Baah!! There is not a finite amount of money in the country!!! ARGH!!!!
I'd like to beat the shit out of the economics teacher who keeps telling people this.
You didn't hear it in Economics? Well, that's a relief.
Companies don't hoard cash. In fact, hoarding cash is STUPID. The goal of a corporation is to be as profitable as possible, and that meaans they have to do something with all those dollars they have in the bank, where they're only earning a shitty 2% or so.
Like, pay them to more employees as they expand. Or, give them to the R&D dept (Xerox PARC anyone?) so they can come up with cool stuff to sell. Or, reinvest them in the market so they can get a high rate of return, which allows other companies to use the dollars to hire people and make more cool stuff.
Successful companies create wealth. They make more people wealthier than they were. They don't take money out of the system and fill a pool with it so the board can swandive in hundreds. Economics is NOT a zero-sum game.
Silly person. You don't want it discussed in committee, because if it gets pigeonholed, it'll never get to the floor and no one will ever vote on it.
What the committee wants is for the copyright interests to come up with something that won't get massacred during the hearings, and again before the full Senate. They won't be able to, so basically, this bill is probably gone.
Yaay!
Of course, watch closely for a new bill with a different acronym and more obfusticated language to pop up soon.
We supported the Mujahadin (?sp?) against the Soviet invasion, mostly by selling them stinger shoulder-fire missiles and sending the CIA to train them. Eventually, the soviets pulled out, and (rejecting the 'policemen of the world argument) we left immediately. Well, the place fell apart into warlordism. Whoops! Maybe we should have stayed to help straighten that shit out?
Ohyeah, we aren't supposed to be doing that sort of thing.
Anyway, Pakistan started to get nervous at the rumblings on its border, and since they have a lot of citizens of the same ethnicity as the Taliban faction, they picked the Taliban and helped them gain power. The 'northern alliance' is mainly of a different ethnicity and opposes the Taliban.
You don't get labelled 'terrorist' if you only attack the opposing military... Nobody was plotting to blow up Buckingham Palace or Trafalgar Square during the war for Independence. I think it's time you 'learnt' some history of your own... and you might want to check out this.
We didn't 'support' them . In fact, we squeezed them into about the most uncomfortable political position we could think of, then buttfucked them until they gave us what we wanted. After we were done, we said (and I'm paraphrasing) "Okay, Okay, we'll stop all those nasty economic sanctions. Good luck with the protesters!"
Umm... Wasn't it Pakistan that installed the Taliban?
I defy you to name a middle-eastern country whos leader was installed by the US.
I further defy you to name a middle eastern country who's people hold our ideals sacred.
All criminals hate the authority from which they flee. Most Mexicans do not hate the US... only the ones that fear deportation. Maybe they should stay home!
In fact, Mexicans hate poverty, not Mexico or the , and the flood of people headed north looking for support from the US would be unbearable. If there's anyone in government who has a thorough understanding of what's going on at the Mexico border, it's GW Bush.
Ohyeah, and where are you from again? Lets see if you walk the walk...
Leaving aside the lack of RF shielding, it's been my experience that getting near plexiglass makes my hair stand up... that stuff holds one hell of a static charge! Wouldn't it just get continually worse if you fill it with electronics? If I'm right, this guy's box doesn't have much of a shelf life...
One of the big problems I see with encouraging (and I use this in the Shakespearean 'more things in heaven and earth, Horatio' sense) philosophy-based TLDs is that by default they must pursue a policy of policing their links, both going in and coming out. I suppose if you could get enough popular support it might be made to work, but think of the monitoring that would be necessary! Any chat room, any message board would be a potential hole in the dike unless you completely walled off access to.clean, and verified client connections with a LOT more accuracy that we can at present.
Also, certain groups might want to segment off areas of the net and prevent people from linking into those areas, as well as preventing webmasters from linking out into the wider net. That sort of idea is poison to the net in general. The Better Business Bureau is taking this approach, bringing legal action against non-BBB sanctioned companies who link into their website! I suppose a.BBB TLD would be great for them, but it would place all.BBB companies outside the realm of the searchable net. Any TLD 'club' who wanted to really screen access and block exits would have to prevent google from crawling the entire TLD, and someone would have to maintain a seperate search engine for it. IMHO, search engines are the glue that binds the net together. Fragmenting them would do immesurable damage. Also, I think one of the great strengths of the net is that you aren't really allowed to be homogenous... anybody from anywhere can participate in practically anything.
