...but ensure the police have easy access to the 'source' metadata for all accounts. It wouldn't be hard for Twitter (for example) to provide special user accounts to all police forces that can show the IP address and date and time, plus linked accounts (eg those used from the same IP) and similar. Then instead fo having to ask the site ops who someone was, the police can look it up themselves and then ask the relevant ISPs for that IPs account details.
The police? Since when did being a troll or an obnoxious asshole become criminal?
As Louis Brandeis (correctly, IMHO) pointed out:
"If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." [emphasis added]
Freedom of speech/expression is critical to a free society. Assuming that one day we have a free society (AFAICT, we've been going backwards recently), it's important that we don't stifle the expression of others -- regardless of how obnoxious/nasty/moronic/trollish they are.
elliptic. 1. pertaining to or having the form of an ellipse.
You're still not correct, but I should have said "plane of the ecliptic," (or "ecliptic plane") rather than just "ecliptic." My apologies for any confusion. However, "elliptic plane" refers to any planar ellipsoid surface, while "plane of the ecliptic" specifically refers to the region in which the sun and the vast majority of other matter in our solar system resides.
That region is a three-dimensional ellipsoid (an example of a planar surface in the shape of an ellipse), is correctly referred to as the "plane of the ecliptic" or the "ecliptic plane" not the "elliptic plane."
I'm sorry I got your panties in a bunch, but you were incorrect. Call me an Astronomy Nazi if you like, but nomenclature is relevant, IMHO.
Regardless, it's quite an interesting conundrum. I suppose it's possible that high-energy collisions melted the material which would become the asteroid and it coalesced into solid chunk(s) which are unaffected by the high rotation rate.
Critics have argued that the program is too hard to sign up for, that eligibility criteria should be less strict, and that further requirements should be implemented if Comcast is allowed to buy Time Warner Cable.
[Emphasis Added]
Regardless of Comcast's record of "helping" the poor or any other "requirements" to be levied against Comcast, they should not be allowed to purchase TWC under any circumstances. That would concentrate far too much "last mile" power into too few hands.
Of course, that's the point so the deal will go through and we'll have another win for regulatory capture.
Do you have a point? Not only does that link NOT point to wooden houses (there is one 6600 square foot brick home estimated at $10,414,740), it doesn't provide an empty property price for comparison.
Yes, I have a point. The point is that you're talking out of your ass.
Several of the properties listed were over the $700,000 figure you mentioned, and none of them were mansions. If you factor in the size of the buildings (i.e., number of apartments/building), your hogwash is exposed for what it is.
Granted NYC is a special case, but you spoke in absolutes. Tokyo is worse. Much. As is London or Paris or certain neighborhoods in SF and Boston.
If you want to research lot costs, knock yourself out. At least your written diarrhea won't be clogging up the Intertubes while you do so.
Then I'm sure you won't mind when I call you an idiot, because the question is obviously if being abusive is morally correct and helpful. No one's saying you *can't* act like a jerk, they're saying you shouldn't, especially when holding a respected position.
Please. Speak your mind. If you don't like what I say, say something about it.
I would point out that context is an important part of any communication. I emphatically did not say that I think being verbally obnoxious, abusive, or as you put it, act like a jerk was a good idea, nor did I advocate it.
My point, since you obviously didn't get it the first time, was that if you limit one person's expression (whether that be via law, custom, culture or social pressure), you diminish us all, and set a dangerous precedent.
What is more, your morality is not my morality. Nor is it anyone else's. Morality is our behavior based on the moral choices each of us makes when confronted with a moral choice. That is not a group activity. Each individual must make their own moral choices and be willing to accept responsibility for the actions they take based on their individual moral choices.
I specifically noted that it is an open question as to whether Linus Torvalds' speech is helpful or not. But it's not my place (nor is it yours or the GP's) to attempt to restrict Mr. Torvalds' freedom of expression. If you don't like what he says, say so. Even better, explain why you don't like it. Perhaps you'll convince him.
In case you didn't notice, you didn't reply to what the GP said. You replied to a twisted version of it. A straw man version of it, one might even say.
What is more, I replied to SuperBanana's assertion that:
I specifically said: it's fine to tell people they did something wrong. What you may not do is be abusive.
