If I wanted religion to guide my life, I'd join the Southern Baptists. If I want logic and reason, the bible is about the LAST fucking place I'd look.
"Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end." - Spock
I spent a couple of years working on a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, so I'm as logical/rational as they come. The problem is, only the universe is logical and rational (and only at the scales we've managed to probe so far). People are decidedly not.
If you want to help your fellow man, you must first understand them. And to understand them, you must understand yourself. Reading the Bible helps.
Nassim is one of the brightest thinkers around
on
End Bonuses For Bankers
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm a voracious reader. I figure I've easily read thousands of books in my life. My top ten list (hey, I'm a nerd) of most thought-provoking books I've ever read are:
10. Why Societies Need Dissent - Cass Sunstein 9. The Road to Reality - Roger Penrose 8. Diplomacy - Henry Kissenger 7. Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams 6. Free to Choose - Milton Friedman 5. Cosmos - Carl Sagan 4. Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond 3. Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb 2. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius 1. Bible (KJV)
You are doing yourself a disservice if you don't read Taleb. He is one of those rare authors who doesn't just serve up facts, but fundamentally alters the way you see the world.
Here's my economic theory of taxing the wealthy. You won't find it in any textbook. It may be right, or it may be crazy...
There are two types of wealthy people: the ones that actually create economic value (the Buffets, Jobs, and Gates of the world), and the ones who don't.
The latter became rich, not because of what they accomplished, but because they knew the right people. Went to the right schools. Had executive hair. Had charisma, but no actual ability hiding behind it.
If you're actually a source of economic value, taxes don't affect you as much as you'd think. Government takes, gives to the poor, makes them a bit richer, and they end up buying more of your product. There may not be a 1:1 correlation, but $1 in new taxes probably ends up being far less than $1 out of their pocket when all is said and done. It may even make you more money.
If, on the other hand, you're rich purely because of luck, then a higher tax rate affects you a lot more, because you can't count on the wealth you lose being recirculated to you. It will end up going to an actual value creator and not you.
That's why the Buffets and Gates of the world don't sweat higher taxes too much, and why you hear so much wailing and gnashing of teeth from Wall Street types over the very idea.
"Over the years, we had the option of making large capital expenditures in the textile operation that would have allowed us to somewhat reduce variable costs. Each proposal to do so looked like an immediate winner. Measured by standard return-on investment tests, in fact, these proposals usually promised greater economic benefits than would have resulted from comparable expenditures in our highly-profitable candy and newspaper businesses.
But the promised benefits from these textile investments were illusory. Many of our competitors, both domestic and foreign, were stepping up to the same kind of expenditures and, once enough companies did so, their reduced costs became the baseline for reduced prices industrywide. Viewed individually, each companyâ(TM)s capital investment decision appeared cost-effective and rational; viewed collectively, the decisions neutralized each other and were irrational (just as happens when each person watching a parade decides he can see a little better if he stands on tiptoes). After each round of investment, all the players had more money in the game and returns remained anemic."
A similar dynamic applies to education too. College has historically been the gatekeeper to a better life. You want to be set, you've got to graduate. More and more though, that economic profit is being captured by schools and not the student, in the form of higher tuition. But since HR departments aren't likely to get a clue and stop using "bachelor's degree" as a filter, students *have* to go to school. Which means they're trapped. This will continue until either our country gets a clue, or until schools have captured all the economic rent.
I personally have great respect for libertarian beliefs. Many of my own beliefs are (l)ibertarian. That's why I consider myself Republican. The problem is, (L)ibertarians have a bad habit of assuming when their beliefs about reality conflict with reality, it must be reality that's wrong somehow and not their beliefs. That's not strictly a (L)ibertarian problem, but it does seem to be more prevalent in those circles.
Before 2007 I was sympathetic to the Austrian school of thought. The years since have beaten the necessity of Keynesian thinking into me. Out of intellectually honest, I'm willing to change my beliefs when I'm proven wrong. You seem to be cherry-picking information that happen to agree with your own personal beliefs, without bother to check if your beliefs are correct.
Go read some economics and history. Preferably written by people you disagree with. Because sometimes they're right and you're wrong. Paul Krugman is a liberal, but he's called the past 3 years right.
