I'll second that one. SpamNet's a really effective piece of software that works - I don't think I've seen a single false positive in th e6 months I've been using it and it filters 98%+ of all the spam I get.
As I understand it a neat trick about it's eyeballing mechanism is that to get generally flagged as spam an email has to be flagged by several individuals, the individual's contributions being weighted by how well their flagging of spam has agreed with the concencous of what is spam before.
In the medium term this is why the USA will not abandon the space program, and possibly part of the reason why Bush has increased NASA's budget this year.
The Chinese have show themselves to be willing to create their own technology, albeit behind that of the west. Nuclear technology, chips and space travel are obvious examples. Historically the chinese have always thought in the long-term - decades or even centuries. They may be (much) poorer than the USA, but they have vast resources, both human and natural, and the benefits of long term planning in an area where it is of importance. There's also the matter of prestige - not with the west, but in the eyes of the third world.
The USA has effectively downgraded space exploration since the end of the 1970's. If this continues then in another 20 years the Chinese will have caught up and possibly passed the them.
The only city with any real underground is London. Newcastle and Glasgow have small single line systems. And that's it. Some urban railways too in various places, but *not* the main means of getting around.
Most CCTV used in crimes seems to be from shops, malls etc. Usually takes the police days if not weeks to locate and collate these when there's a serious incident.
You may find it difficult to believe, but apart from city centre 'hot spots' there's very little CCTV monitoring, that that there is is generally obvious. The system does not seem to be abused, and unlike the US we have had a serious terrorist threat in the UK for several decades which has merited some kind of response.
We've also a set of very active Civil Rights organisations here who jump on abuses of any kind, and if abuse of CCTV gets to the point where it is a threat then we'll be in a serious situation with society generally and CCTV abuse will be among the least of our worries. That is, IMHO the level of CCTV monitoring we have - and even some increase in it - can be controlled so that it is not abused by the checks and balances we have in place in our society already. Your situation of course may be different and there may be insufficient democratic checks in the USA so that you could compliment such systems without serious corruption problems.
The corporate entity 'Disney' didn't create Micky Mouse, it was created by a person (Walt himself) who is long since dead. Should the works of Shakespeare be owned and copyrighted? A corporate paid royalties 400 years later on performance of works written by someone with at best an extremely tenous connection to the copyright owners? What about Mozart? Beethoven? Wagner? I think not.
The question then is one of balancing the common heritage of humanity as a whole with corporate and individual rights. Where you draw the line is open to interpretation, but there is obviously a spectrum and whilst we can recognise the ends where we place an artifical cuttoff in the middle is a matter of cultural debate.
It should expire for common reason of common cultural heritage.
Best way to see this is reduce it to an extreme. Let's say the works of Geoffrey Chaucer had been placed in 1000 year copyright, so at the present this still had another 400 years or so to run.
There are a (very) few companies in the world that are older than this, and several that existed to 500 years or more, so it's by no means impossible that the copyright could be owned by a company which had acquired it 25 generations before. There's also a few families around that can trace lineage that far. In either case would it seem reasonable that you should pay someone to reproduce work that was written or aquired by their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-gr eat-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grea t-great-great-great-great-grandfather?
More likely the copyright would now be owned by some entity with no connection whatsoever to the original artist. Would not copyright then seems even less reasonable?
If the answer to the above is no, then like Shaw, we're just haggling over price*. The argument becomes one of where the balance should be struck between humanities common heritage and the rights of artists or representatives to profit from their work. My personal feeling that the European compromise of 50 years (after death in the case of an individual work) or the American one of 75 are both reasonable and just reflect different opinions on the balance between society and business.
===== GBS story goes:
George Bernard Shaw supposedly met a beautiful woman at a party and asked her if she'd sleep with a man for a million pounds. "I would," the woman answered.
"And would you sleep with someone for five pounds?" Shaw asked.
The woman grew indignant. "What do you think I am?" she asked.
Shaw responded: "We've already established what you are. Now, we're just haggling over the price."
OK, first post was phrased a little provocatively for the fun of it, but it is a serious point here.
You simply can't make all of science fit with biblical assumptions. Evolution underlies most of molecular level biology these days. Cosmology and hence most particle physics won't fit either. Geology has to go too. Some sciences, such as chemistry, solid-state physics and so forth might get by pretty much unscathed and it's in these you find the few fundi xian scientists that do exist.