Incedentally, wouldn't a webring that doesn't link outside the ring provide basically the same thing? At least as far as outbound links...
Regarding the censorship issue, I think I come from a slightly more 'old-school' viewpoint. IMO, the issue of whether or not we trust the govt. to regulate content is moot. The govt. isn't allowed to regulate content, no matter how much we citizens might want it to or how good an idea it might be. They have not been granted the Constitutional power to regulate any content, and in fact they have been, clearly and with much consideration, specifically prevented from doing so by the 1st amendment. Even if we desperately wanted to regulate assfuckmydonkey.com in a library, we'd need a constitutional amendment to legally make it happen.
Therefore, much as I might want the librarian to hit the power switch if she sees my kid typing goatse.cx, as an employee of the state or federal govt. she does not have the authority to do so. Neither can any group, association, or local/state/federal governing body in a public place. The ONLY stick they have to swing is the SCOTUS opinions on obscenity, in the narrowly defined legal sense, and on child porn because it's illegal to exploit children in that fashion. A library (or a school for that matter) could not restrict itself to.clean or any other walled garden TLD, though I suppose it could block access to a TLD that contained ONLY legally obscene images and other obscene content.
I found it an interesting irony that this quote appeared at the bottom of your message: Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have. -- Harry Emerson Fosdick You've got to take the good with the bad. Someone with the power to ban goatse.cx could also ban gayrights.com or wicca.org, hell.com, or even democrats.com.
I really know what you mean about that desire to be worry-free. I grew up in a very small town, and I was very frequently out after dark playing in the woods or whatever. In fact, I wished the same for my kids so much that, when I got the opportunity, I moved the whole family to Oranmore, Co. Galway, Ireland (pop: 3000). In a lot of ways, it's like being able to step into my own past while still bringing all the modern stuff along with me. I don't think the desire to not worry makes you lazy or bad, but I can't think of any effective way to protect your kids from the bad stuff except to pull up a chair and go exploring with them.
The entire point of the article was that, if you change the name from 'quake3.exe' to 'quack3.exe' then the game performs differently. In fact, ATI detects if 'quake3.exe' is running, and skimps on the graphics to make the card appear to run better, but does not do so if 'quack3.exe' is running.
Therefore, ATI drivers are NOT, repeat NOT optimized for the id Software code, but instead designed to see 'quake3.exe' cut corners accordingly. If the drivers had been written to take advantage of some feature in the code itself, the drivers wouldn't give a shit what the name of the.exe was! 'quack3.exe' would have turned in exactly the same benchmarks that 'quake3.exe' did.
You missed the point entirely. They didn't optimize for Quake3... they looked for the string "quake3.exe" or some permutation of it, and falsely reported better benchmarks for that.exe name. If they'd optimized for the quake3 code, it wouldn't matter what the.exe was named; the card would have performed the same regardless.
You're completely contradicting yourself!
The.clean tld would be a much smaller subset of the real internet...
I want my daughter to be able to explore and stumble across new and interesting concepts...
If I direct her searches and surfing habits then I'm going to fall into a patern that creates a little clone of myself not an educated and interesting person who follows her own path and learns what she wants to learn.
I. also, am a parent of three, and my eldest, a girl, is 6. Now think about this:
First, what you're actually saying isn't that you want your daughter to be a free-thinking independent person, but that you want your daughter to be restricted to a tiny subset of the net with extremely homogenous content deemed 'safe' by a standards body which has no reason to heed your input. She won't be stumbling across any new or interesting concepts in your.clean TLD because there won't be any there. She won't learn what she wants to learn, because much of that won't be in.clean. She won't follow her own path, because all the paths have been regulated and approved, and.clean is walled off from the rest of the net. No one (by your own admission) would bother to register a.clean domain for their fascinating new research discovery, or anything else, really. Those who will bother will either be marketing to children, or have the safest plain vanilla content they can (or both), to avoid having their domain whacked by the all-powerful.clean reviewers.
.clean would have to block access to all of DejaNews, which effectively censors a third of all the useful commentary and info on the net. Otherwise, the system would devolve into the same old broken censorware we've seen fail to screen usenet properly. In the end,.clean would become so anemic, you probably wouldn't restrict your daughter to it anymore. Back at square one!
Now, your ideas about what's safe for your daughter are certainly different from mine, and they would without a doubt be different from the.clean people. So, you either put up with their regulation, or you turn her loose on google.com, or you monitor her exploring.
You can't have your cake and eat it, too. Either you monitor her, or you risk a trip to goatse.cx, or you effectively censor he rin exactly the way you were trying to avoid by not monitoring her.