Unfortunately no. I asked them if they could just drop cable off the pole and I'd handle the rest, and they said no because it wasn't a physical address. If they would just do that, I could lay fiber and then get a cable modem and fiber converter and run it, similar to what you said.
Our neighbors are in the same boat as my parents, so that's another problem
So that's $236 before S/H, and I'll probably need to buy a couple more pairs of the dish antennas (and poles to mount them on) to serve as passive repeaters.
I've considered 900 Mhz radios too RadioLabs sells a pair with dish antennas for $500. I wanted to test with 2.4 GHz WiFi first just to see, because if I spend $500 on 900 MHz and it doesn't work, then I've poured money in a hole. Whereas if I spend $500 on 2.4 GHz Wifi and antennas and it doesn't work, I can at least use them somewhere else.
A Zhone 24 port VDSL2 DSLAM goes for about $100 a port nowadays. The fiber run and node was north of $20k just for the hardware. Labor was estimated at $5-7k on top of that.
I'd be willing to run twister pair to a neighbor's house, pay their internet if they'd share, and pipe it back on VDSL2 modem. ZyXEL sells 'em for $300. But the neighbors are in much the same situation.
I would be tempted. But given the cost of doing so, and the likelihood that they wouldn't support that either, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
It also doesn't make a lot of sense to invest several thousand laying coax when it's going to be obsoleted by fiber in a few years any. Last time I checked, the successor to HDTV (Utra-HDTV) required 250 Mbs for streaming, and is supposed to be out around 2018. I rather doubt coax would scale that high. So it doesn't make sense to spend money that's going to be obsoleted within the decade.
I have been trying to get broadband for my parents for years. They live a mile off the main road in a deep valley. Thus far...
* No ISDN. A year or two ago Tennessee decided it no longer had to be a tariffed service, and AT&T burned their ships behind them as rapidly as possible, because I was told our CO no longer has ISDN hardware (it did back in 2001-2002).
* No DSL. AT&T has a cluster of SAI cabinets 1 mile from their driveway, but no free ports on their DSLAM, and no intention of adding new ones. I've voluntered to *BUY* them a frickin' VDSL2 DSLAM and give it to them, but I've never heard back from them on that or any of several other offers. AT&T is a bigger information sink than/dev/null
* No Fiber. I have asked Charter if they could provision single-mode fiber if I pulled it to the road. I was agnostic about whether that's a pure FTTH setup, or just a cabinet by the road with a cable modem and a fiber converter. Nope. They cannot provision my fiber under either scenario, but they *can* provision fiber they lay themselves, which strangely costs roughly "one new car" more than doing it myself. Which is kind of hard on retired fixed-income folks.
* No cable. Their house doesn't have cable coax. See Charter's idea of fair price above.
* No cell. The valley effectively blocks all signals. I have maps of every cell tower in a 10 mile radius, and never found a useful signal on any of them.
* No satellite. They don't have line-of-sight with geosynchronous orbit, and even if they did, the satellite providers in our area aren't accepting new customers right now.
I mean, what can you do at this point? My next step is getting two 2 watt Wi-Fi routers and a couple of high-gain antennas, setting up a couple of passive repeaters between them and my house (very NoLOS), and hoping I can set up a wireless bridge. My next step past that is contacting CERN to see if they can beam internet over neutrinos.
The last time this issue came up on Slashdot, the (L)ibertarians came out of the woodwork, blaming my parents for building a house somewhere where there's no broadband, despite the fact that they built the house in 1985. Which is about as rational as blaming settlers in the 1700's for not building cities where the interstates were going to be.
They also pounced on me for wanting something subsidized. Except you're not subsidizing me one thin dime. The phone cable is already in the ground. All I need is a DSLAM in the local SAI cabinet, *which I volunteered to purchase myself*. No go. A free market only exists when the buyer actually has a choice (see "healthcare" for another example of your economic ideologies colliding with reality).
Freshman economics tells you that some business don't behave well under the usual free-market rules, and thus need to be heavily regulated. Those business are called "natural monopolies", which is why gas, electricity, sewage, roads, phone (hah!) are provided by either public utilities, or publicly-regulated private utilities. A utility only needs one set of physical plant, one set of staff, one set of senior management. Multiple companies waste megabucks on multiple plant/staff/management. They waste further megabucks on advertising, trying to steal profitable customers from each other in a zero-sum game. All that needless spending increases your costs, increases the necessary rate of return before they will provide internet, and ends up marooning a lot of marginal households on the wrong side of the digital divide.
