Personal medical decisions are an inherent right, not a privilege granted by a merciful employer.
No, personal medical decisions are an inherent right up to the point at which they impact others around you. When you come in to work sick because you made a personal medical decision that you weren't sick enough to lose a day's pay, you impact others around you, and your employer has the right to send you home.
Requiring immunizations for health care workers is no different. You can be a carrier of many viruses for several days after infection, during which time you are giving it to other people. If you are working in an environment where you constantly have to deal with people who are sick, your odds of spreading that illness to other people rapidly approaches 1 unless you are immunized or have a natural immunity.
It is completely irresponsible of health care workers to refuse immunizations. They might as well refuse to wash their hands after surgery. These are people into whose hands we are trusting our health and possibly our very lives, and it is completely reasonable to expect them to be held to a higher epidemiological standard than the general public.
There exists a level of vaccination above which the vaccine confers substantial protection even to the unvaccinated portions of the public by virtue of reducing the number of people available to spread it to other people, thus increasing the odds of the epidemic simply dying out. Doctors and other people who work in hospitals are the most critical part of that because they are in the best position to spread the virus from a sick person to a previously healthy unvaccinated person. It is the height of irresponsibility for a doctor or nurse to refuse a vaccination.
Are we being stupid in keeping weak immune systems in humanities gene pool?
I wasn't aware the English department had their own gene pool, but it might be wise to put people with weak immune systems into engineering's gene pool instead, as they are less likely to socially interact with other people.
To answer the question, though, susceptibility to a particular virus can be caused by other factors, including factors tied to economics---nutrition and access to health care, for example. Are you suggesting we should just let the inner city kids die because they can't afford health care and good nutrition? Because outright racism is pretty much always underlying any argument for eugenics even if that isn't the intent; it is inherent in the concept.
That magical polio vaccine, which is now being given in Nigeria in the form of a nasal spray (just like the current influenza vaccine being given out now) has mutated and been responsible for causing the current outbreak there.
Uh, no, if you actually read the article you pointed to, you would know that the standard polio vaccine given in the rest of the world is a shot with a dead virus, but in Nigeria, for cost reasons, they were using an attenuated LIVE virus. That's why the virus mutated. They screwed up and did something they shouldn't have done. Also, there was a multi-year period in which immunization was halted due to unfounded fears that the vaccinations were really a Western plot to sterilize Africa. Not joking. Their government leaders really thought this. Attempting to derive any useful statistics about the efficacy of immunization from a population of people who are known for blatantly ignoring vaccination protocols and going utterly off the deep end is an exercise in futility.
Everyone who got the polio vaccine in the US has been exposed to SV 40, one of many viruses in vaccines that have been found to cause cancer.
A few people who got contaminated polio vaccines in the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S. were exposed to SV-40. This was not by any means the norm; it was caused by contaminated monkey tissue that was used to grow the virus. The industry has had screening in place for decades to prevent that from ever happening again.
Also, cancer could theoretically be caused by ANY virus infecting your cells. That's why immunizations are so important. They ensure that your body reacts quickly, minimizing the amount of damage those viruses can cause by leaving behind cells with damaged DNA.
I'm not certain, but I think that token ring cards did this back in the 80s. The choice of Ethernet as a link layer medium is a trivial implementation detail; they're both TCP/IP-based networking cards.
My problem is with maintaining and expanding it, once the original interstates were built user fees should have paid to maintain and expand it.
You do understand that the sorts of government-initiated nonprofit broadband providers that I suggested would work in exactly the way you want, right?
It might of been true if spills like it had not happened before.
By that standard, if my friend's Ford Pinto blew up in an accident, I should not be at all surprised when my Toyota Rav4 does the same thing, and I should have seen it coming. If you want to make such an argument, you need to show that the holding ponds were built with walls of similar thickness, were in areas with similar soil composition, had similar water content.... It's not as simple as "It happened to another one, so they should have known." It's easy to take advantage of 20/20 hindsight and say that they should have taken more precautions. The only relevant question is whether they should reasonably have known at the time based on the information available....
