When people send me Excel files, I kindly ask them to re-send the file in CSV or some other format. Yes, there are things you can only do in native file format. But the vast majority of users never do those things.
The thing is, you are wrong. I deal with a lot of excel users, and let me assure that 90% of them use at least one dynamic field, data generated field, calculated field, or reasonably appropriate formatting.
There is no open well-designed spreadsheet format that is recognized by a standards body. There should be one. In alot of industries, people like you are excluded from many activities because of an insistance on using an inferior file format.
The real-estate industry in my area is pretty cut throat - either use the software we want or you get replaced for a management-friendly vendor. I've got dozens of appraisers who would love to get work.. I pick the ones that are easiest for me to manage. If I get data back on taxes, or metrics, or whatever and I have to spend anything more than 30-seconds formatting/reviewing it for sending to end-clients, you've wasted my time.
Actually the idea of multimedia video clips may be stupid, but embedding into a document is a great and nice feature of the big word processing and office suites. It is very nice to be able to embed a selected bit of data from a spreadsheet into a standard document - and have that data up to date in realtime based on queries from a database or other data source.
That's a terrible way to look at it. If the IRS was a truly business organization they would have been eliminated through the market decades agao. They lose stuff, work in a haphazard way, and basically completely fail in virtually every metric available. If you call them for help with a tax question, you've got a good chance that the info you will get is wrong, incorrect, flawed, or simply false.
I dont blame the ancient programmers. I blame congress. Hundreds of tax law changes a year for 50 years is the ultimate culprit. A real programmer of the Unix-ish variety could rewrite the tax laws to be revenue neutral in about 10 days to be no more than 100 pages long. That same programmer could implement the system that would effecitvely reduce fraud and run on a fraction of the hardware in a few months.
But it's insider information he was explicitly allowed to have.
Air Canada fired him. Laid off. Not any longer employed but continued to give him access to information they wanted to keep private. They have, however, no reasonable expectation that this information would be kept private unless of coure it was previously arranged in the severance or rider contract.
Insider information isn't illegal perse. For example, if I went and physically counted the number of people getting on and off Air Canada planes at different times, and recorded that and sold it to WestJet things would be just fine. It's called market research.
The real issue here isn't insider information. It seems to be in my opinion trade secret.
Wrong. No. Not quite. This isn't the BBC. Only a small portion of the funding for NPR comes directly from the government. Most is from private grants, donations, and fundraising - not to mention "sponsorship".
It's a good debate to have, but better to have in the context of University inventions and developments, drug research, and technology research.
The problem being that alot of NPR listeners on line listen for one segment, or part of one segment. Allowing a big-ass WAV or MP3 download, when 500 kb would have sufficed, doesn't really make economical sense. If you overshoot the required bandwidth by, say, 50% every time with a file download, that's a big time bandwidth bill for the individual station as well as NPR the larger organization.
You are dreaming. Let's say the government caught all the cheats. And they collected and unexpected $10B. That'd be a lot, right?
You think they would lower your taxes? Or just add that to the general fund for spending? Really? Lower your taxes? And if they did, how much? $10B isn't a lot. Hell, even $100B spread over everyone isn't a lot. No, the fact is, they would simply spend it. Gone. Just like that.
For a historical example, look at the tobacco settlement money the states got. Think that went to pay for tobacco healthcare problems? No. That was the claim. The fact is it was wasted in most cases - spend on everything and anything but what it was promised for.
Good SQL performance tuning is a full-time job, but as time progresses, the data complexity becomes more and more a solved problem. For one, data modeling gets better and that increases speed. Secondly, processing power continues to increase and therefore cut down on processing time.
Between those two factors and better software SQL tuning will be a greatly reduced market.
I agree that trying to stem the flow of jobs from the Northeast is important, however, remember that senators are not in DC to watch out for their state individually but as part of the larger whole.
Frankly, I'd rather see a direct handout to farmers rather than price controls. Price controls damage all consumers. And really, it's not right to punish millions to help a few. When that formula is applied to the favor of the rich we complain. We need to remember that is also wrong to hurt millions to help a few - even if they are poor.