Where exactly did I twist things in my response? How is my response a straw man? Perhaps I'm just a bit slow, but I don't get it.
N.B. This is more rope for you. Please, by all means, take it.
In case you didn't notice, you didn't reply to what the GP said. You replied to a twisted version of it. A straw man version of it, one might even say.
Your complaint about my word choice is wrong too. Strawman indeed.
Please carry on and don't take anything I wrote here as an admonition to cease expressing yourself. I would recommend that you give a little more thought to the things you say, folks might take you a bit more seriously if you did.
Justice Brandeis was and is correct that "... the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
No you can't, because the existence of abuse is dependant on the perceptions of person who believes they have been abused. It is not possible to abuse a rational person, you are simply correct or incorrect in your claims and they way you package the data is just a question of efficiency.
So has Linus made and incorrect claim and or done so inefficiently? I'd say no, the message was accurate, clear and memorable.
If people feel that Linus is being abusive they are in the wrong industry, or they can go and write their own OS, cuddlinix.
An excellent point, which fits nicely with the claim that the remedy is more speech, not censorship. And "Political Correctness" is a framework for cultural censorship.
That's not to say that I think courtesy and politeness are passe. Quite the contrary, in fact. However, Linus has continued to speak plainly, does not suffer fools gladly, and generally embeds (at least IME) his sharp (and often salty) comments in a matrix of humor and good sense.
Strawman argument. Nobody except you has posited that "all opinions are valid", and nobody suggested that criticisms can't be made. You invented that position to attack it.
I specifically said: it's fine to tell people they did something wrong. What you may not do is be abusive.
Actually, I can be abusive if I choose to be. It may not win me many friends and it may alienate the ones I do have, but I can certainly do so if I want.
Whether or not Linus advances Linux because of, or in spite of, being abusive is an open question.
As Louis Brandeis (and correctly, IMHO) pointed out, "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
Note that I most certainly did not say that those who disagree with me are probably brain-dead. I said that if the examples I gave weren't enough to elucidate my point that:
You were trying to drive into me your point that I hadn't said anything to the contrary about. Yes, calling people "brain-dead" because they don't accept your point is insulting and non-productive.
Actually, I wasn't responding to you in particular. Your post prompted me to express my thoughts about symmetrical bandwidth in general, and was not meant as a jab at you. Sigh.
Are you feeling a bit stressed today?
You cannot drop the insulting attitude even after it is pointed out to you and you pretend that you didn't mean it in the first place.
Actually, I can proceed as I choose. As can you (not pretending to give you permission, just pointing out what is). If you choose to interpret my statements in a way I didn't intend, that's your privilege. Language is inexact and without other, non-language cues as to my, as you put it, "attitude" I can see why you might interpret my writing that way. I suspect that your idea that I have some axe to grind with you (which I assure you, I don't) is based on the fact we disagree.
Your assessment of my state of mind is of no concern to me. Feel free to interpret me (or not) as you like. It doesn't irk me that you think I'm being disingenuous, although it does raise the idea that perhaps I should be more explicit in the future. In any case, please do carry on. Once again, have a nice day!
I could go on, but if you don't get the idea by now, you're probably brain-dead.
I get the idea that you become insulting when someone doesn't value symmetric data service as much as you do. Was there another point, because if there was your insulting tone did a good job of masking it.
Note that I most certainly did not say that those who disagree with me are probably brain-dead. I said that if the examples I gave weren't enough to elucidate my point that:
It seems to me that providing symmetric high-speed connections is critical to the future of free speech, innovation, creative output and communications the world over.
I don't count disagreeing with me as not getting the idea. Given your response, you clearly did "get the idea" even though you disagree.
It seems you took offense at something not meant for you. Are you feeling a bit stressed today? Perhaps a cold drink, a massage, and some soothing music will calm you. Or not. It's not my concern. Nor is the fact that you disagree with me. I'm okay with that too.
I asserted that symmetric bandwidth was important to our society in a variety of ways, and gave several (IMHO clear and concise) examples as to why I believe that. Take from that what you will. Or not. Either way, have a nice day!
A strong nation ID card would help such that even casual employment was not possible without prior approval by local police would go a long way towards stopping illegals from having the desire to get here. Yet businesses love lowering the wage pool by flooding illegal immigrants into the nation. I wonder just how much the price of groceries would jump if illegal farm labor was shut down.
