The problem is that there is a lot of information to be gained just by seeing who/what you are communicating with, and encryption doesn't work to stop that.
You have to both use encryption and an anonymizing proxy server/network to protect yourself. Of course, communicating with an anonymizing proxy will of course get you noticed also.
You just gave 3 examples of how to fill your upload. None of those will fill your download. The one coming closest would be the TOR router that would use about as much download as upload (leaving maybe 7/8 of the download unused on an ordinary residential connection). If you are on fiber with equal download/upload, you are the exception and my original post was obviously not directed as such connections.
My statement stands. You have to try extremly hard to get even close to filling your download on an ordinary residential connection. Even if you go for something like downloading Blueray ISOs, you still have to find a place where you can get them without trading your upload bandwidth for it. There is probably some theoretic case where it is true, but not in practice.
BitTorrent (and P2P in general) is a kludge. Multicasting is a solution. BitTorrent is an inefficient protocol (from a whole network load point of view.) It bounces the same data around the net in unicasts. Only when it comes to incredibly popular files. However most torrents have maybe a few hundred peers or up to maybe a few thousand, spread over a huge part of the earth Multicasting does little good in a such a situation.
Multicasting is basically about taking you back to the old paradigm where everyone watches the same thing at the same time. (ok, you can save things so people can watch it later, but it is still the old)
Bittorrent could probably benefit some from pairing peers that are locally close to each other, but that is a tracker problem, not a fundamental flaw with the protocol itself.
The swarm control overhead is bigger than it has to be because with slow upstreams you need more peers for acceptable download speeds. Swarm control overhead is minimal unless you are running a rogue client. We are talking in the area of a 1% overhead here.
Btw, getting more peers has nothing to do with getting acceptable download speeds. It only spreads what precious little upload you do have out so that peers will be even less likely to trade chunks with you. Actually, if the extra peers you get are seeds, that isn't true. In that case you do get a little extra speed, although not much.
The real solution if you are planning to p2p, is to stop looking at those stupid download X mbit/s number when getting an ISP. Those numbers are only there for people who don't know that upload is what matters in 95+% of all cases. (And in the remaining cases, price is)
It is like you see on the other slashdot ISP/internet discussions.
One person suddenly says, "If you actually use your X mbit/s download, how much do you think it would cost the ISP?". That is of course ridicioulus, because who actually use their download 24/7?
There are three things that limit most heavy users (exception for compulsive hoarders)
* Consumption Time - You only have X amount free time. * Quality Material - There is only so much good material. * Upload - Heavy users often run servers or upload to p2p. Also, even those who don't often use p2p and share back 1:1 ratio as any good netizen.
Download bandwidth simply never comes into play. As upload is far more limited than download it acts as an upper limit for me, and I guess most heavy p2p users. But even then I don't actually use that limit most months, because there is only so much I have time to actually consume. For pure downloaders I can only guess that they have an even harder time using up bandwidth, as they don't use the upload part.
On a similar subject. I think that the whole advertising of X mbit/s download is just a big scam. Find me one person who actually makes real use of their 24mbit/s connection. I have 24/1 myself, but that is because it got freely upgraded from 8/1 without me doing anything and I can tell you that the difference for me is extremly minimal.
I will happy pay for my bandwidth by the gigabyte if it is sold at market value And that is your mistake. Believing that they will sell something like that at market value. You are lucky if you manage to get a markup of less than 1000%.
The ones really being "screwed" under the current model are the light users, who push a good 2 or 3 megabytes a day to check their email and the weather report, don't call tech support very often, and are paying $60 a month to subsidize us compulsive downloaders. Umm $60? Why would someone like that have such an expensive subscription? I would expect them to have the cheapest subscription.
And if you think that those cheapest subscriptions are too expensive. Consider the fact that even though they only use 2-3 megabytes per day, there still has to be the last mile infrastructure built to support them being a heavy user, incase someone else moves to where they lived.
A low weight user is simply not much cheaper to maintain than a heavy user. Yes, the heavy user more bandwidth, but the fact is that bandwidth is cheap. Atleast in the small amounts used by most of those heavy users. Yes, 200GB/month is not that big an amount of bandwidth nowadays. Especially if it is spread out even across the day, which is more likely in the case of a heavy user than a lightweight one.
The real problem some isps are having is with last mile infrastructures that are inadequate to handle multiple heavy users. A case of having networks that scale poorly you could say. Their solution? Raise the prices of being a heavy user so much that there won't be many heavy users any longer.
So the expensive new pricing schemes for heavy usage being proposed have little to do with the costs of any single heavy user being high, but the fact that due to poor infrastructure choices, isps needs to limit the total number of heavy users in any single area.