Frankly, as far as ME, NH and VT go it is an interesting mix. ME and VT are suffering hard. NH however is growing twice as fast as the neighboring southern Maine area. VT's economic base is shrinking. Meanwhile places like Nashua and Manchester are booming - adding new jobs, new busines and even expanding their meger industrial base. Even small townish Concord is doing well. Why? You joke about ME and especially VT's socialist bent - and that's probably a big part of the problem. ME citizens have the highest tax burden in the nation, and VT isn't far behind. With Maine, NH, VT all very close to each other - and all similiar in racial, social, and landscape makeup - and with Maine being #1, Vermont being #12, and New Hampshire being #49 in tax burden, is it any wonder why NH is doing much better than it's neighbors?
I guess what I am saying is that agreesive defense of exisiting businesses is a patch, a fancy of last resort. And frankly, it's one that VT has gotten itself into.
In fairness, California did not deregulate energy. They re-regulated it.
How so?
For one, in the "deregulation" bills themselves was $30B in direct and indirect payments to the 3 big utilities. This was an instant 30% increase in your power bill during the switchover. Essentailly power companies decided to spin off generation and distribution into two seperate organizations. However, since the power plants were massively indebted and expensive (mostly from bad investments in bad nuclear technology) they had to first be bailed (hence $30B).
Second, thanks to price caps and price freezes designed to offset that 30%, the utilities who were local to California had to sell energy at a profit. Thanks to price caps, consumers had no need to consume, and demand increased without natural stops involved. Normally higher demand creates supply/demand pressure which increases prices which in turn forces downward pressure on demand. It's a cycle really. This was shot all to hell. Outside companies in Texas, Oregon, and Washington state decided, hey, let's sell power to California's distribution power companies. We can sell at a higher rate than in our own states. In fact, Texas and Oregon both scrapped rate increases for their customers thanks to the profits from California. In essence, California subsidized the costs of Oregon and Texas's power.
Finally, thanks to a combination of political and economic factors, there was no significant increase in generating capacity despite a massively increased population base (California is and has been growing rapidly for a long time) and high demand. The supply was maxed out from in state sources. No new power generation facilities came online during the mess. When demand spiked due to cold weather or hot weather there was no extra in state supply. Meaning more out of state companies had to provide the slack at a massive premimium. Again, the local providers had to resell this at a loss. This led to the California based companies to be essentially bankrupt, leading to near bankruptcy. This led to the state of California to buy at a fixed rate power contracts to shore up the sagging electric companies, and therefore, absorb the losses that would be passed onto the consumer. Ouch. When the power market started to level off, California was left paying premium rates when power was then much cheaper, thanks to locking in rates at the virtual top of the energy market prices.
California should not have bailed out the power companies. Bad move. Price caps meant to help things made things worse. What should have been done was to make the distribution and generation companies pay into a relief fund for people who couldn't pay the rates directly during the deregulation process. The transition between heavily and less heavily regulated markets usually leads to higher prices and production shortfalls. This isn't news. California thought price controls and bailouts and fixed power contracts would make things better.
I agree with you about Leahy being "legit". I am not from Vermont but a close by New England state. I've followed his career for a long time, and frankly you have nailed him.
He does "really care" about his citizens.
On the hand, I am not such a big fan of his politics. He has a bent in him that goes from "care" to "nannying".
He was the sponsor of the 2002 farm bill amendment creating something of a national milk cartel. Of course, it is a popular thing for his voters. It helps their struggling farms. But propping up milk prices to help the few dairy farmers at the expense of millions of milk drinkers? Somewhat questionable. It's not good policy, but rather, a patchwork to help him help his dairy farming base.
Heck, even a minor hurdle like installation and configuration of Trumpet Winsock to get online would cut down the riffraff by at least two orders of magnitude.
Wow, you are a grade A prick. I tell you what, why not call up my parents and tell them they are "riffraff" and don't belong on the Internet.
