The problem is the cost of bandwidth in general. Do you know how much the bandwidth your ISP resells to you costs THEM? It's a hell of a lot more than $40-$60 for 6 megabits. More like $100/megabit. More than that if your ISP is in a rural are Bulk bandwidth price at a good location and in big enough amounts is no more than $10/mbit.
Of course, ISPs aren't optimally located (especially rural ones) and they also have to maintain the last mile network. But don't go spewing crap like the general bandwidth prices being too high.
Also, the bulk of the cost from having to dig the lines in the first place. Upgrading capacity should be far from a linear increase in bandwidth costs, especially in rural locations, where the base cost is larger so the capacity upgrade becomes percentually cheaper. And these are big companies we are talking about, so the problem shouldn't be that they are stuck with a bad upstream provider in a lousy contract.
And no, I don't expect to be able to use my download/upload 24/7 at full capacity. I fully understand that oversubscribing is a vital function to create an unexpensive end user network. However, when companies like Time Warner are talking about 40GB total up/down for their best package, something is seriously wrong. That is like 128kb/s total for both directions, and obviously has nothing to do with general bandwidth costs.
Oh, and stop using those 6/8/10 mbit numbers. They are simple tricks that are there to fool unknowing end consumers and we all know it (I hope, or slashdot is worse of than I thought). For the knowledgable user, they provide nothing more than spike bandwidth when streaming/downloading something. Heavy users (a.k.a. filesharers) don't max out their download, they max out their upload and their download follows their upload if anything. Although having a decent download, allows you to get something quicker on a demand.
Personally, I live in sweden and have a 24/1 adsl and the only reason I have 24 download is because it got freely upgraded from 8 which is more than enough for most purposes. I am thinking of upgrading to 20/3 which sounds much better but I havn't had the time nor the will to talk to my ISP. I also don't want to mess with something that already works well.
Finally, the fact that it is pretty much only cable companies that are complaining is a good sign that the grand parent is correct in his assumptions. It is infrastructure that were but into the ground before the internet rush started (such as cable company cables) that is the problem since it is harder to upgrade without a complain redigging.
That is because EA isn't a quality brand. It is a mass production one, that relies on advertising and other brands to sell their products. The EA brand on a product is a negative factor, not a positive one.
If you want quality you have to with a brand like Blizzard which is know to support their products far beyond what is expected.
If you want a product from a company that are only interested in your money and not in your satisfaction go with EA. Sure, they may produce soom good products, but that is because good products sell. They will however never support product after sale, because it is more profitable to squeeze the most out of the market by selling expansion packs and other upgrades.
One thing that has always confused me is why you simply don't have harsh punishments for trying to pressure someone to vote a certain way.
I understand that total secrecy can be a great tool in an oppressive country, but it is well known that such countries just manipulate the elections results directly.
And the cost of total anonymity with no way of verifying that your vote actually got counted is actually pretty high in that it very much increases the chance of election fraud. Oh, and you need to be able to check that your vote didn't get counted if you didn't cast any also. Positive vote verifying isn't enough.
Ah well, I have heard enough of shitty libertarians to know that all your talk is bullshit, just like communism or any of the other pure isms.
How nice it would be if the members in society acted cooperativly and voluntarily. But no, all that happens is that you get greedy people leeching on the work of honest men and when an honest man catches a bad break, they jump onto him like wolfs and claim that it was his own fault.
Regarding your members as equals? That almost made me laugh. All I see is a vicious pyramid game where those at the top and in the middle trample on those at the bottom.
A genuine sense of charity? Yeah right. That is why a larger and larger part of society riches keeps getting into a smaller and smaller part of the population.
A real free society is one where you don't have to live in fear to be backstabbed every day, a society where you can rest assured that as long as you do your best society will care for you. And no, your vision of society doesn't provide for that. Far from it.