Finally, I just want so say that I don't expect a heavy user to pay the same as a light weight one. It is just that there is already pretty adequate differences in prices between different subscriptions. I am just tired of seeing 50-100GB per month being trouted as heavy usage. It isn't unless it all occurs during primetime. Prime time caps is something I can actually favor. It is a good compromise that makes sense. As long as primetime is reasonably defined and spelled out that is.
But 25GB a week? ~4GB a day? That's 10 hours of TV download (350MB epidodes)each day. I would say that was quite a lot. Actually 8 hours. A "1 hour" tv show is actually 42 minutes.
If you are using p2p, half that to account for upload (1:1 ratio as a good netizen) and you are down to 4 hours. God forbid if you watch HD at double the size. That leaves you with 2 hours of tv per day.
And that is just TV for one single week for one person in the household (although the grandparent did say university so it is likely a one person household).
The geneva convention was unfortunally written by big countries meaning that a lot of it is intended protect those countries interest by having a treaty that they can use to claim moral superiority.
Notably guerilla/resistance fighters often do not get any protections at all under the geneva convention due to not being able to forfill the requirements of a "lawful" combatant. Therefore they can be treated like trash and have no human rights.
This is of course not completly unreasonable since guerilla fighters don't have to recognize the geneva convention either. However, it does put a big dent in anyone who tries to claim moral superiority just because they follow the the geneva convention. Real superiority don't come from how well you follow treaties, but what you do on issues where treaties don't apply.
and what happens to people that aren't rich in canada or the UK? They die because they can't get the proper treatment. Mostly no. The health care that suffers the most from queues in socialized countries are usually operation that aren't vital to survival. Still painful for some though, so it isn't perfect.
If you look at basic economics, you will see that monopolies are not as efficient as the free market. I guess you are pro-monopoly..right? The one direct limitation of socialized health care is that the state dictates how much you get to spend on your health care, both in upper and lower limits.
There is however no direct limitation on choice built in to it. You can still have competing hospitals/doctors. They just can't compete on price, but only on service. Of course, this depends on how the goverment regulates things.
As with most things, the free market is not an all or nothing situation. Also in some situations like emergency care I am pro-monopoly, because the free market simply does't work in situations where the buyer doesn't have an opportunity to make an informed choice.
Btw, lots of people have very little choice in the US where insurance companies gets to pick the doctors and treatment, and your employer gets to pick the insurance company. I just added this remark to note that the amount of free market in health care is not really dependent on how socialized the health care is.
because the more people there are, the more people the government will have to support through the health-care system. And the more people there are to pay the taxes. Scaling at practically the same rate.
The current system is broken. Socialized health care is worse. I don't see where socialized health is worse. Statistics doesn't support that, although it is somewhat difficult to find direct comparisons beyond very basic numbers.
At least with the current health-care system of the US, you can get care and live. You might have debt, but you will still be alive. In your system, you wouldn't even have the option. Doesn't support the life expectancy figures I am looking it. The fact is that socialized systems don't like to see their citizens die, and therefore prioritize bad cases.
Of course, that also creates queues on the less prioritized operations because as we all know, health care is expensive and efficency is well...not always the best.
Don't think that goverment isn't looking for ways to make it more efficent though. The fact is that health care is an important subject in any election and if the health care figures are dropping, it can turn quite a few voters towards an opposition party.
I always thought that this was universally true. True:)
Everyone will look after their own interests.
Actually, I think the best is probably to have a balanced goverment with people from many parts of society. That is why people in the congress and senate are more relevant to my first post.
When you need a single person, having one who selects a wide variety of peers to take advice from and actually listens to them would be nice. And for that you probably require mainly intelligence, a willingness to actually listen and the guts to actually make a decision and stand by it.
However, it is difficult to speculate on stuff like this.
and you have been sipping the old socialist toilet water. Sprayed into your mouth by Obama and his comrades. You are calling US democrats socialists. In that case you really have no idea what a socialist is. They are light weight psuedo-socialists at most.
I asked for ONE example of a country the size of the US with successful socialized healthcare Of course you did, because you knew that it would be impossible to find one. (Either that or you are an idiot)
All the countries he listed except for Canada are in the top 25 countries in the world. And if you remove third world countries, most likely in the top 10.
Actually, I don't get why scaling came into the discussion in the first place. It seems to work roughly similar here in Sweden (8 million) as it does in very much large countries such as Canada, Germany or France. Why is it suddenly so different when you jump up to the size of the US?
but anything beyond that is a very long waiting list and most just come to the united states. Ok, that confirms that you are a rich spoiled libertarian atleast. Only rich people can afford coming to the US to get their special treatment, except maybe for a few specific cases where there was a lack of basic medical equipment in Canada.
More likely though is that you are just lying through your teeth.
You don't think the liberal media lies on a constant basis to push agendas? I have no doubt about it. They lie less than the right wing (as in top run) media does though.