In the end you'd be huriting yourself, and I'll tell you why:
Without the riffraff you hate:
You wouldn't be able to afford broadband Internet access, becase common DSL/Cable technology wouldn't be cost justifiable. Your only option would be costly ISDN or a fractional T1
All computer hardware would still be expensive, niche-ish, mostly proprietary and stagnant because of a lack of high-demand, high-profit incentives. Think IBM's MCA architecture as the baseline for what to expect from every manufacturer.
Thousands, if not millions of excellent paying, very rewarding positions in software development, hardware development, IT, and computer related industries would be no more. Entry level positions would be no more.
You and everyone else would still have to pay a graphic designer $100/hr to design a simple brouchure, business card, letterheard, or form. And don't forget expensive multi-color printing costs for virtually anything not able to be photographed.
Online multi-player gaming, high-quality games, and amazing simulations would be gone, thanks again to low demand and crazy high cost-per-unit ratios.
That's just a taste. To all the whiny "joe6pack" hating asshole nerds out there -- try to remember who subsidizes your low-cost, commodity hardware, low-latency high-speed connections, and increased social status. If Sun, or IBM, or other early players had their way the "average" PC would still cost $3500, require expensive manuals and training to operate, be based on closed proprietary hardware requiring expensive licensing to develop software or add-ons for and be out of the reach of the "joe6packs" out there.
What other option does the world have? Allow Saddam to exploit his natural wealth and again bully and repress and destroy foreign nations? Or restrict the flow of blood money and in the process hurt civilians?
Saddam was a madman of the highest order. It now sounds like he was actually high when he invaded Kuwait.
As far as I am concerned, the blood of those people are on the hands of Saddam and no one else. He refused to feed his own people, and instead, stole money from the Oil for Food program (remember that? run properly it would easily feed the entire nation).
Our sanctions did more to ruin Iraq as a country than Saddam did
That's BS. Saddam spent money that would have easily covered the cost of feeding those millions on opulent palaces. He built them constantly throughout the sanction period.
It's absurd to claim what you claim. The post-war sanctions were silly and cruel, but you know what, that's what you get when you invade a peaceful neighboring country in the face of world pressure. Seriously.
OK, and were do these numbers come from anyway?
PBS Frontline aired a "1 year later" special about Iraq. I tried to find a transcript, but it's not online yet (it was on TV just last week).
Just because someone else kills people it's OK for you to do so?
Nope. Didn't say that. I said, if you have a problem with the Iraq war, you can at least take solace in the fact one of the worst butchers of recent history is now out of comission. Even if you hate the war, Bush, etc etc you can take some solace in knowing that 50 million people have been liberated from vicious tryanny.
I think he was right.
I think he was wrong. I also think Bush was and is wrong, but, more than anything Clinton was dead wrong.
These totalarian regimes like Sadaam are essentially never going to fail on thier own. Ever. It just doesn't happen. North Korea, China, Saudia Arabia - when you control the guns you control the country, period. End of story. These rulers have the limited money, the guns, the communications, and therefore, the only time these governments are going to fall is when (a) acted upon by an outside force or (b) acted upon by nature (ie, a natural death).
Objects in motion tend to remain in motion. Look at Cuba. Clinton's Iraq policy is a mirror of the US Cuba policy. How well has that policy worked? If you are a "peace at any cost" type, it's worked great! Otherwise, not so good.
For that, we killed how many thousands of civilians with bombing?
Take consolation that Saadam routinely executed, maimed, murdered, expelled, starved, and generally killed more people each year of his regime. PBS Frontline estimated that number of Saadam victims to be between 75,000 and 125,000.
You argue that P2P apps are not a tool of infringement, however, I argue that on most college campus, by volume, it is the only use of P2P statistically speaking. In the wider content, P2P has positive social implications like you mention. In the real world - which I've experienced on both ends - the fact remains that P2P is used virtually exclusively for infringing transfers.
No other protocol I've seen used is so lopsidedly used for the same single illegal purpose.
Secondly, you claim it can be easily solved with quotas and throttling. As I pointed out before, this is not always the case. For one, it requires investment of capital. Why invest that? If you allow students say 5GB of P2P transfer a week, or a month, why is that better in legal terms if they are still infringing? It simply a matter of degrees - 500GB vs. 5GB - it's still illegal. Your solution of throttling and quotas doesn't necessarily resolve the bandwidth issue, and it doesn't resolve the legal issue.