In the middle 2000's several underserved TN cities and utilities got tired of being ignored by the AT&T and Comcast's of the world and were looking at getting into the game themselves. And then in 2008 our state politicians decided to actively hinder the formation of municipal internet and the entrance of local electric utilities (existing ones got grandfathered in), in the name of "encouraging compet
Not in the sense that you'll ever actually see 200 Mbs, but that they work in some harsh environments. I can get 6 Mbs over 400 ft of buried ROMEX electrical cord between my parents house and garage which is full of electric motors and spliced lines. I expect the upcoming generation of 1Gb G.hn adapters would hit 10-15 Mbs real world. Not bad at all.
In my house with its 1960's wiring, iperf is showing a consistent 44 Mbs.
I'm not asking you to install cable. *THE CABLE IS ALREADY THERE*.
I'm not asking you to buy me a DSLAM or pay to install it. *I'M WILLING TO BUY MY OWN DSLAM*.
I'm simply asking, since Bellsouth is a de facto monopoly, that someone compel them to provide service.
As I posted earlier, my parents built their house in 1985, way before the internet came along. By your same logic, you probably blame the pioneers back in the 1800's for not having the sense to build their settlements where the interstates were going to be.
I believe in (l)ibertarianism, but you (L)ibertards are rather stupid and don't know how you sound (one hopes, anyway).
It's hard to tell the difference between a libertarian and a troll on Slashdot, since they usually say the same things. If it wouldn't be too much of a strain, could you actually *READ* what I say before replying.
I'm not asking you to subsidize our lifestyle. I'm not asking for a single dime of your money. I'm willing to pay full market price for a 24-port DSLAM so my parents can get internet. I am simply asking that AT&T be compelled to get off their corporate duff and *PROVIDE SERVICE*. That's all.
This isn't a house, this is a home. My parents and I built it ourselves. I invested several years of my life doing that. I wouldn't trade it for all the gold in Fort Knox.
Why are all the liber-tards on Slashdot unable to comprehend simple English. *** I AM NOT ASKING YOU TO SUBSIDIZE MY LIFESTYLE ***. I am happy to pay the full price for a whole 24-port DSLAM, just so my parents can finally get internet. I'm not asking you for a single dime. I'm asking that AT&T be compelled to get off its corporate duff and, you know, *PROVIDE*.
It's hard to tell the difference between a libertarian and a troll sometimes.
I am not asking you to pay for my lifestyle. If you'd actually read, you'd notice that I *volunteered to pay the full cost for a whole 24-port DSLAM*, just so my parents can get internet.
I'm not asking you to subsidize me so much as a dime. I'm asking that AT&T be compelled to take the money out of my hand and provide the service I require because they are a de facto internet monopoly in our area. A free market only exists when the buyer has a choice from whom to buy.
Being a analytical guy, I was attracted to libertarian thought, until I realized that A) the world doesn't really work that way and B) instead of recognizing that fact, the hard-core libertarians insisted that reality conform to their model, instead of modifying their model to conform to reality.
I had ISDN at their house when I was staying there (1999-2000). We tried to get it again a few months ago, but were told that they had removed the ISDN equipment from the local CO so they would have space to install DSL hardware. Apparently the state legislature voted last year to deregulate ISDN into a service that AT&T would no longer be compelled to offer, and AT&T has been burning the ISDN ships behind them as quickly as possible. At least that's what I was told.
Plus the general lack of availability of new hardware (I got burned twice buying ISDN equipment on eBay 10 years ago. I shudder to think what it's like now).
My parents live 1 mile off the main road, on a creek rock drive way. There is only one other neighbor living on this road. It's still far cheaper to just buy AT&T a DSLAM, if they even had the internal procedure to do it.
They built this house back in 1985. It was their dream house (still is, and mine too), in a nice, quiet, secluded little valley. I'm led to understand that the Internet wasn't such a big deal back in 1985, and thus had no bearing on their purchasing decision at the time. I'm sure a lot of older, fixed income people are in similar circumstances, having purchased homes before the internet even existed.
