Allright, I'll conceed that Cuba does not have 'better' health care than the US - perhaps it would be more accurate to say it has better healthcare than most countries with a similar GDP.
I don't think you should give in so easily. The quality of healthcare you receive in the US is directly proportional to how wealthy you are. If you have major coin, you will receive first rate healthcare. If you are at the bottom of the economic spectrum you won't.
I would wager that the average Cuban citizen receives better health care than the average Americans does, if only because there are more doctors per capita. Certainly the average Cuban receives better healthcare than poor Americans do. FWIW there are several times more people in the US who have no health insurance whatsoever than there are people who live in Cuba period.
It strikes me as truly ironic that the US spends significantly more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than other industrialized nations do, yet the results are so terribly sub-standard.
When I heard $500-$600 just for the console I got a 360. Why? Because despite a great job, I have a family to support and could not justify spending that much just for the console. It doesn't matter how much better it is, or how many features it has. Just plain couldn't afford it.
I'm sorry, but that line of reasoning does not any sense to me. If you can afford an Xbox 360 now, I assume you could have saved up the additional money to purchase a PS3 when it becomes available later this year.
It's not as if the PS3 will cost that much more than the 360. It's just incrementally more. Yes, it is expensive, but microsoft isn't exactly giving the 360 away either.
I would have been more partial to your argument if you had said you were holding out for a Wii because that was your price-point.
The linked article is pretty content-lite, but I hope he produces something interesting and has a good time doing so.
I have been a big fan of Pink Five for some time now. It's always been funny, but the production values have been getting significantly better as the story continues.
Although it is an apples-organges comparison, I find it interesting that fans with no budget can create movies that are more interesting and entertaining than George Lucas (Ep 1-) can with his billions!
Maybe passion is more important than the size of your wallet?
Good luck. I normally lose interest and never finish games if they have no story.
I know what you mean. I mean, I simply couldn't get into Pac-Man. Why was he eating those dots? What was the backstory with the ghosts? Who could play a game like that which had no plot whatsoever...
OK, critics sometimes do miss the point. It's not uncommon for a newspaper to assign the critic who likes family dramas to review the latest sci-fi extravaganza, in which case a bad review means nothing more than that the critic wasn't in the target audience for the film.
I don't think this was the case here. All of the Toronto theatre critics hated LoTR. The pop-culture critics gave it the benefit of the doubt. I think that they knew it wasn't very good, but they wanted the show to succeeed and bring visitors back to Toronto.
That said, if Lord of the Rings: The Musical really was as bad as the reviews suggested, the problem isn't the reviews, but the show. In that case, the bad reviews are only a symptom.
It depends on where your point of view. I believe that the musical was average as a spectacle, but it was terrible live theatre. The theatre critics called it like it was. If you are a Tolkien fanboy, you will enjoy what you see and hear. If you are a fan of live theatre and not Tolkien, you will leave before the third act.
I think the producers ignored two facts:
The population has been over-exposed with Tolkien
The core group of fans are nerds, and nerds can't get dates. The ticket-buying population for this show is only one-half of any other show out there.
It will be interesting to see if the show can succeed in London or New York, considering how badly it tanked in Toronto...
I have. They appear to be fairly equivalent, as far as I can tell. I run SuSE 10 at the office, but I am required to run a few windows-only applcations. I have been using various versions of VMWare for the past 4 years to get around that barrier. I downloaded a trial version of Parallels to see what it was like. I was initially interested because VMWare has been fairly expensive to re-purchase over the years, and Parallels is quite inexpensive by comparison.
Both install via RPM and the install is pretty straightforward. I did not find Parallels difficult to configure, but then I have been using VMWare for some time, and I am familiar with the concepts and what needs to be done. The Parallels interface is quite similar to VMWare's, so if you are familiar with one product, you should be able to use the other. In the past, I learned the hard way that VMWare was a fairly memory-intensive application. Once I added an extra gig of RAM to my workstation everything ran pretty smoothly. I don't know if Parallels runs well with less RAM or not, but I would assume that more memory is always better. I have an Athlon 1700 CPU, and it can run multiple Linux applications and a virtual windows session without tons of paging or lag.
