And as anyone knows from the InfoSec space, that there's ALWAYS going to be breaches- where someone screws up on this because of speed, convenience, or actual malice.
Just because it's SUPPOSED to be that way doesn't mean it happens that way. Saying that it doesn't happen is just sticking one's head in the sand.
What I'm wondering right now is just how much "Not for public consumption", Confidential, and Secret items got released. Leak enough lower classified and potentially problematic (as in a little of it's not classified, but enough of it gives a window INTO what is...) and you've got as much of a problem as if you'd leaked the Secret and Top Secret stuff.
Considering that classified info has been leaked from systems that shouldn't have had them on there in the past, I would be...hesitant...to make such a bold claim. What is supposed to be done and what ends up happening with information happens to be two radically differing things at times.
Just because it's only supposed to be on trusted systems doesn't mean it stays on them or that people strictly follow the rules because the rules are oftentimes very constraining and they're in a hurry, etc.
However, having said this, it's not the first time someone screwed up bigtime on a DoD system.
We've had other sloppiness come to light from some of the Titan Rain hack announcements- basically, we've had a bit of low-grade (thankfully) leakage of things that are not classified but not for general public consumption, stuff classified Confidential and Secret out of boxes that should NEVER have had the information on them in the first place as they weren't trusted systems.
As it stands, I am not sure what to think of the article. It's the BEEB so it's less likely to sweep something like that under the rug. But it's also the BEEB, so they may be playing it up a bit larger than it actually is for varying reasons.
Would you like it better when people actually bought a copy before realizing it sucks?
Actually, yes. It would give them the needed feedback (word of mouth doing more damage than it already is, etc...) and perhaps they'll straighten up and fly right. After all, the only real copies of Vista being sold are the ones getting jammed down people's throats on new machines and the IT people upgrading so they can support those poor souls. If most everyone got screwed by MS in the manner we all know that Vista will do to most people, you'd have even less people taking them up on it.
As it stands, every one of my friends are asking how to migrate their legal XP installs and what they need to do to be in compliance with the old machine- or asking what they need to do to get Linux and get off of this merry-go-round MS has put everyone on.
That's one of those things that the great-grandparent-poster missed there. That Dell's nice. It's more muscular, no doubt.
The eeePC is not the same thing.
The eeePC is only in a "laptop" form factor because it's what's familiar and is what was useful for what Asustek intended for the device. The eeePC will survive things that'll pretty much nuke a laptop.
Dell: Takes 2 or so minutes to come up. eeePC: Takes roughly 30-40 seconds.
Dell: Comes with a hard disk, lots of other fragile parts. Drop it while it's running and it's liable to be toast. eeePC: Comes with a smaller but still very usably sized solid state disk. NO moving parts to really speak of.
Dell: Comes with Vista. You MIGHT get some default apps, but don't bet on it. Bet on buying stuff to make it useful. eeePC: Comes with Linux. Comes with pretty much everything you need right out of the box.
Dell: Runs warm. eeePC: Runs cool.
Dell: The price you quoted is a SALE PRICE. Trying to buy that "cheapie" will set you back $500 normally. eeePC: That's the base price. They've not taken to selling them at anything like a sale price.
All in all, I'd say it was a push. You probably even have software and whatnot that make that Dell cheapie make sense to buy- for you. The eeePC is an appliance for all intents and purposes and is really being marketed that way. And you can't seem to get ahold of them because everyone's getting them in their hands as fast as they can get them.
Now, if you're talking the UMPC space, instead of the laptop space- which is what this device REALLY is...
Comparing the eeePC to the other UMPCs out there, this thing pastes 'em for the large part because it's cheaper than all but the N800 right at the moment, runs all the same class of software (Even if you consider the XP configuration- which is actually LESS useful than the Xandros one...) on similar classes of hardware and is 1/3 the price for the others. If you're needing something in an UMPC for things, this thing mops up most of the other machines. And, there IS a whole host of end-user uses for UMPCs that people just aren't taking them up for use because the things have been too expensive in many ways. There's things that the cheapie Dell just won't do well with. Things that'd get it trashed (vibration on the HD, for just one example...). Things that it's actually TOO BIG for.
