It's relative: I averaged something like 60ms pings, while everyone else had 20-30ms pings (DSL was still fairly new back then). Not like I was roughing it at 250+ like in the old modem days.
TBH, I did radio/wireless internet for 4-5 years, back in the early 00's. It was pretty rock-solid, with perhaps one instance of trouble due to weather (during a full-on blizzard... the link dropped packets on occasion, but that was about it. My house antenna was 34 miles away from the ISP's antenna, which was just barely within the 35 mile range.
Only real issue I had was with the lag, which made it rough for FPS gaming, though doable.
I actually went and asked a female physicist about it. Her response if she'd been at this lab when younger (older academics develop a very, very thick skin it seems) then yes she would have found it (a lab head with a shirt emblazoned with nearly naked women on it) very off putting probably to the point of not going there.
Anecdotes mean nothing, and here's why: My wife's favorite t-shirt has an almost-nude Bettie Page in full dominatrix gear, and she happily wore it to work when we first met (albeit she's not a physicist or in academia, but she does work in the tech realm.) The difference? She's completely secure in her self-image, and in her femininity - enough that she doesn't give a damn about what some guy wears.
...at making a group feel completely excluded.
What group - militant feministas who are so insecure in their self-image that they have to lash out at the planet? In all honesty, fuck them. I get the whole professional attire business, but I refuse to attenuate my life or attire out of fear that I might somehow offend the perpetually-offended.
If the group you refer to is simply 'women in general'? Sorry, but that group is way too damned diverse to be put into a container, and the dude's shirt wasn't pornographic, so what the hell?
Today is a different story, as movies are no longer confined to obtaining theater owners' blessings. Even 10 years ago, movies like Equilibrium and {insert your favorite anime here} would happily gain widespread viewing and acceptance without ever seeing the inside of a movie theater. In fact, I daresay that movie theaters are going the way of the dinosaur, especially in the age of VOD and the Internet (most notably Netflix).
Sure the MPAA can ruin lives... by over-stepping their charter and chasing copyright ghosts. However, the MPAA's original charter and mission was to rate movies, and nothing more.
I look at this from my POV, where I see pin-up pages run by women (and some awesome artwork of the same style drawn-up by women), women all across Facebook who happily wax nostalgic about the whole genre (retro, rockabilly, pin-up, you-name-it), and I saw the shirt in the same light. Hell, the shirt was designed by a woman, and given to him as a gift.
But no... we have some overwrought bitter old hags who got their crusty old uteri all knotted up because a --gasp-- man was wearing that shirt. Cue the spineless bureaucrats who fear for their careers, and you have some poor bastard who has to tear-up in front of a camera begging forgiveness and estrogen from the now-smug aforementioned hags.
It's feminists like that which explains why we cannot have nice things.
They would rather the government does stuff because it tends to be cheaper and better run than when private companies get involved.
As a blanket statement, I disagree vehemently. See also NIS (WRT healthcare rationing), overburdening the taxpayer, the insane EU rules governing everything from gasoline to what constitutes an actual croissant, etc.
Note that private companies are not an end-all be-all answer either. Both government and private corporations are limited in what they can do well. In the case of the article, I suspect a non-profit organization would serve the purpose better (ironically, see also the MPAA's original role as to ratings).
Ever read a credit card agreement, insurance contract, or mortgage agreement?
There's a huge difference between a private contract you willingly enter into, and a government edict that you are forced into and cannot opt out of.
"Business has a very limited range of things that they do as well or better than the public at large... - business action beyond that range invariably becomes incompetent, expensive, dangerous, or worse.", and
I agree, and my agreement to your point does not invalidate what I wrote.;)
2) It's beyond-belief true for Microsoft exams. Unless you think like a MSFT marketing manager (and not, you know, an actual sysadmin), the MCSE tests will be impossible to pass. I've gotten near-perfect scores on those things simply by suspending disbelief and thinking like a Redmond Marketing droid.
3) I actually agree with you about the Cisco tests - or at least concerning the older ones (not sure about more recent ones, as I haven't had to touch one in years), since they did probe the protocols pretty deeply.
All of them. A *real* woman wouldn't be mindlessly chasing her prince charming... she'd be building a tyrannical empire on her own power, maybe displaying the severed head of Prince Charming on a pike next to her throne built of skulls, and have a horde of male slaves who would...
Aw Crap - I've been playing too many MMORPGs again.
