No, numbnuts, Brits are blaming Thatcher for explicitly prohibiting BT from deploying its final brilliant development as a public telecommuncations researcher and provider. It would have been like Reagan saying, if relevant events were contemporaneous, "No, AT&T, now we've broken you up, you must wipe all your Unix source code rather than releasing your new OS. Otherwise Microsoft won't be able to compete so effectively."
Of course we continue to blame that government for implementing the arrangement which exists to this day - one where progress is merely about playing technical catch-up, and where the regulators have to drag the children kicking and screaming to get them to provide any decent level of service.
I could blame you if it makes you feel better, though?
Joking aside, I wonder if it's a symptom of service-oriented economy. You might have been regarded as the guy responsible for delivering TV service, so it's for you to deal with whatever's wrong - even if that's the power.
It's like when some drunk driver rammed into a telephone pole outside our house. The correct procedure was to call our 1. retail telephony provider and 2. (separately) ISP, even though these companies themselves could do sweet fuck all beyond passing the logged fault on to the company with ownership and responsibility for this equipment: BT Openreach.
Anyway, we contacted the retail telephony provider, but they dallied a while. They said we could not contact Openreach directly. So we took the most direct route, collaring some local repairmen for a chat while they were wandering around trying to identify a nearby fault. It turned out they hadn't even yet been notified about the accident, and the information we gave from the initial safety repairs helped them with what they were actually out for. When they returned a couple of days later, we plied them with a continual supply of tea and biscuits until they'd restored connectivity for everyone in the street.
tl;dr The system is slow, but the workers are quick. Unfortunately, you're discouraged from interacting directly with them, training you into helplessness unless you're particularly stubborn.
As a successful invasion? No. Not unless 9/11 counts as a successful invasion of the US.
Although WW2 was over 5 years after the Battle of Britain, while the US has indentured itself for decades, so maybe 9/11 was a more effective attack. Thanks for making me think about this.
Yeah. I'm not sure whether she hated "socialism" or "free markets" more, but she did as much as she could to make sure Britain enjoyed the features of neither.
Of course we have better broadband than the US: we're a pissant islet in a pond, and Oftel/Ofcom has spent much of its life kicking BT into rolling out service as far and wide as possible (although the unprofitable areas e.g. Scottish Highlands are actually completed with government money - with BT raking in the profits at the end).
And give access to any ISP at cost - are you slow? They have to give access to any ISP at regulated prices, but they certainly are allowed to make a profit. Since telecoms is a natural monopoly and any attempt to create competition is really just the government stepping in and forcing the incumbent operator and local councils to dig up the roads and share pipework/exchanges, it's in fact only "leftie bullshit" which has given us something remotely resembling "competitive" offerings in the UK.
It's classical Thatcherism: what looks like freeing up a market is in fact carefully regulating it to give the impression of competition, when in fact all she did was create a scenario where government had to endlessly socialise losses and channel profits to a bunch of useless leeches. Just as she did with railways, energy companies, water companies, banking industry(Girobank), and is about to happen with the postal service.
You appear to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between neoliberalism (which is classical liberalism renamed, and gave us workhouses etc.) and social democracy.
Neoliberalism is based on the capitalistic belief that it is better to accumulate capital and invest it wisely than to labour.
Socialism is based on the belief that people should not be able to gain personally except from labour.
Social democracy takes a bit of both, although really it is capitalism with a Keynesian bent rather than socialism with a bit of NEP
The upshot of this is that while the average working person is entitled to more rest under social democracy, those who were previously able to leech off their capital genuinely had to "work for results". Thatcherism reversed that, which is why 30 years later Britain's a fucking joke and America's circling the drain.
In particular, BT hasn't had to work much for results for 30 years.
BT used to do interesting things, and was about to d oa very early fibre rollout before Thatcher stuck her beak in, but it's been playing catchup with the rest of the world since it was privatised.
See e.g. the long thread on the Be Internet user forum. It was noted that the government refuses to purchase services from ISPs which aren't already enforcing IWF-strength filtering. This was done to encourage ISPs to follow government pro-censorship policy, instead of directly legislating to require censorship. Then the ISP's filters would look like a business decision and the civil libertarians who are "pro-freedom-of-business" wouldn't be able to get their panties in a twist. Fairly clever, if you ask me, and it's just another reminder of the danger of public-private partnerships.
I did mention AAISP in the final paragraph, but I suppose their approach is so correct that it's worth mentioning twice (or thrice, right here!).
Government and big business play an on-going game of pretending to wrestle each other, but they're usually happy enough to work together while giving the plebs some "state vs private sector interests" theatre to get worked up about.
I haven't heard many complaints about the cost, to be honest.
Run no filter: - lose gov contracts;
Run cheap filter: - gain gov contracts; - increase prices slightly for everyone; - minority of people notice they're missing legitimate web sites;
Run expensive filter: - minority still complain because they tend to object to filtering in principle; - lose custom from extra costs which will be passed on to consumer.