Falling behind - well at a pretty fundemental level if parts of your 'truth' are off limits to rational investigation then that impacts the very ethos behind how science works and has a detrimental effect.
It's exactly analogous to Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union. In case your not familiar with this Darwinian evolution was effectively banned because the philosophy did not agree with Bolshovik views and a form of Lamarckian evolution was taken as the truth, beyond question, because the party said so. Consequently the science of genetics was denounced as reactionary, bourgeois, idealist and formalist. It was held to be contrary to the Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism
This had something of an impact on the development of Soviet agriculture:-) Indeed it never really recovered and contributed to the reliance of the Soviet Union on American grain imports, which in turn didn't exactly help the long term stability on the state. I wouldn't like to exagerate, but in some part the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced back to ideological constraints on accepting evolutionary theory.
The obvious area where the USA is falling behind at the moment is in medical genetics. It's no coincidence that the first cloned animal was produced in europe, and whereas there was a steady flow of molecular biologist/geneticicts etc to the states from europe during the 70's and 80's in the last decade the flow has strongly reversed.
To go back to the Soviet analogy. After the revolution it was declared that soviet science would be practical and focused on serving the people. In fact what happened was that the Soviets abandoned whole branches of science because the risks of an individual discovering something that conflicted with the party ideology was too great. Instead Soviet science excelled in abstract areas and in particular pure math.
Religious xian fundementalism, if allowed to grow, will most likely destroy cutting-edge biological research in the US.
Great Stuff. If the religious fundamentalists succeed in their quest to distort the teaching of 'science' and control it's pursuit of certain areas of knowledge then the long-term decline of the american empire is assured. The signs are that the usa is already falling behind in the medical and biological sciences. As the religious right gains power this trend can only continue and grow.
The original assertion about us being subject to 'evolutionary constraints' was related to the purported observation that most species seem to have a 'lifespan' of 4 million years.
Personally I don't think that observation is supported by good evidence anyway, but even if it were my comment is simply that because we are self-aware we are not subject to evolutionary pressures in the same way as any other previous species and would not be subject to this species 'lifespan' argument should such a concept exist (which I don't think it does anyway).
Of course humans are subject to evolution in the same way as any organism, or indeed system, on which natural selection can operate. However as Darwin himself observed, artificial selection operates at a far greater rate than natural selection and can produce results in complete opposition to it - such as a French Poodle:-). Basically things just got complex because we now have to consider the compounded effects of both natural selection and humanity's deliberate actions.
A species deemed 'self-aware' enough not to be subject to the usual evolutionary constraints is defined as a species that is capable of debating if it is subject to the usual evolutionary constraints.
It's effectively impossible to kill off any species by disease. Sure you can make it crash, but once the suseptible population density drops below a level at which infection can be spread efficiently then the disease burns itself out. Lots and lots of example of this from myxomatosis introduced into the australian rabbit population to plague in 13th C europe.
Species die because their ecological niche dissappears. That can either happen because environment changes - be it from climate change or a passing asteroid:-) - or because they loose when a more efficient competitor takes over their niche.
The only exceptions I can think of to this are the extinctions of the non-african mega-flaura by ourselves a few hundred thousand years back and similar events since (american carrier pigeon comes to mind). Otherwise, in the long term, disease cannot harm us.
Ever see the population growth curve for europe since the 10th C? The black death killed between 1/3 and 2/3's of the population but it makes scarcely a dent - population was back to pre-black death levels well within a hundred years
We are self aware. That's never happened before in the history of the earth so the same trends about species lifespan don't necessarily apply to us. Knowbody knows.
Oh, should have said, PenIsDown/Up because the joke originally refered to a vector line drawing printer which really did have a pen (or set of pens) on an arm which could be set up/down. Not seen one of those for years now but they sure were cool to watch.
Pull up your favourite p2p application and type in a word or two that describes some trait you like, then download tracks at random and see what you find.
Works for me. Discovered several bands and artists that I now have complete CD sets of by this means - and incidently giving the lie to the RIAA about p2p reducing the amount of CD's bought.
Amazon's lists are also useful - especially if you find a new band from the p2p method which you can then use to seed into that.
Wasn't in Port Chicago at all. Large explosions are quite common during war time, but don't get publicity at the time for obvious reasons. I'd never heard of the Port Chicago one before this post but it seems nothing unusual.
