The US-FCC simply decided one day to censor radio and television. They did not need any prior Congressional law to make this decision. Similarly the FTC decided a few years ago that porn sites can only be accessed if "age verified" using credit cards, or else the owner of said site could face prosecution for allowing minors to view his material. Again they acted independently, without needed prior legislation.
A more recent decision by the FCC will allow them to take channels 26 through 51 away from TV Broadcast and sell them to Wireless/cellular companies. Even if you think that's a good idea, the fact the unelected FCC made this decision without prior Congressional approval (or the approval of the people in general) is troublesome.
This is how modern unelected bureaucrats operate. Give them an inch, and they take a mile.
>>>The "small breasted porn" issue is incorrect sensationalism,
Not really. I've read multiple articles about women having their topless photos taken off the net, because the police assumed they were underage teens, when in fact they were legal 20-something adults. It isn't sensationalism if the event is actually happening. .
This dissolved the monarchy in the late 1600s, and created a Republic of Great Britain. Unfortunately the monarchists were able to overthrow that republic and restore the tyranny of a supreme monarch, but I suspect if this happened again the results would be very different. The UK would end up looking like France or Germany without a king/queen.
>>>What kind of habits, lifestyle, and hobbies do you have that would put you in the path of police to get arrested and have all these horrible terrible things happen to you?
I was harassed by police simply because I decided to take a vacation and drive from California to Florida. I was stopped at several points along the way, to ask if I was a US Citizen, and then I arrived at a location just south of Houston where the Homeland SS demanded to search my trunk. I said "no". They said "yes". I said "Do you have a search warrant?" "No" "Then no." They made me stand in the hot Texas hot sun for over an hour while they sat in the cool shade..... eventually they let me go but I was already very sunburned at that point. i.e. I was punished for exercising my US and TX Constitutional rights.
So what was my lifestyle you ask? I took a traveling vacation. Oh I am such a piece of scum.
My brother had a similar incident up in New Hampshire, where they demanded to search the rear of his SUV during a search for illegal immigrants. He complied but later told me that it made him feel like a Jew in Nazi Germany, and he wished he had said "no".
As Martin Luther King discovered, even a peaceful protest often results in getting beat-up. In his demonstrations, it was the *police* that initiated violence not MLK or his followers.
(Which I suspect was MLK's plan all along - look like a victim and you gain the sympathy of the general populace, who then pressured Republican Congresscritters to draft and eventually pass civil rights legislation, even while the Democrats opposed it.)
>>>So cry me a river about your right to form mass uncontrolled protests without police planning and assistance.
If that's how you feel, then change the law. Until you make that change, the law is quite clear. PA Constitution: "The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the invaluable rights of man, and every citizen may freely speak, write and print on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty."
The latter allows the police to deal with people destroying property, but the first part allows the People to speak their minds (and that right is further reinforced by the national Constitution). That is the law and if you disagree with it, then alter it to strike-out the "free speech" part.
In the meantime those Pittsburgh protesters in the video had done nothing wrong, and had every right to stand there and speak their minds, per the Law of this Sovereign State.
I had no idea youtube links could be shortened like this. Where is the dot-be domain located? Ahhh Belgium. Pretty ingenious unless whoever owns that domain goes out of business and then these "shortcut" links will be broken.
Anyway, I love how these US soldiers are thumping their shields. Looks like something out of Star Wars. "Obey or die rebel scum."
And I'm glad the German party revealed the EU's plans to spy on citizens. The EU Parliament frankly scares me.
Which is not at all how it works. That would make the browser run slower, not faster, because a ~160x200 bitmap image is huge and would take forever to load. Instead: "A page is compressed, then delivered to the phone in a markup language called OBML (Opera Binary Markup Language).[30] This compression process makes transfer time about two to three times faster." - wikipedia
In other words Opera Mini is a lot like how Turbo mode operates in the full Opera browser - compressed text and images sent one at a time, not as one single giant bitmap.
And as for the final result? This video is pretty clear for why I'd rather use Opera than Safari. Opera also has nifty features like tab browsing and speed dialing (visual bookmarks) that make it more pleasing to use than Safari Mobile. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvyl7aI70ik#t=65s
>>>the market for phone games would be a lot harder to monetize if anyone with the ability to program BASIC games could deliver games to the iPad's [C64emulator app]
Again: Silly reasoning on Apple's part. You can't run BASIC games on a C64. I know. I've tried programming some, and they all ran horribly slow on the C64 1 megahertz processor. Like a DVD set on 10% slow-mo playback.