For a laptop, yes, it's probably still a bit pricey- and very definitely NOT something I'd do my laptop type computing stuff with as it's VERY underpowered for the things I need from a full-on laptop. As a UMPC, which is what this really is, it's a bang-up answer like few others.
I'm setting aside budget for one for a couple of uses I've in mind that the other, $1000+ UMPCs just are too damn expensive for.
As long as the phones are on, they're going to try to link up to a tower, which causes a definite beacon-like behavior that can be tracked with a portable cell site or the modern signal warfare hardware the US military already has.
Heh... Shows you how clueless they are. The US military has gear that can track cell conversations and their general location of origin, along with pretty much any RF comm gear you can imagine, in a theater of operations.
This just goes to show what is truly broken about their minds. They are far too self-interested to really be concerned about anything resembling "greater good." And I'll say it once again -- this is not the exclusive territory of muslim extremists. It's not even the exclusive territory of religious extremists though it does seem to be something of a hallmark of them. It's a problem of the self-centered[was interested] mind.
There...corrected it for you...
There's nothing quite wrong with a self-interested mind. Much of what we call "progress" is due to the self-interested mind.
It's when it's self-centered (The world revolves around the person, not the other way around...) and the self in question isn't in alignment with the rest of the people around them, whether that's right or wrong (Keep that in mind...) that it becomes a problem.
I'm betting "a", myself. They don't need a string of precedents like this one being handed down to them- they need this like they need a hole in their heads.
They might TRY "B", but it's definitely going to NOT go well for them to play the SCOX play here.:-D
As a shareseller, yes, you probably would hold that value.
If you're looking at at share price, you're looking at the exit value for your ownership in the company.
A shareholder is someone who holds onto their stocks. Unless you see dividends, the typical ways to extract a return on your investment is to either get a loan and use it as collateral, or sell the stock.
The share price, for many people isn't a shareholder value because you need to sell it and diminish your stake or remove your stake in the company's well being to get the return on things.
Because of this, the incentives for doing sensible things long-term get taken away as people keep trying to maximize their returns on their investments in a manner that's not sustainable. This is not to say that this is a bad thing overall- just a bad thing for us to be doing in the large like we're doing these days. Decisions for a company shouldn't be made the way the law firms are trying to do right now. Moreover, decisions for a company shouldn't be made based on a short-term look at the share price (though that's what happens all too often- because they're worried about these stupid lawsuits...). You should be making business decisions based off of the outlook on the company and the running 12-18 month average of the share price. There's just far too much volatility in most of the market to be deciding on business plans on that share price directly.
Considering that there's superhero/supervillan, military, and sci-fi MMOGs as well...
It's not the genre that's the problem. It's the networking and gameplay that comes from being multi-player over the internet that's part of it- plus how things like PvP are handled that ends up scotching most of them.
The reality is that that "extra penny a minute" that they "eat" is because they didn't PLAN on you using the bandwidth that the ISPs promised you and then seriously overbooked for a major profit. It's not that the claims weren't true on the networking solutions being better overall- it's that greedy people didn't implement what they claimed and pocketed the extra, we can't seem to get people to move to things like IP Multicast to shed most of that load, and things like the aforementioned.
I don't go boo-hoo for the ISPs. They knew this was going to eventually happen. They didn't prepare for it. They had the chance to do the right thing and they didn't- and still aren't. All in the name of large profits- something that nobody can sustain for long, ever. Nobody gets rich quick save by stealing or dumb luck. Once people start remembering that concept perhaps sanity will resume...naaahhh...we would never have that, now would we?
Yes it still needs human assistance, but that doesn't negate the fact that it provides 4 hours of light with no external power source required
external... You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means...;-)
Boils down to that you aren't (nor is anyone else, for that matter) drawing that "external" box right. It's NOT gravity powered. It uses gravity to store energy potential.
