>> The average Canadian taxpayer pays about $20,000 / year for health care costs.
> Your numbers are off by almost a factor of 4, actually. The per capita costs for healthcare in 2015 was $5292
$6000 on the government spending PERSON (plus $500 out of pocket). You probably have either kids or parents who are paying very little tax, if any. Guess who is paying the $6,000 each that they cost? It ends up roughly $20,000 per payer, per person employed full time. That is, each person currently paying pays an average of $20,000.
> that in USD, I would have an annual take home pay of $132 extra living in Texas
Employers provide health coverage in the US. It's not part of take-home pay in either place. In both places, the bulk of the cost is not seen by the consumer (which screws things up), with some incidentals like non-prescription medicine paid for from take-home.
The systems are actually quite similar, just basically in Canada the government runs the one and only insurance company. The only major difference is that in the US you have more choices you make, there are different plans to choose from. Here's something that would be really different:
My wife and I were referred for MRI scans. Since the cost wasn't paid out-of-pocket, we didn't care too much what it cost, but I did ask, for reasons that are slightly off-topic here. The place the doctors referred us to charged $2,000 apiece. I took 5 seconds to do a Google search for "MRI Dallas" and cAalled the first place listed. They said $1,200, but only $1,000 during off hours, and $650 if I filed the insurance form rather than having them handle it (which means they get paid immediately from my HSA). From $2,000 with the "normal" method that 99% of people do to $1,200 just by making one quick phone call! Another $200 saved if I came in after work, when they less busy. That's fully half the cost saved. What if there were a system that encouraged people to cut the costs in half by making a phone call and scheduling the appointment for 5:30, when they get off work.
To add to what you said, it very much depends on length, and also on exactly how the termination is done (untwisted length, etc). Ten feet of CAT5 introduces less noise than 100 meters of CAT6.
Also, gigabit was actually designed to work over cat5, but barely.
This post isn't really a reply to CaptSlaq. Sorry to reply to you randomly, but I wanted to out this above the idiot Koran spammer.
A common misconception is that this use of a blockchain is a new crypto-currency. Readers should note this is a DIFFERENT use of a blockchain, it is not a new currency, nor is it Bitcoin. It's simply a ledger.
> As for the labels, they used to discover the best artists and promote them, and do a great job with production. That all ended somewhere in the late 1990s or so.
I too prefer the "classic rock" station, vs the top 40 station. My favorite station advertises "the best music from sixties, seventies, and eighties". The pop station plays the weekly top 40, the songs that are popular this week.
It occurs to me that "sixties, seventies, and eighties", 30 years, is a MUCH broader library to choose from than this week is. It may be that there was plenty of teenie bopper crap cranked out in the 1970s too, and we let it stay there. Heck I know the Beatles cranked out more teenie pop than Justin Bieber, sometimes spending less than two hours on a song. We don't play the crappy ones from the 1970s today, because they are crappy and we have more than just one week of music to choose from.
Again, there are millions and millions of songs available for free on Myspace and a million other places. Literally 99.9% of music is free. Why would anyone in their right mind pay the record labels?
They would pay the record labels only if the labels were giving them something they want, adding some value.
> but for whatever reason there actually seem to be a lot of people who object to the idea of being charged for their actual usage
I have a monthly expense of $870/month for child care. Some months I use it more than others. I spoke with person providing the service and we BOTH prefer that I spend, and she receives, the same amount every month. It makes budgeting easier for both of us. Also it makes sense because when I decide not to use the service that particular day, she's already made the service AVAILABLE for me, I have the spot reserved whether I use it or not.
Both are true for internet. If you're going to pay $600 for internet this year, most people would rather it be $50/month rather than $10 one month and $90 the next month.
Also, the ISP has to provide you with the capacity every day, whether you use it or not.
I provide a hot spare service, where I keep an extra copy of the customer's web server. I used to charge by how many GBs of storage were used. Customers didn't like that the charge varied a few dollars each month. I changed it so now we bill un 100GB increments. Unless your site gets 100 GB bigger, your cost stays the same each month. Most costumers prefer that. Of course, Amazon AWS shows that variable pricing *can* work.
Lastly, regarding everyone buying more than you need, the price of the 300 GB isn't related in anyway to the actual cost of carrying 300 GB. The price is a function of the AVERAGE USAGE of customers subcribed to that plan. If the average customer with a 300 GB limit actually uses 1GB, pricing becomes a function of that cost to serve the customer 1 GB.
That term doesn't mean what you think it does, though you used it three times in one short post.
Myspace alone offers 53 million songs by 14 million artists, with 13,000 songs uploaded each day. BMG has 312 artists signed to their label. Over 99.9% of musicians are not associated with a label.
Yet there is some reason you want that 0.01% of music, not the 99.99% or so that's independent.
If you feel that you really want to have the tiny, tiny fraction of music that's distributed by the major labels, that the vast majority of music, which is free, isn't good enough for some reason, that obviously means that the label music is, in your opinion, BETTER in some important way. If label wasn't better in some way, you'd ignore it and listen to the millions and millions of other songs.
Maybe you want the label music because the millions of free artists include too many that aren't good and you don't want to spend the time to find the good ones? Perhaps the labels discover some of the best artists and promote them so you know about them? Maybe you want the label music because the production quality tends to be a lot better, being produced by experienced professionals in multi-million dollar studios rather than in the artist's basement? Maybe it's just predictability - you know that "Warner Music Nashville" will give you the type of music you like, without having to hunt through millions and millions of songs.