With socialized health-care, we would have one large monopoly run by the most inefficient business there is: the government. The goverment isn't a business. And it doesn't seem to be the least efficent either considering goverment run health care seems to cost less per capita than the same US run health care that doesn't produce better results on average.
Here is a nice example of how great french health care [bbc.co.uk] is (since you did include it on your list). Some issues with efficency is your great complaint. Let me strike back with this one. The US is so inefficent that it fails to treat 1/6 of it its own population. (and that is not including those who are under insured)
Oh, and if you want to find some dirt on my country's health care, I'll just go ahead and provide it for you from one of your own right wing "think" tanks (aka. propaganda center). I never said Swedish health care was perfect, but I still think it beats the US by far.
Yes, Sweden have some problems with queues, and the conservative think tank is not shy on focusing on it as it wants to glorify privatized health care. Of course it completly fails to mention that Sweden is top class when you actually get your treatment, which among other things is evidenced by our good average life span.
Ok, that probably reinforces what you believe. That the rich should pay and get their treatment directly, while the poor should shut up, die and go to hell.
No one in power should be common. My experience with the common, non-educated, man is not encouraging. My experience with elitist, educated men is not encouraging either.
I far prefer a common, not completly stupid person over any elitist in power. The reason being simple. The elitist will always look after his own special interests just by the fact that his worldview leans that way.
Best of course is a well educated, intelligent, non-elitst that frequently talks/debates with people from all layers of society.
The post I responded to clearly stated that legislation bullying was stupid because it wouldn't stop bullying. And that is no different than saying that legislating murder is stupid because it won't stop murder.
Your friend has undiagnosed mental illness and tends to read into things people say and is always taking things the wrong way. You send her a letter as a joke, purporting to be from someone else, she misunderstands it and either kills herself or someone else...Should you be charged? NO! Depends on the amount of letters you send and how much of a "joke" you are playing. Just like there is a difference between accidentally causing someones death, causing someones death by negilence and intentionally killing someone.
Law judges not only what is done, but how it is done and with what intent.
In the story you are talking about (which I btw am not even familiar with) where a child commited suicide, it would be up to the justice system to determine if it was purely accidental (a remark that got interpeted wrong), negilence (repeated harassment that although not intended eventually lead to the suicide) or with intent (directed psychological harassment with the intent of causing the child to harm herself).
There are always going to be people who are assholes, period. There will always be bullies, period. If the bullying is physical it should be chargable under a criminal statute if it rises to the level of criminality; Why should physical assault be punished harder than mental assault when science have shown that mental assault can cause atleast as much if not more damage (especially long term) than physical assault.
Give me a fucking break. Sorry, I won't give you a break in this matter.
And more than anything. I definitly won't give assholes a break. They have had it far too easy for far too long.
But you can punish it.
what is free speech and what is harrassment? What is a joke and what isn't a joke? What is manslaughter and what is first degree murder? Even if that sort of legislation passed can you image trying to enforce it.
You cannot legislate cyberbullying away any more than you can legislate schoolyard bullying away. Bullies are a fact of life You simply can't stop people from killing other people. Killing is a fact of life. So we should just remove all those laws against killing, because all they do is take away our precious freedoms.
I was bullied as a child, but only ever once by each bully - they soon learned the lesson once I broke noses and fingers. In that case you weren't bullied. You were simply probed.
Bullying occurs when a bully finds a target that doesn't have the mentality to fight back, which may occur once in every 10 or 20 targets.
That is why I hate all the "just fight back" replies that pop up whenever a bullying article occurs on slashdot. If the child had the mentality to fight back it wouldn't be bullied in the first place.
But no, it is the child who dislikes violence and fighting who is at fault, while the bully is just doing his duty. I guess the same people think we shouldn't imprison fraud artists, because those who fall for it needed to learn a lesson. Or to go even further. The girl who got raped is at fault because she didn't fight back strongly enough.
Olympic medals per capita? That isn't fair either. Smaller countries get more competitors per capita, which makes it more likely for them to score gold medals. (unless you assume that competitors always perform at their maximums)
I'd say that Western ideology includes treating women like slaves. For example, my wife is pregnant, and due to give birth in 1 month. She gets 1 year maternity leave, but it's all UNPAID. She, and all other women, are expected to take care of the baby and home generally, for FREE. Not all western countries are the same of course.
Here in Sweden there is 480 days of paid parenthood. I am not sure how big percentage of the salary that is is.
However, one interesting thing to note is that these 480 days may be distributed in any way between father and mother. This is relativly new, and one of the things implemented to decrease gender discrimination here in Sweden. It is a very good law. Not only does it help women who want to keep working. There are also many new fathers that would like to spend more time with their children.
