The same technology that makes chips faster also makes them run cooler. The only reason the latest T-bird needs that massive heatsink is because it's performance is pushed to the limit, and that takes a lot of juice. Back the clock on it down to ~400Mhz, and your heat output would be significantly lower than a PII running at the same clock speed.
These new processors require less power than older processors do when doing the same amount of work. however, the performance ceiling for the newer procs is much, much higher.
I think it is great that processor technology is dontinuing to evolve and break through many technical limitations in the past few years. However my larger concern is with the I/O bottlenecks that are becoming more and more of a problem now that chips are running faster and faster. When is the next great breakthough in RAM technology going to come?
Until we can start pumping 100+Gb/s to the processor, most of the power is wasted while it waits to fetch memory.
If the quality of the actual US dollars that are in circulation falls below a certain point, they become worth very little because after taking so much wear they are not recognizable as authentic currency. Older bills need to be taken out of circulation, and new ones printed to keep the worlds faith in the strength of the dollar alive. New bills must contstantly be printed to prevent forgeries of older bills to be passed easily (it is very hard to pass off 20,000 $100 bills that were all printed in '84, when the worldwide supply of those bills is known to only be 60,000 or so (made up nubers I know, but you get the point.
There will always be cash money in use by millions in the world, at least for the forseeable (next 75 years) future. And the US dollar will continue to be one of if not the strongest currency on the planed. Until that changes the US government has a massive interest in upholding the functionality, appearance, and perception of the US dollar.
How does a credit card prevent you from staying in your budget? I suppose you could say cash makes it easier to track your limit, but you already have problems if a) you need to set a limit, b) you live close to that limit, and c) you're unaware when you do unusual things that impact your budget.
Okay, lets talk about disposable income. Everytime I get paid a certain amount of that paycheck goes to the usual places, taxes, food, rent, gas, etc. Most of these are essentially fixed costs. What is left over is money that I can dispach at my choosing. It will not significantly degrade my economic situation to go out and buy several CD's. Or to go out for coffe 3-5 time a week now and again. Personally I find it much easier to budget my expenses when I can see cash in my wallet, and I can watch it disappear. This is a whole lot easier than trying to keep track of totals in my head 4.85 + 12.34 + 22.15 +.75 etc. Vs. I used to have $80, now I only have $40. My cash keeps track of my spending for me. It doesn't itemize, but I'm generally not interested in religiously tracking my discresionary spending.
Bottom line: It is easier for some (many?) people to keep track of their money when they have actual bills in their hands. People with credit cards and poor memories (like myself) can sometimes get themselves into trouble. Cash always sets a hard limit, and your friends are much less eager to give you free credit than Visa is to give it to you at 19%
Note how the Postal Service provides a "baseline" for all citizens, but doen't hold a monopoly. If you want to send a package faster, pay a little more and use UPS or a bike courier.
The alternatives only work if you want better service for more money. It is illegal to offer first class mail delivery in the US. UPS and Fedex et al. don't offer first class service, they do airfreight, or overnight, etc.
So if the government provided the baseline for X no one else would be able to provide the same baseline for And what is baseline service? Give everyone AOL??
If the book is available only in an "encrypted" format that works only with a particular display technology, then I'd stick with paper. But if the book is available in clear-text, I'd rather display it on a future version of e-paper that they keep promising us...
That my little friend is the entire point. Any format that has even the potential to be controlled in such a proprietary manner will be. Do you really think publishers will really sell plain-text binary versions of their novels for people to load onto any e-paper they want? Guess again... If you ask me e-paper will be killed by the same people that kill every other new media innovation, media companies If they cannot control with ironclad certainty the use of e-paper, they will not support it, and may even move to have it rebulated into oblivion.
Sure, I would love e-paper that I can load with anything I want. I would love to have text copies of all the books I OWN on my computer to do with them as I please. But unfortunately the current corporate establisment is working very hard to make sure that dream never becomes reality.
