Not all of us are able to make decisions secure in the knowledge that only we ourselves will suffer the consequences if our decisions turn out to be wrong or even just-sub optimal.
Many families in this country make due with much less financially than we currently make. Would your kids be better off with 10k less per year, if in exchange they got a father that didn't hate his life (and had healthcare)? If you're making 20k per year, probably not. If you're making 60k per year, most people will remember their father's disposition more fondly than the 20% increase in family wealth.
By having a job that you complain about endlessly, you're basically teaching your kids that they too should put up with bad jobs in bad working conditions. That's hardly the message most people want their kids to learn.
Unless you're a factory worker in Michagin, you should have enough financial flexibility to trade a little income for a lot of job satisfaction and self-respect.
The iPhone's utility above a standard free phone, as any owner can tell you, is having the internet in your pocket. Look up which movie people had wanted to see on Livejournal, check the rating on Rotten Tomatoes, then find a theater playing it nearby. All while still sitting in the resturant after work with people debating what to do.
As outlook integration comes online, I can see this easily becoming the next crackberry as well.
And finally, the iPhone makes a great google map for us who keep getting lost.
Ultimately, if you pick up the iPhone for its phone calling capabilities, you're missing the point. It has a lot of capabilities that extend beyond a basic landline, and the potential for expanded abilities is even more exciting. If the PC was just a calculator with some recipe-filing abilities, the real potential of the device never would have gotten off the ground. Similarly, if the iPhone was permanently tethered to specific, approved uses, it would always be playing catch-up with devices where users were free to experiment with new and exciting uses.
This is precisely the concern. Have you ever worked in support? I worked technical support for several years. The worst part of the whole ordeal was dealing with all of the unpredictability on the other end... The more predictable the workspace on the other end of the line, the better a technician can deal with a situation.
I'll need to see some substantial evidence before I believe the brazen supposition that anyone in management makes business decisions based around technical support.
If you know how many people the **AA has sued so far, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out how many people would need to sign up (and which would need to be excluded) to make the running of such an insurance pool a profitable venture.
I believe the equation you are looking for is:
( Total file sharers / Total sued in a year ) * cost of average suit + profit margin per person = cost per person
If I'm not mistaken, the Lotus v. Borland split was entirely based upon whether or not a menu system can be copyrightable. This seems to further support the idea that the expressive portion of games is, in fact, under copyright.
The implementation is subject to copyright. The public interface may also be subject to copyright to the extent that it contains expression (for example, the appearance of an icon).
And games, being somewhat superfluous in nature, are generally more expressive than business software. You're allowed to duplicate non-expressive functionality in software. Are you allowed to duplicate expressive functionality? Or board layouts / rule sets? Scrabulous specifically falls derivative enough to Scrabble on so many axis that I would hesitate to call it "OK."
It's OK for Scrabulous to essentially copy Scrabble because you can't copyright or patent game rules, but it's not OK to copy this game?
Actually, Scrabulous is likely to be removed soon. You do have some degree of copyright protection over game rules, and people do patent the damned things all the time. See also: KC Munchkin.
I'd check availability in your particular part of boston. It doesn't seem like Verizon is holding anyone hostage, so much as rollout is taking longer than all of us would like.
Even if you don't make a bit-for-bit copy of a game, you can still be liable for infringement. See also K.C. Munchkin. Copyright protects the expression of an idea, and whether a copy of that expression happens mechanically or at the hand of a person, the result is still either direct copyright infringement or the creation of derivitave work (which is also copyright infringement).
However, they clearly did decompile the original Flash file and just swapped a few (though not all) art resources. The clouds aren't suspiciously similar... they're the same. The snow, mechanic, ice art, launching art, health bar, etc aren't just similar, they're identical. The tuning seems to be the same, with the same launch times, etc.
It's true that the Chinese are known for copying things. And that flash games get copied a lot more than they should. But the olympic games are notorious for enforcing their copyrights over the slightest infraction by others. Having the Olympics casually steal other developer's work in this fashion seems extremely self-contradictory.
