After 12 years of trying to get cable service 5 power poles up my road via 3 diff companies (Adelphia, Time Warner, and now Spectrum), there was some hope this March. On a whim I called the # for Spectrum I just saw on TV, the CSR says "Oh yeah, we just opened up that service area to new orders and you are the first!". "Great, Let's do it!" I said. "2 weeks....blah blah blah". 3 weeks later, no return call, so I call... "Oh, your address is un-serviceable," they say. "Three weeks ago you said I was," I reply. Unfortunately it was on a weekend, got transferred to 2 other CSRs, the last of which attempted to be helpful as he could, but still no real answers. I just wanted them to keep to their word.
Off go complaints to the Attorney General's office and the NYS Rural Broadband Commission (especially appropriate, I thought, because Gov Cuomo announced that Phase 3 was 100% successful (how could it be, I still don't have this "broadband" they are speaking of)).
Got a phone call from the Rural Broadband Commission in May explaining that the TWC/Charter/Spectrum deal wasn't part of the Rural Broadband Initiative. Great. But if we are absolutely unservicable, by the end of the year, they will make a deal available from Hughesnet (which we currently have, at 1.5mbps at best...albeit gen3 if it's called that). Ok, not ideal, but something a _little_ better (same abysmal latency but theoretically faster, still not all-you-can-eat).
Then we get a visit from one of Charter's construction/survey dept reps in late May, sees what needs to be done, and says you'll have service in Dec/Jan. Woot!
I've been carrying around and bragging about 2 letters I got around June 6, in the same envelop. One from the Attorney General, saying Charter's response to my complaint is enclosed. Charter's letter says construction will be completed in Jan 2019, but the timeline is subject to change. Yay! I have it in writing!!!!
Yeah, right. Thanks. Heard the news yesterday on the radio, and immediately knew those letters were now null and void.
Saved up the $500 from my first summer job after my freshman year in high school in '80. Just looked it up on oldcomputers.net and learned more than I knew. Installed the RS232 card by unplugging the 8080, plugging it into the card, and plugging the card into the empty processor socket. Game controllers were funky...digital direction and an analog knob at the top of the stick. BASIC was a little like the CoCo, especially the graphics (x,y,color,something...or was it x,y,fg,bg?), but different enough to find it painful to convert. I think it overheated due to the very solid metal box the mainboard was contained in. Was forgotten when family for a ][e in '83. WHEE!!!
Funny... I just got my/28 block in 44-land yesterday. Semi-isolated, 1200bps packet node running for months using linux native AX25 and FBB PBBS.
My choice in such a situation would be to roll-out wifi mesh/bridges. Sure, mesh routing needs work, but it'll work in a pinch. Its an area where amateur radio can help do research for trickle-down consumer networking that can help make the "net neutrality" issue go away.
So much of the discussion seems to be a "Battle of the Sweeteners".
My beef (and other meat) with corn is how much there is in our diets. Start your day off with a bowl of corn-sweetened, puffed or flaked corn cereal moistened with the milk from corn-fed beef. For lunch, some corn-fed meat and HFCS-based condiment, a bag of crunchy corn chips, washed down with some carbonated HFCS. Repeat for dinner.
Cattle are supposed to eat grasses, not corn. Much energy (drive an e-85 vehicle to the fast food drive-thru?) is used to convert corn into something cattle can digest (with the help of antibiotics and growth hormones).
Of course this isn't just any corn, it's an industrial monoculture created and patented by Monsanto.
The corn I grew in the garden was great this year, but I couldn't help being reminded how much corn is already in our diets. At least the stuff in the garden still had some bran fiber left. It seems like a filler, added to everything because the corn producers need to turn inventory into profit.
Corn. It's what's for breakfast, lunch and dinner!
Its probably to late to make a large enough batch that are 180 degrees out of phase with the ones currently being used, but for next time, making 50% of them out of phase would make them self-quieting.
Maybe a ringtone or mp3 that is 180 degrees out could be quickly deployed.
Two negatives make a positive, and two positives make a negative. Yeah, right.
The NORAD Command Center in "War Games" was always a favorite of mine, but Starfleet(tm) Bridge or Engineering could be fun too. Folks could have uniforms of differently colored company polo shirts.
A generic command post with visitor theater above it might be intriguing.
Replicating part of the cubical farm in The Matrix could just be an interesting "after-work" team-building project.