The level of political apathy in this country is appaling! Last November only about half of the eligible voters in the US even bothered to go to the polls and vote. Most people live in a near news vacuum, rarely seeing or hearing more than the headlines on any given day. I would bet that if you polled people on the street and asked them if they 1. knew what the DMCA was and 2. could name one action it protected/prohibited, the percentages would fall pretty close to 50%/25% and those numbers would probably be high.
The only weapons to fight things likethe DMCA are education and solicitation. Tell everyone you know about it, and write your congresscritters incessantly about it (reminiscent of a scene from The Shawshank Redemption)
These are the weapons we have, and we must use them
The Kernel is called Linux, and nothing will change that. just like you won't rename the Bessemer Process, Occam's Razor, Van Neuman's Architecture, etc. The name's catchy and it stuck, simple as that. It doesn't need to be political or devious or anything like that
And personally, I don't think linus would have a coniption if some other name for the kernel arose and was universally accepted.
We are the same people that us IANAL, IOW, OTOH, IMHO,etc. We are *NIX people and are "lazy" by default, so if we don't have to type "GNU/" to get our point across, we won't. No disrespect, but it's easier to type, and it also rolls off the tounge a little more smoothly. It's akin to insisting that the dining hall at school be called "Anderson Common" when everyone does, and always will call it "SAGA"
prietary licenses, whereby a state-designated owner can use state power to declare some string of bits "property" and do nasty things to you if you copy them, are an infringement of "flerbage". (Or "freedom", if you prefer).R> "flerbage" would be the absense of copyright - not passing new restrictions on proprietary licences, but rather removing the exisitng restrictions that make proprietary licences possible.
You really need to beware of excessive flerbage. If I had enough of it I could come oven and excercise my flerbage on your car, bed, shower, TV, etc. Flerbage is limited all around us. (just try running around your block several time naked and you will see what I mean) And you (and many others) happen to not like a certain limiting of your flerbage. And claim the moral high ground crying for "Maximum 'flerbage'", when all you want is maximum software copying flerbage.
The simple fact is, that software costs money to develop, and developers need to recover their development costs, and possibly (gasp) make money. If you remove the mechanism which guarantees them revenue, developers stop developing, and then (surprise) no more software (or at least a lot less). I know you don't want to pay for software, but I don't want to pay for my food, but that doesn't mean I break the law to obtain it without paying for it.
There is a time and a place for all sorts of licences, even licences that some people don't like/hate. I will admit that Microsoft has become an Evil(tm) money grabbing corporation that should be dealt with rather severely for the wrongs it has committed.
but at the same time, it did standardize the desktop, introduce a GUI to the PC world, and provide some semblance of multitasking to the average household.
Other licences have their strength and weaknesses, their opportunities for exploitation, or limits on utilization etc. and there is a ploace for all of them in the software world.
Personally, "information wants to be free" "death to IP" type people really scare me. They are some type of tech-enabled anarchists, the same type of people that hate the record companies and steal CD's/movies/DVD's etc from stores, and at the same time would cry foul if the companies went under and no longer produced music for them to steal.
I'd love to hear why the power of choice would be a bad thing, even if you choose a proprietary license. Try and write a cheat-resistant multiplayer game with open source on both client and server, and see just how far you get before the cheats make the game unplayable except among friends
This is a brilliant example of why proprietary licences are useful/nessesary in some instances.
I say different strokes for different strokes, and eventually a licence, or (most likely)several will end up victorious. But in the end everyone wins.
Wrong, you pay pennies on the dollar for the production of the textbook, and the rest is royalties to the publisher and authors of the book. Is this bad? no. if there was no money in it most textbook authors and publishers would not do it as a public service.
If people realized that the abolition of copyright removes or squeezes the profit motive out of all information industries, publishing (music and print) and software predominantly, and that such action then reduces both the number of suppliers and the quality and quantity of what is produced, it no longer sounds like a Good Idea(TM)
If, however, as is the case with software, we can both use it without either of us affecting the other, then it's not an economic good.
Then it can only be produced outside of the system of economics. In case you havn't realized, or if you are living in your Linux Kernel/Apache/etc. free software fantasy world, it takes money to develop software. and until you can have whatever you want developed free of charge, software will be an economic good. Proprietary licences are simply a way of defraying production costs and making money::shudders:: in an economic venture.