Potential spills is only part of the problem. Another problem is Mountaitop Removal. Also notice the coal slurry pond above the elementary school in the third photo. Google has more photos as well as maps of Mountaintop Removal. Then there's the CO2 emissions as well as other problems.
That's the tip of the iceberg. Airborne uranium, mining runoff, mine fires and cave-ins.... Those things would still be happening with a corporation in charge, though.
Mining would not happen on the scale it does if there wasn't a demand.
And you think there would be less demand if a corporation were running the power plants? Power consumption has, for all practical purposes, never obeyed the law of supply and demand, with few exceptions (mostly dealing with time-of-day metering). It takes insane hikes in power rates to trigger any significant drop in overall consumption. Therefore, none of your criticisms of TVA are any less true for any other power provider. Is it perfect? No. Are their power rates a small fraction of what I'm paying in California? Yes.
Is that why communism won over capitalism?
Neither has actually been tried.... Assuming you mean the fall of the USSR, that had nothing to do with communism and everything to do with Reagan convincing them that we were nuts, causing them to build up their war capacity at colossal expense, essentially causing them to bleed themselves dry. This was coupled with a huge drop in the price of oil that significantly reduced their intake. Their problems had nothing to do with communism and everything to do with an inept government. Other communist countries (China, Cuba, North Korea) are doing just fine.
And nonprofit corporations are not communist. These would more properly be described as fascist/statist. You don't want a large percentage of your economy to be this way (as the USSR learned), and under no circumstances should such state-owned businesses be run as a budget source for the government (which is why I specified government-seeded nonprofit corporations, not governmnet-run). It's a fine line, but the results are dramatically different.
Why should cellular networks allow competition on their own networks when competitors could build their own networks.
I neither said nor implied that they should. I merely said that this was the reason there was no competition for long distance providers on cellular networks.
A friend of mine was pissed that he was throttled back to less than 100K down and 0K up 85 - 95% of the time.
No kilobytes per second? So how do you make an HTTP request at all? That's upstream bandwidth. If you're truly not getting any outbound traffic, this likely indicates that there is something electrically wrong, not that they are shaping traffic that hard. Either that or you have a clogged pipe from your ISP up to the outside world.
Users pay, that's who. Fuel taxes are supposed to pay for roads, though they don't. Even the neoconservative Weekly Standard [wikipedia.org] published an article, The Net-Zero Gas Tax [weeklystandard.com] advocating raising fuel taxes. While I consider that a start I'd go further. When People renew their license plate tags, I'd have them pay a fee on how many miles they drove. I'd then require the fees to be high enough to pay for the roads. However like the article says, I'd cut income taxes. If by raising the fuel tax the average fuel bill goes up $10 a week I'd cut income tax by $10 a week.
And you missed the entire point of my comparison, which is that this is what would likely happen with broadband, but that it is not possible to make the users pay for the initial buildout because without some infrastructure to begin with, there are no users to pay for it. Just like with the interstates when they were first created.
I followed you until you brought up TVA. Some lost when that TVA Kingston Fossil Plant coal fly ash slurry spill [wikipedia.org] happened.
And yet, this is no different than it would be for any other company maintaining that power plant. The plant is a 50 year old plant. TVA has been trying to replace them with nuclear power for several years, but they've been met with environmental resistance. Also, after the accident, TVA is talking about retrofitting this plant so that it won't need these holding ponds; sometimes it takes an accident to show people how badly things can go wrong. I don't think anyone could have predicted that the wall of that holding pond would suddenly collapse.
Either way, my point was not about how well they run outdated coal plants. My point was about the reliability of power relative to the financial cost. Damage to a handful of residences out in an extremely rural area could be solved just by requiring them to buy more land around the property and not put holding ponds so close to a river.... In the grand scheme of things, it's a sign of design mistakes from 50 years ago coming back to bite them, not a sign of poor maintenance like we see so consistently with commercial power production.
TVA also operates nuclear power plants and those like the Navajo have had to pay, for accidents, mining, and spills.