So "run cheap filter" is always the profitable option in the UK, which is why everyone feeds the IWF list plus the easiest interpretation of court orders into something in the style of the original Cleanfeed, augmented more recently by DPI by some ISPs.
Oh, what bullshit. ISPs have bent over backwards so they don't lose out on delicious government contracts, which in the UK require satisfactory filtering methods in place.
There are maybe one or two ISPs which have had a backbone in all this - such as Andrews&Arnold. You can tell the difference because their Internet service is 100% unfiltered. They even ask you if you want filtering and refuse to provide you with service if you say "yes".
Given that even classical medicine has a horrible habit of misapplying hypothesis testing, that quantitative macroeconomics is almost pure voodoo, and that weather prediction leaves a lot to be desired, I'd say the problem is not a lack of mathematics, but that the American model (unlike the European model) is to put numbers before logic.
Maybe it's a language matter. If I say, "Guns have done immense harm," I don't mean all guns have done immense harm. Psych research has involved and led to some brilliant and some atrocious shit. For the former, I gave the example of advances in mental healthcare. For the latter, I'd highlight applied psychometrics, which is really eugenics with delayed effect.
1) We have a lot of fundamental misunderstandings about shit, but that doesn't invalidate all our research. Bla bla Newton Einstein archetype;
2) Psychological research has done immense harm, but it's also brought mental healthcare out of the stone age of arbitrary, cruel punishment - since 1 in 4 people will suffer a mental health problem at some time in their life, this is seriously significant shit;
3) Neurological research has helped to treat my overworked wrists, turning me from someone barely able to write for 15 minutes without a break to someone approaching normal function below the elbows. So, there you're just talking shit.
The word "shit" in this post was brought to you by The Dude.
The creativity which went into Monkey Island, The Longest Journey or Grim Fandango, or even Curses and Zork Zero, leave me bored when I confront what is merely a technical exercise. I haven't enjoyed an FPS since Thief.
I remember watching Titanic when it first came out. It was a watershed: after this, films would not be defined by art, but by geekery. And everyone can apply an engineering technique, really.
Slashdot Mirror
The only way to replace all labourers with robots is to produce robots with the intelligence of humans.
And then any ethical system worth its salt would have to give the same rights to the robots as to the humans.
And then you have the same problem as before, but with greater population across at least two species.
Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
No, numbnuts, Brits are blaming Thatcher for explicitly prohibiting BT from deploying its final brilliant development as a public telecommuncations researcher and provider. It would have been like Reagan saying, if relevant events were contemporaneous, "No, AT&T, now we've broken you up, you must wipe all your Unix source code rather than releasing your new OS. Otherwise Microsoft won't be able to compete so effectively."
Of course we continue to blame that government for implementing the arrangement which exists to this day - one where progress is merely about playing technical catch-up, and where the regulators have to drag the children kicking and screaming to get them to provide any decent level of service.
I could blame you if it makes you feel better, though?
Joking aside, I wonder if it's a symptom of service-oriented economy. You might have been regarded as the guy responsible for delivering TV service, so it's for you to deal with whatever's wrong - even if that's the power.
It's like when some drunk driver rammed into a telephone pole outside our house. The correct procedure was to call our 1. retail telephony provider and 2. (separately) ISP, even though these companies themselves could do sweet fuck all beyond passing the logged fault on to the company with ownership and responsibility for this equipment: BT Openreach.
Anyway, we contacted the retail telephony provider, but they dallied a while. They said we could not contact Openreach directly. So we took the most direct route, collaring some local repairmen for a chat while they were wandering around trying to identify a nearby fault. It turned out they hadn't even yet been notified about the accident, and the information we gave from the initial safety repairs helped them with what they were actually out for. When they returned a couple of days later, we plied them with a continual supply of tea and biscuits until they'd restored connectivity for everyone in the street.
tl;dr The system is slow, but the workers are quick. Unfortunately, you're discouraged from interacting directly with them, training you into helplessness unless you're particularly stubborn.
As a successful invasion? No. Not unless 9/11 counts as a successful invasion of the US.
Although WW2 was over 5 years after the Battle of Britain, while the US has indentured itself for decades, so maybe 9/11 was a more effective attack. Thanks for making me think about this.
Yeah. I'm not sure whether she hated "socialism" or "free markets" more, but she did as much as she could to make sure Britain enjoyed the features of neither.
Of course we have better broadband than the US: we're a pissant islet in a pond, and Oftel/Ofcom has spent much of its life kicking BT into rolling out service as far and wide as possible (although the unprofitable areas e.g. Scottish Highlands are actually completed with government money - with BT raking in the profits at the end).
And give access to any ISP at cost - are you slow? They have to give access to any ISP at regulated prices, but they certainly are allowed to make a profit. Since telecoms is a natural monopoly and any attempt to create competition is really just the government stepping in and forcing the incumbent operator and local councils to dig up the roads and share pipework/exchanges, it's in fact only "leftie bullshit" which has given us something remotely resembling "competitive" offerings in the UK.
