A manned shuttle would have wings, and would be able to glide or power back to a landing strip. Or, if it were a vertical lander, it could do a really fancy tail swing maneuver and touch down with rockets on.
An unmanned wingless craft could be permitted to go splash in the ocean.
The use of the word "theft" is the key. As long as you misuse the word in this fashion, you will have a problem reconciling your beliefs about freedom and property.
"Theft" means someone was deprived the use of their property by its removal.
Copies do not deprive the owner of the use of their property. It merely can be argued that the owner did not get a right to control the copying, or is deprived of a fee they wish to impose. That, by the way, is a civil matter, not a criminal one.
At least was not until the DMCA, when it was made felonious and brought to the criminal courts instead of the civil.
Now, another thing 'fore I go: An owner of a copyright does not, NOT, own the material as a property. It has no physical existence. The owner owns the right to control the manufacture of copies.
The difference is absolutely crucial, and core to your intellectual conundrum.
Copiers don't STEAL, they COPY. They don't deprive, they multiply property.
I believe about a hundred million of us voted. And voted for Gore, by over a half million votes.
Maybe voter apathy, next time, will be inspired by The Supreme Court Rightmost Five's bald-faced installation of a president guaranteed to install someone of their own ideological persuasion on the SC, so that the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation ilk will steamroller our laws into far-right shapes for decades to come.
That decision broke my heart, and I have quite a big one. To paraphrase what majority said: "This decision applies to this case only, and is not to be used as a precedent in any similar case". "The resumption of the recount will cease because it may cause damage to George W. Bush"... oh yeah.
I dissent indeed.
What odious, vile... oh, forget it. There are no appropriate words for what Scalia and company did to us.
So, for the first time in my life, I am apathetic to the process. The NY Times, the Grey Lady herself, spinning the private recount last year into a win for Bush, when with overvotes, Gore won; undervotes, Gore won; with every scenario but one, Gore won. When the press itself becomes a lapdog for the conservatives, there is no hope. Got to wait for another century. The election was stolen, and the story can't even be told because of mass denial on the parts of the very people we expect to defend us from such evil.
There won't even be a choice next election. No one could even make a peep without the Death Machine, honed over the last nine years, ruining them financially and socially.
It's about as safe as a cigarette lighter, which no one seems to have problems with.
Also, you drive every day in front of the massive bomb you call your car's gas tank.
It's just a matter of fear, and familiarity.
It's business, specifically megacorporations that use our free-market campaign financing laws to buy laws that micromanage citizens to death.
Government really doesn't exist as an entity, and moreover, isn't motivated to steal our freedom, whatever Randites believe. In a way, our government is in the business of selling freedom.
Ah, but business, business exists to squeeze every possbile shekel, at the cost of our freedoms if necessary, from the citizenry. And corporations are the ultimate amoral thieves of freedom - they don't really exist, are nearly impossible to sue, and have no responiblity to coexist with their power. Save one: make money.
WE are the government. Hating it is like hating the face you see in the mirror.
Well, so sayeth the law, but don't believe everything the law says. There are hundreds of ways to get rid of over-40's withut tripping the age alarm, and anyway, even if it is blatant, it's a matter of getting someone to give a rat's ass if you are fired because of your age.
All in all, better to be young than poor. An IT worker over 40 is in a heap o' trouble if he/she loses their job. A 20 year old is merely out for a while - an older worker might as well try selling insurance.
Oversimplified? Of course. A lot of it is simple monkey politics - mentors and protectors, ins and outs, alphas and betas, appearance and perception above all else. Skills and dedication mean bupkis if no one cares to notice.
I still think that starting your own business is one of the few ways of getting out from under people politics. Of course, then you enter the realm of CUSTOMER politics, but that's another story.
The best revenge is long term. In 8-10 years, your boss and fellow workers will be nearly unemployable, whilst you will be merely less young.
Everything is in front of you; just wait for it.
But, remember what it felt like to be discriminated against for you age when youare peering at someone's resume some day. Judge on the merits, or the potential, not the calendar, when you are the hirer.
"Computer Science is as much about computers as Astronomy is about telescopes".
Mayhap it should be called something else,then.
