Amen. This is how it works in Australia and New Zealand, and we're confused by why America think they ought to be special.
Also, that American Internet users don't seem to be able to do basic maths, and work out that bandwidth * number of subscribers * usage per subscriber = capacity, that even fiber optic cables DO have a finite capacity (even if that limit is in the endpoint switch gear and not so much the optics of the cable it self), and that putting in more capacity actually does cost.
Yes, broadband companies are bastards, but they're not *completely* inventing a 'bandwidth shortage' just to scam you.
If you want 'all you can eat' Internet, expect to pay what it costs. If you don't want to pay a near-infinite amount for a near-infinite capacity, or pay a finite amount for an apparently infinite capacity which is actually capped, try paying a finite amount for a finite slice of capacity - paying for what you use.
What this does mean is that yes, running TV over Internet is a really huge capacity hog, so something's going to have to give. But that's not really the ISP's problem, it's between the consumer and the content provider. If it's not efficient to stream terabytes of TV on demand over shared pipes, it's never going to be efficient no matter how much you demand you get infinite bits for free because you're the golden youth and you deserve it.
Ye cannae change the laws of physics, even information physics, and it's a fact that there's a limit to how many bits you can squeeze down a shared pipe when everyone's pulling stuff at once. Seriously. No joke. You can laugh at 'tubes' metaphors all you like, but it's still a valid metaphor because there IS a limit.
Okay: so a sensible answer to this whole thing would be to transition the Internet from an everyone-pulls-direct-from-the-servers model to a everyone-caches-everything-at-the-subnet model, which would be much more efficient, but would give the copyright lawyers conniptions. But start advocating massive decentralised caching, if you want a serious solution.
And then suddenly the Internet became 1000% better without all the worms and torrent kidz and goatse and griefers and Rickrolling and we all said 'hey why didn't we appoint a CEILING CAT years ago? This was a great idea we had!'
"When the Chinese hacker returns to it to download even more information, then he would get gigabytes of fake data. "
How exactly would you generate gigabytes of real-seeming but fake data about something as complex as a jet fighter? And do it on demand, in near-real-time?
Seems like whatever agency can do that, has probably already cracked strong AI.
""Ask any economist and they'll tell you that wars are not only not inevitable, but there is no rational explanation for them at all,.."
This is utopian/socialist thinking, not real thinking."
Also utopian/libertarian thinking. Socialism is not required to see war as irrationally unprofitable, just a little bit of basic accounting.
But yes, in real modern history even those corporations and nations who screamed the loudest about 'free trade' were quite willing to define 'freedom' as the ability to make deals to lock competitors out of the market. And while mercantilism a la the British East India Company and friends is not the same philosophy as free trade, in practice a lot of wars seem to have been fought over nothing more than access to markets.
I blame the Prisoner's Dilemma myself, where *rational* economic decisions lead to *irrational* outcomes. With the result that I distrust philosophies that value everyting in terms of rationality.
"Unfortunately Facebook, Myspace etc. do not allow pseudonymous identities."
That's not a bug, it's a feature. Some of us actually *want* people to know who we are online, and want to know who the people are who we are dealing with.
Yes, we'd no doubt get a whole lot more privacy if we always went by Zasduhauy Q. Viisufod online and posted a picture of our cat run through a Gaussian blur as our photograph.
But why not extend that logical principle and go to the office and supermarket every day wearing a Guy Fawkes mask? The Man shall not chain me! I shall be a free, unharrassed, absolutely private individual! None shall know my secret identity!
If you have stuff you don't want the world to know, don't put it up on public forums.
Conversely, if you want to create a public forum where people can trust each other, don't let them lie about their identity.
Sheesh. You guys are *protesting* paying fairly for what you use? Wtf? Aren't you supposed to be the home of free trade? But you're wanting a socialist subsidy of your Internet?
Welcome to how the entire rest of the planet pays for their Internet: you pay a monthly bill for a data transmission rate PLUS an amount of transfer in gigabytes. If you go over the transfer amount, you buy more. Simple, straightforward and fair.
See, there are two costs to providing Internet: the cables, and the usage of those cables. The more bits you send, the more capacity you use up. Simply pay for the capacity you use and this all resolves itself.
