Before anyone goes off on a rant about me being a Republican or a Bush ass-kisser let me kick that in the nuts right now and say I am a Liberal.
That was pretty obvious.
Why should my fuel cost me $10/gallon when your's only costs you $2/gallon? Regulations spread the load out evenly across all members of our society.
There are lots of posts in this thread from people who live in rural areas (I live in a tiny town, BTW. There is a field full of sheep in the 'center of downtown') who think they only have this that or the other service due to a regulation that forces big-business to play fair, when it reality there is no regulation, and the service is there simply because the company turns a profit. Your gas example is exactly that. The only thing stopping somebody from charging $10/gallon for gasoline in rural america is that somebody else will come in and charge $2.50/gallon and put them out of business.
This particular regulation isn't about a building block of society. It's about cable TV. *NOBODY* needs cable TV. There is nothing you can get with it that you can't get without it. (With a dish and an antenna, for example)
Regulation has its place. This isn't it.
(Incidentally, even though all I can hear is mooing out my window at night, Verizon ran fiber to my house without any regulation saying that they had to. The old copper line satisfied all their obligations.)
It's not so much a community that gets cherry picked (though it can be), but individual households.
For example, in my town Verizon has run fiber to every house serviced by overhead lines (though if only the last 250ft is buried, they will still offer you service).
It is too expensive to pay to dig under streets to run cable and still turn a profit, so they simply choose not to offer their service in those neighborhoods, or even for individuals (who may be more than 250 feet from the nearest pole). This isn't a problem for telephone and internet, as they don't have to get local approval, but when they wanted to do television they had to accept build-out requirements. It sucks to be them. They signed the license with the requirement on the 12th of December.
There are two types of Treo users. Users that don't have crashing problems (people who can learn from feedback), and people that do (idiots, who can't learn from feedback).
Just like when you run windows, if something causes your device to crash, don't do that anymore.
There are exactly two things that cause my Treo to crash. Downloading more than 100 messages in a single Versamail session, and saving an attachment/download that is larger than the available memory on the device. So, I use GoodMail, and I download to an SD card. According to my debug output, I haven't had a crash since July.
I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard somebody say "My Treo crashes every time I do ". I don't understand why people keep doing the thing that doesn't work.
In that it kills the deal. It is not useable. With PalmOS, you get a dirt simple UI (no nested menus. I can get to any feature I use on my Treo with two button presses without looking), you get zero arbitrary restrictions (unlike the arbitrary screen resolution limit, and various other limits that Windows Mobile has to make it "not PocketPC"), and you get full hackability (which allows you to bypass all ridiculous carrier restrictions, and implement features that carries charge per-use for even though the device is capable of doing it on its own).
I don't care how hard it is to program for (but I've done it, and quite honestly I think a lot of developers are a bunch of whiners), and I don't think it is the best possible system, but it is the best one on the market right now, and nobody has caught up even though the platform has stagnated for over 10 years.
It made me wonder why the hell it wasn't off. I saw it and held the power button until the light was orange. I didn't know it meant it had downloaded crap... Silly me for thinking it wouldn't connect to the internet unless I told it to.
Now that I know what it meant, I'm actually pretty pissed about it.
If the situation described in the parent's post was an electrical fire instead of a gas leak, he would have come home to a pile of ashes instead of to the fire department airing his house out.
The simple fact is that when you have a lot of energy, you have to be careful with it. We have developed safety devices for both electricity and for gas.
The only thing I have left to say about this is that when you buy homeowner insurance, they don't charge you extra for having gas heat or appliances, but they do charge you extra if you have fuses instead of circuit breakers... If they had evidence that one was worse than the other, they would charge you more for using it.
If you are more comfortable with one over the other, it is probably because you have a better understanding of the technology used with it.
So only the people who use cable are paying for all those non cable related things? That doesn't sound very reasonable.
If the tax were direct, the local government would be held accountable for all the money they spent. As it is now, I am aware of very few communities that don't spend more than is necessary to provide the essential services. Most people chose not to participate in local government (even by voting) as long as the check they have to write every year (or quarter) is small enough. Governments exploit this by hiding the tax. There is nothing good about that.
If I had to pay the same money directly to my town rather than indirectly through my cable company, I would prefer it that way.