In fact the biggest single conventional explosion of the second world war happened less than 10 miles from where I grew up in Burton-on-Trent, England. Only the Hirmoshima, Nagasaki and New Mexico tests were larger. It was 'common knowlege' at the time locally, and cracks in ceilings were regularly pointed out to me as a kid as having been caused by 'the dump blowing up', but few people outside the area have ever heard of it.
The Fauld dump exploded in November 1944 taking 4,000 tons of bombs with it. There's good pages here (http://www.carolyn.topmum.net/tutbury/fauld/fauld crater.htm) and here (http://www.healeyhero.fsnet.co.uk/rescue/blew_up1.htm). I remember seeing the crater being used as a motor cycling scrambling route in the late 1970's. The size was impressive to say the least.
Theres's also a couple of earlier large naval explosion that may be of interest as similar forgotten tragedies. Bothe happened in Sheerness harbour in WWI - the HMS Bulwark and later the Princess Irene. The BBC did an program on these recently - http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/beyond/factsheets/m akhist/makhist6_prog8b.shtml
Not to break it to you Einstein, but democracy was invented in ancient Greece. That's not a couple of hundred years, it's a couple of thousand years... just about as old as christianity itself.
But not democracy as you know it. The Athens 'electorate' was a very small proportion of the total population. Not much chance of the Athenians giving the slaves the vote to start with:-). Plus it was a direct democracy, no elected representatives, the few people eligible to vote did so in person.
Representative democracy with univeral sufferage is a much more recent development and is probably what Brin is referencing.
I believe that Bank's 'Use of Weapons' was optioned for a movie and has gotten near to production - hopefully we may see it somewhere.
Trouble I suspect with Banks is that although they would make terrific movies, The Culture is just every so slightly too politically suspect for Hollywood;-) and it'd be difficult to get around this without bowlderizing The Culture's universe completely (if your not familiar with The Culture then suffice to say that it's just about the deepest red anarcho-communist utopia you'll ever find).
Ken Macleod's excellent 'Engines of Light' series actually has a role for crustal bacteria as a living organism - Gaia if you will. Excellent books - the last in the trilogy has just come out in hardback. The hero's are deepest red communists though so might be a bit challenging to those of you in the colonies.
If you look carefully (I'm in europe so watched it from download) you'll see that the guns are decidely not 1900s pistols. I think the idea is that they're much more high-tech, but look 'western' by design.
It's just a tv show so it doesn't have to completely be rational, but I think there's more to it than meets the eye on casual viewing. IMHO the shame is that if it is cancelled we'll never know the back-story - and there sure is a hell of a lot of that.
Absolutly. I got as far as the checkout with a couple of CDs last week at my local music store, when waiting in the queue I checked the backs. In small letters one had 'BMG' (BMG is/will be copy protecting all CDs in Europe) on it, the other was an independent publisher. So when I paid I only took the independent and said why I didn't want the other - which I had had every intention of purchasing up to that point.
As a coder I only play CDs on my computer. I buy a lot of CDs, but more and more for any artist on a label using copy protection I pull up a p2p client, download the mp3 and burn the tracks myself. What other choice do I have?
It's very true that it doesn't work for games, and video conferencing isn't much good either (although I've heard there is a few tricks that can be pulled that can make this acceptable). One particular pain from my viewpoint is that neither VNC or pcAnywhere runs well either.
However on average, if you optimise as suggested, web browsing is no worse than conventional broadband. P2P, internet radio, file downloading, ftp and virtually everything else I can think of works fine at excellent speeds. That's 98% of what I do on the net.
In fact, with my sat connection I have considerably more bandwidth (512kb uncontended, 2Mb burst) than ADSL users. Not that that's an option in the middle of the Scottish Highlands where I live:-)
I have a satellite connection and it runs fine for web browsing, but you have to set it up correctly.
Windows by default sets simultanious connections to 3, so every time you browse a web page it can only get three items at a time. With no latency that isn't a problem, but on a satellite it's pretty grim.
So you up the connections to 25 (your sat. sofware should do this, but if your browing on a network pc which isn't the gateway then it obviously doesn't). Now instead of a multiple fetch-display-fetch cycle on each page you usually get the whole page in one go.
This does make for odd broadband. Instead of going to a page and it coming back bit by bit you open the page, there's a short latency, then bam - everything arrives back - but the net effect is no slower than 'normal' broadband.
There's other refinments you can make on tcp packet size and other parmeters, but connections is the main one.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll second that one. SpamNet's a really effective piece of software that works - I don't think I've seen a single false positive in th e6 months I've been using it and it filters 98%+ of all the spam I get.