You are an idiot. Seriously. You'd have to work harder to even be considered a worthy troll on FARK, much less here.
The FCC needs to compel broadband providers to actually provide service in some instances. My parents live a mile off the road in a deep valley. The "mile off the road" part precludes cable because the cable company wants $15,000 to run line. The "deep valley" part precludes cell service and satellite. Literally, their only option is DSL, but BellSouth's local DSLAM has no free ports and they have refused to add a new one for several years.
We've raised the issue with the Tennessee Regulatory Commission (the TN service nominally in charge of overseeing utilities) and even they won't/can't do anything due to our braindead legislators handicapping them.
I can find 24 port VDSL2 DSLAM's on Google for $100 a port. I'm presuming AT&T, with their much larger negotiating power, can do even better. I'd be willing to buy the whole DSLAM for them, but they have no internal way of even handling that.
When the customer has no other option from whom to buy, there is no "free market". In that particular circumstance, the seller should be compelled to provide service.
The numbers in the Reuter's article show the speed of light for neutrinos is 1 part in 40,000 times faster than the speed of light for normal matter.
I don't think this involves causality violations just yet. All our speed of light experiments to date involve measuring particles involving the electromagnetic force (protons, electrons, photons). Even if confirmed, it could be that there's some measurement error in the EM-derived speed of light, which the neutrino is immune to. In which case, it's not useful for time travel. It simply means our measurement of c was off by a smidge.
And given the small size of the result, if FTL neutrino communication is proved true, I expect the only real-world application would be financial companies trying to squeeze a few more nanoseconds off NYC-London communications.
Slashdot Mirror
"Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end." - Spock
I spent a couple of years working on a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, so I'm as logical/rational as they come. The problem is, only the universe is logical and rational (and only at the scales we've managed to probe so far). People are decidedly not.
If you want to help your fellow man, you must first understand them. And to understand them, you must understand yourself. Reading the Bible helps.
I'm a voracious reader. I figure I've easily read thousands of books in my life. My top ten list (hey, I'm a nerd) of most thought-provoking books I've ever read are:
10. Why Societies Need Dissent - Cass Sunstein
9. The Road to Reality - Roger Penrose
8. Diplomacy - Henry Kissenger
7. Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams
6. Free to Choose - Milton Friedman
5. Cosmos - Carl Sagan
4. Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
3. Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
2. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
1. Bible (KJV)
You are doing yourself a disservice if you don't read Taleb. He is one of those rare authors who doesn't just serve up facts, but fundamentally alters the way you see the world.
Here's my economic theory of taxing the wealthy. You won't find it in any textbook. It may be right, or it may be crazy...
There are two types of wealthy people: the ones that actually create economic value (the Buffets, Jobs, and Gates of the world), and the ones who don't.
The latter became rich, not because of what they accomplished, but because they knew the right people. Went to the right schools. Had executive hair. Had charisma, but no actual ability hiding behind it.
If you're actually a source of economic value, taxes don't affect you as much as you'd think. Government takes, gives to the poor, makes them a bit richer, and they end up buying more of your product. There may not be a 1:1 correlation, but $1 in new taxes probably ends up being far less than $1 out of their pocket when all is said and done. It may even make you more money.
If, on the other hand, you're rich purely because of luck, then a higher tax rate affects you a lot more, because you can't count on the wealth you lose being recirculated to you. It will end up going to an actual value creator and not you.
That's why the Buffets and Gates of the world don't sweat higher taxes too much, and why you hear so much wailing and gnashing of teeth from Wall Street types over the very idea.
My 2 cents, anyway.
"Over the years, we had the option of making large capital expenditures in the textile operation that would have allowed us to somewhat reduce variable costs. Each proposal to do so looked like an immediate winner. Measured by standard return-on investment tests, in fact, these proposals usually promised greater economic benefits than would have resulted from comparable expenditures in our highly-profitable candy and newspaper businesses.
But the promised benefits from these textile investments were illusory. Many of our competitors, both domestic and foreign, were stepping up to the same kind of expenditures and, once enough companies did so, their reduced costs became the baseline for reduced prices industrywide. Viewed individually, each companyâ(TM)s capital investment decision appeared cost-effective and rational; viewed collectively, the decisions neutralized each other and were irrational (just as happens when each person watching a parade decides he can see a little better if he stands on tiptoes). After each round of investment, all the players had more money in the game and returns remained anemic."