OBTW, everyone who really really likes this whole free (beer) software idea should really read "Atlas Shrugged" and view the ultimate end of such philosophies
All software licenses are inherently coercive; they use the power of the State through the means of copyright to restrict the rights of the user.
How do you distinguish between coersion and civil cooperation? Massive amounts of coersion are required to simply maintain an ordered society. Is an agreement beween a buyer and a seller coersion? Even in a barter economy? (Am I coersing(sp) you to give me a dozen eggs for this steak?) A software licence is a legal aggreement between two parties. I would like someone to tell me what massive power is compelling people to use software they object to on any grounds? If you don't want to pay for software, don't buy it! If you don't want eggs from caged chickens, only buy free-range eggs!
Why is it that people have this notion that they deserve free software/music/movies/etc.? And if they deserve these things, and are not willing to pay for it, are they not coersing the programmers to produce things for them, for no real compensation whatsoever?
Personally this sounds like something out of Atlas Shrugged. Everyone gets this idea that they deserve this or that and starts demanding that people give it to them, and then the goverment steps in to insure that they get the things they demand, and eventually it collapses under it's own weight.
It is that simple. As many people have pointed out DirectX runs on 80%-90% of all home pc, so switching to Open GL to capture more marketshare is only feasible if the cost of development are the same. The problem is: they are not.
Microsoft has poured unknown millions into the development of DirectX and has produced a universal set of API's that work on any video hardware. Until OpenGL or MesaGL etc. can function out of the box with the same (relative) ease development houses will stick with DirectX.
In simple economic terms, DirectX and OpenGL are not close substitutes. One is well known entrenched and universally supported, the competition resides more on the margins and has universal compatability problems. And these compatability/extension issues drive up the price of developing with OpenGL so it becomes an even less attractive substitute.
The OpenGL/Direct3D battle is no different from the Linux/Windows or IIS/Apache or any other open source/proprietary battle. It is not won with principle, or good intentions, but with results. If people want to see OpenGL succeed make it better, and cheaper to develop with than the proprietary offering.
What do you expect when you post a nebulous article about the future of Apple on Slashdot?
I hate to be hardhearted but the percentage of people here who really care about the future of apple is probably about as high as those who can't wait to see what great new ideas MicroSoft will unveil when it launches XP later this year.
IOW, how do you troll for something that's not there?
Articles like this were made for posting self-congratulatory comments which demonstrate people's skill or lack there-of to make wry and witty remarks about the topic in question BSo please quit raining on the parade
Personally I don't think there is a great and sunny future for Apple computers. They make great imaging and publishing software from what I understand, but aside from their little niche, they have very little universal appeal. Also, having working in a computer lab with several iMacs I know that they don't network worth snot.
Apple may have their corner of the market and they may do some things very well, but I have little if any interest in whether or not they bite it in the long run
JUST BECAUSE YOU REALLY WANT SOMETHING TO BE A CERTIAN WAY DOESN'T MEAN IT WILL BE THAT WAY
You are both right and wrong. Yes, holding hands and singing Kumbaya will not bring world peace, or solve world hunger, free Dimitry, or accomplish anything on it's own. However, as the american media has proved time and time again: Perception
IS
Reality.
Example time: People percieve that, regardless of their current financial state, they are entitled to, and will recieve (nearly) limitless healthcare. And for a great many people this is entirely true, because most people don't require expensive medical care. For these people, this is reality. Much like people believing that their e-mail is secure, or their car is safe in the garage, or anywhere for that matter. The reality is, aside from being in immediate medical danger, or giving birth, hospitals will refuse care. e-mail can very easily be intercepted and read, a car thief could steal your car from you locked garage within a minute.
People form their beliefs from whatever information they are fed, or happen to hear, and then form their reality around it. I'm not here to try and champion the "wild and wooly" internet per se, but it irks me to hear people poo poo the notion that only when enough people stop caring, things will really start to slide.