Text in case the blog goes down again
on
Donkey Kong and Me
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Donkey Kong and Me
In the fall of 1981 I was going to college and became addicted to the Atari arcade games Centipede and Tempest. I knew a little bit about the hardware of the Atari 400/800 home computer systems, and decided to make a scary purchase on my student budget and buy an Atari 400 and a black and white TV (which was all I could afford). I messed around in Basic for a while, then bought an Assembler/Editor cartridge and started hacking away on a Centipede clone. I didnt have much to go on in terms of seeing prior designs for games and had to figure everything out myself. Like most of the school problems, you really just have to work things out with a few hints from the textbooks and lectures.
Anyone whos worked with that Asm/Editor cartridge probably bears the same deep emotional scars that I do. It was unbelievably slow, the debugger barely worked, and I had to remove comments and write in overlays of a couple K in order to squeeze in enough code. My game, which I called Myriapede, took about three months to write. I still have the original artwork and designs in my files; graph paper marked up with multi-colored pens, with the hexadecimal for the color assignments painstakingly translated on the side.
[I had to guess at colors. All I had was that cheap black and white TV, and I had visit a friends and his color TV for a couple hours in order to fine tune things].
The Atari Program Exchange (a captive publishing house) was holding a contest. The grand prize for the winning game was $25,000. Id spent a semester of college blowing off most of my courses and doing almost nothing except work on Myriapede. I finished it with a week or two to spare and submitted to the contest.
A few weeks after I mailed Myriapede off to the contest, I got a letter from Atari that said (1) they were very impressed with the work, but (2) it looked to them like a substantial copy of Centipede (well, it was) and that theyd rejected it for that reason. The subtext was they would probably sue me if I tried to sell it anywhere else, too. I was crushed. I wound up going to a local user group and giving a couple copies of it away; I assume that it spread from there. I hear that people liked it (best download of 1982 or something like that).
A few weeks later I got a call from Atari; they wanted to know if I was interested in interviewing for a job. I was practically vibrating with excitement. I flew out and did a loop, and made sure to show Myriapede to each interviewer; it was a conversation stopper every time. Until they saw it they kind of humored me (yeah, okay, you wrote a game), then when the game started up they started playing it, got distracted and (ahem!) had to be reminded that they were doing an interview! One of the guys I talked to was the author of Ataris official Centipede cartridge. He said on the spot that my version was better than his.
A couple weeks later they gave me an offer. Atari moved my single roomful of stuff out to California. I flew out and spent two weeks in a hotel waiting for my things to arrive; Atari wanted me out there real bad.
Now, there were two popular arcade games that I simply could not stand; the first was Zaxxon, a stupid and repetitive scrolling shooter. The second was Donkey Kong it was loud, pointless and annoying. Of course, the reason they wanted me in California was so I could work on a Donkey Kong cartridge. After a few moments of dispair (and faking enthusiasm in front of my bosses) I gritted my teeth, got a roll of quarters and spent a lot of time in the little arcade that my hotel had, playing the DK machine there and getting to know it really, really well.
I should explain how Ataris Arcade conversions group worked. Basically, Ataris marketing folks would negotiate a license to ship GameCorps Foobar Blaster on a cartridge for the Atari Home Computer System. That was it. That was the entirety of the deal. We got ZERO help from the original developers of the games. No listings, no talking to the engineers, no design documents
If you want to know why, take for example, the WiiShop channel on Christmas day, You couldn't even get on, let alone get to the point where you could download a game.
If I follow your argument correctly, you're saying that digital distribution is doomed because demand has been higher than expected?
Would you rather pay more for software that has less features but is faster?
I'd rather pay more for software that had the same amount of features but less years of krufty hack layered upon krufty hack.
Quite simply, we're talking about Windows here (and maybe Norton). Mac OS7 did a great job of providing both abstraction and speed in a maintainable environment on a 68030: a chip so slow that you wouldn't notice it if it was working as a co-processor on a modern machine.
Vista, on the other hand, requires a pretty beefy on-board graphics chip to do anything at all, and renders every window as a 3D object. It also pulls in tons of useless side-board crap that probably renders in its own wonky and inefficient scripting language. And, from everything I've heard out of Redmond, has grown into an unmaintainable and unsupportable mess anyway.
