In a previous comment, someone postulated the idea that Apple did the lawsuits soley to drum up media buzz and would probably drop them altogether right after MacWorld.
I would tend to think that in light of recent events, that poster was dead-on accurate.
I think it's been stated before that he released this primarily as a POC and since 911 automatically sends officers to the doorstep, they are guaranteed to call Microsoft and complain.
Unlike other viruses where nothing damaging happens, this one actually got Microsoft to get their rears in action fixing real issues.
It doesn't help that IE exploits come out once a month and Microsoft takes anywhere from one to two months to fix them. Or in the case of some exploits, just ignores them.
Teligent spent $1.3bn in a year building its network but only signed up 35,500 customers by the time it filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
One of the biggest problems I have with government subsidized wireless access is the misconception that it can be done with minimal cost to taxpayers.
If it hasn't been done by the market yet, then it most likely cannot be done till you have the right market. Trying to push "free" wireless on people who will be paying the tax for it, and may or may not have access, is a pain. Especially if the people paying for it get tired of latency issues or cannot access it and have to keep paying for their already overpriced cable/dsl.
I also find it VERY interesting that this individual claims it will only cost $3 billion to cover 90% of the US. I'm assuming she means population, and I'd like to figure she gets to that number at $100,000 per zipcode (approximately 9,000+ zipcodes). That's $900 million for just the equipment. Half assets, 450 million, is for energy to keep them going. Double assets, $1.8 billion, is for employment to upkeep, handle network issues, etc. This estimate does not consider upgrades, maintenance, raises, or energy conservation. It's likely to need continual re-evaluation.
3 billion dollars paid for by 130 million taxpayers? (IRS estimates 130 million income taxes were filed in 2003) That's $23.07 per taxpayer, per year, regardless of whether you end up getting service or not. And regardless of the uptime or latency of said service. Sounds great, right? Ask the French about their "videophones".
I can see something like this working in Korea, but not the US.
I'm just glad the kind of practices they use (trawling the internet for emails) are illegal, although that doesn't mean much.
I know of no country that has stated it is illegal to obtain email addresses this way. Sending emails to the addresses after you've collected them this way may be illegal in some countries like the US, but collecting them is certainly not.
Copy/Paste from Google Cache (Scroll to the bottom-third of the page)
Note: Sorry the tables aren't lined up.
February 11, 2005 Eight years of email stats, pass 1 Posted by Marc Eisenstadt What's the reality behind the 'email overload' talk? Let's look at some numbers... personal numbers.
To kick things off, I've got a huge email archive. I started emailing in the early ArpaNet days, around 1972, and haven't stopped since. My archive has been extremely thorough for at least the past 12 years (and, in case you think I'm nuts for keeping all of these, my actual regret from a scientific/archive perspective is that I don't have the earlier ones too!). Why? Let's just say that one day I planned to do an analysis of it all... types of mails, social networks, the whole works. But things got a little out of hand.... (anyone lookin' for some data, give me a shout... but first read on)...
Most of this 'storage mania' was triggered by a casual comment in around 1992 or 1993 by Ron Baecker, of the University of Toronto, a longtime research colleague and acquaintance and someone whose work I have long admired and respected. Ron asked me, "given ultra-cheap storage and ultra-fast search, both clearly on their way, why would you ever need either to delete or indeed to accurately file/categorize your emails?"
OK, so as a little personal experiment, I decided to keep 'em, and to see what happened. The quick story is that migrating across machines, operating systems, and preferred email clients, plus being a bit cavalier about the whole thing, has meant that although all the emails are 'there' in various archive files, it takes a little work to get 'em all back in a harmonious form, that is with all headers intact and no duplicates (the main formats are Vax mails, Unix mails, Mac Eudora, PC Eudora, Outlook Express, and Outlook).
The longer story, with some data and preliminary analysis, begins like this:
Even though I haven't had the time or motivation thus far to put in the harmonization work required to get all the data in one format and with duplicates eliminated, I nevertheless thought that a little 'first pass' set of totals (with my estimate of their accuracy) would be interesting, and maybe even provide a little coarse empirical support for Stowe's "Just Say No To Email" campaign.
