Firefox will still be used so long as Chrome maintains its policy of not really allowing any major customizations. Firefox lets you customize -EVERYTHING-, seriously, type in about:config in Firefox, until Chrome lets you do this, I for one will stay with Firefox because I've got it customized exactly how I like it and Chrome won't let me.
If we had a free economy, it would be no issue. In all honesty the idea of having health insurance to pay for tiny little things is completely and utterly backwards. Health insurance should be to pay for -major- things, like if you were in a car accident and needed major surgery, if you got cancer and had expensive treatment. However, today health insurance is used to pay for tiny little expenses, why? You shouldn't need health insurance to go to the doctor to get a check up, you shouldn't need health insurance to pay for antibiotics, you shouldn't need health insurance to pay for other little expenses.
We need to reduce the cost of health care so we don't need insurance to pay for those things. Does no one else find it incredibly backwards that you would use insurance for such trivial things? Chances are you wouldn't use your homeowners insurance to pay for something as silly as a small board that needed replacing, or for a bit of touch-up paint, but yet we seem to think we need health insurance to pay for those things?
It's a question of should *I* have to pay for your insistence that you be granted the freedom to spend a disgusting amount of money to extend one life by a trivial amount of time, especially when others are dying much younger, for want of much less expensive care...
If we had a free economy that wouldn't ever be a problem, but instead we have doctors who are too afraid to compete, regulations which screw doctors out of actually -being- with their patents and helping them and instead they have to fill out paperwork for government/insurance/etc. If we would let the free market really work, we'd see an increase in the amount of life saving cures, a decrease in the cost of health care so you wouldn't use insurance to pay for tiny little things, with that gone then insurance would go down because not everyone is going to develop cancer or some major thing and need to use that much insurance, rather than today someone uses insurance on something as silly as a scraped knee.
Fix the economy and you've pretty much fixed health care.
Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep someone alive for another few days (if at all), drugged out of their mind is just a waste of resources.
Perhaps for/you/ it is, but what about that person? What about that person's family? See thats the nice thing about freedom is that you shouldn't have to pay for what I want and I don't dictate what you want. Of course our government fucked us over long ago removing any true economic freedom....
Right, because we all know that the people who are in charge listen to what the people want... Look at Obama, he basically shoved bills down people's throats because he could, I don't consider Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc. to have been all that listening to what people wants. I'm not saying that Ron Paul would be a perfect candidate, but it certainly would be a step in the right direction. People -don't- want costly wars to continue, people -don't- want hyperinflation caused by our country's spending addiction, people -don't- want needless "wars" on "drugs" that cost the tax payers millions, people -want- sane immigration reform so we don't need laws like Arizona's. The American people really only elected Obama because they didn't want another Bush, if they thought that a third party candidate could win, I'm sure that many of them would have voted for a candidate that shared their beliefs.
Case in point, I wrote to all of my senators, my representative, and the president about various issues. All I got back was essentially a propaganda piece saying that they are voting against what I wish that I should be happy because of it.
All politicians suck, but really, honestly, I think Ron Paul sucks less than any other major politician we've had in Washington in the last 25 years.
Right, and Dan Brown is always right in his books.
According to Wikipedia
The oldest surviving manuscript for about half of Plato's dialogues is the Clarke Plato (MS. E. D. Clarke 39), which was written in Constantinople in 895 and acquired by the Oxford University in 1809
So lets see here, our oldest manuscript is over a thousand years old and we still think that we can accurately "decode" his code? Because everything was faithfully reproduced? Lets see here, some books of the Old Testament of the Bible were written in later than 500 BC and the dead sea scrolls date from around 150 BC - 70 AD depending on who you ask, making the Dead Sea Scrolls a more faithful reproduction more likely than our copies of Plato's writings.
Well, of course. There is a reason they are called "lab" extensions, they aren't stable, they aren't guaranteed to not increase memory usage, the majority of them are to add a feature quickly, then later work on an elegant solution.
That is bad... how? You don't like competition from the government, because they actually compete rather than collude?
But that isn't competition. Competition is "we do what we want, you do what you want, we let the consumer decide" rather than we, your competition, dictate what your ISP can do.
Probably not much differently than the private ISPs, given we gave them boatloads of money for nothing!
So, we should continue a mistake?
So USPS is a pile of shit because of a anecdote on your part? Show me a country with substantially better mail service from a private organization or organizations.
We already have better systems for sending packages in the US, right now, called UPS and FedEx, however we have a monopoly forbidding the free market from doing things better than USPS because they are unable to send first class mail. Chances are, if that was removed, we'd see improvements in first class mail delivery comparable to the benefits already seen in package delivery by private companies.
Define "bullying the private sector" - because from your incredibly vague claims there, I'd say it's a good thing.
As in saying "because we can give you 2.5 MB/sec, you have to also in order to run an ISP", or price controls and the like.
Roads. Mail (see below). Internet. Yes, internet. Municipal internet has on many occasions proven cheaper and more reliable than private. See here or here for a list. I personally know people who use these services and will tell you how superior they are to the private internet in the same towns. Oh, did I mention how private interests like to sue cities for providing these? Yes, we can hand over out infrastructure to privates...
Yes, but how were these funded? And I glanced through the documents and really saw no mention of hard facts like internet speed, latency, etc.
You just made my point, sir. A public organization has control of a market and has service and price that is as good as or better than the majority of the world's. NOT some kind of hell on earth, totally inefficient, money-bleeding, Soviet-like organization that libertarians go about claiming will result from nationalizing businesses. It proves that nationalized infrastructure works. So why don't we try with internet?