Right now, the biggest efficiencies to computer speed seem to lie within the realm of software. Specifically, getting rid of the years of bad decisions and bad hacks that are stealing inordinate amounts of processor time and making it impossible to deliver on promised feature upgrades. We currently have processors that are capable of crunching tens of thousands of times more numbers than could have been done in the 68030 days. Where is that power going? Throwing more hardware at the problem isn't the most efficient way of effecting a solution, especially if the problem is preventing necessary code updates.
You still need promotion, experience, and funding. To a fresh-faced band that is just breaking out of their home town, the prospect of someone coordinating and fronting the money for a 500k dollar video + a 40 city tour is very attractive, especially if they can get said band into rotation on MTV and Clearchannel. They're hitmakers, and everyone wants to be a hit.
Labels will probably continue to have a place for a long, long time.
Yes. I was trying to emphasize the marketing claims of 99.99%+ uptime. In reality, lots of components seem to have about 99.5% uptime, or one working day of downtime per year. This seems especially true for any parts of the chain being leased from 3rd parties.
The problem with multiple routes is issues that hit multiple locations. The two power outages in the past ten years which took down the entire western half of the US could only have been side-stepped by massive geographic distribution of servers. When a major storm starts knocking lines down in the northeast, chances are it could knock down any satellite uplink connections too. And I'll be damned if T1's don't seem to go down in groups. Getting DDOSed because of a post considered inflamatory to an obscure Lithuanian separatist group? All of your upstream eventually hitting the same Tier 3 provider? Is everyone secretly reselling Covad?
I'm not saying 99.999 is a bad target to shoot for, especially for any given component. And in theory, it's attainable. In practice, it's damned expensive.
I think the change is that the Lenovo have been a no-nonsense business machine for a long time now. Switching to widescreen display with rubberized grips and various other touches implies that IBM's primary ultralite is aimed at more of a consumer-level target.
The solid-state drive standard is pretty revolutionary, though that revolution has started sweeping over notebook lines as we speak.
As a consumer, you're more than entitled to take Comcast to small claims court, which is most likely the mechanism that Comcast would use to extract unpaid bills from you. That Comcast is more likely to enact this mechanism than you are is not a fault of politicians.
It varies by state, but usually it costs 15 dollars to take a company to court, and no lawyers are required. It is generally quick and painless, and people at your local courthouse can fill you in on the details and help you through the process.
That's right, it takes hours on the phone to get one of those companies to either own up to, and pay for losses accrued by their customers through loss of service.
Having been on the other end of these types of calls, this sort of thing can be *very* annoying. People do call all of the time with the expectation that because they do five or six thousand dollars worth of business in a day, the ISP is somehow responsible for those thousands of dollars when some idiot Verizon contractor accidentally cuts our cables. Other reasons for outages include: power loss, fire, flood, exploding transformers, telephone pole collapse, and many other issues outside of our capability.
If you want guaranteed uptime, get it in your contract and be prepared to pay for it! Otherwise, we'll do the best we can to provide service at the funding level we recieve, and will gladly refund the 59c worth of service that you would have paid for a 6 hour outage.
Would you expect Ford to pay you for lost wages when someone hits your car? Would you expect your grocery store to pay for your chiwawa when he starves to death because the store is out of dog food?
The server is up 99.99% of the time. The server's T1 is up 99.99% of the time. T1's ISP is up 99.99% of the time. The backbone provider is up 99.99% of the time. The cellular ISP is up 99.99% of the time. The cell-to-tower linkage is up 99.99% of the time...
Eventually, with all of these little points of failure, you're going to get a good sized chunk of fail. Add in things like the inherent instability of wireless technologies and our nation-wide problem with an aging electrical infrastructure, and you have the sorts of occasionally mildly-inconviencing issues that you see today.
Right now it seems like the things users want to optimize most for are A: speed and B: cost. One day every other month where our home internet is down doesn't seem like the end of the world, especially with the cost of the alternative.
I prefer to get my health care on a timely basis, from the doctor of my choosing, thankyouverymuch.
Per-capita healthcare spending in Canada is half of what we pay. If we wanted too, we could adopt a Canadian-style healthcare system at our current spending levels and get both universal coverage and snappy service.
Don't forget that while the supplier's T3 (or whathaveyou) has a fixed capacity that either goes unused or doesn't, it doesn't have unlimited capacity. Once you hit one over a certain threshold, you have a *huge* bill to upgrade with higher capacity lines, followed by generally higher monthly upkeep. And it is very likely that two or so of the companies along your upstream are intentionally running very close to capacity, and have periods of degraded service speeds just to get all of the current traffic through their pipes.