A similar dynamic applies to education too. College has historically been the gatekeeper to a better life. You want to be set, you've got to graduate. More and more though, that economic profit is being captured by schools and not the student, in the form of higher tuition. But since HR departments aren't likely to get a clue and stop using "bachelor's degree" as a filter, students *have* to go to school. Which means they're trapped. This will continue until either our country gets a clue, or until schools have captured all the economic rent.
I personally have great respect for libertarian beliefs. Many of my own beliefs are (l)ibertarian. That's why I consider myself Republican. The problem is, (L)ibertarians have a bad habit of assuming when their beliefs about reality conflict with reality, it must be reality that's wrong somehow and not their beliefs. That's not strictly a (L)ibertarian problem, but it does seem to be more prevalent in those circles.
Before 2007 I was sympathetic to the Austrian school of thought. The years since have beaten the necessity of Keynesian thinking into me. Out of intellectually honest, I'm willing to change my beliefs when I'm proven wrong. You seem to be cherry-picking information that happen to agree with your own personal beliefs, without bother to check if your beliefs are correct.
Go read some economics and history. Preferably written by people you disagree with. Because sometimes they're right and you're wrong. Paul Krugman is a liberal, but he's called the past 3 years right.
That's the nicest complement I've gotten in a while. :-)
Unfortunately no. I asked them if they could just drop cable off the pole and I'd handle the rest, and they said no because it wasn't a physical address. If they would just do that, I could lay fiber and then get a cable modem and fiber converter and run it, similar to what you said.
Our neighbors are in the same boat as my parents, so that's another problem
Appreciate the suggestions though.
There are electric poles to my parent's house, but that hits two major problems:
* Hanging anything on a power pole costs $1 per month. Multiply that by the number of poles it would take, and that's $30 a month just by itself.
* Even if I did that, no one else on my main road has DSL either.
Right now I'm looking at creating a wireless bridge to my house. Airlive sells a 2 watt Wifi Router for $70
http://www.flyteccomputers.com/details.cfm?wid=1270&wb=N.Power&wre=1
and TP-Link sells a 24 DBi Wifi dish antenna for $48.
http://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-NT-TL-ANT2424B-2-4G-24dBi/dp/B003CFATOW/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1319760719&sr=8-7
So that's $236 before S/H, and I'll probably need to buy a couple more pairs of the dish antennas (and poles to mount them on) to serve as passive repeaters.
I've considered 900 Mhz radios too RadioLabs sells a pair with dish antennas for $500. I wanted to test with 2.4 GHz WiFi first just to see, because if I spend $500 on 900 MHz and it doesn't work, then I've poured money in a hole. Whereas if I spend $500 on 2.4 GHz Wifi and antennas and it doesn't work, I can at least use them somewhere else.
A Zhone 24 port VDSL2 DSLAM goes for about $100 a port nowadays. The fiber run and node was north of $20k just for the hardware. Labor was estimated at $5-7k on top of that.
I'd be willing to run twister pair to a neighbor's house, pay their internet if they'd share, and pipe it back on VDSL2 modem. ZyXEL sells 'em for $300. But the neighbors are in much the same situation.
Actually I have considered it. It's a ludicrous idea, but it's also a ludicrous situation too.
I would be tempted. But given the cost of doing so, and the likelihood that they wouldn't support that either, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
It also doesn't make a lot of sense to invest several thousand laying coax when it's going to be obsoleted by fiber in a few years any. Last time I checked, the successor to HDTV (Utra-HDTV) required 250 Mbs for streaming, and is supposed to be out around 2018. I rather doubt coax would scale that high. So it doesn't make sense to spend money that's going to be obsoleted within the decade.
I have been trying to get broadband for my parents for years. They live a mile off the main road in a deep valley. Thus far...
* No ISDN. A year or two ago Tennessee decided it no longer had to be a tariffed service, and AT&T burned their ships behind them as rapidly as possible, because I was told our CO no longer has ISDN hardware (it did back in 2001-2002).
