"Quality" is not "Objective", usually. However, there are things that can describe whether or not something is of "Quality".
Fresh ground steak, is generally better "quality" than "ground beef" (continuing Burger analogy). However if your steak is rotting, then it isn't. If you like less fat, 7% is better "quality" than 22% ground beef.
Quality of vegitables is also similar, local fresh tomatoes are generally better tasting than mass produced factory farm varieties. Again, this doesn't necissarily make it so.
McDonalds product is at least "consistant". It is the same wherever you go, and you generally don't have much option for having a better burger. But I've also been to the Philippines, and been to McDonalds there, and I can tell you that hamburger was the worst I've ever had. My friend later told me it probably wasn't beef I was eating, I don't want to know what it was.
Quality is at least partially "subjective" (qualitative), but does have some quantitatively addressable parts.
popularity is the closest thing to an objective measure of quality that we have.
You're kidding? You say that about Fox News Channel? How about GWB who was popular enough to get elected.... twice. Windows? Comcast? Tiger Woods three weeks ago.
Just because something is "popular" doesn't mean it is the best. And no, it isn't the most objective means to measure quality.
Price, Quality, Service. Pick any two. McDonalds forsakes quality for price and (ahem) service.
John Stewart and Sean Hannity are the same kind of "news". There are lots of liberals who only watch John Stewart as their "news", just like conservatives watch Sean Hannity for their news.
If people call Hannity "news" in ripping Fox, then why can't I use John Stewart? Trust me, there are many "liberals" who's only source for "news" is shows like Stewart, Colbert and Maher.
I'll give another great example of "False" Reporting, one that is being repeated often by liberals, this one being promoted by Bill Maher himself. He recently said that the US Military has never left a place that we invaded; that we have military bases there. This is simply wrong. I can name a place where we invaded, declared it a protectorate and even had a couple of military bases (big ones) as recently as the '70s, where we have no military at all. The Philippines. The point being, Bill Maher is reporting something that is factually wrong. Yet because he isn't a "news" program, he is excused.
Now, I know that isn't going to sit well with the Bill Maher listeners, and that I'm sure they will figure out excuses (Hypocrisy) why it doesn't matter; that he's still right. Okay fine, but he isn't right.
I'm not defending Hannity or even Fox News or even bashing Bill Maher, Colbert, and Stewart, far from it. What I am doing is saying that there is plenty of places to pick up bad information, information that is often used as "facts" when it clearly isn't all that factual.
There is enough hypocrisy on both sides to go around.
A huge 500-acre vat of this stuff will explode all at once, causing a rift in the time-space continuum that allows Species 8472 to emerge and exact retribution for bursting their cozy bubble.
Just as long as Seven-of-Nine shows up to fight them, I'd be okay with that.
Most people already have enough information on the internet that if someone wanted to find them, they could be found.
To be found, most people only need to expose their real name, and from that a great deal of "Private" information is already available on the net. If I know where you work, what town you live in, it is even easier to find all sorts of information about you.
Nothing on the web is "private", it is ALL public. That is what it was designed for.
The internet is anything but "Private". It is a "PUBLIC" network. Putting things on MyFace or Spacebook, and even the stupid twits tweeting on twitter are all exposing themselves better than the perv in the park ever could.
I have a Facebook account, and it doesn't use my real name, uses a throwaway email address, doesn't contain any personal information, and I don't use it for "social networking" at all.
So, why do I have it? To keep the idiots from asking me "Do you have a Facebook". I tell them Yeah I do, and not lie.
I tell them if they can find me, they can add me. If they really are my friends, they don't need facebook to talk to me.
So, if you're reading this post, and can find me on facebook, great. Send me a note you're from slashdot, and I'll add you. You already have all the information needed to find me. And good luck with that.
NYTIMES, Dan Rather, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, John Stewart....
Everyone lies. Learn to adjust your filter better and you'll realize that. Or as you probably call these "lies".... "honest errors".