Curious; as a tech school programmer, essentially a plumber, I have to ask: is all that you listed useful in any way for a programmer, in the long run? I know it's required, and it certainly opens your mind to rigorous discipline, but does anyone use it?
Sometimes I think the world just needs better plumbers. Or better plumbing.
Is it possible computing is just a bit overcomplex for what it actually does?
Well, the majority of the energy generated in a gasoline engine is simply wasted as heat. Putting therocouples into the engine block, say, would not make the engine work harder at all. There is an abundance of wasted energy ready to tap at many points.
It's not perpetual motion, but an attempt to retain energy that is now simply radiated away.
Really? Heard about Peewee in the last couple of days? Someone dropped a quarter on him, alleging kiddie porn, so his hard drives were seized, and now he is being ridiculed anew for his porn collection they are finding -- amazing, since it should have been a secret cataloging by the cops...
BTW, no kiddie porn. But his career is being wrecked -- again.
The Slashdot crowd is the very opposite of ignorant.
begin:
"The anti-ashcroft FUD needs to die. The turning of molehills into mountains needs to stop. I used to work for an ISP and the FBi would routinely ask for IP information and identity information. This worked two ways, because if we were cooperative then they were really cooperative in tracking someone who we had a beef against (like the asswad that trin00'ed us). "
The Church of Scientology dumped millions of gibberish posts into Usenet a few years back, to shut up critics, in a blantant DOS attack. Begging the Feds to do something was useless; they said they weren't interested unless some real monetary damage was involved. Want FBI involvement? Be rich and offended, they jump.
"The new law essentially lets the FBI get info to get _leads_. Under old law, the FBI could force you to give up info on someone already suspected of a crime. Now I think they can go further and try to find leads also. "
The law goes farther and lets them log anyone they want, anytime they want, without warrant, without oversight, without disclosure, forever.
Leads my sorry ass, they want to go fishing. They do not have the power to wiretap phones or open mail without warrant, tho they'd dearly like to. But now, the Internet is different. They can do anything they want. Log our keystrokes. Read our mail. Check our hard drives. Break into our houses to take a look around, without warrant.
"War" on terrorism, like "war" on drugs, or prostitution, or dissent, is interminable. And lest we forget, there is a little HOLE in the PATRIOT act. Bush and or Ashcroft can designate anything they like as terroristic. It's completely up to them. Ashcroft, for instance, not many months ago, described hackers as terrorists. Definitions are key.
What is happening is this. Like a pilot turning a barge, the extreme right wing is slowly changing the definitions of crimes, a nip at a time. They are establishing precedent to eliminate the Judiciary and the Congress from whatever campaigns they or their successors may attempt in the future. Trials, juries, rules of evidence, habeas corpus, say bye-bye. Trust them to do what's right, as they did, say, when they destroyed Clinton.
"Of course, none of this was in the slashdot blurb. Stop the negativity,"
No.
"the sensationalism, and the yellow journalism."
This from the group that made GroinGate America's Number One problem for two years, who attempted to overthrow an elected president, and who rejoiced in the installation of an unelected president. Yellow, dirty, filthy innuendo and lies have been the order of the day for the GOP for almost ten years; now everyone is supposed to be nice to the Powers That Be? What directed, purposeful hypocrisy.
Yellow journalism? Slashdot isn't a journal, firstly. Secondly, I'd welcome any kind of journalism back from the abyss it apparently dived into the past ten years, as the industry became soley profit-motivated and scandal-driven. Practically every cable outlet and news magazine has the GOP's hands up its puppet butt, and in the current atmosphere, it's a thousand times worse. Every damned show and mag I read seems to have writers and commentators that have been stunned with a sledgehammer to their foreheads. NO ONE will really critize Bush/Ashcroft/Rowe, who are respectively:
A guy who lost the presidency under any sane standard;
A religious fanatic who actively distrusts courts, and who, apparently, doesn't want any calico cats around him, because they are signs of Satan, and -- BTW, doesn't think anthrax threats against abortion providers as anything worth his attention;
A dirty trick master who was actively involved in the GOP undercover Jihad against the President for eight years, and even after his nasty little side whon their Jihad, he fabricated and spread the blantant lies about "thefts" and "destruction" by the previous admin.