You can do a text adventure game using C= BASIC but that's about it. I have my doubts the few persons (3?) interested in playing a text version of "Drive In" would harm Apple's profit potential. Their excuse to remove BASIC functionality was pure bullshit and anal-retentiveness. Maybe they used to be MS employees. .
Ati-authoritarian and libertarian are basically the same thing. Unless you go to the extreme of "anarchist" but I don't that's true. .
>>>I understand the tragedy of the commons and natural monopolies.
Then how come you can't understand that ISPs are a natural monopoly (or so government has decreed), thereby limiting the People's choices to cable or telco? As for the common carrier deal, it's not that simple. Phone companies are common carriers and yet still have the right to limit services whenever they feel like it.
>>>I assumed we were talking about "broadband" in the networking sense, not in the RF sense.
Then you are using the word incorrectly. The word "broadband" can only ever be used when talking about Frequencies, not bits. The latter is the DATARATE.:-) You could have a channel that is very broad in frequency, but still very slow in datarate. Like TV closed captioning. Or ELF radio. .
>>>The relevant meaning of "broadband" is something more like "at least 1MBps and reasonable latency for both download and upload"
Citation please. Last I checked anything greater than Dialup (56k) or ISDN (128k) speed is considered a high speed network. Even my 750k line is considered high speed per FCC regs. .
>>> a standard which satellite didn't meet, last time I checked (have they moved beyond dialup upload by now?)
Satellite provides 1.5 Mbit/s (Wild Blue company). Or more.
But seamonkey is no longer part of Mozilla. They are a separate company called SeaMonkey Council, and should be allowed to submit their own product to the EU. ----- And if the argument is: "FF and SM use the same mozilla base," that is not valid either. There are two Webkit browsers on the EU ballot.
Back to topic:
I don't expect Apple to reject VLC. If they do it will make them look like hypocrites.
>>> The HTC G2, T-Mobile's HSPA+ successor to the HTC G1,
Is it just me, or other people confused by these G1, G2 numbers? I thought we had already reached the level of G4 networks. .
>>>Or you can wait 6 months at get one with 2x1GHz on a smaller process. >>>You have to give up on waiting and get something eventually.
You jest but that's exactly what I'm doing. I need a cellphone with web capability, but I don't need it until 2011 and I know new models of cellphones (with 3 or even 4 inch screens) will be released between now and then, so I'm waiting until the last minute rather than buy a 2 inch phone that will be obsoleted.
They allowed the Opera Mini browser, even though it directly competes with (and is ~5 times faster than) Apple's Safari browser. So I'm betting Apple will approve VLC too. - If they do reject it the reason will be something else - like ability to hack into iPad internals (same reason the C64emultator was rejected from iStore) rather than because of fear of competition.
offtopic:
Why isn't SeaMonkey listed on the EU's browser choice screen? I like its old Netscape style.:-|
>>>Second, it automatically shuts off on low bandwidth accounts.
Interesting. Google's Instant Update did not shutoff on my dialup line, probably because I have web accelerator (compression) turned on, and Netscape ISP's caching appears to be high bandwidth to google.com's viewpoint. You say it's automatic but you appear to be wrong.
And Opera is #3 with approximately 10% of the share. Since it's European, it is in the interests of the EU MEPs to protect it from becoming like Netscape (pushed into non-existence by the default MS-IE in Windows). And that's why they acted to protect Opera and punish US-based Microsoft.
Really the EU Parliament is operating no differently than how the sellouts in the US Congress act. Protecting their own corporations.
>>>thousands of businesses denying themselves access to services because they aren't willing to upgrade
And also as others have pointed-out, the employees can disable this feature and make Google.com IE6 compatible again. The problem will be for IT Admins to explain how to millions of computer-illiterate office workers. Several manhours will be lost. (shrug).
If you want to pay to upgrade me to a $50/month connection because webmasters like to stream megabytes of crap, instead of optimizing pages to fit in kilobytes... feel free to do so. What's that? You can't afford it? Well guess what. Neither can I.
It is unacceptable for webmasters to design sites that don't work properly on 1 megabit/s connections.
That's great until you actually want a shopping site (like to find the cheapest HD Radio possible).
I hate their new Image search page which, instead of just displaying images, runs some CPU intensive script that expands/shrinks images as you pass over them. What used to be a fast, pleasant browse is now like walking through molasses. It's so annoying that I'm trying to figure out how to turn if off and go back to the "old" plain images, but the option does not exist.
>>>POTS lines are 3 KHz, specifically 400 Hz to 3.4 KHz
And 8000 samples per second, which enables 64k data rate (8000 x 8 bits==64000 bps). If HD Voice happens the sampling rate will be doubled to 16,000, which means dialup modems could jump to 128k speeds.