Thirdly, you recommend cracking down on users based on the content of what they download. This puts an additional burden in that each P2P transfer must be statefully monitored. Better yet, most P2P today are moving towards end-to-end encryption/obsfication of data transfer. There is and will not ever be a reliable method of monitoring which P2P users are infringing.
The bottom line remains in tact: any amount of P2P use by students will invariably lead to infringement. There is no reliable way to block students from exposing the school to liability and still allow P2P transfers.
you reduce infringement only at the cost of making the network less useful.
In theoretical terms yes, in practical terms a definte "nope". P2P use within college student networks is for all intents and purposes exclusively for illegal and/or infringing transfers. The odd CS student using a BitTorrent to download a Linux ISO cannot possibly offset the vast risks of letting proportionally thousands more students run P2P style apps with or without limit.
I'm going to assume half the capacity is reserved for university computers
Nope. Not realistic. Lab computers get much higher percentage - the external website, e-mail, usenet, etc etc take a huge, huge number. In my case it was 70% dedicated to staff, faculty, special projects and classrooms. There was 25% assigned for dorms with 5% held as a reserve against various contingencies.
That's only 1500 connections. With literally everyone running at least one P2P it easily pushes past that. Especially on weekends.
That's not such a high number, and if the school's vastly larger size doesn't allow it to purchase more bandwidth than the small school, we do have a major problem
Umm.. hate to break the news, but during the height of Napster P2P was universal - virtually 100%. Even now with all the crappy fragmentation
going on its well over 80% on unblocked networks.
Not to mention the people using traditional sharing - FTP, IRC, USENET, etc.
Trust me here for real. I've done the numbers, looked at the angles, etc. The options are (a) anarchy and services suffer, lawsuits galore (b) throttling/shaping and its high-overhead plus lawsuits, or (c) total P2P ban, no lawsuits, and services are stable.
A, B, or C. I find A & B to unacceptable for public institutions.
Why would you want to premptively take on responsibility for a user?
You mean by blocking activity that is 90% likely to be illegal? Because it reduces the exposure to liability.
If the university is going to targetted either way, why not adopt a policy that punishes the abusive users and gives you at least some ability to say 'We didn't know it was going on, but by golly we're gunna help you git these varmints!'.
Deep pockets. Copyright holders don't want to "get these varmints". They want the activity stopped. Suing individual students will get no where since they have no assets generally speaking. Suing Univerisites will get you somewhere because they have assets. Getting a judgement against a bankrupt person is useless.
are it's just another hidden fee tacked onto the tuition for whatever shithole you've decided deserves your scorn
Just about every University in the country runs a deficit that is made up tax dollars. I dont know of any or many that completely self-financed at this point. Maybe some of the huge popular ones, but certainly not most State U's. My opinion on the matter is that for student dorms and whatnot no connectivity should be offered. Allow cable and DSL companies the opportunity to sell to the students. Let them setup wireless grid networks on their own. Let them use dial-up. For University and state owned computers, acceptable use policies and network policies should enforce rules strictly against illegal P2P use.
even if usage by everyone else increased 10 times
Let me clear up your angry comments toward me.
The typical P2P app out there uses as much bandwidth as possible to facilitate uploads and downloads. The top 1/4 of 1% of students use 97% of bandwidth because they know how. The other users computers would use more bandwidth if it were available. These users suck up more and more bandwidth as it becomes available, starting out slowly using an equal share and then as other users usuage peaks and wanes, gobbles more and more, until progressively it is a major user of bandwidth.
Even without the "heavy users" the other clueless users and their P2P apps on the network will automatically fill the void, so that, even if a single P2P host on the network virtually 100% of the Internet connection can be saturated. The difference is the 0.25 do it on purpose, and the others out of stupidity and misinformation.
Slashdot Mirror
When people send me Excel files, I kindly ask them to re-send the file in CSV or some other format. Yes, there are things you can only do in native file format. But the vast majority of users never do those things.
