Supporting EFF is a good start, I agree, but it's no magic solution. Remember, EFF's lawsuit about the NSA dragnet was completely stopeed in its tracks by the "state secrets" defense for YEARS, until Snowden's leak put the relevant info into the public domain, when it was finally allowed to proceed.
Gigabit ethernet has some more life left in it, but not many more years, now. There are wireless networking protocols in the works which will have speeds in excess of 1Gbps. Companies far and wide have been using 10GbE uplinks for over a decade now. The economy quieted things down for a bit, but I still expect 10GbE in consumers hands soon. And even without it, bonded gigabit NICs can utilize nearly double the bandwidth. And in homes with multiple users, the gigabit ethernet connection can be a bottleneck. Of course that's likely an issue with businesses large and small for a couple years before consumers can join in. But still only a few short years.
And gigabit is a big bottleneck for storage. A local RAID array of just a few drives can easily exceed gigabit speeds several times over. Fine only for servers you know won't have heavy I/O requirements.
Because if one or two people that are fed up act on it and they get brushed off, 20 people act up get sent to jail, 200 get still get sent to jail but get a dismissive blurb in the local paper,
You're a fool for assuming that doing something to stop this, requires violent protests. That would be counterproductive, no matter how many people you have on your side.
Meanwhile, those same 2,000 people, in a single congressional district, can swing the outcome of the vote. Even just the fear of that, will make the representative in question ready to do whatever your bidding... Including starting an congressional investigation into NSA's practices.
Hell, with your proposed 2 million people, even with them only just voting the way you tell them, you would be the dictator of whatever the state, and would completely determine all the races for senator and house representatives in that state. You would single-handedly choose which Presidential candidate wins that state, which could be HUGE. You would have the heads of both the political parties, coming to your home on a regular basis, trying to find out what they can possibly say or do that month, to get you to vote for their side in the next election.
Utilities don't get funded through the general budget.
Not directly, but they do get to tell the government: "Hey, we're having a problem with X. You guys should go fix that."
This could range from saltwater infiltration into wells, monitoring of water levels, building of dams and other flood control structures, cleaning specific pollutants out of ground water (some wells are located in EPA Superfund sites), free allocation of public land, protection of endangered species due to systematic drainage of bodies of water, repairs to damaged wetlands, etc., etc. etc.
The number clearly show that taxing people instead of having a water bill would be substantially cheaper for everyone. I mean 20% cheaper
Unmetered flat billing is usually cheaper, until you realize it incentivizes excessive consumption, and that 20% is gone in an instant, with people going nuts watering lawns and other waste.
With taxes, you no longer need a billing system. So you loose the expense of that, the infrastructures for that, the expense of maintaining PCI compliance, accountants, taking people to court who don't pay there bills, cut down on meter reading, paper.
If the billing is such a huge expense, you should do like many other utilities, and COMBINE billing for all the municipal-provided utilities (water, sewer, trash, and possibly more), into a single bill. you don't eliminate the costs of billing and meter readers, but you cut it, across the board, by at least 1/3rd.
Actually, you COULDN'T cut down on meter reading, because people MOVE, and won't necessarily notify you when they did so. You'll have to go back and figure out exactly how much they owe, versus the new residents, and somebody is going to dispute the number...
And you aren't cutting-down on "taking people to court" at all... You're just shifting the burden of doing so, on to your state's District Attorney's office. And you'd have a bigger problem out of it, as "gas bill" avoidance and loopholes are non-existent, but not so for taxes.
municipally run fiber networks are an inevitable necessity
Fiber to the home is not some magic, infinite-bandwidth pipe that'll be great, forever. That mistake seems to be at the heart of those who think municipal data networks are magically perfect, with no down-sides...
Figure that whatever network wiring you install, will have to be replaced in its entirety once every DECADE. Consider if municipal networks had been in-vogue a few decades earlier:
In the 70s, municipal networks might have simply been phone lines.
In the 80s, people would have wanted the area wired with coax cable for TV, in ADDITION to those phone lines.
In the 90s, people would have wanted those phone-lines cleaned-up, with upgrades to support their use with high-speed dial-up and ISDN.
In the 2000s, people would have wanted their coax cable infrastructure ripped-out and replaced with fiber behind the scenes, to give them MORE TV channels, and higher-speed cable internet.
Also in the 2000s, people wanted to replace their phone lines with cellular, and with poor coverage of early providers, no doubt they would have wanted their muni to somehow invest in that, too.
