're just going to leave on some crappy old hardware & depriortize your customer service unless they can get more revenue out of you.
For the kind of money they paid for the service, that's a good way to get such negative reviews that you quickly find yourself without customers.
Then again, so is dumping a large chunk of your customer base, so odds are, this company is desperate because they're struggling to pay the bills. I wouldn't trust them to host my lolcats site, much less anything that I cared about.
By that same argument, I hereby declare my intent to patent rocks cut into the shape of an iPhone. They don't exist in nature, and to my knowledge, nobody has ever made them before, so they should be worthy of a patent, right? After all, they're not the whole rock, just the part shaped like an iPhone.
Let me restate that another way, then. When it comes to surveillance, the UK took its cues from the 'States and one-upped them at every turn. Therefore, at least as far as this issue goes, the UK is worse, not better.
This doesn't follow. Lots of common, everyday objects and activities have "potential for abuse" one could describe as "almost unlimited". Automatic weapons. Automobiles. Kitchen knives. Ball-point pens.
Not true. The potential for abuse for all those things is inherently limited. A gun has only so many bullets, and when you run out, the police are going to shoot your sorry ***. If you're running pedestrians over with an automobile, you'll eventually have to stop for gas, and when you run out, the police.... You see the pattern.
More to the point, at least for the moment, all of those things require a human user. At most, a single person can control a couple of automatic weapons, one car, a couple of kitchen knives or ballpoint pens, etc. Therefore, the abuse is fundamentally limited by the number of people you have. As soon as you're talking about cameras that catalog information en masse, you're stepping over what should be a bright line from being limited by manpower to being unlimited in your surveillance ability.
Besides, at some point LPRs could be as simple as an app for a smartphone, or for a headmounted display like Google glasses, and then lots of people will have them. On what basis would law enforcement then be enjoined not to deploy them?
On the basis that the government being allowed to collect nearly unlimited amounts of information about the citizenry is inherently dangerous no matter how much information the citizenry is allowed to collect about the government.
What abuse could be gathered from someone knowing where a car was at some time?
Short list?
You are one of the five cars that happened to be near three murders. We don't know which one of you did it, so we're going to beat you all until one of you confesses.
We computed your speed at 65.1 in a 65 zone. Here is your speeding ticket. Sorry the Interstate is clogged up with cars, but nobody is driving close to the speed limit all of a sudden. Since nobody is going 65, we've decided to lower the limit to 55 so that we can continue to bring in revenue.
I think that girl is pretty. If I track her car everywhere she goes, I can figure out where she'll be, and always be there. (There's no stalker like po[lice] stalkers like no stalker I know.)
I see you have parked your car near [x] and [y]. They are known communists. We know you must be one, too, so you have been blacklisted and will never act again.
Seriously, read about the McCarthy era and tell me that the U.S. couldn't have descended into an absolute hellhole had those government officials had access to more information about the location of its citizenry. Sane people don't trust government because government has routinely violated that trust. That's not saying you have to be paranoid and believe that the government is always lying about everything, but a healthy degree of skepticism and a strong set of reins to prevent excessive government power over the people is generally a good idea.
The worst examples of totalitarianism from the 20th Century occurred when governments lost the ability to govern either through economic calamity (e.g., the rise of the USSR and the Nazi regime) or intervention by foreign powers (e.g., American intervention in South America and the Middle East). Charismatic megalomaniacs, usually backed by a loyal military, then rise to power through the promise of a new Utopia that quickly collapses into brutal totalitarianism. The slow march of a well-intentioned, functioning government towards totalitarianism is a nonexistent threat in modern times.
9/11, and the economic crisis that followed, look remarkably like the government lost the ability to govern through economic calamity and intervention by foreign powers. Not a complete breakdown of the system, mind you, but the question is whether it was enough of a breakdown to cause society to let the government's promise of security lead the country into, as you put it, a new Utopia that collapses into totalitarianism.
The inability to fly without being photographed naked or felt up says yes. The rapid rise of license plate scanners says yes. The PATRIOT act and the secret courts that resulted from it say yes. The extrajudicial internment camp at Guantanamo Bay says yes. Need I continue?
What foreign languages do you speak? Because last I checked, the UK was the US's lap dog, with most of the other English-speaking Commonwealth nations falling quickly into line.
No, you pretty much have two options: put up with it or find a way to fight it (preferrably legally, either in the court system or in the court of public opinion). If you don't fight tyranny wherever it begins, it will eventually spread to wherever you went to avoid it. And then it's too late.