If you want examples, I'll be happy to show you. Including the reports by traditional news sources about the DC protests that were equally fallacious. Or how about the "White, gun toting, racist protester" that just about every news organization showed, and commented on, except Fox? If you didn't watch FOX, you'd never know it was a black guy they were commenting on, carefully edited to adjust for the Bias the news organization wanted to show (White people carry guns and hate Obama).
Or how about another recent example of Charlie Gibson not knowing ANYTHING about ACORN scandal? Oh right, because that was FOX driven news.
Or how about Charlie Rangel being put in charge of the Tax System, even though he forgot about 4 apartments and his house in the Bahamas on his taxes. Or Geitner. Or "Lets teach the kids how to fist" Kevin Jennings as safe schools czar? or climategate or...
Now, if you average the Traditional news with Fox News, somewhere in between you'll realize is the truth. News bias is as much as what IS covered as it is about what ISN'T covered. And if you don't get your news from a variety of sources, even if they are biased, you'd never know.
And if you think "Fox News" is the "what others are thinking" you'd be right, but it also shows how little respect you have for differing opinions, which is typical of elitists, and is shown for their absolute distain for "Flyover Country", as if everyone should think a believe like NY City, or Hollywood (Think gun control).
The point being is that our views are tainted by our "reality". Expand your reality and your views will probably change with it. What is that left wing bumper sticker saying.... "Minds are like Parachutes, they only work when they are open", or is it "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out";)
They want the ISP's to be forced to take the billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars they pocketed and invest that money into enhanced infrastructure that can provide a reasonable level of bandwidth to consumers to be used however the consumer damn well pleases.
The Telco's are doing what the government has been doing, namely taking billions(Trillions) of dollars and not actually doing anything useful with it.
You want to complain, complain to the Politicians who dreamed this shit up. Cash for clunkers is a good example was a joke, costing $24,000 per clunker, one could buy a nice new car for that.
And now, they are trying to be just as efficient with "healthcare". Good luck with that.
if the internet is so dangerous then children shouldn't be on it in the first place. or maybe THE PARENTS need to step up to the challenge and pusome fucking initiative in to monitoring their kids.
Yes, I agree. However, there is a whole other side to the argument, namely why does the iNet need to be so freaking dangerous in the first place?
BTW, the iNet is just a symptom of the problems, not the cause of it. Our society has lost something; politeness, decency, integrity, honor. It has lost all of these things in the name of the asshat cry of "but there is no law against it".
I guess if you want to live there, then fine, but I don't have to like it.
You know, this post just sums up the problem for me. People who randomly talk about sex with strangers are the problem. I can't think of a situation where I would randomly talk about sex with anyone I don't know.
I'm not a prude or anything, I just think that this is just a sign of how meaningless sex has become, and now people are acting like dogs in heat, trying to mate with anything that moves.
Yup, Amazon and Publishers are both "middle men", between Authors and Customers.
My guess, is that at least ONE middle man between the two is ideal, a bazaar, a single place where authors can meet and sell to their customers. It would require standards.
I can even seeing a couple three alternative choices out there, including Amazon and the Publisher's Marketplace, and perhaps one built by and for authors.
Layers and layers of "middle men" are not needed anymore. I am about to self publish a book, so I would love to have a couple options available where I can market it, directly. I really don't want to tied to Amazon/Kindle if I don't have to be.
Over subscriptions are based on average loads and peak loads, and statistical analysis. BitTorrent Clients skew the stats. And mostly people are complaining about bittorrent or other "file sharing" applications. They are using bandwith that they themselves are not actually "using" (hence the "sharing" part.
Look, I'm not complaining about filesharing per se, just those who want to seed and saturate their connection for whatever ego boosting they think they deserve for doing it.
If they throttled the torrent to a "reasonable" level, they could benefit the torrent community, while not being a asshat to everyone else who has to share the same resources.
Yeah, you can be an asshat, but just realize asshats screw it up for everyone else. If that is your goal, then by all means, go ahead and be an asshat.