* No DSL. AT&T has a cluster of SAI cabinets 1 mile from their driveway, but no free ports on their DSLAM, and no intention of adding new ones. I've voluntered to *BUY* them a frickin' VDSL2 DSLAM and give it to them, but I've never heard back from them on that or any of several other offers. AT&T is a bigger information sink than /dev/null
* No Fiber. I have asked Charter if they could provision single-mode fiber if I pulled it to the road. I was agnostic about whether that's a pure FTTH setup, or just a cabinet by the road with a cable modem and a fiber converter. Nope. They cannot provision my fiber under either scenario, but they *can* provision fiber they lay themselves, which strangely costs roughly "one new car" more than doing it myself. Which is kind of hard on retired fixed-income folks.
* No cable. Their house doesn't have cable coax. See Charter's idea of fair price above.
* No cell. The valley effectively blocks all signals. I have maps of every cell tower in a 10 mile radius, and never found a useful signal on any of them.
* No satellite. They don't have line-of-sight with geosynchronous orbit, and even if they did, the satellite providers in our area aren't accepting new customers right now.
I mean, what can you do at this point? My next step is getting two 2 watt Wi-Fi routers and a couple of high-gain antennas, setting up a couple of passive repeaters between them and my house (very NoLOS), and hoping I can set up a wireless bridge. My next step past that is contacting CERN to see if they can beam internet over neutrinos.
The last time this issue came up on Slashdot, the (L)ibertarians came out of the woodwork, blaming my parents for building a house somewhere where there's no broadband, despite the fact that they built the house in 1985. Which is about as rational as blaming settlers in the 1700's for not building cities where the interstates were going to be.
They also pounced on me for wanting something subsidized. Except you're not subsidizing me one thin dime. The phone cable is already in the ground. All I need is a DSLAM in the local SAI cabinet, *which I volunteered to purchase myself*. No go. A free market only exists when the buyer actually has a choice (see "healthcare" for another example of your economic ideologies colliding with reality).
Freshman economics tells you that some business don't behave well under the usual free-market rules, and thus need to be heavily regulated. Those business are called "natural monopolies", which is why gas, electricity, sewage, roads, phone (hah!) are provided by either public utilities, or publicly-regulated private utilities. A utility only needs one set of physical plant, one set of staff, one set of senior management. Multiple companies waste megabucks on multiple plant/staff/management. They waste further megabucks on advertising, trying to steal profitable customers from each other in a zero-sum game. All that needless spending increases your costs, increases the necessary rate of return before they will provide internet, and ends up marooning a lot of marginal households on the wrong side of the digital divide.
In the middle 2000's several underserved TN cities and utilities got tired of being ignored by the AT&T and Comcast's of the world and were looking at getting into the game themselves. And then in 2008 our state politicians decided to actively hinder the formation of municipal internet and the entrance of local electric utilities (existing ones got grandfathered in), in the name of "encouraging compet
Not in the sense that you'll ever actually see 200 Mbs, but that they work in some harsh environments. I can get 6 Mbs over 400 ft of buried ROMEX electrical cord between my parents house and garage which is full of electric motors and spliced lines. I expect the upcoming generation of 1Gb G.hn adapters would hit 10-15 Mbs real world. Not bad at all.
In my house with its 1960's wiring, iperf is showing a consistent 44 Mbs.
I swear you Libertard-trolls don't read....
I'm not asking you to install cable. *THE CABLE IS ALREADY THERE*.
I'm not asking you to buy me a DSLAM or pay to install it. *I'M WILLING TO BUY MY OWN DSLAM*.
I'm simply asking, since Bellsouth is a de facto monopoly, that someone compel them to provide service.
As I posted earlier, my parents built their house in 1985, way before the internet came along. By your same logic, you probably blame the pioneers back in the 1800's for not having the sense to build their settlements where the interstates were going to be.
I believe in (l)ibertarianism, but you (L)ibertards are rather stupid and don't know how you sound (one hopes, anyway).
Binkley's Law of Slashdot: Any sufficiently advanced troll is indistinguishable from Libertarian.
This thread has taught me a lesson I will always remember.
It's hard to tell the difference between a libertarian and a troll on Slashdot, since they usually say the same things. If it wouldn't be too much of a strain, could you actually *READ* what I say before replying.
I'm not asking you to subsidize our lifestyle. I'm not asking for a single dime of your money. I'm willing to pay full market price for a 24-port DSLAM so my parents can get internet. I am simply asking that AT&T be compelled to get off their corporate duff and *PROVIDE SERVICE*. That's all.
