I'm wondering if these people ended up there because they picked it, or because they were shoved into it for lack of space elsewhere? The website is being horribly unuseful for finding this out.
If they went there through not having other choices, then the University had a responsibility to give them the sort of access the other dorms have (not necessarily legally, but morally). If the students had to go get it themselves, the reaction by the University is clearly wrong. Unfortunatly, unless it was legally wrong, that doesn't make a damn.
A somewhat similar situation is going on here at Brandeis regarding cable TV theft. No one has been arrested or even accused of stealing cable, but it is known that lots of it occurs. The proposed solution is to tack on a "cable TV" fee to housing costs and just turn on everyone's cable, rather than try to find people breaking into cable boxes and turning on cable illegitimately. I'm not sure what they'd do if they found someone doing that, but it wouldn't involve jail (though it might involve Brandeis cops).
Brynn, who finds Brandeis policies rather sane, with the exception of things requiring much more bureucracy than necessary
This is just like MS saying, "Look, we're open, we let anyone who wants to use our APIs!" (this assumes that MS APIs actually are completely open, but I digress) This only enforces the idea that WOTC is like MS and nothing like Linux. Dancey not only says that helping AD&D make money for WOTC is the sole purpose of the "hobby gaming industry", but he says that all other gaming systems cause "inefficiency" in the system of getting that money to WOTC and this caused the current bullishness of the gaming industry! He is basically saying that the best thing for gaming is for everyone to make AD&D products because *no one else has enough mindshare*. Tell me, is this Open Source talk? Would Apache ppl say that anyone who makes Web Applications should make them only for Apache because anything else hurts the Internet?
If I were Richard Stallman, I'd be incredibly pissed off at being associated with such a move. But I'm not Richard Stallman;)
Brynn, President of the BSCF (Brandeis University gaming club) and all-around role-player
This has its good sides. However, your karma economy leaves a significant part of the slashdot community in the cold: the lurkers. These are people (like me) who post rarely if ever (I have posted twice other than this in as many months).
The reason they do not post vary; in my case, I am no computer guru, lawyer, etc., and generally someone else has said what I want to say already. The other posts I mentioned were: something I had specifically study (the recent scientific article on sleep) and a quote that seemed so absurd (and offensive) that I did research to find more info on it, which showed it to be a major exageration (by the person who made the quote, not the commentor).
How would your system allows lurkers (another way to put it is people who specialize in reading Slashdot) to moderate? I really think the idea that "well, if they don't post they must not care" or that lurkers wouldn't get karma even if they posted is prejudiced.
Also, the current system *does not* give moderator priorities to people who have higher karma, but your system does. That feels really skewed; someone can be intellegent without being especially coherent or charismatic (like me;P). It turns Slashdot into a popularity contest, which I had hoped I'd left behind in high school.
Brynn, who tries to speak only if she has something to say
Here is a paragraph out of the article on this incident as reported in the Digital Library Journal:
"However, the rapist -- who has not been caught -- was not seen on the library's main floor, where Internet stations are located, according to library director Martha Ferriby. The rape occurred in the women's restroom on the ground floor, where the girl had gone after coming to the library with her father; different news organizations reported that the rapist followed the girl into the restroom or was already present there. "We know nothing about this man, if he's ever been in the library before," Ferriby said. She said she was "99 percent sure" he hadn't used the Internet, since workstations are monitored closely."
The other paragraph basically states Gary Glenn's comment about how the internet is at fault, which is contradicted here. It wasn't as if this guy looked at porn and then grabbed a random library patron and rapped her on the library floor. If the library had had no internet access, the chance that this event would still have occured are incredibly high. Even if he was looking at porn on a library machine (highly unlikely, as the machines are monitored as mentioned), it did not force him to go rape that girl (remember, the internet doesn't rape people; people rape people).
Brynn, who is really pissed off when people blame machines for people problems
I'm currently taking a class called "the Neurobiology of Sleep and Dreaming" so I know a bit about the subject at hand.
First of all, there are parts of your brain that have increased activity during sleep, especially in the brainstem (note that most researchers sperate sleep into slow wave and REM, since REM is really strange, but this statement applies to all sleep).
Second of all, past sleep dep studies have shown that the main symptom of sleep dep is. . . feeling sleepy. Yes, cognitive functions are impared, but significantly less so than expected (it is suspected that most of those effects are due to attention problems rather than actual cortical processing issues).