I did this with an old Linux box and the HTB packet scheduler [luxik.cdi.cz]. It cost nothing but time to setup. If I can manage to do this then doesn't it stand to reason that a company with the resources of Comcast could pull it off?
Yeah, because a 1.5 mb T1 is just like multiple routed GB (or 10GB) connections.
What you fail to not realize is that your setup doesn't "scale" to ISP backbone levels. Yeah, I agree that it probably works for your office setup, but it doesn't work at ISP levels.
It isn't a lie, it is accepted business practices. You don't want what you're really asking for. You want 10mb for $24.95, not the dedicated 10mb for $1500.
If you REALLY wanted dedicated 10mb connection, you'd ask for it, with QoS and SLA agreements, in short, you're asking for BUSINESS CLASS SERVICE not the Consumer Class versions.
Yes, most service providers offer this service, it is just that most people really wants to pay for it.
Warning, Car Analogy Ahead:
You're like the guy who buys a F150 truck with the smallest engine, and then complains that they can't tow their big-ass boat up the hill very well, even though the "Tow Rating" says it should.
And you burn up your engine / transmission early because you do it every weekend. Should FORD be sued because they advertised it wrong? Or are you an just an idiot using consumer toys for commercial duty?
Now, to be completely clear - I feel overselling bandwidth is wrong.
Over selling isn't wrong, it is necessary for services like this. The fact is, all service providers oversell their capacity. The trick is to manage the overselling to a ratio that on average, within a specific scope, doesn't cause bandwidth jams for a prescribed statistical level.
Having run an ISP, the oversell ratio is about 10:1 - 15:1 depending on who your subscribers are, and their usage patterns. This means you can get 10-12 people on a data circuit that is really designed to handle 1 fully loaded client. This statistical usage only works at large scales, and actually as the scale increases, may raise the over subscription to 20 or 25 to one.
I guarantee you that if everyone wanted to Torrent all the time, at full speed, the internet could not handle the traffic. It wasn't designed to. It has been over sold.
Bittorrent is not normal traffic pattern. A Torrent is a congestion point on the internet, at a place where one is not expected. Most people don't need 80 gigabytes of streaming data, day in and day out. If this were DVD movies, you'd be downloading more movies than you could watch.
I don't have any complaints for ISPs that throttle Torrents and take other measures against "high usage" users, who are file sharing. I'm not against filesharing, I'm against idiots who cause congestion because they don't know how to configure Bittorrent client to be "reasonable".
I don't get my news from Fox. I don't get it from NYT, the BBC, PBS or anywhere else like that.
I prefer my news raw and unfiltered by news organizations. My point is News organizations are slanting news coverage, by definition.
The internet makes news gathering interestingly easy for just about anyone to "gather" their own "news".
I subscribe to a wide variety of RSS feeds(news sites, Blogs, Drudge etc), to get my "news". The intersting thing about this approach is that I can usually find the sources and quotes directly from first hand sources, unbiased and unfiltered.
I used the Dan Rather example because I knew three or four days before the "news" organizations picked up on it, that someone had figured out it was Microsoft Word document, not the "original" Rather believed it was. Mainstream news only picked it up after the internet caught them with their pants down.
I also know when "thousands" of protesters are only a couple dozen Liberal protesters, and when a 'few hundred' people are really tens of thousands of "teabaggers".
Yeah, it is funny how people see the news they want. And yeah, I know I'm not going to change your mind, but perhaps you'll start looking at the "news" differently
Slashdot Mirror
I wish people would stop making the assumption that things on the web are private. WORLD WIDE WEB is called that for a reason.
There are no "levels" of privacy on the web. There is only "more or less secure", and Facebook is anything but "secure".
And if you don't directly control it, you don't have control over it.
SO, you see, you're just wrong.
"Quality" is not "Objective", usually. However, there are things that can describe whether or not something is of "Quality".