Since that could be done without warrant, this is obviously perfectly fine, and not even worth thinking about.
All that tells us is that legally, it isn't an technically an invasion of privacy, per se. However, the potential for abuse is almost unlimited, and as such, it is not something the government (or any private party, either) should ever be allowed to do—not for privacy reasons, but because it gives the government nearly unlimited power over the people. As Jefferson once put it, "A government afraid of its citizens is a democracy; citizens afraid of government is tyranny."
The big thing you're missing is that the public would never authorize the expenditure for such a colossal waste of resources if this were done with humans, which means that although that could theoretically be done, it can't happen in practice. One reason the public would never authorize it is that it would be one very large step towards the panopticon, towards the world of Big Brother, etc. It would massively creep out the public to see twenty police officers on every street corner, to the point that everyone would feel constantly afraid for their freedom—afraid to say or do anything, for fear that they might accidentally cross some line and get arrested. That is the essence of totalitarianism.
Cameras on every corner are really no different from officers on every corner. What makes them far more dangerous is that they are less daunting psychologically—less likely to cause the public to realize the risk they pose—yet the totalitarian threat they represent is exactly the same. This means that they represent a way for government to take enormous strides towards increasing its power over the people without the public ever noticing. Nothing could be more dangerous to democracy and freedom. Not all the tin-pot dictators in the world, not the corrupt politicians in the pockets of big business, not terrorists, not whatever country we're ostensibly at military war or cold war with. Nothing.
The nature of government is to march determinedly towards totalitarianism. In a free society, it is the public's greatest responsibility to periodically push them back with such vigor that they are forced to retreat to a more balanced position. This is potentially a very large step towards totalitarianism. It is, therefore, the public's supreme duty, in the face of such an overstep, to slap the government's hand and say, "No. Bad government. No cookie." As it is oft said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Slashdot Mirror
Airline travel sucked and made people grumpy well before the TSA.... :-) But yeah, they definitely made it worse.
Stop right there. Analogy fail. When you worked on a farm, you almost certainly did a bunch of different things. Sure, you might have worked a long day, but you spent a little while gathering the eggs, a while milking the cows, a while cleaning out the horse stalls, and I'm sure you did some fun stuff in there, too.
In the business world, most people do not work on a farm. Most people milk cows. They do a single, fairly narrow task over and over. Imagine if you had to do ten hours of nothing but walking back and forth to the chicken coop to collect eggs and bring them inside. You'd be bored out of your freaking mind, and after four or five hours, you'd be moving pretty slowly, dropping eggs, and in general, screwing up constantly.
Also, on a farm, you manage the workload. You don't go down to the store and buy a bunch more chickens if you don't think you can handle the extra workload. You're in charge. In the business world, you're not. If you did not say "no", management would gladly take 24 hours per day, 7 days a week from you. That's why people go home after eight hours. Limiting their work hours is the only tool that workers have at their disposal for limiting the number of chickens that management throws at them.
Short workdays are provably more productive. This has been shown in study after study. It's not the workers. It's the work. Even if you made the work more interesting by adding more projects, longer hours might be more productive in the short term, but as those multiple projects began competing for your time, work would become increasingly stressful, and eventually you'd be back to burning out after five or six hours. The core of the problem comes down to feeling like you're doing the same thing over and over with no regular transitions to radically different projects, coupled with stress caused by management that can't seem to figure out that you can't triple the workload without increasing staffing and expect things to get done.
I don't. Those folks tend to die of congestive heart failure at 50 because they gave and gave until they couldn't give any more. It isn't healthy to spend ten and twelve hours per day sitting in front of a computer. In fact, it's downright dangerous.
Even most people who like their jobs would not continue to put in a full 40-hour workweek if they won the lottery. A standard workweek leaves far too little time for anything else but work and recovering from work. Although I've worked for longer than that on occasion, it is always for a very short time while doing something really cool.
On an extended basis, there's no amount of money you could pay me that would cause me to work a 60+ hour week... unless it was enough money that I could do it for a year and retire, in which case I would do it for a year, tell you to get bent, and retire, leaving you with all the expense of finding some other sucker to do the job for a year, rinse, repeat.