Seriously guys. This is why we Down Under (I'm in New Zealand) look at you strangely. You're getting 100 GB a month and you're STILL complaining? What the heck are you downloading over there, entire Blu-Ray renderings of live streaming TV or something?
We've learned to budget our Internet transfer and live within our means, just like we budget everything else in life that takes time and energy to produce and doesn't exist in infinite amounts. You can too. It's the only sustainable option for *anything*.
"So stuff that a big huge corporation put together and protects with draconian copywrite a DMCA is only worth it?"
Dear Sir/Madam:
CopyRIGHT.
Your licence to hold an opinion about a legal concept you don't even know how to spell is hereby _revoked_.
After the mandatory 21-day stand-down period you may reapply for said licence at your local City Council service centre, in the usual manner, ie, on the unlighted fifth sub-basement floor in the disused lavatory marked with the sign 'Beware of the Leopard', etc, etc.
Yours with all due regards, the Campaign for Minimal Literacy Standards in Online Flora & Fora.
"I watched paper after paper after paper, day after day after day, tow the party line"
Nice post and I agree with your sentiments but...
grr! Quit breaking English. It's TOE the line. Not tow. 'Tow the line' is one of those phrases spread by the very sloppy journalists you complain about who don't fact-check their work.
Toe the line, as in, a runner anxiously awaiting the start of a race, but being VERY careful to put their toe across the starting line, because if they do they will be disqualified.
So to 'toe the line' means to have an internalised sense of official boundaries, what is allowed to be talked about and what is not. To fall into place in a regimented system. To respect the Party and subdue one's inner instincts.
As opposed to to 'tow the line' would mean to haul something behind one... which doesn't really mean anything. A sort of sensible enough eggcorn, sure, if you didn't know what the actual meaning was, but if you're going to complain about the distortion of facts, start with the degradation of language.
"Make the claim that people who have invested their resources in education and personal development are inherently more valuable to society, and you'll be immediately attack as an Elitest"
Maybe not the elitest, but you will be eliter than even most elitists.
"Google is destroying the independence of newspapers by reducing the value of their content below what it costs to generate it. "
I don't understand this. Google News only shows a summary of news content, doesn't it? I have to click through to the newspaper's own site to read the full article.
At least, I always *do* click through - if the content interests me at all. I love using aggregators to *find* content, but I hate reading content *through* an aggregator - I always want to get to the source in case the aggregator is filtering stuff I care about. Yes, that means I get the ads and the comments.
But if the newspaper is putting articles behind a pay-wall, then how does Google matter anyway? If their articles are indexed on Google, then I might read them, or at least know they exist; if not, I'm sure not going to buy a year's subscription to SomeRandomBigPaper just on the off chance there might be some unindexed article there.
Either way, if they put up a paywall, they don't get my clicks, and if Google indexes them, they do.
Has there been some mass movement of all the hip kidz reading the Web exclusively through RSS feeds or something? Did aggregators suddenly get a whole lot less sucky? I'm always the last to know about these fads. Darn kids, get off my wlan.
"Of course, the competitor's site opens in a new window, so you'll come back to theirs to continue browsing."
No, you'll swear and make a mental note never to use that site again if you can help it.
Spawning new windows for any reason is a really dumb, 1997-era thing to do. It ruins the page-based flow of the Web and shows an arrogant, designer-centric rather than user-centric philosophy. The user will pick up on that and run a mile.
"Can we please make 2012 a no party year? Candidates should be themselves rather than cloak themselves in stupid pointless ideologies."
You mean you want candidates to avoid even paying lip-service to having a set of thought-out policy positions, and trade *entirely* on hairstyle and name recognition? That will certainly, um, 'help'.
Parties may be a bad thing, but what we need is far *more* ideology in politics, not less.
Politics without ideology is just corruption, pure and simple: no positions, no agenda, no roadmap, no honour, no promises, no standard to be judged by. Just empty rhetoric. You really want that?
Does anyone else over 30 who read the British kids' magazine 'Look and Learn' in the 1970s remember E.D.I.E., the Entwhistle Detecting and Investigating Electrobrain?
Doesn't a few hundred generations of mating, reproduction and death have to occur in the middle there?