You can say all you want about how impossible it is, but that won't change what actually happened to me, will it?
Impossible? No. But what is really important is the relative risk. The risk of an electrical fire is probably about the same as the risk of a fire due to a gas leak. At least your house was completely fine after your gas leak.
No software product, no matter how well intentioned the developers, will ever be completely absent of bugs come release-time.
That is a ridiculous assertion. If you'd like to add something about a minimum level of complexity to that, then maybe it would be plausible, but it still wouldn't be provable. As your statement stands, though, it is completely false. There are hundreds if not thousands of simple to moderately complex software products available today that have no bugs.
Are they really amazed that it could slip from a person's hand and go flying?
I'd be amazed.
More likely it didn't slip, but people let go. It's just not slippery, even when your hands are all sweaty.
I don't see how anybody can argue that it is Nintendo's fault that somebody let go of their controller. It is completely unreasonable that we should be able to require companies to produce products that are unable to do damage to any other object if you aren't careful with them. We'd have to make everything out of foam-rubber.
They already built the network. They already have their wires. They already have permission to send data over them. This battle isn't about that. It's about what kind of data they plan to transmit.
And good graces my ass. They exist to benefit both parties. It's not like the town said "Oh, OK, I suppose you can run some cable and turn a profit." The town needed phone service as much as the company needed permission to run its wires.
Also, the wires frequently (if not usually) run over private property that the local government saw fit to grant rights of way over. So you can forcibly release private control of private property to the municipality, but if you want to do it at the state or federal level instead it's fascism? I think you need to rethink that a little bit.
Unrelated question, and obvious attempt to stir up conspiracy hounds: does anyone know if Comcast is subtly or overtly behind efforts to ban or restrict satellite dishes? Seems like there was a move in Boston to ban visible satellite dishes, largely in violation of FCC regs that don't generally permit localities to do so.
Comcast pays a percentage of its revenues to the licensing municipality. Satellite TV providers don't. Comcast doesn't have to put pressure on the local governments. The local governments want the extra cash enough on their own to push this trash.
This has nothing to do with the FCC. Check your town's budget reports to see how big a check they get from the cable company every month is to prevent competition from coming into town. You'll wonder if your representatives have your best interests in mind after all. This isn't about corporate power, the federal government, or the FCC. It's about local government revenues.
States, sure. But it is rediculous to let every town micro-govern every aspect of its community. All it results in is enormous duplication of bureaucracy so some townies can have their power trip. (Or more specifically, sell their 'rights' to the highest corporate bidder to fund their pet project, like making sure their son's team wins the state championship, or making sure that everybody on main street keeps their lawn mode to 1.75 inches OR ELSE).
If you knew how much that public access stuff cost, you'd probably wish the money went to something else. Now that we have the internet, it is absurd to spend 50-100 thousand dollars per town, per year for public access. Do you have any idea what that adds up to? It's over $15 million dollars a year in my state alone.
We're not moving away from net neutrality... We never had net neutrality. Neither from the providers, nor from the government.
Here is a case (and the same thing is happening with Verizon's FiOS) where a company has wires in place, and is sending data, but the local government won't let them send certain data (digitally encoded TV shows) without giving the municipality a cut of their total revenue. It's ridiculous. Worse, this cut of the money is passed directly on to consumers, but most consumers (voters) don't realize that their local government gets between three and six percent of the local cable TV revenues. It's a huge tax that people don't know is there, and that's why they are surprised when their local government doesn't allow a new competitor into the market. Well here's the reason: It's so the town/city continues to get a fat check every month.
I'm sorry, but throwing away 10% of your resources is the same problem either way. Scaling it up by ten just helps illustrate the problem to people who don't see it.
When the issue at hand is all computers bought in a single country that don't run windows, what scale would you say that is? I'd say that it is measurable economic impact.
Can they really build a fully streamed world comprised of tens of thousands of servers? That's way above my paygrade, but I'll guess that task fits under the rubric of Fricking Hard.
I don't want this to sound like a blanket indictment, because some studios get this right, but a lot of the unreliability, and failure to execute on difficult tasks in the gaming industry is due to the moronic staffing decisions of many game development companies. I haven't played Second Life, so for all I know (and from the sounds of it) maybe they got it right. A fully streamed world comprised of thens of thousands of servers? Sounds like some work, but it sounds completely feasible. When you're only willing to hire people who want to work in games so badly that they're drooling all over themselves at the opportunity and thus are willing to work at well below industry average pay level, what do you think you are going to get?