What you call free is nothing more than the strong oppressing the weak. And I bet you are in favor of no inheritence taxes also so that your offspring will get a better chance of oppressing the offspring of those poorer than you. Sorry, but I am not some fool that will fall for simple rethoric and excuses about not actually having had a libertarian society anywhere. (just like how communist likes to say that we havn't had communism anywhere)
"Increasing taxes are but one item among many which impede freedom. All else being equal, the citizens of a country with more taxes and public spending are self-evidently less free than citizens of another country that taxes and spends less, if only because the latter has so graciously granted the freedom to determine the manner in which the products of their labor are to be expended"
Why am I less free because I can get decent health care without being middle class or rich? Why am I less free because there is a safety net incase I get unemployed so I don't have to starve? Why am I less free because police catches criminals and military prevents other nations from invading my country.
Of course, if you are rich you may be less free because you could have afforded to pay for everything yourself and usually even spending more money for even better service. However, the self-evidently less free is by no means universally or logically true.
It only applies if every citizen in your country is as rich as the median, which is pretty much impossible. So it is you that doesn't make logical sense. The tax that makes a rich man slightly less free can make a poor man quite a lot more free.
Of course, if you have a country where your politicians aren't really responsible to the citizens, then you may be right. But that doesn't mean that "less taxes==more free" is true in the general case.
"Other things being equal, more taxes mean less freedom."
The problem with this of course being that increased taxes can allow a country to transfer money or resouces such as education/healthcare/communication to their less free citizens (wage slaves) so that they become more free.
Yes, the taxation of someone removes some of their freedom, but if they had enough resources already, the loss in freedom can be small compared to the increase in freedom for those who had little to nothing.
And then of course there is the fact that in a capitalistic cutthroat society you are often required to act selfishly and immorally to survive/prosper. You may be free theoretically, but reality is another matter.
Don't look at this post as an endorsement to tax everything. I just find it important to look at things from different perspectives before making up my mind on issues.
Barack Obama isn't very leftist. He is slightly more left than Hillary, but not much so. They are both very much mainstream democrats.
The real problem with the US point of view is that it is extremly compressed due to the two party system where mainstream candidates try to get as close as possible to the other party without losing out to third parties or non-voters.
If you want an example of a real leftist democrat, I suggest you look at someone like Dennis Kucinich who dropped out of the race far earlier. There was one more leftist candidate, but I can't remember his name. As I am a european and not a US citizen, I don't follow the election that closely.
I can confirm the math. I have done it myself in the past.
One small question if you wouldn't mind. Is that megabit-month on the OC3 a sum for both directions, or is it bidirectional which essentially doubles the total bandwidth?
I have been wondering that for a while about dedicated connections and havn't been able to find the answer. It seems you are just assumed to know it.
Just don't falsify it. Just claim that everything on youtube is violating a copyright that you actually own.
The illegal part seems to be to claim that you own the copyright of something you don't. That the work you are requesting taken down doesn't contain your copyrighted work doesn't seem to matter for all those using automated scripts and sending dmca requests without checking the actual content first.
I am not a US citizen and definitly not a US lawyer, but the dmca and how it is being used is definitly questionable in a lot of cases.
There is nothing about net neutrality that say that you can't shape bandwidth. You just can't shape based on things such as protocol and destination. You can still look at how much is transferred from each user, and give the low bandwidth user preferred treatment.
Why should someone transferring 50GB via http get better treatment than someone transferring 50GB via bittorrent? People like the parent never seems to be able to answer that question adequatly. Usually spewing some crap about their information being more important than the neighbours. If their information is that important, they should just pay for a better connection.
Of course, as with most things, pure 100% net neutrality may not be the best. This canadian proposal seems to allow exceptions for reasonable traffic shaping, which isn't a bad thing in itself as some traffic have constraints regarding latency.
Who were the most efficent terrorists. The 9/11 hijackers who did an act of terror, but failed to actually use it to reach any meaningful political goals. Or the western politicians who didn't do the act itself, but instead took advantage of it afterwards to drive their agendas.
The real hidden terrorism of turning fear into political goals is a big menace on society. (Not the only mind you. There are several other nasty ways to reach you goals politically). And it isn't a new invention, far from it. Hitler used the fear of communism, as did the US by the way after WW2. Even further back, a large part of most religions is basically based on people's fear of death.
But, until people in general realize that the 9/11 hijackers were second rate amateurs, things aren't going to change. They will keep getting scared and allow politicians to run wild with crazy and dangerous laws.
Finally, one more thing. Politicians like everyone else are of course also afraid of things. Trying to create a law against something you are actually afraid of isn't terrorism. It may be stupid, but not evil in the same way.
