This has been part of a long tug-of-war between the major ISPs and regulators for a long time. The questions comes down to whether internet service is "content delivery" or "data transport". Is it a utility, which has other significant fairness requirements, or is it a buyer-beware unregulated luxury? We've been dodging this question for over a decade. In exchange for not getting internet access called a utility, the major ISPs have made (and broken) major roll-out promises, and have kept the data transport at least somewhat network-neutral.
But I would think that philosophically, internet access is far more of a utility than cable TV, and that is regulated as a utility.
So the way we're doing things is really hiding our heads in the sand, pretending it's all going to come out OK. I'll have to agree with what someone else said, with a little modification... In internet tax is just corporate welfare - unless it's accompanied by declaring internet access to be a utility.
Makes you wonder when the first publicly visible lethal abuse of the walled garden concept will happen, who will do it, what it will be, and what will be the logic in the case, and how the garden owners will weasel out of it. Makes you wonder even more about the non-visible case(s).
Blame the politicians if you wish - they're not blameless. But they don't carry the real weight. We do - the people who elect. There are also the wealthy and corporations - the power-brokers who make sure that "the right people" are put in front of us, when we vote.
Nor am I in the "literal truth" camp, in any way, shape, or form. But as allegory and insight into a group of people that became and lost (and regained and re-lost, etc) a nation, the Bible has an uncommon depth to it, including a depth of time.
Do I believe Jonah lived in the belly of a whale for 3 days? No way. Do I believe that the author thought that Hebrews were shirking their religious responsibilities, and chose to exemplify it through a story with a character he named "Jonah"... sounds reasonable to me.
Plus though there doesn't appear to be any historical record of Jesus, there are independent historical records that do a reasonably decent job of corroborating equivalent parts of Biblical history.
Others on this subthread have said essentially the same. One other thought... We live in a fact-saturated world. We can have some idea of what's happening almost anywhere in the world, at our fingertips. I don't think we're mentally equipped to understand what it's like when news travels almost exclusively by word-of-mouth, where most of the population is illiterate, where it may be easier for us to find out what's happening on the far side of the world than for them to find out what's happening in the next village. There are the simple facts, and then there's the psychological underpinnings that those knowledge constraints put on one's very way of thinking.
Yeah, and they gave birth to some of the worst brats ever - Us. (I'm a late boomer, so I'm part of that generation, but I try to do better.)
Study the Bible a bit, and you'll see that the Hebrew nation survived every adversity thrown against it, except one. Prosperity - got them every time. Seems to me that has something to do with our current situation.
In this case, science fiction can be a leading indicator. Even as the moon landings happened, post-apocolypse science fiction was well established. Of course even some of that managed to be the optimistic, "we will recover, we will do better," type. I'd say one signpost of the optimism really dying, though perhaps not the key event, was the corporate-ruled dystopia genre. Government stupidity and butchery was only a contributing factor, not the key one.
I don't mind paying my share of well-baby services, national parks, promotion of the Arts, space exploration, pregnancy care, taking care of people who have fallen upon hard times, etc, etc, etc.
I object far more to paying for weapons systems that are black holes of funding and deliver barely-functional weapons. I object to paying for wars that never should have been waged. I object to paying for subsidies that wind up going to already-highly-profitable corporations.
Oh, and I don't like welfare fraud, either.
But some 20 years ago, while hearing a far-right-wing co-worker rail about welfare while the Savings and Loan Scandal was ramping up, I realized something. In the Savings and Loan Scandle, rich people bilked ordinary people of billions, then managed to skate away scott-free. My tax dollars helped "fix the mess". Essentially I indirectly gave a bunch of my money to Neil Bush. (to name one, but there were others)
Since then I have come to believe that far more of my tax dollars go to people making more than me than go to people making less. I don't begrudge the downtrodden. Even if he's a lazy bum, and I don't believe most are, it's a small price to pay, to make sure that the truly deserving are covered.
By the way, you may never need pregnancy services. Do you have a wife or sister? What about your mother?
How do you suggest breaking the cycle then? IMHO if the founding fathers had seen what corporations would become, they would have done a specific delineation of rights in the Constitution. Perhaps it would be as some sort of "collections of peoples", actually rather similar to a church, when you think about it. As it is, corporations are getting everything but the vote, less of the liabilities, and the recent and not-so-recent "personhood" rulings form the Supremes indeed make mere people second-class citizens.
Again, as you say, a corporation only exists because it gets its charter from the government. What piece of legal fiction would you use to give a corporation existence? Or would you go back to partnerships, abandon the limited-liability nature of corporations, and recognize them only as the people running the show? (That may not be a bad idea, now that I think about it.)