"When all else fails" does not mean that there will always be a way to get pr0n or post some video of your car after a tornado parked it on the roof of your house. It means that net neutrality goes down the tubes and traffic gets severely "shaped". Most, if not all "traffic" will go through formal "nets", to and from official government jurisdictions and maybe NGOs such as Red Cross and Salvation Army. See http://www.usraces.org/ and http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/pscm/sec1-ch1.html, respectively.
Actually, there is a portion of the 802.11b/g 2400-2450 MHz wifi band that falls within FCC Part 97 rules. Amateurs have the ability to use high power and very high gain antennas on a couple channels (-1 and o, iirc) using WRT-56G and the like. There is a page at ARRL regarding "the hinternet" and HSMM at http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/high-speed-digital/ and http://www.n5oom.org/hsmm/index.htm has some good technical links. The ARRL seems to have dropped the HSMM ball, perhaps due to pressure from the WISP lobby.
Yes, D-Star and other VHF packet setups are slow, up to a whopping 9600bps or so. The band is only so wide, we gotta share the bandwidth. There is more elbow room elsewhere.
But in case of a real emergency, amateurs will loose all non-emergency communication privileges within the bits of the radio spectrum covered by Part 97 rules.. Maybe hardcore/. users can lobby for creating an internet equivalent to http://www.usraces.org/ (cough cough)
Steam?!?! Isn't that VERY HOT DHMO!?!?! That can't be good, according to http://www.dhmo.org/ !!
Seriously, amateur radio operators are subject to FCC Part 97 rules, and specifically, http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/regulations/news/part97/e.html#407 (b). "In the event of an emergency which necessitates invoking the President's War Emergency Powers under the provisions of section 706 of the Communications Act of 1934..." amateur radio as a hobby would be put on hold. That rule applies only to frequencies that amateurs are licensed to use. Obama, and any other president since 1934, could invoke said Powers, but I don't see how they could apply to non-wireless or unlicensed wireless communications. The Gov can shut down it's interstate highways, international borders, airspace, licensed radio spectrum, etc at it's discretion. When governments shut down cell phone networks, well, see the recent events in Iran.
Would or could the government jam the unlicensed spectrum that wifi uses? If "no", wireless mesh networks FTW! Otherwise, maybe we'll be saying "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a backpack full of usb flash drives," as long as some state borders are left open.
Good thing we'll still be able to build steam-powered spark-gap generators, tho!;)
This vaguely reminds me of a website years ago that presented an interactive interface of a huge number line. The page was divided into a couple sections for the zoom level, the closest zoom level showed a bar for the number of entries it had for each individual number (tall=more entries). Clicking on the number would give a list of representations, selecting a representation gave a selection from the web resource the info came from.
I checked my bookmarks and googled a bit, but does anyone else remember the site, and if so, is it still around?
It's interesting that folks are looking into the possibilities. Perhaps it will find itself useful for training and in other different ways.
One idea came to mind:
Health care is a hot topic in the US. I'm old enough to remember family doctors making house calls, in the late 60's and very early 70's, in my home town in upstate NY. Judging by the lack of local medical help in the rural town where I am now, there aren't enough doctors to go around. Some towns have sponsored (new?) doctors, paying their education bill, providing facilities, a place to live, and other basic necessities.
Suppose more communities did this, creating a larger market for doctors. Such virtualization tools could enable doctors to make house calls again, and even give them some side income. Doctors could "see" patients via SL, perhaps for $L, during slow times between RL, local patients.
Develop an inexpensive USB dongle that can measure pulse, BP, temp, etc, and distribute them widely and with a lifetime guarantee. Have it capable of storing medical records for a family.
There will be privacy issues, the storage and sharing of medical records, proxies, filters, and trust, but those are things that will need to be dealt with for any "Health Care Reform" to happen. No more filling out paperwork while in the waiting room, but the internet has a great "magazine rack".
As a wildblue.com user (directv customer) with a 17GB down, 5GB up 30-day rolling cap, I don't think satellite ISPs will like the idea. For me, it's $70/mo for 1.5mbps down, 254kbps up. The unrealistic all up or all down prices would be $4.12/GB down, $14/GB up. Cellular 5GB cap would be $8GB/mo, at $40/mo. Satellite transmit bandwidth is inherently less than receive (ie xmit power in consumer vs pro gear), so it is like ADSL in that respect, but I get penalized twice!
For only $2500 per customer, the cable company will bring cable service 5 poles further up the road to service 3 customers. The phone company mentioned that they would have to install "expensive equipment", roughly half way between the current local COs, and there is no available copper due to capacity and damage. It's not like these companies invest in system-wide upgrades, just those where they can get the best RoI.