Otherwise Darwin's answer to 'hey you have a new evolutionary pressure in your environment' is generally not 'YOU EVOLVE! YAY!' but '... good try, but the rules have now changed, you all die, sucks to be you'.
To get an 'evolutionary' effect out of video gaming you'd have to look at self-selection, I think. In other words, a case where it's not that playing a game makes your eyesight better, but just that normally-sighted people drop out en masse and the only players left are super-sighted freaks.
What's happening here seems to be more interesting than just selection.
"The parent Slashdot comment was posted by someone who calls themselves FuturePower (R), with the parenthesized 'R' suggesting a registered trademark. "
"You know how you really create wealth? By growing your GDP faster than your population, resulting in a growth in disposable income per capita."
No, that's how you create *money*, which is just a mostly meaningless number measuring raw activity and relative value. But not all valued activity is wealth-producing: some is parasitical, some (like crime and warfare) actively destroys wealth.
You create *wealth* by doing things that objectively promote life, health, science and aesthetics: by planting trees, growing food, raising animals, marrying, raising children, researching, travelling, writing, producing artwork, voting for honest politicians, making wise decisions, installing sewerage systems, and so on.
You can do all of these completely without money, and to a large extent without international trade. What you do need though is a community that trusts its members enough to let specialist occupations arise, and shares its resources.
To accumulate money, you need cunning and sociopathy; to create wealth, you need wisdom and generosity. They're not at all the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen. This is how it works in Australia and New Zealand, and we're confused by why America think they ought to be special.
Also, that American Internet users don't seem to be able to do basic maths, and work out that bandwidth * number of subscribers * usage per subscriber = capacity, that even fiber optic cables DO have a finite capacity (even if that limit is in the endpoint switch gear and not so much the optics of the cable it self), and that putting in more capacity actually does cost.
Yes, broadband companies are bastards, but they're not *completely* inventing a 'bandwidth shortage' just to scam you.
If you want 'all you can eat' Internet, expect to pay what it costs. If you don't want to pay a near-infinite amount for a near-infinite capacity, or pay a finite amount for an apparently infinite capacity which is actually capped, try paying a finite amount for a finite slice of capacity - paying for what you use.
What this does mean is that yes, running TV over Internet is a really huge capacity hog, so something's going to have to give. But that's not really the ISP's problem, it's between the consumer and the content provider. If it's not efficient to stream terabytes of TV on demand over shared pipes, it's never going to be efficient no matter how much you demand you get infinite bits for free because you're the golden youth and you deserve it.
Ye cannae change the laws of physics, even information physics, and it's a fact that there's a limit to how many bits you can squeeze down a shared pipe when everyone's pulling stuff at once. Seriously. No joke. You can laugh at 'tubes' metaphors all you like, but it's still a valid metaphor because there IS a limit.
Okay: so a sensible answer to this whole thing would be to transition the Internet from an everyone-pulls-direct-from-the-servers model to a everyone-caches-everything-at-the-subnet model, which would be much more efficient, but would give the copyright lawyers conniptions. But start advocating massive decentralised caching, if you want a serious solution.
And then suddenly the Internet became 1000% better without all the worms and torrent kidz and goatse and griefers and Rickrolling and we all said 'hey why didn't we appoint a CEILING CAT years ago? This was a great idea we had!'
And we all had a party and ate cake.
You do realize that Star Trek was fictional, right?
... but now it's true?
Every second alien ship would take over the computer just by looking at it... yep, an eerily accurate prediction.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of an eighteen-wheeler filled with backup tapes.
"When the Chinese hacker returns to it to download even more information, then he would get gigabytes of fake data. "
How exactly would you generate gigabytes of real-seeming but fake data about something as complex as a jet fighter? And do it on demand, in near-real-time?
Seems like whatever agency can do that, has probably already cracked strong AI.
"That's just it. The 'rah-rah-ness' of Starship Troopers was a deliberate and ironic statement on fascism."
The movie, yes definitely. Hence the SS trooper uniforms.
But I'm not sure Heinlein would know irony if it dropped an asteroid on him.
""Ask any economist and they'll tell you that wars are not only not inevitable, but there is no rational explanation for them at all,.."
This is utopian/socialist thinking, not real thinking."
Also utopian/libertarian thinking. Socialism is not required to see war as irrationally unprofitable, just a little bit of basic accounting.