What the heck does a botched mining operation in New Mexico have to do with power plants in the Tennessee Valley area? That makes as much sense as blaming TVA for coal mine collapses. Mining anything has risks, and that's a part of life. Those risks are still there whether a nonprofit like TVA is buying the material or a for-profit like Enron is doing so. TVA doesn't allow those accidents to occur. The mining companies do. Therefore, the nonprofit approach has no significant downsides and significant financial upsides. Relative to commercial power, everyone wins by virtue of getting cheaper, more reliable power.
Cellphones are more competition.
In economic terms, cell phones are what is known as a disruptive technology. It doesn't compete so much as it makes the old technology no longer relevant. Cellular networks never allowed real competition on their networks, and as such, cell phone long distance providers weren't really competing with the long-distance carriers that operated on land lines. They were competing with the land lines themselves. As the land lines became largely obsolete, the long distance carriers no longer had a market, and have diminished to almost a nonexistent state. Add to that the fact that the cell companies chose to roll the cost of long distance into the per-minute cell phone cost instead of splitting it out as a line item, and you had a closed, monopolistic market within each cell carrier in which no long distance carrier could compete even if they wanted to. Were it not for competition among the various cell carriers themselves, the s
Yes, but the Amiga did this on an 8MHz 68K with 1MB of RAM. Can you imagine an Amiga with today's hardware specs?
It did it all with outboard hardware, though, IIRC. Saying that the Amiga did all that stuff with such a slow processor is like saying that there's a new breed of humans that can move at 65+ MPH and conveniently omitting the words "in a car".
When I got my iPhone, I used iSync to copy my contacts off my Sony Ericsson T616, and that, IMHO, is decidedly NOT a smart phone in any useful sense of the word. Even dumb phones that do nothing but IM, contact lists, and phone calls can sync with your computer, assuming you have the right software.
A free market wouldn't require government to build and own the infrastructure.
The point is that you can still have a free market that sits on top of a government-run monopoly. We have plenty of examples of that. Cars aren't useful without roads, for example. It might be more cost effective for the government to just provide Internet service outright, though. Hard to say. Maybe let the government provide a standard, basic redidential setup and let businesses offer high-end services for people and businesses who need more. *shrugs*
If government does though I'd rather it be local and regional government working on local stuff, the state doing state wide stuff, and the feds doing interstate connections.
Absolutely agreed.
Who pays though, taxpayers? Taxpayers who don't want and won't use the infrastructure shouldn't be made to pay, in which case how does government pay for it?
Who pays for the interstates? Taxpayers who don't want and won't drive from state to state shouldn't be made to pay.
See the problem with that logic? It's the same thing. The initial construction costs come from the taxpayers because it is in the national interest to have much, much better broadband and to not continue falling rapidly behind the rest of the world. The continued maintenance costs come out of the money you pay the ISPs for your network connection, just like road work is largely paid for by gas taxes, car tags, sales tax on cars, etc.
Also if there's no competition what incentive does the government have to upgrade the systems? In a really free market cable operators would be compeating with each other and with DSL and fiber.
What incentive is there to upgrade the network now? In large cities, where there is at least a little bit of competition, you have options. In most places, you have at most two competitors, and for homes beyond that first few thousand feet from the CO, you only have one. Right now, there's no incentive to upgrade because people can't easily switch ISPs on a dime. There are exorbitant setup fees, early termination charges, etc. all because of the cost of doing a truck roll to the premises. And even after you get past that, it's a huge hassle with downtime, changing out CPE, etc. And their email often goes through the ISP, so they feel locked in (though this is slowly changing).
If you set it up correctly--as a government-run nonprofit with a separate funding pool--then the money has to get spent somewhere because otherwise it just sits there doing nothing, so there's no incentive not to upgrade the infrastructure. A great example of this in action is TVA. They provide some of the cheapest power in the country, their lines are generally well maintained, their infrastructure gets regular upgrades... everybody wins. And with government-issue fiber, the CPE becomes compatible across every service and no truck roll is ever needed (unless the fiber is bad, in which case the government pays to fix it), so there's no valid reason for the ISPs to charge early termination fees and similar, so they likely won't be allowed to do so. This makes changing ISPs as simple as changing long distance providers is now, which is why there *is* competition in that space (though much less now that cell phones offer free long distance; the point is that there was a lot of competition before something free came along).