Fresh ground steak, is generally better "quality" than "ground beef" (continuing Burger analogy). However if your steak is rotting, then it isn't. If you like less fat, 7% is better "quality" than 22% ground beef.
Quality of vegitables is also similar, local fresh tomatoes are generally better tasting than mass produced factory farm varieties. Again, this doesn't necissarily make it so.
McDonalds product is at least "consistant". It is the same wherever you go, and you generally don't have much option for having a better burger. But I've also been to the Philippines, and been to McDonalds there, and I can tell you that hamburger was the worst I've ever had. My friend later told me it probably wasn't beef I was eating, I don't want to know what it was.
Quality is at least partially "subjective" (qualitative), but does have some quantitatively addressable parts.
You're kidding? You say that about Fox News Channel? How about GWB who was popular enough to get elected .... twice. Windows? Comcast? Tiger Woods three weeks ago.
Just because something is "popular" doesn't mean it is the best. And no, it isn't the most objective means to measure quality.
Price, Quality, Service. Pick any two. McDonalds forsakes quality for price and (ahem) service.
They have a choice. Yet they still choke down the burgers. That says more about them than they realize.
And the fact that you realize that they "choke down" McD's burgers shows you do too.
Given a choice between going hungry for a few hours and having McD's I'd choose to go hungry for a short while.
What some people call a "sad social life", I call peaceful. ;)
I don't need lots and lots of so-called friends. I just need a few good ones. The difference is I value quality of friends, not quantity.
Just because McDonalds has served "Billions and Billions" of burgers doesn't mean their burgers are any good.
John Stewart and Sean Hannity are the same kind of "news". There are lots of liberals who only watch John Stewart as their "news", just like conservatives watch Sean Hannity for their news.
If people call Hannity "news" in ripping Fox, then why can't I use John Stewart? Trust me, there are many "liberals" who's only source for "news" is shows like Stewart, Colbert and Maher.
I'll give another great example of "False" Reporting, one that is being repeated often by liberals, this one being promoted by Bill Maher himself. He recently said that the US Military has never left a place that we invaded; that we have military bases there. This is simply wrong. I can name a place where we invaded, declared it a protectorate and even had a couple of military bases (big ones) as recently as the '70s, where we have no military at all. The Philippines. The point being, Bill Maher is reporting something that is factually wrong. Yet because he isn't a "news" program, he is excused.
Now, I know that isn't going to sit well with the Bill Maher listeners, and that I'm sure they will figure out excuses (Hypocrisy) why it doesn't matter; that he's still right. Okay fine, but he isn't right.
I'm not defending Hannity or even Fox News or even bashing Bill Maher, Colbert, and Stewart, far from it. What I am doing is saying that there is plenty of places to pick up bad information, information that is often used as "facts" when it clearly isn't all that factual.
There is enough hypocrisy on both sides to go around.
Yes.
Give me your login and password, and I'll show you "anyone can get that information".
Your login/password are private, the data is not.
A huge 500-acre vat of this stuff will explode all at once, causing a rift in the time-space continuum that allows Species 8472 to emerge and exact retribution for bursting their cozy bubble.
Just as long as Seven-of-Nine shows up to fight them, I'd be okay with that.
Most people already have enough information on the internet that if someone wanted to find them, they could be found.
To be found, most people only need to expose their real name, and from that a great deal of "Private" information is already available on the net. If I know where you work, what town you live in, it is even easier to find all sorts of information about you.
Nothing on the web is "private", it is ALL public. That is what it was designed for.
BINGO!
The internet is anything but "Private". It is a "PUBLIC" network. Putting things on MyFace or Spacebook, and even the stupid twits tweeting on twitter are all exposing themselves better than the perv in the park ever could.
I have a Facebook account, and it doesn't use my real name, uses a throwaway email address, doesn't contain any personal information, and I don't use it for "social networking" at all.
So, why do I have it? To keep the idiots from asking me "Do you have a Facebook". I tell them Yeah I do, and not lie.