Mind you, I only boot the windows VM once a week or so, and run it for maybe 15-20 minutes at a time. If you wanted to run something more intensive, YMMV. I have not tried to run any games via VMWare either, so I have no idea what that would be like. On the whole, I am pleased to say that both Parallels and VMWare both work really well for me. They offer similar performance and functionality, and both are quite stable applications. The next time VMWare rolls out an upgrade that I have to pay for, I will be switching to Parallels.
As other posters have stated, games are probably the holy grail of windows virtualization. I would like nothing better to have an Intel-based PowerMac with a kick-ass graphics card that could give me all the benefits of owning a Mac, with the added bonus of being able to play my favourite games without rebooting.
And the terror age we live in is filled with uncertainty.
I suspect that if you were to examine history, you would find that attacks against civilians by military or paramilitary units have been utterly commonplace. Even in these supposedly more enlightened times, military attacks against civilian targets have been justified in the name of some greater good.
Of course, the judgement of whether an act of aggression against civilians was justified depends on who won (and subsequently wrote the history books!). After all, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
The only difference is that this time, the US has been attacked. In the past, the US had largely been immune to this sort of violence. Unfortunately, the notoriety of the 9/11 attack, coupled with the unfortunate presence of opportunistic politicians has lead some to believe that things have changed, or that these sorts of attacks never happened before.
If there is such a thing as an age of terror, it started a few thousand years ago. Sadly, there is no indication it is coming to a close.
Aren't they the little people who you see anoying everyone in public places because they won't stop crying their eyes out? I've always wondered what could be so awful about their lives that they feel the need to cry so much.
The problem is not with the chidren, it is with the adults. Kids can only handle so much activity and stimulation, and there comes a point where they need a nap. Kids will be kids, and when they do, we as the adults need to behave like adults. Yes, it is difficult to get all the things done we need to do in the limited time we have available, but their needs trump ours.
Trust me, nobody deliberately plans for their 5 year-old to totally freak out in the middle of the check-out line. It's not the kid's fault, they are tired and cranky and have had enough. I think a bit of empathy is called for, rather than being offended by any inconveneince you might have to endure.
Pardon for the snipe, but just because you teach children, don't assume everyone else is as immature as they. I don't need you to tell me how to teach a child colors, or anything else. It wasn't helpful, it was condescending.
His post was not condescneding - I thought it was rather charming. I have found that spending time with kids, helps me keep things in perspective. Perhaps they find delight in silly things that are contrary to my adult sensibilities, but seeing them happy makes me happy.
FWIW, I think that making them laugh and smile is one of my jobs as an adult, even if it does make me look a bit foolish on occasion. We all take ourselves too seriously at times, and spending time with kids can be a useful reminder of that.
Like the "Progressive Conservative Party", the most obviously fake corporatist party ever.
They don't call themself that anymore. When the party was hijacked by neo-cons and social conservatives a couple of years ago, they changed the name to the "conservative party of canada"
The progressive elements of the party either abandoned it or were run out of town.
That is, I believe the environment should be protected via economics. Pollute or otherwise damage the environment? Pay a tax based on the damage done.
I agree! Corporations have (desite the bogus PR) no sense of morality or ethics. They do understand taxation levels, and the impact they have on profitiability. We cannot regulate corporate behaviour by appealing for them to do what is right, or what is decent. We can modify their behavior by heavily taxing what we do not want them to do, and by not taxing (or taxing less) behaviour we want to encourage.
The challenge of course, is to get the taxation levels changed despite their lobbying and bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H campaign donations.
From me: There's a lot of difference between publishing (which is what very many scientists do) in reputable journals, and stating things publicly.
So why not publish the dissenting findings in a reputable, peer-reviewed journal? If there are sufficient grounds to question the research that has been published thus far, I would expect that it would not be difficult to promote a dissenting work.