Of course as consumers we can brush all of this off with "You offered 'unlimited.' What did you expect, dummies?" But this is slashdot, and some of us are going to be the ones dealing with this stuff.
There is something within humanity that makes us classify certain groups as "the other," then treat that scapegoat group with hideous cruelty. What we're doing with muslims is in some ways not as bad as what happened to the japanese in WW2 (not rounding everyone up), and in some ways it is worse ( removal of citizenship status, sanctioned torture, indefinite detention outside of both non-us and non-international law, invading an unrelated country).
Patting ourselves on the back on how far we've evolved since those primitive times does nothing to dissuade the fact that we're still quite capable of that level of human indifference. That gitmo is an atrocity in the eyes of most other countries seems to escape our cone of vision somehow.
I really hope we can put the tax-and-spend liberal myth to bed soon. I wholeheartedly support the idea of electing fiscally responsible representatives, and would like to see this happen in practice.
This is not necessarily directed at parent poster, but as a Japanese American with Parents and Grandparents in the US internment camps (Minidoka, primarily), I find this sentiment offensive. The internment camps were not some random act by a barbaric people in an ancient time. It was us, reacting like people do, about a generation ago.
And now we do see similar things going on with muslims. Indefinite detention and torture without trial at guantanamo? Abu Ghraib and sanctioned arbitrary prisoner abuse? The many secret (but becoming known) prisoner detention facilities around the world? Sure, this time they're not rounding them all up to quite the same degree. But there is also more of a emphasis on torture this time.
Fifty years from now we'll probably look back and say "That Guantanamo thing was so long ago..." then have a knee-jerk reaction and racially persecute another group in a new and unique way.
Slashdot Mirror
Not all of us are able to make decisions secure in the knowledge that only we ourselves will suffer the consequences if our decisions turn out to be wrong or even just-sub optimal.
Many families in this country make due with much less financially than we currently make. Would your kids be better off with 10k less per year, if in exchange they got a father that didn't hate his life (and had healthcare)? If you're making 20k per year, probably not. If you're making 60k per year, most people will remember their father's disposition more fondly than the 20% increase in family wealth.
By having a job that you complain about endlessly, you're basically teaching your kids that they too should put up with bad jobs in bad working conditions. That's hardly the message most people want their kids to learn.
Unless you're a factory worker in Michagin, you should have enough financial flexibility to trade a little income for a lot of job satisfaction and self-respect.
The iPhone's utility above a standard free phone, as any owner can tell you, is having the internet in your pocket. Look up which movie people had wanted to see on Livejournal, check the rating on Rotten Tomatoes, then find a theater playing it nearby. All while still sitting in the resturant after work with people debating what to do.
As outlook integration comes online, I can see this easily becoming the next crackberry as well.
And finally, the iPhone makes a great google map for us who keep getting lost.
Ultimately, if you pick up the iPhone for its phone calling capabilities, you're missing the point. It has a lot of capabilities that extend beyond a basic landline, and the potential for expanded abilities is even more exciting. If the PC was just a calculator with some recipe-filing abilities, the real potential of the device never would have gotten off the ground. Similarly, if the iPhone was permanently tethered to specific, approved uses, it would always be playing catch-up with devices where users were free to experiment with new and exciting uses.
This is precisely the concern. Have you ever worked in support? I worked technical support for several years. The worst part of the whole ordeal was dealing with all of the unpredictability on the other end... The more predictable the workspace on the other end of the line, the better a technician can deal with a situation.
I'll need to see some substantial evidence before I believe the brazen supposition that anyone in management makes business decisions based around technical support.
If you know how many people the **AA has sued so far, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out how many people would need to sign up (and which would need to be excluded) to make the running of such an insurance pool a profitable venture.
I believe the equation you are looking for is:
( Total file sharers / Total sued in a year ) * cost of average suit + profit margin per person = cost per person
If I'm not mistaken, the Lotus v. Borland split was entirely based upon whether or not a menu system can be copyrightable. This seems to further support the idea that the expressive portion of games is, in fact, under copyright.