I don't know *why* you have such a strong desire for those relatively very few songs that are distributed by labels, but clearly you do, most people do. There's *something* about the music that the labels are involved in which people strongly prefer; it's better in some important way. The labels add some kind of value that is important to people.
The definition of rent seeking is acquiring a profit without adding any value. It can occur when the rent-seekers control most of the supply. Rent seeking can occur when have to buy from the rent-seeker at an inflated price because you can't just skip the middle man and get the item from the source.
With music, 99.99% of it isn't controlled by the labels. You *can* get it from other sources - in fact the vast *majority* of musicians distribute their own music, no label involved. But you don't want the free music. You want the label music, because there's something you value that the labels give you. Since you want, you value something about what the labels offer, that's the opposite of rent-seeking.
Even if there is an 80% chance that the money is wasted, doing the development might be the smart choice in order to establish market share while the private space industry is in it's infancy. So I wouldn't *suggest* a change.
The other *option* they should consider finding and fixing the significant existing problems before investing so much in a new platform that will likely have the same problems again. Figure out how to build an pressure tank before you build an even bigger version, for example. Maybe one problem is the quality control of the materials that one of their subcontractors is using. Example, maybe the material lining their tanks has more impurities than specified. Find out and get a different, better source for the material before you build another rocket with the same substandard lining . Or figure out how to build a tank that still work with the lining material, maybe by making it twice as thick. But don't just build another rocket with the same type of lining, which have the same type of failure.
> My point is that usage limits are pointless, there is no limit to the data a connection will transfer, the only limit is the bandwith.
So you're thinking there there is a limit to the number of bits per second, but not a limit to the bytes per month? Those are actually two ways of expressing the same same thing, how many symbols can it transfer in a given period of time.
GB per month = Mbps * 316 Minus overhead, 1 Mbps = 300 GB / month
So for each Mbps, there's a hard limit of 300 GB / month, because those two numbers represent exactly the same thing. Just like your speed in MPH limits how far you can drive in a day.
Then somewhere along the path, you're sharing the connection - you don't have a direct connection to each and every web server. If nothing else, obviously you're sharing the links between your city and other cities. If you're very lucky and you in an office building which houses a significant peering point, you are are only sharing a high speed links. Anyway, on each link, the mathematical maximum average bandwidth (measured per second or per month) for each user is the bandwidth of the link divided by the number of users. If your city has 1 Gbps (300 TB/month) of connectivity to the rest of the world, and has 100,000 residents, that 300TB of capacity the city has is shared by the 100,000 residents, giving 1 GB/month per resident.
It's POSSIBLE to build it more bigger faster while still trying to figure out why your design keeps resulting in "not an explosion", why your launch attempts turn into "fast fires".
That approach, go more bigger faster right now, is entirely likely to result in more bigger faster balls of flames. They *might* get lucky and an even more ambitious design might be more reliable, for no reason that anyone could predict. More likely, since they haven't yet figured out how to keep X from failing to contain 300 PSI, it won't do any better at containing 500 PSI. They are *probably* spending billions of dollars designing things based around ideas that don't work all that well. But maybe they'll get really lucky.
Let's do look at the Toyota Way, which is organized into four sections.
Section 2 is "The Right Process Will Produce the Right Results".
Within that, we have principles 5, 6, and 8:
Build a culture... to get quality right the first time. Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation... Use only reliable, thoroughly tested...
Do ya think maybe they try to follow the same process consistently? Or is it a cowboy culture where everyone does their own thing?
> I'm just clearing up the idea that "just going by the book"
It's not -just- going by the book. According to Toyota, there are four overarching ideas, and the second of those four ideas is "going by by the book", consistently following the "correct" process, not whichever way *you* like to do it.
> I don't know why but schools in asian nations are allowing students to get qualifications based on book sense not the ability to work through a complex problem that may need a left of field answer.
According to the people I work with who aren't from the US, that's a significant cultural difference. Most cultures value more knowing and following the rules and procedures, being an efficient part of the team. And that's good - Japan achieves consistently high quality partly because the workers consistently follow the specified procedure.
The US is different in the degree to which we value "outside the box thinking" or what you call "out of left field" answers, coming up with your own way of doing things. On the other hand, many of my American colleagues lack the book knowledge. For example, database adminstrators with little knowledge of, and no respect for, the basic normalization rules. Flying by the seat of your pants, thinking outside the box can be very good, and it can be very bad. If you're trying to come up with a revolutionary new design for a mach 6 jet, you'll need to think outside the box. When manufacturing the turbine blades inside the jet's engine, you need to know the book knowledge cold and follow the correct procedures precisely.
It's no coincidence that people in the US have invented so many things, while Japan and other nations beat us mightily at building higher quality cars, electronics, and other items. Some American goes off and invents the transistor, then the integrated circuit, by trying some wild idea. Then Asian people build millions of ICs that work right, pretty damn consistently.
Again, it's a cultural thing. Obviously nothing about being American is genetic - we're a genetic soup, but we have our own culture. Less so now than 40, 60, or 100 years ago.
