Let's take some more accurate figures, defining the "Northeast" as all of New England, New York state, Pennsylvania and New Jersey:
Studio Apartment $300 Try much closer to $700, for anything that's within 15 miles of where you work. Much more if you live in any large city.
Heat $100 Assuming your heat isn't electric, this is pretty close, but $150 is more realistic based on fuel oil prices.
a good working car $150 At 7.5% interest with a $500 down payment over 48 months that works out to less than $6000 worth of car. There's a good chance that car won't outlast the payments, and there's also a very good chance that it'll need major maintenance (clutch/transmission/water pump/timing belt/what have you). Oh, and you're not taking into account car insurance; figure another $100 each month for that (plus or minus, based on where you live, what your driving record is like, what color your skin is, etc). (It's mandatory in most states up here.) This will be closer to $200, assuming you've got the $500 down payment (and not including insurance, see below.)
30 miles travel day at $4:00 a gallon $256 I have no idea where you're coming up with this figure. My figures look like this: 30 miles per day X 22 working days = 660 miles; 660 miles / (25miles/gallon) = 26.4 gallons; 26.4 gallons x $4/gallon = $105.6 per month. If you mean this number to include your gas AND insurance, it's a little closer. My commute is 70 miles a day, and that's probably about average for the Boston area. So if you double the fuel cost component of that, you're looking at closer to $350. Oh, and let's not forget people who have to pay for parking. If you park at a transit station outside the city, you'll pay $2 to $7 or so each day for parking. If you drive in to work and your employer doesn't pay for parking (as mine doesn't), how does $20 a day hit you.
food $320 Assuming you brown bag your lunch and never eat out (but maybe with the occasional pizza delivery), this is close.
electricity $100 Assuming you don't have electric heat, yes. If you do have electric heat, plan on this doubling in the winter.
medical $200 You're insane. Assuming you can even GET medical insurance, plan on this being at least $100 - $150 a week. My current employer pays 50% of my Blue Cross / Blue Shield HMO, and my contribution would be $150 twice a month. If you're on your own (or $deity forbid you have a family), this figure will be anywhere from $400 to $1000 (no joke.)
So let's do the numbers:
Car expenses (gas/tolls/insurance/possible parking) $400 Car payment $200 Rent (for a crappy studio in a lousy neighborhood) $700 Food $320 Electric $100 Heat $150 Medical $400 (if you can get medical insurance, more if you have dependents) or cross your fingers
So adding that all up, we get $2270 a month, or $27,240 a year, requiring a salary of $35,412 (minus taxes) just to break even. This comes out to more than $17/hour, nearly twice the $9/hour you quoted.
Oh, and by the way, someone making $9/hour will take home closer to $13k after taxes.
Also remember, these numbers assume that you do nothing but work, eat, and sleep. No cable tv, no movies, no dates, no computer, no Internet, no fun for you whatsoever. AND, no money to pay down debt or save. Also remember the $50k of student loans you've got to pay off eventually.
We as Americans need to learn to put their pride aside and learn to lower their standard of living Yeah, because who needs silly things like health insurance or a car. (And even if you are able to take public transit, you can probably count on that being at least $100 to $150 each month.)
I would agree that Americans need to be more financially responsible in general, but sometimes financial responsibility takes a back seat to not getting evicted.
Still, if I were salaried, I'd probably make as much as I am now. That's the thing.
How do you figure?
Let's take a given job requiring a given skill set. Two companies are offering positions requiring that skill set. One offers a rate of $25/hour, while the other offers a salary of $52,000 a year. (Yes, I know, it's not exact, but work with me.)
HR managers (spit) are well aware of what compensation that skill set commands. So let's say the programmer offered the salaried position knew that there would most likely be overtime involved, and also knows that, were he/she salaried, he/she would be making overtime pay. He/she then goes back to the HR manager and says "Since I'm not eligible for overtime, I'm asking for a higher salary to compete with other people who are eligible."