Actually, gamers are one of the few consumers groups that actually can draw any benefit at all from TPM as it can be used for online cheating prevention.
It is one of the few instances I can think of where you actually don't want to have control over the code running on your own computer, simply for the fact that you don't want others playing online against you to have that control.
I like statistics and number, but unless you understand what you are basing everyhing on, they are useless and misrepresenting.
THe TIOBE index is estimating use based on hits on search engines, and specifically a very specific query " programming". It is no wonder that C# gets left behind considering that one big selling point of.NET is the language agnostic part.
This is especially noticed when you compare the searches "c# programming" on google which gives 640,000 hits while ".net programming" instead gives "1,790,000" hits. So you basically have 3 times as many hits that discuss.Net programming in general compared to c# specifically. And most of those sites probably use C# as the language of discussion, or use both VB.NET and C#.
This isn't very strange, as there is far less to discuss about a specific programming language compared to the libraries and environment that it use. And C# uses.NET libraries, not C# libraries.
..as long as everyone involved, including teachers, police/guards, politicians, parents, lobbyists/manufacturers, students and probably the rest of the population are tagged and everyone has equal access to the monitoring system.
The problem is always that those with money/power/influence have more rights than those without and that imbalance inevitably leads to a bad place. Children are very lacking in all those areas which has lead to lots of legislation that restricts what children can do.
On a similar subject. I very much dislike how imprisoned criminals in some countries can lose their voting rights. "No taxation without representation" is about far more than taxation in my opinion. Locking someone up may be needed as punishment to uphold law and safeguard the population as a whole, but taking away their right to representation is to go down a dark path.
Selective law enforcement is another one interesting issue. Not to mention the court systems that favor those with money. Every one is about someone more powerful exercising control over those less powerful.
He specifically said that dogs still havn't been seperated so long that they have speciated. He also made a minor reference to real observed speciation, but without any links so here we go.
If you were buying the construction of the car, the sum of the price of the pieces would be a lot cheaper than the price of the car (and you can buy them. They're just expensive). Why is it the contrary? Because there is a cost associated to distributing a thousand different pieces, which is significantly bigger than selling the same number of complete cars (overstock problem, for one). (there are other reason, but this one exists and I think it is the biggest; in thcase of coputers, it is not the case) True.
You don't speak at all about my suggestion of using piratebay statistics or the like; maybe you've missed it? O Doh. I miseed it.:)
However, in the end it comes back to the fact that statistics are very good at lying. Your suggestions of IRS style inspections are interesting, but that fails to account that the internet isn't a single country. What if most of your population are using services that are located in other countries? As there are a lot of countries, there is a fairly good chance that is the case. Not to mention, that if something like that happened, you would have bot nets and dedicated servers as well as fans that just downloaded things so they could increase the statistics.
If you want to do something like that, it is probably just as easy to just monitor the downloads of your own population, or you could let the user select which things he wants to sponsor with the "tax". I prefer the last one as it is far closer to a free market. You could even create software that helped a user keep track of things he watch so he could allocate as he feels is fair.
There is also the problem with different pricings. If businesses gets money dependent on how many download or watchings of something, you will basically get businesses that will try to optimize creation cost vs number of views. And that gets even more complicated when dealing with different product types such as software vs video vs music vs books.
Finally, what about a family vs someone who lives alone. Should the one living alone pay the same fee as family who have four family members that all consume information via the internet.
What makes your movie trailer downloaded via http more important than my textbook of equal size downloaded via bittorrent?
And I could just as well ask that question in the other direction. Neither of has have a moral right to demand being prioritized when we are paying for the same service.
But saying "bundling always favors the seller giving them more power and money" is not true; for example, you can see cars as a huge bundle of tires, motor, etc; but it actually serves the consumer that it is bundled, because the economical impact of scaling is so big that cars can be made much cheaper than the sum of their gears. Compared to an equivalent big company that deliveries those parts in pieces? The only reason such a company doesn't exist, is because what the consumers are buying isn't the bundled parts, but the construction of a car
Why do I think that this internet license makes sense? Because the cost and difficulies of knowing what every internet user downloads is so high, it's just not doable (part of the cost: I would be protesting in the street if it was the case). But the problem starts right there. If you don't know what each internet user downloads, you can't accuratly divide the money among those who deserve them. It would probably hugely favor those who sell the most via traditional stores and show up in the statistics, while very much hurting those who rely on distribution via the internet.
