Enough to cover the maintenance of that line? Or enough to cover that, plus extension of other lines, plus new services being rolled out, plus profit?
As other posters have mentioned, the old conditions required the Bells to charge the external customers the same rate that they charge their internal customers. I'd define that as reasonable.
If I laid out a serious amount of money to establish COs and copper to (nearly) every house in the United States, I'd be a little pissed at the government for making me open it up to people who are offering competing services.
Technically, the Bells really should be able to lay down the law when it comes to who access their cables. I mean, it's their cables.
I'm all for competition, but this is kind of an awkward situation.
The point you're missing is that the Bells, unlike say McDonald's being forced to let Burger King use their extra grills, have a monopoly in the last-mile telecom arena. What's more, it's a government-sponsored monopoly. That means that the Bells have, as a condition of their monopoly, certain restrictions and responsiblities that other industries don't.
The Bells can stifle any sort of telecom competition simply because they DO control the wires going into your house. Thus, the only way to ensure any sort of telecom competition is to force the Bells, as a condition of their maintaining their utility/monopoly status, to open their networks to competitors at reasonable prices.
The last thing I want to do when someone defrauds me using ebay is jump through the many legal hoops to obtain a warrant.
Yeah, that whole due-process, checks-and-balances thing is awfully inconvenient. The only reason the law even makes people jump through those hoops to get a warrant for someone's arrest is to inconvenience you personally.
I feel fairly sure that if you add up all the taxes you pay (income, sales, property, utility, phone, gas, etc.), it'd amount to over 50% of the average person's income.
Don't you cross some sort of line into communism or socialism when more than half of your money goes to the government?
Sure, this can be seen as an invasion of privacy. While this is terrible and unfortunate, the fact of the matter is there currently exists some very terrible, murderous people in this world that are willing to do things that have never really been done before, in order to accomplish their task of murder.
Really? Never been done before? I'm sure the people in Europe and Israel will be pleased to know that terrorist are just now starting to target innocent civillians in ways that cause increasing casualties and fear. The only remarkable things about the September 11 attacks were that A) The scale of damage was more than even they had planned, due to the towers collapsing, and B) it was a rare attack on US soil, whereas before we'd been able to get complacent due to the fact that most targets were "US interests overseas."
I dislike the facts of this modern reality just as much as the next person. Unfortunately, there isn't much that the US Government can do to protect its citizens (which is a big component of government) and preserve the way life has been.
You know what? There's not much the government can do. Even if you turned the US into an Orwellian nightmare, a determined person could still find a way around the system to kill people and cause damage. In fact, given the government's historical record, it's likely that its current path toward police-state policies will only serve to feed the corrupt elements in the government, and provide little to no actual increased safety to the citizens. Remember, every generation, we give the government more and more powers that our grandparents would have found alarming, yet we don't get any safer. Curious, that.
There simply is no other way to rectify this issue. Even if the US pulled out of the Middle East and swore off the oil habit and simply ceased dealing with that part of the world. The minds behind these murderous fundamentalists would not change. They would still plan their assaults and still carry out what they are able to carry out.
You're right - no matter what we do, those murderous fundamentalists will always be able to find a way to carry out their plans. We'll catch them some of the times, they'll succeed some of the times. The US is too big to guard all of the borders and coastlines. As a cultural melting pot, it's very easy for anyone to blend into the background.
Here's a little fun activity: Take all of these new "security" ideas that are being proposed (Dept. of Homeland Security, easy wiretapping, secret operations, loss of privacy), and describe them to your grandparents and others of the WWII/Cold War generation. Then ask them if you're talking about the United States, or those godless commies in Russia. I'd be willing to bet that most of them will think you're talking about Russia.
We're in the process of destroying America in order to save it. Judging from the people we keep sending to Washington, the popular opinion is that if we just give the government some more power, everything will be alright, but I'd rather accept the fact that there will always be a chance that terrorists could strike than watch the continued erosion of our civil liberties in favor of an ever-more-powerful federal government.
In the end, though, the people want to give more and more of their rights and responsibilities to the government, so you'll probably get your wish soon. We'll see if it actually solves the problem, though. I have my doubts.
If they're Atlanta Braves fans as it seems, it could refer to Mark "Dirt" Lemke, a Braves infielder during the mid-90s. While not a great player by the numbers, he was a big fan favorite.
I agree - I was able to build a very functional GUI app in Perl/Tk after going through the book "Learning Perl/Tk".
