Size and bandwidth are only loosely related. Most DVD drives are not capable of outperforming ethernet, or even good wifi, so the speed of the LAN should be no problem.
Yes. Please pay attention. I'm not defending ISPs in any way. What I am defending is overselling. Whenever these stories appear, a whole swarm of idiots come out of the woodwork and say that it's due to overselling. It's not. It's due to a lack of capacity. Overselling is not the problem and it does not deserve criticism.
If TCP/IP had been encrypted from the beginning, we'd be worse off, not better.
Why? Because any crypto available from that time is trivially crackable today. So instead of an obviously insecure communications medium, you'd have an insecure communications medium that everyone thinks is secure because, hey, it's encrypted! It wouldn't change anything except make people more complacent.
So you don't enjoy work, you don't really enjoy women... and you're trying to convince us that your way of life is better?
I love my wife. She gives me a deep emotional fulfillment that you simply don't get from quickie short-term partners. I also get to have sex with her often.
I also love my job. I essentially get paid to sit at home and tinker with fun stuff on my computer all day long, but with enough structure around it that I can ship the product of my labor so that thousands of people get to use it.
You get no emotional fulfillment from women. It sounds like you have much less sex than I do as well. Your job does nothing for you but suck up your time and give you some money. So why are you acting like we should envy you?
As well as problems with uneven distribution which other posters covered, you also assume that having sex with an infected woman automatically means that you get infected. This completely ignores the realities of disease transmission (exposure does not automatically equal infection) and the effects of prophylactics.
And I'm not saying that marriage is the best thing for everybody, or that it gives you the best results in all areas. But we're not talking about finances or answering for your actions, we're talking about sex. And the studies show that married couples, on average, have more and better sex than singles who go out and eventually accumulate dozens or hundreds of one-time sex partners.
So obvious that everybody knows about it and solves it.
It's not a problem. You size your infrastructure for peak demand. Yes, that peak demand tends to happen between 6PM and 11PM. Yes, a lot more people use their connection a lot more than they do at other times of the day. But no, that peak demand is still well below the theoretical maximum. If you oversell by sizing your network to average demand then, yes, you will fail hard. But if you oversell by sizing your network to actual peak demand then you will succeed in providing what you promise while still provisioning only a small fraction of the theoretical maximum usage.
The concept of overselling isn't very hard to grasp. I don't know why so many people here just don't get it. Aren't you people supposed to be smart?
Really? How do you oversell and not monitor and throttle if all of your customers start using P2P and leave their computers online all the time? It'll be like everyone picking up their phones and connecting to each other just to listen to music all day long. How do you oversell if all of your customers turn into faeries with giant butterfly wings? Your statement is nonsensical. Not all customers start using P2P and leave their computers online all the time. Even with the current rise of P2P, most customers are offline most of the time. Your peak rate is still vastly lower than what you would need if every single user were downloading at the maximum rate simultaneously. Overselling still works fine in this environment as long as you provision the infrastructure to match demand. The problem is not overselling. The problem is ISPs not upgrading their infrastructure to match demand.
No, it's not. The statistical maximums take that usage into account. Proper provisioning does not involve making some worthless model of an ideal customer that never interacts with the real world. It means you look at actual usage, and actual growth rates, project usage into the future, and upgrade your infrastructure to suit.
Just because your ISP doesn't have the capacity to handle every single customer downloading at the maximum rate simultaneously does not mean they're doing anything wrong, because that never happens. As long as they can handle the actual peak loads then they're doing everything right. Yes, automated access increases peak loads, but they still don't come anywhere close to the theoretical maximum.
Whining about how ISPs don't provision to match theoretical maximum loads is equivalent to whining that ISPs don't have 90% unused capacity sitting around all the time accomplishing absolutely nothing beyond driving up the price you pay for service. It's like complaining about rush-hour traffic in your area by saying that the city should build 500-lane highways to handle the case where every single car in the region is on that highway simultaneously.
Sex tends to decrease after a while in any relationship. The wedding ceremony just gives you a convenient marker at which to start counting and to be nostalgic about.