Third, the need for sleep decreases as you age, although I can't point to any studies on sleep dep. in the elderly (it is known, however, that significant sleep dep. in the elderly mimics Alzheimer's in that it causes misdiagnoses).
Fourth, I suspect the 17 days rat sleep dep. death figure is due to use of the water tank method of sleep dep., where a rat is placed on a very small platform in a tank of water, such that it falls in the water if it falls asleep. This is highly stressful in addition to depriving sleep. An experiment where the bottom of a cage was rotated (the walls stayed still, so the rat was bumped by the walls which woke it up and it had to walk some before it stopped) when EEG signals indicated sleep for the experimental rat (a control rat was also in the cage but was allowed to sleep; I did not suffer ill effects) showed that it took 30 days for the rat to die. That's something of a nitpick, but implies that stress might also be deadly.
Finally, to counter the story of the DJ, let me tell you the story of the 17 year old kid who stayed awake for 264 hours (11 days) in an attempt to break the world record (dunno if he succeeded) in 1965. By the last day he was really sleepy but could still perform tasks (the kind that scientists give people, I don't know specifics). Afterwards he slept for 14 hours 40 minutes straight, then was fully recovered with no aftereffects. Also, Kales in 1970 performed an experiment where 4 subjects were kept awake for 205 hours. They suffered eyelid tremors and decreased performance (which was suspected to be due to lack of motivation) and had a big REM rebound (lots more of their sleep was in REM than normal) for 4 days, then also fully recovered.
A good book on the subject is "Sleep" by J. Allen Hobson (an expert on the subject who works at Harvard).
Brynn, who suspects that the DJ in question already had some stability issues
>but I would suggest that something added to the "living equilibrium", such as a (relatively) >spontaneously created medication, has the >potential to unbalance many of the delicate >chemical systems we need to live a healthy, >darwinian fit, happy life.
I get somewhat annoyed by people who imply that the things humans do aren't "natural", as if beaver dams are more "natural" than the Hoover dam because they're made of wood rather than concrete. This "living balance" is *caused* by changes we (along with everything else on this planet) make and made, starting with amino acid formation and evolving into modern tech via microbes that made this world oxygen-laden. We just happen to be more observant of our changes because they tend to be large-scale (although microbes and virii can certainly beat us out for changing the environment, they're just less visible (pardon the pun)). As for this "delicate chemical balance", I don't buy it. It's delicate in the sense that very little chemical things can do great damage (e.g. many atoms of cholrine in gaseous form). The *balance*, however, is not delicate, because the system is very flexible and efficient (efficient in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and "if it isn't in use, ditch it" senses). It will readjust to the new situation - the new virii will evolve around this medication (kinda similar to the Internet routing around censorship;P).
Brynn, who believes that since evolution gave us this nice big brain, we might as well use it
>I'm not saying that any of the items listed in >the review are not noteworthy; I'm just pointing >out that the list does not appear to be particularly exhaustive.
I noticed this as well; under Behavior, they failed to mention the discovery that adult primates demonstrated neurogenesis (new neurons) in the neocortex (top brain layer), refuting the belief that adults brains don't make new neurons (Note: this doesn't mean that killing brain cells with alcohol isn't bad, since they'll "grow back"; each neuron is unique in it's connections to other neurons). Hell, that even showed up on the front page of the NYT.
I'm guessing that only things they opted to put in their magazine showed up (well, duh, given all the references) and they might've missed out on a few things; science is moving at an ever-increasing pace, no one can be blamed if they miss something.
>In the year 1000 didn't everybody hold their >breaths because they thought Jesus was coming? >There's always next millenium...
Actually, based on discussions with my friend (a history major who has been reading book on millennium cults right before 1000), those cults weren't so much concerned with the passing of a millennium as the coming of a millennium of peace just prior to the Apocalypse.
There was (is?) a theory (based on a comment in the new testament that a thousand years is as a day to God) that threre will be 7 Ages of Man (like days of the week, neh?), each a thousand years long (after which we get Apocalypse), and the birth of Jesus marked the beginning of the 6th Age. They weren't waiting for apocalypse, they were waiting for peace, the lion living with the lamb, the whole bit (pardon me if my Revelations is a bit rusty, I'm Jewish after all;P).