And the absolute bottom line is that reproduction as well as immigration degrades the quality of life for all of us. We need strict population size control.
You're absolutely right. Those people don't deserve to live here, thinking they can come to this country and have their descendants live here too! And all those wetback children using our diapers are a disgrace! We Americans have been here since the beginning of the American continent, formed as the super-continent Pangaea broke up starting about 175 million years ago. Immigrants must be stopped. They never gave us anything but trouble. But why stop with just keeping out the immigrants and limiting procreation (that's worked out really well in China, no?)? Let's get Swiftian on their asses! MMMM babies!
"Fair" is a very subjective word. Who says it is fair to have everyone paying for service that they wont' use? Most people don't need the same upstream speed as they need down. Not even those who are using Netflix or downloading large Linux distributions need the same up as down. Only those sending out large amounts of data will see any difference, and that's only if the transmission is monitored in real-time and not just a background task.
As someone else pointed out, this change will make very little difference in the load imbalance at the peering points since most people aren't hitting an upload limit to start with.
It seems to me that providing symmetric high-speed connections is critical to the future of free speech, innovation, creative output and communications the world over.
When I can serve up my documentary on government malfeasance and allow dozens, if not hundreds of other people to pull my content easily -- and those folks can then host it for tens or hundreds of thousands more people, it becomes much harder for the "big lie" to succeed.
When I can host my own "social network" that links to those people I give a crap about, and there's no corporate slime drooling all over my personal data because I own *and* host it (think Diaspora) and my friends and connections host their own servers that I can connect or not connect with -- at my discretion, some semblance of privacy is recovered.
When I can write my own software or music or literature and distribute it without the (economic) censorship of the corporate world stifling me or that same crowd sucking up most of the profits, innovation and creativity will blossom.
I could go on, but if you don't get the idea by now, you're probably brain-dead.
...The owner will have to decide between passing the overhead to the customer by raising rates (potentially losing customers due to the rate hike) or terminating a helper plus working longer hours to compensate. This type of hard choice happens all the time for small businesses anytime a major unexpected change occurs in the mechanics of the world that power that business. Computer repair shops weren't doing so hot a few years ago when Thailand flooded and new hard drive prices literally doubled overnight, for example; I wonder how many of them went out of business because of the spike.
What you're leaving out is that just as that employer is required to pay more, all the other employers are required to do so as well. This eliminates the crux of your main argument. No additional pressures are put on the business, since all other like businesses need to conform to the same standard. It's possible that prices might rise as a result, depending on the profit margins desired by the business owner.
What happens when more people have more income? Perhaps they'll be able to afford goods and services they were unable to afford in the past, or weren't able to purchase in the quantities desired/required without the wage increases.
Applying minimum wage hikes (perhaps $.50/hour each year in addition to increases to address inflation, until the minimum wage is, in fact, a living wage) would drive folks who don't save to spend more, driving consumer demand and pulling the economy along with it.
Feel free to disagree, but don't expect me to subscribe to your (IMHO) incorrect assessment of the situation.
No, it really wasn't.
The internet was invented to be an interesting communication protocol.
Later on, commercial entities and the general public got connected to it.
For a _long_ time, it was.edu (as latter became) only.
If a city or state wanted to have a public utility type state owned ISP instead of the current craze of profit/rent seeking privately owned ISP, this would incentivize the status quo.
In general, don't do anything that isn't your core business. Or another way of saying it, Do What Only You Can Do.
If you are an insurance company, is building and maintaining hardware your business? No, not in the slightest. You have no more business maintaining computer hardware as you have maintaining printing presses to print your own claims forms.
Maintaining hardware and the rest of the infrastructure stack however, is the business of Amazon AWS, Windows Azure, etc. The "fantasy" you're referring to is the crazy idea that you, as some kind of God SysAdmin, can out-perform the world's top infrastructure providers at maintaining infrastructure. Even if you were the best SysAdmin alive on the planet, you can't scale very far.