I haven't read all the comments yet, but I'd expect someone to mention "volume discounts" for greater usage. There is still no internet equivalent to the "dial tone", or to "long distance".
Seems like another place to either export democracy to, or to fight potential terrorism. Either way, sounds like a place with oil, so its a potential new customer for Halliburton. Fast track to Mars!
the comparison of automobile and computer operation will be acceptable. Both activities require the operator to _learn_ the skill of operation.
With that said, I use Mandriva 2006 100% now, having started from SLS, then RH, Debian, and then Mandrake. Easyurpmi is your friend, urpmi is as usable as apt-get, if not more so. Newer kernels turned me toward RH and Mandriva, I prefer the later's selection of apps. No, you don't get to play a game while it installs. This is installed on a Dell Inspiron 8500 with nvidida 4go, wifi and bluetooth. It has been a non-trivial task getting everything usable, and I've learned a few things in the process. I have several other machines running with M2k6, one primarily for use as an audio workstation involved even more learning with just the hardware, the software will have even more learning involved. And I'm just a noodler as far as music goes.
Granted, being on dialup (!) has certainly limited my choice of distros for the past couple years. It's fortunate that I've found Mandriva to be a perfectly usable distro. YMMV.
Owning a computer involves exploration and learning. I advise those not interested in either against computer ownership. "... bang the rocks together, guys."
This was my take on the situation (I'll RTFA ASAP). I don't see Time-Warner eager to switch all of it's cablemodem customers to AOL. Sounds like they could have several interested buyers now. Now, why does Google want a cut?
Slashdot Mirror
After 12 years of trying to get cable service 5 power poles up my road via 3 diff companies (Adelphia, Time Warner, and now Spectrum), there was some hope this March. On a whim I called the # for Spectrum I just saw on TV, the CSR says "Oh yeah, we just opened up that service area to new orders and you are the first!". "Great, Let's do it!" I said. "2 weeks....blah blah blah". 3 weeks later, no return call, so I call... "Oh, your address is un-serviceable," they say. "Three weeks ago you said I was," I reply. Unfortunately it was on a weekend, got transferred to 2 other CSRs, the last of which attempted to be helpful as he could, but still no real answers. I just wanted them to keep to their word.
Off go complaints to the Attorney General's office and the NYS Rural Broadband Commission (especially appropriate, I thought, because Gov Cuomo announced that Phase 3 was 100% successful (how could it be, I still don't have this "broadband" they are speaking of)).
Got a phone call from the Rural Broadband Commission in May explaining that the TWC/Charter/Spectrum deal wasn't part of the Rural Broadband Initiative. Great. But if we are absolutely unservicable, by the end of the year, they will make a deal available from Hughesnet (which we currently have, at 1.5mbps at best...albeit gen3 if it's called that). Ok, not ideal, but something a _little_ better (same abysmal latency but theoretically faster, still not all-you-can-eat).
Then we get a visit from one of Charter's construction/survey dept reps in late May, sees what needs to be done, and says you'll have service in Dec/Jan. Woot!
I've been carrying around and bragging about 2 letters I got around June 6, in the same envelop. One from the Attorney General, saying Charter's response to my complaint is enclosed. Charter's letter says construction will be completed in Jan 2019, but the timeline is subject to change. Yay! I have it in writing!!!!
Yeah, right. Thanks. Heard the news yesterday on the radio, and immediately knew those letters were now null and void.
How about those cross-country water pipelines?
Oh, not as valuable as oil yet?
Saved up the $500 from my first summer job after my freshman year in high school in '80. Just looked it up on oldcomputers.net and learned more than I knew. Installed the RS232 card by unplugging the 8080, plugging it into the card, and plugging the card into the empty processor socket. Game controllers were funky...digital direction and an analog knob at the top of the stick. BASIC was a little like the CoCo, especially the graphics (x,y,color,something...or was it x,y,fg,bg?), but different enough to find it painful to convert. I think it overheated due to the very solid metal box the mainboard was contained in. Was forgotten when family for a ][e in '83. WHEE!!!
The entrance wound is Hellas Basin and the exit wound is in the neighborhood of Olympus Mons/Tharsis neighborhood.
Deimos is prolly some mars guts, and the projectile is still inside.
Let's see that in CSI graphics!
It worked in Egypt, right?
Would David Cameron apologize for causing such a thing, or blame it on hooliganism?