How soon do you think someone else (who didn't say a thing about the overtime situation) would be offered the job instead?
True, the company that paid by the hour would probably get a better candidate, and better work (because companies that pay more fairly get the best workers, at least in theory), but this assumes that these companies are interested in quality over profits.
Since companies who don't value profit over quality get their lunch eaten by the profit whores, there's no reason to pay higher salaries to compensate for lack of overtime pay, assuming you're not the only one in the state with that skill set.
The RIAA will soon assert that the information is their IP and therefore using FreeDB will give them all the information they need to sue you.
And in this country you can sue anyone for anything, provided you can pay for your lawyers' fees. In the RIAA's case, they're betting (usually correctly, by making sure they sue people who can't afford to defend themselves) that you can't, and therefore will have to do whatever they demand.
I would need two hands to count the number of places I have worked at where everything that happened on a user's PC was IT's responsibility, regardless of the cause of the problem.
I have worked at Fortune 500 companies that did NOT have Acceptable Use Policies, because they didn't want to annoy the users.
The only way anyone gets fired here for what they do with a computer is if they get caught with child pornography on a company-owned system. Other than that, it's IT's problem/fault.
Careful, they'll take away your secret decoder ring...
Just kidding. I'm actually posting to give you kudos for being able to see how badly the Republican party has been hijacked by Big Business and the religous right. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Massachusetts liberal but find myself willing to vote for a moderate Republican candidate if it means those yahoos fall out of power.
I wish more people would realize that just because you've always voted for one party (or feel that that party is aligned with your own personal politics) doesn't mean you HAVE to vote for someone you don't like.
You're missing my point. If the rule is bad, change the rule. But in the meantime, the bad rule is STILL the rule.
We're not talking about ethics or morals here. We're talking about computer security. Security policy must be enforced at all times; if it isn't, and people are allowed to get away with breaking it, when the rule IS changed to not suck so much, people still won't follow it.
You should follow rules that serve practical and ethical purposes, but you are morally obligated to circumvent the useless cock snot coughed out by some process consultants.
By that logic I should be able to plant a dozen pot plants in my back yard and drag my idiot Governor from his car and beat him with a lead pipe. You can't pick which rules to follow and which ones not to. If the rule is bad, change the rule. If everyone chooses to ignore security policy you may as well not have one. ANY security policy is better than none. And the people who break the policy because "the rule is stupid" should be sanctioned appropriately, up to and including termination; otherwise, when the policy IS corrected to be less retarded, nobody will follow that one either.
And need I remind you that this is in a hospital? The administration is opening themselves up for SERIOUS liability if they don't fire these people. Look up HIPAA in Wikipedia for what I'm talking about.
This VA situation also appears to be yet another case of IT being given responsibility without any of the required authority. Had you asked anyone in IT whether this was a good idea or not, unless they've all been lobotomized, they'd say "absolutely not". But, since they have no authority, the users know they can basically do whatever the fuck they want, since IT will catch the heat for anything they do wrong anyway.
It's kind of like telling a police officer, "OK guard this prisoner, but you can't watch him or lock the door. Just sit in your office down the hall. But if he escapes, it's your fault."
Well, as it happens this was back when "smart terminals" were getting popular, and this was a floor full of programmers, so it took about eight seconds after the last auditor left for the coders to agree on "F12" as a common macro key to spit out the required three passwords and log in.
Two problems here: Ignorant overpaid "consultants" who think a splint is a good remedy for food poisoning and a floor full of programmers who should be escorted to the door by (physical) security personnel.
Just because a security policy is retarded is no reason to justify ignoring it. I don't care if the password policy is that you must dance a particular sequence on a DDR pad for access, if that's the security policy, you follow it until a better policy can be put in place.
Furthermore, you should schedule a meeting with a career counselor for Tuesday morning, bright and early.