Sure, any of those providers can (and do, frequently) fail. Still, they are better than you can ever hope to be, especially once you scale past a handful of servers. If you are concerned that they still fail, that's good, yet it's still a problem worst addressed by taking the hardware in house. A much better solution is to build your deployments to be cloud vendor agnostic: Be able to run on AWS or Azure (or both, and maybe a few other friends too) either all the time by default or at the flip of a (frequently tested) switch.
Even building in multi-cloud redundancy is far easier, cheaper, and more reliable than you could ever hope to build from scratch on your own. That's just the reality of modern computing.
There are reasons to build on premises still, but they are few and far between. Especially now that cloud providers are becoming PCI, SOX, and even HIPAA capable and certified.
Yes. AWS, Azure, etc. are focused on (and are actually pretty good at) providing compute services (whether that be PaaS or straight-up VMs). However, what they are not is contractually responsible for the safekeeping or integrity of your data.
There are definitely use cases for using "someone else's servers." Use them for external-facing resources like a web presence, customer portal, extranet services or even email. But when it comes to business critical systems and data, no one has a more compelling motive to secure and maintain them than an internal IT staff.
I imagine you'll disagree with me, which is fine. I would point out that despite the costs of implementing and maintaining a highly availabile internal virtualization environment, many of those costs are significantly offset by the usage and maintenance contracts as well as network connectivity required to support internal access to "someone else's servers."
In the end, it's a matter of balancing the costs against the criticality and confidentiality of the data, IMHO.
Assuming it would require me to provide personal information, remind me not to do business with whatever company you work for. Then again, if you're a shill for a "cloud" (marketing-speak for "someone else's servers), I understand. Either way, carry on.
Slashdot Mirror
...but ensure the police have easy access to the 'source' metadata for all accounts. It wouldn't be hard for Twitter (for example) to provide special user accounts to all police forces that can show the IP address and date and time, plus linked accounts (eg those used from the same IP) and similar. Then instead fo having to ask the site ops who someone was, the police can look it up themselves and then ask the relevant ISPs for that IPs account details.
The police? Since when did being a troll or an obnoxious asshole become criminal?
As Louis Brandeis (correctly, IMHO) pointed out:
Freedom of speech/expression is critical to a free society. Assuming that one day we have a free society (AFAICT, we've been going backwards recently), it's important that we don't stifle the expression of others -- regardless of how obnoxious/nasty/moronic/trollish they are.
Presumably, you meant the ecliptic
No. From reference.com:
elliptic. 1. pertaining to or having the form of an ellipse.
You're still not correct, but I should have said "plane of the ecliptic," (or "ecliptic plane") rather than just "ecliptic." My apologies for any confusion. However, "elliptic plane" refers to any planar ellipsoid surface, while "plane of the ecliptic" specifically refers to the region in which the sun and the vast majority of other matter in our solar system resides.
That region is a three-dimensional ellipsoid (an example of a planar surface in the shape of an ellipse), is correctly referred to as the "plane of the ecliptic" or the "ecliptic plane" not the "elliptic plane."
I'm sorry I got your panties in a bunch, but you were incorrect. Call me an Astronomy Nazi if you like, but nomenclature is relevant, IMHO.
the whole thing flew off as one piece from some supernova explosion
I didn't read TFA but is it's in the elliptic plane, cruising along in the same general direction as everything, it originated in this solar system.
Presumably, you meant the ecliptic not the elliptic plane .
That said, you are likely correct that the asteroid formed via accretion in the protoplanetary disk, rather than being ejected from a supernova.
Regardless, it's quite an interesting conundrum. I suppose it's possible that high-energy collisions melted the material which would become the asteroid and it coalesced into solid chunk(s) which are unaffected by the high rotation rate.
From TFS:
[Emphasis Added]
Regardless of Comcast's record of "helping" the poor or any other "requirements" to be levied against Comcast, they should not be allowed to purchase TWC under any circumstances. That would concentrate far too much "last mile" power into too few hands.
Of course, that's the point so the deal will go through and we'll have another win for regulatory capture.
Do you have a point? Not only does that link NOT point to wooden houses (there is one 6600 square foot brick home estimated at $10,414,740), it doesn't provide an empty property price for comparison.
Yes, I have a point. The point is that you're talking out of your ass.
Several of the properties listed were over the $700,000 figure you mentioned, and none of them were mansions. If you factor in the size of the buildings (i.e., number of apartments/building), your hogwash is exposed for what it is.