Ok, so apparently having no competition and there declaring that it is the clear winner proves your point? All it seems to prove that in a race even if you were the slowest one competing, you can still win first prize. And yes, USPS is a big pile of shit. I detailed this in another post, but I'll post it again here
Number one is they think they needed to change my home address not once, not twice, but three times. Ranging from things like changing "street" to "terrace" then from "west" to "east" all really without notifying... anyone else. So my city taxes got sent to the wrong address, I kept getting magazine subscriptions months late, and general chaos. Number two is that they leave terrible letters and stop delivering my mail because there is "too much snow" in front of it in the winter. But its not my snow, no, the city decides to generally pile up snow right in front of my mailbox, now its not hard to get to or anything, but I suppose when you get paid a government employees paycheck, its easier to stick a note on my mailbox than to just put my mail in it... And number three is that they won't ever take my mail out of my mailbox! Their rules say to keep your flag up if you have mail so I "mailed" a large amount of invitations and put up the flag. I returned from work to see my flag still up and my mail dumped on top of the letters I had to send out...
Ok, as a "casual" user of USPS I can tell you they suck.
Number one is they think they needed to change my home address not once, not twice, but three times. Ranging from things like changing "street" to "terrace" then from "west" to "east" all really without notifying... anyone else. So my city taxes got sent to the wrong address, I kept getting magazine subscriptions months late, and general chaos. Number two is that they leave terrible letters and stop delivering my mail because there is "too much snow" in front of it in the winter. But its not my snow, no, the city decides to generally pile up snow right in front of my mailbox, now its not hard to get to or anything, but I suppose when you get paid a government employees paycheck, its easier to stick a note on my mailbox than to just put my mail in it... And number three is that they won't ever take my mail out of my mailbox! Their rules say to keep your flag up if you have mail so I "mailed" a large amount of invitations and put up the flag. I returned from work to see my flag still up and my mail dumped on top of the letters I had to send out...
Now, I haven't had 100% absolutely perfect experiences with FedEx/UPS but they have been a million times better than USPS.
The financial industry isn't regulated to substantive degree. Which is what led to the great recession. Between the fraud, theft and dealing with securities which exceed the GDP of every nation the effect was shockingly similar to if there were no regulations in place at all.
No, you can't draw that conclusion. You can certainly say that our current regulations aren't working but there are two ways of looking at it, one is we have not enough regulation the other is that you have too much regulation. I tend to favor the latter as the real reason. Like I said in a previous post, there are several flaws in our current financial system. The main reason being the fiat currency we have.
When you have a solid currency based on at least -something- tangible you get rid of some of the worst culprits because they don't make sense in an economy based on something. Number one is fractional reserve lending. Number two is it helps reduce inflation. Number three is that historically fiat and debased currencies have failed terribly, one needs only to look as recently as Post-WWI Germany or as far into the past as Athens in ancient Greece to see the problems with fiat currency.
We have a financial system that needs regulation because it makes no sense. Imagine if you have a rare baseball card, even a 10 year old can tell you why it is rare, because only, say, 200 were made. But suddenly they crank up the printing presses and make 2,000,000 more all identical! Suddenly that rare baseball card is worthless. But yet we do the same thing with our currency, if it isn't based on anything our "leaders" will abuse that power to the maximum and we will eventually have hyperinflation.
Once we get a solid currency, everything becomes much more sane and we can work on deregulating the rest. But that one thing must be in place to make sure everything else becomes sane.
Likewise, energy companies haven't gotten the message that they're being regulated. The recent BP debacle is hardly the only major accident in recent years due to a lack of care. There was the on down in Texas and one up here in WA, and those aren't the only ones. They also charge us more for gas in Seattle than they do in pretty much any other part of the state, even though the only reason is that they're not being told that they can't do it.
Well, first off I have little doubt that Seattle, being a pretty liberal state taxes gas/oil/etc pretty heavily which is partially to blame I have no doubt. Secondly regulation isn't always bad for the company but its always bad for the consumer because with regulation they get things like liability caps and the like. Regulation will always be gamed so corporations get nice breaks while charging high prices and discouraging competition.
If it's true that the government can only do bad, why then do you think my suggestion would be a negative? I only said create a public ISP, not nationalize the whole thing (though I'd not object to that). If the private ISPs are so much better (they're not), you can use them. Choice is good, right? Or are you afraid of competition that isn't driven by profit?
Because in general, a public anything ends up bullying the private sector by effectively forcing them to conform to their methods or by requiring the public to pay a tax even if they don't use it they still pay for it.
The problem is, there is no major public thing that I know of that does not either bully the private sector or require payment by those who don't use it and funding it purely with a use tax.
Have you ever sent a letter via UPS? Go try. Tell me how that goes. I won't deny that USPS is not as good when it comes to package delivery, but it's not that horrible, either. What I wonder is how bad the market on mail/shipping would be if USPS didn't exist to compete with FedEx and UPS.
Yeah thats because the government gave the USPS a legal monopoly on first class letters. So USPS can't send letters if it wanted to because the government fucked with the free market. Now how does that help your point?
Ok, name me something that has been truly "solved" by the government not relating to prevention of force and fraud that hasn't had free-market solutions that blow the government system out of the water.
Lets see here:
The USPS is a complete and utter mess filled with idiot workers and BS policies for no reason whatsoever and ever-increasing rates. Nearly always Fed-Ex or UPS does a better job of doing, well just about everything.