The biggest remaining gender discrimination here in Sweden is probably the wage gap which is hard to explain. There is work being done to reduce it, but it is hard without understanding the real reason for it. As you say, women aren't less skilled or capable, so how come they on average have lower salaries.
Is it concious discrimination by those setting salaries, or maybe unconcious discrimination. Or are women less likely to ask for salary increases? Until we fully know the answer to those questions it will be hard to fix it.
Stop kidding yourself. The core network bandwidth is extremly cheap.
No, the problem ISPs are having is that their scam of using old pre- internet era edge networks is finally cracking under the pressure of higher demands from their ordinary customers.
That, and ridiciously bad regulations in the US, all in the name of the free market, but which instead allows monopoly practices to run wild (as always when it comes to infrastructure). Of course, if the US were to regulate I fully expect them to regulate in the wrong way which wouldn't be just as bad.
If you want a good example of regulations, look at current Sweden telcom/it regulations. They actually work pretty well.
If only it were $1 for every 10GB. That is what I would call acceptable prices. However these companies want $1 per GB or even more than that.
Light users keep complaining about heavy users, but the truth is that the vast majority of the cost is building the infrastructure in the first place. As you noted, actual bandwidth is pretty cheap.
There is one place where heavy bandwidth users are more costly and that is in building the infrastructure in the first place. Cable companies have managed by using their pre internet era structure to serve basic internet, but as demands are rising for the average user that is quickly becoming impossible, and the fact that cable companies have pocketed money instead of building infrastructure is coming back to bite them in their fat overfed asses.
Detecting adblockers is simple. It is just a matter of adding a small javascript to the page.
Sure, you can bypass that script manually, but that requires extra handcoding (I have personally done that for one site I frequent). Disabling rjavascript is another option, but it is easy to make a page that doesn't work without javascript (simply hide everything and run a script to show it). Having javascript enabled also provides a bunch of advantages on many sites.
To make an adblocker that is more difficult to detect you would have to have some integration with the rendering engine itself. Having some DOM properties that can only be detected/modified locally by the adblocker script.
If anything, I find it is the heavy users that are quickly becoming to bear too much of the actual costs involved.
Let's just look at the costs
Independent of bandwidth used: * Service * Digging Infrastructure - UNLESS you havn't dug the infrastructure yet because you have been able to exploit old infrastructure until now, but heavy users are making that less possible. * Digging between ISP and backbone
Dependent on bandwidth used: * Switches/Routers - Costs aren't very high anymore though as evidence by cheap backbone bandwidth * Backbone traffic - Again backbone costs aren't that high compared anymore unless you have a sucky contract. (note, that the digging costs for the connection shouldn't be included here as that is bandwidth independent)
When looking at the transfer caps/fees that ISPs are beginning to come up with you will quickly note that the charges for using more bandwidth is 1000%, if not 10000% or more markups compared to the backbone bandwidth costs.
I can understand a 200% markup because they have to have switches/routers from the backbone to you. I can also understand if they have higher markup for primetime and less for the other time. However, what they are currently trying to do is not reasonable. (Note, that if AT&T pricing is reasonable I apologize in advance. The cable companies aren't.)
Yes, oversubscription is nescessary for efficency. The kind of oversubscription that most ISPs seems to be talking about today isn't nescessary.
Time Warner with their 40GB/month for $59.95 package is just plain robbery. The backbone cost for 40GB is somewhere around $1. I am just tired of hearing that the general bandwidth cost is the problem with heavy users, because it is a plain and simple lie.
The fact is that the US internet is overly reliant on pre internet infrastructure, which is increasingly having trouble keeping up with the increasing user demands.
As you say, laying down fiber is expensive, but it is a must to be able to handle future demand. Adsl can be used to avoid having to lay down last mile fiber in less populated areas where it isn't profitable. US lack of regulations, which allows telecoms to maintain exclusive control over their (initially goverment paid) copper lines, prevents that however.
Anyway, back on subject. After fiber is in the ground, the cost of bandwidth itself is actually a minor factor. This can be seen in countries like mine (Sweden) where 10/10 fiber is cheaper than 24/1 adsl. Equipment for sending huge amounts of traffic has been decently cheap for a long time.
Of course, if you try to save money on equipment the first time around you will have to upgrade to soon which is more costly. And I guess this is another area where US isps have made mistakes.
Again, I am not saying that I don't expect oversubscription. I just expect it to be done in moderation. Even a heavy bittorrent user like myself havn't used more than.5/.5 on average in a single month. On a 16/2 line, that is 1/32 of the download and 1/4 of the upload. And that is a heavy month. My average usage is less than that.
When the US ISPs come up with reasonable transfer caps I will stop debating, but as it stands now, it looks like most of the us consumers are or are about to get screwed.
