I don't care about a potential maximum rate of 6.0Mbps if I'm only ever able to actually get 1.5Mbps burst and 768Kbps sustained. These ISPs should be forced to advertise minimum guaranteed rates. I completely agree, but some servers will just not be able to upload as fast as others. Short of caching and proxying every page on the Internet, such a guarantee just is not possible. Transfer rates among customers of the same domain otoh...
But throttling any lower than the advertised max should be ruled illegal; the only valid reason for a Comcast customer's download speed to be less than 4Mb [or 3, or 8, depending on locale -- advertised bandwidth] is that the remote server is not able to upload that fast. Comcast has made that representation, repeatedly and should be held to it, legally. But that is a trifling offense compared to the following.
Last month, the Commission tasked its Wireline Competition Bureau to seek comments on allegations by P2P provider Vuze that Comcast's throttling practice -- intended to curb high-bandwidth file sharing that Comcast believes to typically be unlicensed -- is actually cutting into its legitimate business. What Comcast does or does not believe about traffic based on generalizations is completely irrelevant. They simply have no business monitoring content, whatsoever. They are not police, and are not qualified to behave as "deputized investigators" or any other type of law enforcement assistant. Owners of copyrights are responsible for their own investigations of alleged infractions. "Everybody's doing it" is not accepted as an excuse for the crimes of copyright or patent infringement, and should also not be accepted as an excuse for violation of privacy rights by third parties. The police need a warrant to inspect any customer's communications for unlawful content, not a survey that says some percentage of P2P traffic is illegitimate. "Reasonable suspicion" must be established individually, not collectively, and not by association. And Internet Service Providers have no place making inferences about what their customers are uploading or downloading, other than "data."
Comcast, let me explain to you the exact nature of the service you are contracted to provide: get the data where I tell you to send them, do so at the rate advertised, and get the hell out of my way. That is all.
it wouldn't be as spectacular (or easy) without an oxidizer. No, but OSHA would still insist on placing the thing far enough from Earth that terr'ists couldn't use it to blow up anything but themselves, which will be a good thing when/if we have an Australia-sized freighter full of hydrocarbons hanging out at the top of a space elevator!
This isn't remotely realistic, but having every steet enclosed and made of a reflective substance on the interior would mean light keeps bouncing around where we want it, instead of disappearing off into space. We would need much less lighting to illuminate streets if that was the case.
If this is your notion of a clever idea, I'm glad I don't have to maintain your code. No, it's neither realistic nor clever, but an array of mW semiconductor light sources would be more resilient than 100W+ light sources spaced 100ft+ from one another. The advantage is very similar to that which was DARPA's motivation for the Internet itself: redundancy and also failover.
The summary shows anti-trust regulation for what it is : people with guns raiding private property. And, you have "no comment" on the number of assertions of "cooperation" in the same summary, have you?
"Excuse"? "Sucking"? WTF? Their performance disadvantage is marginal, and on high-end products that are beyonds most customers' budgets. Also, the complaint probably has to do with commercial practices older than "the past year and a half," if I correctly understand The Fine Article.
The initial findings of a probe by the Commission unveiled last summer concluded that the chip firm engaged in anti-competitive action to thwart AMD. Findings that were unveiled "last summer" were found months before that, and gathered months before that, which means the time being discussed is within the period of AMD's total pwning of Intel, performance-wise.
Or, you could be smart. Just build a space elevator, suck the hydrocarbon lakes dry from orbit, and occasionally send Australia-sized freighters full of fuel back to an Earth-orbiting space elevator -- with its terminus high enough that an Australia-sized freighter full of hydrocarbons could explode without knocking Australia off the map, of course.
Exclusivity deals are nothing new. It seems only an issue when it's our favorite targets. Very hypocritical, which is nothing new in the Open Source Movement. Chairman Stallman approves. Free market arguments rely on assumptions about information and options which are less applicable without Open Source. Why don't you quit whining and compete on your merits?
This assumes that you believe that a totally free market is a good thing(tm). We Europeans tend to take a more interventionist approach, especially where one competitor seems to have been accused of breaking the law. Both entities have their headquarters in a freer market. Do you suppose this is mere coincidence?
(Obama has missed more votes than Clinton, so I guess she has more "stones" than he does in Washington) That depends very much on which votes they missed, landslides or close calls. I suspect your analysis is flawed, but I am unaware of sources that report the data conveniently to refute you; my guess is based mostly on Clinton having a greasy, insincere look, and Obama looking more serious at the appropriate times. He seems like somebody who would show up and vote when it matters, and not bother unnecessarily with done-deals and lost causes. Hillary, on the other hand, wants her name attached to as many pieces of shit that "win" as possible.