It costs money. A lot of it. Running multiple identical cables to your door, just for the sake of competition, is not efficient nor practical, and it's not going to happen for good reason. Deregulation just means that the people who own the one or two cables that do exist are free to rape you for all you can reasonably give them, and give you as little as they want in return. We are ALREADY seeing this happen, so don't go claiming it is somehow not the case.
Yeah, and that good reason is if/when those companies rape you through rate increases and service deterioration.
Is there problem regulation? Yes, there is. There is a lot wrong with giving out artificial monopolies to ISPs in places where none is needed to motivate installation of the wires, and I have horrible problems with the fact that it seems cities cannot give internet to their population without being sued by some private company. On the other hand, I'm sure you think that cities providing internet is evil, because it runs counter to "the free market..."
Yes, cities providing internet usually will cripple their citizens by either not funding it though use taxes, or by discouraging private industries from giving higher-quality internet. If they do fund it purely via use taxes and don't discourage private industries from competing, I have no problem.
The government you at least superficially elect, but monopolies you have no say in. You cannot vote with your feet if you have only one option. It has been proven time and again that when infrastructure is handed to private interests, with no public competition, bad things happen. 10 points to you if you can figure out why that's the case
Bullshit again. I have a great say in monopolies. Here is a hint, if I don't pay taxes what happens? I go to jail. I can't legally not support the government without making a huge, inconvenient move, which may be impossible. If I don't use a service I simply don't have that service. There are -many- ways I could go without supporting any major ISP financially. For one, I could use a cell modem for my internet thus eliminating Comcast, for another I could not have my own internet connection but use free connections in coffee shops and the like. If no one uses a monopoly, it dies. If no one uses the government they use that as an excuse to increase taxes/penalties.
If no one bought HP laptops for, say, a month, how long do you think until HP closed down their laptop division? WE influence corporations without us, they are nothing.
And which party did you elect to do that? Oh, right, both the evil democrats and the free-market republicans. Gee, I wonder if they had any ulterior motive...
Yeah, because we all know that there aren't any third parties people support. I vote libertarian.
Without those tax dollars, do you think they would have run internet to unprofitable locations? Uhh, I guess those small towns don't need internet!
Yes because its an untapped market, and technology can make it easy. The same thing could be said about anything, do you think without tax dollars they would put a Wal-Mart in almost every town? A McDonalds? A Pizza Hut? Etc. Of course we have a fast-food restaurant in almost every town, we have a Wal-Mart in almost every town, or if not then one within a few minutes drive.
If a few people want to start a small-town ISP they simply get some capital and lay some cable. If they won't then use WWAN to service small areas.
What you should be asking yourself is why the government handed over money to private interests. Why could get not define the internet as a part of vital infrastructure like highways or radio waves? Imagine if that money was not given to a for-profit interest, but one with the goal of actually enhancing society. Oh, but that's socialism!
Yeah, you mean like how that system of government has always worked. No corruption there in Cuba, China, USSR, etc.
Humans will be selfish greedy bastards. We can't change that. What we can do is make their greed work for the benefit of humanity. It was because of greed that humankind has created our greatest achievements.
You totally ignore my point about the efficiency of multiple networks. Why should society be shelling out billions (either through higher internet or some other way) just because 'the free market works better'? One cable works fine. We do not need 5 or 10, which is what artificially creating a "market" where there is none will mean. That will cost far more than you seem to believe it will.
But its not society, it is individuals who want better service. Why should society be buying overpriced hardware? Why should society be buying overpriced computer service. Society isn't. Individuals are. When you say "society" you make it think that we will be footing the bill. We won't it is the people who want to pay higher prices that foot the bill. Just because Best Buy sells overpriced memory and Geek Squad costs $50 to put it in doesn't mean that I have to pay that when I install my RAM myself which I bought from Newegg.
It's all about off-setting costs. YOU only look at the taxes, and act as if not wanting internet is a reasonable choice today. It isn't. We need to stop letting private interests trample on our infrastructure that you rightly point out, we paid for.
So you want a system with one ISP which will undoubtedly end up censoring, throttling or just giving crap service? Like I said in a different post, for the fun of it try to reason through an electric or water bill. You get terrible service because you can't change. If I get fed up with one ISP I should be able to pick another. What works for you might not work for me. Hence why we have choice. Its a nice thing. There is a reason you can go out and buy a tiny little hybrid Toyota or an 18-wheeler, different people need different cars and different ISPs.
Create a public ISP in every market. Stop all handouts to companies. Watch them start offering better rates and better bandwidth in a month.
Yeah, because that works so well for power/water companies. No. You get crap service, prices equivalent to gouging and generally a worse experience than ever before.
For fun compare the USPS service to FedEx or UPS, the USPS makes you jump through hoops, you get crap service and it seems yearly they want to raise their rates. You will get crap service with a public ISP.
Um, you run it the same way you run every business. You get capital from the bank, run cable through someplace small, like a neighborhood, rent space on the cable from a major ISP or get enough capital to run your own line.
An ISP is really no different than any other business that needs lots of capital like a pawn shop or the like. You focus on quality in a small geographical area then you move out from the center.
It is not a "natural monopoly" any more than a cell provider is a "natural monopoly". There are lots of room for competition in the ISP market. Anytime we call something a "natural monopoly" we open it up to be an abusive monopoly. Ever try to settle a bill dispute with a water company or power company? Its not an easy experience because we've basically forbidden any competition possibilities, you either pay them their rates no matter if they are calculated correctly or not, take them to court or have no water/power. We don't need to extend that status to ISPs.
