Tell me, what is your early termination fee with Sprint? I've been with Sprint for ages, mostly because my ancient plan is *still* the best value I can find (free unlimited texting from before texting got popular), but I'd call my relationship with them indifferent at best.
Freedom of speech ends when it infringes someone else's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I don't know if I necessarily agree with this as a blanket statement-- one person's opinion of their liberty and happiness may require nobody else quote Monty Python where they can ever see or hear it-- or never show your boobs in public as you noted (as an aside-- she was acquitted in that case as her topless demonstration was considered an exercise of free speech). "Harm" is subjective, so we must rely on a judge or jury to determine if any real harm was done. As it is, I consider this case to be the system working as intended.
You certainly are right that anonymity is not guaranteed by freedom of speech, but I can't agree that it has no place in a free society. Yes, very often anonymity is used to harass; however, there are plenty of instances where an individual wants to write and *not* have those words tied to them personally due to potential social consequences. Anonymity can provide a speaking platform to your community without tying you individually up in a name and shame campaign (IE: an LBGT writer in a predominantly conservative community). If you have opinions or preferences that the rest of your community disagrees with, there are real consequences for that information coming out. An overlooked side effect of having a free society, is *everybody* is entitled to their opinions, and if your opinions go against the grain you can be subject to real, demonstratable persecution.
Anonymity in speech isn't *just* to protect you from the government-- it also protects you from your fellow citizens.
the people in question literally only want to send email and surf the Internet.
I don't think you can derive that from the summary (at least I didn't), their *technical* background may be surfing the internet, but 9 and 26 year olds who don't play games? That's just plain gullibility!
You don't need a technical background to install games and office software, you just need to click a couple times on "next" buttons-- something it has already been demonstrated they are exceedingly adept at.
Well, given a post gets capped out at "5," factoring his karma bonus and starting mod, it looks like 3 are all the mod points you would ever need in the world!
Which parent are we talking about? I'm so confused now!
I was referring to the original post w/ the artical from New Scientist-- Should not be modded down simply because the science isn't right (as Brian Gordon insisted). That post is in sticky territory-- he had some new information but opened up with "bury the parent in down mods please" because he disagreed with the content.
So there's your conundrum, do you mod down a post (in this case referring to the 2nd cousin twice removed post) that otherwise has interesting information because the author opened it up with trollish statements? Luckily that's an exercise for somebody else to figure out since I'm fresh out of points!:)
Yes, parent pointed out facts, but he also called out an end to discussion. You can't debunk by silencing-- you are only going to make those involved feel persecuted and fight that much harder. No, you won't convince all the crazy that they are wrong, but if you at least allow the crazy to be discussed, you can far easier show other folks that it's crazy.
Besides... what do slashdot and facts have to do with each other? Review the moderator guidelines, they expressly call out this sort of moderation as abuse. Disagreeing doesn't mean you get to silence your opposition.
Doesn't necessarily mean trashing all the lessons learned when building the new system. However you bring up a great point-- it works. How many failures have there been since 1970? If it's just now making news for a failure, then reliability doesn't seem to be an issue.
With greater visibility on your post, others can realize the folly of your statements... This subject absolutely *does* pertain to me. Parenting is rough, but there is plenty that you can do to help your kids deal with the internet, and there is plenty other folks are doing to help *you* deal with your kids on the internet.
The internet is not a happy place, accept that and adjust your children's use of it. Let me put this as clearly as I can: It is not your job to police the internet for other people, however objectionable you find it.
Odd, I've found the only time I actually watch TV anymore is just to see "what's on." Any shows that I *want* to watch, I typically get on Hulu (or similar). Right now for me that's the only value added-- being able to flip through to find something interesting at the moment. Yes, HD broadcasts are higher quality than streamed video, but I honestly don't notice once I start getting into the show.
Hang on a sec... Didn't I just read a comment on ad blocking by you that went something exactly like this:
Good! Blocking you stops you from adding pennies to my monthly bill. "Pennies" might sound trivial but multiply by a thousands of ad-blocking visitors and you've got a lot of money wasted
Now I can only assume you were trolling then, or are trolling now (or both, that's cool too). Using the fruits of somebody else's labors for free is cool, but damned if somebody were to do the same to you. Do a count (and be honest with yourself here, you don't need to tell the rest of us)- How many movies have you torrented, watched, *enjoyed*, and actually bought (or went to see in a theater later). I can accept torrenting a song or two, then buying a couple of albums or singles from an artist you likes. Movies just don't have the same parallel. Few people watch a movie more than once or twice.