Incedentally, what you're really advocating here is (at the bottom of that nasty slippery slope) is fragmentation of the most severe kind for the net, with every interest group setting up the sort of walled garden for their content that killed off prodigy and Compu$erve. It's the eventual de-linking of the web, perhaps damaging it permanently in the process, or else it's a poor idea that withers away in the face ot the true free flow of information, even the most objectionable kind. What I'd imagine might happen: every interest group starts restricting content into their own TLD, and if you want to find anything, you have to either go to one of a hundred different search engines, or else find some meta-search bot that covers them all, which is for all intents and purposes the same thing we have now!
Also, as you probably know, you would be sorely taxed trying to turn your daughter into a clone of yourself. Short of hardcore brainwashing, there's little you could do to prevent her becoming her own person. She's going to learn a lot of what she wants regardless of your opinions on the matter. IMHO (and this is exactly what I'm doing with my three) there isn't a subject my kids should be afraid to ask me about. That gives me the opportunity to let them select the topic without also letting them run across goatse.cx. Hopefully that will continue.
Being a parent requires you to take a level of responsibility that many people aren't comfortable with, but regardless, there's no middle ground available. Either you're involved, or you're not. You can't put a technological or regulatory system in place that absolves you of your responsibility to teach what is appropriate when you think it's appropriate, however you might define it.
Finally, there's a HUGE difference between the Boy Scouts banning gay kids (perfectly constitutional, it's not a governmental ban) and allowing a regulatory body like ICANN (who's power flows from the Congress) appoint anyone to a position which allows them to screen access based on content. That's censorship, as would any attempt to restrict a public PC to the.clean domain only, whatever the circumstances.
Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but here is the esteemed Declan McCullagh's report on the subject. Deconstructing this 'filtering' is becoming so easy it's almost boring.
Who modded this up?
Your plan has holes I could throw a cat through. redirecters get in trouble with who? What if I'm serving my 'dirty' content from Malasaya?
What if I post family photos from my trip to a nude beach on the French Riveara? Does your kids group censor this? People in France certainly won't find it objectionable.
Who gets to be in the kids group? Pentacostal ministers who find images of Catholic Saints 'blasphemous' and inappropriate for kids? What body picks it's members? and who picks them? Where does the power REALLY flow from?
The judgements are SO subjective, it immediately renders any division of the net based on content completely pointless. When you add in the fact that the rest of the world also has net access, it just ends up downright stupid.
Any censoring body that does not derive its power from the Congress is by default illegitemate and illegal. Congress can never set up a censoring body because the people will never allow it, and it's prevented by the Constitution. The technology prevents any attempt from being even marginally successful. The judgements are too subjective and impossible to implement uniformly across the world.
In short, it's hopeless. Give up on technology and start being a parent.
What turned me off was when they had some catastrophic system failure and took 3 weeks to load their current search results back into the database. I was getting results that were 3 or 4 months old, and I switched permanently to google after that.
Yeah, the background tiles look nice. It's 9:40 GMT here and I've been waiting for 10 minutes so far... say, isn't that a section from Peter Bruegel's The Triumph of Death?
Poor ickle server, just can't handle the pressure...
AFAIK, Time Warner doesn't give you a refund or a free month, no matter how often or how long you're without cable service. SWBell home DSL has no service level agreement, and DSL can be shut down for unspecified reasons for significant lengths of time with no recourse to the user. I routinely recommend that businesses avoid basic DSL for that exact reason: you can lose tons of productivity and you still have to pay for the crappy service.
In fact, several years ago the utility company dug through the T-1 line servicing Hoover's, Inc. in Austin, TX, and they had to threaten SWBell with legal action to get the 2 days of downtime taken from their bill.
Either Mediaone is very friendly, or you turned in a command performance on the phone with them. Either way, congrats!
Slashdot Mirror
Links please. I'll believe that when I see it.
I have a feeling the protests will evaporate right about the time the US leaves.
Baah!! There is not a finite amount of money in the country!!! ARGH!!!!
I'd like to beat the shit out of the economics teacher who keeps telling people this.
You didn't hear it in Economics? Well, that's a relief.
Companies don't hoard cash. In fact, hoarding cash is STUPID. The goal of a corporation is to be as profitable as possible, and that meaans they have to do something with all those dollars they have in the bank, where they're only earning a shitty 2% or so.