But wait, you're producing helium? Think about the environmental impact! Millions of adults walking around talking like chipmunks all the time! Won't someone think of the children!?!
I do understand that the choice isn't between having the law or not; if I didn't, I wouldn't have suggested rolling back certain aspects of the law to the way things were before they started going seriously wrong.:-)
Regarding littering, yeah, that clearly is a minor thing in the grand scheme of things, and if digging up old littering is the worst thing they can do to you, they're probably not trying very hard. With all the arcane laws on the books, I probably broke at least three this morning... somehow.... Maybe a law about waking up after 10 or a law about discharging water from bottles into a sink while your water supply is turned off or... who knows.
Ah. Yeah. That's definitely true. To that end, such a virus would be useful. I thought you meant that it would weaken Tor. You meant the other way around.:-)
Wrong from the start. The purpose of copyright law is to promote creative activities which would otherwise have no financial incentive. Artists have no inherent right to profit from their work because everything they create is necessarily derivative and therefore owes a debt to the society/culture in which they were born and raised.
No, there was a financial incentive for creating musical and artistic works long before copyright. In fact, there were two financial incentives. One was patronage and commissioned works, in which someone paid an artist to create something. The other was self publication, in which someone made a handwritten copy of a work and sold it to someone who wanted a copy of that work.
It has only been since the invention of technology that made copying progressively cheaper that copyright has been necessary. Prior to the invention of the printing press circa 1440, the notion of copyright did not even exist. Yet people made money from works of literature, music, and art for thousands of years before that.
Wouldn't matter if the poster has a secure entry node. Yes, you could sniff the traffic, but you could not determine where it came from originally. That's the whole point of Tor.
Under the current proposals all ports and message types have to be treated at the same priority, so DoS attack would have the same priority as E-mail.
That's not correct. HR3458 does not propose ANY specific regulations. It authorizes the FCC to create regulations and specifies a set of guiding principles for those regulations.
Further, it says that ISPs have the duty to:
'(1) not block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade the ability of any person to use an Internet access service to access, use, send, post, receive, or offer any lawful content, application, or service through the Internet;
Emphasis mine. DOS attacks are presumptively not lawful until proven otherwise.
Finally, it leaves a specific exemption for any reasonable QoS.
(d) Reasonable Network Management- Nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit an Internet access provider from engaging in reasonable network management consistent with the policies and duties of nondiscrimination and openness set forth in this Act. For purposes of subsections (b)(1) and (b)(5), a network management practice is a reasonable practice only if it furthers a critically important interest, is narrowly tailored to further that interest, and is the means of furthering that interest that is the least restrictive, least discriminatory, and least constricting of consumer choice available. In determining whether a network management practice is reasonable, the Commission shall consider, among other factors, the particular network architecture or technology limitations of the provider.
Again, emphasis mine. You can pretty much skip everything not in bold and you'll get the gist of the paragraph.
In other words, injecting TCP resets into BitTorrent traffic: banned; throttling bandwidth of excessive users only during periods of heavy load on the network and only to the extent necessary to give reasonable bandwidth to people just browsing the web casually: allowed. For once, the government got the regulation almost exactly right.
There can be no free market in these services until government lays down the cable itself and leases it in a nondiscriminatory fashion to any ISP that wants to set up shop in a community. Only when the colossal startup infrastructure cost is taken out of the picture completely can competition be even slightly practical outside of large cities.
That's absurd. The fairness doctrine will never be applied to ISPs. It covers ONLY broadcast TV and radio, and only because of limited spectrum. It doesn't even cover content providers like print media, much less ISPs. There's no way that anyone could possibly get it expanded to cover ISPs.