BTW she did also sponsor several amendments to other people's bills. Those include:
requires the Federal Protective Service to have at least 1,200 officers protecting the Congressional Office Building, the Capitol, and other federal buildings.
requires the Comptroller General to study sharing border enforcement with Mexico and Canada.
requires the Secretary of Homeland Security to require that DHS contracts require successful acquisition outcomes
I won't get into whether or not the things she did "benefited the American people", nor any other highly subjective stuff, but here's a list of the laws she sponsored during her eight years in the Senate:
S. 3613: A bill to name a post office the "Major George Quamo Post Office Building."
S. 3145: A bill to designate a highway in New York as the Timothy J. Russert highway.
S. 1241: A bill to establish the Kate Mullany National Historic Site in the State of New York.
In addition to those three laws, she also sponsored a bill the president did not sign:
2. S.Con.Res.27 â" 110th Congress (2007-2008) A concurrent resolution supporting the goals and ideals of "National Purple Heart Recognition Day".
Three laws in eight years might sound rather low. It is, the average Senator does quite a bit more.
You be the judge as to whether or not her eight years in the Senate "benefited the American people". Aside from those eight years, she has been in politics in 1977. Much of that has been running PR and especially damage control for the officeholder, her husband.
> Hey, wait, I have a solution! How about you charge for the actual bandwidth in megabits per second, instead of for some arbitrary number of gigabytes per month?... Then everybody's happy, right?
You CAN buy bandwidth that way. I do. It's exactly the opposite of what you want for your home internet connection. Those connections are called T1, T3, DS1, DS3, and you may remember ISDN. That's exactly how to make you UNhappy.
At home, you want to load a Slashdot, have it load in less than a second, then spend 300 seconds reading it. Then you go get a snack for another 300 seconds. You do that for a few hours, then go to bed. The next day, you go to work, then come home and use the internet. You'll use it for a few seconds at a time, for a couple of hours. You do NOT want to sit there and wait for stuff to load - you want the connection to be much, much faster than what you're actually using each hour.
You want a very fast connection, maybe 20-100 Mbps, but you're only downloading 1GB per day, which means you're actually using the connection 0.1% of the time. 99.9% of the time, you're not actually using it. Even you you did 300 GB / month, that 100 Mbps connection would sit idle 99% of the time.
It's good that you don't actually want to use it 99% of the time because a full-transit connection from your home through to the internet costs about $10-$25 per mbps. A full transit 100 Mbps line, about $1,200 / month, depending on location. The great news is, because you're using it less than 1% of the time, you can SHARE it with your neighbors and split the cost. If you each use it 1% of the time or so, 30 neighbors can all share that $1,200/month bill, paying $40 each. THAT is what you want for home internet service.
That's the basic reason why your cable modem at 35 Mbps is SO much cheaper than the 35 Mbps serving your office. Your office likely doesn't share the bandwidth with other companies, and doesn't share the cost. They get the full 35 Mbps 24/7 and pay the full $500 / month.
Sharing a fast connection is awesome, you save tons of money, but one problem arises. One of your neighbors sets up a server and hosts web sites for three or four of his friends, then another neighbor leaves Netflix streaming 24/7 in two different rooms, when he's not even home. That's quite wasteful, but what does he care, he's only paying a tiny fraction of the cost. You get less of the shared bandwidth because dumbass is streaming HD video to an empty living room.
There is no perfect solution to that, but about the best solution we have are caps. Unfortunately ISPs haven't been clear about what the caps are for different pricing tiers. Most consumers probably don't know how many GBs they want, so that's part of the problem. I think the best might be if the major ISPs offered three plans:
Light use economy plan. Standard plan - perfect for daily browsing with some Youtube. Power user / HD video plan - for people who watch a lot of Netflix.
Each plan should a little bit higher usage allowance than it's name suggests, so almost everyone people who doesn't use IP video or torrent regularly will be happy with the medium sized plan. That way everyone is paying for their fair share of the shared connection, and everyone is getting what they pay for. That would make customers happy.
Selling you 45 Mbps of dedicated, guaranteed bandwidth on a T3 line for $800 would make CenturyLink happy, but it wouldn't make you very happy. You'd rather share the cost, and the capacity.
> I fully expected them to be cybercriminals (stupid word though it is), but it wasn't the cheating in games that led to it. It was their life-long habits.
So you agree that the correlation is likely. Nobody claimed that one caused the other.
Aside from "Chiseling little weasels that shoplifted and vandalized for fun", there are also people who like to hack, to install Linux on their phone or DVR, to turn our Linksys router into a media server or VPN concentrator, etc. Some of us like to not only think outside the box, but twiddle with the box and make it do things it wasn't designed to do. I'm like that. I could have gone either way with that, good or bad. I ended up in network security, I'm pen testing a PCI lab today. When I was younger I worked as a locksmith because again I enjoy skillfully opening a safe without the combination, doing something you're not supposed to be able to do. Something about manipulating the mechanism of that safe appeals to me.
For me, I have to maintain the highest morals and ethics I possibly can, in order to not let the camel's nose into the tent. I live on a slippery slope, so to speak, because I enjoy the cleverness of the hack. Today, I learn how bad guys do it and come up with clever ways to defend against it. However I know that if allowed myself to become a "little bit" of a crook, I'd soon be enjoying hacking US currency by overprinting $5 bills to become $20 bills or something.
In case anyone takes this comment seriously, the emissions per passenger mile are about the same for airliners and cars. Bo Big planes use more fuel per hour than ONE car does, but they carry heck of a lot more people, in a much shorter time.
A private jet carrying just Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and four hookers is of course dirtier - both because there are fewer people carried vs emissions, and because Clinton and hookers always ends up dirty.