You certainly do have a right to return a bad product. Have you ever tried to walk out of a movie you didn't enjoy? Many, possibly all theaters offer refunds (or credit to another movie) if you walk out of a film early because you didn't enjoy it, *provided* of course that you didn't sit through the entire film. I certainly don't see why you'd sit through an entire crappy movie writhing in agony... Have you ever tried renting a film before you bought it? Maybe perhaps called the customer service line for the company that put out that DVD that you hated so much? It isn't *that* hard to politely assert yourself outside of the internet if you thought you got the raw end of a purchase.
If you want to make a principled stance, don't buy their crap *and* don't download their crap. Not partaking not only denies that company of income, but reduces their significance and overall popularity in our culture. Claiming you're downloading movies because most of them suck is disingenuous. The "principled" excuse is simply the "entitled" excuse taking advantage of honest efforts many of us are trying to harm the industry. If you want to vote with your wallet, do it! Don't watch that movie, don't buy that CD, but don't turn around and download it so you can still enjoy it out of spite.
Certainly sufficient to do just about any task, but when you get used to having dual 1600x1200 displays for work, the lack of real estate definitely effects your productivity. It *can* be done, it takes getting used to, and it may cost you some time managing windows or workspaces. I wouldn't choose to do all of my work on a small screen, but like I said-- it's awesome that it will do the trick in a pinch.
Of course, just about all of us started on computers at 640x480 or less, so I suppose you could argue what all the hoopla is about!
You're right that he can't argue what didn't happen, but there is some supporting evidence for his talking points... We *do* have the interstate highway system and while it isn't without fault, we could definitely do worse for an infrastructure that allows individual freedom of movement. Certainly not all potential alternatives would be worse, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a privately developed road system anywhere in the world that really matches the publicly built systems.
How do you think the railroads got built without being owned by the government?
...By enormous land grants which the railroads could sell to finance construction. Sometimes land which people already lived on and had to be removed. The public still paid for the railroads one way or the other. I'm not saying it was a bad thing though, for a while we had excellent railroads considering the vast amount of land that had to be covered. However, what has changed or significantly improved on our rails since then?
I'd strongly recommend visiting (or at least researching) what happens to a place when there is no government to "force people to cooperate." You can even do it in your tin foil hat! They are all the rage these days:)
Who would you prefer to manage these roads, people who have no vested interest in the roads (public officials who get paid regardless) or private individuals whose livelihood depends on providing quality service?
Who would you prefer to manage the roads, people who have a vested interest in the roads (public officials who will get voted out of office when they fail) or private corporations who are answerable only to their shareholders?
I'm not meaning for this to be a "fixed that for you," simply another point of view (and a lesson in manipulative language). Private organizations can and will mess things up and provide crap for service just as often as governments do. I certainly won't argue that current road construction projects are devoid of greed and corruption between the private companies and local leaders (it's a *big* problem where I live), but some services simply don't translate well into privatization. There is nothing wrong with a community of people deciding "hey, let's have some decent roads going to everybody's homes and businesses" and following through with it. Historically speaking, infrastructure has been a hallmark of most civilizations. Where you have roads, you have trade, which with few exceptions benefits both parties involved.
The biggest issue with your argument - people paying for what they use - doesn't take into account the tremendous interdependency people have on each other. Simply because you don't directly use a resource doesn't mean people you depend on don't as well.
You did the maths behind that then? Y'know, figured the average number of fires vs the average cost of putting them out, found a happy little break even point on the population of your community there? Of course taking into account variations in fire seasons, cost of equipment purchase vs maintenance, etcetc. Not to mention all the costs involved when your house burns down will often enough lead to bankruptcy-- making it awful hard for your private fire department to collect that $7000.
"Simple Solutions" are easy enough to invent. Go ahead and implement it though, looks like you've got a sound business plan.
...unless of course I just fell for a fantastic troll. In that case, Bravo! You had me at "homeowner's association":)
1) This is a municipality (not state, not federal) government putting together its network. In this case you have community leaders who are much more directly answerable to the voters. Municipalities and co-ops work fantastically for a number of utilities at the local level (usually water, sewage). I'm not necessarily saying that net service is best delivered as a local utility, simply stating it's an experiment that ought to be tried a bit before it's written off.
2) From my skimming of the articles, we're not talking backbones but last mile service.