There is perpetual complaint about "government messing around with business," but clearly not enough complaint about "business messing around with government." I would also argue that the ramifications of the latter are far worse than the former. Think for a moment about the "military-industrial complex" and the number of complex defense contracts that are apparently largely a mechanism to get fat sucking off of the government (and taxpayer) teat. The place where it gets really bad is when we don't get the weapons system that we might actually need - even at the vastly inflated price.
This is a situation where the two of you should really have been talking all along. If you're in this fundamental a disagreement, maybe you shouldn't have gotten here. Sex is a bit different with the "I'm fertile NOW!" thrown in, of course, but that's part of life.
It would be best if baby would be welcomed into the world by loving parents. That may be ideal and rose-colored, but I think it's still a good goal. I also believe that birth control for timing and quantity is an important part of that ideal goal, as well.
But where would you be, had your father had this available, and felt too "baby pressured?"
I wish I had mod points. This is one of the simplest explanations I've seen on the reality of this matter.
There are also those who will say that "an unpriced negative externality" is of no value whatsoever, since the only value that anything has is what the market assigns it. I don't happen to agree with that assessment, but I'm sure that many would salute if you ran it up the flagpole, especially if they're making money hand-over-fist making money that way.
Plus how much government waste is because the corporate world has learned to "feed from the trough" and has bought enough influence keep the gravy train coming.
There are so many heartfelt AND serious calls to stop government interference in business, but while there are many calls to stop business interference in government, it's quite clear that The Golden Rule really doesn't call for it.
Better yet, it's time for a social experiment. If he really devalues his/. ID that much, the reveal it.
Make a post containing his/. id, numeric id, and password. Make it so anyone/everyone can use his id. Then watch the fireworks. Too bad he also couldn't "fix" the password, so that the first hijacker can't change it and lock all other hijacker-wannabees out.
His guarantee and his opinion is worth just as much as yours. They're both opinions.
Look at the historical side of it. Through most of history, science has been a matter of hobby or patronage on the part of rich people - either they dabbled in it themselves, or they sponsored scientists. (Though in the patronage days they weren't so much scientists as natural artists, since that's what evolved to become what we call scientists today.)
Modern science is more recent, only a few centuries old. While "practical science" has been funded privately, I strongly suspect that the "pure science' has always been dominated by government and universities. Things like Bell Labs and Watson Research are very new - less than a century old.
Finally, reflexive "Government can't do squat right," is about as thinking, insightful, and accurate as "A government program can solve about any problem."
Patents last 17 years from date of issue or 20 (or is it 21) years from date of file. Copyrights last forever, or at least are on track to last "the second half of eternity." Add to that, patents, can be "personally expressed", though not sold, while copyrights have become as close to absolute as the MafiAA can afford. (Back on the "personally expressed," elsewhere in this thread I see that you can do so for research, but not for everyday use. Don't know about that, or whether you can call it "life cycle testing" to cover that one.)
Watch for "fuzz" lawsuits on copyright - manufacturers arguing that their part hasn't been changed enough, or that the "essence" is still present in the tweaked 3d-printed part.
I accidentally fixed a stiction problem once for a friend. He gave me an "old dead PC", and I stuck it in the back of the minivan. By the time I got it home, it had fallen over sideways. When I plugged it in to begin diagnosis, it simply booted up.
I told him what happened, and gave it back. I have no idea how long that "repair" lasted.
I seem to remember reading/hearing that the LEM walls were on the order of soda-can thickness, or perhaps more like double that. We're talking order-of-magnitude here, it wasn't oildrum-thick, for instance. Someone else talked of the "ping" or "bong" sound/feeling when they pressurized it, and that squares with my source. In addition, a good pocket knife could have cut through the walls.
I'm a Verizon landline dumpee as well. In our case, we're now FairPoint customers.
The news from me to that ArsTechnica article is that Verizon is no longer pursuing FIOS, either. They haven't sold it, and they're still running it, but they're not pushing new rollouts, either.
I got Comcast cable long before DSL became available to me. Recently/. ran a story on the "National Broadband Map" that led me to believe that a local CLEC would be an option for me. But somewhere between my house and the CO, there's fiber, and the moment the signal touches fiber all ILEC/CLEC deals are off. Too bad, too. The local CLEC had a really good set of services/TOS. They would do domain hosting, let you run your own servers, etc.
It's also easier to find alternatives to oil. When it comes to drinking and growing crops, there's not substitute for fresh water. I'll agree that we're not very good about finding alternatives to oil, and there are some uses where there are no alternatives at all, but we are making progress at it.
Slashdot Mirror
This has been part of a long tug-of-war between the major ISPs and regulators for a long time. The questions comes down to whether internet service is "content delivery" or "data transport". Is it a utility, which has other significant fairness requirements, or is it a buyer-beware unregulated luxury? We've been dodging this question for over a decade. In exchange for not getting internet access called a utility, the major ISPs have made (and broken) major roll-out promises, and have kept the data transport at least somewhat network-neutral.