In a lot of marriages it has nothing to do with the fact of being married, but just that people's lives change. Most people get busier as they get older, which leaves less time for romance and sex. No surprise, a guy working 60 hours a week at a salaried "we really mean overtime" position to pay for a heavily mortgaged house will have less time for sex than a guy working 30 hours a week and living in an apartment. But the same thing would happen if you stayed single, too!
In any case, if you have one-night stands with a couple hundred partners (I realize that some of these partners may not have been one night stands) then that's still only a couple of years' worth of slow once-a-week-or-two married sex.
Of course, as you imply, humans like variety. There's certainly something to be said for being able to have many different partners. But that's not the only, or even the primary, criterion for judging the quality of one's sex life.
I disagree. Advertising as unlimited is perfectly reasonable, if you can provide it. There's nothing that says you can't. This should be obvious simply by observing that a huge number of ISPs over a very long period of time have advertised and provided unlimited access with no problems.
The problem comes when you no longer want to provide it but still want to advertise it, which is what these large US ISPs are beginning to do, and this is indeed unreasonable.
Back to the beer analogy, let's say you sell a beer subscription that's limited to 1 beer an hour but is otherwise unlimited. However you only provision your restaurant for 10 beers an hour despite the fact that you've sold 100 subscriptions. Nothing wrong with this so far. If you worked out your numbers to see what your peak demand is and that peak demand is 10, then you're in good shape!
The problem comes when people start drinking more, and so your peak demand increases past 10 beers per hour. At this point you have two honorable choices. One is to say, sorry, we can no longer offer the unlimited subscription, would you like a subscription which comes with 30 beers per month, and a charge per each beer after that? Another is to increase your supply of beer. If your subscribers are now peaking at 15 beers per hour then arrange for that amount to be delivered. Unfortunately these US ISPs are taking a cowardly way out. They are, essentially, continuing to offer the unlimited beers but are finding all the guys who constantly come in for one beer every hour nonstop, intercepting them on the way out the restaurant, dragging them into the alley, and beating them up.
But if you just increase your supply to match the actual demand, there's nothing wrong with overselling while advertising unlimited service, since that is in fact exactly what you are providing.
Exactly right. So complain about insufficient capacity, and not about overselling which is necessary, common, and entirely reasonable.
It just gets me how it seems like everybody in these discussions does not actually understand reality. "Ooh, the evil cable company promised 100 people in my neighborhood 5MBit connections but they don't actually have 500Mbit of bandwidth serving us! What a bunch of liars!" Sorry guys, but that's not actually how it works!
Now if people will complain about a lack of capacity then I'll be right there with them. But everybody just jumps straight to complaining about "overselling" and it makes them look like a bunch of fools.
To take your analogy, if you know from past behavior that you can sell beer "subscriptions" and only purchase half the beer that your subscriptions would require because most of your customers won't drink their full subscription, this is just good business practice and it's a good thing to do.
I've only ever had sex with one woman. But in terms of the number of times I've had sex, you'll have to have those hundreds of one-night-stand partners to match it. And since we know each other well, probably 99% of the time it is very good. She never fumbles around or bails out early or ends up being really disgusting underneath the clothes or turns out not to bathe all that frequently.
Sure, you'll beat me on pure number of partners, unless something extremely unusual happens to both our lives. But I have no idea why that metric matters at all. Quantity of sex, yes, and quality of sex, definitely. The advantage in quantity goes to the committed and married people on average. The advantage in quality almost always goes to the partners who have been together a while and know each other well.
Of course I don't know these things personally, but then again neither do you, unless you followed up those 35-45+ partners with a long-term commitment that you haven't mentioned, and the studies back up my side of things.
Everybody in my neighborhood picked up the phone at the same time and half of them couldn't get through!
Overselling is not a bad thing. It can just mean that you sell based on statistical maximums rather than theoretical maximums which never happen. When done this way, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
When 90% of your customers are offline at any given time, there's no point in provisioning more than one tenth of the bandwidth you would need to support all of them downloading at the maximum rate simultaneously.
The problem is not overselling. The problem is that some ISPs oversell too much. They aren't willing increase capacity to match actual use, but instead try to reduce usage to match actual capacity. This is wrong. But the simple fact of overselling is the only sane way to do business.