Heck, Phillipe Rushton still gets published from time-to-time, and his research has been widely discredited. This suggests that the relative popularity and/or merit of your findings does not appear to have much influence on whether (or not) you get published,
So, if the case for global warming is as weak as some of these folks claim, why have they not published rebuttals or counter-claims?
No, I'm STATING that revisionist history is bullshit. We won. Period. Saying "well, we could have won WITHOUT doing this..." is nonsense.
TRANSLATION: Yes, the ends justify the means.
The rest of your rant is entirely irrelevant. Of course, since you appear to be trolling, that is to be expected.
Ah, yes, because they were such a peace loving nation before then. There's no WAY they would have even considered developing nukes before then.
First, let's throw some of your own words back at you:
You can speculate all you like, but you're being about as scientific as a 5 year old poking a dead squirl with a stick. You have no way to test any theories you develop, you're just spreading crap all over the place.
Now, after you choke those down, I'd like to add a few comments of my own.
Officially, the Mullahs only want to develop nuclear technology for the purposes of generating electricity. This is consistent with their rights as signatories of the NPT.
Of course, nobody believes them. It is fairly obvious that they intend to develop nuclear weapons. But there is ample precedent for that to happen too. Israel has never publicly admitted to having nuclear weapons. Pakistan and India are not signatories of the NPT, and North Korea has previously withdrawn from the treaty. Strange that you should be so concerned that Iran might be able to develop nuclear weaons in a few years time, but it's OK for the military regime in Pakistan to have them now...
I don't trust the Mullahs either, but how can it be OK for India and Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons and not Iran?
I also find it ironic that people whine about the CIA funding an Iranian coup in 1953, but don't say a word about Iran funding the Iraqi insurgency today. Ofcourse, you can justify that, right? When the US funded the Iranian coup it was "a blatant power grab". Meanwhile Iran funding an insurgency in Iraq is just "helping their Islamic brothers repel the Capitalist Amerikkkan Emperialist Pig-Swine".
Actually, both are examples of evil foreign policies. When did I suggest otherwise?
REALLY?? NO WAY! Wow, I guess we better go apologize to the germans ad start paying them reparations or something. Maybe we can build a time machine and go back in time to give Hitler some nukes. Obviously we didn't deserve to win WW2. We were such horrible people.
<yawn>
You will have to troll better than that. I never said any of those things.
Bush. The fact that all the idiots who make fun of "American rednecks" also think that Bush is stupid is all the proof I need of THEIR intelligence. You're a bunch of superficial retards. You judge the man on the way he speaks and on the way the mass media and your "progressive" buddies portray him. Which is fine. It means that he's constantly under-estimated by his enemies and opponents, which is deffinitely a good thing.
Well, if there was ever any doubt whether you are a troll, here is the evidence, with a healthy dose of flamebait thrown in for good measure.
Nuclear Non-proliferation = no growing or increasing nuclear capabilities.
You really have no idea what you are talking about. Dictionary definitions are irrelevant in this instance. If you want to make declarations as to what is, or is not consistent with the NPT, you need to be familiar with the content of that treaty.
As you appear to be lacking that information, please allow me to point you in the direction of a good overview. In particular, you might want to check out the three pillars of the treaty, before you pronounce on the rights and obligations of the signatories.
The difference between Iran wanting to build a new nuclear weapon and the US wanting to build a new nuclear weapon is vastly significant in my opinion. I think it's light years away from a, "do what we say, not what we do" situation. The US *currently* possess a nuclear weapons capability, and it has for over half a century, while Iran -- we hope -- doesn't yet have the means to produce a destructive nuclear device.
Wasn't the whole point of the non-proliferation treaty for non-nuclear states to remain that way, and in exchange the nuclear states would dispose of their nuclear arsenals over time?
The policy of developing new nukular weapons seems an outright betrayal of that treaty. If one signatory openly disregards the treaty, how can we in good conscience criticize another nation for threatening to withdraw from the treaty.