As a bonus, the code runs under both X and Win32, which means some non-Linux folks have been able to use it with just a few checks of $^O. It's been great. I looked into WxWindows a few months ago, but the documentation was nowhere near as complete as Perl/Tk's is.
I hope to heck that some idiot Congressman trying to put together a family tree photo album is told that at some point in the near future: "no, I can't copy your old family pictures since the right to copy them belongs to the photographer." This includes school photos, wedding photos, and all that sort of stuff. So now, you have to wait for the photographer to die, then wait another 70 years before you own pictures of yourself and your loved ones. This law is not only unconstitutional (I'm with Breyer and Stevens on this one) but morally bankrupt from the get go. Why should copyright last well over 100 years, and patents only 20?
An excellent point. This Christmas - my mom got my sister and I each copies of our childhood "Santa pictures" via the photo-copiers at Wal-Mart. A few of them were from a Richmond department store that closed in 1990. Wal-Mart wouldn't let her copy those photographs, because she didn't hold the copyright to them.
Is that the benefit of copyright law? You can't reproduce pictures of your own family taken by a defunct business? I'm glad our government is looking out for us.
If you haven't seen the horde of drooling fanboys demonizing Red Hat every chance they get, simply because it's the most "mainstream" Linux distro, you should check this website.
If you want to talk ugly about Mandrake, go on. It just shows an elitist side that does not realize that without users, programming is just writing utilities and tools so we can write more utilities and tools. In short, without users who need easy to use distros, all we're left with is writing code and making systems for ourselvs. I don't know about you, but to me that is a bit much like masteurbation.
I wonder how many Mandrake fans who feel like this turn right around and talk shit about Red Hat being "The Microsoft of Linux" or say "Red Hat sux0rz! Mandrake is 31337!!!11" or try to score cool-points by fighting against "the man"?
Or I could simply publish an eBook under the context of secure DRM. If the book is successful, then I've got some capital to work with in order to bring the book to the bookshelf.
It isn't all evil, people. But this is slashdot so I'd better go screw myself, eh?
And, by using this "secure DRM", you feel that you also have the right to dictate to the purchaser the exact terms and conditions that they are allowed to use your book under? Things like not being able to print the book, not being able to copy it from device to device, the book becoming unavailable after X days?
Normal publishers don't get to dictate these terms - why should you? That's the problem with DRM.
Re:I was hoping they would wait.
on
New Red Hat Beta
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I think Redhat is still dumb as shit regarding KDE. Both X and GNOME-2.2 have not yet been released as stable versions, so they could very well have added KDE-3.1rc6.
Did you even bother doing basic research before flapping your yap?
Now is this good? After the 8.0 release I didn't see so many people praising Red Hat as with the 7.3 release. I see Red Hat push for a standardization in the Linux community, but it is more of "their" standards, not what the community wants. This is a double edged sword, good for them and getting Linux more coverage, but possibly bad for the community with a muscle like Red Hat who as we can tell is starting to flex a bit.
That would probably come from listening to drooling Slashdot fanboys whose only reaction to hearing the words "Red Hat" is "d00d!!11 r3d h@t si evil!!!! my Distro is more 31137 than j00!" or some other nonsense. Remember - you can't be cool" if you look like you're supporting the most popular thing. It happens with everything - the hip little bar downtown suddenly becomes "a sellout" and uncool once everyone discovers it. Same with bands, TV shows, etc. It's just very disappointing to see the Linux community turn on one of their own just to earn 31337-points. Shit-talking Red Hat just to show how cool you are doesn't help the Linux community gain credibility - it makes people think that the community is filled with a bunch of immature back-biters.
Nobody has ever come up with anything more than half-baked conspiracy theories to show that Red Hat is out to become "the Microsoft of Linux." The 8.0 release was a big jump in terms of functionality and overall direction. Some people liked it, some people didn't. There are lots of things I like, and several things I wish they'd have done differently. But business and technical decisions by a company whose product is open-source is not evil. I find it hard to believe that when you can take Red Hat 8.0, strip out a couple of minor packages, do s/Red Hat/MyUberDistro/ in the source code, and resell it, that Red Hat is the evil behemoth that people claim.
And do you know how Red Hat flexes its muscle? By GPL'ing nearly everything it produces, supporing the LSB, and employing people to work full-time on Linux, thus contributing their work back to the community for everyone from you to SuSE to Debian to use. Ooooh, how deliciously evil.
So I think that the only people who rail against the evils of Red Hat are paranoid conspiracy theorists who don't have the slightest idea of what they're talking about, and are only looking to score cool-points at Red Hat's expense. If Red Hat doesn't do the job for you, use their bugzilla or email lists and attempt to convince them to change things, or by all means use the distro that works best for you. But demonizing Red Hat simply because they happen to be the biggest and/or most popular distro hurts all of us in the long run.