As I understand it a neat trick about it's eyeballing mechanism is that to get generally flagged as spam an email has to be flagged by several individuals, the individual's contributions being weighted by how well their flagging of spam has agreed with the concencous of what is spam before.
In the medium term this is why the USA will not abandon the space program, and possibly part of the reason why Bush has increased NASA's budget this year.
The Chinese have show themselves to be willing to create their own technology, albeit behind that of the west. Nuclear technology, chips and space travel are obvious examples. Historically the chinese have always thought in the long-term - decades or even centuries. They may be (much) poorer than the USA, but they have vast resources, both human and natural, and the benefits of long term planning in an area where it is of importance. There's also the matter of prestige - not with the west, but in the eyes of the third world.
The USA has effectively downgraded space exploration since the end of the 1970's. If this continues then in another 20 years the Chinese will have caught up and possibly passed the them.
Ho Ho Ho. Not been the the UK recently have we?
The only city with any real underground is London. Newcastle and Glasgow have small single line systems. And that's it. Some urban railways too in various places, but *not* the main means of getting around.
Most CCTV used in crimes seems to be from shops, malls etc. Usually takes the police days if not weeks to locate and collate these when there's a serious incident.
You may find it difficult to believe, but apart from city centre 'hot spots' there's very little CCTV monitoring, that that there is is generally obvious. The system does not seem to be abused, and unlike the US we have had a serious terrorist threat in the UK for several decades which has merited some kind of response.
We've also a set of very active Civil Rights organisations here who jump on abuses of any kind, and if abuse of CCTV gets to the point where it is a threat then we'll be in a serious situation with society generally and CCTV abuse will be among the least of our worries. That is, IMHO the level of CCTV monitoring we have - and even some increase in it - can be controlled so that it is not abused by the checks and balances we have in place in our society already. Your situation of course may be different and there may be insufficient democratic checks in the USA so that you could compliment such systems without serious corruption problems.
The corporate entity 'Disney' didn't create Micky Mouse, it was created by a person (Walt himself) who is long since dead. Should the works of Shakespeare be owned and copyrighted? A corporate paid royalties 400 years later on performance of works written by someone with at best an extremely tenous connection to the copyright owners? What about Mozart? Beethoven? Wagner? I think not.
The question then is one of balancing the common heritage of humanity as a whole with corporate and individual rights. Where you draw the line is open to interpretation, but there is obviously a spectrum and whilst we can recognise the ends where we place an artifical cuttoff in the middle is a matter of cultural debate.
It should expire for common reason of common cultural heritage.
r eat-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grea t-great-great-great-great-grandfather?
Best way to see this is reduce it to an extreme. Let's say the works of Geoffrey Chaucer had been placed in 1000 year copyright, so at the present this still had another 400 years or so to run.
There are a (very) few companies in the world that are older than this, and several that existed to 500 years or more, so it's by no means impossible that the copyright could be owned by a company which had acquired it 25 generations before. There's also a few families around that can trace lineage that far. In either case would it seem reasonable that you should pay someone to reproduce work that was written or aquired by their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-g
More likely the copyright would now be owned by some entity with no connection whatsoever to the original artist. Would not copyright then seems even less reasonable?
If the answer to the above is no, then like Shaw, we're just haggling over price*. The argument becomes one of where the balance should be struck between humanities common heritage and the rights of artists or representatives to profit from their work. My personal feeling that the European compromise of 50 years (after death in the case of an individual work) or the American one of 75 are both reasonable and just reflect different opinions on the balance between society and business.
=====
GBS story goes:
George Bernard Shaw supposedly met a beautiful woman at a party and asked her if she'd sleep with a man for a million pounds. "I would," the woman answered.
"And would you sleep with someone for five pounds?" Shaw asked.
The woman grew indignant. "What do you think I am?" she asked.
Shaw responded: "We've already established what you are. Now, we're just haggling over the price."
OK, first post was phrased a little provocatively for the fun of it, but it is a serious point here.
:-) Indeed it never really recovered and contributed to the reliance of the Soviet Union on American grain imports, which in turn didn't exactly help the long term stability on the state. I wouldn't like to exagerate, but in some part the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced back to ideological constraints on accepting evolutionary theory.
You simply can't make all of science fit with biblical assumptions. Evolution underlies most of molecular level biology these days. Cosmology and hence most particle physics won't fit either. Geology has to go too. Some sciences, such as chemistry, solid-state physics and so forth might get by pretty much unscathed and it's in these you find the few fundi xian scientists that do exist.