But I would think that philosophically, internet access is far more of a utility than cable TV, and that is regulated as a utility.
So the way we're doing things is really hiding our heads in the sand, pretending it's all going to come out OK. I'll have to agree with what someone else said, with a little modification... In internet tax is just corporate welfare - unless it's accompanied by declaring internet access to be a utility.
Makes you wonder when the first publicly visible lethal abuse of the walled garden concept will happen, who will do it, what it will be, and what will be the logic in the case, and how the garden owners will weasel out of it. Makes you wonder even more about the non-visible case(s).
Blame the politicians if you wish - they're not blameless. But they don't carry the real weight. We do - the people who elect. There are also the wealthy and corporations - the power-brokers who make sure that "the right people" are put in front of us, when we vote.
Nor am I in the "literal truth" camp, in any way, shape, or form. But as allegory and insight into a group of people that became and lost (and regained and re-lost, etc) a nation, the Bible has an uncommon depth to it, including a depth of time.
Do I believe Jonah lived in the belly of a whale for 3 days? No way. Do I believe that the author thought that Hebrews were shirking their religious responsibilities, and chose to exemplify it through a story with a character he named "Jonah"... sounds reasonable to me.
Plus though there doesn't appear to be any historical record of Jesus, there are independent historical records that do a reasonably decent job of corroborating equivalent parts of Biblical history.
Others on this subthread have said essentially the same. One other thought... We live in a fact-saturated world. We can have some idea of what's happening almost anywhere in the world, at our fingertips. I don't think we're mentally equipped to understand what it's like when news travels almost exclusively by word-of-mouth, where most of the population is illiterate, where it may be easier for us to find out what's happening on the far side of the world than for them to find out what's happening in the next village. There are the simple facts, and then there's the psychological underpinnings that those knowledge constraints put on one's very way of thinking.
Yeah, and they gave birth to some of the worst brats ever - Us. (I'm a late boomer, so I'm part of that generation, but I try to do better.)
Study the Bible a bit, and you'll see that the Hebrew nation survived every adversity thrown against it, except one. Prosperity - got them every time. Seems to me that has something to do with our current situation.
In this case, science fiction can be a leading indicator. Even as the moon landings happened, post-apocolypse science fiction was well established. Of course even some of that managed to be the optimistic, "we will recover, we will do better," type. I'd say one signpost of the optimism really dying, though perhaps not the key event, was the corporate-ruled dystopia genre. Government stupidity and butchery was only a contributing factor, not the key one.
You mean like Mel Tillis...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_Tillis
I don't mind paying my share of it.
I don't mind paying my share of well-baby services, national parks, promotion of the Arts, space exploration, pregnancy care, taking care of people who have fallen upon hard times, etc, etc, etc.
I object far more to paying for weapons systems that are black holes of funding and deliver barely-functional weapons. I object to paying for wars that never should have been waged. I object to paying for subsidies that wind up going to already-highly-profitable corporations.
Oh, and I don't like welfare fraud, either.
But some 20 years ago, while hearing a far-right-wing co-worker rail about welfare while the Savings and Loan Scandal was ramping up, I realized something. In the Savings and Loan Scandle, rich people bilked ordinary people of billions, then managed to skate away scott-free. My tax dollars helped "fix the mess". Essentially I indirectly gave a bunch of my money to Neil Bush. (to name one, but there were others)
Since then I have come to believe that far more of my tax dollars go to people making more than me than go to people making less. I don't begrudge the downtrodden. Even if he's a lazy bum, and I don't believe most are, it's a small price to pay, to make sure that the truly deserving are covered.
By the way, you may never need pregnancy services. Do you have a wife or sister? What about your mother?
How do you suggest breaking the cycle then? IMHO if the founding fathers had seen what corporations would become, they would have done a specific delineation of rights in the Constitution. Perhaps it would be as some sort of "collections of peoples", actually rather similar to a church, when you think about it. As it is, corporations are getting everything but the vote, less of the liabilities, and the recent and not-so-recent "personhood" rulings form the Supremes indeed make mere people second-class citizens.
Again, as you say, a corporation only exists because it gets its charter from the government. What piece of legal fiction would you use to give a corporation existence? Or would you go back to partnerships, abandon the limited-liability nature of corporations, and recognize them only as the people running the show? (That may not be a bad idea, now that I think about it.)
There is perpetual complaint about "government messing around with business," but clearly not enough complaint about "business messing around with government." I would also argue that the ramifications of the latter are far worse than the former. Think for a moment about the "military-industrial complex" and the number of complex defense contracts that are apparently largely a mechanism to get fat sucking off of the government (and taxpayer) teat. The place where it gets really bad is when we don't get the weapons system that we might actually need - even at the vastly inflated price.