Note that the 1996 Telecommunications Act partially funded the original analog-to-digital phone line upgrades, so people could use the then-new 56k modems for accessing the net. (That was considered FAST in an era when most people still had 14k or 28k modems.) And yes the digital lines did improve voice calls a lot. Calling home from California to Maryland may be frequency-limited, but at least it's static free. Calls in 1990 didn't sound as good as they do in 2010.
Slashdot does something more assiduous than removing posts. It mods people down to (0) or (-1) and then sets the default "view" at 1 or higher, thereby making posts invisible that slashdot (or its mod) does not like. That gives the appearance that everyone can speak, but if your post is made invisible to the vast whole of Visitors, then it might as well be as if you never spoke at all. Like a press conference aired on TV, but the video & sound is muted.
Back to topic: Fortunately we have a free market (for hosting companies). This church can just move the website to a different host company that does not censor free speech/press. Also: Can you imagine the uproar if the proposed Mosque located near ground zero suddenly had their website yanked?
And for those who think the Mosque should not be built 3 blocks from ground zero:
Are you a law-abiding citizen? If you answered "yes" then start by obeying these Supreme Laws: "Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion." "The powers not delegated to the United States... are reserved to the States or to the People." "The enumeration in the constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the People." - SUPREME LAW OF NEW YORK: "The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever be allowed in this state to all humankind."
Finally I heard this and it scared me:
"If they build it, we'll blow it up." - Christian at local church (aka a terrorist)
>>>taxpayers have already footed 300 billion for "high speed" internet that was never delivered and is conveniently forgotten
Citation please.
And I don't mean a blog of someone's opinion which has no facts to support it. I mean an actual provable citation. Why? Because I've read through the 1996 Act, and most of the money was appropriated to upgrading phone lines from analog to digital, in order to increase connections from ~24k to the then cutting edge ~50k. For the most part, companies did that. They complied with Congresses' order to enable digital internet on the phones.
If you think that was a lousy way to spend the money, don't blame the telcos. Blame the lawmakers.
Slashdot Mirror
So naive.
The US-FCC simply decided one day to censor radio and television. They did not need any prior Congressional law to make this decision. Similarly the FTC decided a few years ago that porn sites can only be accessed if "age verified" using credit cards, or else the owner of said site could face prosecution for allowing minors to view his material. Again they acted independently, without needed prior legislation.
A more recent decision by the FCC will allow them to take channels 26 through 51 away from TV Broadcast and sell them to Wireless/cellular companies. Even if you think that's a good idea, the fact the unelected FCC made this decision without prior Congressional approval (or the approval of the people in general) is troublesome.
This is how modern unelected bureaucrats operate. Give them an inch, and they take a mile.
>>>The "small breasted porn" issue is incorrect sensationalism,
Not really. I've read multiple articles about women having their topless photos taken off the net, because the police assumed they were underage teens, when in fact they were legal 20-something adults. It isn't sensationalism if the event is actually happening.
.
>>>How would they do that?
This dissolved the monarchy in the late 1600s, and created a Republic of Great Britain. Unfortunately the monarchists were able to overthrow that republic and restore the tyranny of a supreme monarch, but I suspect if this happened again the results would be very different. The UK would end up looking like France or Germany without a king/queen.
>>>What kind of habits, lifestyle, and hobbies do you have that would put you in the path of police to get arrested and have all these horrible terrible things happen to you?
I was harassed by police simply because I decided to take a vacation and drive from California to Florida. I was stopped at several points along the way, to ask if I was a US Citizen, and then I arrived at a location just south of Houston where the Homeland SS demanded to search my trunk. I said "no". They said "yes". I said "Do you have a search warrant?" "No" "Then no." They made me stand in the hot Texas hot sun for over an hour while they sat in the cool shade..... eventually they let me go but I was already very sunburned at that point. i.e. I was punished for exercising my US and TX Constitutional rights.
So what was my lifestyle you ask?
I took a traveling vacation.
Oh I am such a piece of scum.
My brother had a similar incident up in New Hampshire, where they demanded to search the rear of his SUV during a search for illegal immigrants. He complied but later told me that it made him feel like a Jew in Nazi Germany, and he wished he had said "no".
As Martin Luther King discovered, even a peaceful protest often results in getting beat-up. In his demonstrations, it was the *police* that initiated violence not MLK or his followers.
(Which I suspect was MLK's plan all along - look like a victim and you gain the sympathy of the general populace, who then pressured Republican Congresscritters to draft and eventually pass civil rights legislation, even while the Democrats opposed it.)
>>>So cry me a river about your right to form mass uncontrolled protests without police planning and assistance.