Now if that scientists had looked dead into the camera and said "Yeah, it's a nice shirt a ladyfriend of mine designed, and I wore it as a favor to her. Don't like it? Get the sand outta yer vag and shut the fuck up", I think I would have fell out of my chair in trying to get up and cheer... and so would most other men.
The notion that "portraying men as muscled killing machines" is a kind of sexism has not yet arrived in the mainstream. Which tells you interesting things about our society.
Yeah - it basically means that male humans aren't generally hung up on that kind of 'OMG impossible body-image expectations for boys to reach!!111!' bullshit.
Wat. How will having a private entity help with non-biased labeling?
A private entity cannot enforce anything upon the populace, nor can they promulgate laws based on their ratings.
Government has a very limited range of things that they do as well or better than the public at large (war/defense, money, basic law enforcement, etc) - governmental action beyond that range invariably becomes incompetent, expensive, dangerous, or worse.
Never give government more power than the worst-case scenario you would be willing to live under.
Have you been to Seaside Oregon lately? It's pretty built up.
The law grandfathers existing shoreline development (whatever existed as of 1967).
Also, "right behind" high-tide is a misnomer. Anything new can only be built on land higher than 16' (altitude) above sea level at low-tide, which is much farther back than the mere high-tide mark (which averages around 8'), so unless you're building on a cliff-edge, or a mountainside or suchlike, you're not really going to get a beach view out of your new property...
The state also reserves the right to regulate such land further as needed.
Seriously? The old self-loathing OMG-I-hate-my-country-because-we're-all-so-fat! trope? What are you, a sophomore in his first PoliSci class?
Lookit - you're dead-wrong in that this is somehow just an American thing: Europe and many parts of Asia(!) are seeing a large rise in obesity as well.
This isn't a national thing, it's a side-effect caused by an overall rising standard of living within any given culture. The short version: If you're not forced to skip meals and not forced to sweat your ass off just to put food on the table, you're going to have a surfeit of calories, and neither your metabolism or hunger mechanism got the memo.
Now if you're that worried about folks whose physiological evolution hasn't caught up to relative prosperity, then crash the global economy and drive civilization back into the dark ages. Otherwise, dude, grow up already... this is much simpler (and at the same time more complex) than you think.
One wrong is greater than another? In this instance, no. Neither own the network, both are abusing it in their own ways.
It's no more abusive than effectively shutting up an overly-noisy diner in a restaurant (minus using actual violence to do so, that is).
I like hat you did there, with the ripped movies/porn reference. Cause those are the only things people do with bittorrent, right?
Nice try, but I mentioned one other example as well - fact is though, most people use BT in a coffeeshop or such specifically to hide their IP addy (or at least avoid having their ISP get the notice, whereupon their home internet would get shut off.) There's only one real reason why someone would actively want to not have their home IP addy tied to the activity. You're kidding yourself if you think otherwise.
If it can knock a bittorrent user off the network, it can knock anyone off the network.
A pickup truck can be used as a mode of transportation, or it can be used to mow down pedestrians. Your point?
This tool will work for maybe a few weeks before torrent clients upgrade to defend against it. Probably by doing the same thing but redirecting ALL local traffic to the bittorrent user instead.
Perhaps, though you should be aware that most BT client devs are emphatically not going to incorporate such a thing into their apps - they have a hard enough time justifying their products as legal devices (to a largely ignorant public) as it is. Anything that gives the RI/MPAA ammunition to lobby against such apps is something they actively avoid providing.
Here's a better idea: how about if you're going to use BT on a network that you don't pay the bills for, you first learn enough about it to configure the thing to be polite on the network? That way business owners and frustrated laptop users won't be tempted to start using this little tool.
As odd as this is going to sound, I disagree. A simple blanket statement that makes no allowance for corner cases? I'm going to need something more than that to be convinced.
Let me explain...
In this particular instance, the "wrong" of hogging bandwidth is far, far greater than the "wrong" of blasting the hogs into oblivion. Even though privately-owned and run, one should expect at least some sense of common courtesy when using a resource like wifi. If you want to download pr0n and/or ripped movies, for heaven's sake do it at home and pay for the pipe. There are very few legitimate reasons to run multi-GB BitTorrents at full-bore in a coffee shop, and I promise you that there are simply not that many people who desperately need an emergency.iso download of CentOS or Ubuntu away from home.