It's HUMAN powered as that is the external power source for the light. It's still impressive in it's own right because it's probably one of the first "useful" human powered devices that will work for four hours without any more effort than it needs right now.
But is it needing no external power source? NO. It needs a human to input energy into it's gravity "battery" much like we charge Ni-MH or Li-Ion battery packs on our devices. They need an external source. This light needs one too. It's just different than what the other gadgets use.
Wind is mechanical energy caused by thermal differentials and the rotation of the Earth- causing air flows from high to low pressure zones. The motion of the ocean is mechanical energy brought about by thermal differentials, wind, and tidal effects from the Moon's orbit.
You have your info a bit off. As for energy production via non-mechanical means...
Nuclear COULD do direct conversion (Atomic "batteries" typically work via thermopile and a thermal differential from the nucleotides and the outside environment) but that's currently inefficient so we use a slightly more efficient Brayton cycle conversion of heat to mechanical energy. Once we get more efficient thermal differential converters for direct electrical production, we'll probably use that and skip the mechanical steps as they're actually inefficient and leave a LOT of the energy on the floor. We might also be able to scoop up some of the energy flux from the nuclear energy directly- but that's proven out to be difficult at best and more subtle than the thermal differential work.
Coal and other fossil fuels could be converted to more usable forms and fed into a fuel cell which doesn't do mechanical stages in it to produce energy. Some of the fuels don't need conversion.
In the end, right NOW we get power from conversion from one form of energy to some thermal differential which imparts mechanical energy, which then gets converted into work or some other form of more usable energy. We're working on better ways of extracting the energy potentials than mechanical means unless that's the only good way to do so. Soon we'll have a bunch of that sort of thing going on instead because it's less efficient to convert it to work and then make the work produce a different form of energy that's more useful to us.
Ah... But that item you linked to happens to be referring to their technical data; which is subject to Copyright and the statement indicates as such.
They don't lay claim to legitimately obtained parts or technical data being sold on ebaY. Just pirated stuff or stuff that was obtained under license and covered under more than Copyright because of an EULA.
Definitely not anything unheard of. Sometimes you get a gem out of the Chinese stuff. Most of the time, though, you get shoddy workmanship, which is what you expect. That's because the incentives are on cutting corners wherever you can on the stuff over there. That's part of why I question any value in much, if not most, of the offshoring we keep insisting upon doing here in the States.
I strongly suspect that they KNEW that it wasn't even remotely encrypted with AES. Using AES "somewhere" doesn't get them off the hook for fielding it and labeling it with "secured with AES" when it only uses AES for a handshake on the chip and then the thing uses some really stupid encryption for the rest of the drive. And, I don't buy the "misleading labeling" either- in my not so humble opinion, their engineers are not terribly competent or they knew that this chip didn't do what they wanted to claim and then used it anyway at management's insistence, to shave pennies off their BOM. Happens ALL the time in the entire industry.
Stealing's illegal and is criminal. Breach of agreement is illegal, it's just that it's covered under Civil law instead of criminal law and carries differing penalties, etc.
Once you realize this, things make more sense. And yes, owning a Hackintosh could be deemed as illegal if there's any enforceability of the licensing agreements on Leopard possible. If usage implies acceptance of the terms of licensing, you accepted to ONLY use MacOS on an APPLE machine. If you're not, you may not be allowed to use the software and could be sued for the breach of the agreement you entered into by USING the software.
In the end, I'd say it's a bit better to do Linux or *BSD as there's none of those gotchas in the mix.:-)
Heh... They're against net-neutrality, just not stupid in the same way about it.
And, they're more than happy to allow you to use every drop of that peak bandwidth- you've just got to have a business account and service with them; it's only double what they're charging for the consumer service.