If that's how you feel, then change the law. Until you make that change, the law is quite clear. PA Constitution: "The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the invaluable rights of man, and every citizen may freely speak, write and print on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty."
The latter allows the police to deal with people destroying property, but the first part allows the People to speak their minds (and that right is further reinforced by the national Constitution). That is the law and if you disagree with it, then alter it to strike-out the "free speech" part.
In the meantime those Pittsburgh protesters in the video had done nothing wrong, and had every right to stand there and speak their minds, per the Law of this Sovereign State.
>>>youtu.be/akwjAjcQnqM
I had no idea youtube links could be shortened like this. Where is the dot-be domain located? Ahhh Belgium. Pretty ingenious unless whoever owns that domain goes out of business and then these "shortcut" links will be broken.
Anyway, I love how these US soldiers are thumping their shields. Looks like something out of Star Wars. "Obey or die rebel scum."
And I'm glad the German party revealed the EU's plans to spy on citizens. The EU Parliament frankly scares me.
BGE still owns all the NG pipes and electrical wires.
You still have to pay BGE.
You have no choice.
Well Opera certainly LOOKS better in this video. It's fast. It has tabs. It has speed dial.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvyl7aI70ik#t=65s
>>>[Opera] displaying a pre-rendered bitmap
Which is not at all how it works. That would make the browser run slower, not faster, because a ~160x200 bitmap image is huge and would take forever to load. Instead: "A page is compressed, then delivered to the phone in a markup language called OBML (Opera Binary Markup Language).[30] This compression process makes transfer time about two to three times faster." - wikipedia
In other words Opera Mini is a lot like how Turbo mode operates in the full Opera browser - compressed text and images sent one at a time, not as one single giant bitmap.
And as for the final result? This video is pretty clear for why I'd rather use Opera than Safari. Opera also has nifty features like tab browsing and speed dialing (visual bookmarks) that make it more pleasing to use than Safari Mobile. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvyl7aI70ik#t=65s
>>>the market for phone games would be a lot harder to monetize if anyone with the ability to program BASIC games could deliver games to the iPad's [C64emulator app]
Again: Silly reasoning on Apple's part. You can't run BASIC games on a C64. I know. I've tried programming some, and they all ran horribly slow on the C64 1 megahertz processor. Like a DVD set on 10% slow-mo playback.
You can do a text adventure game using C= BASIC but that's about it. I have my doubts the few persons (3?) interested in playing a text version of "Drive In" would harm Apple's profit potential. Their excuse to remove BASIC functionality was pure bullshit and anal-retentiveness. Maybe they used to be MS employees.
.
Ditto.
Plain text slashdot is the way to go. And I use Mozilla/SeaMonkey which seems to operate faster than Firefox, and has built-in Usenet support.
Ati-authoritarian and libertarian are basically the same thing. Unless you go to the extreme of "anarchist" but I don't that's true.
.
>>>I understand the tragedy of the commons and natural monopolies.
Then how come you can't understand that ISPs are a natural monopoly (or so government has decreed), thereby limiting the People's choices to cable or telco? As for the common carrier deal, it's not that simple. Phone companies are common carriers and yet still have the right to limit services whenever they feel like it.
>>>I assumed we were talking about "broadband" in the networking sense, not in the RF sense.
Then you are using the word incorrectly. The word "broadband" can only ever be used when talking about Frequencies, not bits. The latter is the DATARATE. :-) You could have a channel that is very broad in frequency, but still very slow in datarate. Like TV closed captioning. Or ELF radio.
.
>>>The relevant meaning of "broadband" is something more like "at least 1MBps and reasonable latency for both download and upload"
Citation please. Last I checked anything greater than Dialup (56k) or ISDN (128k) speed is considered a high speed network. Even my 750k line is considered high speed per FCC regs.
.
>>> a standard which satellite didn't meet, last time I checked (have they moved beyond dialup upload by now?)
Satellite provides 1.5 Mbit/s (Wild Blue company). Or more.
But seamonkey is no longer part of Mozilla. They are a separate company called SeaMonkey Council, and should be allowed to submit their own product to the EU. ----- And if the argument is: "FF and SM use the same mozilla base," that is not valid either. There are two Webkit browsers on the EU ballot.
Back to topic:
I don't expect Apple to reject VLC. If they do it will make them look like hypocrites.
.
>>> The HTC G2, T-Mobile's HSPA+ successor to the HTC G1,
Is it just me, or other people confused by these G1, G2 numbers? I thought we had already reached the level of G4 networks.
.
>>>Or you can wait 6 months at get one with 2x1GHz on a smaller process.
>>>You have to give up on waiting and get something eventually.