In the 2010s, people would be insisting on LTE cellular upgrades, and WiFi hotspots installed all over the area. And that's in-addition to wanting fiber optics to their home for even higher speeds than those cable modems can provide...
In the 2020s, people will no longer be willing to share the capacity of a fiber-optic cable with 64 of their neighbors, and will demand their provider remove all those optical splitters (see: FIOS) and give them dedicated circuits to the central office, so they can get very, very high-speed data connections. At the same time, they'll want ever-faster wireless/cellular internet service as well.
In the 2030s, people will be chafing under the bandwidth limitations of old-fashioned fiber optic cables, and either want the whole area completely rewired with higher-bandwidth fiber optics, or some entirely new technology.
In addition to that, you've got routine maintenance, as well as possibly lots of emergency repairs. And those huge expenses are all assuming it's a very well-run and efficient agency. A little bit of cruft in the organization, and municipal fiber can easily be a HUGE money-pit.
And frankly, you can get all the same advantages, just by controlling existing telcoms as monopolies, and carefully regulating them, as was done with the Bell System in the old days.
Except neither of those is an SSH client. If they were, you could visit the demo page, and connect to any SSH server. You can't, because it isn't. It's more like a strange simulation... only a visual simulation.
I also couldn't find a way to format your floppy disks and Zip drives.
Nothing is distributed on floppies or zip drives. Every movie out there is distributed on Blu-ray or DVD. Comparing with antiquated technologies, does not make them antiquated.
If the physical media side of it is causing your brain to lock-up, just find ANY web-based video encoding software that does H.264 and similar.
Was this supposed to be a joke? SSH is in Chrome Web Store.
A NaCl Chrome app that requires Native Client, is not "on the internet". It's a local, binary program, that Google just happens to force you to launch from inside their browser.
Sun could just as easily forced Java apps to be run from a web browser, but it still wouldn't have made all Java based apps into "web" anything.
Why is he left wondering why the DOT didn't analyze the parking ticket data?
Because the DOT is responsible for EVERYTHING having to do at all with roads. No question they analyze data on a regular basis, at the very least, to find which areas have the most accidents and therefore require upgrades. Plenty of logistics involved in DOT operations, so they definitely have staff that is capable.
Personally, I think the NYPD should be the ones throwing up red flags, and alerting the DOT to a very poorly marked section of road. They're the ones issuing all those tickets, so they have all that data (the DOT does not). The cops apparently know the law better than motorists, and can easily see that they're issuing tons of fines right there. Presuming any ONE of those meter maids has EVER driven a car, they could surely see that the markings are confusing enough that they, themselves, would likely have made a similar mistake.
DOT and their associated fines act as the Executive, as opposed to the Legislative or Judicial Branches.
Neither legislative nor judicial branches would be any more responsible to "analyze the parking ticket data" than the DOT. Why do you think the Executive branch of government is *supposed* to be blind and stupid?
The DOT is not in the business of analyzing which parking areas generate the most money, if anything, they should be in the business of optimizing the parking areas which make the LEAST money.
Doing either one of those, requires them to analyze the data to find which is which.
I really don't see why they just don't abandon the whole "watch video in your web browser" scenario.
It's all about locked-down company computers, kiosks, borrowed laptops, etc., where people can't install software. It's crazy as hell, but it has been a driving force in getting crazy crap rebuilt to run inside a web browser, no matter how HORRENDOUS the experience.
In fact HuluDesktop is GREAT for media PCs operated by remote control, while navigating their website via remote would be a tedious nightmare. Hulu wants you to buy a device, instead, where they require you to pay for HuluPlus.
This is why we HAVE states... Let Washington do something crazy*, and the rest of us will sit back and see how the crazy works out for their economy. I would expect either higher prices, or a rash of (eg.) fast-food restaurants closing.
If it goes bad for them, we don't have to go down that hole. If the predictions are off, then everyone else can adopt a significantly higher wage. The effort to get this across the country would be stupid and dangerous.
* Actually, to be fair this is only just BARELY crazy... Washington has higher cost of living than many states, and employees won't get the full $15 for several years, now. California's $10 minimum wage works fine, but a $15 minimum wage in Canute, Oklahoma would be downright ridiculous.
I also object to the "living wage" bullshit. A single mother with 10 kids in NYC isn't going to get by on her own, with any job... While a young, single guy renting a room in a small town, could be pretty comfortable with a part-time, $5/hour job. The only way to establish a "living wage" is to switch to full-fledged socialism, where jobs don't pay a fixed rate, but give you however much you need. I suppose "company towns" could make that kind of thing work, too, if those in charge so desired.
it's actually a net loss for everyone if one of the ways that kid is undercutting lawn services is by not paying taxes on that income.