For freight, airplanes carry 35% of all freight, and produce 12% of freight-carrying emissions.
I'm really glad you enjoy where you live. Seriously.
> I could just stay in Canada and enjoy my universal healthcare vs paying hundreds a month in Texas
The average Canadian taxpayer pays about $20,000 / year for health care costs. Personally, I'd rather pay "hundreds a month in Texas" via my employer than thousands via the govt in Canada, but if you like what you have, great!
I would only think you were silly if you traveled to the US for the treatment you needed rather than sitting on the waiting list for six months in Canada, and while here complained that we should be doing it the Canadian way. That would be silly because if you actually liked the Canadian way, you'd stay in Canada for treatment. You'd come to to the US (and pay cash) only if there was a clear benefit from the way we do it here. We get a LOT of Californians doing that - fleeing the results on California policies and coming here, where they are quote vocal about trying to enact the exact same policies that sent their job outsourced from California.
> started getting subverted into something else, once people... started twisting it and gaming it into what they wanted it to be
Some of the things presidents have said out-loud, publicly, are kind of shocking if you understand what's actually written in the Constitution. For example:
--- the Warren Court, it wasnâ(TM)t that radical. It didnâ(TM)t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution ---
A president thinks the government needs to "break free from the essential constraints placed in the Constitution".
--- the Constitution--that it is not a static but rather a living document and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world. ---
The words of the Constitution change depending on what you want to do today, Mr. president?
You probably know that the Constitution grants to Congress the power to lay taxes and decide where the money should be spent: The Congress shall have power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common defence and general Welfare of the United States....
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law;
The President, on the other hand, shall âoerecommend to Congress such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient". The president makes recommendation to Congress, it is Congress who, via appropriations laws, decided how tax money will be spent.
Each time the Congress appropriated money in a way he didn't like, one president made it a habit to attach the following signing statement to the law:
"provisions of this bill purport to condition the authority of executive branch officials to spend or reallocate funds on the approval of congressional committees.... our spending decisions shall not be treated as dependent on the approval of congressional committees."
"Our spending decisions"?!?! Read your Constitution, Mr. President. Spending decisions are made by the Congress, not by you.
Bush Jr and other presidents have been less careful than I'd like in closely following the Constitution. The quotes above are different, that's a president, President Obama, now declaring publicly that he doesn't intend to follow the Constitutional limits on his power, that he intends to "break free of the essential constraints placed in the Constitution" and make the law himself.
To me it seems obvious that it's true. Let's take a closer look a the claim and perhaps I can better understand your thoughts on the matter. The claim is:
> "some young people"... who mod online games in order to cheat may eventually progress to using low level cybercrime services and could use steering in the right direction
Let's break that down and you can tell me which part you disagree with:
A) some young people mod online games in order to cheat
B) may eventually progress to using low level cybercrime
C) could use steering in the right direction - "into gaming, cyber security, law enforcement, etc where they can use their cyber skills positively to have interesting and prosperous careers."
I'm guessing (B) is where you're taking issue with the idea? I assume you agree (A) is true - some people hack games to cheat the rules. I would also assume that it's obvious that young people experimenting with hacking would use some steering in the right direction, such as careers in the gaming or security industry rather than the spamming or malware industry.
Is my guess right? Would you say it's false that some young people who hack games in order to cheat may later apply similar skills to "cheat" the law, to be involved in "low level cybercrime"?
Since this thread is likely to attract the attention of our readers from California, I'll add note here that's a bit of a tangent.
Many of you have moved to Texas or are considering doing so, because in Texas many more jobs are available, and you can get a house five times larger than what you can afford in the desirable parts of California*, etc.
* Based on:
Texas unemployment 4.2% vs California 6.3%
Average home price/sq foot of $661 in San Francisco area vs $121 in DFW
61K average income in California vs $53K in DFW
If you've moved here or are thinking about moving here, welcome to Texas!
What does this have to with dumb laws and ridiculous regulation in California? If you think Texas might be a better place for you to live, consider that there are *reasons* for that. The things we do in Texas *cause* Texas to have much lower cost of living, with lower unemployment and comparable wages. You left California and came here because the California way of doing things didn't work out. You're coming to Texas because the way we do things works better. Therefore, when you arrive please don't lecture us about "you should do it this way, the way did it in California." If you like the California way so much, including the results of the California way, please enjoy those results - by staying in California. Here in Texas we don't want to ban the use of dihydrogen monoxide in construction. If you want to live without dihydrogen monoxide, you can do that in California - there's not much H2O there. If you decide Texas would be better place to live, welcome. Now put down the bong, take off that dress, Fred, and hop in the truck. We have some work to do.
CH2O is an essential compound using by the human body to produce other, more complex compounds. Your body maintains a fairly steady 2 ppm CH2O by releasing any excess as you exhale. California bans plywood containing any more than 0.05 PPM - because CH20 is "known to the State of California to cause cancer". Your body needs 50 times that level. Apparently California didn't notice that even eating the plywood would REDUCE the overall concentration of CH2O (formaldehyde) in the body.
That makes perfect sense, in California politico-legal logic. This is, after all, the same state that gave us the glorious legal logic "racial discrimination is mandatory by law because racial discrimination is illegal".
Slashdot Mirror
>> The average Canadian taxpayer pays about $20,000 / year for health care costs.