And even if they did, in order to get bandwidth restrictions put in place, they would have to prove that traffic was being unfairly altered in such a way that limited access to one side of the issues. The fairness doctrine requires equal access to the content, not equal viewing of that content. It would no more allow them to reduce bandwidth for a right wing site than it would allow them to force people to keep their radios turned on while a Democrat gives a rebuttal to a Republican State of the Union address.
BTW, the FCC commissioner who suggested this absurdity is a Republican-appointed commissioner who was formerly a paid lobbyist for telecom companies. His comments should be carefully weighed against his biases. I suspect that if you follow the money, you'll find that the Democrats who are fighting against network neutrality are similarly beholden to such telecom special interests.
If there's only been a "few examples" why pass a law restricting it? Shouldn't the government try to get by with as few laws as possible instead of as many as possible?
As far as I know, there has only been one example. The problem is that the example is Comcast, which is the nation's largest residential ISP, serving more than 15.3 million customers, or almost 14% of the households in the United States.
Indeed, it is clear that I desperately need an editor when writing things late at night. Indeed, I began three sentences in a row with the word indeed. Indeed.
With GCD, instead you simply create as many threads as you like, and the central manager decides how many can be run across all the cores.
Close.... With GCD, you don't create any threads. You create work queues. Those work queues may or may not be backed by one thread, ten threads, or thirty threads, depending on the OS, depending on the number of CPU cores, depending on the number of other processes competing for CPU time.... You get the picture. The point of GCD is that work queues are nearly free, with lockless synchronization used wherever possible to maximize performance, and designed in a way that encourages lockless data flow design patterns instead of procedural thinking, thus leading to code that is inherently easier to parallelize.
The other part (Blocks) simply makes is easier to define the parts that can run off in separate threads,
I would have said that blocks make it possible to pass stack-local data into what amounts to a callback routine, and other syntactic sugar, but yeah.
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No, personal medical decisions are an inherent right up to the point at which they impact others around you. When you come in to work sick because you made a personal medical decision that you weren't sick enough to lose a day's pay, you impact others around you, and your employer has the right to send you home.
Requiring immunizations for health care workers is no different. You can be a carrier of many viruses for several days after infection, during which time you are giving it to other people. If you are working in an environment where you constantly have to deal with people who are sick, your odds of spreading that illness to other people rapidly approaches 1 unless you are immunized or have a natural immunity.
It is completely irresponsible of health care workers to refuse immunizations. They might as well refuse to wash their hands after surgery. These are people into whose hands we are trusting our health and possibly our very lives, and it is completely reasonable to expect them to be held to a higher epidemiological standard than the general public.
There exists a level of vaccination above which the vaccine confers substantial protection even to the unvaccinated portions of the public by virtue of reducing the number of people available to spread it to other people, thus increasing the odds of the epidemic simply dying out. Doctors and other people who work in hospitals are the most critical part of that because they are in the best position to spread the virus from a sick person to a previously healthy unvaccinated person. It is the height of irresponsibility for a doctor or nurse to refuse a vaccination.
I wasn't aware the English department had their own gene pool, but it might be wise to put people with weak immune systems into engineering's gene pool instead, as they are less likely to socially interact with other people.
To answer the question, though, susceptibility to a particular virus can be caused by other factors, including factors tied to economics---nutrition and access to health care, for example. Are you suggesting we should just let the inner city kids die because they can't afford health care and good nutrition? Because outright racism is pretty much always underlying any argument for eugenics even if that isn't the intent; it is inherent in the concept.
Are these people allergic to eggs, by some chance?
Uh, no, if you actually read the article you pointed to, you would know that the standard polio vaccine given in the rest of the world is a shot with a dead virus, but in Nigeria, for cost reasons, they were using an attenuated LIVE virus. That's why the virus mutated. They screwed up and did something they shouldn't have done. Also, there was a multi-year period in which immunization was halted due to unfounded fears that the vaccinations were really a Western plot to sterilize Africa. Not joking. Their government leaders really thought this. Attempting to derive any useful statistics about the efficacy of immunization from a population of people who are known for blatantly ignoring vaccination protocols and going utterly off the deep end is an exercise in futility.