Like, pay them to more employees as they expand. Or, give them to the R&D dept (Xerox PARC anyone?) so they can come up with cool stuff to sell. Or, reinvest them in the market so they can get a high rate of return, which allows other companies to use the dollars to hire people and make more cool stuff.
Successful companies create wealth. They make more people wealthier than they were. They don't take money out of the system and fill a pool with it so the board can swandive in hundreds. Economics is NOT a zero-sum game.
Silly person. You don't want it discussed in committee, because if it gets pigeonholed, it'll never get to the floor and no one will ever vote on it.
What the committee wants is for the copyright interests to come up with something that won't get massacred during the hearings, and again before the full Senate. They won't be able to, so basically, this bill is probably gone.
Yaay!
Of course, watch closely for a new bill with a different acronym and more obfusticated language to pop up soon.
Just avoid the UK... over there you can now be detained for an unlimited amount of time without being charged with a crime.
And you people think civil liberties are under attack in America!
You could go to Ireland... wait, no. Refusing to answer police questions is considered an admission of guilt in Ireland. Damnit!
Maybe America isn't so bad?
We supported the Mujahadin (?sp?) against the Soviet invasion, mostly by selling them stinger shoulder-fire missiles and sending the CIA to train them. Eventually, the soviets pulled out, and (rejecting the 'policemen of the world argument) we left immediately. Well, the place fell apart into warlordism. Whoops! Maybe we should have stayed to help straighten that shit out?
Ohyeah, we aren't supposed to be doing that sort of thing.
Anyway, Pakistan started to get nervous at the rumblings on its border, and since they have a lot of citizens of the same ethnicity as the Taliban faction, they picked the Taliban and helped them gain power. The 'northern alliance' is mainly of a different ethnicity and opposes the Taliban.
You don't get labelled 'terrorist' if you only attack the opposing military... Nobody was plotting to blow up Buckingham Palace or Trafalgar Square during the war for Independence. I think it's time you 'learnt' some history of your own... and you might want to check out this.
THAT was funny. I wish I had mod points!
We didn't 'support' them . In fact, we squeezed them into about the most uncomfortable political position we could think of, then buttfucked them until they gave us what we wanted. After we were done, we said (and I'm paraphrasing) "Okay, Okay, we'll stop all those nasty economic sanctions. Good luck with the protesters!"
Umm... Wasn't it Pakistan that installed the Taliban?
I defy you to name a middle-eastern country whos leader was installed by the US.
I further defy you to name a middle eastern country who's people hold our ideals sacred.
All criminals hate the authority from which they flee. Most Mexicans do not hate the US... only the ones that fear deportation. Maybe they should stay home!
In fact, Mexicans hate poverty, not Mexico or the , and the flood of people headed north looking for support from the US would be unbearable. If there's anyone in government who has a thorough understanding of what's going on at the Mexico border, it's GW Bush.
Ohyeah, and where are you from again? Lets see if you walk the walk...
Woo hoo! How about... Germany! Japan! South Korea! Haiti!
Learn some history, youngling.
Maybe you had a few too many Samuel Adams before you wrote that?
carlos_benj: "Whoo! Only a President could make beer this good!"
Leaving aside the lack of RF shielding, it's been my experience that getting near plexiglass makes my hair stand up... that stuff holds one hell of a static charge! Wouldn't it just get continually worse if you fill it with electronics? If I'm right, this guy's box doesn't have much of a shelf life...
One of the big problems I see with encouraging (and I use this in the Shakespearean 'more things in heaven and earth, Horatio' sense) philosophy-based TLDs is that by default they must pursue a policy of policing their links, both going in and coming out. I suppose if you could get enough popular support it might be made to work, but think of the monitoring that would be necessary! Any chat room, any message board would be a potential hole in the dike unless you completely walled off access to .clean, and verified client connections with a LOT more accuracy that we can at present.
.BBB TLD would be great for them, but it would place all .BBB companies outside the realm of the searchable net. Any TLD 'club' who wanted to really screen access and block exits would have to prevent google from crawling the entire TLD, and someone would have to maintain a seperate search engine for it. IMHO, search engines are the glue that binds the net together. Fragmenting them would do immesurable damage. Also, I think one of the great strengths of the net is that you aren't really allowed to be homogenous... anybody from anywhere can participate in practically anything.
.clean or any other walled garden TLD, though I suppose it could block access to a TLD that contained ONLY legally obscene images and other obscene content.