Heh... Your name dropping of available ISPs indicates you're in the UK. You're where there's some hefty competition in the cell, data, etc. space (with an effective monopoly ran by the government on the television space...which seems to work reasonably well all the same...;-)
Where the parent poster was referring to is in the States. Where while we came UP with the whole idea of the Internet, we don't have competition in many of the areas of the country because many don't find it economically viable to compete with the incumbents (i.e. Comcast, Time Warner, etc...) or the companies in the area don't deem a "rural" area as being economically viable enough to roll service out to (even though they promised to do so over time... See: AT&T or Verizon...).
While we have other countries like Japan, Finland, etc. having ISPs rolling out 100Mb service to customers, we're forced to piddling 1.5Mbit/128kbit configurations with DSL and 6Mbit/256kbit configurations, with 15Mbit/2Mbit or 50Mbit/5Mbit configurations if you're one of the "lucky" customers in a Verizon area where they're flogging FiOS and you get a business grade connection (With at least a $130-250/mo account charge associated with the same...).
None of the real connection options are cheap right at the moment over here. Not everywhere offers it- nor in many cases do you have more than ONE ISP or perhaps two, neither of which really offer any good choices for you if you live in one of the areas in question. It's all because the companies are operating off of pure unrestrained greed. They're more worried about short-term profitability and highest return on their investment in the shortest time. Laudable goals, really but unrealistic in that they'd see a better return if they risk a little more and think in terms of 5-10 years down the road. Unfortunately, that's not what's going on these days.
In a typical amount of political weasel-speak, they worded the motion in such a way you had to re-read it at least once to parse precisely what they intended to do.
It was worded to STRIKE the immunity provision. A Yea vote was one where they were to hold the telcos accountable for civil violations of the law with regards to FISA. A No vote was to give the telcos a get out of jail free card.
McCain voted to give them a free out.
Clinton didn't bother to vote.
Obama voted to keep them accountable for their illicit activities. (Which, unfortunately, would be an accurate appraisal of the telcos' position right now...)
I suspect Obama, even if he wanted to give them a way out, just bought himself quite a bit of street cred with a LOT of people if there's something of a big deal made about this.
Slashdot Mirror
And as anyone knows from the InfoSec space, that there's ALWAYS going to be breaches- where someone screws up on this because of speed, convenience, or actual malice.
Just because it's SUPPOSED to be that way doesn't mean it happens that way. Saying that it doesn't happen is just sticking one's head in the sand.
What I'm wondering right now is just how much "Not for public consumption", Confidential, and Secret items got released. Leak enough lower classified and
potentially problematic (as in a little of it's not classified, but enough of it gives a window INTO what is...) and you've got as much of a problem
as if you'd leaked the Secret and Top Secret stuff.
This wasn't the DHS. This was the DoD- whom should have KNOWN BETTER.
Considering that classified info has been leaked from systems that shouldn't have had them on there in the past, I would be...hesitant...to make such
a bold claim. What is supposed to be done and what ends up happening with information happens to be two radically differing things at times.
Just because it's only supposed to be on trusted systems doesn't mean it stays on them or that people strictly follow the rules
because the rules are oftentimes very constraining and they're in a hurry, etc.
They would like to have that role. But if this is how they handle security...heh...
One has to wonder about that...
However, having said this, it's not the first time someone screwed up bigtime on a DoD system.
We've had other sloppiness come to light from some of the Titan Rain hack announcements-
basically, we've had a bit of low-grade (thankfully) leakage of things that are not classified
but not for general public consumption, stuff classified Confidential and Secret out of
boxes that should NEVER have had the information on them in the first place as they weren't
trusted systems.
As it stands, I am not sure what to think of the article. It's the BEEB so it's less likely
to sweep something like that under the rug. But it's also the BEEB, so they may be playing it
up a bit larger than it actually is for varying reasons.
Heh... They'd have to pay a lot- it's pretty craptacular.
Actually, yes. It would give them the needed feedback (word of mouth doing more damage than it already is, etc...)
and perhaps they'll straighten up and fly right. After all, the only real copies of Vista being sold are the ones
getting jammed down people's throats on new machines and the IT people upgrading so they can support those poor souls.
If most everyone got screwed by MS in the manner we all know that Vista will do to most people, you'd have even less
people taking them up on it.