Granted NYC is a special case, but you spoke in absolutes. Tokyo is worse. Much. As is London or Paris or certain neighborhoods in SF and Boston.
If you want to research lot costs, knock yourself out. At least your written diarrhea won't be clogging up the Intertubes while you do so.
Unless it's a huge mansion, you're not paying $700K for the house. You're paying the bulk of that for the real property the house sits on.
Eh, not so much
So there!
That takes me way back! I have some Epsilon 3.3 install disks around here somewhere -- perhaps I'll fire it up.
Then again, it's was just emacs for DOS/Windows.
Then I'm sure you won't mind when I call you an idiot, because the question is obviously if being abusive is morally correct and helpful. No one's saying you *can't* act like a jerk, they're saying you shouldn't, especially when holding a respected position.
Please. Speak your mind. If you don't like what I say, say something about it.
I would point out that context is an important part of any communication. I emphatically did not say that I think being verbally obnoxious, abusive, or as you put it, act like a jerk was a good idea, nor did I advocate it.
My point, since you obviously didn't get it the first time, was that if you limit one person's expression (whether that be via law, custom, culture or social pressure), you diminish us all, and set a dangerous precedent.
What is more, your morality is not my morality. Nor is it anyone else's. Morality is our behavior based on the moral choices each of us makes when confronted with a moral choice. That is not a group activity. Each individual must make their own moral choices and be willing to accept responsibility for the actions they take based on their individual moral choices.
I specifically noted that it is an open question as to whether Linus Torvalds' speech is helpful or not. But it's not my place (nor is it yours or the GP's) to attempt to restrict Mr. Torvalds' freedom of expression. If you don't like what he says, say so. Even better, explain why you don't like it. Perhaps you'll convince him.
Ah, the old may/may not can/can not confusion.
In case you didn't notice, you didn't reply to what the GP said. You replied to a twisted version of it. A straw man version of it, one might even say.
What is more, I replied to SuperBanana's assertion that:
Where exactly did I twist things in my response? How is my response a straw man? Perhaps I'm just a bit slow, but I don't get it.
N.B. This is more rope for you. Please, by all means, take it.
Ah, the old may/may not can/can not confusion.
In case you didn't notice, you didn't reply to what the GP said. You replied to a twisted version of it. A straw man version of it, one might even say.
Your complaint about my word choice is wrong too. Strawman indeed.
Please carry on and don't take anything I wrote here as an admonition to cease expressing yourself. I would recommend that you give a little more thought to the things you say, folks might take you a bit more seriously if you did.
Justice Brandeis was and is correct that "... the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
No you can't, because the existence of abuse is dependant on the perceptions of person who believes they have been abused. It is not possible to abuse a rational person, you are simply correct or incorrect in your claims and they way you package the data is just a question of efficiency.
So has Linus made and incorrect claim and or done so inefficiently? I'd say no, the message was accurate, clear and memorable.
If people feel that Linus is being abusive they are in the wrong industry, or they can go and write their own OS, cuddlinix.
An excellent point, which fits nicely with the claim that the remedy is more speech, not censorship. And "Political Correctness" is a framework for cultural censorship.
That's not to say that I think courtesy and politeness are passe. Quite the contrary, in fact. However, Linus has continued to speak plainly, does not suffer fools gladly, and generally embeds (at least IME) his sharp (and often salty) comments in a matrix of humor and good sense.
Actually, I can be abusive if I choose to be.
No you cannot. We have extensive laws against it.
How's this? Fuck you. You gonna arrest me now?
Strawman argument. Nobody except you has posited that "all opinions are valid", and nobody suggested that criticisms can't be made. You invented that position to attack it.
I specifically said: it's fine to tell people they did something wrong. What you may not do is be abusive.
Actually, I can be abusive if I choose to be. It may not win me many friends and it may alienate the ones I do have, but I can certainly do so if I want.
Whether or not Linus advances Linux because of, or in spite of, being abusive is an open question.