A few people who got contaminated polio vaccines in the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S. were exposed to SV-40. This was not by any means the norm; it was caused by contaminated monkey tissue that was used to grow the virus. The industry has had screening in place for decades to prevent that from ever happening again.
Also, cancer could theoretically be caused by ANY virus infecting your cells. That's why immunizations are so important. They ensure that your body reacts quickly, minimizing the amount of damage those viruses can cause by leaving behind cells with damaged DNA.
Well, to be pedantic, they're both network cards into which computers typically segment and transmit TCP/IP packets....
And to be more specific, I'm thinking of IBM's token ring cards.
I'm not certain, but I think that token ring cards did this back in the 80s. The choice of Ethernet as a link layer medium is a trivial implementation detail; they're both TCP/IP-based networking cards.
You do understand that the sorts of government-initiated nonprofit broadband providers that I suggested would work in exactly the way you want, right?
By that standard, if my friend's Ford Pinto blew up in an accident, I should not be at all surprised when my Toyota Rav4 does the same thing, and I should have seen it coming. If you want to make such an argument, you need to show that the holding ponds were built with walls of similar thickness, were in areas with similar soil composition, had similar water content.... It's not as simple as "It happened to another one, so they should have known." It's easy to take advantage of 20/20 hindsight and say that they should have taken more precautions. The only relevant question is whether they should reasonably have known at the time based on the information available....
That's the tip of the iceberg. Airborne uranium, mining runoff, mine fires and cave-ins.... Those things would still be happening with a corporation in charge, though.
And you think there would be less demand if a corporation were running the power plants? Power consumption has, for all practical purposes, never obeyed the law of supply and demand, with few exceptions (mostly dealing with time-of-day metering). It takes insane hikes in power rates to trigger any significant drop in overall consumption. Therefore, none of your criticisms of TVA are any less true for any other power provider. Is it perfect? No. Are their power rates a small fraction of what I'm paying in California? Yes.
Neither has actually been tried.... Assuming you mean the fall of the USSR, that had nothing to do with communism and everything to do with Reagan convincing them that we were nuts, causing them to build up their war capacity at colossal expense, essentially causing them to bleed themselves dry. This was coupled with a huge drop in the price of oil that significantly reduced their intake. Their problems had nothing to do with communism and everything to do with an inept government. Other communist countries (China, Cuba, North Korea) are doing just fine.
And nonprofit corporations are not communist. These would more properly be described as fascist/statist. You don't want a large percentage of your economy to be this way (as the USSR learned), and under no circumstances should such state-owned businesses be run as a budget source for the government (which is why I specified government-seeded nonprofit corporations, not governmnet-run). It's a fine line, but the results are dramatically different.
I neither said nor implied that they should. I merely said that this was the reason there was no competition for long distance providers on cellular networks.
No kilobytes per second? So how do you make an HTTP request at all? That's upstream bandwidth. If you're truly not getting any outbound traffic, this likely indicates that there is something electrically wrong, not that they are shaping traffic that hard. Either that or you have a clogged pipe from your ISP up to the outside world.
And you missed the entire point of my comparison, which is that this is what would likely happen with broadband, but that it is not possible to make the users pay for the initial buildout because without some infrastructure to begin with, there are no users to pay for it. Just like with the interstates when they were first created.
And yet, this is no different than it would be for any other company maintaining that power plant. The plant is a 50 year old plant. TVA has been trying to replace them with nuclear power for several years, but they've been met with environmental resistance. Also, after the accident, TVA is talking about retrofitting this plant so that it won't need these holding ponds; sometimes it takes an accident to show people how badly things can go wrong. I don't think anyone could have predicted that the wall of that holding pond would suddenly collapse.
Either way, my point was not about how well they run outdated coal plants. My point was about the reliability of power relative to the financial cost. Damage to a handful of residences out in an extremely rural area could be solved just by requiring them to buy more land around the property and not put holding ponds so close to a river.... In the grand scheme of things, it's a sign of design mistakes from 50 years ago coming back to bite them, not a sign of poor maintenance like we see so consistently with commercial power production.