> Your numbers are off by almost a factor of 4, actually. The per capita costs for healthcare in 2015 was $5292
$6000 on the government spending PERSON (plus $500 out of pocket). You probably have either kids or parents who are paying very little tax, if any. Guess who is paying the $6,000 each that they cost? It ends up roughly $20,000 per payer, per person employed full time. That is, each person currently paying pays an average of $20,000.
> that in USD, I would have an annual take home pay of $132 extra living in Texas
Employers provide health coverage in the US. It's not part of take-home pay in either place. In both places, the bulk of the cost is not seen by the consumer (which screws things up), with some incidentals like non-prescription medicine paid for from take-home.
The systems are actually quite similar, just basically in Canada the government runs the one and only insurance company. The only major difference is that in the US you have more choices you make, there are different plans to choose from. Here's something that would be really different:
My wife and I were referred for MRI scans. Since the cost wasn't paid out-of-pocket, we didn't care too much what it cost, but I did ask, for reasons that are slightly off-topic here. The place the doctors referred us to charged $2,000 apiece. I took 5 seconds to do a Google search for "MRI Dallas" and cAalled the first place listed. They said $1,200, but only $1,000 during off hours, and $650 if I filed the insurance form rather than having them handle it (which means they get paid immediately from my HSA). From $2,000 with the "normal" method that 99% of people do to $1,200 just by making one quick phone call! Another $200 saved if I came in after work, when they less busy. That's fully half the cost saved. What if there were a system that encouraged people to cut the costs in half by making a phone call and scheduling the appointment for 5:30, when they get off work.
Electric translition of exciting product of our company google writes true word all times.
If you frequently make a change to a 10GB file, check out rsync. It transfers only the bytes that changed, rather than the whole file. Basic usage:
rsync -av local/file.bin user@123.1.1.8:/home/remote/file.bin
Where the user has ssh access.
To add to what you said, it very much depends on length, and also on exactly how the termination is done (untwisted length, etc). Ten feet of CAT5 introduces less noise than 100 meters of CAT6.
Also, gigabit was actually designed to work over cat5, but barely.
This post isn't really a reply to CaptSlaq. Sorry to reply to you randomly, but I wanted to out this above the idiot Koran spammer.
A common misconception is that this use of a blockchain is a new crypto-currency. Readers should note this is a DIFFERENT use of a blockchain, it is not a new currency, nor is it Bitcoin. It's simply a ledger.
> As for the labels, they used to discover the best artists and promote them, and do a great job with production. That all ended somewhere in the late 1990s or so.
I too prefer the "classic rock" station, vs the top 40 station. My favorite station advertises "the best music from sixties, seventies, and eighties". The pop station plays the weekly top 40, the songs that are popular this week.
It occurs to me that "sixties, seventies, and eighties", 30 years, is a MUCH broader library to choose from than this week is. It may be that there was plenty of teenie bopper crap cranked out in the 1970s too, and we let it stay there. Heck I know the Beatles cranked out more teenie pop than Justin Bieber, sometimes spending less than two hours on a song. We don't play the crappy ones from the 1970s today, because they are crappy and we have more than just one week of music to choose from.
Again, there are millions and millions of songs available for free on Myspace and a million other places. Literally 99.9% of music is free. Why would anyone in their right mind pay the record labels?
They would pay the record labels only if the labels were giving them something they want, adding some value.
> but for whatever reason there actually seem to be a lot of people who object to the idea of being charged for their actual usage
I have a monthly expense of $870/month for child care. Some months I use it more than others. I spoke with person providing the service and we BOTH prefer that I spend, and she receives, the same amount every month. It makes budgeting easier for both of us. Also it makes sense because when I decide not to use the service that particular day, she's already made the service AVAILABLE for me, I have the spot reserved whether I use it or not.
Both are true for internet. If you're going to pay $600 for internet this year, most people would rather it be $50/month rather than $10 one month and $90 the next month.
Also, the ISP has to provide you with the capacity every day, whether you use it or not.
I provide a hot spare service, where I keep an extra copy of the customer's web server. I used to charge by how many GBs of storage were used. Customers didn't like that the charge varied a few dollars each month. I changed it so now we bill un 100GB increments. Unless your site gets 100 GB bigger, your cost stays the same each month. Most costumers prefer that. Of course, Amazon AWS shows that variable pricing *can* work.
Lastly, regarding everyone buying more than you need, the price of the 300 GB isn't related in anyway to the actual cost of carrying 300 GB. The price is a function of the AVERAGE USAGE of customers subcribed to that plan. If the average customer with a 300 GB limit actually uses 1GB, pricing becomes a function of that cost to serve the customer 1 GB.
That term doesn't mean what you think it does, though you used it three times in one short post.
Myspace alone offers 53 million songs by 14 million artists, with 13,000 songs uploaded each day. BMG has 312 artists signed to their label. Over 99.9% of musicians are not associated with a label.
Yet there is some reason you want that 0.01% of music, not the 99.99% or so that's independent.
If you feel that you really want to have the tiny, tiny fraction of music that's distributed by the major labels, that the vast majority of music, which is free, isn't good enough for some reason, that obviously means that the label music is, in your opinion, BETTER in some important way. If label wasn't better in some way, you'd ignore it and listen to the millions and millions of other songs.
Maybe you want the label music because the millions of free artists include too many that aren't good and you don't want to spend the time to find the good ones? Perhaps the labels discover some of the best artists and promote them so you know about them?
Maybe you want the label music because the production quality tends to be a lot better, being produced by experienced professionals in multi-million dollar studios rather than in the artist's basement?