On whose planet does that happen? When you get fired, you get handed a packet describing COBRA eligibility and a packet describing how to file for unemployment. Why the hell would a company care what happens to someone after they get fired? They obviously didn't think enough of them beforehand to keep them on staff, and assisting its former employees to find new employment might mean the competition would hire them, thus potentially making them more competitive. No, it's in the employer's interest to make DAMN SURE that employee is given NO HELP WHATSOEVER finding a new job, beyond what they're required to do by law.
Besides, the career counselor costs money. They barely want to spend any money on benefits for their current employees, they damn sure don't want to spend any on people who don't work there anymore.
I think (some) people have finally discovered that pissing people off and making enemies is not the best business model.
How can you avoid pissing someone off when you fire them? You can't. (Some) companies have discovered that the career counselor makes no difference whatsoever in the former employee's opinion of your company. And again, this implies that the company gives a flying shit sandwich about the employee after they fire them.
Where the hell are you downloading from? Most torrents can be had in under an hour...
Not everyone has broadband internet available to them. Where I live there are several options, but I live in a major metropolitan area. I have my choice from 6Mbit/s cable down to 128k/s DSL. Many people aren't so lucky, and some of them can still only get dialup. Ever tried downloding a 4GB file over dialup? Weeks is conservative.
This might be another fly in the ointment for the ITVS.. Downloading an.aac file from iTunes isn't too onerous right now for those on dialup; it might take a while, but not weeks. Apple will probably need to be ready for hordes of angry customers who are too unsophisticated (read: stupid) to understand file size issues. They're used to buying a music track, starting the download, and having it in a reasonable amount of time. When they go to buy a movie and it takes for-fucking-ever, they'll either not do it again or scream bloody murder at Apple's customer service drones (quite possibly both.) The first hurts sales, the second increases Apple's expenses.
I think Apple is going to have a challenge setting people's expectations here. Many of their customers can't understand Netflix; they're too used to the Blockbuster model, and anything different is too complicated. Getting those customers to understand how a multible gigabyte file takes longer than a multiple megabyte file is in a lot of cases going to be like teaching a pig to sing: it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
If you need proof, just look at a duck-billed platypus.
I mean seriously, what the fuck? Hair, bill, warm-blooded, lays eggs, nurses its young, males have venomous spurs..
(They also have the best electroperception of any mammal and swim with their eyes closed. You can't make this shit up, check out the Wikipedia entry. They're even wierder than I thought.)
It is up to the artist and his attorney to negotiate that out of the contract if they feel the need to.
Sounds like the true issue here is either 1) Al's contract attorney needs to be fired/sued/flogged for allowing this clause to hurt his client financially or 2) Al doesn't have a contract attorney, which lowers my sympathy for him considerably.
I love Al, but if he signed a recording contract without legal counsel, he can't be as smart as I thought he was.
That being said, it's been repeated ad nauseum, but if you want to support an artist (Al included), go see them in concert. Artists make much more money from touring than they do from record/album/CD/iTunes sales in nearly all cases.
Codifying how personal data can be collected, how the data can bee stored and used, and especially how the owners will be compensated for the loss or misuse of said data, can only be beneficial, especially in this day and age.
This has already been done. I hate to trot out an old and busted Internet meme, but the US government has basically said "All your info are belong to us." You have no privacy. You have no right to any privacy. The government knows when you call your aunt Betty. The government knows when you buy tomatoes with your debit card. The government knows what you say on your cell phone. The government knows that all it has to say to wiretap your POTS phone is "terrorists," and they only even do that because it's politically convenient. The government will release classified information that can get your wife killed because you said something. (And apparently that's legal because the President said so. The President is apparently above the law of the land; he's signed hundreds of memos with "signing statements" saying "this is fine, except I don't have to comply with this law." And apparently that works! I'll have to sign my next loan application with a statement saying "this is fine, except I don't have to pay you back for this money.") The government will take away your right to peaceful protest and have the gall to call where they force you to go "free speech zones." This government has given up any pretext of representing the rights of the people, and has concentrated its efforts in promoting its right-wing fundamentalist Christian agenda... and apparently "Christian" has come to mean "We get ours, you fuck off."