There are people out there who have built massive clusters and have decades of experience solving these problems... But they usually don't work in games, because they can make five times as much in other industries. When a company comes along and runs a game studio like a real software company, people who are stuck in the more traditional 'you should thank your lucky stars you are working in games' mindset shouldn't be too surprised when that company actually succeeds at problems that were considered too hard in the past.
Let me be more specific than saying you're full of shit.
The extra cost to the product means that if you are a small to medium business buying 100 machines, and you have to pay a 10% premium to Microsoft on each unit (You said $50, right? The average non-gaming desktop is well under $500 these days), that means instead of 10 more actual computers that would have practical use, you got nothing of value.
Besides, your original argument was that a computer without Windows was "practically useless". I think it would be better to say that your argument is practically the definition of absurd.
Now tell me which definition of the word 'practical' you are using to describe being forced to pay for something you are not going to use in order to purchase something that you *are* going to use.
You are confusing 'practical' with some other word.
If you are purchasing a computer on which you intend to install your own OS (or your OS of choice), having a different OS that you were forced to pay for already installed isn't exactly 'practical'.
However, if they're going after HP, they should go after Apple too.
Who said anything about allocating? Ever see a programmer dereference some data pulled off the network as an address? (Hell, maybe it was an address on the server side...) How about dereferencing a null pointer as an array with a suitably high index? Or clobbering your stack with a buffer overflow, and then dereferencing what used to be a perfectly valid pointer? Overwriting data by accident is a bad thing even if it is nowhere near your code segment, but bugs happen, and there are plenty of bad programmers out there.
I think a better answer to the parent is that you can turn this stuff off while you are debugging.
Slashdot Mirror
You hit the nail on the head.
Before anyone goes off on a rant about me being a Republican or a Bush ass-kisser let me kick that in the nuts right now and say I am a Liberal.
That was pretty obvious.
Why should my fuel cost me $10/gallon when your's only costs you $2/gallon? Regulations spread the load out evenly across all members of our society.
There are lots of posts in this thread from people who live in rural areas (I live in a tiny town, BTW. There is a field full of sheep in the 'center of downtown') who think they only have this that or the other service due to a regulation that forces big-business to play fair, when it reality there is no regulation, and the service is there simply because the company turns a profit. Your gas example is exactly that. The only thing stopping somebody from charging $10/gallon for gasoline in rural america is that somebody else will come in and charge $2.50/gallon and put them out of business.
This particular regulation isn't about a building block of society. It's about cable TV. *NOBODY* needs cable TV. There is nothing you can get with it that you can't get without it. (With a dish and an antenna, for example)
Regulation has its place. This isn't it.
(Incidentally, even though all I can hear is mooing out my window at night, Verizon ran fiber to my house without any regulation saying that they had to. The old copper line satisfied all their obligations.)
There aren't usually build-out requirements for internet service. That pretty much kills your argument.
It's not so much a community that gets cherry picked (though it can be), but individual households.
For example, in my town Verizon has run fiber to every house serviced by overhead lines (though if only the last 250ft is buried, they will still offer you service).
It is too expensive to pay to dig under streets to run cable and still turn a profit, so they simply choose not to offer their service in those neighborhoods, or even for individuals (who may be more than 250 feet from the nearest pole). This isn't a problem for telephone and internet, as they don't have to get local approval, but when they wanted to do television they had to accept build-out requirements. It sucks to be them. They signed the license with the requirement on the 12th of December.
There are two types of Treo users. Users that don't have crashing problems (people who can learn from feedback), and people that do (idiots, who can't learn from feedback).
Just like when you run windows, if something causes your device to crash, don't do that anymore.
There are exactly two things that cause my Treo to crash. Downloading more than 100 messages in a single Versamail session, and saving an attachment/download that is larger than the available memory on the device. So, I use GoodMail, and I download to an SD card. According to my debug output, I haven't had a crash since July.
I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard somebody say "My Treo crashes every time I do ". I don't understand why people keep doing the thing that doesn't work.