At lower income levels, the tax burden is very small. There's no way a lawn care service is remitting 50% of the money it charges, paying taxes and similar, so while there is a small loss to the local, state and federal governments, the net effect is extremely obviously POSITIVE for all involved.
This story is a bit too much inside-ball to be interesting, but still, I'm surprised they didn't say anything about the link between blonde and red hair... Though not exclusive, it seems rare to find someone with blonde hair, without a red-haired ancestor. Even as much of a recessive trait as blonde hair may be, red hair is even more extreme, and the two seem very closely linked.
If you in particular can attract and mate easier chances are you will follow a simpler route on average and not try harder.
This doesn't follow. Even if your choices are good, you're still driven to excel and expand your pool of mates to the max. We aren't just wired to find any old mate... We are wired to try to get the MOST and BEST mates.
Neither men nor women are naturally (completely) monogamous, so finding ONE mate isn't sufficient. But more than that, everyone wants to find THE BEST mate possible. It's only very recently in the industrialized world, that ANY mate you pick will produce sufficient viable offspring, and a decent quality of life. A few centuries back, if you didn't have your pick, you could end up not getting enough food to survive, and/or a diseased and infertile partner.
It seems that such areas are underserrved because they can't afford it.
That's never the reason... Or rather, it can be a self-reinforcing problem.
Sometimes it's a problem of geography... Land-locked countries don't have access to those submarine cables that coastal countries can connect to.
But scale seems to ALWAYS be a problem. Without enough early-adopters... people willing to commit a big chunk of their income to non-essential internet access... you never get the economies of scale, and it stays astronomically expensive.
they could believe that internet access would accelerate some elevation in socioeconomic conditions for such areas, though that would be a bit of overconfidence in what access to the internet could help a society overcome...
Cell phones have been a HUGE boon for people in impoverished countries. You would be amazed at how much a couple lines of information can be worth. From learning which seeds may perform better in a given climate, to finding up-to-date current rates for the grains you want to sell in different areas, to gaining access to loans from financial institutions.
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Supporting EFF is a good start, I agree, but it's no magic solution. Remember, EFF's lawsuit about the NSA dragnet was completely stopeed in its tracks by the "state secrets" defense for YEARS, until Snowden's leak put the relevant info into the public domain, when it was finally allowed to proceed.
Gigabit ethernet has some more life left in it, but not many more years, now. There are wireless networking protocols in the works which will have speeds in excess of 1Gbps. Companies far and wide have been using 10GbE uplinks for over a decade now. The economy quieted things down for a bit, but I still expect 10GbE in consumers hands soon. And even without it, bonded gigabit NICs can utilize nearly double the bandwidth. And in homes with multiple users, the gigabit ethernet connection can be a bottleneck. Of course that's likely an issue with businesses large and small for a couple years before consumers can join in. But still only a few short years.
And gigabit is a big bottleneck for storage. A local RAID array of just a few drives can easily exceed gigabit speeds several times over. Fine only for servers you know won't have heavy I/O requirements.
You're a fool for assuming that doing something to stop this, requires violent protests. That would be counterproductive, no matter how many people you have on your side.
Meanwhile, those same 2,000 people, in a single congressional district, can swing the outcome of the vote. Even just the fear of that, will make the representative in question ready to do whatever your bidding... Including starting an congressional investigation into NSA's practices.
Hell, with your proposed 2 million people, even with them only just voting the way you tell them, you would be the dictator of whatever the state, and would completely determine all the races for senator and house representatives in that state. You would single-handedly choose which Presidential candidate wins that state, which could be HUGE. You would have the heads of both the political parties, coming to your home on a regular basis, trying to find out what they can possibly say or do that month, to get you to vote for their side in the next election.
Not directly, but they do get to tell the government: "Hey, we're having a problem with X. You guys should go fix that."
This could range from saltwater infiltration into wells, monitoring of water levels, building of dams and other flood control structures, cleaning specific pollutants out of ground water (some wells are located in EPA Superfund sites), free allocation of public land, protection of endangered species due to systematic drainage of bodies of water, repairs to damaged wetlands, etc., etc. etc.
Unmetered flat billing is usually cheaper, until you realize it incentivizes excessive consumption, and that 20% is gone in an instant, with people going nuts watering lawns and other waste.