Maybe it's just predictability - you know that "Warner Music Nashville" will give you the type of music you like, without having to hunt through millions and millions of songs.
I don't know *why* you have such a strong desire for those relatively very few songs that are distributed by labels, but clearly you do, most people do. There's *something* about the music that the labels are involved in which people strongly prefer; it's better in some important way. The labels add some kind of value that is important to people.
The definition of rent seeking is acquiring a profit without adding any value. It can occur when the rent-seekers control most of the supply. Rent seeking can occur when have to buy from the rent-seeker at an inflated price because you can't just skip the middle man and get the item from the source.
With music, 99.99% of it isn't controlled by the labels. You *can* get it from other sources - in fact the vast *majority* of musicians distribute their own music, no label involved. But you don't want the free music. You want the label music, because there's something you value that the labels give you. Since you want, you value something about what the labels offer, that's the opposite of rent-seeking.
> What alternative do you suggest?
Even if there is an 80% chance that the money is wasted, doing the development might be the smart choice in order to establish market share while the private space industry is in it's infancy. So I wouldn't *suggest* a change.
The other *option* they should consider finding and fixing the significant existing problems before investing so much in a new platform that will likely have the same problems again. Figure out how to build an pressure tank before you build an even bigger version, for example. Maybe one problem is the quality control of the materials that one of their subcontractors is using. Example, maybe the material lining their tanks has more impurities than specified. Find out and get a different, better source for the material before you build another rocket with the same substandard lining . Or figure out how to build a tank that still work with the lining material, maybe by making it twice as thick. But don't just build another rocket with the same type of lining, which have the same type of failure.
> My point is that usage limits are pointless, there is no limit to the data a connection will transfer, the only limit is the bandwith.
So you're thinking there there is a limit to the number of bits per second, but not a limit to the bytes per month? Those are actually two ways of expressing the same same thing, how many symbols can it transfer in a given period of time.
GB = Mb / (8 * 1024)
month = (seconds * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30)
GB per month = Mbps * 316
Minus overhead, 1 Mbps = 300 GB / month
So for each Mbps, there's a hard limit of 300 GB / month, because those two numbers represent exactly the same thing. Just like your speed in MPH limits how far you can drive in a day.
Then somewhere along the path, you're sharing the connection - you don't have a direct connection to each and every web server. If nothing else, obviously you're sharing the links between your city and other cities. If you're very lucky and you in an office building which houses a significant peering point, you are are only sharing a high speed links. Anyway, on each link, the mathematical maximum average bandwidth (measured per second or per month) for each user is the bandwidth of the link divided by the number of users. If your city has 1 Gbps (300 TB/month) of connectivity to the rest of the world, and has 100,000 residents, that 300TB of capacity the city has is shared by the 100,000 residents, giving 1 GB/month per resident.
It's POSSIBLE to build it more bigger faster while still trying to figure out why your design keeps resulting in "not an explosion", why your launch attempts turn into "fast fires".
That approach, go more bigger faster right now, is entirely likely to result in more bigger faster balls of flames. They *might* get lucky and an even more ambitious design might be more reliable, for no reason that anyone could predict. More likely, since they haven't yet figured out how to keep X from failing to contain 300 PSI, it won't do any better at containing 500 PSI. They are *probably* spending billions of dollars designing things based around ideas that don't work all that well. But maybe they'll get really lucky.
Let's do look at the Toyota Way, which is organized into four sections.
Section 2 is "The Right Process Will Produce the Right Results".
Within that, we have principles 5, 6, and 8:
Build a culture ... to get quality right the first time. ... ...
Standardized tasks and processes are the foundation
Use only reliable, thoroughly tested
Do ya think maybe they try to follow the same process consistently? Or is it a cowboy culture where everyone does their own thing?
> I'm just clearing up the idea that "just going by the book"
It's not -just- going by the book. According to Toyota, there are four overarching ideas, and the second of those four ideas is "going by by the book", consistently following the "correct" process, not whichever way *you* like to do it.
> I don't know why but schools in asian nations are allowing students to get qualifications based on book sense not the ability to work through a complex problem that may need a left of field answer.
According to the people I work with who aren't from the US, that's a significant cultural difference. Most cultures value more knowing and following the rules and procedures, being an efficient part of the team. And that's good - Japan achieves consistently high quality partly because the workers consistently follow the specified procedure.
The US is different in the degree to which we value "outside the box thinking" or what you call "out of left field" answers, coming up with your own way of doing things. On the other hand, many of my American colleagues lack the book knowledge. For example, database adminstrators with little knowledge of, and no respect for, the basic normalization rules. Flying by the seat of your pants, thinking outside the box can be very good, and it can be very bad. If you're trying to come up with a revolutionary new design for a mach 6 jet, you'll need to think outside the box. When manufacturing the turbine blades inside the jet's engine, you need to know the book knowledge cold and follow the correct procedures precisely.
It's no coincidence that people in the US have invented so many things, while Japan and other nations beat us mightily at building higher quality cars, electronics, and other items. Some American goes off and invents the transistor, then the integrated circuit, by trying some wild idea. Then Asian people build millions of ICs that work right, pretty damn consistently.
Again, it's a cultural thing. Obviously nothing about being American is genetic - we're a genetic soup, but we have our own culture. Less so now than 40, 60, or 100 years ago.