I'm curious as to how you can claim that cable was incumbent but DSL had to roll out new stuff. The two technologies are essentially identical as far as required additional infrastructure. In both cases, the wires were already there but new equipment had to be installed at the user end and big expensive new equipment had to be installed at each central office at the provider end.
OSX is intrinsically more secure than Windows There fixed that for you. Was there some event I missed where it was decided that you no longer look like a total asshole when you change someone's quote and reply with "fixed that for you"?
If I give you a plow, you can't use it for anything but making food. What if I use it to grow flowers, or cocaine, or to hit people over the head?
If I give you a sword, you can't feed yourself with it without killing people. What if I use it to dig up potatoes, or to cut down wheat?
And this, folks, is why cooperatives never work on the large scale. They're simply too detached from reality.
If you don't like that, how about the scenario where your boss fires you,
That's why we have an employment court.
And the court will only let you keep your job if the firing was for a very bad reason. In most states in the US your boss can fire you just because he feels like it and there's nothing you can do about it. And how about the marriage question? Divorcing someone is a great way to ruin their life, so government really ought to put a stop to that.
Replace "people" with "politicians" and you start to see where the trouble lies.
As long as it isn't defamatory, you won't have a problem... in a free society. And if you don't have a free society you won't have real freedom of speech anyway.
And what if it is defamatory? Or at least is close enough that you can't risk the potential loss of being found guilty for it?
"Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me."
That's simply not true, even when taken in context. It's been shown that verbal bullying can cause genuine physical harm. Humans are social creatures by instinct, after all.
As far as I know this is only true in situations where people are trapped with their abusers, such as in the glorified prisons we call primary and secondary schools. The rules for children are different. Adults can simply walk away.
It's easy, just have a strong will and a strong character.
That's very nice for you; do please remember this wasn't a choice.
Character and will is something you can build.
Saying that because you wouldn't care makes it OK is just like a bully saying that he wouldn't care if someone hit him, so that makes it OK for him to hit someone else.
You asked if I was somehow immune. When I tell you why I am immune you don't get to suddenly act as though it's some attempt at a generalized justification.
This kind of thing doesn't bother me because I don't give a crap what most people think about me.
Antisocial much?
How ironic. My inspiration for that attitude comes from one of the most notoriously social genius ever to walk the face of the earth, Richard Feynman. He wrote (well, more like dictated) an autobiographical book called "What do you care what other people think?" He was also widely known for being extremely friendly and highly outgoing. Seriously, why should I care what random strangers think about me?
Besides, you may not care what they think about you, but you'd care if they started refusing to sell you food, kicked you out of your apartment, fired you, etc.
I own my own home, remember that property ownership discussion? This is one reason why land ownership ought to be a strongly guarded right. In any case, if someone is able to convince such an enormous population that I'm that evil, then either what he's saying is true and doesn't come under the normal definition of slander, or they're a bunch of weak-minded assholes I wouldn't want to be associated with anyway.
Ironically the most likely way for what you describe to happen in the US today would be if you were forced to register as a sex offender. This can happen either falsely, if you were wrongly convicted, or misleadingly, if you were convicted for a "sex crime" such as statutory rape while a minor which most people wouldn't care about. And this is all done under the guise of protecting people!
Do you remember the slashdot story about the guy whose credit card was used to buy child porn?
Not at all. But that would be covered adequately under theft laws.
It's completely different. Physical attacks are inherently harmful, verbal attacks are not.
Nonsense.
I'm going to need a cite for this if you're going to claim that verba
Design cost is enormous, frequently outweighing manufacturing cost even for large runs of units. It is, quite simply, cheaper to make one design and sell it everywhere than it is to make a new "cheap" design without these useless features. You'd end up paying more and getting less, and what would be the point?
Every time I'm at the grocery store, trying to choose between one brand of juice that's $4.12/gallon and another brand that's $0.04/ounce, I pray for a switch.
Being able to trivially interconvert between different units for the same kind of value is quite valuable in everyday life.