Look back in the past, how did Comcast/Verizon/Time Warner/etc get so large? They basically stole your tax dollars to provide internet access and "modernize" America (and in the case of Verizon they got lots of infrastructure from the breakup of AT&T). Without governments screwing with the free market we can make sure that the corporations serve us rather than the other way around. We need a government to prevent force and fraud, as you pointed out, the majority of ISPs/Cell Companies use fraud in their marketing and should be forced to either provide what they market or provide compensation.
What we need is a definition of the internet to include all of the internet to start out. Secondly we need to stop handouts to private companies all of them to prevent this from happening in the future. Eventually, our current infrastructure will be obsolete and Comcast/Time Warner/Verizon will be as laughable of companies as Atari and AOL is today. But in the meantime, simply allow for more competition in the ISP market, allow for true free market systems where if one corporation can use public land to lay cable though any ISP who wants to should be able to within a certain window. When we solve the inequalities there, it fixes itself. If an ISP blocks YouTube and there is a choice, everyone will switch. The problem is our government has limited the choices.
Bullshit. The financial sector isn't deregulated in the least, it is still insanely regulated. All we can say is that our previous version of regulations were working better than our most recent revision. The root of the problem is that we have a meaningless currency based on absolutely nothing, with that comes insane inflation. Why is it that people stay poor? A huge reason is that because we have a fiat currency, whenever you save in a bank, unless it has a great interest rate inflation + taxation mean that you will more likely lose more money than you gain! Mix that with tax laws and regulation designed to protect the rich and those with lobbyists rather than making them accept personal responsibility. And no we don't need "regulations" to do that because regulations can be and will be gamed to achieve gain.
Our energy sector is insanely regulated also. The BP oil spill wasn't caused because of deregulation but because the morons "we" elected to congress thought it was a good idea to artificially cap liability.
Likewise, the problem we've had with the net is a lack of regulation rather than too much of it.
So what are these problems with the internet that are because of a lack of regulation that will magically become better with regulation? In almost every single case regulation simply leads to corporations screwing the public even more because they can game them and the public losing in higher prices and less choice because it makes it harder to start up a business or to compete with established companies.
The firms like MS and the ISPs that do very little to curtail the soft targets aren't going to get better knowing that they'll face even less regulation.
MS pretty much lives on the regulation we call software patents and copyright. ISPs got the way they did by screwing the public by taking money to provide internet access and then unilaterally changing the definition of the internet to their own interests.
We don't need regulation there, we need sane patent reform, we need a return of sane copyright, we need a correct definition of internet, we need to end all public handouts to businesses, etc.
When consumers have choice they will be more effective than "regulation" ever will be. The problem is regulation almost always reduces chocie.
How about this? A 20 year moratorium on introducing any new rules/regulations on the internet.
Its a rarity if government regulation actually helps, and even when it does "help" it either creates larger problems down the road or fixes something else the government did.
Other than the initial creation of the internet, it has been largely a private affair and that is responsible for the majority of its growth.
Yes, but all those things involve tradeoffs. With browsers there aren't any because the vast majority of them are free (as in beer) and have good community support.
If I buy a 1970/80s car, chances are it will be really cheap. If I buy the newest car the day of release, its going to cost me. Similarly, if I buy my car from ObscureCarMakerOutOfFinland, I'm not going to get very good support, on the other hand, some of the more obscure browsers give the best support and usually the ones not backed up by a company have an open source foundation giving even better abilities to fix it.
With something common, like a Ford, I can go in and buy any part I need easily, with obscure car brands I can't. Its generally the opposite with software.
When it comes down to it, there are no trade offs that are so common with the physical market, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, etc. give you good browsing experiences with different features with very little drawbacks.
This isn't a positive example of the free market because it is a net negative for the net as a whole. Yes, the free market working on perhaps its last stronghold that keeps on getting eroded is a good thing, but why was IE not being used? Because it was filled with more holes than swiss cheese, that it didn't support hardly any technology, it was a pain to code for, etc.
The only reason why this has happened is because IE for a time was complete crap. Yes, it has resulted in benefits for some of us, but it means that many people have been and are using browsers that can be easily exploited into spewing DDoS attacks and spam (Does anyone still get spam anymore? I think I've had a grand total of like 4 messages since I started using Gmail) and all kinds of malware.
So, while it is nice that it opened up competition in the browser market, it was a net loss for the internet as a whole.
Why are some browsers not supported?
There are two primary reasons--security and popularity. There are dozens of browsers in use today, but not all offer the minimum levels of security that we require while others may not perform well with our site. The security of your accounts and private information is one of our highest priorities and some browsers, especially older versions, are simply higher security risks to use with our site.
As for popularity, we continually monitor the types of browsers that customers use to access our site. Based on that information, we know that supported browsers are used by more than 95% of our customers. If a new browser begins to grow in popularity, we will assess and test its security and performance with our site to determine whether or not we should support its use.
Right... Because its sooooo hard to use standards and make a secure site? Lets face it, if you code things right you can support every single browser except for perhaps IE (though they have gotten better). It is pure stupidity not to support various other browsers because they "aren't secure" when you can't give a reason other than they aren't used as much.
The vast majority of security for banking comes from 3 main places. Encryption (controlled by the site owners), Physical/Software security of the servers (controlled by the sites owners) and elimination of flaws in the browser (judging by their inclusion of IE 6... they aren't worried about this).