So I quickly eyeballed-and-tallied the most coherent of the archives, spanning eight years of emails, from January 1st 1997 to December 31st 2004. The totals are real enough, but the 'eyeballing' was needed to assess the approximate propotion of spam and duplication involved in the emails. A more detailed analysis later will enable me to do these more accurately. I've indicated my estimate of the margin for error in the third column, and my estimate for the percentage of spam received (and I mean real spam: i.e. either 'greedily-lookin-for-suckers' or 'low-down-mean-and-nasty spam', not conference announcements - you know what I'm talkin' about). For 2003, this number is precise, because I filtered off such spam using SpamAssassin, and counted them! 2004 spam numbers are an extrapolation, but the totals are accurate, as explained below. Here goes:
2003 is the most accurate, because (unlike earlier years when I was changing clients and machines) I have all emails in one clean format and all spam preserved, auto-filtered by SpamAssassin into a folder that I look at only a few times a year, scanning rapidly for false rejections. Incidentally, that falsely rejected email rate appears to be roughly 1 in 5000: good enough for me! By 2004, although I kep
IGE is probably one of the best things to happen to the Chinese economy. Thousands upon thousands of Chinese workers "farm" in-game items and make a living doing so.
IGE is also the best thing for those of us that do not spend 40+ hours a week playing these games. Not all of us are college or high school students anymore and cannot devote our lives to an MMORPG. Paying for levelling and items is our only alternative to keeping up with the other kids that play these games.
I read the article. I was expecting to hear some more solid facts on it.
For example, what is this phenomenon that shows up before major world events? If it's one's and zero's, what weird stuff is happening? Are more 1's showing up than 0's?
Instead. I get to RTFA and find that it actually says absolutely nothing about what it is that is indicating that these events are going to occur.
Also, there are a number of factors that can be taken to make the box "seem" as if it is predicting these numbers. For one, the range of time analyzed. For two, the proximity to the "world event". For 911, the article talks about sequences just shortly before the planes hit, making it sound like they were using a minute by minute or hour by hour comparison. For the tsunami, they talk about the week leading up to the tsunami. It would seem to me that if you had a world event, then went back and analyzed the data, you could conjure up something interesting after some time.
What I'd like to see is any mailing list chatter those who worked on this project had prior to 911 and the tsunami. Seeing things along the lines of: "Hey, did you check out the day by days lately? Looks like something big is going to happen!" before the tsunami would lend more credibility to their claims.
Also, it would be VERY interesting to see if what they claim as an indicator that 911 was going to happen is a sequence that has happened either previously or since, and what, if any events happened the day of.
My guess is they are being very selective and not releasing their actual data because the whole thing is hogwash.
Well, there are some other services the government has provided for so long that people simply do not question it anymore. Public roads, fire departments, and 911.
The reality is that other long-standing government services have been replaced or started to be replaced by commercial, like postal services and parks. Even FedEx now handles a good portion of the USPS.
What the government *really* needs to get out of is some of the restrictive FCC and zoning regulations. A good reason why cable companies have monopolies is their ABUSE of the government to prevent any possible competition from arrising.
While blame can be placed on the corporations for doing this, it doesn't help that we, as citizens, have provided a framework for these corporations to do so by asking the government to regulate that which should be left up to the free market.
A great deal of fear that anyone can do anything ends up resulting in less options over the long term.
It's -1, Redundant. Not -1, I_don't_agree. The history of driver ID usage that he states has absolutely no bearing on the future use. The first things cops ask for is your driver's license, even if you aren't driving.
Is it possible that this information could somehow be abused? Of course. Its possible to abuse any sort of personal information. Is it likely to bring 1984 crashing down around our ears? Hardly.
Instead of modding you down, I'm responding.
There are 3 main reasons why I object to this. 1) What I did in New Mexico 5 years ago has no bearing on what I'm doing in CA. 2) Those who are willing to give up a little liberty for safety deserve neither liberty nor saftey. 3) Cost.
I'm sorry, but the costs to implement this would be enormous and yet another wasteful spending run on the part of the new-era Republican government.
Ironically, the Czech Republic, Costa Rica, and other countries are actually heading in the opposite direction. I'm actually anticipating leaving this country for greener pastures sometime in the next 3 years.
I take some pretty huge offense towards this. You could have said "misinformation". I'm not Chicken Little, global warmning activists are.
"There is a huge consensus amongst models that global warming is in progress and will continue and get worse as more greenhouse gases are released."
Total human contributions to greenhouse gases account for only about 0.28% of the "greenhouse effect". Anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide (CO2) comprises about 0.117% of this total, and man-made sources of other gases ( methane, nitrous oxide (NOX), other misc. gases) contributes another 0.163%.