Making such claims today though is rather like sitting back and saying that the D-day invasion should have never taken place. It's one part of a larger war, and a war that our side won.
Are you suggesting that the ends justify the means?
They were quite clear on that. "Sadam WILL do the following, or we'll come in and finish the job we started in 1991".
So, where were the weapons that he was purported to have?
Oh, that's right - there weren't any...
And you can bet your ass PNAC's had it's crosshairs on Iran for a while.
Of course, Flushed with their recent <ahem> successes in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is only natural that they would want to continue their world tour.
In the words of Doctor Evil: "You just don't get it, do you? You don't..." Iran is not trying to build nuclear weapons despite the invasion of Iraq, they are doing it because of the invasion of Iraq. The Mullahs know that Iraq was invaded because of what they had (geo-political strategic location, oil) and what they did not have (weapons). Conversely, the Mullahs know that North Korea would not be invaded because they have nuclear weapons, and nothing else of value. Their solution? Develop a nuclear weapons program and the US will not risk invading their country.
Right now we're at the same stage with Iran that we were with Germany in 1938.
Of course, if you studied your history, you would probably recognize that treaty which ended the first world war set in action the chain of events that lead to the second world war.
if we follow YOUR sage advice, we'll have another massive war on our hands within the decade. We'll also have a smoking crater where Israel used to be,
Since when are those are the only alternatives?
Luckily, the US seems to be capable of electing intelligent individuals, instead of the "intelectuals" much preferd by other countries
What a fascinating suggestion - can you offer me a recent example?
I think it's important to differentiate between protocol based prioritisation and toll based prioritisation.
Do you think that backbone routers will make that distinction?
Routers can do QOS based on protocol and source/destination IP address. It's just another set of statements in the config IIRC. My guess is that the telcos will implement MPLS, so the relevant provider can slap their own QOS labels on the packets when it reaches their network, regardless of whether the packet had a QOS bit set in the first place.
Then they wouldn't have any way to know how to filter it would they?
Maybe by port number.....but they wouldn't be able to parse packets for "google" and slow those down.
I do not believe that is a solution to the problem. They aren't interested in slapping QOS tags on packets based on the protocol being used, but the destination of the packets. Encryption can disguise the payload of the packet, but not the source/destination IP address.
Indeed, people are going to be pissed off -- which is why I expect some ISPs to stay away from packet discrimination.
How would that make any difference? At some point, those packets are likely to ride over one of the big telco's backbones. At that point it will be subject to QOS.
Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, OpenOffice, GIMP, and Firefox, etc, etc.
Certainly you have listed some good products, but with the exception of Apache, their marketshare is statistically insignificant. Despite a few alternatives, microsoft is still a monopoly and they will continue to run roughshod over their customers and competitors regardless of laws or ethical considerations. The speed of change in their market space will have no impact on their behaviour.
I am the CEO/President/Head Honcho of a small telecom firm and we compete and beat the big guys every day. We do better customer service and the market rewards us. We have more business than we can handle.
I am pleased to hear that your business is doing so well. To be honerst, I doubt that you are competing and winning against the big guys at all, much less "every day". It is more likely you operate in a niche market that the main players have abandoned, or is small enough that it is not worth their while to enter. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with that though.
You need to replace your imagination with the real world. I have several friends who have started very successful, small (2-8 towers) Wi-Fi ISPs.
And that is great for them. I wish those people and their customers all the best. However, with such limited infrastructure, they are fairly constrained in what they can offer. Should their customers have requirements that are beyond the ability of the small firm to meet, the customer will have to go with a larger provider.
Small mom & pop operations are not competation for the big telcos. AT&T and Verizon may not even consider the likes of Sprint and Qwest to be serious competitors any more. They are more likely to be focused on each other and the cable companies. Fortunately, as the big guys fight it out over the biggest chunk of the market, there will always be room for smaller players to fill in the gaps left behind.