Not required....merely 'persuaded' (look to the phone companies for a good example).
No persuasion necessary. The big businesses that have this information are the government. All that nonsense with "elections" is only so the crooks that get elected can say the people chose them to represent their constituents in Washington. (Which is true, except their constituents are the companies that line their pockets with campaign contributions, and not Joe and Jane Sixpack working for too little money for those companies.) Nowadays they don't even have to bother with all that "counting the votes", either, because their buddies at Diebold have made these magical little black boxes that spit out results that cannot be verified by anyone, so they can basically make them say whatever they want and nobody can refute them.
How rude is it to take an entire community for fools by attempting to sell them on untruths?
That's not "rude", that's "marketing."
They could have just said 'no' instead of assuming that the world is full of suckers who'll swallow down whatever crap they spew.
Unfortunately, the world is in fact full of said suckers. It's more cost effective to assume so under nearly all circumstances.
No surprise that opponents of both Theo and RMS constantly resort to ad-hominem when faced with their reasoned and well rounded arguments.
RMS... reasoned and well rounded...
Ok, there goes any credibility you might have had. RMS is like a black hole for credibility; he forms a "credibility D Destruction field" around his event horizon much like Uncle Steve's Reality Distortion Field.
If that were the case, they'd have to match the US govt for funds until it changed to a more business-friendly administration (like with US DOJ vs Microsoft) - I'm assuming only a Democrat administration would bother bringing such a case in the first place, naturally.
If all a big company like this has to do is pay money, they'll do it because it's more profitable to continue to do the things that got them in trouble in the first place (see DOJ vs. Microsoft. Show of hands, who knows what Microsoft has done differently since they were found to be an illegal monopoly, besides change their PR strategy. Anyone?)
And i'm not sure what you mean about "match the US govt for funds". Is this related to the losing party paying all legal fees under British law? Because we certianly don't have that here. Assuming the business in question hasn't already purchased enough Congressmen to avoid the suit in the first place, they essentially have unlimited funds with which to defend their case, and the government most certianly does not. "My lawyers can beat up your lawyers."
1 ISPs will deliberately throttle bandwidth for websites that don't pay up. I doubt this makes sense. In a competitive market, an ISP who deliberately slows down websites will lose customers.
Which part of "no consumer choice" don't you understand? Let me make this simple: Your choices are the cable company (legislated monopoly) or the phone company (practical monopoly, eg they own the wires. In theory you can get DSL from another provider, but your Baby Bell owns the CO. Posession is nine tenths of the law, and if they want to make it nearly impossible to get service from someone else, they can.)
Also, Americans don't take their business elsewhere due to rotten service. They just don't. Americans buy based on price, period, especially with something they don't understand like Internet service. Look at movie theaters: Lousy seats, lousy sound, overpriced popcorn, surly workers, rude audiences. Sure, maybe the theater down the street is a little better, but you don't see them switching. Why? Because the first theater is fifty cents cheaper.
2 ISPs will offer faster access to websites that pay for it, thus forcing websites into a zero sum competition and allowing the ISPs to reap monopoly rents. Well, fast access to consumers is certainly valuable to websites but there is no room for zerosum competition here. Websites will not pay to be "faster than the competition" beyond a certain point (once everyone is reasonably fast, there are better things to compete on).
Like what? Quality? Nobody competes on quality anymore. What this means is the big guys crush the little guys by suffocating them, just like everything else. They'll buy up all the QoS they can because they have the deep pockets. After all, why compete when you can eliminate the competition?
And I don't believe any company has a monopoly on fibre,
Not yet they don't.
so websites can always move if they feel they are paying too much.
You've never worked for a company that runs an enterprise-level web site, have you. These contracts are negotiated in terms of years, and moving the site is likely to be far more expensive than just ponying up the premium. Besides, the problem isn't with your bandwidth provider, it's with your customers' providers. You're getting the bandwidth you're paying for, but your customers are at the mercy of their provider in terms of whose packets get through unimpeded.