Absolutely false. With the $300-$500 console, you can play all the newest games. With the $300 PC, you can't play the newest games. True, I think his $300 is a little low. You are probably much better off spending an extra $100 on the graphics card.
But otherwise he is spot on. We are comparing to consoles here, so no playing at 1600x1200 or at high settings with anti aliasing.
you still have yet to buy a display) We are outputting to TV of course. Most graphic cards support that, so it shouldn't be a problem.
Your sarcasm doesn't change the fact that consoles are better designed for multiplayer on the same system than PCs are. Actually, no. Console games in general may be better designed for multiplayer, but that is purely a matter of software. There are some PC games that support multiplaying on a single computer.
That's absurd. Multiplayer support isn't some sort of concession begrudgingly granted by the console maker. It's an integral part of the design. No, it is an integeral part of the usage pattern of the console, which is family entertainment around the tv. The only specific design console design part is extra controls, but that is easy to add to the PC also, via USB.
That usage paterrn does however mean that more game developers focus on creating split screen games on console. So the software availability on the console does become an advantage.
Of course, the PC has its own software advantage due to its better control options, and less restrictions on distribution.
They don't need to, the vast overwhelming majority of people already have them. Very few people already have a computer screen but no computer. Additionally, the vast overwhelming majority of people who have both a computer screen and a television have a *significantly* larger TV than computer display. Then there's sound, as well. You can use a TV as a computer screen. Of course, that way you will notice the obvious shortcoming of the TV, esepcially old ones. But as we only want a gaming PC that can match a console, we don't really need to spend extra money on a computer monitor.
And since when do Musicians need to be in a union? Apparently, according to the numbers we are discussing they really need to be in a union. But it looks like their union is doing a very poor job.
Why would a bittorrent app mark its packets as low latency?
It would just cause problems for the VOIP client on the same computer. Sure, there may be an option for users who want it, but it wouldn't really help them as most of those packages would get remarked since they would go over the quota for low latency packets.
Since it costs us exactly the same whether we download a HD movie or a single email I sure as hell wouldn't have my expensive 24/1 connection on if all I used the internet for was reading email.
The internet is in no way like the tradegy of the commons. I am paying for my road, and every else is paying for their roads. I have a wider road, so I am paying more than the email reader who has the smallest road he could find.
If the ISPs want to further restrict the width of my road, OK. But I expect the contract to clearly state any restrictions so that I can compare ISPs. Informed consumers are vital to a functioning market economy.
Also, making restriction based on what I am transporting on my road shouldn't be allowed if you want to call yourself an ISP. How much, yes. At which time of the day, yes. What, no.
Aren't the point of 'internet' supposed to be a source of information and education, instead of 'fast' movie leeching ? What if I just happened to be torrenting a documentary or some learning software?
Actually, the answer to your question is no. The internet is for communication, any kind of communication. Saying that you should get better transfer rates because your communication is more important than your neighbours is simply arrogant. If your traffic really is more important, you should be willing to pay more for it, so it actually works out in the end.
However ISPs are generic internet providers, and as such if two people buy the same internet package, they should have the same bandwidth/data transfer rights. (Shaping based on bandwidth/data used is OK.)
So, even with very robust network tuning and traffic shaping, the "me, me" crowd will still screw everybody else...and be proud that they did. Die a miserable death in prison you ignorant pieces of shit. So you are basically saying that your "robust" traffic shaping is not very robust. Guess why? Because you, just like comcast and other ISPs try to solve the "problem" in a completly backwards way.
If you do packet/protocol/destination based traffic shaping the users will just move to other protocols/destinations. The real way to do it is to give each user their own bandwidth/transfer limit, including allowing bursts.
Packet traffic shaping is just a way of saying, my traffic is more important than your traffic (meaning, that you are the 70mph woman). Of course, in a business environemnt that is fine as a business is within their rights to control internet traffic however they want.
ISPs however are in the business of providing internet connections, not "restricted, part of the internet" connections. They should stay out of what kind of data I am transferring.
