I have rarely read a more perfect example of complete political ignorance than to call Charles Shumer a "conservative".
Don't get me wrong, I find most "conservatives" to be clueless hypocrites, just as most "liberals" are clueless hypocrites. Some very few are actually principled individuals, Shumer is not.
However, as per Chuckies voting record, he is a socialist. An "International Socialist" as opposed I guess to a "National Socialist".
There is no "except". You are paying. Part of the calculation for the cost of your "unlimited" service is the fact that there is no personal "100%" use. You sleep some time. Or, as you put it, "while I'm not at home".
Your service provider, if they are capable of charging a price you're likely to pay, did not provision their backbone, or contract with their circuit/service/peering/long-haul providers, with 100% (or even 25%) utilization in mind.
As people such as yourself, by "allowing passers-by to use my 802.11b", increase the agrigate use of resources, either the greater use of resources will have to be paid for by raising the fees you pay, or your provider will go out of business.
Yes, in fact I have performed network engineering for just such providers, in just such enterprises, with just such issues at stake. One such enterprise may have been your present service provider.
That is one reason that business (multi-person) IP services generally cost more than personal (single person, family) IP services. They utilize greater resources.
So you are wrong to say it "doesn't cost me". It certainly DOES cost you. Because in the final reconing, There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
It likely also violates your service agreement, so don't bother crying about it if they shut you off for "sharing".
When the broadband providers that fuel this 802.11 "freenet" vampirism fail, the 802.11 vampires will fail.
Those that have used and enjoyed the 802.11 services will find another provider and likely pay for it this time.
The doom-and-gloom fails to recognize that the vast majority of internet use is pay already, those ISP's pay their interconnect providers, the interconnect providers use that money to pay their long-haul providers, and so forth.
As long as there is demand for some offered service, someone will provide that service.
Nothing is free, as in beer. Someone pays for it. At this moment it may not be you. Some other time, it will be.
Just such a political theory exists today.
The present American incarnation is "Libertarian." There are such incarnations in most every country on earth, where people defend the rights of others.
Before you freak out and knee-jerk with "anti-government extremists" or "drug using hippy-freaks", "gun-toting militia members" or even "home schooling fundamentalists", be aware that EVERYONE believes there is something that is sacred.
When someone finally realizes that everyone has something that is sacred, they are one step away from freedom. That one step is recognition of others rights to choose what it is that is sacred for them. Some people think they recognize freedom of religion, but still choose to limit how others may pray.
Some people believe in "free speach" while choosing to limit what others may say, or read, or write.
The idea of "private property" is restricted in what I may do with my property, where or when or to whom I may sell it, or destroy it. Or even what I am allowed to own.
Defending your own ability to choose means also defending other peoples ability to choose, even if you disagree with that choice. This recognition of the equal rights of others is the root of "libertarian", and directly opposes the abuses of force that are being objected to here at Slashdot.
Yet look at the backlash that the word LIBERTARIAN causes. A backlash from people who still believe that only what they themselves believes is sacred actually is.
The fact that blatently abusive groups continue to win popular elections is a perfect demonstration that the "majority" is still very much in favor of that abuse. It may be time to revisit the idea of "majority rule".
Bob-
Oh great. Another "technical advance" in making ticket prices higher.
When StarWars was released on 70mm, ticket prices went up to pay for the new projectors. I really hated having to pay $2.50 just to see that movie....ten times...
Beauty and the Beast, Titan AE, I can think of a lot more scenes but I can't remember what shows they were from. Now "Blood". Gee golly, something new?
No.
And if you don't like violent people in school uniforms, don't watch Japanese cartoons! Shall I complain about the awful special effects in I Dream Of Jeannie? Why bother?
Pokimon has one great aspect: Young people with concealed weapons going around helping people and defeating badguys. Morally speaking, it's a gun-control freak's nightmare!
Bob-
"Patents will be issued so that inventors have exclusive rights to their inventions for a limited time." -paraphrased
Yet what do we actually have? A system of tyrany, where the courts bow to the wiliest lawyer as to what is or is not patentable, enforcable, or "right". Someone recently patented the wheel!
The DMCA makes use of material illegal, not just making a profit off of other peoples work.
Do Freedom. Use ideas, and give credit where credit is due.
Bob-
I too would pay good money for a cellphone that looked and acted like TOS communicators. Perfectly reasonable using (now) cheap technology.
Paramount would have a fit, though. Copyright, don't you know....
I think this whole copyright thing is utter crap. Every few years since 1910, "copyright" is extended so that nothing enters the public domain unless deliberately thrown into it.
An LCD, at 30 Watts, is a substantial cost savings to use, especially when you have lots of screens.
Yes, they cost more, but what are you really paying for?