Are you honestly asserting that it would be fair if anyone could ruin your life and you weren't allowed to do anything about it? Yep. "Ruin your life" is not something that I think the legal system should protect against in the general case. You can ruin someone's life by, say, selling a better product for less money and driving them to bankruptcy through entirely legitimate means. That's different; gambling with bankruptcy on a business venture is a choice, and in any case there's no fraud or other wrongdoing involved in this scenario. You're changing your position here. Look at the original quote at the top; you never said it would be OK if the ultimate situation started with my own choice. The scenario I gave is one where someone could ruin my life and I'm not allowed to do anything about it, as you said, and yes I'm asserting that this is fair.
If you don't like that, how about the scenario where your boss fires you, or your wife divorces you? Sure, I guess you theoretically have a choice as to whether you want to take a job or get married, but that's a pretty crappy position to take in my mind.
This is exactly the opposite of what I think. The ability to say what you want is fundamental to a free society, I fail to see how not being allowed to slander people comprises a harmful limitation on your freedom, any more than not being allowed to hit them does. It would seem to be just another case of hurt feelings due to an unreasonable (and irrational) expectation. Replace "people" with "politicians" and you start to see where the trouble lies. If I had the legitimate threat of a court case hanging over me every time I said something bad about a politician or a powerful business leader, I would be extremely reluctant to say anything bad about them. Yes, the truth is a defense in theory, but in practice the guy with the most lawyers tends to win.
and if your life is set up such that someone can destroy it with mere words then that's your own fault. Blame the victim? Did you forget about the part where I don't agree with you? There is no victim to blame here. "Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me." I learned that in the second grade. Letting words hurt you is a choice.
I fail to see how anyone could avoid being vulnerable to defamation, short of living on a mountaintop somewhere. It's easy, just have a strong will and a strong character. This kind of thing doesn't bother me because I don't give a crap what most people think about me. The people whose opinions matter to me are also those who wouldn't listen to somebody else spreading lies about me.
And, again, this sort of excuse is no different from someone saying that "if you're too weak to hit back then that's your own fault". It's completely different. Physical attacks are inherently harmful, verbal attacks are not. It is the government's responsibility to physically protect you from others, but not to mentally protect you. If you don't like what I'm saying, just stop listening!
As for anti-dumping regulations, these only apply in rare cases (foreign companies, monopolies) and in any case I think that they're wrong too. Don't try to trap me into a "contradiction" by pointing out that my views don't agree with how the laws are in reality, because I already know this to be the case.
As for your "fairness" thing, no, you just used a different word with the same meaning. It has no more significance than before. You're just using fairness as a mechanism to explain that you think freedom from slander is more important than freedom of speech. If you're going to break the concept of fairness down into each individual way people can hurt one another, you're going to have to make a very long list. Well, the problem is there: people do not agree on what is fair. You can either ignore the problem, or you can try to deal with it by spelling out exactly what is fair to you.
Are you honestly asserting that it would be fair if anyone could ruin your life and you weren't allowed to do anything about it? Yep. "Ruin your life" is not something that I think the legal system should protect against in the general case. You can ruin someone's life by, say, selling a better product for less money and driving them to bankruptcy through entirely legitimate means. Should that be illegal? I certainly don't think so. Government sets up the ground rules for society but then lets it play out freely. They are not there to protect you from everything.
[...] I think that it is much more unfair to be legally penalized for something I say than it is for a slanderer to go unpunished. The problem is, anybody could use that sort of excuse; no doubt the average bully thinks it would be much more unfair to penalize him for hitting someone than it would be for assault to go unpunished. Perhaps my use of the personal pronoun confused matters. Let me try it again. I think that it is much more unfair for anyone to be legally penalized for something they say than it is for a slanderer to go unpunished.
Fairness is about weighing alternate harms. Defamation laws, like laws against assault, cause little harm beyond perhaps hurt feelings; defamation itself can cause enormous harm. This is exactly the opposite of what I think. The ability to say what you want is fundamental to a free society, and if your life is set up such that someone can destroy it with mere words then that's your own fault.
If land were just sitting there with nobody owning it then I could be persuaded to agree with you, but the fact is that most land in most countries belongs to someone now. If you take that away from them then it's no better than taking anything else they own.