"This is an _Open_ _Source_ _Development_ _Network_ for christ sake. It's not the _misinformed_ _anti-bush_ _activism_ _scare-mongering_ _network_. "
If it is, it's one of the damned few.
Actually, It's the "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" site. The fact that the net is now a police state IS PERTINENT. The fact, and it is a fact, that the "terrorist" powers that the executive branch has siezed as we lay mourning will someday be applied to hackers, dissidents, and anyone that Bush or the DOJ damned well feels like applying them to.
"Take your anti-RIAA/MS/BUSH/ASHCROFT/MPAA FUD and post it on usenet or something."
No.
Anti-Clinton vileness was de rigeur for almost ten years, with almost no respect for evidence, proportionality, or justice.
Bush is stealing trillions from our future, crippling the economy, attacking environment groups as traitors, destroying at least three amendments of the Bill of Rights, detaching the courts and Congress from decision making, and all in all following a radical agenda he denied having whilst he was running for office -- not that any damned reported ever grilled him the way they savaged Gore.
"Slashdot has become hypocrisy online. Every day it devotes space to content that is based on Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt (FUD (TM)). "
Slashdot is not a journal, it cannot be hypocritical, say, like the administration is. It is a collection of opinion, and if you don't like it, don't participate.
Those of us who can still think will still be here.
You like tax-free shopping on the Internet? You will disclose your personal information.
I don't see why that would be necessary. I don't see a connection.
You want regulations that keep bandwidth affordable? You will accept government monitoring of your private communicaton.
How does regulation keep it affordable? Hands-off government doesn't regulate bandwidth. Non sequitur.
You want to be/stay in business as an access provider? You will log everything and make those logs available on a whim.
Now, there's a true statement. Blackmail on the most primitive level. Do what we say, or men with guns shut you down, and the DOJ ruins you with legal fees.
Heil Ashcroft. Watch out for those calico cats; Ashroft believes they are symbols of Satan.
I'll state this up front. I am not a networking expert, network programmer, or even a guest on The Battle of the Network Stars. *
What I am, tho, is someone who has been on this scene since '81. I remember the advent of fiber optic lines, and the promise of immense bandwidth Some Day, maybe in ten years...
In the mid Eighties, the talk was of laying the mighty fiber trucklines through major cities. I remember the day that downtown Chicago got it's first, GASP, fiber line down the middle of State Street (I think).
Speculation was rife about fiber to the house. Of course, the holdup was that it would cost roughly 500 -- that's five hundred -- dollars per household in '86 dollars to fiber the country up. No one wanted to shoulder that expense. No company wanted to do it -- the profit model couldn't be made to show it working as a business proposition.
I remember debate about letting it become a governemnt service, like water, or a regulated utility. Let taxpayer cash fund the structure of the net; the benefit would be laser beams for all, forever and ever, amen.
Well, the '80's marked the ascendency of the capitalist as a god, and business was our new religion. Public anything was communism, anti-profit, and besides, private biz could do it cheaper, faster, and without the bureaucracy.
We went ahead. Modems reached dizzying speeds of 28.8k, 56k... and the businesses who would pay the premium got T1/T3 lines. No fiber ever reached the citizen, except for a few private projects.
Curiously, as hardware became commodity priced, switches, routers, and their humongous bigger brothers became a cash cow for the companies that made them. Shakeouts occured, companies merged, profits stayed pretty high. Small ISPs couldn't compete with ever-bigger competitors, and died.
Here we are. 2001. And we still are using modems over 1890 Bell wire. And the phone bills still keep climbing, tho why is a mystery...
Here's the bad math. If we had fiber, say, 50 million homes and apartment complexes in the late '80's at guvmint expense, the total would have been:
$ 500.00 US * 50,000,000
= 25,000,000,000 bucks.
Let's adjust it a bit by assuming:
1. That even tho the per home cost of equipment should have dropped with that scale of manufacturing, the cost would have stayed about the same due to the enormous physical work necessary to lay glass pipes over entire cities and burbs.
2. That inflation would make it, say for the fun of it, about $50,000,000,000 US in today's dollars.
3. The project would have taken, say, fifteen years.
Okay then. Per annum, 3 1/3 billion a year to fiber every one of fifty million homes. Hell, there weren't even that many PC's yet, so I'm overshooting.