Remember, at one time integrity and honor were prized qualities of any elder statesman, slowly people stopped caring, and look what has happenned to the once noble worlk of politics and diplomacy.
meanwhile i am going to shrug the atlas and sit back and watch them die.
How exactly does one "shrug the atlas"?? I can only assume you are referring to Ayn Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged" in which one character remarked that if he was Atlas, the man who held the world on his shoulders, he would shrug it off, refusing to carry it. You could "shrug like Atlas", or something like that, but "shrugging the atlas" is akin to "setting us up the bomb"
I still think the DSL providers had it coming to them. Now be honest, who ever thought the Baby Bells, or other TelCo's were really going to play fair? Who expected them to act any differently than they did?
Now you may be able to sell better lemonade than the bully down the street. Or give better odds than the bookie at the bar, but you are also wise enough to know that you can't survive playing that game, and you are definately not going to win.
Everyone knows TelCo's suck, and they don't play fair, and they cheat whaa whaa whaa!!! But that's the current business climate unfortunately, and it definately needs a massive overhaul. But anyone that thought that some well intentioned third party people, and some deregulation talk from state capitals was going to change things really shouldn't be empowered to make major business descisions
They re-imagined Planet of the Apes, just released Apocalypse Now Redux, and now it the matrix...RELOADED!
But look on the bright side, at least it's not "Matrix episode 2: Attack of the Clones"
the sad truth about DSL
on
Rhythms Flatlines
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It appears that most DSL providers are victims of the same business model that sunk so many.com's: "Sell at a loss, and make it up in volume." Now there is a chance that DSL could be provided for $39.99 a month, but the customer base would have to be huge in order to keep the price that low. They unfourtunately ran out of money before they could build up a large enough customer base to make the business profitable.
Personally, I'm somewhat saddened to see so many DSL providers dying an early death, but that's the free market economy for you.
Slashdot Mirror
The same technology that makes chips faster also makes them run cooler. The only reason the latest T-bird needs that massive heatsink is because it's performance is pushed to the limit, and that takes a lot of juice. Back the clock on it down to ~400Mhz, and your heat output would be significantly lower than a PII running at the same clock speed.
These new processors require less power than older processors do when doing the same amount of work. however, the performance ceiling for the newer procs is much, much higher.
I think it is great that processor technology is dontinuing to evolve and break through many technical limitations in the past few years. However my larger concern is with the I/O bottlenecks that are becoming more and more of a problem now that chips are running faster and faster. When is the next great breakthough in RAM technology going to come?
Until we can start pumping 100+Gb/s to the processor, most of the power is wasted while it waits to fetch memory.
If the quality of the actual US dollars that are in circulation falls below a certain point, they become worth very little because after taking so much wear they are not recognizable as authentic currency. Older bills need to be taken out of circulation, and new ones printed to keep the worlds faith in the strength of the dollar alive. New bills must contstantly be printed to prevent forgeries of older bills to be passed easily (it is very hard to pass off 20,000 $100 bills that were all printed in '84, when the worldwide supply of those bills is known to only be 60,000 or so (made up nubers I know, but you get the point.
There will always be cash money in use by millions in the world, at least for the forseeable (next 75 years) future. And the US dollar will continue to be one of if not the strongest currency on the planed. Until that changes the US government has a massive interest in upholding the functionality, appearance, and perception of the US dollar.
How does a credit card prevent you from staying in your budget? I suppose you could say cash makes it easier to track your limit, but you already have problems if a) you need to set a limit, b) you live close to that limit, and c) you're unaware when you do unusual things that impact your budget.
.75 etc. Vs. I used to have $80, now I only have $40. My cash keeps track of my spending for me. It doesn't itemize, but I'm generally not interested in religiously tracking my discresionary spending.