I'm done talking about this. It has become clear to me you are not in this field and do not want to start talking actual facts. You're going to have to do at least a tad bit more research outside of the "A" you got on the greenhouse gas report you did in high school.
Do you think Newton was the only individual who had a theory for gravity at the time? Because there can only be one "right" formula or law. It is, no doubt, based on a multitude of factors, but it's one formula or one equation to explain global temperature.
Right now you have thousands of climatologists all trying to say that their model for the formula is right; several of them negating the impact of the other variables and focusing on just one, carbon dioxide.
If an increase in carbon dioxide is impacting the temperature to increase 1 degree from 1900 to 2000, what stopped the consistent decreasing from 1850 to 1900?
Draw a line a mile long with mountains and valleys. Take a one foot by one foot square of it and predict what will be in the next one foot square.
I guarantee you I can find in that mile long line another one foot square similar to the one foot bye one foot square that you found and present the next one foot by one foot square that conflicts with the "results" you predict. And I can probably do that more than once.
The one foot square represents known and recorded temperature. The line represents the history of the earth's habitable temperature. It just goes to show you how pointless everything is.
If there's anything sad to be said, it's that the temperature over the last five hundred years has fallen and increased, with the biggest change in temperature from 1850 to 1900. It then dipped and came back up by 2000. The question should be, why the huge increase in temperature from 1850 to 1900, and the very small dip and return from 1900 to 2000.
They have been since 1970, at about 0.01 inch per year. The caps are not increasing their melting any, in fact, all signs point to "cyclical".
After all, the only way for the caps to grow in size is for precipitation to fall on the poles, and that's hard to come by when the area surrounding is made up of ice.
Using your logic, we should just charge people who want the service. Need the fire department? Well, they are currently billing at $85/hour/firefighter plus equipment and supplies.
Actually, I fail to see what is wrong with this. Why not have it this way? I could run this exact same service cheaper.
Also, did you know that the state and local fire departments aren't liable for any damage they do? Look it up, no state allows civil cases to be brought up against government-employed firefighters.
An examination of the private fire department in Scottsdale, Arizona found that, in comparison with nearby public-sector departments, it had the lowest per capita cost of fire service and one of the lowest fire incidence and loss records. In Denmark, the cost of private fire services was found to be only one-third as much as publicly provided services.
I'm not going to address the Time Warner issue. If you had even an inkling of the history of the cable market, you'd see the wheeling and dealing the cable companies have done to establish an oligarchy that has been confirmed and stamped "valid" by state and federal governments. It's exactly the kind of "government action" that people pleaded for and got. You'd also realize that if you don't think you are getting your measly $40 a month out of the service, you could be moving along to DSL or wireless. The government isn't going to solve your problems.
What I do know is that the city goes out of the way to maintain a good standard of service.
Oh really? Let's start hearing your favorite services the city is providing. For each one you give, cite and example of how you think it went over and above what they should provide. I, on the other hand, will give an example of a private organization that can do it better. This includes road maintenance and even emergency services. Go ahead, don't hold back. I won't.
Here's a taste, hope you enjoy: "In 2000, the city of Austin began marketing bottled water to the public for 'promotional purposes.' The water is merely city tap water, poured into tanker trucks and then bottled. Austin sells a case of 24 bottles for $6. Unfortunately, each case costs the city $8.90, so Austin loses $2.90 per case sold. Only a government monopoly, with no competition and no incentive to try harder, can sell tap water for more than gasoline, and still manage to lose money."
Here's how the government decides to implement a new "service":
In order to implement a new service we need X cents per taxpayer. Given X, we can service (10 * X) percent of the taypayers with this plan. Since we want this plan to be supported and only expect minimal resistance, we can get by with an increase of 6 cents per taxpayer for a coverage of %60 of the taxpayer base. %40 of the taxpayers will be paying for a service that they do not use or cannot use.
Slashdot Mirror
Outside of the US, global warming is a religion.
http://www.gravito.com/globalwarming
The above website is my own.
In a previous comment, someone postulated the idea that Apple did the lawsuits soley to drum up media buzz and would probably drop them altogether right after MacWorld.
I would tend to think that in light of recent events, that poster was dead-on accurate.
I think it's been stated before that he released this primarily as a POC and since 911 automatically sends officers to the doorstep, they are guaranteed to call Microsoft and complain.