The implementation is subject to copyright. The public interface may also be subject to copyright to the extent that it contains expression (for example, the appearance of an icon).
And games, being somewhat superfluous in nature, are generally more expressive than business software. You're allowed to duplicate non-expressive functionality in software. Are you allowed to duplicate expressive functionality? Or board layouts / rule sets? Scrabulous specifically falls derivative enough to Scrabble on so many axis that I would hesitate to call it "OK."
It's OK for Scrabulous to essentially copy Scrabble because you can't copyright or patent game rules, but it's not OK to copy this game?
Actually, Scrabulous is likely to be removed soon. You do have some degree of copyright protection over game rules, and people do patent the damned things all the time. See also: KC Munchkin.
Fios is viable over here in Cambridge. DSL reports claims that there is FiOS in parts of Boston proper. There is also a slightly out of date map showing deployment in the area. And, of course, their statement of intent to expand Boston coverage from a year ago. Heck, they're selling it out of Jordan's Furniture. You can't get more Bostonian than that.
I'd check availability in your particular part of boston. It doesn't seem like Verizon is holding anyone hostage, so much as rollout is taking longer than all of us would like.
Even if you don't make a bit-for-bit copy of a game, you can still be liable for infringement. See also K.C. Munchkin. Copyright protects the expression of an idea, and whether a copy of that expression happens mechanically or at the hand of a person, the result is still either direct copyright infringement or the creation of derivitave work (which is also copyright infringement).
However, they clearly did decompile the original Flash file and just swapped a few (though not all) art resources. The clouds aren't suspiciously similar... they're the same. The snow, mechanic, ice art, launching art, health bar, etc aren't just similar, they're identical. The tuning seems to be the same, with the same launch times, etc.
It's true that the Chinese are known for copying things. And that flash games get copied a lot more than they should. But the olympic games are notorious for enforcing their copyrights over the slightest infraction by others. Having the Olympics casually steal other developer's work in this fashion seems extremely self-contradictory.
Donkey Kong and Me
In the fall of 1981 I was going to college and became addicted to the Atari arcade games Centipede and Tempest. I knew a little bit about the hardware of the Atari 400/800 home computer systems, and decided to make a scary purchase on my student budget and buy an Atari 400 and a black and white TV (which was all I could afford). I messed around in Basic for a while, then bought an Assembler/Editor cartridge and started hacking away on a Centipede clone. I didnt have much to go on in terms of seeing prior designs for games and had to figure everything out myself. Like most of the school problems, you really just have to work things out with a few hints from the textbooks and lectures.
Anyone whos worked with that Asm/Editor cartridge probably bears the same deep emotional scars that I do. It was unbelievably slow, the debugger barely worked, and I had to remove comments and write in overlays of a couple K in order to squeeze in enough code. My game, which I called Myriapede, took about three months to write. I still have the original artwork and designs in my files; graph paper marked up with multi-colored pens, with the hexadecimal for the color assignments painstakingly translated on the side.
[I had to guess at colors. All I had was that cheap black and white TV, and I had visit a friends and his color TV for a couple hours in order to fine tune things].
The Atari Program Exchange (a captive publishing house) was holding a contest. The grand prize for the winning game was $25,000. Id spent a semester of college blowing off most of my courses and doing almost nothing except work on Myriapede. I finished it with a week or two to spare and submitted to the contest.
A few weeks after I mailed Myriapede off to the contest, I got a letter from Atari that said (1) they were very impressed with the work, but (2) it looked to them like a substantial copy of Centipede (well, it was) and that theyd rejected it for that reason. The subtext was they would probably sue me if I tried to sell it anywhere else, too. I was crushed. I wound up going to a local user group and giving a couple copies of it away; I assume that it spread from there. I hear that people liked it (best download of 1982 or something like that).
A few weeks later I got a call from Atari; they wanted to know if I was interested in interviewing for a job. I was practically vibrating with excitement. I flew out and did a loop, and made sure to show Myriapede to each interviewer; it was a conversation stopper every time. Until they saw it they kind of humored me (yeah, okay, you wrote a game), then when the game started up they started playing it, got distracted and (ahem!) had to be reminded that they were doing an interview! One of the guys I talked to was the author of Ataris official Centipede cartridge. He said on the spot that my version was better than his.