However, that is backbone bandwidth, which is quite cheap. ($10/mbit and month at an optimal location, not claiming that ISPs have optimal access though)
No, the grandparent is correct in that it is the last mile or two mile infrastructure that is the costly part and that has to be built to support the heaviest users in the first place. (The problem some companies in the US are having seems to be that they didn't build their networks to support the heavy users in the first place)
That isn't to say that heavier users shouldn't pay more. However, a linear increase in money payed based on bandwidth used is heavily unfair towards heavy users.
Another fact to support that last mile infrastructure is the problem is to look here in Sweden. How come 10/10 fiber connections are cheaper than 24/1 adsl ones. The reason is simple. It isn't the long distance bandwidth that is costly, but getting the final mile. And once fiber has been put into the ground, it is cheaper to maintain than adsl.
The difference between Sweden and the US is that we actually regulated infrastructure here in Sweden and used that regulation to create a free market in the service provider part.
The free market is a tool for efficency and not a magic bullet. As it simply isn't efficent to build one set of infrastructure for each company to a house, free market is a bad tool for that specific case.
Of course, we have also spent quite a bunch of goverment money digging fiber in the last 10 years, but from what I understand so has the US. (except the US seems to have a lack of oversight in where the money it spends actually end up).
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Not right wing, authoritarian.
The two biggest parties in Sweden, the right wing Moderates and the left wing Social Democrates are both authoritarian.
And several other parties have authoritarian pressure coming from their party tops.
The problem is that there is a lot of information to be gained just by seeing who/what you are communicating with, and encryption doesn't work to stop that.
You have to both use encryption and an anonymizing proxy server/network to protect yourself. Of course, communicating with an anonymizing proxy will of course get you noticed also.
You just gave 3 examples of how to fill your upload. None of those will fill your download. The one coming closest would be the TOR router that would use about as much download as upload (leaving maybe 7/8 of the download unused on an ordinary residential connection). If you are on fiber with equal download/upload, you are the exception and my original post was obviously not directed as such connections.
My statement stands. You have to try extremly hard to get even close to filling your download on an ordinary residential connection. Even if you go for something like downloading Blueray ISOs, you still have to find a place where you can get them without trading your upload bandwidth for it. There is probably some theoretic case where it is true, but not in practice.
Multicasting is basically about taking you back to the old paradigm where everyone watches the same thing at the same time. (ok, you can save things so people can watch it later, but it is still the old)
Bittorrent could probably benefit some from pairing peers that are locally close to each other, but that is a tracker problem, not a fundamental flaw with the protocol itself. The swarm control overhead is bigger than it has to be because with slow upstreams you need more peers for acceptable download speeds. Swarm control overhead is minimal unless you are running a rogue client. We are talking in the area of a 1% overhead here.
Btw, getting more peers has nothing to do with getting acceptable download speeds. It only spreads what precious little upload you do have out so that peers will be even less likely to trade chunks with you. Actually, if the extra peers you get are seeds, that isn't true. In that case you do get a little extra speed, although not much.
The real solution if you are planning to p2p, is to stop looking at those stupid download X mbit/s number when getting an ISP. Those numbers are only there for people who don't know that upload is what matters in 95+% of all cases. (And in the remaining cases, price is)
It is like you see on the other slashdot ISP/internet discussions.
One person suddenly says, "If you actually use your X mbit/s download, how much do you think it would cost the ISP?". That is of course ridicioulus, because who actually use their download 24/7?
There are three things that limit most heavy users (exception for compulsive hoarders)
* Consumption Time - You only have X amount free time.
* Quality Material - There is only so much good material.
* Upload - Heavy users often run servers or upload to p2p. Also, even those who don't often use p2p and share back 1:1 ratio as any good netizen.
Download bandwidth simply never comes into play. As upload is far more limited than download it acts as an upper limit for me, and I guess most heavy p2p users. But even then I don't actually use that limit most months, because there is only so much I have time to actually consume. For pure downloaders I can only guess that they have an even harder time using up bandwidth, as they don't use the upload part.
On a similar subject. I think that the whole advertising of X mbit/s download is just a big scam. Find me one person who actually makes real use of their 24mbit/s connection. I have 24/1 myself, but that is because it got freely upgraded from 8/1 without me doing anything and I can tell you that the difference for me is extremly minimal.
And if you think that those cheapest subscriptions are too expensive. Consider the fact that even though they only use 2-3 megabytes per day, there still has to be the last mile infrastructure built to support them being a heavy user, incase someone else moves to where they lived.
A low weight user is simply not much cheaper to maintain than a heavy user. Yes, the heavy user more bandwidth, but the fact is that bandwidth is cheap. Atleast in the small amounts used by most of those heavy users. Yes, 200GB/month is not that big an amount of bandwidth nowadays. Especially if it is spread out even across the day, which is more likely in the case of a heavy user than a lightweight one.