Which is actually much more cheerful than the Apocalypse theory; incidentally, the notion that 2000 marks Apocalypse would only makes sense if they'd been right and we'd had peace for the last 100 years. We haven't so we have nothing to worry about;)
Brynn, who learned more about christianity from an athiest than anyone else;)
I am pondering why I am not a female CS geek. I know that I could easily be a CS geek if I desired to be so, but I lack that desire. I have had a computer since I was 4 or 5 (a Vic 20:) and I had computer class with logo once a week throughout elementary school. My parents encouraged me to play with computers as well as read and ask questions (they bought me multiple books on programming in basic before I was 10). I'm even comfortable with cryptic UNIX commands (even if I forget them half the time, that's what man is for:). However, I completely failed to become a hacker (at least in the computer sense). I am a geek-in-training of neuropsychology.
I suspect that this might be a little wider than simply "females don't like to program". CS has to compete with other sciences for females like me who enjoy scientificness. I would be interested to see if this isn't a greater issue of females not into science rather than females not into programming, as I suspect.
I'll never remember to check the bookmarked page, guys! That's just unrealistic. I say give us a new slashbox for the show, which would have links to the page with the shows for each week (is this a regular weekly thing? Time goes funky during the summer). That way when a new one shows up it'll be right there on the front page of/.
> I think as a kid I would have been pretty > dissappointed if I was always hearing my parents > and practically all adults going about how much > that fucking Chewbacca kept annoying them and > how they hated him so.
That Chewy was never hated should tell you something. The first three movies all had characters with "child appeal": Chewy in the first, Yoda in the second, and the Ewoks in the third. OK, the Ewoks get some ribbing, but for being cutsey, not for being stupid/insulting. Chewy was the pilot of the MF, and must have been rather competent considering all the mishygosh they had to get through. Yoda's first appearance made him seem vaguely Jar-Jar like, but that was a *ruse*! A Jedi master can, in fact, sound like Grover from Sesame Street and be a muppet but still strike one as incredibly wise. The Ewoks managed to beat up the much larger and more "advanced" Storm Troopers by being *intellegent*! They tripped up their flyers, they outflew them, and in general kicked their collective ass.
Jar-Jar, however, was neither intellegent nor competent. He bumbled his was to a high position (bombast general), simply by being in the wrong place at the right time. He was comical without being amusing, clumsy, and in general a fool. Sure, he has kid appeal, ask any 4-5th grader. However, because he was a bumbling fool, he added nothing to the movie.
Note, however, that the gungans as a race were actually decent fighters and people; I liked Boss Nass and the general. This despite the fact that the only reason they didn't die by the thousands was an all-too-serendipitous shot.
In general, you are correct: the Gungans' "primitiveness" (I don't know how primitive you can be when you have force shields and contained EMPs, but the *style* was the point) overpowered the incredibly high-tech droids and pulse guns of the Trade Federation. Kinda makes you think of Walden. . .
However, they should have picked a Gungan other than Jar-Jar Binks. He was essentially a bumbling idiot; he got kicked out of the Gunga city for dropping something on the Boss' head (that's what I think; I've seen it 3 times and still can't figure out exactly what he's saying there). All he had on his side was serendipity, e.g. his taking out 2-3 droids (including a dreaded droidicar) when he gets his foot stuck in half a droid. Perhaps a more Hans Soloish gungan, whose motives differ widely from the "good guys" but ends up doing the "right thing for the wrong reasons" or something.
I'm sorry, but Jar-Jar is not a geek in the sense most of us think. As Qui-Gon said, "The ability to speak does not make one intellegent."
Up here near Boston, MediaOne does a rather good job with their cable modems. We had one last summer and the only problem we had was a DOS attack (damned skript kiddies). The guy who installed it was knowlegeful and on time, so the install went without a hitch. The price for a cable modem is $50/months, same to install (unless you already have cable, in which case its free), and you can get cable as well (no need, MediaOne seems to grok cable modem sans cable TV) for an additional $10 a months, making it $60 for the whole thing. That's rather good pricewise, and the connection to campus was faster than the connection on campus (i.e. from one machine to another on campus). We plan to get a cabel modem this summer as well (again, need to install it, but there's cable already so no problem, and the landlords like having a cable modem port, its ups house value;P). This year we're determining the possibility of doing a LAN, since we're living with 3 other computers/people (yea, I know, obe machine per person, how minimalist;P).
Apologies for the rambling, but MediaOne in Boston is good schtuff and I don't want it getting a bad rep from other areas (the only issue is you need a mac/win box to get it installed, but then you boot into linux and you're fine).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm wondering if these people ended up there because they picked it, or because they were shoved into it for lack of space elsewhere? The website is being horribly unuseful for finding this out.