For 3.33 bil a year, we could have replaced the phone system with a packet-switched digital model. Had video phones. Cable TV with thousands of channels. Video cameras on neighborhood networks, so that everyone could see what was going on around town. Cheap ways for bizes to connect with each other.
The upkeep cost of the system would be in the billions every year, not to mention the cost of fibering new customers all the time. Obsolesence would be a major pain, but we'd get by by standardizing on newer equipment using old standards, and do Good Enough overall.
Okay, so by today, we would all be connected by laser, running at rather interesting speeds. The equipment would become obsolete, but mostly at the neighborhood switch level and higher -- the customer setup would become commodity priced pretty quickly.
What do we have instead?
Okay, let's just say we have, um ten million cable modem subscribers now. Each pays $50 US a month.
That's 500,000,000 mil a month. For 128, 256, whatever, bandwidth.
That multiplied by 12 is $6,000,000,000 - six billion a year we shell out.
And under that biz model, there is no profit incentive, ever, to fiber our homes.
Think about it. Twiddle the numbers around. Don't forget businesses pay far higher prices for their connectivity as well. I left out the modem users and what THEY pay to the phone companies and ISPs.
How much has the free market cost us, and what have we gotten for it?
Shangri La: we had spent 3 billion or maybe more a year, in today's bucks, over a long period of time, to fiber everyone. Yay us.
Too expensive? What about all that Dark Fiber laid down in the last few years? Why innanameofGawd is everything so expensive when it wasn't all that hard to drop that fiber?
Reality: the mega-companies that are buying up and/or creating bandwidth are never going to fiber us, not at prices we can afford. And they also are becoming the same companies that additionally own the entertainment giants, so they want to monitor our net usage to make sure we don't steal their "property". They don't want us sharing bandwidth, or using too much bandwidth, because their profit models would be ruined.
That's business? A small group of rather wealthy companies get it all their own way, and we gave up fiber for this? 'Cause biz was better and cheaper?
I've watched the Great Experiment of the dereg of the telcos (now remerging), of the degreg of media, and I see that we are getting absolutely robbed, of not only our cash, but what the future should have been.
Hell, not the future, the PRESENT.
* Battle of the Network Stars was a really, really bad show in the '70's. Forget I mentioned it.
There are ecologists, environmentalists, and conservationists.
Ecologists are scientists studying the way life interrelates. Systems analysts, really.
Environmentalists are people that try to limit damage to the ecosphere by indifference, greed, or maliciousness.
Conservationists, like the Sierra Club, are not necessarily either of the two above. They are usually more conservative, politically, and don't have the fire of the environmentalists. They compromise; they support hunting; they can be both a backpacker and a driver of an SUV.
Notice I ddin't mention the Greens. They are environmentalists that are really pissed. And I can't blame them, really.
"the majority have been desensitized to any sort of reform that nobody even cares enough to vote any more on issues they have to directly live with. "
I agree about the apathy and its consequences: I take issue with the denial of our culpability for them.
The public has not "been desensitized". It was never sensitive, not ever through our country's history. It took brave men and precious few of them to fight for the rights inherent to all of us, and those men and women had to fight, fight the ignorance and apathy, greed and cynicism of their countrymen at every step.
Ignorance and bad thinking is endemic in our culture. Why are geeks geeks? Because they were the smart ones, the ones WHO READ A FRIGGIN' BOOK instead of watching sports or similar crap.
Remember "Tom Sawyer"? Remember the class plotting vengeance on the Smart Kid who made them all look bad? This is our history.
Slashdot Mirror
A manned shuttle would have wings, and would be able to glide or power back to a landing strip. Or, if it were a vertical lander, it could do a really fancy tail swing maneuver and touch down with rockets on.
An unmanned wingless craft could be permitted to go splash in the ocean.
Simple:
The use of the word "theft" is the key. As long as you misuse the word in this fashion, you will have a problem reconciling your beliefs about freedom and property.
"Theft" means someone was deprived the use of their property by its removal.
Copies do not deprive the owner of the use of their property. It merely can be argued that the owner did not get a right to control the copying, or is deprived of a fee they wish to impose. That, by the way, is a civil matter, not a criminal one.