You really shouldn't make "police state" claims like that. If you think this is a police state, you obviously have no idea what a true police state is. Displaying such an obscene level of ignorance is probably not in your best interest.
I've seen police states. I've had to pass through checkpoints and answer questions about where I was going, why I was going there and when I plan on being back. The US is not a police state. Because searches occur electronically, go undetected, and do not require you to stop what you're doing or have any clue that they occurred, does not imply that your rights are any less violated when they occur. They're just sneakier. The method of an illegal search or seizure does not diminish its illegality one bit. "Police state" is not an exaggeration. I hope Europeans will continue to not visit the United States. It should be boycotted until it begins to recognize that privacy is a human right, fully included in the rights to property and pursuit of happiness.
I think you can't pardon a company, because a company would not go to jail or have a criminal record. The executives can receive criminal penalties, but as the sibling poster mentioned, many of the lawsuits are civil cases. And they can never become criminal cases, if the evidence is can never be subpoenaed because the actions are covered by blanket immunity. Special legal protections for corporations are all terrible ideas.
Fucking Republicans impeached Clinton even though they knew full well they couldn't convict him -- and yet the Democrats don't even have the backbone to stand up to a veto threat by the White House before they knuckle over. Isn't there some middle ground between being the White House bitch and impeachment? Failing to impeach for lying about the cause of a war of aggression = being the White House's... obsequious lackey. Remember, impeachment proceedings generally, and against Clinton specifically, begin when there is a charge, not only after there is incontrovertible proof, of "high crimes" or "misdemeanors" by the President, while in office. The debate about whether the falsified & outdated evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program presented to the Legislative Branch and the voters was presented to us in good faith, at the time by the Executive Branch, is therefore not a valid argument against beginning impeachment proceedings. That is merely a defense that the Executive Branch could be expected to offer, and they should be compelled to do defend themselves under oath for such a monumental blunder.
Assuming they want it. They only want what they're told to want. If voters don't speak up, they hear only the voices of the lobbyists, whom we already know are all pure evil.
I personally can't scrape up that much faith in any single politician, much less the majority vote in the clusterfuck that is congress. It isn't your "faith" that is needed to write to your Congresscritter to oppose the bill; it would be an act of faith to imply assent by not voicing your objections to statutory classification of telcos as above the law.
At any rate, I find it surprising that we would expect more backbone out of corporations dealing with the American government than we expect out of them when dealing with, say, the Chinese government. If we tolerate Google "playing by China's rules" when all they stand to lose is their entry into the Chinese market, then why would we expect better of AT&T when they would be running afoul of their home country's government? It is not rational to expect private entities to take a harder line with China than that taken by the government of the nation in which they're headquartered. The United States accepts preposterously imbalanced tariffs with China, and as far as I know so far, is not planning to boycott the upcoming Olympics, despite the UK gag order. Our government is not acting in a principled manners in its dealings with China in our name, and has not done so, for some time. The chorus that Google, a privately-owned entity, should be more principled in its dealings with China than the United States government is, amounts to holding it to higher standards as a "corporate citizen," a fallacious concept in the first place, than the real citizens are holding yourselves and your representatives. It is not Google's fault, and not its owners' personal responsibility, that access to the cheapest labor on Earth has been a higher political priority of our "representatives" than the interests of the general populace; that has been going on since before "Google" was so much as a Lego brick.
When censorship = The Law and freedom of speech is classed as a historical example of un-good ideas, you're going to do what?
I keep telling you guys to practice your "Heil Bush!". Yet I keep getting mocked and voted/modded down. One of these days I'll be going "I told you so!". Sure -- to your cell wall, say "I told you so!" all you want. You'll no longer have the right to speech complaining of censorship. I wish I was joking.
I think he was talking about Linux, and I have to agree. The software support for Linux is just plain awful. I do believe that developers try, but the honest truth is the majority of us have very specialized software that we use for specific tasks and there simply is not a turn-key solution (none is there enough time to develop our own solution). Not everything that is done on Windows can be done on Linux (or the Mac). Like, exactly what?
In truth, I have been using Linux since about 1998 and I have yet to actually even see good hardware support. APC? No... crap software. Hibernation? I don't think so. Powering down automatically is generally not desirable on servers. Debian GNU/Linux 4.1 does cut power just fine, though, and awakens in a few seconds. About software, who would ever need more than 18,000 packages?