As it stands, every one of my friends are asking how to migrate their legal XP installs and what they need to do
to be in compliance with the old machine- or asking what they need to do to get Linux and get off of this merry-go-round
MS has put everyone on.
That's one of those things that the great-grandparent-poster missed there. That Dell's nice. It's more muscular, no doubt.
The eeePC is not the same thing.
The eeePC is only in a "laptop" form factor because it's what's familiar and is what was useful for what Asustek intended for
the device. The eeePC will survive things that'll pretty much nuke a laptop.
Heh... Let's compare:
Dell: Takes 2 or so minutes to come up.
eeePC: Takes roughly 30-40 seconds.
Dell: Comes with a hard disk, lots of other fragile parts. Drop it while it's running and it's liable to be toast.
eeePC: Comes with a smaller but still very usably sized solid state disk. NO moving parts to really speak of.
Dell: Comes with Vista. You MIGHT get some default apps, but don't bet on it. Bet on buying stuff to make it useful.
eeePC: Comes with Linux. Comes with pretty much everything you need right out of the box.
Dell: Runs warm.
eeePC: Runs cool.
Dell: The price you quoted is a SALE PRICE. Trying to buy that "cheapie" will set you back $500 normally.
eeePC: That's the base price. They've not taken to selling them at anything like a sale price.
All in all, I'd say it was a push. You probably even have software and whatnot that make that Dell
cheapie make sense to buy- for you. The eeePC is an appliance for all intents and purposes and is
really being marketed that way. And you can't seem to get ahold of them because everyone's getting
them in their hands as fast as they can get them.
Now, if you're talking the UMPC space, instead of the laptop space- which is what this device REALLY is...
Comparing the eeePC to the other UMPCs out there, this thing pastes 'em for the large part
because it's cheaper than all but the N800 right at the moment, runs all the same class of software
(Even if you consider the XP configuration- which is actually LESS useful than the Xandros one...)
on similar classes of hardware and is 1/3 the price for the others. If you're needing something
in an UMPC for things, this thing mops up most of the other machines. And, there IS a whole host
of end-user uses for UMPCs that people just aren't taking them up for use because the things
have been too expensive in many ways. There's things that the cheapie Dell just won't do well
with. Things that'd get it trashed (vibration on the HD, for just one example...). Things that
it's actually TOO BIG for.
For a laptop, yes, it's probably still a bit pricey- and very definitely NOT something I'd do
my laptop type computing stuff with as it's VERY underpowered for the things I need from a
full-on laptop. As a UMPC, which is what this really is, it's a bang-up answer like few others.
I'm setting aside budget for one for a couple of uses I've in mind that the other, $1000+ UMPCs
just are too damn expensive for.
Considering that the smoke COMES from the fire usually...
As long as the phones are on, they're going to try to link up to a tower, which causes a definite
beacon-like behavior that can be tracked with a portable cell site or the modern signal warfare hardware
the US military already has.
Heh... Shows you how clueless they are. The US military has gear that can track cell conversations
and their general location of origin, along with pretty much any RF comm gear you can imagine, in a
theater of operations.
There...corrected it for you...
There's nothing quite wrong with a self-interested mind. Much of what we call "progress" is due to the self-interested mind.
It's when it's self-centered (The world revolves around the person, not the other way around...) and the self in question isn't
in alignment with the rest of the people around them, whether that's right or wrong (Keep that in mind...) that it becomes a problem.
I'm betting "a", myself. They don't need a string of precedents like this one being handed down to them-
:-D
they need this like they need a hole in their heads.
They might TRY "B", but it's definitely going to NOT go well for them to play the SCOX play here.
As a shareseller, yes, you probably would hold that value.
If you're looking at at share price, you're looking at the exit value for your ownership in the company.
A shareholder is someone who holds onto their stocks. Unless you see dividends, the typical ways to
extract a return on your investment is to either get a loan and use it as collateral, or sell
the stock.