If the billing is such a huge expense, you should do like many other utilities, and COMBINE billing for all the municipal-provided utilities (water, sewer, trash, and possibly more), into a single bill. you don't eliminate the costs of billing and meter readers, but you cut it, across the board, by at least 1/3rd.
Actually, you COULDN'T cut down on meter reading, because people MOVE, and won't necessarily notify you when they did so. You'll have to go back and figure out exactly how much they owe, versus the new residents, and somebody is going to dispute the number...
And you aren't cutting-down on "taking people to court" at all... You're just shifting the burden of doing so, on to your state's District Attorney's office. And you'd have a bigger problem out of it, as "gas bill" avoidance and loopholes are non-existent, but not so for taxes.
Fiber to the home is not some magic, infinite-bandwidth pipe that'll be great, forever. That mistake seems to be at the heart of those who think municipal data networks are magically perfect, with no down-sides...
Figure that whatever network wiring you install, will have to be replaced in its entirety once every DECADE. Consider if municipal networks had been in-vogue a few decades earlier:
In the 70s, municipal networks might have simply been phone lines.
In the 80s, people would have wanted the area wired with coax cable for TV, in ADDITION to those phone lines.
In the 90s, people would have wanted those phone-lines cleaned-up, with upgrades to support their use with high-speed dial-up and ISDN.
In the 2000s, people would have wanted their coax cable infrastructure ripped-out and replaced with fiber behind the scenes, to give them MORE TV channels, and higher-speed cable internet.
Also in the 2000s, people wanted to replace their phone lines with cellular, and with poor coverage of early providers, no doubt they would have wanted their muni to somehow invest in that, too.
In the 2010s, people would be insisting on LTE cellular upgrades, and WiFi hotspots installed all over the area. And that's in-addition to wanting fiber optics to their home for even higher speeds than those cable modems can provide...
In the 2020s, people will no longer be willing to share the capacity of a fiber-optic cable with 64 of their neighbors, and will demand their provider remove all those optical splitters (see: FIOS) and give them dedicated circuits to the central office, so they can get very, very high-speed data connections. At the same time, they'll want ever-faster wireless/cellular internet service as well.
In the 2030s, people will be chafing under the bandwidth limitations of old-fashioned fiber optic cables, and either want the whole area completely rewired with higher-bandwidth fiber optics, or some entirely new technology.
In addition to that, you've got routine maintenance, as well as possibly lots of emergency repairs. And those huge expenses are all assuming it's a very well-run and efficient agency. A little bit of cruft in the organization, and municipal fiber can easily be a HUGE money-pit.
And frankly, you can get all the same advantages, just by controlling existing telcoms as monopolies, and carefully regulating them, as was done with the Bell System in the old days.
That's a locally running, fat-client app, just like any Android app. It's absolutely NOT "on the web".
How fortunate for me, then, that NOBODY was talking about ChromeOS. You're the one who is trying to change the topic, into something that it's not.
It makes it a client-side, local application, completely and totally refuting the assertion of the GP, who claimed:
"you can do anything on the internet"
That's the topic at-hand.
Yeah, I don't count Flash apps.
Except neither of those is an SSH client. If they were, you could visit the demo page, and connect to any SSH server. You can't, because it isn't. It's more like a strange simulation... only a visual simulation.
Nothing is distributed on floppies or zip drives. Every movie out there is distributed on Blu-ray or DVD. Comparing with antiquated technologies, does not make them antiquated.
If the physical media side of it is causing your brain to lock-up, just find ANY web-based video encoding software that does H.264 and similar.
I wasn't asking about the legal aspects...
A NaCl Chrome app that requires Native Client, is not "on the internet". It's a local, binary program, that Google just happens to force you to launch from inside their browser.
Sun could just as easily forced Java apps to be run from a web browser, but it still wouldn't have made all Java based apps into "web" anything.
Because the DOT is responsible for EVERYTHING having to do at all with roads. No question they analyze data on a regular basis, at the very least, to find which areas have the most accidents and therefore require upgrades. Plenty of logistics involved in DOT operations, so they definitely have staff that is capable.
Personally, I think the NYPD should be the ones throwing up red flags, and alerting the DOT to a very poorly marked section of road. They're the ones issuing all those tickets, so they have all that data (the DOT does not). The cops apparently know the law better than motorists, and can easily see that they're issuing tons of fines right there. Presuming any ONE of those meter maids has EVER driven a car, they could surely see that the markings are confusing enough that they, themselves, would likely have made a similar mistake.