Falling behind - well at a pretty fundemental level if parts of your 'truth' are off limits to rational investigation then that impacts the very ethos behind how science works and has a detrimental effect.
It's exactly analogous to Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union. In case your not familiar with this Darwinian evolution was effectively banned because the philosophy did not agree with Bolshovik views and a form of Lamarckian evolution was taken as the truth, beyond question, because the party said so. Consequently the science of genetics was denounced as reactionary, bourgeois, idealist and formalist. It was held to be contrary to the Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism
This had something of an impact on the development of Soviet agriculture
The obvious area where the USA is falling behind at the moment is in medical genetics. It's no coincidence that the first cloned animal was produced in europe, and whereas there was a steady flow of molecular biologist/geneticicts etc to the states from europe during the 70's and 80's in the last decade the flow has strongly reversed.
To go back to the Soviet analogy. After the revolution it was declared that soviet science would be practical and focused on serving the people. In fact what happened was that the Soviets abandoned whole branches of science because the risks of an individual discovering something that conflicted with the party ideology was too great. Instead Soviet science excelled in abstract areas and in particular pure math.
Religious xian fundementalism, if allowed to grow, will most likely destroy cutting-edge biological research in the US.
Great Stuff. If the religious fundamentalists succeed in their quest to distort the teaching of 'science' and control it's pursuit of certain areas of knowledge then the long-term decline of the american empire is assured. The signs are that the usa is already falling behind in the medical and biological sciences. As the religious right gains power this trend can only continue and grow.
The original assertion about us being subject to 'evolutionary constraints' was related to the purported observation that most species seem to have a 'lifespan' of 4 million years.
:-). Basically things just got complex because we now have to consider the compounded effects of both natural selection and humanity's deliberate actions.
Personally I don't think that observation is supported by good evidence anyway, but even if it were my comment is simply that because we are self-aware we are not subject to evolutionary pressures in the same way as any other previous species and would not be subject to this species 'lifespan' argument should such a concept exist (which I don't think it does anyway).
Of course humans are subject to evolution in the same way as any organism, or indeed system, on which natural selection can operate. However as Darwin himself observed, artificial selection operates at a far greater rate than natural selection and can produce results in complete opposition to it - such as a French Poodle
A species deemed 'self-aware' enough not to be subject to the usual evolutionary constraints is defined as a species that is capable of debating if it is subject to the usual evolutionary constraints.
It's effectively impossible to kill off any species by disease. Sure you can make it crash, but once the suseptible population density drops below a level at which infection can be spread efficiently then the disease burns itself out. Lots and lots of example of this from myxomatosis introduced into the australian rabbit population to plague in 13th C europe.
:-) - or because they loose when a more efficient competitor takes over their niche.
Species die because their ecological niche dissappears. That can either happen because environment changes - be it from climate change or a passing asteroid
The only exceptions I can think of to this are the extinctions of the non-african mega-flaura by ourselves a few hundred thousand years back and similar events since (american carrier pigeon comes to mind). Otherwise, in the long term, disease cannot harm us.
Ever see the population growth curve for europe since the 10th C? The black death killed between 1/3 and 2/3's of the population but it makes scarcely a dent - population was back to pre-black death levels well within a hundred years
We are self aware. That's never happened before in the history of the earth so the same trends about species lifespan don't necessarily apply to us. Knowbody knows.
Except for the radiation levels which would kill you.
Oh, should have said, PenIsDown/Up because the joke originally refered to a vector line drawing printer which really did have a pen (or set of pens) on an arm which could be set up/down. Not seen one of those for years now but they sure were cool to watch.
Your teacher? This one has been around for at least 20 years.
Pull up your favourite p2p application and type in a word or two that describes some trait you like, then download tracks at random and see what you find.
Works for me. Discovered several bands and artists that I now have complete CD sets of by this means - and incidently giving the lie to the RIAA about p2p reducing the amount of CD's bought.
Amazon's lists are also useful - especially if you find a new band from the p2p method which you can then use to seed into that.