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I don't think you should give in so easily. The quality of healthcare you receive in the US is directly proportional to how wealthy you are. If you have major coin, you will receive first rate healthcare. If you are at the bottom of the economic spectrum you won't.
I would wager that the average Cuban citizen receives better health care than the average Americans does, if only because there are more doctors per capita. Certainly the average Cuban receives better healthcare than poor Americans do. FWIW there are several times more people in the US who have no health insurance whatsoever than there are people who live in Cuba period.
It strikes me as truly ironic that the US spends significantly more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than other industrialized nations do, yet the results are so terribly sub-standard.
You can cite a reputable source for that statistic - right?
Thanks for the flame and all, but you might actually want to go back and actualy read the GPP again...
He says that he bought a 360 because the PS3 is too expensive. He did not offer an opinion on whether any console was worth that much money.
I'm sorry, but that line of reasoning does not any sense to me. If you can afford an Xbox 360 now, I assume you could have saved up the additional money to purchase a PS3 when it becomes available later this year.
It's not as if the PS3 will cost that much more than the 360. It's just incrementally more. Yes, it is expensive, but microsoft isn't exactly giving the 360 away either.
I would have been more partial to your argument if you had said you were holding out for a Wii because that was your price-point.
The linked article is pretty content-lite, but I hope he produces something interesting and has a good time doing so.
I have been a big fan of Pink Five for some time now. It's always been funny, but the production values have been getting significantly better as the story continues.
Although it is an apples-organges comparison, I find it interesting that fans with no budget can create movies that are more interesting and entertaining than George Lucas (Ep 1-) can with his billions!
Maybe passion is more important than the size of your wallet?
I know what you mean. I mean, I simply couldn't get into Pac-Man. Why was he eating those dots? What was the backstory with the ghosts? Who could play a game like that which had no plot whatsoever...
You mean something like this or this?
I don't think this was the case here. All of the Toronto theatre critics hated LoTR. The pop-culture critics gave it the benefit of the doubt. I think that they knew it wasn't very good, but they wanted the show to succeeed and bring visitors back to Toronto.
It depends on where your point of view. I believe that the musical was average as a spectacle, but it was terrible live theatre. The theatre critics called it like it was. If you are a Tolkien fanboy, you will enjoy what you see and hear. If you are a fan of live theatre and not Tolkien, you will leave before the third act.
I think the producers ignored two facts:
It will be interesting to see if the show can succeed in London or New York, considering how badly it tanked in Toronto...
I have. They appear to be fairly equivalent, as far as I can tell. I run SuSE 10 at the office, but I am required to run a few windows-only applcations. I have been using various versions of VMWare for the past 4 years to get around that barrier. I downloaded a trial version of Parallels to see what it was like. I was initially interested because VMWare has been fairly expensive to re-purchase over the years, and Parallels is quite inexpensive by comparison.
Both install via RPM and the install is pretty straightforward. I did not find Parallels difficult to configure, but then I have been using VMWare for some time, and I am familiar with the concepts and what needs to be done. The Parallels interface is quite similar to VMWare's, so if you are familiar with one product, you should be able to use the other. In the past, I learned the hard way that VMWare was a fairly memory-intensive application. Once I added an extra gig of RAM to my workstation everything ran pretty smoothly. I don't know if Parallels runs well with less RAM or not, but I would assume that more memory is always better. I have an Athlon 1700 CPU, and it can run multiple Linux applications and a virtual windows session without tons of paging or lag.
Mind you, I only boot the windows VM once a week or so, and run it for maybe 15-20 minutes at a time. If you wanted to run something more intensive, YMMV. I have not tried to run any games via VMWare either, so I have no idea what that would be like. On the whole, I am pleased to say that both Parallels and VMWare both work really well for me. They offer similar performance and functionality, and both are quite stable applications. The next time VMWare rolls out an upgrade that I have to pay for, I will be switching to Parallels.