As Louis Brandeis (and correctly, IMHO) pointed out, "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
After all these years of running SETI@Home, we still haven't found any extraterrestial TV signals carrying alien porn. :/
It was on the tee-vee, friend. :)
Note that I most certainly did not say that those who disagree with me are probably brain-dead. I said that if the examples I gave weren't enough to elucidate my point that:
You were trying to drive into me your point that I hadn't said anything to the contrary about. Yes, calling people "brain-dead" because they don't accept your point is insulting and non-productive.
Actually, I wasn't responding to you in particular. Your post prompted me to express my thoughts about symmetrical bandwidth in general, and was not meant as a jab at you. Sigh.
Are you feeling a bit stressed today?
You cannot drop the insulting attitude even after it is pointed out to you and you pretend that you didn't mean it in the first place.
Actually, I can proceed as I choose. As can you (not pretending to give you permission, just pointing out what is). If you choose to interpret my statements in a way I didn't intend, that's your privilege. Language is inexact and without other, non-language cues as to my, as you put it, "attitude" I can see why you might interpret my writing that way. I suspect that your idea that I have some axe to grind with you (which I assure you, I don't) is based on the fact we disagree.
Your assessment of my state of mind is of no concern to me. Feel free to interpret me (or not) as you like. It doesn't irk me that you think I'm being disingenuous, although it does raise the idea that perhaps I should be more explicit in the future. In any case, please do carry on. Once again, have a nice day!
I could go on, but if you don't get the idea by now, you're probably brain-dead.
I get the idea that you become insulting when someone doesn't value symmetric data service as much as you do. Was there another point, because if there was your insulting tone did a good job of masking it.
Note that I most certainly did not say that those who disagree with me are probably brain-dead. I said that if the examples I gave weren't enough to elucidate my point that:
I don't count disagreeing with me as not getting the idea. Given your response, you clearly did "get the idea" even though you disagree.
It seems you took offense at something not meant for you. Are you feeling a bit stressed today? Perhaps a cold drink, a massage, and some soothing music will calm you. Or not. It's not my concern. Nor is the fact that you disagree with me. I'm okay with that too.
I asserted that symmetric bandwidth was important to our society in a variety of ways, and gave several (IMHO clear and concise) examples as to why I believe that. Take from that what you will. Or not. Either way, have a nice day!
In 2013 almost a million people immigrated to the US legally.
I know. Recognizing sarcasm isn't your strong suit, eh?
A strong nation ID card would help such that even casual employment was not possible without prior approval by local police would go a long way towards stopping illegals from having the desire to get here. Yet businesses love lowering the wage pool by flooding illegal immigrants into the nation. I wonder just how much the price of groceries would jump if illegal farm labor was shut down. And the absolute bottom line is that reproduction as well as immigration degrades the quality of life for all of us. We need strict population size control.
You're absolutely right. Those people don't deserve to live here, thinking they can come to this country and have their descendants live here too! And all those wetback children using our diapers are a disgrace! We Americans have been here since the beginning of the American continent, formed as the super-continent Pangaea broke up starting about 175 million years ago. Immigrants must be stopped. They never gave us anything but trouble. But why stop with just keeping out the immigrants and limiting procreation (that's worked out really well in China, no?)? Let's get Swiftian on their asses! MMMM babies!
"Fair" is a very subjective word. Who says it is fair to have everyone paying for service that they wont' use? Most people don't need the same upstream speed as they need down. Not even those who are using Netflix or downloading large Linux distributions need the same up as down. Only those sending out large amounts of data will see any difference, and that's only if the transmission is monitored in real-time and not just a background task.
As someone else pointed out, this change will make very little difference in the load imbalance at the peering points since most people aren't hitting an upload limit to start with.
It seems to me that providing symmetric high-speed connections is critical to the future of free speech, innovation, creative output and communications the world over.
When I can serve up my documentary on government malfeasance and allow dozens, if not hundreds of other people to pull my content easily -- and those folks can then host it for tens or hundreds of thousands more people, it becomes much harder for the "big lie" to succeed.
When I can host my own "social network" that links to those people I give a crap about, and there's no corporate slime drooling all over my personal data because I own *and* host it (think Diaspora) and my friends and connections host their own servers that I can connect or not connect with -- at my discretion, some semblance of privacy is recovered.
When I can write my own software or music or literature and distribute it without the (economic) censorship of the corporate world stifling me or that same crowd sucking up most of the profits, innovation and creativity will blossom.