If they want to cap data transfer, limit bandwidth during prime time and other such things, they are fine to do so, as long as they provide adequate information about what they are doing. Selling a 24mpbs/1mpbs connection and neglecting to tell that it may only be used at full speed for 5 minutes per day is very close to fraud.
Fortunally I live in Sweden where ISPs actually seems fairly interested in providing me with good products. Of course, that may be because there is actual competition.
Actually religious people are quite capable of reason as long it is outside the sphere of their religious world view. Compartmentalization is a very interesting psychological phenomena. Everyone does it. Just to different degrees.
That is what makes it difficult to debate with people in general. You have to first understand in which compartment the issue is placed before you can come up with argument that actually are effective in convincing the person in question. If any convincing is possible in the first place, that is. In some cases, such as very dogmatic people, the compartment may be too solid and unmovable to affect at all. Atleast without serious psychiatric treatment or a psychologically shocking event.
Trying to convince a lightly religious person to stop believing in god is usually difficult as it aims to destroy a whole mental compartment, that often is anchored in something like childhood. Instead, changing the perception of that god is a far easier task as it doesn't destroy the compartment. Make them into deists instead of christians or muslims or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, ISPs aren't optimally located (especially rural ones) and they also have to maintain the last mile network. But don't go spewing crap like the general bandwidth prices being too high.
Also, the bulk of the cost from having to dig the lines in the first place. Upgrading capacity should be far from a linear increase in bandwidth costs, especially in rural locations, where the base cost is larger so the capacity upgrade becomes percentually cheaper. And these are big companies we are talking about, so the problem shouldn't be that they are stuck with a bad upstream provider in a lousy contract.
And no, I don't expect to be able to use my download/upload 24/7 at full capacity. I fully understand that oversubscribing is a vital function to create an unexpensive end user network. However, when companies like Time Warner are talking about 40GB total up/down for their best package, something is seriously wrong. That is like 128kb/s total for both directions, and obviously has nothing to do with general bandwidth costs.
Oh, and stop using those 6/8/10 mbit numbers. They are simple tricks that are there to fool unknowing end consumers and we all know it (I hope, or slashdot is worse of than I thought). For the knowledgable user, they provide nothing more than spike bandwidth when streaming/downloading something. Heavy users (a.k.a. filesharers) don't max out their download, they max out their upload and their download follows their upload if anything. Although having a decent download, allows you to get something quicker on a demand.
Personally, I live in sweden and have a 24/1 adsl and the only reason I have 24 download is because it got freely upgraded from 8 which is more than enough for most purposes. I am thinking of upgrading to 20/3 which sounds much better but I havn't had the time nor the will to talk to my ISP. I also don't want to mess with something that already works well.
Finally, the fact that it is pretty much only cable companies that are complaining is a good sign that the grand parent is correct in his assumptions. It is infrastructure that were but into the ground before the internet rush started (such as cable company cables) that is the problem since it is harder to upgrade without a complain redigging.
That is because EA isn't a quality brand. It is a mass production one, that relies on advertising and other brands to sell their products. The EA brand on a product is a negative factor, not a positive one.
If you want quality you have to with a brand like Blizzard which is know to support their products far beyond what is expected.
If you want a product from a company that are only interested in your money and not in your satisfaction go with EA. Sure, they may produce soom good products, but that is because good products sell. They will however never support product after sale, because it is more profitable to squeeze the most out of the market by selling expansion packs and other upgrades.
One thing that has always confused me is why you simply don't have harsh punishments for trying to pressure someone to vote a certain way.
I understand that total secrecy can be a great tool in an oppressive country, but it is well known that such countries just manipulate the elections results directly.
And the cost of total anonymity with no way of verifying that your vote actually got counted is actually pretty high in that it very much increases the chance of election fraud. Oh, and you need to be able to check that your vote didn't get counted if you didn't cast any also. Positive vote verifying isn't enough.
Ah well, I have heard enough of shitty libertarians to know that all your talk is bullshit, just like communism or any of the other pure isms.
How nice it would be if the members in society acted cooperativly and voluntarily. But no, all that happens is that you get greedy people leeching on the work of honest men and when an honest man catches a bad break, they jump onto him like wolfs and claim that it was his own fault.