As for your "fairness" thing, no, you just used a different word with the same meaning. It has no more significance than before. You're just using fairness as a mechanism to explain that you think freedom from slander is more important than freedom of speech. I think you'll find that essentially everybody believes in justice, fairness, or whatever you call it, so it's meaningless to say that you do. What changes is exactly what each person thinks justice is. I also believe in justice and fairness just like every other human, but I think that it is much more unfair to be legally penalized for something I say than it is for a slanderer to go unpunished.
Yes, by your definition I believe that the right to free speech is "inherent", as is the right to property. Any state which forbids the ownership of private property is evil. However I don't like the use of the word "inherent", as it simply doesn't fit here in my mind. It's not part of the essential nature of humanity, it's an artificial construct. "Inherent" would, to my mind, be used to describe things that are part of being human no matter what the circumstances, such as the ability to love, or feel hunger. Saying that people have the inherent right to X when so many people don't have that right in practice is just pointless.
And no, I don't think that true right and wrong are culturally relative, even though many cultures disagree on what is right and wrong.
My belief that free speech is an absolute right is essentially a pointless matter of philosophy, yes. It's one of the strong guiding principles behind my ideas of politics but it doesn't actually change the world in any way, other than changing my individual actions.
Your statement at the end that you consider the right to justice to be more important than the right to free speech is also meaningless. "Justice" is what you get when right prevails over wrong. The strength of the right to free speech is part of what determines what is right and wrong. The right to justice is essentially outside all others, because the relative strengths of all the others simply determines what justice is.
Slashdot Mirror
Size and bandwidth are only loosely related. Most DVD drives are not capable of outperforming ethernet, or even good wifi, so the speed of the LAN should be no problem.
Yes. Please pay attention. I'm not defending ISPs in any way. What I am defending is overselling. Whenever these stories appear, a whole swarm of idiots come out of the woodwork and say that it's due to overselling. It's not. It's due to a lack of capacity. Overselling is not the problem and it does not deserve criticism.
If TCP/IP had been encrypted from the beginning, we'd be worse off, not better.
Why? Because any crypto available from that time is trivially crackable today. So instead of an obviously insecure communications medium, you'd have an insecure communications medium that everyone thinks is secure because, hey, it's encrypted! It wouldn't change anything except make people more complacent.
So you don't enjoy work, you don't really enjoy women... and you're trying to convince us that your way of life is better?
I love my wife. She gives me a deep emotional fulfillment that you simply don't get from quickie short-term partners. I also get to have sex with her often.
I also love my job. I essentially get paid to sit at home and tinker with fun stuff on my computer all day long, but with enough structure around it that I can ship the product of my labor so that thousands of people get to use it.
You get no emotional fulfillment from women. It sounds like you have much less sex than I do as well. Your job does nothing for you but suck up your time and give you some money. So why are you acting like we should envy you?
As well as problems with uneven distribution which other posters covered, you also assume that having sex with an infected woman automatically means that you get infected. This completely ignores the realities of disease transmission (exposure does not automatically equal infection) and the effects of prophylactics.
And I'm not saying that marriage is the best thing for everybody, or that it gives you the best results in all areas. But we're not talking about finances or answering for your actions, we're talking about sex. And the studies show that married couples, on average, have more and better sex than singles who go out and eventually accumulate dozens or hundreds of one-time sex partners.
So obvious that everybody knows about it and solves it.
It's not a problem. You size your infrastructure for peak demand. Yes, that peak demand tends to happen between 6PM and 11PM. Yes, a lot more people use their connection a lot more than they do at other times of the day. But no, that peak demand is still well below the theoretical maximum. If you oversell by sizing your network to average demand then, yes, you will fail hard. But if you oversell by sizing your network to actual peak demand then you will succeed in providing what you promise while still provisioning only a small fraction of the theoretical maximum usage.
The concept of overselling isn't very hard to grasp. I don't know why so many people here just don't get it. Aren't you people supposed to be smart?