"Traditional" businesses don't understand technology at all, especially "consumer" technology trends. Usually software backed up by a large businesses is considered to be a bonus for the "traditional" business drone, however, as any tech-literate person will tell you, those programs usually are outdated, slow and bloated.
Its quite silly how they don't understand it. In their mind IE = Microsoft = stable. In everyone elses mind IE = Microsoft = Slow/Bloated/Insecure. In their mind Chrome = New = Unstable, in everyone elses mind Chrome = New = Fast.
Businesses need to realize people don't, and shouldn't, choose software like they choose a car.
Slashdot Mirror
Firefox will still be used so long as Chrome maintains its policy of not really allowing any major customizations. Firefox lets you customize -EVERYTHING-, seriously, type in about:config in Firefox, until Chrome lets you do this, I for one will stay with Firefox because I've got it customized exactly how I like it and Chrome won't let me.
We need to reduce the cost of health care so we don't need insurance to pay for those things. Does no one else find it incredibly backwards that you would use insurance for such trivial things? Chances are you wouldn't use your homeowners insurance to pay for something as silly as a small board that needed replacing, or for a bit of touch-up paint, but yet we seem to think we need health insurance to pay for those things?
It's a question of should *I* have to pay for your insistence that you be granted the freedom to spend a disgusting amount of money to extend one life by a trivial amount of time, especially when others are dying much younger, for want of much less expensive care...
If we had a free economy that wouldn't ever be a problem, but instead we have doctors who are too afraid to compete, regulations which screw doctors out of actually -being- with their patents and helping them and instead they have to fill out paperwork for government/insurance/etc. If we would let the free market really work, we'd see an increase in the amount of life saving cures, a decrease in the cost of health care so you wouldn't use insurance to pay for tiny little things, with that gone then insurance would go down because not everyone is going to develop cancer or some major thing and need to use that much insurance, rather than today someone uses insurance on something as silly as a scraped knee.
Fix the economy and you've pretty much fixed health care.
Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep someone alive for another few days (if at all), drugged out of their mind is just a waste of resources.
Perhaps for /you/ it is, but what about that person? What about that person's family? See thats the nice thing about freedom is that you shouldn't have to pay for what I want and I don't dictate what you want. Of course our government fucked us over long ago removing any true economic freedom....
Right, because we all know that the people who are in charge listen to what the people want... Look at Obama, he basically shoved bills down people's throats because he could, I don't consider Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc. to have been all that listening to what people wants. I'm not saying that Ron Paul would be a perfect candidate, but it certainly would be a step in the right direction. People -don't- want costly wars to continue, people -don't- want hyperinflation caused by our country's spending addiction, people -don't- want needless "wars" on "drugs" that cost the tax payers millions, people -want- sane immigration reform so we don't need laws like Arizona's. The American people really only elected Obama because they didn't want another Bush, if they thought that a third party candidate could win, I'm sure that many of them would have voted for a candidate that shared their beliefs.
Case in point, I wrote to all of my senators, my representative, and the president about various issues. All I got back was essentially a propaganda piece saying that they are voting against what I wish that I should be happy because of it.
All politicians suck, but really, honestly, I think Ron Paul sucks less than any other major politician we've had in Washington in the last 25 years.
Because Ron Paul embraces 9/11 conspiracy nuts in some way?
By over a thousand years old, I was referring to a thousand years after Plato had died, not just the age of the manuscript.
According to Wikipedia
The oldest surviving manuscript for about half of Plato's dialogues is the Clarke Plato (MS. E. D. Clarke 39), which was written in Constantinople in 895 and acquired by the Oxford University in 1809
So lets see here, our oldest manuscript is over a thousand years old and we still think that we can accurately "decode" his code? Because everything was faithfully reproduced? Lets see here, some books of the Old Testament of the Bible were written in later than 500 BC and the dead sea scrolls date from around 150 BC - 70 AD depending on who you ask, making the Dead Sea Scrolls a more faithful reproduction more likely than our copies of Plato's writings.
Well, of course. There is a reason they are called "lab" extensions, they aren't stable, they aren't guaranteed to not increase memory usage, the majority of them are to add a feature quickly, then later work on an elegant solution.
That is bad... how? You don't like competition from the government, because they actually compete rather than collude?
But that isn't competition. Competition is "we do what we want, you do what you want, we let the consumer decide" rather than we, your competition, dictate what your ISP can do.
Probably not much differently than the private ISPs, given we gave them boatloads of money for nothing!
So, we should continue a mistake?
So USPS is a pile of shit because of a anecdote on your part? Show me a country with substantially better mail service from a private organization or organizations.
We already have better systems for sending packages in the US, right now, called UPS and FedEx, however we have a monopoly forbidding the free market from doing things better than USPS because they are unable to send first class mail. Chances are, if that was removed, we'd see improvements in first class mail delivery comparable to the benefits already seen in package delivery by private companies.
Define "bullying the private sector" - because from your incredibly vague claims there, I'd say it's a good thing.
As in saying "because we can give you 2.5 MB/sec, you have to also in order to run an ISP", or price controls and the like.
Roads. Mail (see below). Internet. Yes, internet. Municipal internet has on many occasions proven cheaper and more reliable than private. See here or here for a list. I personally know people who use these services and will tell you how superior they are to the private internet in the same towns. Oh, did I mention how private interests like to sue cities for providing these? Yes, we can hand over out infrastructure to privates...
Yes, but how were these funded? And I glanced through the documents and really saw no mention of hard facts like internet speed, latency, etc.