What the heck does a botched mining operation in New Mexico have to do with power plants in the Tennessee Valley area? That makes as much sense as blaming TVA for coal mine collapses. Mining anything has risks, and that's a part of life. Those risks are still there whether a nonprofit like TVA is buying the material or a for-profit like Enron is doing so. TVA doesn't allow those accidents to occur. The mining companies do. Therefore, the nonprofit approach has no significant downsides and significant financial upsides. Relative to commercial power, everyone wins by virtue of getting cheaper, more reliable power.
In economic terms, cell phones are what is known as a disruptive technology. It doesn't compete so much as it makes the old technology no longer relevant. Cellular networks never allowed real competition on their networks, and as such, cell phone long distance providers weren't really competing with the long-distance carriers that operated on land lines. They were competing with the land lines themselves. As the land lines became largely obsolete, the long distance carriers no longer had a market, and have diminished to almost a nonexistent state. Add to that the fact that the cell companies chose to roll the cost of long distance into the per-minute cell phone cost instead of splitting it out as a line item, and you had a closed, monopolistic market within each cell carrier in which no long distance carrier could compete even if they wanted to. Were it not for competition among the various cell carriers themselves, the s
It did it all with outboard hardware, though, IIRC. Saying that the Amiga did all that stuff with such a slow processor is like saying that there's a new breed of humans that can move at 65+ MPH and conveniently omitting the words "in a car".
When I got my iPhone, I used iSync to copy my contacts off my Sony Ericsson T616, and that, IMHO, is decidedly NOT a smart phone in any useful sense of the word. Even dumb phones that do nothing but IM, contact lists, and phone calls can sync with your computer, assuming you have the right software.
The point is that you can still have a free market that sits on top of a government-run monopoly. We have plenty of examples of that. Cars aren't useful without roads, for example. It might be more cost effective for the government to just provide Internet service outright, though. Hard to say. Maybe let the government provide a standard, basic redidential setup and let businesses offer high-end services for people and businesses who need more. *shrugs*
Absolutely agreed.
Who pays for the interstates? Taxpayers who don't want and won't drive from state to state shouldn't be made to pay.
See the problem with that logic? It's the same thing. The initial construction costs come from the taxpayers because it is in the national interest to have much, much better broadband and to not continue falling rapidly behind the rest of the world. The continued maintenance costs come out of the money you pay the ISPs for your network connection, just like road work is largely paid for by gas taxes, car tags, sales tax on cars, etc.
What incentive is there to upgrade the network now? In large cities, where there is at least a little bit of competition, you have options. In most places, you have at most two competitors, and for homes beyond that first few thousand feet from the CO, you only have one. Right now, there's no incentive to upgrade because people can't easily switch ISPs on a dime. There are exorbitant setup fees, early termination charges, etc. all because of the cost of doing a truck roll to the premises. And even after you get past that, it's a huge hassle with downtime, changing out CPE, etc. And their email often goes through the ISP, so they feel locked in (though this is slowly changing).
If you set it up correctly--as a government-run nonprofit with a separate funding pool--then the money has to get spent somewhere because otherwise it just sits there doing nothing, so there's no incentive not to upgrade the infrastructure. A great example of this in action is TVA. They provide some of the cheapest power in the country, their lines are generally well maintained, their infrastructure gets regular upgrades... everybody wins. And with government-issue fiber, the CPE becomes compatible across every service and no truck roll is ever needed (unless the fiber is bad, in which case the government pays to fix it), so there's no valid reason for the ISPs to charge early termination fees and similar, so they likely won't be allowed to do so. This makes changing ISPs as simple as changing long distance providers is now, which is why there *is* competition in that space (though much less now that cell phones offer free long distance; the point is that there was a lot of competition before something free came along).
But wait, you're producing helium? Think about the environmental impact! Millions of adults walking around talking like chipmunks all the time! Won't someone think of the children!?!