I could go on, but if you don't get the idea by now, you're probably brain-dead.
...The owner will have to decide between passing the overhead to the customer by raising rates (potentially losing customers due to the rate hike) or terminating a helper plus working longer hours to compensate. This type of hard choice happens all the time for small businesses anytime a major unexpected change occurs in the mechanics of the world that power that business. Computer repair shops weren't doing so hot a few years ago when Thailand flooded and new hard drive prices literally doubled overnight, for example; I wonder how many of them went out of business because of the spike.
What you're leaving out is that just as that employer is required to pay more, all the other employers are required to do so as well. This eliminates the crux of your main argument. No additional pressures are put on the business, since all other like businesses need to conform to the same standard. It's possible that prices might rise as a result, depending on the profit margins desired by the business owner.
What happens when more people have more income? Perhaps they'll be able to afford goods and services they were unable to afford in the past, or weren't able to purchase in the quantities desired/required without the wage increases.
Applying minimum wage hikes (perhaps $.50/hour each year in addition to increases to address inflation, until the minimum wage is, in fact, a living wage) would drive folks who don't save to spend more, driving consumer demand and pulling the economy along with it.
Feel free to disagree, but don't expect me to subscribe to your (IMHO) incorrect assessment of the situation.
And since the Internet as we know it has become, thanks to scum-sucking advertizers, a hive of scum and villainy,
Headquartered at Mos Eisley, I presume?
No, it really wasn't. The internet was invented to be an interesting communication protocol. Later on, commercial entities and the general public got connected to it. For a _long_ time, it was .edu (as latter became) only.
Bzzzt! Wrong. Thanks for playing.
I'd love to see the "last mile" connection maintained by public utilities, breaking all cable company monopolies everywhere,
I couldn't agree more.
If a city or state wanted to have a public utility type state owned ISP instead of the current craze of profit/rent seeking privately owned ISP, this would incentivize the status quo.
There. FTFY.
In general, don't do anything that isn't your core business. Or another way of saying it, Do What Only You Can Do.
If you are an insurance company, is building and maintaining hardware your business? No, not in the slightest. You have no more business maintaining computer hardware as you have maintaining printing presses to print your own claims forms.
Maintaining hardware and the rest of the infrastructure stack however, is the business of Amazon AWS, Windows Azure, etc. The "fantasy" you're referring to is the crazy idea that you, as some kind of God SysAdmin, can out-perform the world's top infrastructure providers at maintaining infrastructure. Even if you were the best SysAdmin alive on the planet, you can't scale very far.
Sure, any of those providers can (and do, frequently) fail. Still, they are better than you can ever hope to be, especially once you scale past a handful of servers. If you are concerned that they still fail, that's good, yet it's still a problem worst addressed by taking the hardware in house. A much better solution is to build your deployments to be cloud vendor agnostic: Be able to run on AWS or Azure (or both, and maybe a few other friends too) either all the time by default or at the flip of a (frequently tested) switch.
Even building in multi-cloud redundancy is far easier, cheaper, and more reliable than you could ever hope to build from scratch on your own. That's just the reality of modern computing.
There are reasons to build on premises still, but they are few and far between. Especially now that cloud providers are becoming PCI, SOX, and even HIPAA capable and certified.
Yes. AWS, Azure, etc. are focused on (and are actually pretty good at) providing compute services (whether that be PaaS or straight-up VMs). However, what they are not is contractually responsible for the safekeeping or integrity of your data.
There are definitely use cases for using "someone else's servers." Use them for external-facing resources like a web presence, customer portal, extranet services or even email. But when it comes to business critical systems and data, no one has a more compelling motive to secure and maintain them than an internal IT staff.
I imagine you'll disagree with me, which is fine. I would point out that despite the costs of implementing and maintaining a highly availabile internal virtualization environment, many of those costs are significantly offset by the usage and maintenance contracts as well as network connectivity required to support internal access to "someone else's servers."
In the end, it's a matter of balancing the costs against the criticality and confidentiality of the data, IMHO.
Assuming it would require me to provide personal information, remind me not to do business with whatever company you work for. Then again, if you're a shill for a "cloud" (marketing-speak for "someone else's servers), I understand. Either way, carry on.