If they went there through not having other choices, then the University had a responsibility to give them the sort of access the other dorms have (not necessarily legally, but morally). If the students had to go get it themselves, the reaction by the University is clearly wrong. Unfortunatly, unless it was legally wrong, that doesn't make a damn.
A somewhat similar situation is going on here at Brandeis regarding cable TV theft. No one has been arrested or even accused of stealing cable, but it is known that lots of it occurs. The proposed solution is to tack on a "cable TV" fee to housing costs and just turn on everyone's cable, rather than try to find people breaking into cable boxes and turning on cable illegitimately. I'm not sure what they'd do if they found someone doing that, but it wouldn't involve jail (though it might involve Brandeis cops).
Brynn, who finds Brandeis policies rather sane, with the exception of things requiring much more bureucracy than necessary
This is just like MS saying, "Look, we're open, we let anyone who wants to use our APIs!" (this assumes that MS APIs actually are completely open, but I digress)
;)
This only enforces the idea that WOTC is like MS and nothing like Linux. Dancey not only says that helping AD&D make money for WOTC is the sole purpose of the "hobby gaming industry", but he says that all other gaming systems cause "inefficiency" in the system of getting that money to WOTC and this caused the current bullishness of the gaming industry! He is basically saying that the best thing for gaming is for everyone to make AD&D products because *no one else has enough mindshare*. Tell me, is this Open Source talk? Would Apache ppl say that anyone who makes Web Applications should make them only for Apache because anything else hurts the Internet?
If I were Richard Stallman, I'd be incredibly pissed off at being associated with such a move. But I'm not Richard Stallman
Brynn, President of the BSCF (Brandeis University gaming club) and all-around role-player
This has its good sides. However, your karma economy leaves a significant part of the slashdot community in the cold: the lurkers. These are people (like me) who post rarely if ever (I have posted twice other than this in as many months).
;P). It turns Slashdot into a popularity contest, which I had hoped I'd left behind in high school.
The reason they do not post vary; in my case, I am no computer guru, lawyer, etc., and generally someone else has said what I want to say already. The other posts I mentioned were: something I had specifically study (the recent scientific article on sleep) and a quote that seemed so absurd (and offensive) that I did research to find more info on it, which showed it to be a major exageration (by the person who made the quote, not the commentor).
How would your system allows lurkers (another way to put it is people who specialize in reading Slashdot) to moderate? I really think the idea that "well, if they don't post they must not care" or that lurkers wouldn't get karma even if they posted is prejudiced.
Also, the current system *does not* give moderator priorities to people who have higher karma, but your system does. That feels really skewed; someone can be intellegent without being especially coherent or charismatic (like me
Brynn, who tries to speak only if she has something to say
Here is a paragraph out of the article on this incident as reported in the Digital Library Journal:
"However, the rapist -- who has not been caught -- was not seen on the library's main floor, where Internet stations are located, according to library director Martha Ferriby. The rape occurred in the women's restroom on the ground floor, where the girl had gone after coming to the library with her father; different news organizations reported that the rapist followed the girl into the restroom or was already present there. "We know nothing about this man, if he's ever been in the library before," Ferriby said. She said she was "99 percent sure" he hadn't used the Internet, since workstations are monitored closely."
The other paragraph basically states Gary Glenn's comment about how the internet is at fault, which is contradicted here. It wasn't as if this guy looked at porn and then grabbed a random library patron and rapped her on the library floor. If the library had had no internet access, the chance that this event would still have occured are incredibly high. Even if he was looking at porn on a library machine (highly unlikely, as the machines are monitored as mentioned), it did not force him to go rape that girl (remember, the internet doesn't rape people; people rape people).
Brynn, who is really pissed off when people blame machines for people problems
I'm currently taking a class called "the Neurobiology of Sleep and Dreaming" so I know a bit about the subject at hand.
First of all, there are parts of your brain that have increased activity during sleep, especially in the brainstem (note that most researchers sperate sleep into slow wave and REM, since REM is really strange, but this statement applies to all sleep).
Second of all, past sleep dep studies have shown that the main symptom of sleep dep is. . . feeling sleepy. Yes, cognitive functions are impared, but significantly less so than expected (it is suspected that most of those effects are due to attention problems rather than actual cortical processing issues).