Neither legislative nor judicial branches would be any more responsible to "analyze the parking ticket data" than the DOT. Why do you think the Executive branch of government is *supposed* to be blind and stupid?
Doing either one of those, requires them to analyze the data to find which is which.
It's all about locked-down company computers, kiosks, borrowed laptops, etc., where people can't install software. It's crazy as hell, but it has been a driving force in getting crazy crap rebuilt to run inside a web browser, no matter how HORRENDOUS the experience.
In fact HuluDesktop is GREAT for media PCs operated by remote control, while navigating their website via remote would be a tedious nightmare. Hulu wants you to buy a device, instead, where they require you to pay for HuluPlus.
I'm having a hard time ripping, editing, and re-encoding my Blu-ray discs, via the internet. Perhaps you could help?
Is there an HTML5 version of Blender for 3D modeling, on the internet somewhere? How about online GIMP for full-fledged image editing?
And "SSH" "on the internet" doesn't work well at all.
Meanwhile, it runs on the even older TCP/IP protocols!!! What's the name for something a DECADE older than "ancient"?
Either you didn't even read half-way through the summary, OR you don't understand how QUOTES work...
"Seize your moment, my lovely trolls"
"You will most likely need to file a federal income tax return."
Where the hell do you live, that there are 4 weeks of summer, and that grass doesn't need to be cut any other time of year?
Even in your worst-case scenario, the 10% lost in taxes is far less than the 50% he claims to have saved. That's a net positive.
Thought-crime... Got it.
This is why we HAVE states... Let Washington do something crazy*, and the rest of us will sit back and see how the crazy works out for their economy. I would expect either higher prices, or a rash of (eg.) fast-food restaurants closing.
If it goes bad for them, we don't have to go down that hole. If the predictions are off, then everyone else can adopt a significantly higher wage. The effort to get this across the country would be stupid and dangerous.
* Actually, to be fair this is only just BARELY crazy... Washington has higher cost of living than many states, and employees won't get the full $15 for several years, now. California's $10 minimum wage works fine, but a $15 minimum wage in Canute, Oklahoma would be downright ridiculous.
I also object to the "living wage" bullshit. A single mother with 10 kids in NYC isn't going to get by on her own, with any job... While a young, single guy renting a room in a small town, could be pretty comfortable with a part-time, $5/hour job. The only way to establish a "living wage" is to switch to full-fledged socialism, where jobs don't pay a fixed rate, but give you however much you need. I suppose "company towns" could make that kind of thing work, too, if those in charge so desired.
At lower income levels, the tax burden is very small. There's no way a lawn care service is remitting 50% of the money it charges, paying taxes and similar, so while there is a small loss to the local, state and federal governments, the net effect is extremely obviously POSITIVE for all involved.
This story is a bit too much inside-ball to be interesting, but still, I'm surprised they didn't say anything about the link between blonde and red hair... Though not exclusive, it seems rare to find someone with blonde hair, without a red-haired ancestor. Even as much of a recessive trait as blonde hair may be, red hair is even more extreme, and the two seem very closely linked.
This doesn't follow. Even if your choices are good, you're still driven to excel and expand your pool of mates to the max. We aren't just wired to find any old mate... We are wired to try to get the MOST and BEST mates.
Neither men nor women are naturally (completely) monogamous, so finding ONE mate isn't sufficient. But more than that, everyone wants to find THE BEST mate possible. It's only very recently in the industrialized world, that ANY mate you pick will produce sufficient viable offspring, and a decent quality of life. A few centuries back, if you didn't have your pick, you could end up not getting enough food to survive, and/or a diseased and infertile partner.
That's never the reason... Or rather, it can be a self-reinforcing problem.
Sometimes it's a problem of geography... Land-locked countries don't have access to those submarine cables that coastal countries can connect to.
But scale seems to ALWAYS be a problem. Without enough early-adopters... people willing to commit a big chunk of their income to non-essential internet access... you never get the economies of scale, and it stays astronomically expensive.
Cell phones have been a HUGE boon for people in impoverished countries. You would be amazed at how much a couple lines of information can be worth. From learning which seeds may perform better in a given climate, to finding up-to-date current rates for the grains you want to sell in different areas, to gaining access to loans from financial institutions.
MaraDNS caches to memory, not disk, but will return expired DNS records to the client when there is no answer from authoritative sources.
PowerDNS can connect to a database backend, which can then permanently store a huge collection of DNS records.