I tell them if they can find me, they can add me. If they really are my friends, they don't need facebook to talk to me.
So, if you're reading this post, and can find me on facebook, great. Send me a note you're from slashdot, and I'll add you. You already have all the information needed to find me. And good luck with that.
Right, because traditional news doesn't lie.
NYTIMES, Dan Rather, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, John Stewart ....
Everyone lies. Learn to adjust your filter better and you'll realize that. Or as you probably call these "lies" .... "honest errors".
If you want examples, I'll be happy to show you. Including the reports by traditional news sources about the DC protests that were equally fallacious. Or how about the "White, gun toting, racist protester" that just about every news organization showed, and commented on, except Fox? If you didn't watch FOX, you'd never know it was a black guy they were commenting on, carefully edited to adjust for the Bias the news organization wanted to show (White people carry guns and hate Obama).
Or how about another recent example of Charlie Gibson not knowing ANYTHING about ACORN scandal? Oh right, because that was FOX driven news.
Or how about Charlie Rangel being put in charge of the Tax System, even though he forgot about 4 apartments and his house in the Bahamas on his taxes. Or Geitner. Or "Lets teach the kids how to fist" Kevin Jennings as safe schools czar? or climategate or ...
Now, if you average the Traditional news with Fox News, somewhere in between you'll realize is the truth. News bias is as much as what IS covered as it is about what ISN'T covered. And if you don't get your news from a variety of sources, even if they are biased, you'd never know.
And if you think "Fox News" is the "what others are thinking" you'd be right, but it also shows how little respect you have for differing opinions, which is typical of elitists, and is shown for their absolute distain for "Flyover Country", as if everyone should think a believe like NY City, or Hollywood (Think gun control).
The point being is that our views are tainted by our "reality". Expand your reality and your views will probably change with it. What is that left wing bumper sticker saying .... "Minds are like Parachutes, they only work when they are open", or is it "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out" ;)
So, you're advocating reverting to uncivilized fucking, to show how civilized you are?
o.O
The Telco's are doing what the government has been doing, namely taking billions(Trillions) of dollars and not actually doing anything useful with it.
You want to complain, complain to the Politicians who dreamed this shit up. Cash for clunkers is a good example was a joke, costing $24,000 per clunker, one could buy a nice new car for that.
And now, they are trying to be just as efficient with "healthcare". Good luck with that.
There, fixed it for you.
Yes, I agree. However, there is a whole other side to the argument, namely why does the iNet need to be so freaking dangerous in the first place?
BTW, the iNet is just a symptom of the problems, not the cause of it. Our society has lost something; politeness, decency, integrity, honor. It has lost all of these things in the name of the asshat cry of "but there is no law against it".
I guess if you want to live there, then fine, but I don't have to like it.
You know, this post just sums up the problem for me. People who randomly talk about sex with strangers are the problem. I can't think of a situation where I would randomly talk about sex with anyone I don't know.
I'm not a prude or anything, I just think that this is just a sign of how meaningless sex has become, and now people are acting like dogs in heat, trying to mate with anything that moves.
Then how would you tell your daughter to "haul her ass home" for dinner?
Yup, Amazon and Publishers are both "middle men", between Authors and Customers.
My guess, is that at least ONE middle man between the two is ideal, a bazaar, a single place where authors can meet and sell to their customers. It would require standards.
I can even seeing a couple three alternative choices out there, including Amazon and the Publisher's Marketplace, and perhaps one built by and for authors.
Layers and layers of "middle men" are not needed anymore. I am about to self publish a book, so I would love to have a couple options available where I can market it, directly. I really don't want to tied to Amazon/Kindle if I don't have to be.
I didn't ignore your point. Your point misses the point.
They (Comcast et al) are using the resources they have, and people are f'in whining about it.
They want their full 25MB connection without any QoS applied. Or are you just not reading the threads.
They want their BitTorrents running at 25MB (or whatever) without any throttling.