But suppose all the telcos banded together to do this, to set limits and impose tolls -- wouldn't that be a virtual monopoly? More importantly, wouldn't that be collusion, possibly prosecuteable under the RICO racketeering statutes? Perhaps there's more than one way to fight this.
#1, proving the collusion and prosecuting under RICO would be hellaciously difficult and expensive to do (the telcos have deep deep deep pockets, in other words, their lawyers can beat up your lawyers) and #2 what exactly is the government going to do even IF they are found guilty? Fine them? It's not like they can shut them down or put anyone in jail. Even a government-mandated plan for correcting the issue is basically unenforceable; it's a return to the days of "We don't have to care, we're the phone company."
The only chance we have of this not destroying the Internet as we know it is to keep it from happening in the first place.
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You are so completely out of your mind.
Let's take some more accurate figures, defining the "Northeast" as all of New England, New York state, Pennsylvania and New Jersey:
Studio Apartment $300 Try much closer to $700, for anything that's within 15 miles of where you work. Much more if you live in any large city.
Heat $100 Assuming your heat isn't electric, this is pretty close, but $150 is more realistic based on fuel oil prices.
a good working car $150 At 7.5% interest with a $500 down payment over 48 months that works out to less than $6000 worth of car. There's a good chance that car won't outlast the payments, and there's also a very good chance that it'll need major maintenance (clutch/transmission/water pump/timing belt/what have you). Oh, and you're not taking into account car insurance; figure another $100 each month for that (plus or minus, based on where you live, what your driving record is like, what color your skin is, etc). (It's mandatory in most states up here.) This will be closer to $200, assuming you've got the $500 down payment (and not including insurance, see below.)
30 miles travel day at $4:00 a gallon $256 I have no idea where you're coming up with this figure. My figures look like this: 30 miles per day X 22 working days = 660 miles; 660 miles / (25miles/gallon) = 26.4 gallons; 26.4 gallons x $4/gallon = $105.6 per month. If you mean this number to include your gas AND insurance, it's a little closer. My commute is 70 miles a day, and that's probably about average for the Boston area. So if you double the fuel cost component of that, you're looking at closer to $350. Oh, and let's not forget people who have to pay for parking. If you park at a transit station outside the city, you'll pay $2 to $7 or so each day for parking. If you drive in to work and your employer doesn't pay for parking (as mine doesn't), how does $20 a day hit you.
food $320 Assuming you brown bag your lunch and never eat out (but maybe with the occasional pizza delivery), this is close.
electricity $100 Assuming you don't have electric heat, yes. If you do have electric heat, plan on this doubling in the winter.
medical $200 You're insane. Assuming you can even GET medical insurance, plan on this being at least $100 - $150 a week. My current employer pays 50% of my Blue Cross / Blue Shield HMO, and my contribution would be $150 twice a month. If you're on your own (or $deity forbid you have a family), this figure will be anywhere from $400 to $1000 (no joke.)
So let's do the numbers:
Car expenses (gas/tolls/insurance/possible parking) $400
Car payment $200
Rent (for a crappy studio in a lousy neighborhood) $700
Food $320
Electric $100
Heat $150
Medical $400 (if you can get medical insurance, more if you have dependents) or cross your fingers
So adding that all up, we get $2270 a month, or $27,240 a year, requiring a salary of $35,412 (minus taxes) just to break even. This comes out to more than $17/hour, nearly twice the $9/hour you quoted.
Oh, and by the way, someone making $9/hour will take home closer to $13k after taxes.
Also remember, these numbers assume that you do nothing but work, eat, and sleep. No cable tv, no movies, no dates, no computer, no Internet, no fun for you whatsoever. AND, no money to pay down debt or save. Also remember the $50k of student loans you've got to pay off eventually.