Certainly, the guy could get a hotspot (as suggested), but that's like telling the guy to go buy his own property if they want a quiet park to sit in when a small group in the public park has a constant loud party going on. Also, hotspots don't always work as advertised - I lost count of the times I've had to duck into a rural/small-town MickeyD's or coffee shop because the stupid employer-issued hotspot/3g/4g device didn't have enough bars to get a decent connection.
Maybe I sound like a dick for cheering this guy on, but think this through for a moment - if coffee shop owners start getting slammed with MPAA/RIAA C&D orders, if their costs skyrocket, and if they generally figure the wifi to be more trouble than it's worth, then eventually the "free" wifi will become metered, will be QoS'd down to practically nothing, or worse. None of us want that. I like knowing that if my normal connectivity goes tits-up, I can duck into a coffee shop, buy a cup of joe, and use their wifi to do what needs done until I can get connected normally again.
It's abusers of the system that eventually become the reason why we can't have nice things, so this little "wrong" is a pretty nice way to keep bigger "wrong"s to a minimum, no?
I'm still wondering how they intend to get around transplant rejection problems.
Now if they could convert adult stem cells into insulin factories, then that bit is obviated - you take the stem cells off of the patient him/herself, convert then, then put them into the pancreas...
If the guy indeed has a paper trail of good-to-excellent reviews and promotions, then suddenly got fired after the employer willingly admits the reason was over some petty vengeance from Comcast, then the guy can indeed sue the employer initially. All it would take is a subpoena of the alleged Comcast email/recording, and once Comcast fails to produce a valid (as in independently verifiable) version of either, suddenly he can go after Comcast for perpetrating all kinds of fraudulent stuff (and TBH, so can the employer).
A lot of these vendors are locked into their own technologies.
I had interviewed at Epic once (didn't feel like moving to Wisconsin... sorry) and realized that they used M for most of what they did... not much interconnectivity there.
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It's relative: I averaged something like 60ms pings, while everyone else had 20-30ms pings (DSL was still fairly new back then). Not like I was roughing it at 250+ like in the old modem days.
TBH, I did radio/wireless internet for 4-5 years, back in the early 00's. It was pretty rock-solid, with perhaps one instance of trouble due to weather (during a full-on blizzard... the link dropped packets on occasion, but that was about it. My house antenna was 34 miles away from the ISP's antenna, which was just barely within the 35 mile range.
Only real issue I had was with the lag, which made it rough for FPS gaming, though doable.
Agreed. That said, on those grounds, not a peep would have made it to the media.
I actually went and asked a female physicist about it. Her response if she'd been at this lab when younger (older academics develop a very, very thick skin it seems) then yes she would have found it (a lab head with a shirt emblazoned with nearly naked women on it) very off putting probably to the point of not going there.
Anecdotes mean nothing, and here's why: My wife's favorite t-shirt has an almost-nude Bettie Page in full dominatrix gear, and she happily wore it to work when we first met (albeit she's not a physicist or in academia, but she does work in the tech realm.) The difference? She's completely secure in her self-image, and in her femininity - enough that she doesn't give a damn about what some guy wears.
...at making a group feel completely excluded.
What group - militant feministas who are so insecure in their self-image that they have to lash out at the planet? In all honesty, fuck them. I get the whole professional attire business, but I refuse to attenuate my life or attire out of fear that I might somehow offend the perpetually-offended.
If the group you refer to is simply 'women in general'? Sorry, but that group is way too damned diverse to be put into a container, and the dude's shirt wasn't pornographic, so what the hell?
30 years ago, you would be absolutely correct.
Today is a different story, as movies are no longer confined to obtaining theater owners' blessings. Even 10 years ago, movies like Equilibrium and {insert your favorite anime here} would happily gain widespread viewing and acceptance without ever seeing the inside of a movie theater. In fact, I daresay that movie theaters are going the way of the dinosaur, especially in the age of VOD and the Internet (most notably Netflix).
Sure the MPAA can ruin lives... by over-stepping their charter and chasing copyright ghosts. However, the MPAA's original charter and mission was to rate movies, and nothing more.
Sadly, you're right.
I look at this from my POV, where I see pin-up pages run by women (and some awesome artwork of the same style drawn-up by women), women all across Facebook who happily wax nostalgic about the whole genre (retro, rockabilly, pin-up, you-name-it), and I saw the shirt in the same light. Hell, the shirt was designed by a woman, and given to him as a gift.