You jest but that's exactly what I'm doing. I need a cellphone with web capability, but I don't need it until 2011 and I know new models of cellphones (with 3 or even 4 inch screens) will be released between now and then, so I'm waiting until the last minute rather than buy a 2 inch phone that will be obsoleted.
They allowed the Opera Mini browser, even though it directly competes with (and is ~5 times faster than) Apple's Safari browser. So I'm betting Apple will approve VLC too. - If they do reject it the reason will be something else - like ability to hack into iPad internals (same reason the C64emultator was rejected from iStore) rather than because of fear of competition.
offtopic:
Why isn't SeaMonkey listed on the EU's browser choice screen? I like its old Netscape style. :-|
>>>Second, it automatically shuts off on low bandwidth accounts.
Interesting. Google's Instant Update did not shutoff on my dialup line, probably because I have web accelerator (compression) turned on, and Netscape ISP's caching appears to be high bandwidth to google.com's viewpoint. You say it's automatic but you appear to be wrong.
And Opera is #3 with approximately 10% of the share. Since it's European, it is in the interests of the EU MEPs to protect it from becoming like Netscape (pushed into non-existence by the default MS-IE in Windows). And that's why they acted to protect Opera and punish US-based Microsoft.
Really the EU Parliament is operating no differently than how the sellouts in the US Congress act. Protecting their own corporations.
>>>thousands of businesses denying themselves access to services because they aren't willing to upgrade
And also as others have pointed-out, the employees can disable this feature and make Google.com IE6 compatible again. The problem will be for IT Admins to explain how to millions of computer-illiterate office workers. Several manhours will be lost. (shrug).
>>>some college kid
If you want to pay to upgrade me to a $50/month connection because webmasters like to stream megabytes of crap, instead of optimizing pages to fit in kilobytes... feel free to do so. What's that? You can't afford it? Well guess what. Neither can I.
It is unacceptable for webmasters to design sites that don't work properly on 1 megabit/s connections.
That's great until you actually want a shopping site (like to find the cheapest HD Radio possible).
I hate their new Image search page which, instead of just displaying images, runs some CPU intensive script that expands/shrinks images as you pass over them. What used to be a fast, pleasant browse is now like walking through molasses. It's so annoying that I'm trying to figure out how to turn if off and go back to the "old" plain images, but the option does not exist.
>>>POTS lines are 3 KHz, specifically 400 Hz to 3.4 KHz
And 8000 samples per second, which enables 64k data rate (8000 x 8 bits==64000 bps). If HD Voice happens the sampling rate will be doubled to 16,000, which means dialup modems could jump to 128k speeds.
Note that the 1996 Telecommunications Act partially funded the original analog-to-digital phone line upgrades, so people could use the then-new 56k modems for accessing the net. (That was considered FAST in an era when most people still had 14k or 28k modems.) And yes the digital lines did improve voice calls a lot. Calling home from California to Maryland may be frequency-limited, but at least it's static free. Calls in 1990 didn't sound as good as they do in 2010.
Slashdot does something more assiduous than removing posts. It mods people down to (0) or (-1) and then sets the default "view" at 1 or higher, thereby making posts invisible that slashdot (or its mod) does not like. That gives the appearance that everyone can speak, but if your post is made invisible to the vast whole of Visitors, then it might as well be as if you never spoke at all. Like a press conference aired on TV, but the video & sound is muted.
Back to topic: Fortunately we have a free market (for hosting companies). This church can just move the website to a different host company that does not censor free speech/press. Also: Can you imagine the uproar if the proposed Mosque located near ground zero suddenly had their website yanked?
And for those who think the Mosque should not be built 3 blocks from ground zero:
Are you a law-abiding citizen? If you answered "yes" then start by obeying these Supreme Laws: "Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion." "The powers not delegated to the United States... are reserved to the States or to the People." "The enumeration in the constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the People." - SUPREME LAW OF NEW YORK: "The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship, without discrimination or preference, shall forever be allowed in this state to all humankind."
Finally I heard this and it scared me:
"If they build it, we'll blow it up." - Christian at local church (aka a terrorist)
>>>taxpayers have already footed 300 billion for "high speed" internet that was never delivered and is conveniently forgotten
Citation please.
And I don't mean a blog of someone's opinion which has no facts to support it. I mean an actual provable citation. Why? Because I've read through the 1996 Act, and most of the money was appropriated to upgrading phone lines from analog to digital, in order to increase connections from ~24k to the then cutting edge ~50k. For the most part, companies did that. They complied with Congresses' order to enable digital internet on the phones.
If you think that was a lousy way to spend the money, don't blame the telcos. Blame the lawmakers.