Regarding your members as equals? That almost made me laugh. All I see is a vicious pyramid game where those at the top and in the middle trample on those at the bottom.
A genuine sense of charity? Yeah right. That is why a larger and larger part of society riches keeps getting into a smaller and smaller part of the population.
A real free society is one where you don't have to live in fear to be backstabbed every day, a society where you can rest assured that as long as you do your best society will care for you. And no, your vision of society doesn't provide for that. Far from it.
What you call free is nothing more than the strong oppressing the weak. And I bet you are in favor of no inheritence taxes also so that your offspring will get a better chance of oppressing the offspring of those poorer than you. Sorry, but I am not some fool that will fall for simple rethoric and excuses about not actually having had a libertarian society anywhere. (just like how communist likes to say that we havn't had communism anywhere)
"Increasing taxes are but one item among many which impede freedom. All else being equal, the citizens of a country with more taxes and public spending are self-evidently less free than citizens of another country that taxes and spends less, if only because the latter has so graciously granted the freedom to determine the manner in which the products of their labor are to be expended"
Why am I less free because I can get decent health care without being middle class or rich? Why am I less free because there is a safety net incase I get unemployed so I don't have to starve? Why am I less free because police catches criminals and military prevents other nations from invading my country.
Of course, if you are rich you may be less free because you could have afforded to pay for everything yourself and usually even spending more money for even better service. However, the self-evidently less free is by no means universally or logically true.
It only applies if every citizen in your country is as rich as the median, which is pretty much impossible. So it is you that doesn't make logical sense. The tax that makes a rich man slightly less free can make a poor man quite a lot more free.
Of course, if you have a country where your politicians aren't really responsible to the citizens, then you may be right. But that doesn't mean that "less taxes==more free" is true in the general case.
"Other things being equal, more taxes mean less freedom."
The problem with this of course being that increased taxes can allow a country to transfer money or resouces such as education/healthcare/communication to their less free citizens (wage slaves) so that they become more free.
Yes, the taxation of someone removes some of their freedom, but if they had enough resources already, the loss in freedom can be small compared to the increase in freedom for those who had little to nothing.
And then of course there is the fact that in a capitalistic cutthroat society you are often required to act selfishly and immorally to survive/prosper. You may be free theoretically, but reality is another matter.
Don't look at this post as an endorsement to tax everything. I just find it important to look at things from different perspectives before making up my mind on issues.
Barack Obama isn't very leftist. He is slightly more left than Hillary, but not much so. They are both very much mainstream democrats.
The real problem with the US point of view is that it is extremly compressed due to the two party system where mainstream candidates try to get as close as possible to the other party without losing out to third parties or non-voters.
If you want an example of a real leftist democrat, I suggest you look at someone like Dennis Kucinich who dropped out of the race far earlier. There was one more leftist candidate, but I can't remember his name. As I am a european and not a US citizen, I don't follow the election that closely.
I can confirm the math. I have done it myself in the past.
One small question if you wouldn't mind. Is that megabit-month on the OC3 a sum for both directions, or is it bidirectional which essentially doubles the total bandwidth?
I have been wondering that for a while about dedicated connections and havn't been able to find the answer. It seems you are just assumed to know it.
Just don't falsify it. Just claim that everything on youtube is violating a copyright that you actually own.
The illegal part seems to be to claim that you own the copyright of something you don't. That the work you are requesting taken down doesn't contain your copyrighted work doesn't seem to matter for all those using automated scripts and sending dmca requests without checking the actual content first.
I am not a US citizen and definitly not a US lawyer, but the dmca and how it is being used is definitly questionable in a lot of cases.
There is nothing about net neutrality that say that you can't shape bandwidth. You just can't shape based on things such as protocol and destination. You can still look at how much is transferred from each user, and give the low bandwidth user preferred treatment.
Why should someone transferring 50GB via http get better treatment than someone transferring 50GB via bittorrent? People like the parent never seems to be able to answer that question adequatly. Usually spewing some crap about their information being more important than the neighbours. If their information is that important, they should just pay for a better connection.