You just made my point, sir. A public organization has control of a market and has service and price that is as good as or better than the majority of the world's. NOT some kind of hell on earth, totally inefficient, money-bleeding, Soviet-like organization that libertarians go about claiming will result from nationalizing businesses. It proves that nationalized infrastructure works. So why don't we try with internet?
Ok, so apparently having no competition and there declaring that it is the clear winner proves your point? All it seems to prove that in a race even if you were the slowest one competing, you can still win first prize. And yes, USPS is a big pile of shit. I detailed this in another post, but I'll post it again here
Number one is they think they needed to change my home address not once, not twice, but three times. Ranging from things like changing "street" to "terrace" then from "west" to "east" all really without notifying... anyone else. So my city taxes got sent to the wrong address, I kept getting magazine subscriptions months late, and general chaos. Number two is that they leave terrible letters and stop delivering my mail because there is "too much snow" in front of it in the winter. But its not my snow, no, the city decides to generally pile up snow right in front of my mailbox, now its not hard to get to or anything, but I suppose when you get paid a government employees paycheck, its easier to stick a note on my mailbox than to just put my mail in it... And number three is that they won't ever take my mail out of my mailbox! Their rules say to keep your flag up if you have mail so I "mailed" a large amount of invitations and put up the flag. I returned from work to see my flag still up and my mail dumped on top of the letters I had to send out...
Ok, as a "casual" user of USPS I can tell you they suck.
Number one is they think they needed to change my home address not once, not twice, but three times. Ranging from things like changing "street" to "terrace" then from "west" to "east" all really without notifying... anyone else. So my city taxes got sent to the wrong address, I kept getting magazine subscriptions months late, and general chaos. Number two is that they leave terrible letters and stop delivering my mail because there is "too much snow" in front of it in the winter. But its not my snow, no, the city decides to generally pile up snow right in front of my mailbox, now its not hard to get to or anything, but I suppose when you get paid a government employees paycheck, its easier to stick a note on my mailbox than to just put my mail in it... And number three is that they won't ever take my mail out of my mailbox! Their rules say to keep your flag up if you have mail so I "mailed" a large amount of invitations and put up the flag. I returned from work to see my flag still up and my mail dumped on top of the letters I had to send out...
Now, I haven't had 100% absolutely perfect experiences with FedEx/UPS but they have been a million times better than USPS.
The financial industry isn't regulated to substantive degree. Which is what led to the great recession. Between the fraud, theft and dealing with securities which exceed the GDP of every nation the effect was shockingly similar to if there were no regulations in place at all.
No, you can't draw that conclusion. You can certainly say that our current regulations aren't working but there are two ways of looking at it, one is we have not enough regulation the other is that you have too much regulation. I tend to favor the latter as the real reason. Like I said in a previous post, there are several flaws in our current financial system. The main reason being the fiat currency we have.
When you have a solid currency based on at least -something- tangible you get rid of some of the worst culprits because they don't make sense in an economy based on something. Number one is fractional reserve lending. Number two is it helps reduce inflation. Number three is that historically fiat and debased currencies have failed terribly, one needs only to look as recently as Post-WWI Germany or as far into the past as Athens in ancient Greece to see the problems with fiat currency.
We have a financial system that needs regulation because it makes no sense. Imagine if you have a rare baseball card, even a 10 year old can tell you why it is rare, because only, say, 200 were made. But suddenly they crank up the printing presses and make 2,000,000 more all identical! Suddenly that rare baseball card is worthless. But yet we do the same thing with our currency, if it isn't based on anything our "leaders" will abuse that power to the maximum and we will eventually have hyperinflation.
Once we get a solid currency, everything becomes much more sane and we can work on deregulating the rest. But that one thing must be in place to make sure everything else becomes sane.
Likewise, energy companies haven't gotten the message that they're being regulated. The recent BP debacle is hardly the only major accident in recent years due to a lack of care. There was the on down in Texas and one up here in WA, and those aren't the only ones. They also charge us more for gas in Seattle than they do in pretty much any other part of the state, even though the only reason is that they're not being told that they can't do it.
Well, first off I have little doubt that Seattle, being a pretty liberal state taxes gas/oil/etc pretty heavily which is partially to blame I have no doubt. Secondly regulation isn't always bad for the company but its always bad for the consumer because with regulation they get things like liability caps and the like. Regulation will always be gamed so corporations get nice breaks while charging high prices and discouraging competition.
If it's true that the government can only do bad, why then do you think my suggestion would be a negative? I only said create a public ISP, not nationalize the whole thing (though I'd not object to that). If the private ISPs are so much better (they're not), you can use them. Choice is good, right? Or are you afraid of competition that isn't driven by profit?
Because in general, a public anything ends up bullying the private sector by effectively forcing them to conform to their methods or by requiring the public to pay a tax even if they don't use it they still pay for it.
The problem is, there is no major public thing that I know of that does not either bully the private sector or require payment by those who don't use it and funding it purely with a use tax.
Have you ever sent a letter via UPS? Go try. Tell me how that goes. I won't deny that USPS is not as good when it comes to package delivery, but it's not that horrible, either. What I wonder is how bad the market on mail/shipping would be if USPS didn't exist to compete with FedEx and UPS.
Yeah thats because the government gave the USPS a legal monopoly on first class letters. So USPS can't send letters if it wanted to because the government fucked with the free market. Now how does that help your point?
Ok, name me something that has been truly "solved" by the government not relating to prevention of force and fraud that hasn't had free-market solutions that blow the government system out of the water.