This isn't a house, this is a home. My parents and I built it ourselves. I invested several years of my life doing that. I wouldn't trade it for all the gold in Fort Knox.
Why are all the liber-tards on Slashdot unable to comprehend simple English. *** I AM NOT ASKING YOU TO SUBSIDIZE MY LIFESTYLE ***. I am happy to pay the full price for a whole 24-port DSLAM, just so my parents can finally get internet. I'm not asking you for a single dime. I'm asking that AT&T be compelled to get off its corporate duff and, you know, *PROVIDE*.
It's hard to tell the difference between a libertarian and a troll sometimes.
I am not asking you to pay for my lifestyle. If you'd actually read, you'd notice that I *volunteered to pay the full cost for a whole 24-port DSLAM*, just so my parents can get internet.
I'm not asking you to subsidize me so much as a dime. I'm asking that AT&T be compelled to take the money out of my hand and provide the service I require because they are a de facto internet monopoly in our area. A free market only exists when the buyer has a choice from whom to buy.
Being a analytical guy, I was attracted to libertarian thought, until I realized that A) the world doesn't really work that way and B) instead of recognizing that fact, the hard-core libertarians insisted that reality conform to their model, instead of modifying their model to conform to reality.
I had ISDN at their house when I was staying there (1999-2000). We tried to get it again a few months ago, but were told that they had removed the ISDN equipment from the local CO so they would have space to install DSL hardware. Apparently the state legislature voted last year to deregulate ISDN into a service that AT&T would no longer be compelled to offer, and AT&T has been burning the ISDN ships behind them as quickly as possible. At least that's what I was told.
Plus the general lack of availability of new hardware (I got burned twice buying ISDN equipment on eBay 10 years ago. I shudder to think what it's like now).
My parents live 1 mile off the main road, on a creek rock drive way. There is only one other neighbor living on this road. It's still far cheaper to just buy AT&T a DSLAM, if they even had the internal procedure to do it.
They built this house back in 1985. It was their dream house (still is, and mine too), in a nice, quiet, secluded little valley. I'm led to understand that the Internet wasn't such a big deal back in 1985, and thus had no bearing on their purchasing decision at the time. I'm sure a lot of older, fixed income people are in similar circumstances, having purchased homes before the internet even existed.
You are an idiot. Seriously. You'd have to work harder to even be considered a worthy troll on FARK, much less here.
The FCC needs to compel broadband providers to actually provide service in some instances. My parents live a mile off the road in a deep valley. The "mile off the road" part precludes cable because the cable company wants $15,000 to run line. The "deep valley" part precludes cell service and satellite. Literally, their only option is DSL, but BellSouth's local DSLAM has no free ports and they have refused to add a new one for several years.
We've raised the issue with the Tennessee Regulatory Commission (the TN service nominally in charge of overseeing utilities) and even they won't/can't do anything due to our braindead legislators handicapping them.
I can find 24 port VDSL2 DSLAM's on Google for $100 a port. I'm presuming AT&T, with their much larger negotiating power, can do even better. I'd be willing to buy the whole DSLAM for them, but they have no internal way of even handling that.
When the customer has no other option from whom to buy, there is no "free market". In that particular circumstance, the seller should be compelled to provide service.
The numbers in the Reuter's article show the speed of light for neutrinos is 1 part in 40,000 times faster than the speed of light for normal matter.
I don't think this involves causality violations just yet. All our speed of light experiments to date involve measuring particles involving the electromagnetic force (protons, electrons, photons). Even if confirmed, it could be that there's some measurement error in the EM-derived speed of light, which the neutrino is immune to. In which case, it's not useful for time travel. It simply means our measurement of c was off by a smidge.
And given the small size of the result, if FTL neutrino communication is proved true, I expect the only real-world application would be financial companies trying to squeeze a few more nanoseconds off NYC-London communications.
I can't buy a Ferrari for $50. We must have a Ferrari shortage...
To all the Krugman haters...
http://comparative-advantage.com/documents/Analysis-of-Forcast-Accuracy-in-the-Political-Media.pdf
http://www.frumforum.com/could-it-be-that-our-enemies-were-right
I'm a (r)epublican, but call a spade a spade. He's been a lot righter than most.