We as Americans need to learn to put their pride aside and learn to lower their standard of living Yeah, because who needs silly things like health insurance or a car. (And even if you are able to take public transit, you can probably count on that being at least $100 to $150 each month.)
I would agree that Americans need to be more financially responsible in general, but sometimes financial responsibility takes a back seat to not getting evicted.
How do you figure?
Let's take a given job requiring a given skill set. Two companies are offering positions requiring that skill set. One offers a rate of $25/hour, while the other offers a salary of $52,000 a year. (Yes, I know, it's not exact, but work with me.)
HR managers (spit) are well aware of what compensation that skill set commands. So let's say the programmer offered the salaried position knew that there would most likely be overtime involved, and also knows that, were he/she salaried, he/she would be making overtime pay. He/she then goes back to the HR manager and says "Since I'm not eligible for overtime, I'm asking for a higher salary to compete with other people who are eligible."
How soon do you think someone else (who didn't say a thing about the overtime situation) would be offered the job instead?
True, the company that paid by the hour would probably get a better candidate, and better work (because companies that pay more fairly get the best workers, at least in theory), but this assumes that these companies are interested in quality over profits.
Since companies who don't value profit over quality get their lunch eaten by the profit whores, there's no reason to pay higher salaries to compensate for lack of overtime pay, assuming you're not the only one in the state with that skill set.
You're not salaried, are you.
I'd love to be hourly and putting in the hours I am. I'd make more in overtime than I would in straight time.
But, since salaried workers are (effectively, if not techincally) ineligible for overtime, there we are.
The RIAA will soon assert that the information is their IP and therefore using FreeDB will give them all the information they need to sue you.
And in this country you can sue anyone for anything, provided you can pay for your lawyers' fees. In the RIAA's case, they're betting (usually correctly, by making sure they sue people who can't afford to defend themselves) that you can't, and therefore will have to do whatever they demand.
Clearly you don't work in the States.
I would need two hands to count the number of places I have worked at where everything that happened on a user's PC was IT's responsibility, regardless of the cause of the problem.
I have worked at Fortune 500 companies that did NOT have Acceptable Use Policies, because they didn't want to annoy the users.
The only way anyone gets fired here for what they do with a computer is if they get caught with child pornography on a company-owned system. Other than that, it's IT's problem/fault.
Careful, they'll take away your secret decoder ring...
Just kidding. I'm actually posting to give you kudos for being able to see how badly the Republican party has been hijacked by Big Business and the religous right. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Massachusetts liberal but find myself willing to vote for a moderate Republican candidate if it means those yahoos fall out of power.
I wish more people would realize that just because you've always voted for one party (or feel that that party is aligned with your own personal politics) doesn't mean you HAVE to vote for someone you don't like.
AT&T is a private sector company, not a government agency. The NSA (National Security Agency) is a branch of the federal government.
You're missing my point. If the rule is bad, change the rule. But in the meantime, the bad rule is STILL the rule.
We're not talking about ethics or morals here. We're talking about computer security. Security policy must be enforced at all times; if it isn't, and people are allowed to get away with breaking it, when the rule IS changed to not suck so much, people still won't follow it.
Sadly, I fear you're quite correct.
I beg to differ. HIPAA is very serious business, and the penalties for violating any part of it are severe.
And need I remind you that this is in a hospital? The administration is opening themselves up for SERIOUS liability if they don't fire these people. Look up HIPAA in Wikipedia for what I'm talking about.
This VA situation also appears to be yet another case of IT being given responsibility without any of the required authority. Had you asked anyone in IT whether this was a good idea or not, unless they've all been lobotomized, they'd say "absolutely not". But, since they have no authority, the users know they can basically do whatever the fuck they want, since IT will catch the heat for anything they do wrong anyway.
It's kind of like telling a police officer, "OK guard this prisoner, but you can't watch him or lock the door. Just sit in your office down the hall. But if he escapes, it's your fault."