The law is a shell of what it could have been. There is also the standing court challenge against the BCRA that is currently in Federal appeals court. It WILL go to the supreme court as soon as this formality is through.
It's pretty telling that the only time Congress cares about the Bill of Rights is when their paychecks are in jeopardy.
Speaking only on bugzilla places like Red Hat and Mozilla, any bug you file will generate an email to someone, so that bug report should at least get looked at.
Of course, with limited resources, they may have to decide how big of a priority your bug is, but you should probably at least try to go through the estabished bug-reporting channels before deciding that they don't work.
Just because a package has zero bugs reported doesn't mean that nobody looks at those bug reports - it means that no users care enough to file anything on them. Tons of bugs in the "unconfirmed" state would be a better indication that nobody looks at them.
I wonder...I'm in the US, middle class. I pay about 30-ish% federal income tax, probably (ballpark, not pulling out the figures to look) 10% state income tax, social security tax, medicate tax, sales tax (6.5%), personal property taxes, etc., etc., etc.
I would estimate that over half of my earned income goes back to the government in some way, shape, or form. Would over 50% taxation make the US a socialist nation?
Slashdot Mirror
Enough to cover the maintenance of that line? Or enough to cover that, plus extension of other lines, plus new services being rolled out, plus profit?
As other posters have mentioned, the old conditions required the Bells to charge the external customers the same rate that they charge their internal customers. I'd define that as reasonable.
If I laid out a serious amount of money to establish COs and copper to (nearly) every house in the United States, I'd be a little pissed at the government for making me open it up to people who are offering competing services.
Technically, the Bells really should be able to lay down the law when it comes to who access their cables. I mean, it's their cables.
I'm all for competition, but this is kind of an awkward situation.
The point you're missing is that the Bells, unlike say McDonald's being forced to let Burger King use their extra grills, have a monopoly in the last-mile telecom arena. What's more, it's a government-sponsored monopoly. That means that the Bells have, as a condition of their monopoly, certain restrictions and responsiblities that other industries don't.
The Bells can stifle any sort of telecom competition simply because they DO control the wires going into your house. Thus, the only way to ensure any sort of telecom competition is to force the Bells, as a condition of their maintaining their utility/monopoly status, to open their networks to competitors at reasonable prices.
The last thing I want to do when someone defrauds me using ebay is jump through the many legal hoops to obtain a warrant.
Yeah, that whole due-process, checks-and-balances thing is awfully inconvenient. The only reason the law even makes people jump through those hoops to get a warrant for someone's arrest is to inconvenience you personally.
I feel fairly sure that if you add up all the taxes you pay (income, sales, property, utility, phone, gas, etc.), it'd amount to over 50% of the average person's income.
Don't you cross some sort of line into communism or socialism when more than half of your money goes to the government?
Sure, this can be seen as an invasion of privacy. While this is terrible and unfortunate, the fact of the matter is there currently exists some very terrible, murderous people in this world that are willing to do things that have never really been done before, in order to accomplish their task of murder.
Really? Never been done before? I'm sure the people in Europe and Israel will be pleased to know that terrorist are just now starting to target innocent civillians in ways that cause increasing casualties and fear. The only remarkable things about the September 11 attacks were that A) The scale of damage was more than even they had planned, due to the towers collapsing, and B) it was a rare attack on US soil, whereas before we'd been able to get complacent due to the fact that most targets were "US interests overseas."
I dislike the facts of this modern reality just as much as the next person. Unfortunately, there isn't much that the US Government can do to protect its citizens (which is a big component of government) and preserve the way life has been.
You know what? There's not much the government can do. Even if you turned the US into an Orwellian nightmare, a determined person could still find a way around the system to kill people and cause damage. In fact, given the government's historical record, it's likely that its current path toward police-state policies will only serve to feed the corrupt elements in the government, and provide little to no actual increased safety to the citizens. Remember, every generation, we give the government more and more powers that our grandparents would have found alarming, yet we don't get any safer. Curious, that.
There simply is no other way to rectify this issue. Even if the US pulled out of the Middle East and swore off the oil habit and simply ceased dealing with that part of the world. The minds behind these murderous fundamentalists would not change. They would still plan their assaults and still carry out what they are able to carry out.