Wasn't in Port Chicago at all. Large explosions are quite common during war time, but don't get publicity at the time for obvious reasons. I'd never heard of the Port Chicago one before this post but it seems nothing unusual.
d crater.htm) and here (http://www.healeyhero.fsnet.co.uk/rescue/blew_up1 .htm). I remember seeing the crater being used as a motor cycling scrambling route in the late 1970's. The size was impressive to say the least.
m akhist/makhist6_prog8b.shtml
In fact the biggest single conventional explosion of the second world war happened less than 10 miles from where I grew up in Burton-on-Trent, England. Only the Hirmoshima, Nagasaki and New Mexico tests were larger. It was 'common knowlege' at the time locally, and cracks in ceilings were regularly pointed out to me as a kid as having been caused by 'the dump blowing up', but few people outside the area have ever heard of it.
The Fauld dump exploded in November 1944 taking 4,000 tons of bombs with it. There's good pages here (http://www.carolyn.topmum.net/tutbury/fauld/faul
Theres's also a couple of earlier large naval explosion that may be of interest as similar forgotten tragedies. Bothe happened in Sheerness harbour in WWI - the HMS Bulwark and later the Princess Irene. The BBC did an program on these recently - http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/beyond/factsheets/
But not democracy as you know it. The Athens 'electorate' was a very small proportion of the total population. Not much chance of the Athenians giving the slaves the vote to start with :-). Plus it was a direct democracy, no elected representatives, the few people eligible to vote did so in person.
Representative democracy with univeral sufferage is a much more recent development and is probably what Brin is referencing.
I believe that Bank's 'Use of Weapons' was optioned for a movie and has gotten near to production - hopefully we may see it somewhere.
;-) and it'd be difficult to get around this without bowlderizing The Culture's universe completely (if your not familiar with The Culture then suffice to say that it's just about the deepest red anarcho-communist utopia you'll ever find).
Trouble I suspect with Banks is that although they would make terrific movies, The Culture is just every so slightly too politically suspect for Hollywood
Ken Macleod's excellent 'Engines of Light' series actually has a role for crustal bacteria as a living organism - Gaia if you will. Excellent books - the last in the trilogy has just come out in hardback. The hero's are deepest red communists though so might be a bit challenging to those of you in the colonies.
0 67 9/qid=1039511654/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3_3/026-5377380-4 269214
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/184149
Buy gun
Go hunting
Shoot deer
Eat deer
Die a slow lingering death from prions
Profit the human race!
If you look carefully (I'm in europe so watched it from download) you'll see that the guns are decidely not 1900s pistols. I think the idea is that they're much more high-tech, but look 'western' by design.
It's just a tv show so it doesn't have to completely be rational, but I think there's more to it than meets the eye on casual viewing. IMHO the shame is that if it is cancelled we'll never know the back-story - and there sure is a hell of a lot of that.
Absolutly. I got as far as the checkout with a couple of CDs last week at my local music store, when waiting in the queue I checked the backs. In small letters one had 'BMG' (BMG is/will be copy protecting all CDs in Europe) on it, the other was an independent publisher. So when I paid I only took the independent and said why I didn't want the other - which I had had every intention of purchasing up to that point.
As a coder I only play CDs on my computer. I buy a lot of CDs, but more and more for any artist on a label using copy protection I pull up a p2p client, download the mp3 and burn the tracks myself. What other choice do I have?
It's very true that it doesn't work for games, and video conferencing isn't much good either (although I've heard there is a few tricks that can be pulled that can make this acceptable). One particular pain from my viewpoint is that neither VNC or pcAnywhere runs well either.
:-)
However on average, if you optimise as suggested, web browsing is no worse than conventional broadband. P2P, internet radio, file downloading, ftp and virtually everything else I can think of works fine at excellent speeds. That's 98% of what I do on the net.
In fact, with my sat connection I have considerably more bandwidth (512kb uncontended, 2Mb burst) than ADSL users. Not that that's an option in the middle of the Scottish Highlands where I live
So you get your provider to come back and re-align the dish. Why is this different from any other consumer product with a maintenance contract?
I have a satellite connection and it runs fine for web browsing, but you have to set it up correctly.
Windows by default sets simultanious connections to 3, so every time you browse a web page it can only get three items at a time. With no latency that isn't a problem, but on a satellite it's pretty grim.
So you up the connections to 25 (your sat. sofware should do this, but if your browing on a network pc which isn't the gateway then it obviously doesn't). Now instead of a multiple fetch-display-fetch cycle on each page you usually get the whole page in one go.
This does make for odd broadband. Instead of going to a page and it coming back bit by bit you open the page, there's a short latency, then bam - everything arrives back - but the net effect is no slower than 'normal' broadband.
There's other refinments you can make on tcp packet size and other parmeters, but connections is the main one.