But yes, in real modern history even those corporations and nations who screamed the loudest about 'free trade' were quite willing to define 'freedom' as the ability to make deals to lock competitors out of the market. And while mercantilism a la the British East India Company and friends is not the same philosophy as free trade, in practice a lot of wars seem to have been fought over nothing more than access to markets.
I blame the Prisoner's Dilemma myself, where *rational* economic decisions lead to *irrational* outcomes. With the result that I distrust philosophies that value everyting in terms of rationality.
"but do remember that literal pennies add up to literal billions when you aggregate receiving literal pennies from millions of consumers. "
Er... literal pennies from literal millions actually adds up to literal tens of thousands of dollars, not billions.
Perhaps you were meaning the figurative kind of 'literal'?
"Unfortunately Facebook, Myspace etc. do not allow pseudonymous identities."
That's not a bug, it's a feature. Some of us actually *want* people to know who we are online, and want to know who the people are who we are dealing with.
Yes, we'd no doubt get a whole lot more privacy if we always went by Zasduhauy Q. Viisufod online and posted a picture of our cat run through a Gaussian blur as our photograph.
But why not extend that logical principle and go to the office and supermarket every day wearing a Guy Fawkes mask? The Man shall not chain me! I shall be a free, unharrassed, absolutely private individual! None shall know my secret identity!
If you have stuff you don't want the world to know, don't put it up on public forums.
Conversely, if you want to create a public forum where people can trust each other, don't let them lie about their identity.
Works for me.
Sheesh. You guys are *protesting* paying fairly for what you use? Wtf? Aren't you supposed to be the home of free trade? But you're wanting a socialist subsidy of your Internet?
Welcome to how the entire rest of the planet pays for their Internet: you pay a monthly bill for a data transmission rate PLUS an amount of transfer in gigabytes. If you go over the transfer amount, you buy more. Simple, straightforward and fair.
See, there are two costs to providing Internet: the cables, and the usage of those cables. The more bits you send, the more capacity you use up. Simply pay for the capacity you use and this all resolves itself.
Seriously guys. This is why we Down Under (I'm in New Zealand) look at you strangely. You're getting 100 GB a month and you're STILL complaining? What the heck are you downloading over there, entire Blu-Ray renderings of live streaming TV or something?
We've learned to budget our Internet transfer and live within our means, just like we budget everything else in life that takes time and energy to produce and doesn't exist in infinite amounts. You can too. It's the only sustainable option for *anything*.
... but I can still use short clips of Kylie Minogue's 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' as a personal defence sonic stun weapon, right?
"So stuff that a big huge corporation put together and protects with draconian copywrite a DMCA is only worth it?"
Dear Sir/Madam:
CopyRIGHT.
Your licence to hold an opinion about a legal concept you don't even know how to spell is hereby _revoked_.
After the mandatory 21-day stand-down period you may reapply for said licence at your local City Council service centre, in the usual manner, ie, on the unlighted fifth sub-basement floor in the disused lavatory marked with the sign 'Beware of the Leopard', etc, etc.
Yours with all due regards, the Campaign for Minimal Literacy Standards in Online Flora & Fora.
"I watched paper after paper after paper, day after day after day, tow the party line"
Nice post and I agree with your sentiments but...
grr! Quit breaking English. It's TOE the line. Not tow. 'Tow the line' is one of those phrases spread by the very sloppy journalists you complain about who don't fact-check their work.
Toe the line, as in, a runner anxiously awaiting the start of a race, but being VERY careful to put their toe across the starting line, because if they do they will be disqualified.
So to 'toe the line' means to have an internalised sense of official boundaries, what is allowed to be talked about and what is not. To fall into place in a regimented system. To respect the Party and subdue one's inner instincts.
As opposed to to 'tow the line' would mean to haul something behind one... which doesn't really mean anything. A sort of sensible enough eggcorn, sure, if you didn't know what the actual meaning was, but if you're going to complain about the distortion of facts, start with the degradation of language.
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/72/tow/
"Make the claim that people who have invested their resources in education and personal development are inherently more valuable to society, and you'll be immediately attack as an Elitest"
Maybe not the elitest, but you will be eliter than even most elitists.