You would give up a lot more than that if you worked a 100-hour week. That's about 14 hours and 17 minutes per day, even at seven days per week. Add in even a few minutes of travel time back to your house, time to shower, time for eating food, and time for getting to bed, and you basically can't get a healthy eight hours of sleep. Anywhere near that level of work is considered a serious health hazard.
More importantly, working more than about 55 hours per week results in statistically significant cognitive decline even among otherwise healthy adults. So if you're working a 100-hour week, you're giving up your mind, too, not just your body.
What we need most is for people to stop calling meetings for announcements and other things for which actual discussion is expected to be minimal. An email message can convey the same material in less time, with better retention, and more importantly, with the ability to go back and consult it later. Meetings should be reserved for situations where there is disagreement. Send the email first, and if there is disagreement, then call a meeting to discuss it. Otherwise, there's no reason to call a meeting.
Even better than a regular status email is keeping that information on a wiki status page, coupled with an email that says the status page has changed. This has the same advantages as an email message, but with the ability to delete the email and *still* go back and consult it later. :-)
Either one is preferable to a meeting. With a meeting, you have to sit there through the whole thing even if you only care about three minutes worth. With a meeting, you have to interrupt what you were doing, no matter how important it might have been, to go there at a particular time. In short, meetings should be reserved for situations where there is expected to be significant value to engaging in discussion. Sadly, the lack of such self control causes some companies try to encourage 12-16 hour workdays to make up for the loss of efficiency.
That's not it. The reason we are no longer impressed by it is not that merely that it has become normal. Even when the shuttle program eventually got scrubbed, you can't tell me that anyone in those record crowds watching the last few takeoffs thought of it as normal. Even the folks who live down there were always impressed.
The reason we are no longer impressed with most technology like airplanes and cell phones is that we have come to depend on it, and it has let us down. When airplanes were relatively rare, you didn't have people depending on them for most of their travel. People drove cars. An airplane was an exotic experience because you didn't have to depend on it to get you somewhere that you had to be. In much the same way, nobody cared about dropped calls in the early days because they weren't using them for the bulk of their communication. It was too expensive.
As soon as any piece of technology becomes a regular part of your life, however, anything that goes wrong becomes a road block for you. Now that people depend on air travel for much of their work and pleasure travel—now that people have grown to depend on being able to readily go long distances for work and vacation—the delays and other problems have more of an impact because they don't build in that extra day to accommodate things going wrong. Similarly, now that many people use cell phones as their primary means of communication, dropped calls are a frequent hassle that bothers people more.
If you want people to be impressed by something that they actually depend on, you have to do the right thing every time. It has to "just work". Every time. As soon as that consistency starts to falter, people quickly lose patience. And for good reason. A flight delay can cause them to miss the next flight, which puts them stranded in an unknown city halfway across the country from home. That didn't happen nearly as much in the early days of flying, back when on-time performance was less important than getting you there. If your flight was late, to the extent possible, they held the next leg. Now, on many airlines, they're forbidden to do so, and as a result, there's a lot more uncertainty about the ability of air travel to get you where you're going, so when things go wrong, people get edgy. In short, people can't count on the airlines to do the right thing every time. Ditto for the cell phone companies who frequently seem to be in a battle to see who can screw the customer hardest while making it as hard as possible to get justice when they do so (with mandatory binding arbitration clauses, for example).
And this, in a nutshell, is why technology ceases to thrill—not because it has become commonplace, but because what was once optional has become essential, and because the companies that provide the technology invariably take advantage of that fact to let them get away with poorer service, poorer quality, poorer longevity, etc.
Trains are great for short runs. What's missing are the high-speed long-range runs, e.g. San Francisco to Chicago. That route takes a little more than two days. The only way it isn't faster to fly is if you decide to fly to Hong Kong on the way. Twice.
Trains are inefficient because there are too many stops, and the longer the trip, the more obvious that inefficiency becomes. For rail travel to be efficient, you really need are two separate trains for each route: a slow train that picks up passengers along the way and carries them to specific pick-up points along the route, bouncing back and forth between those pick-up points, combined with a high-speed train that runs much more frequently and stops at only a handful of stops, all timed precisely so that a high-speed train arrives just a few minutes after the slow train arrives.
This is important even for short runs, if you want to compete with cars. Average travel time from San Jose to San Francisco ranges from about 45 minutes to an hour, depending on traffic. By train, it takes anywhere from 59 minutes for the bullet train (limited stops), up to an hour and 31 minutes if it isn't—twice the commute time by car. Once you factor in travel time at the other end, even the bullet train isn't all that efficient, and the normal train is horrible. The only reason anybody takes either of them is that the SF Bay Area has a lot of tech folks who can work during their commute (and, to a limited degree, because parking fees in San Francisco are extortionate).