Unlike other viruses where nothing damaging happens, this one actually got Microsoft to get their rears in action fixing real issues.
It doesn't help that IE exploits come out once a month and Microsoft takes anywhere from one to two months to fix them. Or in the case of some exploits, just ignores them.
Teligent spent $1.3bn in a year building its network but only signed up 35,500 customers by the time it filed for bankruptcy in 2001.
One of the biggest problems I have with government subsidized wireless access is the misconception that it can be done with minimal cost to taxpayers.
If it hasn't been done by the market yet, then it most likely cannot be done till you have the right market. Trying to push "free" wireless on people who will be paying the tax for it, and may or may not have access, is a pain. Especially if the people paying for it get tired of latency issues or cannot access it and have to keep paying for their already overpriced cable/dsl.
I also find it VERY interesting that this individual claims it will only cost $3 billion to cover 90% of the US. I'm assuming she means population, and I'd like to figure she gets to that number at $100,000 per zipcode (approximately 9,000+ zipcodes). That's $900 million for just the equipment. Half assets, 450 million, is for energy to keep them going. Double assets, $1.8 billion, is for employment to upkeep, handle network issues, etc. This estimate does not consider upgrades, maintenance, raises, or energy conservation. It's likely to need continual re-evaluation.
3 billion dollars paid for by 130 million taxpayers? (IRS estimates 130 million income taxes were filed in 2003) That's $23.07 per taxpayer, per year, regardless of whether you end up getting service or not. And regardless of the uptime or latency of said service. Sounds great, right? Ask the French about their "videophones".
I can see something like this working in Korea, but not the US.
I'm just glad the kind of practices they use (trawling the internet for emails) are illegal, although that doesn't mean much.
I know of no country that has stated it is illegal to obtain email addresses this way. Sending emails to the addresses after you've collected them this way may be illegal in some countries like the US, but collecting them is certainly not.
I remember a time when the size of my genitalia wasn't an issue.
I remember when I never had any Korean friends.
I remember a time when I went to the pharmacist for a drug I needed, not the pharmacist asking me which drugs I wanted to buy online.
I remember when consolidating a loan was a big decision instead of "just a click away!".
I remember a time where when I left high school, there was no chance in hell I'd ever have to hear from those nitwits again.
God, I miss those days.
Copy/Paste from Google Cache (Scroll to the bottom-third of the page)
Note: Sorry the tables aren't lined up.
February 11, 2005
Eight years of email stats, pass 1
Posted by Marc Eisenstadt
What's the reality behind the 'email overload' talk? Let's look at some numbers... personal numbers.
To kick things off, I've got a huge email archive. I started emailing in the early ArpaNet days, around 1972, and haven't stopped since. My archive has been extremely thorough for at least the past 12 years (and, in case you think I'm nuts for keeping all of these, my actual regret from a scientific/archive perspective is that I don't have the earlier ones too!). Why? Let's just say that one day I planned to do an analysis of it all... types of mails, social networks, the whole works. But things got a little out of hand.... (anyone lookin' for some data, give me a shout... but first read on)...
Most of this 'storage mania' was triggered by a casual comment in around 1992 or 1993 by Ron Baecker, of the University of Toronto, a longtime research colleague and acquaintance and someone whose work I have long admired and respected. Ron asked me, "given ultra-cheap storage and ultra-fast search, both clearly on their way, why would you ever need either to delete or indeed to accurately file/categorize your emails?"
OK, so as a little personal experiment, I decided to keep 'em, and to see what happened. The quick story is that migrating across machines, operating systems, and preferred email clients, plus being a bit cavalier about the whole thing, has meant that although all the emails are 'there' in various archive files, it takes a little work to get 'em all back in a harmonious form, that is with all headers intact and no duplicates (the main formats are Vax mails, Unix mails, Mac Eudora, PC Eudora, Outlook Express, and Outlook).
The longer story, with some data and preliminary analysis, begins like this:
Even though I haven't had the time or motivation thus far to put in the harmonization work required to get all the data in one format and with duplicates eliminated, I nevertheless thought that a little 'first pass' set of totals (with my estimate of their accuracy) would be interesting, and maybe even provide a little coarse empirical support for Stowe's "Just Say No To Email" campaign.