The real problem some isps are having is with last mile infrastructures that are inadequate to handle multiple heavy users. A case of having networks that scale poorly you could say. Their solution? Raise the prices of being a heavy user so much that there won't be many heavy users any longer.
So the expensive new pricing schemes for heavy usage being proposed have little to do with the costs of any single heavy user being high, but the fact that due to poor infrastructure choices, isps needs to limit the total number of heavy users in any single area.
Finally, I just want so say that I don't expect a heavy user to pay the same as a light weight one. It is just that there is already pretty adequate differences in prices between different subscriptions. I am just tired of seeing 50-100GB per month being trouted as heavy usage. It isn't unless it all occurs during primetime. Prime time caps is something I can actually favor. It is a good compromise that makes sense. As long as primetime is reasonably defined and spelled out that is.
If you are using p2p, half that to account for upload (1:1 ratio as a good netizen) and you are down to 4 hours. God forbid if you watch HD at double the size. That leaves you with 2 hours of tv per day.
And that is just TV for one single week for one person in the household (although the grandparent did say university so it is likely a one person household).
The geneva convention was unfortunally written by big countries meaning that a lot of it is intended protect those countries interest by having a treaty that they can use to claim moral superiority.
Notably guerilla/resistance fighters often do not get any protections at all under the geneva convention due to not being able to forfill the requirements of a "lawful" combatant. Therefore they can be treated like trash and have no human rights.
This is of course not completly unreasonable since guerilla fighters don't have to recognize the geneva convention either. However, it does put a big dent in anyone who tries to claim moral superiority just because they follow the the geneva convention. Real superiority don't come from how well you follow treaties, but what you do on issues where treaties don't apply.
There is however no direct limitation on choice built in to it. You can still have competing hospitals/doctors. They just can't compete on price, but only on service. Of course, this depends on how the goverment regulates things.
As with most things, the free market is not an all or nothing situation. Also in some situations like emergency care I am pro-monopoly, because the free market simply does't work in situations where the buyer doesn't have an opportunity to make an informed choice.
Btw, lots of people have very little choice in the US where insurance companies gets to pick the doctors and treatment, and your employer gets to pick the insurance company. I just added this remark to note that the amount of free market in health care is not really dependent on how socialized the health care is. because the more people there are, the more people the government will have to support through the health-care system. And the more people there are to pay the taxes. Scaling at practically the same rate. The current system is broken. Socialized health care is worse. I don't see where socialized health is worse. Statistics doesn't support that, although it is somewhat difficult to find direct comparisons beyond very basic numbers. At least with the current health-care system of the US, you can get care and live. You might have debt, but you will still be alive. In your system, you wouldn't even have the option. Doesn't support the life expectancy figures I am looking it. The fact is that socialized systems don't like to see their citizens die, and therefore prioritize bad cases.
Of course, that also creates queues on the less prioritized operations because as we all know, health care is expensive and efficency is well...not always the best.
Don't think that goverment isn't looking for ways to make it more efficent though. The fact is that health care is an important subject in any election and if the health care figures are dropping, it can turn quite a few voters towards an opposition party.
Everyone will look after their own interests.
Actually, I think the best is probably to have a balanced goverment with people from many parts of society. That is why people in the congress and senate are more relevant to my first post.
When you need a single person, having one who selects a wide variety of peers to take advice from and actually listens to them would be nice. And for that you probably require mainly intelligence, a willingness to actually listen and the guts to actually make a decision and stand by it.
However, it is difficult to speculate on stuff like this.
And he is white also. Atleast on one side of the family.
All the countries he listed except for Canada are in the top 25 countries in the world. And if you remove third world countries, most likely in the top 10.
Actually, I don't get why scaling came into the discussion in the first place. It seems to work roughly similar here in Sweden (8 million) as it does in very much large countries such as Canada, Germany or France. Why is it suddenly so different when you jump up to the size of the US? but anything beyond that is a very long waiting list and most just come to the united states. Ok, that confirms that you are a rich spoiled libertarian atleast. Only rich people can afford coming to the US to get their special treatment, except maybe for a few specific cases where there was a lack of basic medical equipment in Canada.
More likely though is that you are just lying through your teeth. You don't think the liberal media lies on a constant basis to push agendas? I have no doubt about it. They lie less than the right wing (as in top run) media does though. With socialized health-care, we would have one large monopoly run by the most inefficient business there is: the government. The goverment isn't a business. And it doesn't seem to be the least efficent either considering goverment run health care seems to cost less per capita than the same US run health care that doesn't produce better results on average. Here is a nice example of how great french health care [bbc.co.uk] is (since you did include it on your list). Some issues with efficency is your great complaint. Let me strike back with this one. The US is so inefficent that it fails to treat 1/6 of it its own population. (and that is not including those who are under insured)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7420744.stm
Oh, and if you want to find some dirt on my country's health care, I'll just go ahead and provide it for you from one of your own right wing "think" tanks (aka. propaganda center). I never said Swedish health care was perfect, but I still think it beats the US by far.
http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA555_Sweden_Health_Care.html
Yes, Sweden have some problems with queues, and the conservative think tank is not shy on focusing on it as it wants to glorify privatized health care. Of course it completly fails to mention that Sweden is top class when you actually get your treatment, which among other things is evidenced by our good average life span.