BTW she did also sponsor several amendments to other people's bills. Those include:
requires the Federal Protective Service to have at least 1,200 officers protecting the Congressional Office Building, the Capitol, and other federal buildings.
requires the Comptroller General to study sharing border enforcement with Mexico and Canada.
requires the Secretary of Homeland Security to require that DHS contracts require successful acquisition outcomes
I won't get into whether or not the things she did "benefited the American people", nor any other highly subjective stuff, but here's a list of the laws she sponsored during her eight years in the Senate:
S. 3613: A bill to name a post office the "Major George Quamo Post Office Building."
S. 3145: A bill to designate a highway in New York as the Timothy J. Russert highway.
S. 1241: A bill to establish the Kate Mullany National Historic Site in the State of New York.
In addition to those three laws, she also sponsored a bill the president did not sign:
2. S.Con.Res.27 â" 110th Congress (2007-2008) A concurrent resolution supporting the goals and ideals of "National Purple Heart Recognition Day".
Three laws in eight years might sound rather low. It is, the average Senator does quite a bit more.
You be the judge as to whether or not her eight years in the Senate "benefited the American people". Aside from those eight years, she has been in politics in 1977. Much of that has been running PR and especially damage control for the officeholder, her husband.
> Hey, wait, I have a solution! How about you charge for the actual bandwidth in megabits per second, instead of for some arbitrary number of gigabytes per month? ... Then everybody's happy, right?
You CAN buy bandwidth that way. I do. It's exactly the opposite of what you want for your home internet connection. Those connections are called T1, T3, DS1, DS3, and you may remember ISDN. That's exactly how to make you UNhappy.
At home, you want to load a Slashdot, have it load in less than a second, then spend 300 seconds reading it. Then you go get a snack for another 300 seconds. You do that for a few hours, then go to bed. The next day, you go to work, then come home and use the internet. You'll use it for a few seconds at a time, for a couple of hours. You do NOT want to sit there and wait for stuff to load - you want the connection to be much, much faster than what you're actually using each hour.
You want a very fast connection, maybe 20-100 Mbps, but you're only downloading 1GB per day, which means you're actually using the connection 0.1% of the time. 99.9% of the time, you're not actually using it. Even you you did 300 GB / month, that 100 Mbps connection would sit idle 99% of the time.
It's good that you don't actually want to use it 99% of the time because a full-transit connection from your home through to the internet costs about $10-$25 per mbps. A full transit 100 Mbps line, about $1,200 / month, depending on location. The great news is, because you're using it less than 1% of the time, you can SHARE it with your neighbors and split the cost. If you each use it 1% of the time or so, 30 neighbors can all share that $1,200/month bill, paying $40 each. THAT is what you want for home internet service.
That's the basic reason why your cable modem at 35 Mbps is SO much cheaper than the 35 Mbps serving your office. Your office likely doesn't share the bandwidth with other companies, and doesn't share the cost. They get the full 35 Mbps 24/7 and pay the full $500 / month.
Sharing a fast connection is awesome, you save tons of money, but one problem arises. One of your neighbors sets up a server and hosts web sites for three or four of his friends, then another neighbor leaves Netflix streaming 24/7 in two different rooms, when he's not even home. That's quite wasteful, but what does he care, he's only paying a tiny fraction of the cost. You get less of the shared bandwidth because dumbass is streaming HD video to an empty living room.
There is no perfect solution to that, but about the best solution we have are caps. Unfortunately ISPs haven't been clear about what the caps are for different pricing tiers. Most consumers probably don't know how many GBs they want, so that's part of the problem. I think the best might be if the major ISPs offered three plans:
Light use economy plan.
Standard plan - perfect for daily browsing with some Youtube.
Power user / HD video plan - for people who watch a lot of Netflix.
Each plan should a little bit higher usage allowance than it's name suggests, so almost everyone people who doesn't use IP video or torrent regularly will be happy with the medium sized plan. That way everyone is paying for their fair share of the shared connection, and everyone is getting what they pay for. That would make customers happy.
Selling you 45 Mbps of dedicated, guaranteed bandwidth on a T3 line for $800 would make CenturyLink happy, but it wouldn't make you very happy. You'd rather share the cost, and the capacity.
> I fully expected them to be cybercriminals (stupid word though it is), but it wasn't the cheating in games that led to it. It was their life-long habits.
So you agree that the correlation is likely. Nobody claimed that one caused the other.
Aside from "Chiseling little weasels that shoplifted and vandalized for fun", there are also people who like to hack, to install Linux on their phone or DVR, to turn our Linksys router into a media server or VPN concentrator, etc. Some of us like to not only think outside the box, but twiddle with the box and make it do things it wasn't designed to do. I'm like that. I could have gone either way with that, good or bad. I ended up in network security, I'm pen testing a PCI lab today. When I was younger I worked as a locksmith because again I enjoy skillfully opening a safe without the combination, doing something you're not supposed to be able to do. Something about manipulating the mechanism of that safe appeals to me.
For me, I have to maintain the highest morals and ethics I possibly can, in order to not let the camel's nose into the tent. I live on a slippery slope, so to speak, because I enjoy the cleverness of the hack. Today, I learn how bad guys do it and come up with clever ways to defend against it. However I know that if allowed myself to become a "little bit" of a crook, I'd soon be enjoying hacking US currency by overprinting $5 bills to become $20 bills or something.
In case anyone takes this comment seriously, the emissions per passenger mile are about the same for airliners and cars. Bo
Big planes use more fuel per hour than ONE car does, but they carry heck of a lot more people, in a much shorter time.