The thing is, you are wrong. I deal with a lot of excel users, and let me assure that 90% of them use at least one dynamic field, data generated field, calculated field, or reasonably appropriate formatting.
There is no open well-designed spreadsheet format that is recognized by a standards body. There should be one. In alot of industries, people like you are excluded from many activities because of an insistance on using an inferior file format.
The real-estate industry in my area is pretty cut throat - either use the software we want or you get replaced for a management-friendly vendor. I've got dozens of appraisers who would love to get work.. I pick the ones that are easiest for me to manage. If I get data back on taxes, or metrics, or whatever and I have to spend anything more than 30-seconds formatting/reviewing it for sending to end-clients, you've wasted my time.
Actually the idea of multimedia video clips may be stupid, but embedding into a document is a great and nice feature of the big word processing and office suites. It is very nice to be able to embed a selected bit of data from a spreadsheet into a standard document - and have that data up to date in realtime based on queries from a database or other data source.
A lot of government revenue doesn't come in through the IRS.
Though it seems like it should, it doesn't.
That's a terrible way to look at it. If the IRS was a truly business organization they would have been eliminated through the market decades agao. They lose stuff, work in a haphazard way, and basically completely fail in virtually every metric available. If you call them for help with a tax question, you've got a good chance that the info you will get is wrong, incorrect, flawed, or simply false.
I dont blame the ancient programmers. I blame congress. Hundreds of tax law changes a year for 50 years is the ultimate culprit. A real programmer of the Unix-ish variety could rewrite the tax laws to be revenue neutral in about 10 days to be no more than 100 pages long. That same programmer could implement the system that would effecitvely reduce fraud and run on a fraction of the hardware in a few months.
But it's insider information he was explicitly allowed to have.
Air Canada fired him. Laid off. Not any longer employed but continued to give him access to information they wanted to keep private. They have, however, no reasonable expectation that this information would be kept private unless of coure it was previously arranged in the severance or rider contract.
Insider information isn't illegal perse. For example, if I went and physically counted the number of people getting on and off Air Canada planes at different times, and recorded that and sold it to WestJet things would be just fine. It's called market research.
The real issue here isn't insider information. It seems to be in my opinion trade secret.
Wrong. No. Not quite. This isn't the BBC. Only a small portion of the funding for NPR comes directly from the government. Most is from private grants, donations, and fundraising - not to mention "sponsorship".
It's a good debate to have, but better to have in the context of University inventions and developments, drug research, and technology research.
The problem being that alot of NPR listeners on line listen for one segment, or part of one segment. Allowing a big-ass WAV or MP3 download, when 500 kb would have sufficed, doesn't really make economical sense. If you overshoot the required bandwidth by, say, 50% every time with a file download, that's a big time bandwidth bill for the individual station as well as NPR the larger organization.
You are dreaming. Let's say the government caught all the cheats. And they collected and unexpected $10B. That'd be a lot, right?
You think they would lower your taxes? Or just add that to the general fund for spending? Really? Lower your taxes? And if they did, how much? $10B isn't a lot. Hell, even $100B spread over everyone isn't a lot. No, the fact is, they would simply spend it. Gone. Just like that.
For a historical example, look at the tobacco settlement money the states got. Think that went to pay for tobacco healthcare problems? No. That was the claim. The fact is it was wasted in most cases - spend on everything and anything but what it was promised for.
Good SQL performance tuning is a full-time job, but as time progresses, the data complexity becomes more and more a solved problem. For one, data modeling gets better and that increases speed. Secondly, processing power continues to increase and therefore cut down on processing time.
Between those two factors and better software SQL tuning will be a greatly reduced market.
I agree that trying to stem the flow of jobs from the Northeast is important, however, remember that senators are not in DC to watch out for their state individually but as part of the larger whole.
Frankly, I'd rather see a direct handout to farmers rather than price controls. Price controls damage all consumers. And really, it's not right to punish millions to help a few. When that formula is applied to the favor of the rich we complain. We need to remember that is also wrong to hurt millions to help a few - even if they are poor.