Also, certain groups might want to segment off areas of the net and prevent people from linking into those areas, as well as preventing webmasters from linking out into the wider net. That sort of idea is poison to the net in general. The Better Business Bureau is taking this approach, bringing legal action against non-BBB sanctioned companies who link into their website! I suppose a
Incedentally, wouldn't a webring that doesn't link outside the ring provide basically the same thing? At least as far as outbound links...
Regarding the censorship issue, I think I come from a slightly more 'old-school' viewpoint. IMO, the issue of whether or not we trust the govt. to regulate content is moot. The govt. isn't allowed to regulate content, no matter how much we citizens might want it to or how good an idea it might be. They have not been granted the Constitutional power to regulate any content, and in fact they have been, clearly and with much consideration, specifically prevented from doing so by the 1st amendment. Even if we desperately wanted to regulate assfuckmydonkey.com in a library, we'd need a constitutional amendment to legally make it happen.
Therefore, much as I might want the librarian to hit the power switch if she sees my kid typing goatse.cx, as an employee of the state or federal govt. she does not have the authority to do so. Neither can any group, association, or local/state/federal governing body in a public place. The ONLY stick they have to swing is the SCOTUS opinions on obscenity, in the narrowly defined legal sense, and on child porn because it's illegal to exploit children in that fashion. A library (or a school for that matter) could not restrict itself to
I found it an interesting irony that this quote appeared at the bottom of your message: Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have. -- Harry Emerson Fosdick
You've got to take the good with the bad. Someone with the power to ban goatse.cx could also ban gayrights.com or wicca.org, hell.com, or even democrats.com.
I really know what you mean about that desire to be worry-free. I grew up in a very small town, and I was very frequently out after dark playing in the woods or whatever. In fact, I wished the same for my kids so much that, when I got the opportunity, I moved the whole family to Oranmore, Co. Galway, Ireland (pop: 3000). In a lot of ways, it's like being able to step into my own past while still bringing all the modern stuff along with me. I don't think the desire to not worry makes you lazy or bad, but I can't think of any effective way to protect your kids from the bad stuff except to pull up a chair and go exploring with them.
The entire point of the article was that, if you change the name from 'quake3.exe' to 'quack3.exe' then the game performs differently. In fact, ATI detects if 'quake3.exe' is running, and skimps on the graphics to make the card appear to run better, but does not do so if 'quack3.exe' is running.
.exe was! 'quack3.exe' would have turned in exactly the same benchmarks that 'quake3.exe' did.
Therefore, ATI drivers are NOT, repeat NOT optimized for the id Software code, but instead designed to see 'quake3.exe' cut corners accordingly. If the drivers had been written to take advantage of some feature in the code itself, the drivers wouldn't give a shit what the name of the
You missed the point entirely. They didn't optimize for Quake3... they looked for the string "quake3.exe" or some permutation of it, and falsely reported better benchmarks for that .exe name. If they'd optimized for the quake3 code, it wouldn't matter what the .exe was named; the card would have performed the same regardless.
BTW, I believe it IS an open source driver...
I'm 'weaping' as I type. I'm not sure what I'm doing, but I'm doing it!
Maybe a trip to this site might be of some use the next time you type something....
If you want wonderment and education, check out 'Little Bear', 'Bear in the Big Blue House' or 'Blue's Clues'.
All are worth a gander.
You're completely contradicting yourself! .clean tld would be a much smaller subset of the real internet ...
.clean TLD because there won't be any there. She won't learn what she wants to learn, because much of that won't be in .clean. She won't follow her own path, because all the paths have been regulated and approved, and .clean is walled off from the rest of the net. No one (by your own admission) would bother to register a .clean domain for their fascinating new research discovery, or anything else, really. Those who will bother will either be marketing to children, or have the safest plain vanilla content they can (or both), to avoid having their domain whacked by the all-powerful .clean reviewers.
.clean would become so anemic, you probably wouldn't restrict your daughter to it anymore. Back at square one!
.clean people. So, you either put up with their regulation, or you turn her loose on google.com, or you monitor her exploring.
.clean domain only, whatever the circumstances.
The
I want my daughter to be able to explore and stumble across new and interesting concepts...
If I direct her searches and surfing habits then I'm going to fall into a patern that creates a little clone of myself not an educated and interesting person who follows her own path and learns what she wants to learn.