At least was not until the DMCA, when it was made felonious and brought to the criminal courts instead of the civil.
Now, another thing 'fore I go: An owner of a copyright does not, NOT, own the material as a property. It has no physical existence. The owner owns the right to control the manufacture of copies.
The difference is absolutely crucial, and core to your intellectual conundrum.
Copiers don't STEAL, they COPY. They don't deprive, they multiply property.
The use of the word "theft" is a word&@*%.
I believe about a hundred million of us voted. And voted for Gore, by over a half million votes.
Maybe voter apathy, next time, will be inspired by The Supreme Court Rightmost Five's bald-faced installation of a president guaranteed to install someone of their own ideological persuasion on the SC, so that the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation ilk will steamroller our laws into far-right shapes for decades to come.
That decision broke my heart, and I have quite a big one. To paraphrase what majority said: "This decision applies to this case only, and is not to be used as a precedent in any similar case". "The resumption of the recount will cease because it may cause damage to George W. Bush"... oh yeah.
I dissent indeed.
What odious, vile... oh, forget it. There are no appropriate words for what Scalia and company did to us.
So, for the first time in my life, I am apathetic to the process. The NY Times, the Grey Lady herself, spinning the private recount last year into a win for Bush, when with overvotes, Gore won; undervotes, Gore won; with every scenario but one, Gore won. When the press itself becomes a lapdog for the conservatives, there is no hope. Got to wait for another century. The election was stolen, and the story can't even be told because of mass denial on the parts of the very people we expect to defend us from such evil.
There won't even be a choice next election. No one could even make a peep without the Death Machine, honed over the last nine years, ruining them financially and socially.
Gloom, gloom. We have a dictator, Houston...
It's about as safe as a cigarette lighter, which no one seems to have problems with.
Also, you drive every day in front of the massive bomb you call your car's gas tank.
It's just a matter of fear, and familiarity.
I believe it extrudes CO2. Like, say, our mouths do.
Do they let you on with a cigarette lighter?
And also, doesn't your point illustrate how silly our paranoia has become?
It's not the government. A common mistake.
It's business, specifically megacorporations that use our free-market campaign financing laws to buy laws that micromanage citizens to death.
Government really doesn't exist as an entity, and moreover, isn't motivated to steal our freedom, whatever Randites believe. In a way, our government is in the business of selling freedom.
Ah, but business, business exists to squeeze every possbile shekel, at the cost of our freedoms if necessary, from the citizenry. And corporations are the ultimate amoral thieves of freedom - they don't really exist, are nearly impossible to sue, and have no responiblity to coexist with their power. Save one: make money.
WE are the government. Hating it is like hating the face you see in the mirror.
Well, so sayeth the law, but don't believe everything the law says. There are hundreds of ways to get rid of over-40's withut tripping the age alarm, and anyway, even if it is blatant, it's a matter of getting someone to give a rat's ass if you are fired because of your age.
All in all, better to be young than poor. An IT worker over 40 is in a heap o' trouble if he/she loses their job. A 20 year old is merely out for a while - an older worker might as well try selling insurance.
Oversimplified? Of course. A lot of it is simple monkey politics - mentors and protectors, ins and outs, alphas and betas, appearance and perception above all else. Skills and dedication mean bupkis if no one cares to notice.
I still think that starting your own business is one of the few ways of getting out from under people politics. Of course, then you enter the realm of CUSTOMER politics, but that's another story.
The best revenge is long term. In 8-10 years, your boss and fellow workers will be nearly unemployable, whilst you will be merely less young.
Everything is in front of you; just wait for it.
But, remember what it felt like to be discriminated against for you age when youare peering at someone's resume some day. Judge on the merits, or the potential, not the calendar, when you are the hirer.
Um, what about us Americans who don't speak Finnish? Can we play?
From your comment, I infer that at least some of the courses are online. True? I'm curious.
"Computer Science is as much about computers as Astronomy is about telescopes".
Mayhap it should be called something else,then.
Curious; as a tech school programmer, essentially a plumber, I have to ask: is all that you listed useful in any way for a programmer, in the long run? I know it's required, and it certainly opens your mind to rigorous discipline, but does anyone use it?
Sometimes I think the world just needs better plumbers. Or better plumbing.