But no... we have some overwrought bitter old hags who got their crusty old uteri all knotted up because a --gasp-- man was wearing that shirt. Cue the spineless bureaucrats who fear for their careers, and you have some poor bastard who has to tear-up in front of a camera begging forgiveness and estrogen from the now-smug aforementioned hags.
It's feminists like that which explains why we cannot have nice things.
They would rather the government does stuff because it tends to be cheaper and better run than when private companies get involved.
As a blanket statement, I disagree vehemently. See also NIS (WRT healthcare rationing), overburdening the taxpayer, the insane EU rules governing everything from gasoline to what constitutes an actual croissant, etc.
Note that private companies are not an end-all be-all answer either. Both government and private corporations are limited in what they can do well. In the case of the article, I suspect a non-profit organization would serve the purpose better (ironically, see also the MPAA's original role as to ratings).
Ever read a credit card agreement, insurance contract, or mortgage agreement?
There's a huge difference between a private contract you willingly enter into, and a government edict that you are forced into and cannot opt out of.
"Business has a very limited range of things that they do as well or better than the public at large ... - business action beyond that range invariably becomes incompetent, expensive, dangerous, or worse.", and
I agree, and my agreement to your point does not invalidate what I wrote. ;)
Wow - you leave your sense of humor at home today, or are you still pissed about the way Measure 92 went down? ;)
1) He said most, not all.
2) It's beyond-belief true for Microsoft exams. Unless you think like a MSFT marketing manager (and not, you know, an actual sysadmin), the MCSE tests will be impossible to pass. I've gotten near-perfect scores on those things simply by suspending disbelief and thinking like a Redmond Marketing droid.
3) I actually agree with you about the Cisco tests - or at least concerning the older ones (not sure about more recent ones, as I haven't had to touch one in years), since they did probe the protocols pretty deeply.
All of them. A *real* woman wouldn't be mindlessly chasing her prince charming... she'd be building a tyrannical empire on her own power, maybe displaying the severed head of Prince Charming on a pike next to her throne built of skulls, and have a horde of male slaves who would...
Aw Crap - I've been playing too many MMORPGs again.
Damn - where are mod points where you need them?
Now if that scientists had looked dead into the camera and said "Yeah, it's a nice shirt a ladyfriend of mine designed, and I wore it as a favor to her. Don't like it? Get the sand outta yer vag and shut the fuck up", I think I would have fell out of my chair in trying to get up and cheer... and so would most other men.
The notion that "portraying men as muscled killing machines" is a kind of sexism has not yet arrived in the mainstream.
Which tells you interesting things about our society.
Yeah - it basically means that male humans aren't generally hung up on that kind of 'OMG impossible body-image expectations for boys to reach!!111!' bullshit.
Wat. How will having a private entity help with non-biased labeling?
A private entity cannot enforce anything upon the populace, nor can they promulgate laws based on their ratings.
Government has a very limited range of things that they do as well or better than the public at large (war/defense, money, basic law enforcement, etc) - governmental action beyond that range invariably becomes incompetent, expensive, dangerous, or worse.
Never give government more power than the worst-case scenario you would be willing to live under.
Have you been to Seaside Oregon lately? It's pretty built up.
The law grandfathers existing shoreline development (whatever existed as of 1967).
Also, "right behind" high-tide is a misnomer. Anything new can only be built on land higher than 16' (altitude) above sea level at low-tide, which is much farther back than the mere high-tide mark (which averages around 8'), so unless you're building on a cliff-edge, or a mountainside or suchlike, you're not really going to get a beach view out of your new property...
The state also reserves the right to regulate such land further as needed.
To be fair, McDonald's doesn't really count as food.
Seriously? The old self-loathing OMG-I-hate-my-country-because-we're-all-so-fat! trope? What are you, a sophomore in his first PoliSci class?
Lookit - you're dead-wrong in that this is somehow just an American thing: Europe and many parts of Asia(!) are seeing a large rise in obesity as well.
This isn't a national thing, it's a side-effect caused by an overall rising standard of living within any given culture. The short version: If you're not forced to skip meals and not forced to sweat your ass off just to put food on the table, you're going to have a surfeit of calories, and neither your metabolism or hunger mechanism got the memo.
Now if you're that worried about folks whose physiological evolution hasn't caught up to relative prosperity, then crash the global economy and drive civilization back into the dark ages. Otherwise, dude, grow up already... this is much simpler (and at the same time more complex) than you think.