In that it kills the deal. It is not useable. With PalmOS, you get a dirt simple UI (no nested menus. I can get to any feature I use on my Treo with two button presses without looking), you get zero arbitrary restrictions (unlike the arbitrary screen resolution limit, and various other limits that Windows Mobile has to make it "not PocketPC"), and you get full hackability (which allows you to bypass all ridiculous carrier restrictions, and implement features that carries charge per-use for even though the device is capable of doing it on its own).
I don't care how hard it is to program for (but I've done it, and quite honestly I think a lot of developers are a bunch of whiners), and I don't think it is the best possible system, but it is the best one on the market right now, and nobody has caught up even though the platform has stagnated for over 10 years.
It made me wonder why the hell it wasn't off. I saw it and held the power button until the light was orange. I didn't know it meant it had downloaded crap... Silly me for thinking it wouldn't connect to the internet unless I told it to.
Now that I know what it meant, I'm actually pretty pissed about it.
If the situation described in the parent's post was an electrical fire instead of a gas leak, he would have come home to a pile of ashes instead of to the fire department airing his house out.
The simple fact is that when you have a lot of energy, you have to be careful with it. We have developed safety devices for both electricity and for gas.
The only thing I have left to say about this is that when you buy homeowner insurance, they don't charge you extra for having gas heat or appliances, but they do charge you extra if you have fuses instead of circuit breakers... If they had evidence that one was worse than the other, they would charge you more for using it.
If you are more comfortable with one over the other, it is probably because you have a better understanding of the technology used with it.
So only the people who use cable are paying for all those non cable related things? That doesn't sound very reasonable.
If the tax were direct, the local government would be held accountable for all the money they spent. As it is now, I am aware of very few communities that don't spend more than is necessary to provide the essential services. Most people chose not to participate in local government (even by voting) as long as the check they have to write every year (or quarter) is small enough. Governments exploit this by hiding the tax. There is nothing good about that.
If I had to pay the same money directly to my town rather than indirectly through my cable company, I would prefer it that way.
You can say all you want about how impossible it is, but that won't change what actually happened to me, will it?
Impossible? No. But what is really important is the relative risk. The risk of an electrical fire is probably about the same as the risk of a fire due to a gas leak. At least your house was completely fine after your gas leak.
No software product, no matter how well intentioned the developers, will ever be completely absent of bugs come release-time.
That is a ridiculous assertion. If you'd like to add something about a minimum level of complexity to that, then maybe it would be plausible, but it still wouldn't be provable. As your statement stands, though, it is completely false. There are hundreds if not thousands of simple to moderately complex software products available today that have no bugs.
Are they really amazed that it could slip from a person's hand and go flying?
I'd be amazed.
More likely it didn't slip, but people let go. It's just not slippery, even when your hands are all sweaty.
I don't see how anybody can argue that it is Nintendo's fault that somebody let go of their controller. It is completely unreasonable that we should be able to require companies to produce products that are unable to do damage to any other object if you aren't careful with them. We'd have to make everything out of foam-rubber.
Presumably because nothing was damaged other than the unit itself.
You're comparing apples and oranges.
They already built the network. They already have their wires. They already have permission to send data over them. This battle isn't about that. It's about what kind of data they plan to transmit.
And good graces my ass. They exist to benefit both parties. It's not like the town said "Oh, OK, I suppose you can run some cable and turn a profit." The town needed phone service as much as the company needed permission to run its wires.
Also, the wires frequently (if not usually) run over private property that the local government saw fit to grant rights of way over. So you can forcibly release private control of private property to the municipality, but if you want to do it at the state or federal level instead it's fascism? I think you need to rethink that a little bit.
Unrelated question, and obvious attempt to stir up conspiracy hounds: does anyone know if Comcast is subtly or overtly behind efforts to ban or restrict satellite dishes? Seems like there was a move in Boston to ban visible satellite dishes, largely in violation of FCC regs that don't generally permit localities to do so.
Comcast pays a percentage of its revenues to the licensing municipality. Satellite TV providers don't. Comcast doesn't have to put pressure on the local governments. The local governments want the extra cash enough on their own to push this trash.