Wrong. A church is not an ISP, nor is a business who is allowing you to use their Internet connection for free, nor a library, nor any other person or entity that isn't charging you for use of the service. These rules do not apply to them.
Wrong again. The actual rules are fairly straightforward and easy to understand. The first rule is that the company must be transparent about its network management policies. The second is that it may not block anything, and the third is that it may not give anyone preferential treatment. None of these things prevent a company from cutting off your service when your contracted coverage runs out.
See also #1.
Ah, now we get to the point—the magic libertarian theory that competition will somehow fix censorship. Here's the reality:
What an amazing coincidence. That's the first of the three FCC net neutrality rules. Unfortunately, information doesn't help when you're outside DSL range. In most places, your only remaining options are cable (from a single cable company) or a dedicated trunk line. You cannot usefully have a free market when the cost of infrastructure is so high that the market naturally degrades to a monopoly. So you have two choices: liberate all the telephone, cable, and fiber lines and lease them back to any ISP for a line rental fee plus the cost of running a trunk line and dropping a router into the government-owned central office, or regulate the commercial entities so that they cannot screw the customers. Those really are the only two options that can actually work.
Uh, you may not have control over tsunamis, but you certainly have control over whether you put your nuclear reactors along the coast, and, for that matter, whether you allow nuclear reactors within a few hundred miles of an active fault....
Ah, but when Amazon does eventually return the right result, it tells you the actual price instead of half the time claiming that a $2,000 printer costs $1.39 because some reseller also sell reams of paper on the same web page. And when the content is sold by Amazon itself (as opposed to a reseller), you can search in categories and get sorting of similar products by price, etc.
In the grand scheme of things, correctness is far more important to the shopping process than ease of searching. Getting better search results from a database is relatively straightforward. The hard part is getting the data into the database to begin with, and if your strategy involves spidering a bunch of e-commerce sites, you'll never be better than half-assed.
When it comes to product search, Google is screwed. It's only a matter of time. Their entire approach is just too completely wrong. It used to work moderately well when it was just a handful of computer product sites getting spidered by sites like pricewatch, but it doesn't generalize very well.
Yup. Are you saying you think this company just put that $500 in a bank account? Companies don't usually do that with their cash. They either spend it or they invest it. So what bank accounts or other guaranteed investments pay is not a relevant question for whether the company should have to pay a higher interest rate on that money.
Sure, if they had pulled this stunt two years ago, that answer would have been different. That isn't relevant. They didn't do this two years ago. They're doing it now.
Police bites you.
I'm crazy, not nuts. The point is that there are things you could reasonably have done with your money (and that I've been encouraging my friends to do for many, many years) that would have done far, far better than 5% per year, and that letting this company off by refunding your money with only 5% interest means that if they had even remotely competent financial advice, they made a profit on the deal (ignoring, for the moment, any costs that they incurred for providing the service). Even just playing the NASDAQ composite over that time period would have netted them a solid 6% APY. And that's without doing anything overly risky like playing the options market, high frequency trading, etc.
On the other hand, if you put $500 into Apple stock six years ago (somehow purchasing approximately 9.427 shares), you would now have $5091, or about 47% APY. Just saying.
$500 for 6 years of service comes out to about $6.94 per month. That isn't a particularly good deal. In fact, it's actually pretty darn expensive when you put a pencil to it. Much cheaper than their current hosting plans, mind you, but compared with the competition, it's highway robbery. For comparison, two bucks more per month from Dreamhost (in two-year blocks) or nearly a buck less from HostGator (in three-year blocks) gets you unlimited web storage (versus 2 GB), unlimited monthly bandwidth (versus 20 GB), unlimited databases (versus 20), and unlimited hosted domains (versus 15).
No, this isn't $500 worth. It's maybe $150-200 worth at best.
For the kind of money they paid for the service, that's a good way to get such negative reviews that you quickly find yourself without customers.
Then again, so is dumping a large chunk of your customer base, so odds are, this company is desperate because they're struggling to pay the bills. I wouldn't trust them to host my lolcats site, much less anything that I cared about.