As other posters have stated, games are probably the holy grail of windows virtualization. I would like nothing better to have an Intel-based PowerMac with a kick-ass graphics card that could give me all the benefits of owning a Mac, with the added bonus of being able to play my favourite games without rebooting.
I suspect that if you were to examine history, you would find that attacks against civilians by military or paramilitary units have been utterly commonplace. Even in these supposedly more enlightened times, military attacks against civilian targets have been justified in the name of some greater good.
Of course, the judgement of whether an act of aggression against civilians was justified depends on who won (and subsequently wrote the history books!). After all, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
The only difference is that this time, the US has been attacked. In the past, the US had largely been immune to this sort of violence. Unfortunately, the notoriety of the 9/11 attack, coupled with the unfortunate presence of opportunistic politicians has lead some to believe that things have changed, or that these sorts of attacks never happened before.
If there is such a thing as an age of terror, it started a few thousand years ago. Sadly, there is no indication it is coming to a close.
The problem is not with the chidren, it is with the adults. Kids can only handle so much activity and stimulation, and there comes a point where they need a nap. Kids will be kids, and when they do, we as the adults need to behave like adults. Yes, it is difficult to get all the things done we need to do in the limited time we have available, but their needs trump ours.
Trust me, nobody deliberately plans for their 5 year-old to totally freak out in the middle of the check-out line. It's not the kid's fault, they are tired and cranky and have had enough. I think a bit of empathy is called for, rather than being offended by any inconveneince you might have to endure.
His post was not condescneding - I thought it was rather charming. I have found that spending time with kids, helps me keep things in perspective. Perhaps they find delight in silly things that are contrary to my adult sensibilities, but seeing them happy makes me happy.
FWIW, I think that making them laugh and smile is one of my jobs as an adult, even if it does make me look a bit foolish on occasion. We all take ourselves too seriously at times, and spending time with kids can be a useful reminder of that.Absolutely! You are only young once, but you can be immature forever!
They don't call themself that anymore. When the party was hijacked by neo-cons and social conservatives a couple of years ago, they changed the name to the "conservative party of canada"
The progressive elements of the party either abandoned it or were run out of town.
I agree! Corporations have (desite the bogus PR) no sense of morality or ethics. They do understand taxation levels, and the impact they have on profitiability. We cannot regulate corporate behaviour by appealing for them to do what is right, or what is decent. We can modify their behavior by heavily taxing what we do not want them to do, and by not taxing (or taxing less) behaviour we want to encourage.
The challenge of course, is to get the taxation levels changed despite their lobbying and bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H campaign donations.
So why not publish the dissenting findings in a reputable, peer-reviewed journal? If there are sufficient grounds to question the research that has been published thus far, I would expect that it would not be difficult to promote a dissenting work.
Heck, Phillipe Rushton still gets published from time-to-time, and his research has been widely discredited. This suggests that the relative popularity and/or merit of your findings does not appear to have much influence on whether (or not) you get published,
So, if the case for global warming is as weak as some of these folks claim, why have they not published rebuttals or counter-claims?
TRANSLATION: Yes, the ends justify the means.
The rest of your rant is entirely irrelevant. Of course, since you appear to be trolling, that is to be expected.
First, let's throw some of your own words back at you:
Now, after you choke those down, I'd like to add a few comments of my own.
Officially, the Mullahs only want to develop nuclear technology for the purposes of generating electricity. This is consistent with their rights as signatories of the NPT.
Of course, nobody believes them. It is fairly obvious that they intend to develop nuclear weapons. But there is ample precedent for that to happen too. Israel has never publicly admitted to having nuclear weapons. Pakistan and India are not signatories of the NPT, and North Korea has previously withdrawn from the treaty. Strange that you should be so concerned that Iran might be able to develop nuclear weaons in a few years time, but it's OK for the military regime in Pakistan to have them now...
I don't trust the Mullahs either, but how can it be OK for India and Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons and not Iran?
Actually, both are examples of evil foreign policies. When did I suggest otherwise?
<yawn>
You will have to troll better than that. I never said any of those things.