This has nothing to do with the FCC. Check your town's budget reports to see how big a check they get from the cable company every month is to prevent competition from coming into town. You'll wonder if your representatives have your best interests in mind after all. This isn't about corporate power, the federal government, or the FCC. It's about local government revenues.
States, sure. But it is rediculous to let every town micro-govern every aspect of its community. All it results in is enormous duplication of bureaucracy so some townies can have their power trip. (Or more specifically, sell their 'rights' to the highest corporate bidder to fund their pet project, like making sure their son's team wins the state championship, or making sure that everybody on main street keeps their lawn mode to 1.75 inches OR ELSE).
If you knew how much that public access stuff cost, you'd probably wish the money went to something else. Now that we have the internet, it is absurd to spend 50-100 thousand dollars per town, per year for public access. Do you have any idea what that adds up to? It's over $15 million dollars a year in my state alone.
We're not moving away from net neutrality... We never had net neutrality. Neither from the providers, nor from the government.
Here is a case (and the same thing is happening with Verizon's FiOS) where a company has wires in place, and is sending data, but the local government won't let them send certain data (digitally encoded TV shows) without giving the municipality a cut of their total revenue. It's ridiculous. Worse, this cut of the money is passed directly on to consumers, but most consumers (voters) don't realize that their local government gets between three and six percent of the local cable TV revenues. It's a huge tax that people don't know is there, and that's why they are surprised when their local government doesn't allow a new competitor into the market. Well here's the reason: It's so the town/city continues to get a fat check every month.
I'm sorry, but throwing away 10% of your resources is the same problem either way. Scaling it up by ten just helps illustrate the problem to people who don't see it.
When the issue at hand is all computers bought in a single country that don't run windows, what scale would you say that is? I'd say that it is measurable economic impact.
Can they really build a fully streamed world comprised of tens of thousands of servers? That's way above my paygrade, but I'll guess that task fits under the rubric of Fricking Hard.
I don't want this to sound like a blanket indictment, because some studios get this right, but a lot of the unreliability, and failure to execute on difficult tasks in the gaming industry is due to the moronic staffing decisions of many game development companies. I haven't played Second Life, so for all I know (and from the sounds of it) maybe they got it right. A fully streamed world comprised of thens of thousands of servers? Sounds like some work, but it sounds completely feasible. When you're only willing to hire people who want to work in games so badly that they're drooling all over themselves at the opportunity and thus are willing to work at well below industry average pay level, what do you think you are going to get?
There are people out there who have built massive clusters and have decades of experience solving these problems... But they usually don't work in games, because they can make five times as much in other industries. When a company comes along and runs a game studio like a real software company, people who are stuck in the more traditional 'you should thank your lucky stars you are working in games' mindset shouldn't be too surprised when that company actually succeeds at problems that were considered too hard in the past.
Let me be more specific than saying you're full of shit.
The extra cost to the product means that if you are a small to medium business buying 100 machines, and you have to pay a 10% premium to Microsoft on each unit (You said $50, right? The average non-gaming desktop is well under $500 these days), that means instead of 10 more actual computers that would have practical use, you got nothing of value.
Besides, your original argument was that a computer without Windows was "practically useless". I think it would be better to say that your argument is practically the definition of absurd.
"Practical" refers to an amount of action, not to value.
Frankly, that is bullshit.
http://dictionary.reference.com/cite.html?qh=pract ical&ia=luna
Click, and read.
Now tell me which definition of the word 'practical' you are using to describe being forced to pay for something you are not going to use in order to purchase something that you *are* going to use.
You are confusing 'practical' with some other word.
In a practical sense, your answer is irrelevant.
Practical for who?
If you are purchasing a computer on which you intend to install your own OS (or your OS of choice), having a different OS that you were forced to pay for already installed isn't exactly 'practical'.
However, if they're going after HP, they should go after Apple too.
Who said anything about allocating? Ever see a programmer dereference some data pulled off the network as an address? (Hell, maybe it was an address on the server side...) How about dereferencing a null pointer as an array with a suitably high index? Or clobbering your stack with a buffer overflow, and then dereferencing what used to be a perfectly valid pointer? Overwriting data by accident is a bad thing even if it is nowhere near your code segment, but bugs happen, and there are plenty of bad programmers out there.
I think a better answer to the parent is that you can turn this stuff off while you are debugging.