Lets see here:
The USPS is a complete and utter mess filled with idiot workers and BS policies for no reason whatsoever and ever-increasing rates. Nearly always Fed-Ex or UPS does a better job of doing, well just about everything.
Etc.
It costs money. A lot of it. Running multiple identical cables to your door, just for the sake of competition, is not efficient nor practical, and it's not going to happen for good reason. Deregulation just means that the people who own the one or two cables that do exist are free to rape you for all you can reasonably give them, and give you as little as they want in return. We are ALREADY seeing this happen, so don't go claiming it is somehow not the case.
Yeah, and that good reason is if/when those companies rape you through rate increases and service deterioration.
Is there problem regulation? Yes, there is. There is a lot wrong with giving out artificial monopolies to ISPs in places where none is needed to motivate installation of the wires, and I have horrible problems with the fact that it seems cities cannot give internet to their population without being sued by some private company. On the other hand, I'm sure you think that cities providing internet is evil, because it runs counter to "the free market..."
Yes, cities providing internet usually will cripple their citizens by either not funding it though use taxes, or by discouraging private industries from giving higher-quality internet. If they do fund it purely via use taxes and don't discourage private industries from competing, I have no problem.
The government you at least superficially elect, but monopolies you have no say in. You cannot vote with your feet if you have only one option. It has been proven time and again that when infrastructure is handed to private interests, with no public competition, bad things happen. 10 points to you if you can figure out why that's the case
Bullshit again. I have a great say in monopolies. Here is a hint, if I don't pay taxes what happens? I go to jail. I can't legally not support the government without making a huge, inconvenient move, which may be impossible. If I don't use a service I simply don't have that service. There are -many- ways I could go without supporting any major ISP financially. For one, I could use a cell modem for my internet thus eliminating Comcast, for another I could not have my own internet connection but use free connections in coffee shops and the like. If no one uses a monopoly, it dies. If no one uses the government they use that as an excuse to increase taxes/penalties.
If no one bought HP laptops for, say, a month, how long do you think until HP closed down their laptop division? WE influence corporations without us, they are nothing.
And which party did you elect to do that? Oh, right, both the evil democrats and the free-market republicans. Gee, I wonder if they had any ulterior motive...
Yeah, because we all know that there aren't any third parties people support. I vote libertarian.
Without those tax dollars, do you think they would have run internet to unprofitable locations? Uhh, I guess those small towns don't need internet!
Yes because its an untapped market, and technology can make it easy. The same thing could be said about anything, do you think without tax dollars they would put a Wal-Mart in almost every town? A McDonalds? A Pizza Hut? Etc. Of course we have a fast-food restaurant in almost every town, we have a Wal-Mart in almost every town, or if not then one within a few minutes drive.
If a few people want to start a small-town ISP they simply get some capital and lay some cable. If they won't then use WWAN to service small areas.
What you should be asking yourself is why the government handed over money to private interests. Why could get not define the internet as a part of vital infrastructure like highways or radio waves? Imagine if that money was not given to a for-profit interest, but one with the goal of actually enhancing society. Oh, but that's socialism!
Yeah, you mean like how that system of government has always worked. No corruption there in Cuba, China, USSR, etc.
Humans will be selfish greedy bastards. We can't change that. What we can do is make their greed work for the benefit of humanity. It was because of greed that humankind has created our greatest achievements.
You totally ignore my point about the efficiency of multiple networks. Why should society be shelling out billions (either through higher internet or some other way) just because 'the free market works better'? One cable works fine. We do not need 5 or 10, which is what artificially creating a "market" where there is none will mean. That will cost far more than you seem to believe it will.
But its not society, it is individuals who want better service. Why should society be buying overpriced hardware? Why should society be buying overpriced computer service. Society isn't. Individuals are. When you say "society" you make it think that we will be footing the bill. We won't it is the people who want to pay higher prices that foot the bill. Just because Best Buy sells overpriced memory and Geek Squad costs $50 to put it in doesn't mean that I have to pay that when I install my RAM myself which I bought from Newegg.
It's all about off-setting costs. YOU only look at the taxes, and act as if not wanting internet is a reasonable choice today. It isn't. We need to stop letting private interests trample on our infrastructure that you rightly point out, we paid for.
So you want a system with one ISP which will undoubtedly end up censoring, throttling or just giving crap service? Like I said in a different post, for the fun of it try to reason through an electric or water bill. You get terrible service because you can't change. If I get fed up with one ISP I should be able to pick another. What works for you might not work for me. Hence why we have choice. Its a nice thing. There is a reason you can go out and buy a tiny little hybrid Toyota or an 18-wheeler, different people need different cars and different ISPs.
Create a public ISP in every market. Stop all handouts to companies. Watch them start offering better rates and better bandwidth in a month.
Yeah, because that works so well for power/water companies. No. You get crap service, prices equivalent to gouging and generally a worse experience than ever before.
For fun compare the USPS service to FedEx or UPS, the USPS makes you jump through hoops, you get crap service and it seems yearly they want to raise their rates. You will get crap service with a public ISP.
Um, you run it the same way you run every business. You get capital from the bank, run cable through someplace small, like a neighborhood, rent space on the cable from a major ISP or get enough capital to run your own line.
An ISP is really no different than any other business that needs lots of capital like a pawn shop or the like. You focus on quality in a small geographical area then you move out from the center.
It is not a "natural monopoly" any more than a cell provider is a "natural monopoly". There are lots of room for competition in the ISP market. Anytime we call something a "natural monopoly" we open it up to be an abusive monopoly. Ever try to settle a bill dispute with a water company or power company? Its not an easy experience because we've basically forbidden any competition possibilities, you either pay them their rates no matter if they are calculated correctly or not, take them to court or have no water/power. We don't need to extend that status to ISPs.