Frankly, as far as ME, NH and VT go it is an interesting mix. ME and VT are suffering hard. NH however is growing twice as fast as the neighboring southern Maine area. VT's economic base is shrinking. Meanwhile places like Nashua and Manchester are booming - adding new jobs, new busines and even expanding their meger industrial base. Even small townish Concord is doing well. Why? You joke about ME and especially VT's socialist bent - and that's probably a big part of the problem. ME citizens have the highest tax burden in the nation, and VT isn't far behind. With Maine, NH, VT all very close to each other - and all similiar in racial, social, and landscape makeup - and with Maine being #1, Vermont being #12, and New Hampshire being #49 in tax burden, is it any wonder why NH is doing much better than it's neighbors?
I guess what I am saying is that agreesive defense of exisiting businesses is a patch, a fancy of last resort. And frankly, it's one that VT has gotten itself into.
You can't sue the government generally, or it's agents, unless Congress gives you permission.
In fairness, California did not deregulate energy. They re-regulated it.
How so?
For one, in the "deregulation" bills themselves was $30B in direct and indirect payments to the 3 big utilities. This was an instant 30% increase in your power bill during the switchover. Essentailly power companies decided to spin off generation and distribution into two seperate organizations. However, since the power plants were massively indebted and expensive (mostly from bad investments in bad nuclear technology) they had to first be bailed (hence $30B).
Second, thanks to price caps and price freezes designed to offset that 30%, the utilities who were local to California had to sell energy at a profit. Thanks to price caps, consumers had no need to consume, and demand increased without natural stops involved. Normally higher demand creates supply/demand pressure which increases prices which in turn forces downward pressure on demand. It's a cycle really. This was shot all to hell. Outside companies in Texas, Oregon, and Washington state decided, hey, let's sell power to California's distribution power companies. We can sell at a higher rate than in our own states. In fact, Texas and Oregon both scrapped rate increases for their customers thanks to the profits from California. In essence, California subsidized the costs of Oregon and Texas's power.
Finally, thanks to a combination of political and economic factors, there was no significant increase in generating capacity despite a massively increased population base (California is and has been growing rapidly for a long time) and high demand. The supply was maxed out from in state sources. No new power generation facilities came online during the mess. When demand spiked due to cold weather or hot weather there was no extra in state supply. Meaning more out of state companies had to provide the slack at a massive premimium. Again, the local providers had to resell this at a loss. This led to the California based companies to be essentially bankrupt, leading to near bankruptcy. This led to the state of California to buy at a fixed rate power contracts to shore up the sagging electric companies, and therefore, absorb the losses that would be passed onto the consumer. Ouch. When the power market started to level off, California was left paying premium rates when power was then much cheaper, thanks to locking in rates at the virtual top of the energy market prices.
This article explains it better than I can.
California should not have bailed out the power companies. Bad move. Price caps meant to help things made things worse. What should have been done was to make the distribution and generation companies pay into a relief fund for people who couldn't pay the rates directly during the deregulation process. The transition between heavily and less heavily regulated markets usually leads to higher prices and production shortfalls. This isn't news. California thought price controls and bailouts and fixed power contracts would make things better.
Nope.
I agree with you about Leahy being "legit". I am not from Vermont but a close by New England state. I've followed his career for a long time, and frankly you have nailed him.
He does "really care" about his citizens.
On the hand, I am not such a big fan of his politics. He has a bent in him that goes from "care" to "nannying".
He was the sponsor of the 2002 farm bill amendment creating something of a national milk cartel. Of course, it is a popular thing for his voters. It helps their struggling farms. But propping up milk prices to help the few dairy farmers at the expense of millions of milk drinkers? Somewhat questionable. It's not good policy, but rather, a patchwork to help him help his dairy farming base.
FYI, I am getting married in less than a month.
There goes yet another sterotype.
Wow, you are a grade A prick. I tell you what, why not call up my parents and tell them they are "riffraff" and don't belong on the Internet.