My favorite warnings were on the dust jacket of 5.25" floppy disks from Beagle Bros, as seen here http://stevenf.com/beagle/diskcare.html
Best Software Company Ever!
Funny... I just got my /28 block in 44-land yesterday. Semi-isolated, 1200bps packet node running for months using linux native AX25 and FBB PBBS.
My choice in such a situation would be to roll-out wifi mesh/bridges. Sure, mesh routing needs work, but it'll work in a pinch. Its an area where amateur radio can help do research for trickle-down consumer networking that can help make the "net neutrality" issue go away.
Look me up on QRZ
73 de Jeff KC2SDS
So much of the discussion seems to be a "Battle of the Sweeteners".
My beef (and other meat) with corn is how much there is in our diets. Start your day off with a bowl of corn-sweetened, puffed or flaked corn cereal moistened with the milk from corn-fed beef. For lunch, some corn-fed meat and HFCS-based condiment, a bag of crunchy corn chips, washed down with some carbonated HFCS. Repeat for dinner.
Cattle are supposed to eat grasses, not corn. Much energy (drive an e-85 vehicle to the fast food drive-thru?) is used to convert corn into something cattle can digest (with the help of antibiotics and growth hormones).
Of course this isn't just any corn, it's an industrial monoculture created and patented by Monsanto.
The corn I grew in the garden was great this year, but I couldn't help being reminded how much corn is already in our diets. At least the stuff in the garden still had some bran fiber left. It seems like a filler, added to everything because the corn producers need to turn inventory into profit.
Corn. It's what's for breakfast, lunch and dinner!
Vespucciland!
(btw: you're all Catholics now...in nomini patri...)
(thx to Firesign Theatre)
Its probably to late to make a large enough batch that are 180 degrees out of phase with the ones currently being used, but for next time, making 50% of them out of phase would make them self-quieting.
Maybe a ringtone or mp3 that is 180 degrees out could be quickly deployed.
Two negatives make a positive, and two positives make a negative. Yeah, right.
The NORAD Command Center in "War Games" was always a favorite of mine, but Starfleet(tm) Bridge or Engineering could be fun too. Folks could have uniforms of differently colored company polo shirts.
A generic command post with visitor theater above it might be intriguing.
Replicating part of the cubical farm in The Matrix could just be an interesting "after-work" team-building project.
Whee!
"When all else fails" does not mean that there will always be a way to get pr0n or post some video of your car after a tornado parked it on the roof of your house. It means that net neutrality goes down the tubes and traffic gets severely "shaped". Most, if not all "traffic" will go through formal "nets", to and from official government jurisdictions and maybe NGOs such as Red Cross and Salvation Army. See http://www.usraces.org/ and http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/pscm/sec1-ch1.html, respectively.
I haven't seen an RFC regarding TCP/IP via one of these http://www2.arrl.org/FandES/field/forms/RADIOGRM.pdf yet ;)
Actually, there is a portion of the 802.11b/g 2400-2450 MHz wifi band that falls within FCC Part 97 rules. Amateurs have the ability to use high power and very high gain antennas on a couple channels (-1 and o, iirc) using WRT-56G and the like. There is a page at ARRL regarding "the hinternet" and HSMM at http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/HTML/high-speed-digital/ and http://www.n5oom.org/hsmm/index.htm has some good technical links. The ARRL seems to have dropped the HSMM ball, perhaps due to pressure from the WISP lobby.
Yes, D-Star and other VHF packet setups are slow, up to a whopping 9600bps or so. The band is only so wide, we gotta share the bandwidth. There is more elbow room elsewhere.
But in case of a real emergency, amateurs will loose all non-emergency communication privileges within the bits of the radio spectrum covered by Part 97 rules.. Maybe hardcore /. users can lobby for creating an internet equivalent to http://www.usraces.org/ (cough cough)
I just hope someone doesn't read past the first sentence and mod it -1 Flamebait.
Steam?!?! Isn't that VERY HOT DHMO!?!?! That can't be good, according to http://www.dhmo.org/ !!
Seriously, amateur radio operators are subject to FCC Part 97 rules, and specifically, http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/regulations/news/part97/e.html#407 (b). "In the event of an emergency which necessitates invoking the President's War Emergency Powers under the provisions of section 706 of the Communications Act of 1934..." amateur radio as a hobby would be put on hold. That rule applies only to frequencies that amateurs are licensed to use. Obama, and any other president since 1934, could invoke said Powers, but I don't see how they could apply to non-wireless or unlicensed wireless communications. The Gov can shut down it's interstate highways, international borders, airspace, licensed radio spectrum, etc at it's discretion. When governments shut down cell phone networks, well, see the recent events in Iran.