Third, the need for sleep decreases as you age, although I can't point to any studies on sleep dep. in the elderly (it is known, however, that significant sleep dep. in the elderly mimics Alzheimer's in that it causes misdiagnoses).
Fourth, I suspect the 17 days rat sleep dep. death figure is due to use of the water tank method of sleep dep., where a rat is placed on a very small platform in a tank of water, such that it falls in the water if it falls asleep. This is highly stressful in addition to depriving sleep. An experiment where the bottom of a cage was rotated (the walls stayed still, so the rat was bumped by the walls which woke it up and it had to walk some before it stopped) when EEG signals indicated sleep for the experimental rat (a control rat was also in the cage but was allowed to sleep; I did not suffer ill effects) showed that it took 30 days for the rat to die. That's something of a nitpick, but implies that stress might also be deadly.
Finally, to counter the story of the DJ, let me tell you the story of the 17 year old kid who stayed awake for 264 hours (11 days) in an attempt to break the world record (dunno if he succeeded) in 1965. By the last day he was really sleepy but could still perform tasks (the kind that scientists give people, I don't know specifics). Afterwards he slept for 14 hours 40 minutes straight, then was fully recovered with no aftereffects. Also, Kales in 1970 performed an experiment where 4 subjects were kept awake for 205 hours. They suffered eyelid tremors and decreased performance (which was suspected to be due to lack of motivation) and had a big REM rebound (lots more of their sleep was in REM than normal) for 4 days, then also fully recovered.
A good book on the subject is "Sleep" by J. Allen Hobson (an expert on the subject who works at Harvard).
Brynn, who suspects that the DJ in question already had some stability issues
>but I would suggest that something added to the "living equilibrium", such as a (relatively) >spontaneously created medication, has the >potential to unbalance many of the delicate >chemical systems we need to live a healthy, >darwinian fit, happy life.
;P).
I get somewhat annoyed by people who imply that the things humans do aren't "natural", as if beaver dams are more "natural" than the Hoover dam because they're made of wood rather than concrete. This "living balance" is *caused* by changes we (along with everything else on this planet) make and made, starting with amino acid formation and evolving into modern tech via microbes that made this world oxygen-laden. We just happen to be more observant of our changes because they tend to be large-scale (although microbes and virii can certainly beat us out for changing the environment, they're just less visible (pardon the pun)).
As for this "delicate chemical balance", I don't buy it. It's delicate in the sense that very little chemical things can do great damage (e.g. many atoms of cholrine in gaseous form). The *balance*, however, is not delicate, because the system is very flexible and efficient (efficient in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and "if it isn't in use, ditch it" senses). It will readjust to the new situation - the new virii will evolve around this medication (kinda similar to the Internet routing around censorship
Brynn, who believes that since evolution gave us this nice big brain, we might as well use it
>I'm not saying that any of the items listed in
>the review are not noteworthy; I'm just pointing
>out that the list does not appear to be particularly exhaustive.
I noticed this as well; under Behavior, they failed to mention the discovery that adult primates demonstrated neurogenesis (new neurons) in the neocortex (top brain layer), refuting the belief that adults brains don't make new neurons (Note: this doesn't mean that killing brain cells with alcohol isn't bad, since they'll "grow back"; each neuron is unique in it's connections to other neurons). Hell, that even showed up on the front page of the NYT.
I'm guessing that only things they opted to put in their magazine showed up (well, duh, given all the references) and they might've missed out on a few things; science is moving at an ever-increasing pace, no one can be blamed if they miss something.
Brynn, undergraduate in neuropsychology
>In the year 1000 didn't everybody hold their >breaths because they thought Jesus was coming? >There's always next millenium...
;P).
;)
;)
Actually, based on discussions with my friend (a history major who has been reading book on millennium cults right before 1000), those cults weren't so much concerned with the passing of a millennium as the coming of a millennium of peace just prior to the Apocalypse.