The share price, for many people isn't a shareholder value because you need to sell it and diminish your
stake or remove your stake in the company's well being to get the return on things.
Because of this, the incentives for doing sensible things long-term get taken away as people keep trying
to maximize their returns on their investments in a manner that's not sustainable. This is not to say
that this is a bad thing overall- just a bad thing for us to be doing in the large like we're doing these
days. Decisions for a company shouldn't be made the way the law firms are trying to do right now.
Moreover, decisions for a company shouldn't be made based on a short-term look at the share price (though
that's what happens all too often- because they're worried about these stupid lawsuits...). You should
be making business decisions based off of the outlook on the company and the running 12-18 month average
of the share price. There's just far too much volatility in most of the market to be deciding on
business plans on that share price directly.
Considering that there's superhero/supervillan, military, and sci-fi MMOGs as well...
It's not the genre that's the problem. It's the networking and gameplay that comes from being multi-player
over the internet that's part of it- plus how things like PvP are handled that ends up scotching most of them.
The reality is that that "extra penny a minute" that they "eat" is because they didn't PLAN on you using the bandwidth that
the ISPs promised you and then seriously overbooked for a major profit. It's not that the claims weren't true on the networking
solutions being better overall- it's that greedy people didn't implement what they claimed and pocketed the extra, we can't seem
to get people to move to things like IP Multicast to shed most of that load, and things like the aforementioned.
I don't go boo-hoo for the ISPs. They knew this was going to eventually happen. They didn't prepare for it. They had the
chance to do the right thing and they didn't- and still aren't. All in the name of large profits- something that nobody can
sustain for long, ever. Nobody gets rich quick save by stealing or dumb luck. Once people start remembering that concept
perhaps sanity will resume...naaahhh...we would never have that, now would we?
external... You keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means...
Boils down to that you aren't (nor is anyone else, for that matter) drawing that "external" box right.
It's NOT gravity powered. It uses gravity to store energy potential.
It's HUMAN powered as that is the external power source for the light. It's still impressive in it's own right because it's
probably one of the first "useful" human powered devices that will work for four hours without any more effort than it needs right now.
But is it needing no external power source? NO. It needs a human to input energy into it's gravity "battery" much like we charge Ni-MH or Li-Ion
battery packs on our devices. They need an external source. This light needs one too. It's just different than what the other gadgets
use.
Wind, caused by the motion of the Ocean?
Heh... Try again.
Wind is mechanical energy caused by thermal differentials and the rotation of the Earth- causing air flows from high to low pressure zones.
The motion of the ocean is mechanical energy brought about by thermal differentials, wind, and tidal effects from the Moon's orbit.
You have your info a bit off. As for energy production via non-mechanical means...
Nuclear COULD do direct conversion (Atomic "batteries" typically work via thermopile and a thermal differential from the nucleotides and the outside environment) but that's currently inefficient so we use a slightly more efficient Brayton cycle conversion of heat to mechanical energy. Once we get more efficient thermal differential converters for direct electrical production, we'll probably use that and skip the mechanical steps as they're actually inefficient and leave a LOT of the energy on the floor. We might also be able to scoop up some of the energy flux from the nuclear energy directly- but that's proven out to be difficult at best and more subtle than the thermal differential work.
Coal and other fossil fuels could be converted to more usable forms and fed into a fuel cell which doesn't do mechanical stages in it to produce energy. Some of the fuels don't need conversion.
In the end, right NOW we get power from conversion from one form of energy to some thermal differential which imparts mechanical energy, which then gets converted into work or some other form of more usable energy. We're working on better ways of extracting the energy potentials than mechanical means unless that's the only good way to do so. Soon we'll have a bunch of that sort of thing going on instead because it's less efficient to convert it to work and then make the work produce a different form of energy that's more useful to us.
Ah... But that item you linked to happens to be referring to their technical data; which is subject to Copyright and the statement indicates as such.
They don't lay claim to legitimately obtained parts or technical data being sold on ebaY. Just pirated stuff or stuff that was obtained under license
and covered under more than Copyright because of an EULA.