Okay, lets talk about disposable income. Everytime I get paid a certain amount of that paycheck goes to the usual places, taxes, food, rent, gas, etc. Most of these are essentially fixed costs. What is left over is money that I can dispach at my choosing. It will not significantly degrade my economic situation to go out and buy several CD's. Or to go out for coffe 3-5 time a week now and again. Personally I find it much easier to budget my expenses when I can see cash in my wallet, and I can watch it disappear. This is a whole lot easier than trying to keep track of totals in my head 4.85 + 12.34 + 22.15 +
Bottom line: It is easier for some (many?) people to keep track of their money when they have actual bills in their hands. People with credit cards and poor memories (like myself) can sometimes get themselves into trouble. Cash always sets a hard limit, and your friends are much less eager to give you free credit than Visa is to give it to you at 19%
Note how the Postal Service provides a "baseline" for all citizens, but doen't hold a monopoly. If you want to send a package faster, pay a little more and use UPS or a bike courier.
The alternatives only work if you want better service for more money. It is illegal to offer first class mail delivery in the US. UPS and Fedex et al. don't offer first class service, they do airfreight, or overnight, etc.
So if the government provided the baseline for X no one else would be able to provide the same baseline for
And what is baseline service? Give everyone AOL??
If the book is available only in an "encrypted" format that works only with a particular display technology, then I'd stick with paper. But if the book is available in clear-text, I'd rather display it on a future version of e-paper that they keep promising us...
That my little friend is the entire point. Any format that has even the potential to be controlled in such a proprietary manner will be. Do you really think publishers will really sell plain-text binary versions of their novels for people to load onto any e-paper they want? Guess again... If you ask me e-paper will be killed by the same people that kill every other new media innovation, media companies If they cannot control with ironclad certainty the use of e-paper, they will not support it, and may even move to have it rebulated into oblivion.
Sure, I would love e-paper that I can load with anything I want. I would love to have text copies of all the books I OWN on my computer to do with them as I please. But unfortunately the current corporate establisment is working very hard to make sure that dream never becomes reality.
The level of political apathy in this country is appaling! Last November only about half of the eligible voters in the US even bothered to go to the polls and vote. Most people live in a near news vacuum, rarely seeing or hearing more than the headlines on any given day. I would bet that if you polled people on the street and asked them if they 1. knew what the DMCA was and 2. could name one action it protected/prohibited, the percentages would fall pretty close to 50%/25% and those numbers would probably be high.
The only weapons to fight things likethe DMCA are education and solicitation. Tell everyone you know about it, and write your congresscritters incessantly about it (reminiscent of a scene from The Shawshank Redemption)
These are the weapons we have, and we must use them
The Kernel is called Linux, and nothing will change that. just like you won't rename the Bessemer Process, Occam's Razor, Van Neuman's Architecture, etc. The name's catchy and it stuck, simple as that. It doesn't need to be political or devious or anything like that
And personally, I don't think linus would have a coniption if some other name for the kernel arose and was universally accepted.
It's stupid, and probably a bit too confusing for some people. simple as that.
We are the same people that us IANAL, IOW, OTOH, IMHO ,etc. We are *NIX people and are "lazy" by default, so if we don't have to type "GNU/" to get our point across, we won't. No disrespect, but it's easier to type, and it also rolls off the tounge a little more smoothly. It's akin to insisting that the dining hall at school be called "Anderson Common" when everyone does, and always will call it "SAGA"
prietary licenses, whereby a state-designated owner can use state power to declare some string of bits "property" and do nasty things to you if you copy them, are an infringement of "flerbage". (Or "freedom", if you prefer).R>
"flerbage" would be the absense of copyright - not passing new restrictions on proprietary licences, but rather removing the exisitng restrictions that make proprietary licences possible.
You really need to beware of excessive flerbage. If I had enough of it I could come oven and excercise my flerbage on your car, bed, shower, TV, etc. Flerbage is limited all around us. (just try running around your block several time naked and you will see what I mean) And you (and many others) happen to not like a certain limiting of your flerbage. And claim the moral high ground crying for "Maximum 'flerbage'", when all you want is maximum software copying flerbage.
The simple fact is, that software costs money to develop, and developers need to recover their development costs, and possibly (gasp) make money. If you remove the mechanism which guarantees them revenue, developers stop developing, and then (surprise) no more software (or at least a lot less). I know you don't want to pay for software, but I don't want to pay for my food, but that doesn't mean I break the law to obtain it without paying for it.