There was (is?) a theory (based on a comment in the new testament that a thousand years is as a day to God) that threre will be 7 Ages of Man (like days of the week, neh?), each a thousand years long (after which we get Apocalypse), and the birth of Jesus marked the beginning of the 6th Age. They weren't waiting for apocalypse, they were waiting for peace, the lion living with the lamb, the whole bit (pardon me if my Revelations is a bit rusty, I'm Jewish after all
Which is actually much more cheerful than the Apocalypse theory; incidentally, the notion that 2000 marks Apocalypse would only makes sense if they'd been right and we'd had peace for the last 100 years. We haven't so we have nothing to worry about
Brynn, who learned more about christianity from an athiest than anyone else
I am pondering why I am not a female CS geek. I know that I could easily be a CS geek if I desired to be so, but I lack that desire. I have had a computer since I was 4 or 5 (a Vic 20 :) and I had computer class with logo once a week throughout elementary school. My parents encouraged me to play with computers as well as read and ask questions (they bought me multiple books on programming in basic before I was 10). I'm even comfortable with cryptic UNIX commands (even if I forget them half the time, that's what man is for :). However, I completely failed to become a hacker (at least in the computer sense). I am a geek-in-training of neuropsychology.
I suspect that this might be a little wider than simply "females don't like to program". CS has to compete with other sciences for females like me who enjoy scientificness. I would be interested to see if this isn't a greater issue of females not into science rather than females not into programming, as I suspect.
I'll never remember to check the bookmarked page, guys! That's just unrealistic. I say give us a new slashbox for the show, which would have links to the page with the shows for each week (is this a regular weekly thing? Time goes funky during the summer). That way when a new one shows up it'll be right there on the front page of /.
Brynn, the forgetful
That Chewy was never hated should tell you something. The first three movies all had characters with "child appeal": Chewy in the first, Yoda in the second, and the Ewoks in the third. OK, the Ewoks get some ribbing, but for being cutsey, not for being stupid/insulting. Chewy was the pilot of the MF, and must have been rather competent considering all the mishygosh they had to get through. Yoda's first appearance made him seem vaguely Jar-Jar like, but that was a *ruse*! A Jedi master can, in fact, sound like Grover from Sesame Street and be a muppet but still strike one as incredibly wise. The Ewoks managed to beat up the much larger and more "advanced" Storm Troopers by being *intellegent*! They tripped up their flyers, they outflew them, and in general kicked their collective ass.
Jar-Jar, however, was neither intellegent nor competent. He bumbled his was to a high position (bombast general), simply by being in the wrong place at the right time. He was comical without being amusing, clumsy, and in general a fool. Sure, he has kid appeal, ask any 4-5th grader. However, because he was a bumbling fool, he added nothing to the movie.
Note, however, that the gungans as a race were actually decent fighters and people; I liked Boss Nass and the general. This despite the fact that the only reason they didn't die by the thousands was an all-too-serendipitous shot.
Brynn
In general, you are correct: the Gungans' "primitiveness" (I don't know how primitive you can be when you have force shields and contained EMPs, but the *style* was the point) overpowered the incredibly high-tech droids and pulse guns of the Trade Federation. Kinda makes you think of Walden. . .
However, they should have picked a Gungan other than Jar-Jar Binks. He was essentially a bumbling idiot; he got kicked out of the Gunga city for dropping something on the Boss' head (that's what I think; I've seen it 3 times and still can't figure out exactly what he's saying there). All he had on his side was serendipity, e.g. his taking out 2-3 droids (including a dreaded droidicar) when he gets his foot stuck in half a droid. Perhaps a more Hans Soloish gungan, whose motives differ widely from the "good guys" but ends up doing the "right thing for the wrong reasons" or something.
I'm sorry, but Jar-Jar is not a geek in the sense most of us think. As Qui-Gon said, "The ability to speak does not make one intellegent."
Brynn
Up here near Boston, MediaOne does a rather good job with their cable modems. We had one last summer and the only problem we had was a DOS attack (damned skript kiddies). The guy who installed it was knowlegeful and on time, so the install went without a hitch. ;P). This year we're determining the possibility of doing a LAN, since we're living with 3 other computers/people (yea, I know, obe machine per person, how minimalist ;P).
The price for a cable modem is $50/months, same to install (unless you already have cable, in which case its free), and you can get cable as well (no need, MediaOne seems to grok cable modem sans cable TV) for an additional $10 a months, making it $60 for the whole thing. That's rather good pricewise, and the connection to campus was faster than the connection on campus (i.e. from one machine to another on campus).
We plan to get a cabel modem this summer as well (again, need to install it, but there's cable already so no problem, and the landlords like having a cable modem port, its ups house value
Apologies for the rambling, but MediaOne in Boston is good schtuff and I don't want it getting a bad rep from other areas (the only issue is you need a mac/win box to get it installed, but then you boot into linux and you're fine).
Brynn