Except that a netbook really *is* a gadget. The screen is too small for most general purpose computing. It only does a few tasks, but does them well. As for real OSes, once there is a device you'll see the development. It happened with Linux for the Atom networks, and it will happen if ARM netbooks come out. As for your analysis on UIs... eh, that's subjective. I'm loving netbook remix, but I'm also not trying to use it as my regular computer. The thing I love about it is in a pinch, yes-- it will do whatever my main computer will do-- but as I typically use it, it is very quick to navigate.
Also-- your signature versus the current moderation (redundant) on your post his hilarious!
Hah! You thought we'd buy into your trolling post! Er... wait... That wasn't a troll. Somebody with mod points fix that... Maybe very slightly offtopic but definitely not a troll.
Do you suppose it was netbooks that helped force Microsoft's hand on the system requirements for windows 7? I don't know of anybody who's tried running Vista on an Atom, but it is nice to see a rollback in OS bloat.
Now, as a linux junkie, any particular reason you went with Windows on your netbook? I had issues with flash video on my aspire one running ubuntu 8.10, but dealt with it. I was suprised at the performance of 9.10 (and despite initial reservations, am loving netbook remix).
Well, given that a belly button is a scar that is a result of birth, every potential reader will have exactly one. The same inobscure metric can't be derived by counting eyes (most folks have two, but some have one, and some don't have any... maybe some have more), and not by counting people (ie Scientologists, marketing majors, people who code in C#, etc that clearly wouldn't be counted).
Yes, but what's the point? If somebody is running Adblock, you'll be more likely to turn them away from your site entirely as you would to get them to disable it. That may be a goal... but I suspect it more effective (and definitely more polite) to display a "please don't block my ads, bro" message.
Even *more* polite would have been to avoid the intrusive ads that were all the rage in the first place. I doubt Adblock would have been developed or grown so popular had that not occurred. Of course, cat's out of the bag now. You'd be hard pressed to get folks to give up adblock even if your site has nonintrusive ads - at least for folks who don't frequent your site. Bandwidth and hosting costs need to be covered from somewhere... Whoever implements a reasonable solution will get sued into oblivion, but the lawsuit victor will become a very wealthy man!
Slashdot Mirror
I am now a happy Sprint customer.
hehe-- that's a good one, dude!
Tell me, what is your early termination fee with Sprint? I've been with Sprint for ages, mostly because my ancient plan is *still* the best value I can find (free unlimited texting from before texting got popular), but I'd call my relationship with them indifferent at best.
Freedom of speech ends when it infringes someone else's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I don't know if I necessarily agree with this as a blanket statement-- one person's opinion of their liberty and happiness may require nobody else quote Monty Python where they can ever see or hear it-- or never show your boobs in public as you noted (as an aside-- she was acquitted in that case as her topless demonstration was considered an exercise of free speech). "Harm" is subjective, so we must rely on a judge or jury to determine if any real harm was done. As it is, I consider this case to be the system working as intended.
You certainly are right that anonymity is not guaranteed by freedom of speech, but I can't agree that it has no place in a free society. Yes, very often anonymity is used to harass; however, there are plenty of instances where an individual wants to write and *not* have those words tied to them personally due to potential social consequences. Anonymity can provide a speaking platform to your community without tying you individually up in a name and shame campaign (IE: an LBGT writer in a predominantly conservative community). If you have opinions or preferences that the rest of your community disagrees with, there are real consequences for that information coming out. An overlooked side effect of having a free society, is *everybody* is entitled to their opinions, and if your opinions go against the grain you can be subject to real, demonstratable persecution.
Anonymity in speech isn't *just* to protect you from the government-- it also protects you from your fellow citizens.
the people in question literally only want to send email and surf the Internet.
I don't think you can derive that from the summary (at least I didn't), their *technical* background may be surfing the internet, but 9 and 26 year olds who don't play games? That's just plain gullibility!
You don't need a technical background to install games and office software, you just need to click a couple times on "next" buttons-- something it has already been demonstrated they are exceedingly adept at.
Well, given a post gets capped out at "5," factoring his karma bonus and starting mod, it looks like 3 are all the mod points you would ever need in the world!
Which parent are we talking about? I'm so confused now!
:)
I was referring to the original post w/ the artical from New Scientist-- Should not be modded down simply because the science isn't right (as Brian Gordon insisted). That post is in sticky territory-- he had some new information but opened up with "bury the parent in down mods please" because he disagreed with the content.
So there's your conundrum, do you mod down a post (in this case referring to the 2nd cousin twice removed post) that otherwise has interesting information because the author opened it up with trollish statements? Luckily that's an exercise for somebody else to figure out since I'm fresh out of points!
You though, Mister LKM, you're cool by me.