One wrong is greater than another? In this instance, no. Neither own the network, both are abusing it in their own ways.
It's no more abusive than effectively shutting up an overly-noisy diner in a restaurant (minus using actual violence to do so, that is).
I like hat you did there, with the ripped movies/porn reference. Cause those are the only things people do with bittorrent, right?
Nice try, but I mentioned one other example as well - fact is though, most people use BT in a coffeeshop or such specifically to hide their IP addy (or at least avoid having their ISP get the notice, whereupon their home internet would get shut off.) There's only one real reason why someone would actively want to not have their home IP addy tied to the activity. You're kidding yourself if you think otherwise.
If it can knock a bittorrent user off the network, it can knock anyone off the network.
A pickup truck can be used as a mode of transportation, or it can be used to mow down pedestrians. Your point?
This tool will work for maybe a few weeks before torrent clients upgrade to defend against it. Probably by doing the same thing but redirecting ALL local traffic to the bittorrent user instead.
Perhaps, though you should be aware that most BT client devs are emphatically not going to incorporate such a thing into their apps - they have a hard enough time justifying their products as legal devices (to a largely ignorant public) as it is. Anything that gives the RI/MPAA ammunition to lobby against such apps is something they actively avoid providing.
Here's a better idea: how about if you're going to use BT on a network that you don't pay the bills for, you first learn enough about it to configure the thing to be polite on the network? That way business owners and frustrated laptop users won't be tempted to start using this little tool.
Two wrongs do not make a right.
As odd as this is going to sound, I disagree. A simple blanket statement that makes no allowance for corner cases? I'm going to need something more than that to be convinced.
Let me explain...
In this particular instance, the "wrong" of hogging bandwidth is far, far greater than the "wrong" of blasting the hogs into oblivion. Even though privately-owned and run, one should expect at least some sense of common courtesy when using a resource like wifi. If you want to download pr0n and/or ripped movies, for heaven's sake do it at home and pay for the pipe. There are very few legitimate reasons to run multi-GB BitTorrents at full-bore in a coffee shop, and I promise you that there are simply not that many people who desperately need an emergency .iso download of CentOS or Ubuntu away from home.
Certainly, the guy could get a hotspot (as suggested), but that's like telling the guy to go buy his own property if they want a quiet park to sit in when a small group in the public park has a constant loud party going on. Also, hotspots don't always work as advertised - I lost count of the times I've had to duck into a rural/small-town MickeyD's or coffee shop because the stupid employer-issued hotspot/3g/4g device didn't have enough bars to get a decent connection.
Maybe I sound like a dick for cheering this guy on, but think this through for a moment - if coffee shop owners start getting slammed with MPAA/RIAA C&D orders, if their costs skyrocket, and if they generally figure the wifi to be more trouble than it's worth, then eventually the "free" wifi will become metered, will be QoS'd down to practically nothing, or worse. None of us want that. I like knowing that if my normal connectivity goes tits-up, I can duck into a coffee shop, buy a cup of joe, and use their wifi to do what needs done until I can get connected normally again.
It's abusers of the system that eventually become the reason why we can't have nice things, so this little "wrong" is a pretty nice way to keep bigger "wrong"s to a minimum, no?
We don't need such a module, because we don't need, or even want humans to go back to the Moon.
Wait - who is this "we" you keep referring to? Okay, he was speaking of Mars, but still...
I'm still wondering how they intend to get around transplant rejection problems.
Now if they could convert adult stem cells into insulin factories, then that bit is obviated - you take the stem cells off of the patient him/herself, convert then, then put them into the pancreas...
Agreed with the AC, actually.
If the guy indeed has a paper trail of good-to-excellent reviews and promotions, then suddenly got fired after the employer willingly admits the reason was over some petty vengeance from Comcast, then the guy can indeed sue the employer initially. All it would take is a subpoena of the alleged Comcast email/recording, and once Comcast fails to produce a valid (as in independently verifiable) version of either, suddenly he can go after Comcast for perpetrating all kinds of fraudulent stuff (and TBH, so can the employer).
A lot of these vendors are locked into their own technologies.
I had interviewed at Epic once (didn't feel like moving to Wisconsin... sorry) and realized that they used M for most of what they did... not much interconnectivity there.
If you think about it, The Great Salt Lake is staring at the same issue (albeit on a longer timescale).
The old Soviet Union did enough ecological damage without having to hang that subject on it...