You're right - no matter what we do, those murderous fundamentalists will always be able to find a way to carry out their plans. We'll catch them some of the times, they'll succeed some of the times. The US is too big to guard all of the borders and coastlines. As a cultural melting pot, it's very easy for anyone to blend into the background.
Here's a little fun activity: Take all of these new "security" ideas that are being proposed (Dept. of Homeland Security, easy wiretapping, secret operations, loss of privacy), and describe them to your grandparents and others of the WWII/Cold War generation. Then ask them if you're talking about the United States, or those godless commies in Russia. I'd be willing to bet that most of them will think you're talking about Russia.
We're in the process of destroying America in order to save it. Judging from the people we keep sending to Washington, the popular opinion is that if we just give the government some more power, everything will be alright, but I'd rather accept the fact that there will always be a chance that terrorists could strike than watch the continued erosion of our civil liberties in favor of an ever-more-powerful federal government.
In the end, though, the people want to give more and more of their rights and responsibilities to the government, so you'll probably get your wish soon. We'll see if it actually solves the problem, though. I have my doubts.
... if wacked-out space-cadet conspiracy theories are the worst things that people can throw at Google, they must be doing alright.
Google's only big enemies appear to be either A) Contrarians, B) Snake-oil marketers, or C) paranoid nutcases.
When Red Hat sets agressive EOL dates for its software, it's an evil plot by "The Man".
When Mandrake sets agressive EOL dates for its software, it's a sound business decision.
If they're Atlanta Braves fans as it seems, it could refer to Mark "Dirt" Lemke, a Braves infielder during the mid-90s. While not a great player by the numbers, he was a big fan favorite.
Just a complete guess.
I agree - I was able to build a very functional GUI app in Perl/Tk after going through the book "Learning Perl/Tk".
As a bonus, the code runs under both X and Win32, which means some non-Linux folks have been able to use it with just a few checks of $^O. It's been great. I looked into WxWindows a few months ago, but the documentation was nowhere near as complete as Perl/Tk's is.
I hope to heck that some idiot Congressman trying to put together a family tree photo album is told that at some point in the near future: "no, I can't copy your old family pictures since the right to copy them belongs to the photographer." This includes school photos, wedding photos, and all that sort of stuff. So now, you have to wait for the photographer to die, then wait another 70 years before you own pictures of yourself and your loved ones. This law is not only unconstitutional (I'm with Breyer and Stevens on this one) but morally bankrupt from the get go. Why should copyright last well over 100 years, and patents only 20?
An excellent point. This Christmas - my mom got my sister and I each copies of our childhood "Santa pictures" via the photo-copiers at Wal-Mart. A few of them were from a Richmond department store that closed in 1990. Wal-Mart wouldn't let her copy those photographs, because she didn't hold the copyright to them.
Is that the benefit of copyright law? You can't reproduce pictures of your own family taken by a defunct business? I'm glad our government is looking out for us.
If you haven't seen the horde of drooling fanboys demonizing Red Hat every chance they get, simply because it's the most "mainstream" Linux distro, you should check this website.
If you want to talk ugly about Mandrake, go on. It just shows an elitist side that does not realize that without users, programming is just writing utilities and tools so we can write more utilities and tools. In short, without users who need easy to use distros, all we're left with is writing code and making systems for ourselvs. I don't know about you, but to me that is a bit much like masteurbation.
I wonder how many Mandrake fans who feel like this turn right around and talk shit about Red Hat being "The Microsoft of Linux" or say "Red Hat sux0rz! Mandrake is 31337!!!11" or try to score cool-points by fighting against "the man"?
Pot, kettle.
Or I could simply publish an eBook under the context of secure DRM. If the book is successful, then I've got some capital to work with in order to bring the book to the bookshelf.
It isn't all evil, people. But this is slashdot so I'd better go screw myself, eh?
And, by using this "secure DRM", you feel that you also have the right to dictate to the purchaser the exact terms and conditions that they are allowed to use your book under? Things like not being able to print the book, not being able to copy it from device to device, the book becoming unavailable after X days?
Normal publishers don't get to dictate these terms - why should you? That's the problem with DRM.
I think Redhat is still dumb as shit regarding KDE. Both X and GNOME-2.2 have not yet been released as stable versions, so they could very well have added KDE-3.1rc6.
...en/os/i386/RedHat/RPMS > pwdt /linux/beta/phoebe/en/os/i386/RedHat/RPMS/ ...en/os/i386/RedHat/RPMS > ls kde* ...0 .9.i386.rpmd ings-devel-3.1-0.3.i386.rpmr pm ...