There is a time and a place for all sorts of licences, even licences that some people don't like/hate. I will admit that Microsoft has become an Evil(tm) money grabbing corporation that should be dealt with rather severely for the wrongs it has committed.
but at the same time, it did standardize the desktop, introduce a GUI to the PC world, and provide some semblance of multitasking to the average household.
Other licences have their strength and weaknesses, their opportunities for exploitation, or limits on utilization etc. and there is a ploace for all of them in the software world.
Personally, "information wants to be free" "death to IP" type people really scare me. They are some type of tech-enabled anarchists, the same type of people that hate the record companies and steal CD's/movies/DVD's etc from stores, and at the same time would cry foul if the companies went under and no longer produced music for them to steal.
I'd love to hear why the power of choice would be a bad thing, even if you choose a proprietary license. Try and write a cheat-resistant multiplayer game with open source on both client and server, and see just how far you get before the cheats make the game unplayable except among friends
This is a brilliant example of why proprietary licences are useful/nessesary in some instances.
I say different strokes for different strokes, and eventually a licence, or (most likely)several will end up victorious. But in the end everyone wins.
Not in FSF's Perfect World(TM). There is no such thing as a proprietary licence in utopia. Trade secrets sound suspiciously like IP if you ask me.
You're paying for the medium (textbooks)
Wrong, you pay pennies on the dollar for the production of the textbook, and the rest is royalties to the publisher and authors of the book. Is this bad? no. if there was no money in it most textbook authors and publishers would not do it as a public service.
If people realized that the abolition of copyright removes or squeezes the profit motive out of all information industries, publishing (music and print) and software predominantly, and that such action then reduces both the number of suppliers and the quality and quantity of what is produced, it no longer sounds like a Good Idea(TM)
If, however, as is the case with software, we can both use it without either of us affecting the other, then it's not an economic good.
::shudders:: in an economic venture.
Then it can only be produced outside of the system of economics. In case you havn't realized, or if you are living in your Linux Kernel/Apache/etc. free software fantasy world, it takes money to develop software. and until you can have whatever you want developed free of charge, software will be an economic good. Proprietary licences are simply a way of defraying production costs and making money
OBTW, everyone who really really likes this whole free (beer) software idea should really read "Atlas Shrugged" and view the ultimate end of such philosophies
All software licenses are inherently coercive; they use the power of the State through the means of copyright to restrict the rights of the user.
How do you distinguish between coersion and civil cooperation? Massive amounts of coersion are required to simply maintain an ordered society. Is an agreement beween a buyer and a seller coersion? Even in a barter economy? (Am I coersing(sp) you to give me a dozen eggs for this steak?) A software licence is a legal aggreement between two parties. I would like someone to tell me what massive power is compelling people to use software they object to on any grounds? If you don't want to pay for software, don't buy it! If you don't want eggs from caged chickens, only buy free-range eggs!
Why is it that people have this notion that they deserve free software/music/movies/etc.? And if they deserve these things, and are not willing to pay for it, are they not coersing the programmers to produce things for them, for no real compensation whatsoever?
Personally this sounds like something out of Atlas Shrugged. Everyone gets this idea that they deserve this or that and starts demanding that people give it to them, and then the goverment steps in to insure that they get the things they demand, and eventually it collapses under it's own weight.
It must do one, and only one thing:
Work better than Direct3D
It is that simple. As many people have pointed out DirectX runs on 80%-90% of all home pc, so switching to Open GL to capture more marketshare is only feasible if the cost of development are the same. The problem is: they are not.
Microsoft has poured unknown millions into the development of DirectX and has produced a universal set of API's that work on any video hardware. Until OpenGL or MesaGL etc. can function out of the box with the same (relative) ease development houses will stick with DirectX.
In simple economic terms, DirectX and OpenGL are not close substitutes. One is well known entrenched and universally supported, the competition resides more on the margins and has universal compatability problems. And these compatability/extension issues drive up the price of developing with OpenGL so it becomes an even less attractive substitute.