Ok, that probably reinforces what you believe. That the rich should pay and get their treatment directly, while the poor should shut up, die and go to hell.
I far prefer a common, not completly stupid person over any elitist in power. The reason being simple. The elitist will always look after his own special interests just by the fact that his worldview leans that way.
Best of course is a well educated, intelligent, non-elitst that frequently talks/debates with people from all layers of society.
The post I responded to clearly stated that legislation bullying was stupid because it wouldn't stop bullying. And that is no different than saying that legislating murder is stupid because it won't stop murder. Your friend has undiagnosed mental illness and tends to read into things people say and is always taking things the wrong way. You send her a letter as a joke, purporting to be from someone else, she misunderstands it and either kills herself or someone else...Should you be charged? NO! Depends on the amount of letters you send and how much of a "joke" you are playing. Just like there is a difference between accidentally causing someones death, causing someones death by negilence and intentionally killing someone.
Law judges not only what is done, but how it is done and with what intent.
In the story you are talking about (which I btw am not even familiar with) where a child commited suicide, it would be up to the justice system to determine if it was purely accidental (a remark that got interpeted wrong), negilence (repeated harassment that although not intended eventually lead to the suicide) or with intent (directed psychological harassment with the intent of causing the child to harm herself). There are always going to be people who are assholes, period. There will always be bullies, period. If the bullying is physical it should be chargable under a criminal statute if it rises to the level of criminality; Why should physical assault be punished harder than mental assault when science have shown that mental assault can cause atleast as much if not more damage (especially long term) than physical assault. Give me a fucking break. Sorry, I won't give you a break in this matter.
And more than anything. I definitly won't give assholes a break. They have had it far too easy for far too long.
But you can punish it. what is free speech and what is harrassment? What is a joke and what isn't a joke? What is manslaughter and what is first degree murder? Even if that sort of legislation passed can you image trying to enforce it. You cannot legislate cyberbullying away any more than you can legislate schoolyard bullying away. Bullies are a fact of life You simply can't stop people from killing other people. Killing is a fact of life. So we should just remove all those laws against killing, because all they do is take away our precious freedoms.
Bullying occurs when a bully finds a target that doesn't have the mentality to fight back, which may occur once in every 10 or 20 targets.
That is why I hate all the "just fight back" replies that pop up whenever a bullying article occurs on slashdot. If the child had the mentality to fight back it wouldn't be bullied in the first place.
But no, it is the child who dislikes violence and fighting who is at fault, while the bully is just doing his duty. I guess the same people think we shouldn't imprison fraud artists, because those who fall for it needed to learn a lesson. Or to go even further. The girl who got raped is at fault because she didn't fight back strongly enough.
Here in Sweden there is 480 days of paid parenthood. I am not sure how big percentage of the salary that is is.
However, one interesting thing to note is that these 480 days may be distributed in any way between father and mother. This is relativly new, and one of the things implemented to decrease gender discrimination here in Sweden. It is a very good law. Not only does it help women who want to keep working. There are also many new fathers that would like to spend more time with their children.
The biggest remaining gender discrimination here in Sweden is probably the wage gap which is hard to explain. There is work being done to reduce it, but it is hard without understanding the real reason for it. As you say, women aren't less skilled or capable, so how come they on average have lower salaries.
Is it concious discrimination by those setting salaries, or maybe unconcious discrimination. Or are women less likely to ask for salary increases? Until we fully know the answer to those questions it will be hard to fix it.
Stop kidding yourself. The core network bandwidth is extremly cheap.
No, the problem ISPs are having is that their scam of using old pre- internet era edge networks is finally cracking under the pressure of higher demands from their ordinary customers.
That, and ridiciously bad regulations in the US, all in the name of the free market, but which instead allows monopoly practices to run wild (as always when it comes to infrastructure). Of course, if the US were to regulate I fully expect them to regulate in the wrong way which wouldn't be just as bad.
If you want a good example of regulations, look at current Sweden telcom/it regulations. They actually work pretty well.
If only it were $1 for every 10GB. That is what I would call acceptable prices. However these companies want $1 per GB or even more than that.
Light users keep complaining about heavy users, but the truth is that the vast majority of the cost is building the infrastructure in the first place. As you noted, actual bandwidth is pretty cheap.