Is it possible computing is just a bit overcomplex for what it actually does?
Don't mention the Gnutella sources of the mp3's either...
That sums up part of the deal. For one year, he has to not break American law WHILE HE IS LIVING IN RUSSIA.
Is this Pournelle's American Empire at last? Has anyone noticed that the DOJ now claims worldwide powers?
So fast, so fast it's happening...
Well, the majority of the energy generated in a gasoline engine is simply wasted as heat. Putting therocouples into the engine block, say, would not make the engine work harder at all. There is an abundance of wasted energy ready to tap at many points.
It's not perpetual motion, but an attempt to retain energy that is now simply radiated away.
Really? Heard about Peewee in the last couple of days? Someone dropped a quarter on him, alleging kiddie porn, so his hard drives were seized, and now he is being ridiculed anew for his porn collection they are finding -- amazing, since it should have been a secret cataloging by the cops...
BTW, no kiddie porn. But his career is being wrecked -- again.
IT IS THE FIFTIES, REDUX.
The Slashdot crowd is the very opposite of ignorant.
begin:
"The anti-ashcroft FUD needs to die. The turning of molehills into mountains needs to stop. I used to work for an ISP and the FBi would routinely ask for IP information and identity information. This worked two ways, because if we were cooperative then they were really cooperative in tracking someone who we had a beef against (like the asswad that trin00'ed us). "
The Church of Scientology dumped millions of gibberish posts into Usenet a few years back, to shut up critics, in a blantant DOS attack. Begging the Feds to do something was useless; they said they weren't interested unless some real monetary damage was involved. Want FBI involvement? Be rich and offended, they jump.
"The new law essentially lets the FBI get info to get _leads_. Under old law, the FBI could force you to give up info on someone already suspected of a crime. Now I think they can go further and try to find leads also. "
The law goes farther and lets them log anyone they want, anytime they want, without warrant, without oversight, without disclosure, forever.
Leads my sorry ass, they want to go fishing. They do not have the power to wiretap phones or open mail without warrant, tho they'd dearly like to. But now, the Internet is different. They can do anything they want. Log our keystrokes. Read our mail. Check our hard drives. Break into our houses to take a look around, without warrant.
"War" on terrorism, like "war" on drugs, or prostitution, or dissent, is interminable. And lest we forget, there is a little HOLE in the PATRIOT act. Bush and or Ashcroft can designate anything they like as terroristic. It's completely up to them. Ashcroft, for instance, not many months ago, described hackers as terrorists. Definitions are key.
What is happening is this. Like a pilot turning a barge, the extreme right wing is slowly changing the definitions of crimes, a nip at a time. They are establishing precedent to eliminate the Judiciary and the Congress from whatever campaigns they or their successors may attempt in the future. Trials, juries, rules of evidence, habeas corpus, say bye-bye. Trust them to do what's right, as they did, say, when they destroyed Clinton.
"Of course, none of this was in the slashdot blurb. Stop the negativity,"
No.
"the sensationalism, and the yellow journalism."
This from the group that made GroinGate America's Number One problem for two years, who attempted to overthrow an elected president, and who rejoiced in the installation of an unelected president. Yellow, dirty, filthy innuendo and lies have been the order of the day for the GOP for almost ten years; now everyone is supposed to be nice to the Powers That Be? What directed, purposeful hypocrisy.
Yellow journalism? Slashdot isn't a journal, firstly. Secondly, I'd welcome any kind of journalism back from the abyss it apparently dived into the past ten years, as the industry became soley profit-motivated and scandal-driven. Practically every cable outlet and news magazine has the GOP's hands up its puppet butt, and in the current atmosphere, it's a thousand times worse. Every damned show and mag I read seems to have writers and commentators that have been stunned with a sledgehammer to their foreheads. NO ONE will really critize Bush/Ashcroft/Rowe, who are respectively:
A guy who lost the presidency under any sane standard;
A religious fanatic who actively distrusts courts, and who, apparently, doesn't want any calico cats around him, because they are signs of Satan, and -- BTW, doesn't think anthrax threats against abortion providers as anything worth his attention;
A dirty trick master who was actively involved in the GOP undercover Jihad against the President for eight years, and even after his nasty little side whon their Jihad, he fabricated and spread the blantant lies about "thefts" and "destruction" by the previous admin.