No, it's not. The statistical maximums take that usage into account. Proper provisioning does not involve making some worthless model of an ideal customer that never interacts with the real world. It means you look at actual usage, and actual growth rates, project usage into the future, and upgrade your infrastructure to suit.
Just because your ISP doesn't have the capacity to handle every single customer downloading at the maximum rate simultaneously does not mean they're doing anything wrong, because that never happens. As long as they can handle the actual peak loads then they're doing everything right. Yes, automated access increases peak loads, but they still don't come anywhere close to the theoretical maximum.
Whining about how ISPs don't provision to match theoretical maximum loads is equivalent to whining that ISPs don't have 90% unused capacity sitting around all the time accomplishing absolutely nothing beyond driving up the price you pay for service. It's like complaining about rush-hour traffic in your area by saying that the city should build 500-lane highways to handle the case where every single car in the region is on that highway simultaneously.
Sex tends to decrease after a while in any relationship. The wedding ceremony just gives you a convenient marker at which to start counting and to be nostalgic about.
In a lot of marriages it has nothing to do with the fact of being married, but just that people's lives change. Most people get busier as they get older, which leaves less time for romance and sex. No surprise, a guy working 60 hours a week at a salaried "we really mean overtime" position to pay for a heavily mortgaged house will have less time for sex than a guy working 30 hours a week and living in an apartment. But the same thing would happen if you stayed single, too!
In any case, if you have one-night stands with a couple hundred partners (I realize that some of these partners may not have been one night stands) then that's still only a couple of years' worth of slow once-a-week-or-two married sex.
Of course, as you imply, humans like variety. There's certainly something to be said for being able to have many different partners. But that's not the only, or even the primary, criterion for judging the quality of one's sex life.
I disagree. Advertising as unlimited is perfectly reasonable, if you can provide it. There's nothing that says you can't. This should be obvious simply by observing that a huge number of ISPs over a very long period of time have advertised and provided unlimited access with no problems.
The problem comes when you no longer want to provide it but still want to advertise it, which is what these large US ISPs are beginning to do, and this is indeed unreasonable.
Back to the beer analogy, let's say you sell a beer subscription that's limited to 1 beer an hour but is otherwise unlimited. However you only provision your restaurant for 10 beers an hour despite the fact that you've sold 100 subscriptions. Nothing wrong with this so far. If you worked out your numbers to see what your peak demand is and that peak demand is 10, then you're in good shape!
The problem comes when people start drinking more, and so your peak demand increases past 10 beers per hour. At this point you have two honorable choices. One is to say, sorry, we can no longer offer the unlimited subscription, would you like a subscription which comes with 30 beers per month, and a charge per each beer after that? Another is to increase your supply of beer. If your subscribers are now peaking at 15 beers per hour then arrange for that amount to be delivered. Unfortunately these US ISPs are taking a cowardly way out. They are, essentially, continuing to offer the unlimited beers but are finding all the guys who constantly come in for one beer every hour nonstop, intercepting them on the way out the restaurant, dragging them into the alley, and beating them up.
But if you just increase your supply to match the actual demand, there's nothing wrong with overselling while advertising unlimited service, since that is in fact exactly what you are providing.
Exactly right. So complain about insufficient capacity, and not about overselling which is necessary, common, and entirely reasonable.
It just gets me how it seems like everybody in these discussions does not actually understand reality. "Ooh, the evil cable company promised 100 people in my neighborhood 5MBit connections but they don't actually have 500Mbit of bandwidth serving us! What a bunch of liars!" Sorry guys, but that's not actually how it works!
Now if people will complain about a lack of capacity then I'll be right there with them. But everybody just jumps straight to complaining about "overselling" and it makes them look like a bunch of fools.
To take your analogy, if you know from past behavior that you can sell beer "subscriptions" and only purchase half the beer that your subscriptions would require because most of your customers won't drink their full subscription, this is just good business practice and it's a good thing to do.
I've only ever had sex with one woman. But in terms of the number of times I've had sex, you'll have to have those hundreds of one-night-stand partners to match it. And since we know each other well, probably 99% of the time it is very good. She never fumbles around or bails out early or ends up being really disgusting underneath the clothes or turns out not to bathe all that frequently.