Correlation is not causation? I'm still trying to figure out the argument. Lessee here... impossible to against the didn't not stuff...
-(1+(-MAD))*-1^-1
If my maths are correct, it's pretty clear we need to nuke Cincinnatti.
Yes, parent pointed out facts, but he also called out an end to discussion. You can't debunk by silencing-- you are only going to make those involved feel persecuted and fight that much harder. No, you won't convince all the crazy that they are wrong, but if you at least allow the crazy to be discussed, you can far easier show other folks that it's crazy.
Besides... what do slashdot and facts have to do with each other? Review the moderator guidelines, they expressly call out this sort of moderation as abuse. Disagreeing doesn't mean you get to silence your opposition.
Doesn't necessarily mean trashing all the lessons learned when building the new system. However you bring up a great point-- it works. How many failures have there been since 1970? If it's just now making news for a failure, then reliability doesn't seem to be an issue.
Screenshot or it never happened.
With greater visibility on your post, others can realize the folly of your statements... This subject absolutely *does* pertain to me. Parenting is rough, but there is plenty that you can do to help your kids deal with the internet, and there is plenty other folks are doing to help *you* deal with your kids on the internet.
The internet is not a happy place, accept that and adjust your children's use of it. Let me put this as clearly as I can: It is not your job to police the internet for other people, however objectionable you find it.
Odd, I've found the only time I actually watch TV anymore is just to see "what's on." Any shows that I *want* to watch, I typically get on Hulu (or similar). Right now for me that's the only value added-- being able to flip through to find something interesting at the moment. Yes, HD broadcasts are higher quality than streamed video, but I honestly don't notice once I start getting into the show.
:)
Yup, droppin off my tv service really soon now
Good! Blocking you stops you from adding pennies to my monthly bill. "Pennies" might sound trivial but multiply by a thousands of ad-blocking visitors and you've got a lot of money wasted
Now I can only assume you were trolling then, or are trolling now (or both, that's cool too). Using the fruits of somebody else's labors for free is cool, but damned if somebody were to do the same to you. Do a count (and be honest with yourself here, you don't need to tell the rest of us)- How many movies have you torrented, watched, *enjoyed*, and actually bought (or went to see in a theater later). I can accept torrenting a song or two, then buying a couple of albums or singles from an artist you likes. Movies just don't have the same parallel. Few people watch a movie more than once or twice.
You certainly do have a right to return a bad product. Have you ever tried to walk out of a movie you didn't enjoy? Many, possibly all theaters offer refunds (or credit to another movie) if you walk out of a film early because you didn't enjoy it, *provided* of course that you didn't sit through the entire film. I certainly don't see why you'd sit through an entire crappy movie writhing in agony... Have you ever tried renting a film before you bought it? Maybe perhaps called the customer service line for the company that put out that DVD that you hated so much? It isn't *that* hard to politely assert yourself outside of the internet if you thought you got the raw end of a purchase.
If you want to make a principled stance, don't buy their crap *and* don't download their crap. Not partaking not only denies that company of income, but reduces their significance and overall popularity in our culture. Claiming you're downloading movies because most of them suck is disingenuous. The "principled" excuse is simply the "entitled" excuse taking advantage of honest efforts many of us are trying to harm the industry. If you want to vote with your wallet, do it! Don't watch that movie, don't buy that CD, but don't turn around and download it so you can still enjoy it out of spite.
Certainly sufficient to do just about any task, but when you get used to having dual 1600x1200 displays for work, the lack of real estate definitely effects your productivity. It *can* be done, it takes getting used to, and it may cost you some time managing windows or workspaces. I wouldn't choose to do all of my work on a small screen, but like I said-- it's awesome that it will do the trick in a pinch.
Of course, just about all of us started on computers at 640x480 or less, so I suppose you could argue what all the hoopla is about!
You're right that he can't argue what didn't happen, but there is some supporting evidence for his talking points... We *do* have the interstate highway system and while it isn't without fault, we could definitely do worse for an infrastructure that allows individual freedom of movement. Certainly not all potential alternatives would be worse, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a privately developed road system anywhere in the world that really matches the publicly built systems.
How do you think the railroads got built without being owned by the government?
...By enormous land grants which the railroads could sell to finance construction. Sometimes land which people already lived on and had to be removed. The public still paid for the railroads one way or the other. I'm not saying it was a bad thing though, for a while we had excellent railroads considering the vast amount of land that had to be covered. However, what has changed or significantly improved on our rails since then?