Look back in the past, how did Comcast/Verizon/Time Warner/etc get so large? They basically stole your tax dollars to provide internet access and "modernize" America (and in the case of Verizon they got lots of infrastructure from the breakup of AT&T). Without governments screwing with the free market we can make sure that the corporations serve us rather than the other way around. We need a government to prevent force and fraud, as you pointed out, the majority of ISPs/Cell Companies use fraud in their marketing and should be forced to either provide what they market or provide compensation.
What we need is a definition of the internet to include all of the internet to start out. Secondly we need to stop handouts to private companies all of them to prevent this from happening in the future. Eventually, our current infrastructure will be obsolete and Comcast/Time Warner/Verizon will be as laughable of companies as Atari and AOL is today. But in the meantime, simply allow for more competition in the ISP market, allow for true free market systems where if one corporation can use public land to lay cable though any ISP who wants to should be able to within a certain window. When we solve the inequalities there, it fixes itself. If an ISP blocks YouTube and there is a choice, everyone will switch. The problem is our government has limited the choices.
Our energy sector is insanely regulated also. The BP oil spill wasn't caused because of deregulation but because the morons "we" elected to congress thought it was a good idea to artificially cap liability.
Likewise, the problem we've had with the net is a lack of regulation rather than too much of it.
So what are these problems with the internet that are because of a lack of regulation that will magically become better with regulation? In almost every single case regulation simply leads to corporations screwing the public even more because they can game them and the public losing in higher prices and less choice because it makes it harder to start up a business or to compete with established companies.
The firms like MS and the ISPs that do very little to curtail the soft targets aren't going to get better knowing that they'll face even less regulation.
MS pretty much lives on the regulation we call software patents and copyright. ISPs got the way they did by screwing the public by taking money to provide internet access and then unilaterally changing the definition of the internet to their own interests.
We don't need regulation there, we need sane patent reform, we need a return of sane copyright, we need a correct definition of internet, we need to end all public handouts to businesses, etc.
When consumers have choice they will be more effective than "regulation" ever will be. The problem is regulation almost always reduces chocie.
How about this? A 20 year moratorium on introducing any new rules/regulations on the internet.
Its a rarity if government regulation actually helps, and even when it does "help" it either creates larger problems down the road or fixes something else the government did.
Other than the initial creation of the internet, it has been largely a private affair and that is responsible for the majority of its growth.
Yes, but all those things involve tradeoffs. With browsers there aren't any because the vast majority of them are free (as in beer) and have good community support.
If I buy a 1970/80s car, chances are it will be really cheap. If I buy the newest car the day of release, its going to cost me. Similarly, if I buy my car from ObscureCarMakerOutOfFinland, I'm not going to get very good support, on the other hand, some of the more obscure browsers give the best support and usually the ones not backed up by a company have an open source foundation giving even better abilities to fix it.
With something common, like a Ford, I can go in and buy any part I need easily, with obscure car brands I can't. Its generally the opposite with software.
When it comes down to it, there are no trade offs that are so common with the physical market, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, etc. give you good browsing experiences with different features with very little drawbacks.
This isn't a positive example of the free market because it is a net negative for the net as a whole. Yes, the free market working on perhaps its last stronghold that keeps on getting eroded is a good thing, but why was IE not being used? Because it was filled with more holes than swiss cheese, that it didn't support hardly any technology, it was a pain to code for, etc.
The only reason why this has happened is because IE for a time was complete crap. Yes, it has resulted in benefits for some of us, but it means that many people have been and are using browsers that can be easily exploited into spewing DDoS attacks and spam (Does anyone still get spam anymore? I think I've had a grand total of like 4 messages since I started using Gmail) and all kinds of malware.
So, while it is nice that it opened up competition in the browser market, it was a net loss for the internet as a whole.
Why are some browsers not supported? There are two primary reasons--security and popularity. There are dozens of browsers in use today, but not all offer the minimum levels of security that we require while others may not perform well with our site. The security of your accounts and private information is one of our highest priorities and some browsers, especially older versions, are simply higher security risks to use with our site. As for popularity, we continually monitor the types of browsers that customers use to access our site. Based on that information, we know that supported browsers are used by more than 95% of our customers. If a new browser begins to grow in popularity, we will assess and test its security and performance with our site to determine whether or not we should support its use.
Right... Because its sooooo hard to use standards and make a secure site? Lets face it, if you code things right you can support every single browser except for perhaps IE (though they have gotten better). It is pure stupidity not to support various other browsers because they "aren't secure" when you can't give a reason other than they aren't used as much.
The vast majority of security for banking comes from 3 main places. Encryption (controlled by the site owners), Physical/Software security of the servers (controlled by the sites owners) and elimination of flaws in the browser (judging by their inclusion of IE 6... they aren't worried about this).
"Traditional" businesses don't understand technology at all, especially "consumer" technology trends. Usually software backed up by a large businesses is considered to be a bonus for the "traditional" business drone, however, as any tech-literate person will tell you, those programs usually are outdated, slow and bloated.
Its quite silly how they don't understand it. In their mind IE = Microsoft = stable. In everyone elses mind IE = Microsoft = Slow/Bloated/Insecure. In their mind Chrome = New = Unstable, in everyone elses mind Chrome = New = Fast.
Businesses need to realize people don't, and shouldn't, choose software like they choose a car.