Except it's not the current market price that determines whether a new competitor enters the market, it's the expected price within the market once they've entered. If the potential new competitor knows the existing market player(s) will drop prices enough to prevent an acceptable ROI for the new competitor, they will stay out of the market regardless of how high the current prices are. Rational consumers would tend to favor underdogs, if only marginally, for the long-term advantage of having a competitive market. Now, where can we get a market full of rational consumers? Oh, here, I have an economics textbook, problem solved!
You're effectively giving charity to AMD. They can't win your money by making the best product, but you're convinced that it will somehow serve you in the long run. I don't know how you can rationally make such an analysis, but I certainly wouldn't bet on it if I were you. I also prefer the AMD brand in general, so much that even if they are marginally worse in price/performance at a particular time for a particular purpose, I would probably not buy the Intel chip, and I don't mind explaining my rationale. The price/performance difference would have to be quite a bit to get me to seriously consider Intel, because I remember the pressure their introduction put on Intel's prices not so long ago, and more recently I remember how quickly they surpassed Intel in performance, and by what a dramatic margin. Intel's current lead in the bleeding-edge is not as wide, is a recent development, and does not overcome my general impression, based on years of following the high-tech news well enough to comfortably post my opinions publicly, that Intel is comparatively bloated, and dependent on its Marketing and Sales departments rather than its Research and Development. Then, there is the anecdotal evidence they frequently give us when they sell below cost, that they recognize their own technical inferiority and can only "win" by the sheer magnitude of their pre-existing capital.
PS Such behavior is irrational when viewing corporations and their customers as entities, and of course the motivations are quarterly earnings, EPS, and other jargon used mostly by people who don't know or care what they're talking about, but all come down to short-term interests of certain investors. I consider that by itself a good reason to dislike collective ownership and laws that favor collective corporate structures, generally. Collective ownership should not be outlawed as such, but it should receive no special preferences, either. Although AMD is also publicly-traded, they appear to have saner management, and to be at worst, a smaller contributor to the same problem, and often appear to have positive effects.
Garridan:
No wonder shuttles keep crashing... you Americans know nothing about the metric system! slaingod:
And I don't doubt there are a lot of things you can measure that are 3.5 inches:) JK!!! No wonder we Americans keep having to farm IT jobs overseas and lower immigration standards. They're just following our academic standards, which are now nearly oxymoronic.
Slashdot Mirror
You have all three acquired a new fan.
Comcast, let me explain to you the exact nature of the service you are contracted to provide: get the data where I tell you to send them, do so at the rate advertised, and get the hell out of my way. That is all.
If this is your notion of a clever idea, I'm glad I don't have to maintain your code. No, it's neither realistic nor clever, but an array of mW semiconductor light sources would be more resilient than 100W+ light sources spaced 100ft+ from one another. The advantage is very similar to that which was DARPA's motivation for the Internet itself: redundancy and also failover.
Or, you could be smart. Just build a space elevator, suck the hydrocarbon lakes dry from orbit, and occasionally send Australia-sized freighters full of fuel back to an Earth-orbiting space elevator -- with its terminus high enough that an Australia-sized freighter full of hydrocarbons could explode without knocking Australia off the map, of course.
I've seen police states. I've had to pass through checkpoints and answer questions about where I was going, why I was going there and when I plan on being back. The US is not a police state. Because searches occur electronically, go undetected, and do not require you to stop what you're doing or have any clue that they occurred, does not imply that your rights are any less violated when they occur. They're just sneakier. The method of an illegal search or seizure does not diminish its illegality one bit. "Police state" is not an exaggeration. I hope Europeans will continue to not visit the United States. It should be boycotted until it begins to recognize that privacy is a human right, fully included in the rights to property and pursuit of happiness.
Abusers, and the victims who keep coming back for More of the $ame.
I thought Microsoft automatically trashed your Windows install as soon as you install it.
PS Such behavior is irrational when viewing corporations and their customers as entities, and of course the motivations are quarterly earnings, EPS, and other jargon used mostly by people who don't know or care what they're talking about, but all come down to short-term interests of certain investors. I consider that by itself a good reason to dislike collective ownership and laws that favor collective corporate structures, generally. Collective ownership should not be outlawed as such, but it should receive no special preferences, either. Although AMD is also publicly-traded, they appear to have saner management, and to be at worst, a smaller contributor to the same problem, and often appear to have positive effects.
Well said. Where the hell are the articles by people who understand their topics?
Megadittoez.