The OpenGL/Direct3D battle is no different from the Linux/Windows or IIS/Apache or any other open source/proprietary battle. It is not won with principle, or good intentions, but with results. If people want to see OpenGL succeed make it better, and cheaper to develop with than the proprietary offering.
What do you expect when you post a nebulous article about the future of Apple on Slashdot?
I hate to be hardhearted but the percentage of people here who really care about the future of apple is probably about as high as those who can't wait to see what great new ideas MicroSoft will unveil when it launches XP later this year.
IOW, how do you troll for something that's not there?
Articles like this were made for posting self-congratulatory comments which demonstrate people's skill or lack there-of to make wry and witty remarks about the topic in question
BSo please quit raining on the parade
Personally I don't think there is a great and sunny future for Apple computers. They make great imaging and publishing software from what I understand, but aside from their little niche, they have very little universal appeal. Also, having working in a computer lab with several iMacs I know that they don't network worth snot.
Apple may have their corner of the market and they may do some things very well, but I have little if any interest in whether or not they bite it in the long run
No not really. He was never popular in school, but his mother still loves him, or at least that's what she says when she tucks him in at night.
You are both right and wrong. Yes, holding hands and singing Kumbaya will not bring world peace, or solve world hunger, free Dimitry, or accomplish anything on it's own. However, as the american media has proved time and time again: Perception
- IS
Reality.Example time:
People percieve that, regardless of their current financial state, they are entitled to, and will recieve (nearly) limitless healthcare. And for a great many people this is entirely true, because most people don't require expensive medical care. For these people, this is reality. Much like people believing that their e-mail is secure, or their car is safe in the garage, or anywhere for that matter. The reality is, aside from being in immediate medical danger, or giving birth, hospitals will refuse care. e-mail can very easily be intercepted and read, a car thief could steal your car from you locked garage within a minute.
People form their beliefs from whatever information they are fed, or happen to hear, and then form their reality around it. I'm not here to try and champion the "wild and wooly" internet per se, but it irks me to hear people poo poo the notion that only when enough people stop caring, things will really start to slide.
Remember, at one time integrity and honor were prized qualities of any elder statesman, slowly people stopped caring, and look what has happenned to the once noble worlk of politics and diplomacy.
meanwhile i am going to shrug the atlas and sit back and watch them die.
How exactly does one "shrug the atlas"?? I can only assume you are referring to Ayn Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged" in which one character remarked that if he was Atlas, the man who held the world on his shoulders, he would shrug it off, refusing to carry it. You could "shrug like Atlas", or something like that, but "shrugging the atlas" is akin to "setting us up the bomb"
sorry, nix the free market crack.
I still think the DSL providers had it coming to them. Now be honest, who ever thought the Baby Bells, or other TelCo's were really going to play fair? Who expected them to act any differently than they did?
Now you may be able to sell better lemonade than the bully down the street. Or give better odds than the bookie at the bar, but you are also wise enough to know that you can't survive playing that game, and you are definately not going to win.
Everyone knows TelCo's suck, and they don't play fair, and they cheat whaa whaa whaa!!! But that's the current business climate unfortunately, and it definately needs a massive overhaul. But anyone that thought that some well intentioned third party people, and some deregulation talk from state capitals was going to change things really shouldn't be empowered to make major business descisions
They re-imagined Planet of the Apes, just released Apocalypse Now Redux, and now it the matrix...RELOADED!
But look on the bright side, at least it's not "Matrix episode 2: Attack of the Clones"
It appears that most DSL providers are victims of the same business model that sunk so many .com's: "Sell at a loss, and make it up in volume." Now there is a chance that DSL could be provided for $39.99 a month, but the customer base would have to be huge in order to keep the price that low. They unfourtunately ran out of money before they could build up a large enough customer base to make the business profitable.
Personally, I'm somewhat saddened to see so many DSL providers dying an early death, but that's the free market economy for you.
one question: "how do they have your fingerprints if you are not a criminal"
Unless they are rummaging through my trash and lifting prints from old soda cans, big brother doesn't have my fingerprints.