Did you even bother doing basic research before flapping your yap?
ncftp
ftp://beta:PASSWORD@ftp.beta.redhat.com/pub/redha
ncftp
kdebase-3.1-0.9.i386.rpm
kdebase-devel-3.1-
kdebindings-3.1-0.3.i386.rpm
kdebin
kdeedu-3.1-0.3.i386.
kdeedu-devel-3.1-0.3.i386.rpm
Looks like just another "Red Hat is eeevil" fool.
Now is this good? After the 8.0 release I didn't see so many people praising Red Hat as with the 7.3 release. I see Red Hat push for a standardization in the Linux community, but it is more of "their" standards, not what the community wants. This is a double edged sword, good for them and getting Linux more coverage, but possibly bad for the community with a muscle like Red Hat who as we can tell is starting to flex a bit.
That would probably come from listening to drooling Slashdot fanboys whose only reaction to hearing the words "Red Hat" is "d00d!!11 r3d h@t si evil!!!! my Distro is more 31137 than j00!" or some other nonsense. Remember - you can't be cool" if you look like you're supporting the most popular thing. It happens with everything - the hip little bar downtown suddenly becomes "a sellout" and uncool once everyone discovers it. Same with bands, TV shows, etc. It's just very disappointing to see the Linux community turn on one of their own just to earn 31337-points. Shit-talking Red Hat just to show how cool you are doesn't help the Linux community gain credibility - it makes people think that the community is filled with a bunch of immature back-biters.
Nobody has ever come up with anything more than half-baked conspiracy theories to show that Red Hat is out to become "the Microsoft of Linux." The 8.0 release was a big jump in terms of functionality and overall direction. Some people liked it, some people didn't. There are lots of things I like, and several things I wish they'd have done differently. But business and technical decisions by a company whose product is open-source is not evil. I find it hard to believe that when you can take Red Hat 8.0, strip out a couple of minor packages, do s/Red Hat/MyUberDistro/ in the source code, and resell it, that Red Hat is the evil behemoth that people claim.
And do you know how Red Hat flexes its muscle? By GPL'ing nearly everything it produces, supporing the LSB, and employing people to work full-time on Linux, thus contributing their work back to the community for everyone from you to SuSE to Debian to use. Ooooh, how deliciously evil.
So I think that the only people who rail against the evils of Red Hat are paranoid conspiracy theorists who don't have the slightest idea of what they're talking about, and are only looking to score cool-points at Red Hat's expense. If Red Hat doesn't do the job for you, use their bugzilla or email lists and attempt to convince them to change things, or by all means use the distro that works best for you. But demonizing Red Hat simply because they happen to be the biggest and/or most
popular distro hurts all of us in the long run.
The law is a shell of what it could have been. There is also the standing court challenge against the BCRA that is currently in Federal appeals court. It WILL go to the supreme court as soon as this formality is through.
It's pretty telling that the only time Congress cares about the Bill of Rights is when their paychecks are in jeopardy.
In a similar vein, from slip-ups.com...
slip-ups.com appears to be a site about comedy in Boston, or somesuch. Is that the site you're meaning to reference?
Oh great, I guess that means I have to find another date to the prom.
They'd definitely be feelin' the Ransom love.
Because the presence or lack thereof of "Jugs" magazine doesn't stop people from checking out "Catcher In The Rye."
Whereas the presence of internet filters blocks legitimate research in the name of trying to block porn.
Never seen CKK before.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly
* Anything that compromises security (anti-piracy, DRM, anti-virus, licensing, encryption, authentication).
So how much can they get away with with the fairly loose requirements of the first point?
Now we know the reasons behind the push toward "Everything we do at Microsoft will now be centered around security."
Speaking only on bugzilla places like Red Hat and Mozilla, any bug you file will generate an email to someone, so that bug report should at least get looked at.
Of course, with limited resources, they may have to decide how big of a priority your bug is, but you should probably at least try to go through the estabished bug-reporting channels before deciding that they don't work.
Just because a package has zero bugs reported doesn't mean that nobody looks at those bug reports - it means that no users care enough to file anything on them. Tons of bugs in the "unconfirmed" state would be a better indication that nobody looks at them.
I wonder...I'm in the US, middle class. I pay about 30-ish% federal income tax, probably (ballpark, not pulling out the figures to look) 10% state income tax, social security tax, medicate tax, sales tax (6.5%), personal property taxes, etc., etc., etc.
I would estimate that over half of my earned income goes back to the government in some way, shape, or form. Would over 50% taxation make the US a socialist nation?
...or implements DRM measures to lock you out!