Well, if there was ever any doubt whether you are a troll, here is the evidence, with a healthy dose of flamebait thrown in for good measure.
You really have no idea what you are talking about. Dictionary definitions are irrelevant in this instance. If you want to make declarations as to what is, or is not consistent with the NPT, you need to be familiar with the content of that treaty.
As you appear to be lacking that information, please allow me to point you in the direction of a good overview. In particular, you might want to check out the three pillars of the treaty, before you pronounce on the rights and obligations of the signatories.
Wasn't the whole point of the non-proliferation treaty for non-nuclear states to remain that way, and in exchange the nuclear states would dispose of their nuclear arsenals over time?
The policy of developing new nukular weapons seems an outright betrayal of that treaty. If one signatory openly disregards the treaty, how can we in good conscience criticize another nation for threatening to withdraw from the treaty.
I'm just saying...
Are you suggesting that the ends justify the means?
So, where were the weapons that he was purported to have?
Oh, that's right - there weren't any...
Of course, Flushed with their recent <ahem> successes in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is only natural that they would want to continue their world tour.
In the words of Doctor Evil: "You just don't get it, do you? You don't..." Iran is not trying to build nuclear weapons despite the invasion of Iraq, they are doing it because of the invasion of Iraq. The Mullahs know that Iraq was invaded because of what they had (geo-political strategic location, oil) and what they did not have (weapons). Conversely, the Mullahs know that North Korea would not be invaded because they have nuclear weapons, and nothing else of value. Their solution? Develop a nuclear weapons program and the US will not risk invading their country.
Of course, if you studied your history, you would probably recognize that treaty which ended the first world war set in action the chain of events that lead to the second world war.
Since when are those are the only alternatives?
What a fascinating suggestion - can you offer me a recent example?
Do you think that backbone routers will make that distinction?
Routers can do QOS based on protocol and source/destination IP address. It's just another set of statements in the config IIRC. My guess is that the telcos will implement MPLS, so the relevant provider can slap their own QOS labels on the packets when it reaches their network, regardless of whether the packet had a QOS bit set in the first place.
I do not believe that is a solution to the problem. They aren't interested in slapping QOS tags on packets based on the protocol being used, but the destination of the packets. Encryption can disguise the payload of the packet, but not the source/destination IP address.
If only Joe Sixpack were that enlightened. It seems obvious to us, but how many people
Considering your example, I think the average user would assume the problem is with Google, and would switch to MSN.
How would that make any difference? At some point, those packets are likely to ride over one of the big telco's backbones. At that point it will be subject to QOS.
Using the smaller ISP does not avoid the issue...
Certainly you have listed some good products, but with the exception of Apache, their marketshare is statistically insignificant. Despite a few alternatives, microsoft is still a monopoly and they will continue to run roughshod over their customers and competitors regardless of laws or ethical considerations. The speed of change in their market space will have no impact on their behaviour.
I am the CEO/President/Head Honcho of a small telecom firm and we compete and beat the big guys every day. We do better customer service and the market rewards us. We have more business than we can handle.I am pleased to hear that your business is doing so well. To be honerst, I doubt that you are competing and winning against the big guys at all, much less "every day". It is more likely you operate in a niche market that the main players have abandoned, or is small enough that it is not worth their while to enter. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with that though.
You need to replace your imagination with the real world. I have several friends who have started very successful, small (2-8 towers) Wi-Fi ISPs.And that is great for them. I wish those people and their customers all the best. However, with such limited infrastructure, they are fairly constrained in what they can offer. Should their customers have requirements that are beyond the ability of the small firm to meet, the customer will have to go with a larger provider.
Small mom & pop operations are not competation for the big telcos. AT&T and Verizon may not even consider the likes of Sprint and Qwest to be serious competitors any more. They are more likely to be focused on each other and the cable companies. Fortunately, as the big guys fight it out over the biggest chunk of the market, there will always be room for smaller players to fill in the gaps left behind.