A couple weeks later they gave me an offer. Atari moved my single roomful of stuff out to California. I flew out and spent two weeks in a hotel waiting for my things to arrive; Atari wanted me out there real bad.
Now, there were two popular arcade games that I simply could not stand; the first was Zaxxon, a stupid and repetitive scrolling shooter. The second was Donkey Kong it was loud, pointless and annoying. Of course, the reason they wanted me in California was so I could work on a Donkey Kong cartridge. After a few moments of dispair (and faking enthusiasm in front of my bosses) I gritted my teeth, got a roll of quarters and spent a lot of time in the little arcade that my hotel had, playing the DK machine there and getting to know it really, really well.
I should explain how Ataris Arcade conversions group worked. Basically, Ataris marketing folks would negotiate a license to ship GameCorps Foobar Blaster on a cartridge for the Atari Home Computer System. That was it. That was the entirety of the deal. We got ZERO help from the original developers of the games. No listings, no talking to the engineers, no design documents
If you want to know why, take for example, the WiiShop channel on Christmas day, You couldn't even get on, let alone get to the point where you could download a game.
If I follow your argument correctly, you're saying that digital distribution is doomed because demand has been higher than expected?
I actually read this as "Marmalade Flood." ...which proves that the biggest hole on earth is still British.
Would you rather pay more for software that has less features but is faster?
I'd rather pay more for software that had the same amount of features but less years of krufty hack layered upon krufty hack.
Quite simply, we're talking about Windows here (and maybe Norton). Mac OS7 did a great job of providing both abstraction and speed in a maintainable environment on a 68030: a chip so slow that you wouldn't notice it if it was working as a co-processor on a modern machine.
Vista, on the other hand, requires a pretty beefy on-board graphics chip to do anything at all, and renders every window as a 3D object. It also pulls in tons of useless side-board crap that probably renders in its own wonky and inefficient scripting language. And, from everything I've heard out of Redmond, has grown into an unmaintainable and unsupportable mess anyway.
Right now, the biggest efficiencies to computer speed seem to lie within the realm of software. Specifically, getting rid of the years of bad decisions and bad hacks that are stealing inordinate amounts of processor time and making it impossible to deliver on promised feature upgrades. We currently have processors that are capable of crunching tens of thousands of times more numbers than could have been done in the 68030 days. Where is that power going? Throwing more hardware at the problem isn't the most efficient way of effecting a solution, especially if the problem is preventing necessary code updates.
You still need promotion, experience, and funding. To a fresh-faced band that is just breaking out of their home town, the prospect of someone coordinating and fronting the money for a 500k dollar video + a 40 city tour is very attractive, especially if they can get said band into rotation on MTV and Clearchannel. They're hitmakers, and everyone wants to be a hit.
Labels will probably continue to have a place for a long, long time.
Yes. I was trying to emphasize the marketing claims of 99.99%+ uptime. In reality, lots of components seem to have about 99.5% uptime, or one working day of downtime per year. This seems especially true for any parts of the chain being leased from 3rd parties.
The problem with multiple routes is issues that hit multiple locations. The two power outages in the past ten years which took down the entire western half of the US could only have been side-stepped by massive geographic distribution of servers. When a major storm starts knocking lines down in the northeast, chances are it could knock down any satellite uplink connections too. And I'll be damned if T1's don't seem to go down in groups. Getting DDOSed because of a post considered inflamatory to an obscure Lithuanian separatist group? All of your upstream eventually hitting the same Tier 3 provider? Is everyone secretly reselling Covad?
I'm not saying 99.999 is a bad target to shoot for, especially for any given component. And in theory, it's attainable. In practice, it's damned expensive.
Call me crazy, but why not board from the overwing and rear entrances too? That ought to scale boarding time somewhat linearly.
I think the change is that the Lenovo have been a no-nonsense business machine for a long time now. Switching to widescreen display with rubberized grips and various other touches implies that IBM's primary ultralite is aimed at more of a consumer-level target.
The solid-state drive standard is pretty revolutionary, though that revolution has started sweeping over notebook lines as we speak.
As a consumer, you're more than entitled to take Comcast to small claims court, which is most likely the mechanism that Comcast would use to extract unpaid bills from you. That Comcast is more likely to enact this mechanism than you are is not a fault of politicians.