Sure, you'll beat me on pure number of partners, unless something extremely unusual happens to both our lives. But I have no idea why that metric matters at all. Quantity of sex, yes, and quality of sex, definitely. The advantage in quantity goes to the committed and married people on average. The advantage in quality almost always goes to the partners who have been together a while and know each other well.
Of course I don't know these things personally, but then again neither do you, unless you followed up those 35-45+ partners with a long-term commitment that you haven't mentioned, and the studies back up my side of things.
Everybody in my neighborhood picked up the phone at the same time and half of them couldn't get through!
Overselling is not a bad thing. It can just mean that you sell based on statistical maximums rather than theoretical maximums which never happen. When done this way, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it.
When 90% of your customers are offline at any given time, there's no point in provisioning more than one tenth of the bandwidth you would need to support all of them downloading at the maximum rate simultaneously.
The problem is not overselling. The problem is that some ISPs oversell too much. They aren't willing increase capacity to match actual use, but instead try to reduce usage to match actual capacity. This is wrong. But the simple fact of overselling is the only sane way to do business.
I'm curious as to how you can claim that cable was incumbent but DSL had to roll out new stuff. The two technologies are essentially identical as far as required additional infrastructure. In both cases, the wires were already there but new equipment had to be installed at the user end and big expensive new equipment had to be installed at each central office at the provider end.
And this, folks, is why cooperatives never work on the large scale. They're simply too detached from reality.
If you don't like that, how about the scenario where your boss fires you,
That's why we have an employment court.
And the court will only let you keep your job if the firing was for a very bad reason. In most states in the US your boss can fire you just because he feels like it and there's nothing you can do about it. And how about the marriage question? Divorcing someone is a great way to ruin their life, so government really ought to put a stop to that.
Replace "people" with "politicians" and you start to see where the trouble lies.
As long as it isn't defamatory, you won't have a problem ... in a free society. And if you don't have a free society you won't have real freedom of speech anyway.
And what if it is defamatory? Or at least is close enough that you can't risk the potential loss of being found guilty for it?
"Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me."
That's simply not true, even when taken in context. It's been shown that verbal bullying can cause genuine physical harm. Humans are social creatures by instinct, after all.
As far as I know this is only true in situations where people are trapped with their abusers, such as in the glorified prisons we call primary and secondary schools. The rules for children are different. Adults can simply walk away.
It's easy, just have a strong will and a strong character.
That's very nice for you; do please remember this wasn't a choice.
Character and will is something you can build.
Saying that because you wouldn't care makes it OK is just like a bully saying that he wouldn't care if someone hit him, so that makes it OK for him to hit someone else.
You asked if I was somehow immune. When I tell you why I am immune you don't get to suddenly act as though it's some attempt at a generalized justification.
This kind of thing doesn't bother me because I don't give a crap what most people think about me.
Antisocial much?
How ironic. My inspiration for that attitude comes from one of the most notoriously social genius ever to walk the face of the earth, Richard Feynman. He wrote (well, more like dictated) an autobiographical book called "What do you care what other people think?" He was also widely known for being extremely friendly and highly outgoing. Seriously, why should I care what random strangers think about me?
Besides, you may not care what they think about you, but you'd care if they started refusing to sell you food, kicked you out of your apartment, fired you, etc.
I own my own home, remember that property ownership discussion? This is one reason why land ownership ought to be a strongly guarded right. In any case, if someone is able to convince such an enormous population that I'm that evil, then either what he's saying is true and doesn't come under the normal definition of slander, or they're a bunch of weak-minded assholes I wouldn't want to be associated with anyway.
Ironically the most likely way for what you describe to happen in the US today would be if you were forced to register as a sex offender. This can happen either falsely, if you were wrongly convicted, or misleadingly, if you were convicted for a "sex crime" such as statutory rape while a minor which most people wouldn't care about. And this is all done under the guise of protecting people!
Do you remember the slashdot story about the guy whose credit card was used to buy child porn?
Not at all. But that would be covered adequately under theft laws.
It's completely different. Physical attacks are inherently harmful, verbal attacks are not.
Nonsense.