In the end you'd be huriting yourself, and I'll tell you why:
Without the riffraff you hate:
You wouldn't be able to afford broadband Internet access, becase common DSL/Cable technology wouldn't be cost justifiable. Your only option would be costly ISDN or a fractional T1
All computer hardware would still be expensive, niche-ish, mostly proprietary and stagnant because of a lack of high-demand, high-profit incentives. Think IBM's MCA architecture as the baseline for what to expect from every manufacturer.
Thousands, if not millions of excellent paying, very rewarding positions in software development, hardware development, IT, and computer related industries would be no more. Entry level positions would be no more.
You and everyone else would still have to pay a graphic designer $100/hr to design a simple brouchure, business card, letterheard, or form. And don't forget expensive multi-color printing costs for virtually anything not able to be photographed.
Online multi-player gaming, high-quality games, and amazing simulations would be gone, thanks again to low demand and crazy high cost-per-unit ratios.
That's just a taste. To all the whiny "joe6pack" hating asshole nerds out there -- try to remember who subsidizes your low-cost, commodity hardware, low-latency high-speed connections, and increased social status. If Sun, or IBM, or other early players had their way the "average" PC would still cost $3500, require expensive manuals and training to operate, be based on closed proprietary hardware requiring expensive licensing to develop software or add-ons for and be out of the reach of the "joe6packs" out there.
What other option does the world have? Allow Saddam to exploit his natural wealth and again bully and repress and destroy foreign nations? Or restrict the flow of blood money and in the process hurt civilians?
Saddam was a madman of the highest order. It now sounds like he was actually high when he invaded Kuwait.
As far as I am concerned, the blood of those people are on the hands of Saddam and no one else. He refused to feed his own people, and instead, stole money from the Oil for Food program (remember that? run properly it would easily feed the entire nation).
Our sanctions did more to ruin Iraq as a country than Saddam did
That's BS. Saddam spent money that would have easily covered the cost of feeding those millions on opulent palaces. He built them constantly throughout the sanction period.
It's absurd to claim what you claim. The post-war sanctions were silly and cruel, but you know what, that's what you get when you invade a peaceful neighboring country in the face of world pressure. Seriously.
OK, and were do these numbers come from anyway?
PBS Frontline aired a "1 year later" special about Iraq. I tried to find a transcript, but it's not online yet (it was on TV just last week).
Just because someone else kills people it's OK for you to do so?
Nope. Didn't say that. I said, if you have a problem with the Iraq war, you can at least take solace in the fact one of the worst butchers of recent history is now out of comission. Even if you hate the war, Bush, etc etc you can take some solace in knowing that 50 million people have been liberated from vicious tryanny.
It's called a silver lining.
I think he was right.
I think he was wrong. I also think Bush was and is wrong, but, more than anything Clinton was dead wrong.
These totalarian regimes like Sadaam are essentially never going to fail on thier own. Ever. It just doesn't happen. North Korea, China, Saudia Arabia - when you control the guns you control the country, period. End of story. These rulers have the limited money, the guns, the communications, and therefore, the only time these governments are going to fall is when (a) acted upon by an outside force or (b) acted upon by nature (ie, a natural death).
Objects in motion tend to remain in motion. Look at Cuba. Clinton's Iraq policy is a mirror of the US Cuba policy. How well has that policy worked? If you are a "peace at any cost" type, it's worked great! Otherwise, not so good.
For that, we killed how many thousands of civilians with bombing?
Take consolation that Saadam routinely executed, maimed, murdered, expelled, starved, and generally killed more people each year of his regime. PBS Frontline estimated that number of Saadam victims to be between 75,000 and 125,000.
At very least, that won't be happening anymore.
You argue that P2P apps are not a tool of infringement, however, I argue that on most college campus, by volume, it is the only use of P2P statistically speaking. In the wider content, P2P has positive social implications like you mention. In the real world - which I've experienced on both ends - the fact remains that P2P is used virtually exclusively for infringing transfers.
No other protocol I've seen used is so lopsidedly used for the same single illegal purpose.