Definitely not anything unheard of. Sometimes you get a gem out of the Chinese stuff. Most of the time, though, you
get shoddy workmanship, which is what you expect. That's because the incentives are on cutting corners wherever you
can on the stuff over there. That's part of why I question any value in much, if not most, of the offshoring we keep
insisting upon doing here in the States.
I strongly suspect that they KNEW that it wasn't even remotely encrypted with AES. Using AES "somewhere" doesn't
get them off the hook for fielding it and labeling it with "secured with AES" when it only uses AES for a handshake
on the chip and then the thing uses some really stupid encryption for the rest of the drive. And, I don't buy the
"misleading labeling" either- in my not so humble opinion, their engineers are not terribly competent or they knew
that this chip didn't do what they wanted to claim and then used it anyway at management's insistence, to shave
pennies off their BOM. Happens ALL the time in the entire industry.
"Illegal" doesn't always mean "criminal".
:-)
Stealing's illegal and is criminal. Breach of agreement is illegal, it's just that it's covered under
Civil law instead of criminal law and carries differing penalties, etc.
Once you realize this, things make more sense. And yes, owning a Hackintosh could be deemed as illegal
if there's any enforceability of the licensing agreements on Leopard possible. If usage implies acceptance
of the terms of licensing, you accepted to ONLY use MacOS on an APPLE machine. If you're not, you may
not be allowed to use the software and could be sued for the breach of the agreement you entered into
by USING the software.
In the end, I'd say it's a bit better to do Linux or *BSD as there's none of those gotchas in the mix.
Heh... They're against net-neutrality, just not stupid in the same way about it.
And, they're more than happy to allow you to use every drop of that peak bandwidth- you've just
got to have a business account and service with them; it's only double what they're charging
for the consumer service.
Heh... Your name dropping of available ISPs indicates you're in the UK. You're where there's some ;-)
hefty competition in the cell, data, etc. space (with an effective monopoly ran by the government
on the television space...which seems to work reasonably well all the same...
Where the parent poster was referring to is in the States. Where while we came UP with the whole
idea of the Internet, we don't have competition in many of the areas of the country because many
don't find it economically viable to compete with the incumbents (i.e. Comcast, Time Warner, etc...)
or the companies in the area don't deem a "rural" area as being economically viable enough to roll
service out to (even though they promised to do so over time... See: AT&T or
Verizon...).
While we have other countries like Japan, Finland, etc. having ISPs rolling out 100Mb service to
customers, we're forced to piddling 1.5Mbit/128kbit configurations with DSL and 6Mbit/256kbit
configurations, with 15Mbit/2Mbit or 50Mbit/5Mbit configurations if you're one of the "lucky"
customers in a Verizon area where they're flogging FiOS and you get a business grade connection
(With at least a $130-250/mo account charge associated with the same...).
None of the real connection options are cheap right at the moment over here. Not everywhere offers
it- nor in many cases do you have more than ONE ISP or perhaps two, neither of which really offer
any good choices for you if you live in one of the areas in question. It's all because the
companies are operating off of pure unrestrained greed. They're more worried about short-term
profitability and highest return on their investment in the shortest time. Laudable goals, really
but unrealistic in that they'd see a better return if they risk a little more and think in terms
of 5-10 years down the road. Unfortunately, that's not what's going on these days.
In a typical amount of political weasel-speak, they worded the motion in such a way you had to re-read it at least once to parse
precisely what they intended to do.
It was worded to STRIKE the immunity provision. A Yea vote was one where they were to hold the telcos accountable for
civil violations of the law with regards to FISA. A No vote was to give the telcos a get out of jail free card.
McCain voted to give them a free out.
Clinton didn't bother to vote.
Obama voted to keep them accountable for their illicit activities. (Which, unfortunately, would be an accurate appraisal of the telcos' position right now...)
I suspect Obama, even if he wanted to give them a way out, just bought himself quite a bit of street cred with
a LOT of people if there's something of a big deal made about this.