So I quickly eyeballed-and-tallied the most coherent of the archives, spanning eight years of emails, from January 1st 1997 to December 31st 2004. The totals are real enough, but the 'eyeballing' was needed to assess the approximate propotion of spam and duplication involved in the emails. A more detailed analysis later will enable me to do these more accurately. I've indicated my estimate of the margin for error in the third column, and my estimate for the percentage of spam received (and I mean real spam: i.e. either 'greedily-lookin-for-suckers' or 'low-down-mean-and-nasty spam', not conference announcements - you know what I'm talkin' about). For 2003, this number is precise, because I filtered off such spam using SpamAssassin, and counted them! 2004 spam numbers are an extrapolation, but the totals are accurate, as explained below. Here goes:
TABLE 1: Eisenstadt's 1997-2004 email totals
Year Emails received Est. Error Est. Spam
1997
4320 20%
2%
1998 3996 20% 3%
1999 6821 10% 5%
2000 7580 5% 6%
2001 6125 5% 7%
2002 6497 5% 10%
2003 13092 1% 37.6%
2004 13889 1% 40%
2003 is the most accurate, because (unlike earlier years when I was changing clients and machines) I have all emails in one clean format and all spam preserved, auto-filtered by SpamAssassin into a folder that I look at only a few times a year, scanning rapidly for false rejections. Incidentally, that falsely rejected email rate appears to be roughly 1 in 5000: good enough for me! By 2004, although I kep
IGE is probably one of the best things to happen to the Chinese economy. Thousands upon thousands of Chinese workers "farm" in-game items and make a living doing so.
IGE is also the best thing for those of us that do not spend 40+ hours a week playing these games. Not all of us are college or high school students anymore and cannot devote our lives to an MMORPG. Paying for levelling and items is our only alternative to keeping up with the other kids that play these games.
I read the article. I was expecting to hear some more solid facts on it.
For example, what is this phenomenon that shows up before major world events? If it's one's and zero's, what weird stuff is happening? Are more 1's showing up than 0's?
Instead. I get to RTFA and find that it actually says absolutely nothing about what it is that is indicating that these events are going to occur.
Also, there are a number of factors that can be taken to make the box "seem" as if it is predicting these numbers. For one, the range of time analyzed. For two, the proximity to the "world event". For 911, the article talks about sequences just shortly before the planes hit, making it sound like they were using a minute by minute or hour by hour comparison. For the tsunami, they talk about the week leading up to the tsunami. It would seem to me that if you had a world event, then went back and analyzed the data, you could conjure up something interesting after some time.
What I'd like to see is any mailing list chatter those who worked on this project had prior to 911 and the tsunami. Seeing things along the lines of: "Hey, did you check out the day by days lately? Looks like something big is going to happen!" before the tsunami would lend more credibility to their claims.
Also, it would be VERY interesting to see if what they claim as an indicator that 911 was going to happen is a sequence that has happened either previously or since, and what, if any events happened the day of.
My guess is they are being very selective and not releasing their actual data because the whole thing is hogwash.
Well, there are some other services the government has provided for so long that people simply do not question it anymore. Public roads, fire departments, and 911.
The reality is that other long-standing government services have been replaced or started to be replaced by commercial, like postal services and parks. Even FedEx now handles a good portion of the USPS.
What the government *really* needs to get out of is some of the restrictive FCC and zoning regulations. A good reason why cable companies have monopolies is their ABUSE of the government to prevent any possible competition from arrising.
While blame can be placed on the corporations for doing this, it doesn't help that we, as citizens, have provided a framework for these corporations to do so by asking the government to regulate that which should be left up to the free market.
A great deal of fear that anyone can do anything ends up resulting in less options over the long term.
It's -1, Redundant. Not -1, I_don't_agree. The history of driver ID usage that he states has absolutely no bearing on the future use. The first things cops ask for is your driver's license, even if you aren't driving.
The day has come for Anonymous P2P.
Why not use technologies like Tor (funded by the US government for FBI and CIA intelligence gathering anonymously), ANTS, Entropy, and Mnet?
Is it possible that this information could somehow be abused? Of course. Its possible to abuse any sort of personal information. Is it likely to bring 1984 crashing down around our ears? Hardly.
Instead of modding you down, I'm responding.
There are 3 main reasons why I object to this.
1) What I did in New Mexico 5 years ago has no bearing on what I'm doing in CA.
2) Those who are willing to give up a little liberty for safety deserve neither liberty nor saftey.
3) Cost.
I'm sorry, but the costs to implement this would be enormous and yet another wasteful spending run on the part of the new-era Republican government.