:-D
I don't know whether to be happy about that or terribly depressed. :-D
I do understand that the choice isn't between having the law or not; if I didn't, I wouldn't have suggested rolling back certain aspects of the law to the way things were before they started going seriously wrong. :-)
Regarding littering, yeah, that clearly is a minor thing in the grand scheme of things, and if digging up old littering is the worst thing they can do to you, they're probably not trying very hard. With all the arcane laws on the books, I probably broke at least three this morning... somehow.... Maybe a law about waking up after 10 or a law about discharging water from bottles into a sink while your water supply is turned off or... who knows.
Ah. Yeah. That's definitely true. To that end, such a virus would be useful. I thought you meant that it would weaken Tor. You meant the other way around. :-)
No, there was a financial incentive for creating musical and artistic works long before copyright. In fact, there were two financial incentives. One was patronage and commissioned works, in which someone paid an artist to create something. The other was self publication, in which someone made a handwritten copy of a work and sold it to someone who wanted a copy of that work.
It has only been since the invention of technology that made copying progressively cheaper that copyright has been necessary. Prior to the invention of the printing press circa 1440, the notion of copyright did not even exist. Yet people made money from works of literature, music, and art for thousands of years before that.
Wouldn't matter if the poster has a secure entry node. Yes, you could sniff the traffic, but you could not determine where it came from originally. That's the whole point of Tor.
That's not correct. HR3458 does not propose ANY specific regulations. It authorizes the FCC to create regulations and specifies a set of guiding principles for those regulations.
Further, it says that ISPs have the duty to:
Emphasis mine. DOS attacks are presumptively not lawful until proven otherwise.
Finally, it leaves a specific exemption for any reasonable QoS.
Again, emphasis mine. You can pretty much skip everything not in bold and you'll get the gist of the paragraph.
In other words, injecting TCP resets into BitTorrent traffic: banned; throttling bandwidth of excessive users only during periods of heavy load on the network and only to the extent necessary to give reasonable bandwidth to people just browsing the web casually: allowed. For once, the government got the regulation almost exactly right.
There can be no free market in these services until government lays down the cable itself and leases it in a nondiscriminatory fashion to any ISP that wants to set up shop in a community. Only when the colossal startup infrastructure cost is taken out of the picture completely can competition be even slightly practical outside of large cities.
That's absurd. The fairness doctrine will never be applied to ISPs. It covers ONLY broadcast TV and radio, and only because of limited spectrum. It doesn't even cover content providers like print media, much less ISPs. There's no way that anyone could possibly get it expanded to cover ISPs.
And even if they did, in order to get bandwidth restrictions put in place, they would have to prove that traffic was being unfairly altered in such a way that limited access to one side of the issues. The fairness doctrine requires equal access to the content, not equal viewing of that content. It would no more allow them to reduce bandwidth for a right wing site than it would allow them to force people to keep their radios turned on while a Democrat gives a rebuttal to a Republican State of the Union address.
BTW, the FCC commissioner who suggested this absurdity is a Republican-appointed commissioner who was formerly a paid lobbyist for telecom companies. His comments should be carefully weighed against his biases. I suspect that if you follow the money, you'll find that the Democrats who are fighting against network neutrality are similarly beholden to such telecom special interests.
As far as I know, there has only been one example. The problem is that the example is Comcast, which is the nation's largest residential ISP, serving more than 15.3 million customers, or almost 14% of the households in the United States.
Indeed, it is clear that I desperately need an editor when writing things late at night. Indeed, I began three sentences in a row with the word indeed. Indeed.
*sigh*
Close.... With GCD, you don't create any threads. You create work queues. Those work queues may or may not be backed by one thread, ten threads, or thirty threads, depending on the OS, depending on the number of CPU cores, depending on the number of other processes competing for CPU time.... You get the picture. The point of GCD is that work queues are nearly free, with lockless synchronization used wherever possible to maximize performance, and designed in a way that encourages lockless data flow design patterns instead of procedural thinking, thus leading to code that is inherently easier to parallelize.
I would have said that blocks make it possible to pass stack-local data into what amounts to a callback routine, and other syntactic sugar, but yeah.