I'm going to need a cite for this if you're going to claim that verba
Design cost is enormous, frequently outweighing manufacturing cost even for large runs of units. It is, quite simply, cheaper to make one design and sell it everywhere than it is to make a new "cheap" design without these useless features. You'd end up paying more and getting less, and what would be the point?
Every time I'm at the grocery store, trying to choose between one brand of juice that's $4.12/gallon and another brand that's $0.04/ounce, I pray for a switch.
Being able to trivially interconvert between different units for the same kind of value is quite valuable in everyday life.
If you don't like that, how about the scenario where your boss fires you, or your wife divorces you? Sure, I guess you theoretically have a choice as to whether you want to take a job or get married, but that's a pretty crappy position to take in my mind. This is exactly the opposite of what I think. The ability to say what you want is fundamental to a free society, I fail to see how not being allowed to slander people comprises a harmful limitation on your freedom, any more than not being allowed to hit them does. It would seem to be just another case of hurt feelings due to an unreasonable (and irrational) expectation. Replace "people" with "politicians" and you start to see where the trouble lies. If I had the legitimate threat of a court case hanging over me every time I said something bad about a politician or a powerful business leader, I would be extremely reluctant to say anything bad about them. Yes, the truth is a defense in theory, but in practice the guy with the most lawyers tends to win. and if your life is set up such that someone can destroy it with mere words then that's your own fault. Blame the victim? Did you forget about the part where I don't agree with you? There is no victim to blame here. "Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me." I learned that in the second grade. Letting words hurt you is a choice. I fail to see how anyone could avoid being vulnerable to defamation, short of living on a mountaintop somewhere. It's easy, just have a strong will and a strong character. This kind of thing doesn't bother me because I don't give a crap what most people think about me. The people whose opinions matter to me are also those who wouldn't listen to somebody else spreading lies about me. And, again, this sort of excuse is no different from someone saying that "if you're too weak to hit back then that's your own fault". It's completely different. Physical attacks are inherently harmful, verbal attacks are not. It is the government's responsibility to physically protect you from others, but not to mentally protect you. If you don't like what I'm saying, just stop listening!
As for anti-dumping regulations, these only apply in rare cases (foreign companies, monopolies) and in any case I think that they're wrong too. Don't try to trap me into a "contradiction" by pointing out that my views don't agree with how the laws are in reality, because I already know this to be the case.
If land were just sitting there with nobody owning it then I could be persuaded to agree with you, but the fact is that most land in most countries belongs to someone now. If you take that away from them then it's no better than taking anything else they own.
As for your "fairness" thing, no, you just used a different word with the same meaning. It has no more significance than before. You're just using fairness as a mechanism to explain that you think freedom from slander is more important than freedom of speech. I think you'll find that essentially everybody believes in justice, fairness, or whatever you call it, so it's meaningless to say that you do. What changes is exactly what each person thinks justice is. I also believe in justice and fairness just like every other human, but I think that it is much more unfair to be legally penalized for something I say than it is for a slanderer to go unpunished.
Yes, by your definition I believe that the right to free speech is "inherent", as is the right to property. Any state which forbids the ownership of private property is evil. However I don't like the use of the word "inherent", as it simply doesn't fit here in my mind. It's not part of the essential nature of humanity, it's an artificial construct. "Inherent" would, to my mind, be used to describe things that are part of being human no matter what the circumstances, such as the ability to love, or feel hunger. Saying that people have the inherent right to X when so many people don't have that right in practice is just pointless.
And no, I don't think that true right and wrong are culturally relative, even though many cultures disagree on what is right and wrong.
My belief that free speech is an absolute right is essentially a pointless matter of philosophy, yes. It's one of the strong guiding principles behind my ideas of politics but it doesn't actually change the world in any way, other than changing my individual actions.
Your statement at the end that you consider the right to justice to be more important than the right to free speech is also meaningless. "Justice" is what you get when right prevails over wrong. The strength of the right to free speech is part of what determines what is right and wrong. The right to justice is essentially outside all others, because the relative strengths of all the others simply determines what justice is.
I never said the public cared, only that the fact that these events make the news shows how rare they are.