"Google is destroying the independence of newspapers by reducing the value of their content below what it costs to generate it. "
I don't understand this. Google News only shows a summary of news content, doesn't it? I have to click through to the newspaper's own site to read the full article.
At least, I always *do* click through - if the content interests me at all. I love using aggregators to *find* content, but I hate reading content *through* an aggregator - I always want to get to the source in case the aggregator is filtering stuff I care about. Yes, that means I get the ads and the comments.
But if the newspaper is putting articles behind a pay-wall, then how does Google matter anyway? If their articles are indexed on Google, then I might read them, or at least know they exist; if not, I'm sure not going to buy a year's subscription to SomeRandomBigPaper just on the off chance there might be some unindexed article there.
Either way, if they put up a paywall, they don't get my clicks, and if Google indexes them, they do.
Has there been some mass movement of all the hip kidz reading the Web exclusively through RSS feeds or something? Did aggregators suddenly get a whole lot less sucky? I'm always the last to know about these fads. Darn kids, get off my wlan.
"Of course, the competitor's site opens in a new window, so you'll come back to theirs to continue browsing."
No, you'll swear and make a mental note never to use that site again if you can help it.
Spawning new windows for any reason is a really dumb, 1997-era thing to do. It ruins the page-based flow of the Web and shows an arrogant, designer-centric rather than user-centric philosophy. The user will pick up on that and run a mile.
Your mind to my mind...
your brain to my... mmm, brains...
ticktickticktickticktick
About freaking time. What's the Internet running anyway, DOS 1.0?
Though I think it's an open question whether .bat will be taken by old-school script file hackers or Christian Bale.
"Can we please make 2012 a no party year? Candidates should be themselves rather than cloak themselves in stupid pointless ideologies."
You mean you want candidates to avoid even paying lip-service to having a set of thought-out policy positions, and trade *entirely* on hairstyle and name recognition? That will certainly, um, 'help'.
Parties may be a bad thing, but what we need is far *more* ideology in politics, not less.
Politics without ideology is just corruption, pure and simple: no positions, no agenda, no roadmap, no honour, no promises, no standard to be judged by. Just empty rhetoric. You really want that?
Why, you coruscating maelstrom of unimaginable energies! You're a seven sector callout, Robot, and that checks to nine decimals!
Does anyone else over 30 who read the British kids' magazine 'Look and Learn' in the 1970s remember E.D.I.E., the Entwhistle Detecting and Investigating Electrobrain?
Now that was an AI. I wanted one.
I see Look and Learn are republishing a 'best of' some of their output: http://www.lookandlearn.com/
Dunno if they've got Number 13 Marvel Street though.
"See better or die. Simple."
Doesn't a few hundred generations of mating, reproduction and death have to occur in the middle there?
Otherwise Darwin's answer to 'hey you have a new evolutionary pressure in your environment' is generally not 'YOU EVOLVE! YAY!' but '... good try, but the rules have now changed, you all die, sucks to be you'.
To get an 'evolutionary' effect out of video gaming you'd have to look at self-selection, I think. In other words, a case where it's not that playing a game makes your eyesight better, but just that normally-sighted people drop out en masse and the only players left are super-sighted freaks.
What's happening here seems to be more interesting than just selection.
"So it could be stored in some data center half a world away.
It's just always available."
The problem is that 1) does not actually guarantee 2).
"The parent Slashdot comment was posted by someone who calls themselves FuturePower (R), with the parenthesized 'R' suggesting a registered trademark. "
Or a sitting Republican congressperson.
"You know how you really create wealth? By growing your GDP faster than your population, resulting in a growth in disposable income per capita."
No, that's how you create *money*, which is just a mostly meaningless number measuring raw activity and relative value. But not all valued activity is wealth-producing: some is parasitical, some (like crime and warfare) actively destroys wealth.
You create *wealth* by doing things that objectively promote life, health, science and aesthetics: by planting trees, growing food, raising animals, marrying, raising children, researching, travelling, writing, producing artwork, voting for honest politicians, making wise decisions, installing sewerage systems, and so on.
You can do all of these completely without money, and to a large extent without international trade. What you do need though is a community that trusts its members enough to let specialist occupations arise, and shares its resources.
To accumulate money, you need cunning and sociopathy; to create wealth, you need wisdom and generosity. They're not at all the same.