There is one place where heavy bandwidth users are more costly and that is in building the infrastructure in the first place. Cable companies have managed by using their pre internet era structure to serve basic internet, but as demands are rising for the average user that is quickly becoming impossible, and the fact that cable companies have pocketed money instead of building infrastructure is coming back to bite them in their fat overfed asses.
Detecting adblockers is simple. It is just a matter of adding a small javascript to the page.
Sure, you can bypass that script manually, but that requires extra handcoding (I have personally done that for one site I frequent). Disabling rjavascript is another option, but it is easy to make a page that doesn't work without javascript (simply hide everything and run a script to show it). Having javascript enabled also provides a bunch of advantages on many sites.
To make an adblocker that is more difficult to detect you would have to have some integration with the rendering engine itself. Having some DOM properties that can only be detected/modified locally by the adblocker script.
If anything, I find it is the heavy users that are quickly becoming to bear too much of the actual costs involved.
Let's just look at the costs
Independent of bandwidth used:
* Service
* Digging Infrastructure - UNLESS you havn't dug the infrastructure yet because you have been able to exploit old infrastructure until now, but heavy users are making that less possible.
* Digging between ISP and backbone
Dependent on bandwidth used:
* Switches/Routers - Costs aren't very high anymore though as evidence by cheap backbone bandwidth
* Backbone traffic - Again backbone costs aren't that high compared anymore unless you have a sucky contract. (note, that the digging costs for the connection shouldn't be included here as that is bandwidth independent)
When looking at the transfer caps/fees that ISPs are beginning to come up with you will quickly note that the charges for using more bandwidth is 1000%, if not 10000% or more markups compared to the backbone bandwidth costs.
I can understand a 200% markup because they have to have switches/routers from the backbone to you. I can also understand if they have higher markup for primetime and less for the other time. However, what they are currently trying to do is not reasonable. (Note, that if AT&T pricing is reasonable I apologize in advance. The cable companies aren't.)
Yes, oversubscription is nescessary for efficency. The kind of oversubscription that most ISPs seems to be talking about today isn't nescessary.
.5/.5 on average in a single month. On a 16/2 line, that is 1/32 of the download and 1/4 of the upload. And that is a heavy month. My average usage is less than that.
Time Warner with their 40GB/month for $59.95 package is just plain robbery. The backbone cost for 40GB is somewhere around $1. I am just tired of hearing that the general bandwidth cost is the problem with heavy users, because it is a plain and simple lie.
The fact is that the US internet is overly reliant on pre internet infrastructure, which is increasingly having trouble keeping up with the increasing user demands.
As you say, laying down fiber is expensive, but it is a must to be able to handle future demand. Adsl can be used to avoid having to lay down last mile fiber in less populated areas where it isn't profitable. US lack of regulations, which allows telecoms to maintain exclusive control over their (initially goverment paid) copper lines, prevents that however.
Anyway, back on subject. After fiber is in the ground, the cost of bandwidth itself is actually a minor factor. This can be seen in countries like mine (Sweden) where 10/10 fiber is cheaper than 24/1 adsl. Equipment for sending huge amounts of traffic has been decently cheap for a long time.
Of course, if you try to save money on equipment the first time around you will have to upgrade to soon which is more costly. And I guess this is another area where US isps have made mistakes.
Again, I am not saying that I don't expect oversubscription. I just expect it to be done in moderation. Even a heavy bittorrent user like myself havn't used more than
When the US ISPs come up with reasonable transfer caps I will stop debating, but as it stands now, it looks like most of the us consumers are or are about to get screwed.
However, that is backbone bandwidth, which is quite cheap. ($10/mbit and month at an optimal location, not claiming that ISPs have optimal access though)
No, the grandparent is correct in that it is the last mile or two mile infrastructure that is the costly part and that has to be built to support the heaviest users in the first place. (The problem some companies in the US are having seems to be that they didn't build their networks to support the heavy users in the first place)
That isn't to say that heavier users shouldn't pay more. However, a linear increase in money payed based on bandwidth used is heavily unfair towards heavy users.
Another fact to support that last mile infrastructure is the problem is to look here in Sweden. How come 10/10 fiber connections are cheaper than 24/1 adsl ones. The reason is simple. It isn't the long distance bandwidth that is costly, but getting the final mile. And once fiber has been put into the ground, it is cheaper to maintain than adsl.
The difference between Sweden and the US is that we actually regulated infrastructure here in Sweden and used that regulation to create a free market in the service provider part.
The free market is a tool for efficency and not a magic bullet. As it simply isn't efficent to build one set of infrastructure for each company to a house, free market is a bad tool for that specific case.
Of course, we have also spent quite a bunch of goverment money digging fiber in the last 10 years, but from what I understand so has the US. (except the US seems to have a lack of oversight in where the money it spends actually end up).