"This is an _Open_ _Source_ _Development_ _Network_ for christ sake. It's not the _misinformed_ _anti-bush_ _activism_ _scare-mongering_ _network_. "
If it is, it's one of the damned few.
Actually, It's the "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" site. The fact that the net is now a police state IS PERTINENT. The fact, and it is a fact, that the "terrorist" powers that the executive branch has siezed as we lay mourning will someday be applied to hackers, dissidents, and anyone that Bush or the DOJ damned well feels like applying them to.
"Take your anti-RIAA/MS/BUSH/ASHCROFT/MPAA FUD and post it on usenet or something."
No.
Anti-Clinton vileness was de rigeur for almost ten years, with almost no respect for evidence, proportionality, or justice.
Bush is stealing trillions from our future, crippling the economy, attacking environment groups as traitors, destroying at least three amendments of the Bill of Rights, detaching the courts and Congress from decision making, and all in all following a radical agenda he denied having whilst he was running for office -- not that any damned reported ever grilled him the way they savaged Gore.
"Slashdot has become hypocrisy online. Every day it devotes space to content that is based on Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt (FUD (TM)). "
Slashdot is not a journal, it cannot be hypocritical, say, like the administration is. It is a collection of opinion, and if you don't like it, don't participate.
Those of us who can still think will still be here.
I don't see why that would be necessary. I don't see a connection.
How does regulation keep it affordable? Hands-off government doesn't regulate bandwidth. Non sequitur.
Now, there's a true statement. Blackmail on the most primitive level. Do what we say, or men with guns shut you down, and the DOJ ruins you with legal fees.
Heil Ashcroft. Watch out for those calico cats; Ashroft believes they are symbols of Satan.
I'll state this up front. I am not a networking expert, network programmer, or even a guest on The Battle of the Network Stars. *
What I am, tho, is someone who has been on this scene since '81. I remember the advent of fiber optic lines, and the promise of immense bandwidth Some Day, maybe in ten years...
In the mid Eighties, the talk was of laying the mighty fiber trucklines through major cities. I remember the day that downtown Chicago got it's first, GASP, fiber line down the middle of State Street (I think).
Speculation was rife about fiber to the house. Of course, the holdup was that it would cost roughly 500 -- that's five hundred -- dollars per household in '86 dollars to fiber the country up. No one wanted to shoulder that expense. No company wanted to do it -- the profit model couldn't be made to show it working as a business proposition.
I remember debate about letting it become a governemnt service, like water, or a regulated utility. Let taxpayer cash fund the structure of the net; the benefit would be laser beams for all, forever and ever, amen.
Well, the '80's marked the ascendency of the capitalist as a god, and business was our new religion. Public anything was communism, anti-profit, and besides, private biz could do it cheaper, faster, and without the bureaucracy.
We went ahead. Modems reached dizzying speeds of 28.8k, 56k... and the businesses who would pay the premium got T1/T3 lines. No fiber ever reached the citizen, except for a few private projects.
Curiously, as hardware became commodity priced, switches, routers, and their humongous bigger brothers became a cash cow for the companies that made them. Shakeouts occured, companies merged, profits stayed pretty high. Small ISPs couldn't compete with ever-bigger competitors, and died.
Here we are. 2001. And we still are using modems over 1890 Bell wire. And the phone bills still keep climbing, tho why is a mystery...
Here's the bad math. If we had fiber, say, 50 million homes and apartment complexes in the late '80's at guvmint expense, the total would have been:
$ 500.00 US * 50,000,000
= 25,000,000,000 bucks.
Let's adjust it a bit by assuming:
1. That even tho the per home cost of equipment should have dropped with that scale of manufacturing, the cost would have stayed about the same due to the enormous physical work necessary to lay glass pipes over entire cities and burbs.
2. That inflation would make it, say for the fun of it, about $50,000,000,000 US in today's dollars.
3. The project would have taken, say, fifteen years.
Okay then. Per annum, 3 1/3 billion a year to fiber every one of fifty million homes. Hell, there weren't even that many PC's yet, so I'm overshooting.