Over subscriptions are based on average loads and peak loads, and statistical analysis. BitTorrent Clients skew the stats. And mostly people are complaining about bittorrent or other "file sharing" applications. They are using bandwith that they themselves are not actually "using" (hence the "sharing" part.
Look, I'm not complaining about filesharing per se, just those who want to seed and saturate their connection for whatever ego boosting they think they deserve for doing it.
If they throttled the torrent to a "reasonable" level, they could benefit the torrent community, while not being a asshat to everyone else who has to share the same resources.
Yeah, you can be an asshat, but just realize asshats screw it up for everyone else. If that is your goal, then by all means, go ahead and be an asshat.
Yeah, because a 1.5 mb T1 is just like multiple routed GB (or 10GB) connections.
What you fail to not realize is that your setup doesn't "scale" to ISP backbone levels. Yeah, I agree that it probably works for your office setup, but it doesn't work at ISP levels.
It isn't a lie, it is accepted business practices. You don't want what you're really asking for. You want 10mb for $24.95, not the dedicated 10mb for $1500.
If you REALLY wanted dedicated 10mb connection, you'd ask for it, with QoS and SLA agreements, in short, you're asking for BUSINESS CLASS SERVICE not the Consumer Class versions.
Yes, most service providers offer this service, it is just that most people really wants to pay for it.
Warning, Car Analogy Ahead:
You're like the guy who buys a F150 truck with the smallest engine, and then complains that they can't tow their big-ass boat up the hill very well, even though the "Tow Rating" says it should.
And you burn up your engine / transmission early because you do it every weekend. Should FORD be sued because they advertised it wrong? Or are you an just an idiot using consumer toys for commercial duty?
Over selling isn't wrong, it is necessary for services like this. The fact is, all service providers oversell their capacity. The trick is to manage the overselling to a ratio that on average, within a specific scope, doesn't cause bandwidth jams for a prescribed statistical level.
Having run an ISP, the oversell ratio is about 10:1 - 15:1 depending on who your subscribers are, and their usage patterns. This means you can get 10-12 people on a data circuit that is really designed to handle 1 fully loaded client. This statistical usage only works at large scales, and actually as the scale increases, may raise the over subscription to 20 or 25 to one.
I guarantee you that if everyone wanted to Torrent all the time, at full speed, the internet could not handle the traffic. It wasn't designed to. It has been over sold.
Bittorrent is not normal traffic pattern. A Torrent is a congestion point on the internet, at a place where one is not expected. Most people don't need 80 gigabytes of streaming data, day in and day out. If this were DVD movies, you'd be downloading more movies than you could watch.
I don't have any complaints for ISPs that throttle Torrents and take other measures against "high usage" users, who are file sharing. I'm not against filesharing, I'm against idiots who cause congestion because they don't know how to configure Bittorrent client to be "reasonable".
so, what you're saying is that these are not left wing enough for you?
Gotcha
I think you've misunderstood my point.
I don't get my news from Fox. I don't get it from NYT, the BBC, PBS or anywhere else like that.
I prefer my news raw and unfiltered by news organizations. My point is News organizations are slanting news coverage, by definition.
The internet makes news gathering interestingly easy for just about anyone to "gather" their own "news".
I subscribe to a wide variety of RSS feeds(news sites, Blogs, Drudge etc), to get my "news". The intersting thing about this approach is that I can usually find the sources and quotes directly from first hand sources, unbiased and unfiltered.
I used the Dan Rather example because I knew three or four days before the "news" organizations picked up on it, that someone had figured out it was Microsoft Word document, not the "original" Rather believed it was. Mainstream news only picked it up after the internet caught them with their pants down.
I also know when "thousands" of protesters are only a couple dozen Liberal protesters, and when a 'few hundred' people are really tens of thousands of "teabaggers".
Yeah, it is funny how people see the news they want. And yeah, I know I'm not going to change your mind, but perhaps you'll start looking at the "news" differently