By that same argument, I hereby declare my intent to patent rocks cut into the shape of an iPhone. They don't exist in nature, and to my knowledge, nobody has ever made them before, so they should be worthy of a patent, right? After all, they're not the whole rock, just the part shaped like an iPhone.
Let me restate that another way, then. When it comes to surveillance, the UK took its cues from the 'States and one-upped them at every turn. Therefore, at least as far as this issue goes, the UK is worse, not better.
Not true. The potential for abuse for all those things is inherently limited. A gun has only so many bullets, and when you run out, the police are going to shoot your sorry ***. If you're running pedestrians over with an automobile, you'll eventually have to stop for gas, and when you run out, the police.... You see the pattern.
More to the point, at least for the moment, all of those things require a human user. At most, a single person can control a couple of automatic weapons, one car, a couple of kitchen knives or ballpoint pens, etc. Therefore, the abuse is fundamentally limited by the number of people you have. As soon as you're talking about cameras that catalog information en masse, you're stepping over what should be a bright line from being limited by manpower to being unlimited in your surveillance ability.
On the basis that the government being allowed to collect nearly unlimited amounts of information about the citizenry is inherently dangerous no matter how much information the citizenry is allowed to collect about the government.
Short list?
Seriously, read about the McCarthy era and tell me that the U.S. couldn't have descended into an absolute hellhole had those government officials had access to more information about the location of its citizenry. Sane people don't trust government because government has routinely violated that trust. That's not saying you have to be paranoid and believe that the government is always lying about everything, but a healthy degree of skepticism and a strong set of reins to prevent excessive government power over the people is generally a good idea.
9/11, and the economic crisis that followed, look remarkably like the government lost the ability to govern through economic calamity and intervention by foreign powers. Not a complete breakdown of the system, mind you, but the question is whether it was enough of a breakdown to cause society to let the government's promise of security lead the country into, as you put it, a new Utopia that collapses into totalitarianism.
The inability to fly without being photographed naked or felt up says yes. The rapid rise of license plate scanners says yes. The PATRIOT act and the secret courts that resulted from it say yes. The extrajudicial internment camp at Guantanamo Bay says yes. Need I continue?
Don't worry, citizen. We are more than capable of tracking you with facial recognition.
—B.B.
Don't like being tracked? Don't have a face. No, wait....
What foreign languages do you speak? Because last I checked, the UK was the US's lap dog, with most of the other English-speaking Commonwealth nations falling quickly into line.
No, you pretty much have two options: put up with it or find a way to fight it (preferrably legally, either in the court system or in the court of public opinion). If you don't fight tyranny wherever it begins, it will eventually spread to wherever you went to avoid it. And then it's too late.
All that tells us is that legally, it isn't an technically an invasion of privacy, per se. However, the potential for abuse is almost unlimited, and as such, it is not something the government (or any private party, either) should ever be allowed to do—not for privacy reasons, but because it gives the government nearly unlimited power over the people. As Jefferson once put it, "A government afraid of its citizens is a democracy; citizens afraid of government is tyranny."
The big thing you're missing is that the public would never authorize the expenditure for such a colossal waste of resources if this were done with humans, which means that although that could theoretically be done, it can't happen in practice. One reason the public would never authorize it is that it would be one very large step towards the panopticon, towards the world of Big Brother, etc. It would massively creep out the public to see twenty police officers on every street corner, to the point that everyone would feel constantly afraid for their freedom—afraid to say or do anything, for fear that they might accidentally cross some line and get arrested. That is the essence of totalitarianism.
Cameras on every corner are really no different from officers on every corner. What makes them far more dangerous is that they are less daunting psychologically—less likely to cause the public to realize the risk they pose—yet the totalitarian threat they represent is exactly the same. This means that they represent a way for government to take enormous strides towards increasing its power over the people without the public ever noticing. Nothing could be more dangerous to democracy and freedom. Not all the tin-pot dictators in the world, not the corrupt politicians in the pockets of big business, not terrorists, not whatever country we're ostensibly at military war or cold war with. Nothing.
The nature of government is to march determinedly towards totalitarianism. In a free society, it is the public's greatest responsibility to periodically push them back with such vigor that they are forced to retreat to a more balanced position. This is potentially a very large step towards totalitarianism. It is, therefore, the public's supreme duty, in the face of such an overstep, to slap the government's hand and say, "No. Bad government. No cookie." As it is oft said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
The only reason they need to give is, "Because we can." That's what monopoly status buys you.