Of course, as with most things, pure 100% net neutrality may not be the best. This canadian proposal seems to allow exceptions for reasonable traffic shaping, which isn't a bad thing in itself as some traffic have constraints regarding latency.
Which is what I have been saying for a long time.
Who were the most efficent terrorists. The 9/11 hijackers who did an act of terror, but failed to actually use it to reach any meaningful political goals. Or the western politicians who didn't do the act itself, but instead took advantage of it afterwards to drive their agendas.
The real hidden terrorism of turning fear into political goals is a big menace on society. (Not the only mind you. There are several other nasty ways to reach you goals politically). And it isn't a new invention, far from it. Hitler used the fear of communism, as did the US by the way after WW2. Even further back, a large part of most religions is basically based on people's fear of death.
But, until people in general realize that the 9/11 hijackers were second rate amateurs, things aren't going to change. They will keep getting scared and allow politicians to run wild with crazy and dangerous laws.
Finally, one more thing. Politicians like everyone else are of course also afraid of things. Trying to create a law against something you are actually afraid of isn't terrorism. It may be stupid, but not evil in the same way.
Actually, gamers are one of the few consumers groups that actually can draw any benefit at all from TPM as it can be used for online cheating prevention.
It is one of the few instances I can think of where you actually don't want to have control over the code running on your own computer, simply for the fact that you don't want others playing online against you to have that control.
"Lies damn lies and statistics"
.NET is the language agnostic part.
.Net programming in general compared to c# specifically. And most of those sites probably use C# as the language of discussion, or use both VB.NET and C#.
.NET libraries, not C# libraries.
I like statistics and number, but unless you understand what you are basing everyhing on, they are useless and misrepresenting.
THe TIOBE index is estimating use based on hits on search engines, and specifically a very specific query " programming". It is no wonder that C# gets left behind considering that one big selling point of
This is especially noticed when you compare the searches "c# programming" on google which gives 640,000 hits while ".net programming" instead gives "1,790,000" hits. So you basically have 3 times as many hits that discuss
This isn't very strange, as there is far less to discuss about a specific programming language compared to the libraries and environment that it use. And C# uses
..as long as everyone involved, including teachers, police/guards, politicians, parents, lobbyists/manufacturers, students and probably the rest of the population are tagged and everyone has equal access to the monitoring system.
The problem is always that those with money/power/influence have more rights than those without and that imbalance inevitably leads to a bad place. Children are very lacking in all those areas which has lead to lots of legislation that restricts what children can do.
On a similar subject. I very much dislike how imprisoned criminals in some countries can lose their voting rights. "No taxation without representation" is about far more than taxation in my opinion. Locking someone up may be needed as punishment to uphold law and safeguard the population as a whole, but taking away their right to representation is to go down a dark path.
Selective law enforcement is another one interesting issue. Not to mention the court systems that favor those with money. Every one is about someone more powerful exercising control over those less powerful.
He specifically said that dogs still havn't been seperated so long that they have speciated. He also made a minor reference to real observed speciation, but without any links so here we go.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html
Took me twenty seconds to find. A boring read, but you wanted real facts.
However, in the end it comes back to the fact that statistics are very good at lying. Your suggestions of IRS style inspections are interesting, but that fails to account that the internet isn't a single country. What if most of your population are using services that are located in other countries? As there are a lot of countries, there is a fairly good chance that is the case. Not to mention, that if something like that happened, you would have bot nets and dedicated servers as well as fans that just downloaded things so they could increase the statistics.
If you want to do something like that, it is probably just as easy to just monitor the downloads of your own population, or you could let the user select which things he wants to sponsor with the "tax". I prefer the last one as it is far closer to a free market. You could even create software that helped a user keep track of things he watch so he could allocate as he feels is fair.
There is also the problem with different pricings. If businesses gets money dependent on how many download or watchings of something, you will basically get businesses that will try to optimize creation cost vs number of views. And that gets even more complicated when dealing with different product types such as software vs video vs music vs books.
Finally, what about a family vs someone who lives alone. Should the one living alone pay the same fee as family who have four family members that all consume information via the internet.
All in all, it is a really messy problem.
What makes your movie trailer downloaded via http more important than my textbook of equal size downloaded via bittorrent?
And I could just as well ask that question in the other direction. Neither of has have a moral right to demand being prioritized when we are paying for the same service.