:)
I'd strongly recommend visiting (or at least researching) what happens to a place when there is no government to "force people to cooperate." You can even do it in your tin foil hat! They are all the rage these days
Who would you prefer to manage these roads, people who have no vested interest in the roads (public officials who get paid regardless) or private individuals whose livelihood depends on providing quality service?
Who would you prefer to manage the roads, people who have a vested interest in the roads (public officials who will get voted out of office when they fail) or private corporations who are answerable only to their shareholders?
I'm not meaning for this to be a "fixed that for you," simply another point of view (and a lesson in manipulative language). Private organizations can and will mess things up and provide crap for service just as often as governments do. I certainly won't argue that current road construction projects are devoid of greed and corruption between the private companies and local leaders (it's a *big* problem where I live), but some services simply don't translate well into privatization. There is nothing wrong with a community of people deciding "hey, let's have some decent roads going to everybody's homes and businesses" and following through with it. Historically speaking, infrastructure has been a hallmark of most civilizations. Where you have roads, you have trade, which with few exceptions benefits both parties involved.
The biggest issue with your argument - people paying for what they use - doesn't take into account the tremendous interdependency people have on each other. Simply because you don't directly use a resource doesn't mean people you depend on don't as well.
You did the maths behind that then? Y'know, figured the average number of fires vs the average cost of putting them out, found a happy little break even point on the population of your community there? Of course taking into account variations in fire seasons, cost of equipment purchase vs maintenance, etcetc. Not to mention all the costs involved when your house burns down will often enough lead to bankruptcy-- making it awful hard for your private fire department to collect that $7000.
...unless of course I just fell for a fantastic troll. In that case, Bravo! You had me at "homeowner's association" :)
"Simple Solutions" are easy enough to invent. Go ahead and implement it though, looks like you've got a sound business plan.
A couple of major distinctions here--
1) This is a municipality (not state, not federal) government putting together its network. In this case you have community leaders who are much more directly answerable to the voters. Municipalities and co-ops work fantastically for a number of utilities at the local level (usually water, sewage). I'm not necessarily saying that net service is best delivered as a local utility, simply stating it's an experiment that ought to be tried a bit before it's written off.
2) From my skimming of the articles, we're not talking backbones but last mile service.
Yet, apparently, TDS still won...
I sleep in a racecar bed. Do *you* sleep in a racecar bed?!
Except that a netbook really *is* a gadget. The screen is too small for most general purpose computing. It only does a few tasks, but does them well. As for real OSes, once there is a device you'll see the development. It happened with Linux for the Atom networks, and it will happen if ARM netbooks come out. As for your analysis on UIs... eh, that's subjective. I'm loving netbook remix, but I'm also not trying to use it as my regular computer. The thing I love about it is in a pinch, yes-- it will do whatever my main computer will do-- but as I typically use it, it is very quick to navigate.
Also-- your signature versus the current moderation (redundant) on your post his hilarious!
Hah! You thought we'd buy into your trolling post! Er... wait... That wasn't a troll. Somebody with mod points fix that... Maybe very slightly offtopic but definitely not a troll.
Do you suppose it was netbooks that helped force Microsoft's hand on the system requirements for windows 7? I don't know of anybody who's tried running Vista on an Atom, but it is nice to see a rollback in OS bloat.
Now, as a linux junkie, any particular reason you went with Windows on your netbook? I had issues with flash video on my aspire one running ubuntu 8.10, but dealt with it. I was suprised at the performance of 9.10 (and despite initial reservations, am loving netbook remix).
Blogs in the 1950s? Woah man, you just blew my mind!
Well, given that a belly button is a scar that is a result of birth, every potential reader will have exactly one. The same inobscure metric can't be derived by counting eyes (most folks have two, but some have one, and some don't have any... maybe some have more), and not by counting people (ie Scientologists, marketing majors, people who code in C#, etc that clearly wouldn't be counted).
Yes, but what's the point? If somebody is running Adblock, you'll be more likely to turn them away from your site entirely as you would to get them to disable it. That may be a goal... but I suspect it more effective (and definitely more polite) to display a "please don't block my ads, bro" message.
Even *more* polite would have been to avoid the intrusive ads that were all the rage in the first place. I doubt Adblock would have been developed or grown so popular had that not occurred. Of course, cat's out of the bag now. You'd be hard pressed to get folks to give up adblock even if your site has nonintrusive ads - at least for folks who don't frequent your site. Bandwidth and hosting costs need to be covered from somewhere... Whoever implements a reasonable solution will get sued into oblivion, but the lawsuit victor will become a very wealthy man!