Ironically, the Czech Republic, Costa Rica, and other countries are actually heading in the opposite direction. I'm actually anticipating leaving this country for greener pastures sometime in the next 3 years.
"You are spreading FUD."
I take some pretty huge offense towards this. You could have said "misinformation". I'm not Chicken Little, global warmning activists are.
"There is a huge consensus amongst models that global warming is in progress and will continue and get worse as more greenhouse gases are released."
Total human contributions to greenhouse gases account for only about 0.28% of the "greenhouse effect". Anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide (CO2) comprises about 0.117% of this total, and man-made sources of other gases ( methane, nitrous oxide (NOX), other misc. gases) contributes another 0.163%.
I'm done talking about this. It has become clear to me you are not in this field and do not want to start talking actual facts. You're going to have to do at least a tad bit more research outside of the "A" you got on the greenhouse gas report you did in high school.
Do you think Newton was the only individual who had a theory for gravity at the time? Because there can only be one "right" formula or law. It is, no doubt, based on a multitude of factors, but it's one formula or one equation to explain global temperature.
Right now you have thousands of climatologists all trying to say that their model for the formula is right; several of them negating the impact of the other variables and focusing on just one, carbon dioxide.
If an increase in carbon dioxide is impacting the temperature to increase 1 degree from 1900 to 2000, what stopped the consistent decreasing from 1850 to 1900?
Draw a line a mile long with mountains and valleys. Take a one foot by one foot square of it and predict what will be in the next one foot square.
I guarantee you I can find in that mile long line another one foot square similar to the one foot bye one foot square that you found and present the next one foot by one foot square that conflicts with the "results" you predict. And I can probably do that more than once.
The one foot square represents known and recorded temperature. The line represents the history of the earth's habitable temperature. It just goes to show you how pointless everything is.
If there's anything sad to be said, it's that the temperature over the last five hundred years has fallen and increased, with the biggest change in temperature from 1850 to 1900. It then dipped and came back up by 2000. The question should be, why the huge increase in temperature from 1850 to 1900, and the very small dip and return from 1900 to 2000.
They are? Wait.. oh wait.
They have been since 1970, at about 0.01 inch per year. The caps are not increasing their melting any, in fact, all signs point to "cyclical".
After all, the only way for the caps to grow in size is for precipitation to fall on the poles, and that's hard to come by when the area surrounding is made up of ice.
Holy crap. I wish I had mod points for you. Excellent find!
Good point, sorry I missed that. Would have made a bit more sense to others. Ironically, for a geek film, very few geeks have seen it. :)
... it looks like the 2600 can still play cartridge games too!
<Napolean>Sweet...</Napolean>
Can it play Duke Nukem Forever too?
Oh, wait...
Yes, MS might create a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, but how do you explain this?
We *could* die.
We *should* die.
We *will* die.
We *won't* die.
It even kind of has the air of: "Jeez, were you dumb enough to fall for that?"
Ever since all that hoopla about MN 2004, it's hard for me to read the word "FUD" on the front page of Slashdot and not giggle.
Actually, I fail to see what is wrong with this. Why not have it this way? I could run this exact same service cheaper.
Also, did you know that the state and local fire departments aren't liable for any damage they do? Look it up, no state allows civil cases to be brought up against government-employed firefighters.
I'm not going to address the Time Warner issue. If you had even an inkling of the history of the cable market, you'd see the wheeling and dealing the cable companies have done to establish an oligarchy that has been confirmed and stamped "valid" by state and federal governments. It's exactly the kind of "government action" that people pleaded for and got. You'd also realize that if you don't think you are getting your measly $40 a month out of the service, you could be moving along to DSL or wireless. The government isn't going to solve your problems.
What I do know is that the city goes out of the way to maintain a good standard of service.
Oh really? Let's start hearing your favorite services the city is providing. For each one you give, cite and example of how you think it went over and above what they should provide. I, on the other hand, will give an example of a private organization that can do it better. This includes road maintenance and even emergency services. Go ahead, don't hold back. I won't.
Here's a taste, hope you enjoy:
"In 2000, the city of Austin began marketing bottled water to the public for 'promotional purposes.' The water is merely city tap water, poured into tanker trucks and then bottled. Austin sells a case of 24 bottles for $6. Unfortunately, each case costs the city $8.90, so Austin loses $2.90 per case sold. Only a government monopoly, with no competition and no incentive to try harder, can sell tap water for more than gasoline, and still manage to lose money."