But otherwise he is spot on. We are comparing to consoles here, so no playing at 1600x1200 or at high settings with anti aliasing. you still have yet to buy a display) We are outputting to TV of course. Most graphic cards support that, so it shouldn't be a problem. Your sarcasm doesn't change the fact that consoles are better designed for multiplayer on the same system than PCs are. Actually, no. Console games in general may be better designed for multiplayer, but that is purely a matter of software. There are some PC games that support multiplaying on a single computer. That's absurd. Multiplayer support isn't some sort of concession begrudgingly granted by the console maker. It's an integral part of the design. No, it is an integeral part of the usage pattern of the console, which is family entertainment around the tv. The only specific design console design part is extra controls, but that is easy to add to the PC also, via USB.
That usage paterrn does however mean that more game developers focus on creating split screen games on console. So the software availability on the console does become an advantage.
Of course, the PC has its own software advantage due to its better control options, and less restrictions on distribution. They don't need to, the vast overwhelming majority of people already have them. Very few people already have a computer screen but no computer. Additionally, the vast overwhelming majority of people who have both a computer screen and a television have a *significantly* larger TV than computer display. Then there's sound, as well. You can use a TV as a computer screen. Of course, that way you will notice the obvious shortcoming of the TV, esepcially old ones. But as we only want a gaming PC that can match a console, we don't really need to spend extra money on a computer monitor.
Why would a bittorrent app mark its packets as low latency?
It would just cause problems for the VOIP client on the same computer. Sure, there may be an option for users who want it, but it wouldn't really help them as most of those packages would get remarked since they would go over the quota for low latency packets.
The internet is in no way like the tradegy of the commons. I am paying for my road, and every else is paying for their roads. I have a wider road, so I am paying more than the email reader who has the smallest road he could find.
If the ISPs want to further restrict the width of my road, OK. But I expect the contract to clearly state any restrictions so that I can compare ISPs. Informed consumers are vital to a functioning market economy.
Also, making restriction based on what I am transporting on my road shouldn't be allowed if you want to call yourself an ISP. How much, yes. At which time of the day, yes. What, no.
Actually, the answer to your question is no. The internet is for communication, any kind of communication. Saying that you should get better transfer rates because your communication is more important than your neighbours is simply arrogant. If your traffic really is more important, you should be willing to pay more for it, so it actually works out in the end.
However ISPs are generic internet providers, and as such if two people buy the same internet package, they should have the same bandwidth/data transfer rights. (Shaping based on bandwidth/data used is OK.)
If you do packet/protocol/destination based traffic shaping the users will just move to other protocols/destinations. The real way to do it is to give each user their own bandwidth/transfer limit, including allowing bursts.
Packet traffic shaping is just a way of saying, my traffic is more important than your traffic (meaning, that you are the 70mph woman). Of course, in a business environemnt that is fine as a business is within their rights to control internet traffic however they want.
ISPs however are in the business of providing internet connections, not "restricted, part of the internet" connections. They should stay out of what kind of data I am transferring.
If they want to cap data transfer, limit bandwidth during prime time and other such things, they are fine to do so, as long as they provide adequate information about what they are doing. Selling a 24mpbs/1mpbs connection and neglecting to tell that it may only be used at full speed for 5 minutes per day is very close to fraud.
Fortunally I live in Sweden where ISPs actually seems fairly interested in providing me with good products. Of course, that may be because there is actual competition.
Actually religious people are quite capable of reason as long it is outside the sphere of their religious world view. Compartmentalization is a very interesting psychological phenomena. Everyone does it. Just to different degrees.
That is what makes it difficult to debate with people in general. You have to first understand in which compartment the issue is placed before you can come up with argument that actually are effective in convincing the person in question. If any convincing is possible in the first place, that is. In some cases, such as very dogmatic people, the compartment may be too solid and unmovable to affect at all. Atleast without serious psychiatric treatment or a psychologically shocking event.
Trying to convince a lightly religious person to stop believing in god is usually difficult as it aims to destroy a whole mental compartment, that often is anchored in something like childhood. Instead, changing the perception of that god is a far easier task as it doesn't destroy the compartment. Make them into deists instead of christians or muslims or whatever.