Would or could the government jam the unlicensed spectrum that wifi uses? If "no", wireless mesh networks FTW! Otherwise, maybe we'll be saying "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a backpack full of usb flash drives," as long as some state borders are left open.
Good thing we'll still be able to build steam-powered spark-gap generators, tho! ;)
it's been in my fridge for an unknown period of time.
"Could be meat, could be cake.... It looks like... meatcake!"
Someone must be saving it for something. Who would have known that ./ers fridges could be of real scientific value? ;)
This vaguely reminds me of a website years ago that presented an interactive interface of a huge number line. The page was divided into a couple sections for the zoom level, the closest zoom level showed a bar for the number of entries it had for each individual number (tall=more entries). Clicking on the number would give a list of representations, selecting a representation gave a selection from the web resource the info came from.
I checked my bookmarks and googled a bit, but does anyone else remember the site, and if so, is it still around?
It's interesting that folks are looking into the possibilities. Perhaps it will find itself useful for training and in other different ways.
One idea came to mind:
Health care is a hot topic in the US. I'm old enough to remember family doctors making house calls, in the late 60's and very early 70's, in my home town in upstate NY. Judging by the lack of local medical help in the rural town where I am now, there aren't enough doctors to go around. Some towns have sponsored (new?) doctors, paying their education bill, providing facilities, a place to live, and other basic necessities.
Suppose more communities did this, creating a larger market for doctors. Such virtualization tools could enable doctors to make house calls again, and even give them some side income. Doctors could "see" patients via SL, perhaps for $L, during slow times between RL, local patients.
Develop an inexpensive USB dongle that can measure pulse, BP, temp, etc, and distribute them widely and with a lifetime guarantee. Have it capable of storing medical records for a family.
There will be privacy issues, the storage and sharing of medical records, proxies, filters, and trust, but those are things that will need to be dealt with for any "Health Care Reform" to happen. No more filling out paperwork while in the waiting room, but the internet has a great "magazine rack".
As a wildblue.com user (directv customer) with a 17GB down, 5GB up 30-day rolling cap, I don't think satellite ISPs will like the idea. For me, it's $70/mo for 1.5mbps down, 254kbps up. The unrealistic all up or all down prices would be $4.12/GB down, $14/GB up. Cellular 5GB cap would be $8GB/mo, at $40/mo. Satellite transmit bandwidth is inherently less than receive (ie xmit power in consumer vs pro gear), so it is like ADSL in that respect, but I get penalized twice!
For only $2500 per customer, the cable company will bring cable service 5 poles further up the road to service 3 customers. The phone company mentioned that they would have to install "expensive equipment", roughly half way between the current local COs, and there is no available copper due to capacity and damage. It's not like these companies invest in system-wide upgrades, just those where they can get the best RoI.
I haven't read all the comments yet, but I'd expect someone to mention "volume discounts" for greater usage. There is still no internet equivalent to the "dial tone", or to "long distance".
Seems like another place to either export democracy to, or to fight potential terrorism. Either way, sounds like a place with oil, so its a potential new customer for Halliburton. Fast track to Mars!
'nuff said
the comparison of automobile and computer operation will be acceptable. Both activities require the operator to _learn_ the skill of operation.
With that said, I use Mandriva 2006 100% now, having started from SLS, then RH, Debian, and then Mandrake. Easyurpmi is your friend, urpmi is as usable as apt-get, if not more so. Newer kernels turned me toward RH and Mandriva, I prefer the later's selection of apps. No, you don't get to play a game while it installs. This is installed on a Dell Inspiron 8500 with nvidida 4go, wifi and bluetooth. It has been a non-trivial task getting everything usable, and I've learned a few things in the process. I have several other machines running with M2k6, one primarily for use as an audio workstation involved even more learning with just the hardware, the software will have even more learning involved. And I'm just a noodler as far as music goes.
Granted, being on dialup (!) has certainly limited my choice of distros for the past couple years. It's fortunate that I've found Mandriva to be a perfectly usable distro. YMMV.
Owning a computer involves exploration and learning. I advise those not interested in either against computer ownership. "... bang the rocks together, guys."
'nuff said
This was my take on the situation (I'll RTFA ASAP). I don't see Time-Warner eager to switch all of it's cablemodem customers to AOL. Sounds like they could have several interested buyers now. Now, why does Google want a cut?
nuff asked