A private jet carrying just Al Gore, Bill Clinton, and four hookers is of course dirtier - both because there are fewer people carried vs emissions, and because Clinton and hookers always ends up dirty.
For freight, airplanes carry 35% of all freight, and produce 12% of freight-carrying emissions.
I'm really glad you enjoy where you live. Seriously.
> I could just stay in Canada and enjoy my universal healthcare vs paying hundreds a month in Texas
The average Canadian taxpayer pays about $20,000 / year for health care costs. Personally, I'd rather pay "hundreds a month in Texas" via my employer than thousands via the govt in Canada, but if you like what you have, great!
I would only think you were silly if you traveled to the US for the treatment you needed rather than sitting on the waiting list for six months in Canada, and while here complained that we should be doing it the Canadian way. That would be silly because if you actually liked the Canadian way, you'd stay in Canada for treatment. You'd come to to the US (and pay cash) only if there was a clear benefit from the way we do it here. We get a LOT of Californians doing that - fleeing the results on California policies and coming here, where they are quote vocal about trying to enact the exact same policies that sent their job outsourced from California.
> started getting subverted into something else, once people ... started twisting it and gaming it into what they wanted it to be
Some of the things presidents have said out-loud, publicly, are kind of shocking if you understand what's actually written in the Constitution. For example:
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the Warren Court, it wasnâ(TM)t that radical. It didnâ(TM)t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution
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A president thinks the government needs to "break free from the essential constraints placed in the Constitution".
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the Constitution--that it is not a static but rather a living document and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.
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The words of the Constitution change depending on what you want to do today, Mr. president?
You probably know that the Constitution grants to Congress the power to lay taxes and decide where the money should be spent: ...
The Congress shall have power
To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common defence and general Welfare of the United States.
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law;
The President, on the other hand, shall âoerecommend to Congress such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient". The president makes recommendation to Congress, it is Congress who, via appropriations laws, decided how tax money will be spent.
Each time the Congress appropriated money in a way he didn't like, one president made it a habit to attach the following signing statement to the law:
"provisions of this bill purport to condition the authority of executive branch officials to spend or reallocate funds on the approval of congressional committees. ... our spending decisions shall not be treated as dependent on the approval of congressional committees."
"Our spending decisions"?!?! Read your Constitution, Mr. President. Spending decisions are made by the Congress, not by you.
Bush Jr and other presidents have been less careful than I'd like in closely following the Constitution. The quotes above are different, that's a president, President Obama, now declaring publicly that he doesn't intend to follow the Constitutional limits on his power, that he intends to "break free of the essential constraints placed in the Constitution" and make the law himself.
To me it seems obvious that it's true. Let's take a closer look a the claim and perhaps I can better understand your thoughts on the matter. The claim is:
> "some young people" ... who mod online games in order to cheat may eventually progress to using low level cybercrime services and could use steering in the right direction
Let's break that down and you can tell me which part you disagree with:
A) some young people mod online games in order to cheat
B) may eventually progress to using low level cybercrime
C) could use steering in the right direction - "into gaming, cyber security, law enforcement, etc where they can use their cyber skills positively to have interesting and prosperous careers."
I'm guessing (B) is where you're taking issue with the idea? I assume you agree (A) is true - some people hack games to cheat the rules. I would also assume that it's obvious that young people experimenting with hacking would use some steering in the right direction, such as careers in the gaming or security industry rather than the spamming or malware industry.
Is my guess right? Would you say it's false that some young people who hack games in order to cheat may later apply similar skills to "cheat" the law, to be involved in "low level cybercrime"?
Since this thread is likely to attract the attention of our readers from California, I'll add note here that's a bit of a tangent.
Many of you have moved to Texas or are considering doing so, because in Texas many more jobs are available, and you can get a house five times larger than what you can afford in the desirable parts of California*, etc.
* Based on:
Texas unemployment 4.2% vs California 6.3%
Average home price/sq foot of $661 in San Francisco area vs $121 in DFW
61K average income in California vs $53K in DFW
If you've moved here or are thinking about moving here, welcome to Texas!
What does this have to with dumb laws and ridiculous regulation in California? If you think Texas might be a better place for you to live, consider that there are *reasons* for that. The things we do in Texas *cause* Texas to have much lower cost of living, with lower unemployment and comparable wages. You left California and came here because the California way of doing things didn't work out. You're coming to Texas because the way we do things works better. Therefore, when you arrive please don't lecture us about "you should do it this way, the way did it in California." If you like the California way so much, including the results of the California way, please enjoy those results - by staying in California. Here in Texas we don't want to ban the use of dihydrogen monoxide in construction. If you want to live without dihydrogen monoxide, you can do that in California - there's not much H2O there. If you decide Texas would be better place to live, welcome. Now put down the bong, take off that dress, Fred, and hop in the truck. We have some work to do.
CH2O is an essential compound using by the human body to produce other, more complex compounds. Your body maintains a fairly steady 2 ppm CH2O by releasing any excess as you exhale. California bans plywood containing any more than 0.05 PPM - because CH20 is "known to the State of California to cause cancer". Your body needs 50 times that level. Apparently California didn't notice that even eating the plywood would REDUCE the overall concentration of CH2O (formaldehyde) in the body.
That makes perfect sense, in California politico-legal logic. This is, after all, the same state that gave us the glorious legal logic "racial discrimination is mandatory by law because racial discrimination is illegal".