I. also, am a parent of three, and my eldest, a girl, is 6. Now think about this:
First, what you're actually saying isn't that you want your daughter to be a free-thinking independent person, but that you want your daughter to be restricted to a tiny subset of the net with extremely homogenous content deemed 'safe' by a standards body which has no reason to heed your input. She won't be stumbling across any new or interesting concepts in your
.clean would have to block access to all of DejaNews, which effectively censors a third of all the useful commentary and info on the net. Otherwise, the system would devolve into the same old broken censorware we've seen fail to screen usenet properly. In the end,
Now, your ideas about what's safe for your daughter are certainly different from mine, and they would without a doubt be different from the
You can't have your cake and eat it, too. Either you monitor her, or you risk a trip to goatse.cx, or you effectively censor he rin exactly the way you were trying to avoid by not monitoring her.
Incedentally, what you're really advocating here is (at the bottom of that nasty slippery slope) is fragmentation of the most severe kind for the net, with every interest group setting up the sort of walled garden for their content that killed off prodigy and Compu$erve. It's the eventual de-linking of the web, perhaps damaging it permanently in the process, or else it's a poor idea that withers away in the face ot the true free flow of information, even the most objectionable kind. What I'd imagine might happen: every interest group starts restricting content into their own TLD, and if you want to find anything, you have to either go to one of a hundred different search engines, or else find some meta-search bot that covers them all, which is for all intents and purposes the same thing we have now!
Also, as you probably know, you would be sorely taxed trying to turn your daughter into a clone of yourself. Short of hardcore brainwashing, there's little you could do to prevent her becoming her own person. She's going to learn a lot of what she wants regardless of your opinions on the matter. IMHO (and this is exactly what I'm doing with my three) there isn't a subject my kids should be afraid to ask me about. That gives me the opportunity to let them select the topic without also letting them run across goatse.cx. Hopefully that will continue.
Being a parent requires you to take a level of responsibility that many people aren't comfortable with, but regardless, there's no middle ground available. Either you're involved, or you're not. You can't put a technological or regulatory system in place that absolves you of your responsibility to teach what is appropriate when you think it's appropriate, however you might define it.
Finally, there's a HUGE difference between the Boy Scouts banning gay kids (perfectly constitutional, it's not a governmental ban) and allowing a regulatory body like ICANN (who's power flows from the Congress) appoint anyone to a position which allows them to screen access based on content. That's censorship, as would any attempt to restrict a public PC to the
Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but here is the esteemed Declan McCullagh's report on the subject. Deconstructing this 'filtering' is becoming so easy it's almost boring.
Who modded this up?
Your plan has holes I could throw a cat through. redirecters get in trouble with who? What if I'm serving my 'dirty' content from Malasaya?
What if I post family photos from my trip to a nude beach on the French Riveara? Does your kids group censor this? People in France certainly won't find it objectionable.
Who gets to be in the kids group? Pentacostal ministers who find images of Catholic Saints 'blasphemous' and inappropriate for kids? What body picks it's members? and who picks them? Where does the power REALLY flow from?
The judgements are SO subjective, it immediately renders any division of the net based on content completely pointless. When you add in the fact that the rest of the world also has net access, it just ends up downright stupid.
Any censoring body that does not derive its power from the Congress is by default illegitemate and illegal. Congress can never set up a censoring body because the people will never allow it, and it's prevented by the Constitution. The technology prevents any attempt from being even marginally successful. The judgements are too subjective and impossible to implement uniformly across the world.
In short, it's hopeless. Give up on technology and start being a parent.
True! Perhaps I should have clarified... UK and Ireland live on GMT, as opposed to the rest of the world, which operates offset in some way.
What turned me off was when they had some catastrophic system failure and took 3 weeks to load their current search results back into the database. I was getting results that were 3 or 4 months old, and I switched permanently to google after that.
I installed the IE toolbar for google at work... my homepage is /.!
Yeah, the background tiles look nice. It's 9:40 GMT here and I've been waiting for 10 minutes so far... say, isn't that a section from Peter Bruegel's The Triumph of Death?
Poor ickle server, just can't handle the pressure...
Slightly offtopic, but:
AFAIK, Time Warner doesn't give you a refund or a free month, no matter how often or how long you're without cable service. SWBell home DSL has no service level agreement, and DSL can be shut down for unspecified reasons for significant lengths of time with no recourse to the user. I routinely recommend that businesses avoid basic DSL for that exact reason: you can lose tons of productivity and you still have to pay for the crappy service.
In fact, several years ago the utility company dug through the T-1 line servicing Hoover's, Inc. in Austin, TX, and they had to threaten SWBell with legal action to get the 2 days of downtime taken from their bill.
Either Mediaone is very friendly, or you turned in a command performance on the phone with them. Either way, congrats!