For 3.33 bil a year, we could have replaced the phone system with a packet-switched digital model. Had video phones. Cable TV with thousands of channels. Video cameras on neighborhood networks, so that everyone could see what was going on around town. Cheap ways for bizes to connect with each other.
The upkeep cost of the system would be in the billions every year, not to mention the cost of fibering new customers all the time. Obsolesence would be a major pain, but we'd get by by standardizing on newer equipment using old standards, and do Good Enough overall.
Okay, so by today, we would all be connected by laser, running at rather interesting speeds. The equipment would become obsolete, but mostly at the neighborhood switch level and higher -- the customer setup would become commodity priced pretty quickly.
What do we have instead?
Okay, let's just say we have, um ten million cable modem subscribers now. Each pays $50 US a month.
That's 500,000,000 mil a month. For 128, 256, whatever, bandwidth.
That multiplied by 12 is $6,000,000,000 - six billion a year we shell out.
And under that biz model, there is no profit incentive, ever, to fiber our homes.
Think about it. Twiddle the numbers around. Don't forget businesses pay far higher prices for their connectivity as well. I left out the modem users and what THEY pay to the phone companies and ISPs.
How much has the free market cost us, and what have we gotten for it?
Shangri La: we had spent 3 billion or maybe more a year, in today's bucks, over a long period of time, to fiber everyone. Yay us.
Too expensive? What about all that Dark Fiber laid down in the last few years? Why innanameofGawd is everything so expensive when it wasn't all that hard to drop that fiber?
Reality: the mega-companies that are buying up and/or creating bandwidth are never going to fiber us, not at prices we can afford. And they also are becoming the same companies that additionally own the entertainment giants, so they want to monitor our net usage to make sure we don't steal their "property". They don't want us sharing bandwidth, or using too much bandwidth, because their profit models would be ruined.
That's business? A small group of rather wealthy companies get it all their own way, and we gave up fiber for this? 'Cause biz was better and cheaper?
I've watched the Great Experiment of the dereg of the telcos (now remerging), of the degreg of media, and I see that we are getting absolutely robbed, of not only our cash, but what the future should have been.
Hell, not the future, the PRESENT.
* Battle of the Network Stars was a really, really bad show in the '70's. Forget I mentioned it.
There are ecologists, environmentalists, and conservationists.
Ecologists are scientists studying the way life interrelates. Systems analysts, really.
Environmentalists are people that try to limit damage to the ecosphere by indifference, greed, or maliciousness.
Conservationists, like the Sierra Club, are not necessarily either of the two above. They are usually more conservative, politically, and don't have the fire of the environmentalists. They compromise; they support hunting; they can be both a backpacker and a driver of an SUV.
Notice I ddin't mention the Greens. They are environmentalists that are really pissed. And I can't blame them, really.
Wow. Fix it, take the time. Post it here. Pretty damned good.
Last summer, I was a-wanderin' down my street, and lo, there was a Fed Ex truck double parked to the right of me.
Overhead and moving fast, a package launched from the truck landed hard and skidded on the greystone's front stoop.
I looked at the driver; he said, "You didn't see that."
I agreed I didn't.
Fed Ex, UPS, it's all the same -- don't judge by brand. Men will still throw packages around, because it's fun.
"the majority have been desensitized to any sort of reform that nobody even cares enough to vote any more on issues they have to directly live with. "
I agree about the apathy and its consequences: I take issue with the denial of our culpability for them.
The public has not "been desensitized". It was never sensitive, not ever through our country's history. It took brave men and precious few of them to fight for the rights inherent to all of us, and those men and women had to fight, fight the ignorance and apathy, greed and cynicism of their countrymen at every step.
Ignorance and bad thinking is endemic in our culture. Why are geeks geeks? Because they were the smart ones, the ones WHO READ A FRIGGIN' BOOK instead of watching sports or similar crap.
Remember "Tom Sawyer"? Remember the class plotting vengeance on the Smart Kid who made them all look bad? This is our history.
Um, no, the comics are still coming out. Go thou to a comic book store and see.
Sigh, I must be the spelling cop...
It's "Hear, Hear!" not "Here, Here!"
I believe that Apple originally licensed the Firewire tech at one US dollar per port.
They have since reduced that price, and basically give it away.