Secondly, you claim it can be easily solved with quotas and throttling. As I pointed out before, this is not always the case. For one, it requires investment of capital. Why invest that? If you allow students say 5GB of P2P transfer a week, or a month, why is that better in legal terms if they are still infringing? It simply a matter of degrees - 500GB vs. 5GB - it's still illegal. Your solution of throttling and quotas doesn't necessarily resolve the bandwidth issue, and it doesn't resolve the legal issue.
Thirdly, you recommend cracking down on users based on the content of what they download. This puts an additional burden in that each P2P transfer must be statefully monitored. Better yet, most P2P today are moving towards end-to-end encryption/obsfication of data transfer. There is and will not ever be a reliable method of monitoring which P2P users are infringing.
The bottom line remains in tact: any amount of P2P use by students will invariably lead to infringement. There is no reliable way to block students from exposing the school to liability and still allow P2P transfers.
you reduce infringement only at the cost of making the network less useful.
In theoretical terms yes, in practical terms a definte "nope". P2P use within college student networks is for all intents and purposes exclusively for illegal and/or infringing transfers. The odd CS student using a BitTorrent to download a Linux ISO cannot possibly offset the vast risks of letting proportionally thousands more students run P2P style apps with or without limit.
I'm going to assume half the capacity is reserved for university computers
Nope. Not realistic. Lab computers get much higher percentage - the external website, e-mail, usenet, etc etc take a huge, huge number. In my case it was 70% dedicated to staff, faculty, special projects and classrooms. There was 25% assigned for dorms with 5% held as a reserve against various contingencies.
That's only 1500 connections. With literally everyone running at least one P2P it easily pushes past that. Especially on weekends.
That's not such a high number, and if the school's vastly larger size doesn't allow it to purchase more bandwidth than the small school, we do have a major problem
Umm.. hate to break the news, but during the height of Napster P2P was universal - virtually 100%. Even now with all the crappy fragmentation going on its well over 80% on unblocked networks.
Not to mention the people using traditional sharing - FTP, IRC, USENET, etc.
Trust me here for real. I've done the numbers, looked at the angles, etc. The options are (a) anarchy and services suffer, lawsuits galore (b) throttling/shaping and its high-overhead plus lawsuits, or (c) total P2P ban, no lawsuits, and services are stable.
A, B, or C. I find A & B to unacceptable for public institutions.
But if users are infringing at a high or slow rate, and therefore breaking the law, what's the difference? The place is still liable for that act...
Why would you want to premptively take on responsibility for a user?
You mean by blocking activity that is 90% likely to be illegal? Because it reduces the exposure to liability.
If the university is going to targetted either way, why not adopt a policy that punishes the abusive users and gives you at least some ability to say 'We didn't know it was going on, but by golly we're gunna help you git these varmints!'.
Deep pockets. Copyright holders don't want to "get these varmints". They want the activity stopped. Suing individual students will get no where since they have no assets generally speaking. Suing Univerisites will get you somewhere because they have assets. Getting a judgement against a bankrupt person is useless.
are it's just another hidden fee tacked onto the tuition for whatever shithole you've decided deserves your scorn
Just about every University in the country runs a deficit that is made up tax dollars. I dont know of any or many that completely self-financed at this point. Maybe some of the huge popular ones, but certainly not most State U's. My opinion on the matter is that for student dorms and whatnot no connectivity should be offered. Allow cable and DSL companies the opportunity to sell to the students. Let them setup wireless grid networks on their own. Let them use dial-up. For University and state owned computers, acceptable use policies and network policies should enforce rules strictly against illegal P2P use.
even if usage by everyone else increased 10 times
Let me clear up your angry comments toward me.
The typical P2P app out there uses as much bandwidth as possible to facilitate uploads and downloads. The top 1/4 of 1% of students use 97% of bandwidth because they know how. The other users computers would use more bandwidth if it were available. These users suck up more and more bandwidth as it becomes available, starting out slowly using an equal share and then as other users usuage peaks and wanes, gobbles more and more, until progressively it is a major user of bandwidth.
Even without the "heavy users" the other clueless users and their P2P apps on the network will automatically fill the void, so that, even if a single P2P host on the network virtually 100% of the Internet connection can be saturated. The difference is the 0.25 do it on purpose, and the others out of stupidity and misinformation.