It's classical Thatcherism: what looks like freeing up a market is in fact carefully regulating it to give the impression of competition, when in fact all she did was create a scenario where government had to endlessly socialise losses and channel profits to a bunch of useless leeches. Just as she did with railways, energy companies, water companies, banking industry(Girobank), and is about to happen with the postal service.
You appear to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between neoliberalism (which is classical liberalism renamed, and gave us workhouses etc.) and social democracy.
Neoliberalism is based on the capitalistic belief that it is better to accumulate capital and invest it wisely than to labour.
Socialism is based on the belief that people should not be able to gain personally except from labour.
Social democracy takes a bit of both, although really it is capitalism with a Keynesian bent rather than socialism with a bit of NEP
The upshot of this is that while the average working person is entitled to more rest under social democracy, those who were previously able to leech off their capital genuinely had to "work for results". Thatcherism reversed that, which is why 30 years later Britain's a fucking joke and America's circling the drain.
In particular, BT hasn't had to work much for results for 30 years.
They were purchasing from Telefonica O2, of which Be was a subsidiary. Telefonica ain't small.
BT used to do interesting things, and was about to d oa very early fibre rollout before Thatcher stuck her beak in, but it's been playing catchup with the rest of the world since it was privatised.
But life itself is a game.
See e.g. the long thread on the Be Internet user forum. It was noted that the government refuses to purchase services from ISPs which aren't already enforcing IWF-strength filtering. This was done to encourage ISPs to follow government pro-censorship policy, instead of directly legislating to require censorship. Then the ISP's filters would look like a business decision and the civil libertarians who are "pro-freedom-of-business" wouldn't be able to get their panties in a twist. Fairly clever, if you ask me, and it's just another reminder of the danger of public-private partnerships.
Making assumptions that things are related is for IQ tests.
In the real world, it's best not to jump to conclusions - either become an expert, or get in touch with one.
Ubuntu is the easiest thing to install if it works first time, and the hardest if it doesn't. In that respect, it's much like Windows.
"They even help GCHQ out by not using carrier grade NAT."
Oh dear.
"all their traffic re-directed to say Sweden"
Oh dear oh dear.
Last successful invasion: 1066.
Get back to me in a millennium, yank.
"When Joining Yet Again was talking about paranoid gun nuts, he MUST HAVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT ME."
OK, you can be "free" and dead. I'll be enjoying my slightly less "free" life.
I did mention AAISP in the final paragraph, but I suppose their approach is so correct that it's worth mentioning twice (or thrice, right here!).
Government and big business play an on-going game of pretending to wrestle each other, but they're usually happy enough to work together while giving the plebs some "state vs private sector interests" theatre to get worked up about.
I haven't heard many complaints about the cost, to be honest.
Run no filter:
- lose gov contracts;
Run cheap filter:
- gain gov contracts;
- increase prices slightly for everyone;
- minority of people notice they're missing legitimate web sites;
Run expensive filter:
- minority still complain because they tend to object to filtering in principle;
- lose custom from extra costs which will be passed on to consumer.
So "run cheap filter" is always the profitable option in the UK, which is why everyone feeds the IWF list plus the easiest interpretation of court orders into something in the style of the original Cleanfeed, augmented more recently by DPI by some ISPs.
I assume this is a parody of the gun nuts who weaken every decent discussion with paranoid, extremist ramblings.
"This is why ISPs..."
Oh, what bullshit. ISPs have bent over backwards so they don't lose out on delicious government contracts, which in the UK require satisfactory filtering methods in place.
There are maybe one or two ISPs which have had a backbone in all this - such as Andrews&Arnold. You can tell the difference because their Internet service is 100% unfiltered. They even ask you if you want filtering and refuse to provide you with service if you say "yes".
Given that even classical medicine has a horrible habit of misapplying hypothesis testing, that quantitative macroeconomics is almost pure voodoo, and that weather prediction leaves a lot to be desired, I'd say the problem is not a lack of mathematics, but that the American model (unlike the European model) is to put numbers before logic.
Maybe it's a language matter. If I say, "Guns have done immense harm," I don't mean all guns have done immense harm. Psych research has involved and led to some brilliant and some atrocious shit. For the former, I gave the example of advances in mental healthcare. For the latter, I'd highlight applied psychometrics, which is really eugenics with delayed effect.
1) We have a lot of fundamental misunderstandings about shit, but that doesn't invalidate all our research. Bla bla Newton Einstein archetype;
2) Psychological research has done immense harm, but it's also brought mental healthcare out of the stone age of arbitrary, cruel punishment - since 1 in 4 people will suffer a mental health problem at some time in their life, this is seriously significant shit;
3) Neurological research has helped to treat my overworked wrists, turning me from someone barely able to write for 15 minutes without a break to someone approaching normal function below the elbows. So, there you're just talking shit.
The word "shit" in this post was brought to you by The Dude.
The creativity which went into Monkey Island, The Longest Journey or Grim Fandango, or even Curses and Zork Zero, leave me bored when I confront what is merely a technical exercise. I haven't enjoyed an FPS since Thief.
I remember watching Titanic when it first came out. It was a watershed: after this, films would not be defined by art, but by geekery. And everyone can apply an engineering technique, really.