This is a situation where the two of you should really have been talking all along. If you're in this fundamental a disagreement, maybe you shouldn't have gotten here. Sex is a bit different with the "I'm fertile NOW!" thrown in, of course, but that's part of life.
It would be best if baby would be welcomed into the world by loving parents. That may be ideal and rose-colored, but I think it's still a good goal. I also believe that birth control for timing and quantity is an important part of that ideal goal, as well.
But where would you be, had your father had this available, and felt too "baby pressured?"
I wish I had mod points. This is one of the simplest explanations I've seen on the reality of this matter.
There are also those who will say that "an unpriced negative externality" is of no value whatsoever, since the only value that anything has is what the market assigns it. I don't happen to agree with that assessment, but I'm sure that many would salute if you ran it up the flagpole, especially if they're making money hand-over-fist making money that way.
Plus how much government waste is because the corporate world has learned to "feed from the trough" and has bought enough influence keep the gravy train coming.
There are so many heartfelt AND serious calls to stop government interference in business, but while there are many calls to stop business interference in government, it's quite clear that The Golden Rule really doesn't call for it.
Better yet, it's time for a social experiment. If he really devalues his /. ID that much, the reveal it.
Make a post containing his /. id, numeric id, and password. Make it so anyone/everyone can use his id. Then watch the fireworks. Too bad he also couldn't "fix" the password, so that the first hijacker can't change it and lock all other hijacker-wannabees out.
I mentioned in another thread to someone talking about "hard" sci-fi, but the original post was AC, so my response probably got lost...
Hal Clement?
I've know read Jack Williamson, but not "Firestarter."
Now that I'm thinking... Clifford D. Simak?
E.E. "Doc" Smith, if you're in that era.
If you're talking "hard" science fiction, you can't forget Hal Clement.
His guarantee and his opinion is worth just as much as yours. They're both opinions.
Look at the historical side of it. Through most of history, science has been a matter of hobby or patronage on the part of rich people - either they dabbled in it themselves, or they sponsored scientists. (Though in the patronage days they weren't so much scientists as natural artists, since that's what evolved to become what we call scientists today.)
Modern science is more recent, only a few centuries old. While "practical science" has been funded privately, I strongly suspect that the "pure science' has always been dominated by government and universities. Things like Bell Labs and Watson Research are very new - less than a century old.
Finally, reflexive "Government can't do squat right," is about as thinking, insightful, and accurate as "A government program can solve about any problem."
Patents last 17 years from date of issue or 20 (or is it 21) years from date of file. Copyrights last forever, or at least are on track to last "the second half of eternity." Add to that, patents, can be "personally expressed", though not sold, while copyrights have become as close to absolute as the MafiAA can afford. (Back on the "personally expressed," elsewhere in this thread I see that you can do so for research, but not for everyday use. Don't know about that, or whether you can call it "life cycle testing" to cover that one.)
Watch for "fuzz" lawsuits on copyright - manufacturers arguing that their part hasn't been changed enough, or that the "essence" is still present in the tweaked 3d-printed part.
I accidentally fixed a stiction problem once for a friend. He gave me an "old dead PC", and I stuck it in the back of the minivan. By the time I got it home, it had fallen over sideways. When I plugged it in to begin diagnosis, it simply booted up.
I told him what happened, and gave it back. I have no idea how long that "repair" lasted.
I seem to remember reading/hearing that the LEM walls were on the order of soda-can thickness, or perhaps more like double that. We're talking order-of-magnitude here, it wasn't oildrum-thick, for instance. Someone else talked of the "ping" or "bong" sound/feeling when they pressurized it, and that squares with my source. In addition, a good pocket knife could have cut through the walls.
I'm a Verizon landline dumpee as well. In our case, we're now FairPoint customers.
The news from me to that ArsTechnica article is that Verizon is no longer pursuing FIOS, either. They haven't sold it, and they're still running it, but they're not pushing new rollouts, either.
I got Comcast cable long before DSL became available to me. Recently /. ran a story on the "National Broadband Map" that led me to believe that a local CLEC would be an option for me. But somewhere between my house and the CO, there's fiber, and the moment the signal touches fiber all ILEC/CLEC deals are off. Too bad, too. The local CLEC had a really good set of services/TOS. They would do domain hosting, let you run your own servers, etc.
Last I heard, Verizon was trying to get out of the business of anything with physical pipes - including "stabilizong" it's FIOS business. They'd rather go for the exorbitant profits of wireless.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/op-ed-verizon-willfully-driving-dsl-users-into-the-arms-of-cable/
It's also easier to find alternatives to oil. When it comes to drinking and growing crops, there's not substitute for fresh water. I'll agree that we're not very good about finding alternatives to oil, and there are some uses where there are no alternatives at all, but we are making progress at it.
I don't deny that. But again, there is evidence that recent price surges have been driven more by speculation than by supply.
If egos could be pushed aside, I think war would be far more likely over fresh water than over oil.