It varies by state, but usually it costs 15 dollars to take a company to court, and no lawyers are required. It is generally quick and painless, and people at your local courthouse can fill you in on the details and help you through the process.
That's right, it takes hours on the phone to get one of those companies to either own up to, and pay for losses accrued by their customers through loss of service.
Having been on the other end of these types of calls, this sort of thing can be *very* annoying. People do call all of the time with the expectation that because they do five or six thousand dollars worth of business in a day, the ISP is somehow responsible for those thousands of dollars when some idiot Verizon contractor accidentally cuts our cables. Other reasons for outages include: power loss, fire, flood, exploding transformers, telephone pole collapse, and many other issues outside of our capability.
If you want guaranteed uptime, get it in your contract and be prepared to pay for it! Otherwise, we'll do the best we can to provide service at the funding level we recieve, and will gladly refund the 59c worth of service that you would have paid for a 6 hour outage.
Would you expect Ford to pay you for lost wages when someone hits your car? Would you expect your grocery store to pay for your chiwawa when he starves to death because the store is out of dog food?
The server is up 99.99% of the time. The server's T1 is up 99.99% of the time. T1's ISP is up 99.99% of the time. The backbone provider is up 99.99% of the time. The cellular ISP is up 99.99% of the time. The cell-to-tower linkage is up 99.99% of the time...
Eventually, with all of these little points of failure, you're going to get a good sized chunk of fail. Add in things like the inherent instability of wireless technologies and our nation-wide problem with an aging electrical infrastructure, and you have the sorts of occasionally mildly-inconviencing issues that you see today.
Right now it seems like the things users want to optimize most for are A: speed and B: cost. One day every other month where our home internet is down doesn't seem like the end of the world, especially with the cost of the alternative.
The same was true of SCO. Attention-mongering dysphoric insane media magnets are sometimes real in their consequences.
I prefer to get my health care on a timely basis, from the doctor of my choosing, thankyouverymuch.
Per-capita healthcare spending in Canada is half of what we pay. If we wanted too, we could adopt a Canadian-style healthcare system at our current spending levels and get both universal coverage and snappy service.
Don't forget that while the supplier's T3 (or whathaveyou) has a fixed capacity that either goes unused or doesn't, it doesn't have unlimited capacity. Once you hit one over a certain threshold, you have a *huge* bill to upgrade with higher capacity lines, followed by generally higher monthly upkeep. And it is very likely that two or so of the companies along your upstream are intentionally running very close to capacity, and have periods of degraded service speeds just to get all of the current traffic through their pipes.
Of course as consumers we can brush all of this off with "You offered 'unlimited.' What did you expect, dummies?" But this is slashdot, and some of us are going to be the ones dealing with this stuff.
There is something within humanity that makes us classify certain groups as "the other," then treat that scapegoat group with hideous cruelty. What we're doing with muslims is in some ways not as bad as what happened to the japanese in WW2 (not rounding everyone up), and in some ways it is worse ( removal of citizenship status, sanctioned torture, indefinite detention outside of both non-us and non-international law, invading an unrelated country).
Patting ourselves on the back on how far we've evolved since those primitive times does nothing to dissuade the fact that we're still quite capable of that level of human indifference. That gitmo is an atrocity in the eyes of most other countries seems to escape our cone of vision somehow.
National debt as a percent of GDP.
I really hope we can put the tax-and-spend liberal myth to bed soon. I wholeheartedly support the idea of electing fiscally responsible representatives, and would like to see this happen in practice.
This is not necessarily directed at parent poster, but as a Japanese American with Parents and Grandparents in the US internment camps (Minidoka, primarily), I find this sentiment offensive. The internment camps were not some random act by a barbaric people in an ancient time. It was us, reacting like people do, about a generation ago.
And now we do see similar things going on with muslims. Indefinite detention and torture without trial at guantanamo? Abu Ghraib and sanctioned arbitrary prisoner abuse? The many secret (but becoming known) prisoner detention facilities around the world? Sure, this time they're not rounding them all up to quite the same degree. But there is also more of a emphasis on torture this time.
Fifty years from now we'll probably look back and say "That Guantanamo thing was so long ago..." then have a knee-jerk reaction and racially persecute another group in a new and unique way.