Just because a security policy is retarded is no reason to justify ignoring it. I don't care if the password policy is that you must dance a particular sequence on a DDR pad for access, if that's the security policy, you follow it until a better policy can be put in place.
Besides, the career counselor costs money. They barely want to spend any money on benefits for their current employees, they damn sure don't want to spend any on people who don't work there anymore.
How can you avoid pissing someone off when you fire them? You can't. (Some) companies have discovered that the career counselor makes no difference whatsoever in the former employee's opinion of your company. And again, this implies that the company gives a flying shit sandwich about the employee after they fire them.
This might be another fly in the ointment for the ITVS.. Downloading an
I think Apple is going to have a challenge setting people's expectations here. Many of their customers can't understand Netflix; they're too used to the Blockbuster model, and anything different is too complicated. Getting those customers to understand how a multible gigabyte file takes longer than a multiple megabyte file is in a lot of cases going to be like teaching a pig to sing: it wastes your time and annoys the pig.
If you need proof, just look at a duck-billed platypus.
I mean seriously, what the fuck? Hair, bill, warm-blooded, lays eggs, nurses its young, males have venomous spurs..
(They also have the best electroperception of any mammal and swim with their eyes closed. You can't make this shit up, check out the Wikipedia entry. They're even wierder than I thought.)
I love Al, but if he signed a recording contract without legal counsel, he can't be as smart as I thought he was.
That being said, it's been repeated ad nauseum, but if you want to support an artist (Al included), go see them in concert. Artists make much more money from touring than they do from record/album/CD/iTunes sales in nearly all cases.
I kinda figured that, but I hate to waste a good tinfoil-hat infused rant when one bubbles up out of the paranoid bubbling crock pot I call a brain.
No persuasion necessary. The big businesses that have this information are the government. All that nonsense with "elections" is only so the crooks that get elected can say the people chose them to represent their constituents in Washington. (Which is true, except their constituents are the companies that line their pockets with campaign contributions, and not Joe and Jane Sixpack working for too little money for those companies.) Nowadays they don't even have to bother with all that "counting the votes", either, because their buddies at Diebold have made these magical little black boxes that spit out results that cannot be verified by anyone, so they can basically make them say whatever they want and nobody can refute them.
Unfortunately, the world is in fact full of said suckers. It's more cost effective to assume so under nearly all circumstances.
RMS... reasoned and well rounded...
Ok, there goes any credibility you might have had. RMS is like a black hole for credibility; he forms a "credibility D
Destruction field" around his event horizon much like Uncle Steve's Reality Distortion Field.
And i'm not sure what you mean about "match the US govt for funds". Is this related to the losing party paying all legal fees under British law? Because we certianly don't have that here. Assuming the business in question hasn't already purchased enough Congressmen to avoid the suit in the first place, they essentially have unlimited funds with which to defend their case, and the government most certianly does not. "My lawyers can beat up your lawyers."
Also, Americans don't take their business elsewhere due to rotten service. They just don't. Americans buy based on price, period, especially with something they don't understand like Internet service. Look at movie theaters: Lousy seats, lousy sound, overpriced popcorn, surly workers, rude audiences. Sure, maybe the theater down the street is a little better, but you don't see them switching. Why? Because the first theater is fifty cents cheaper.
Like what? Quality? Nobody competes on quality anymore. What this means is the big guys crush the little guys by suffocating them, just like everything else. They'll buy up all the QoS they can because they have the deep pockets. After all, why compete when you can eliminate the competition?
Not yet they don't.
You've never worked for a company that runs an enterprise-level web site, have you. These contracts are negotiated in terms of years, and moving the site is likely to be far more expensive than just ponying up the premium. Besides, the problem isn't with your bandwidth provider, it's with your customers' providers. You're getting the bandwidth you're paying for, but your customers are at the mercy of their provider in terms of whose packets get through unimpeded.
The only chance we have of this not destroying the Internet as we know it is to keep it from happening in the first place.
You've missed the point entirely.