I'd also be curious about recycle potential. There is much less material in an LCD, how about polution from disposal? How much of that can be reused and recycled? How about compared to a CRT?
To a teacher, with rare exceptions, this is just a job. They get paid anyway. To the parent, this has a *reason*.
Private schools either do a good job, or loose paying customers. Paying customers also means they can GET PHD and guest lecturers, if the parents want them. Private schools, like the ones that Al Gore Jr. as well as most all of the rest of the children of those who make and set policy and budgets for "public schools", consistantly turn out better educated students.
Want your children taught that creation is fact?
Want to ensure that your children are never taught that creation is fact?
The sword of forced and centrally planned policy cuts all ways, folks. It fails to provide service.
The developer might be able to read email and get a cup of coffee, rather than just reading email, during the compile. Gee wiz.
This may also be a simptom of the "microsoft" disease: creeping bloat, reliance on hardware to make up for shortcomings in software, endless features.
The "cost" of making that little bit of effort to optimize for use might be substantial on a titanic project like MS Office, but I cannot imagine that a non-Borg developer would not take pride in their work and at least try.
And then there's Steve Gibson who takes the principle of optimized code to its extreme. Good for him!
Perdida, "protectionist" efforts only distort the market further, they do not "protect" anything.
A free market tends toward the most efficient and effective answers, it does not gurantee them. A company or style that YOU like is not ensured success just because YOU like it.
When "we revive the ancient pracitice of protecting our old industries", we are thereby ensuring that the market tendency toward efficiency is destroyed, and the demonstrably better AMD chips will be relegated to the same pile as the DEC Alpha, also a demonstrably better technology than anything built at its time.
It is perfectly normal for companies to fail as technology changes. To try to shore-up inefficient processes and corporations is hubris, the sin of pride.
How very true, it is *much* easier to get things done in a dictatorship, if you're on the dictators good side.
There's no question that the most effective and efficient form of "governance" is a benevolent dictatorship.
Two problems: It's never benevolent for long, and it's never benevolent to dissent.
It's also illustrative to consider the concept of "governance", and why efficient "governance" is a really lousy thing anyway.
That's why the U.S. "government" is designed at its inception to be as inefficient as possible, and why it took four-score and seven years before someone was able to install an efficient "governance" under it. And that brought war.
Automatic account generation: Social Security Number @ houston.tx.us
It's unique, convenient, and everyone has one, right?
The idiocy is using force to do what has been done many times before in many different places by interested individuals.
Re-inventing the wheel with someone elses money is an old tradition among bureaucrats, if they have the power to gather other peoples money in the first place.
However, I disagree with him. I believe that anything produced by my labor, including software, is mine just as much as a chair I built or a baby I issue.
I see no boundry with "real" or "virtual" property. It is all the result of my volitional labor, to dispose of as I see fit.
There's the rub: As I see fit. Not RMS, not Bill Gatus of Borg, not the U.S. Patent Office.
If I rob another of their property to produce mine, it is no less theft than if I stole a tree to manufacture a chair.
Simple property laws have been in place for thousands of years. The idiocy of all these arguments is that they try to re-invent the wheel, to invent "new" rules when the old rules work every day just fine.
"Gravity bomb" is a technical term to differentiate it from anything guided or propelled by any means. Just dropped.
I was not referring to its kenetic energy as its weapons potential, I was referring to a maximum explosive payload with minimum waste.
Atomics can also be used in a "gravity bomb" configuration.
Steigler also uses kenetic "crowbars" dropped from orbit in his book, litteral "gravity" bombs, but he goes to great pains to differentiate their effectiveness from those of the explosive nature.
I had been using SunOS for about 4 years running OpenLook, and had worked supporting Mac's and PC's too.
When I decided to try Linux, I picked Debian because of the cooperative development project. I liked that I would be accessing, and maybe helping, the work of truely interested software engineers and advocates.
I learned to keep, and read, the manuals for my hardware! Why? Because I had to learn what the questions were before I could answer them. Now that I know what the ethernet drivers are looking for,and sound, and tools for configuring X have improved dramatically everywhere, it's become very easy to "pick the right one."
This familiarity is true for every flavor of Linux, but the quirks of Slackware, RedHat, and the other flavors I've tried send me back to Debian to see if it works at all, before returning to the other flavor.
I've also been very, very pleased with the package maintainers efforts. Company needs some network monitoring fast, MRTG? Yep, it's in there. Hear of a neat freeware Linux game like X-ShipWars? A quick "dselect" search shows that it's available, and choosing it will get all the needed drivers and support software versions at the same time.
I would say that Debian works very well as a beginners distribution, because you don't have to work hard to install working software.
Did anyone else read Marc Steigler's book, "Davids Sling", in which just such systems are used for dropping bombs on completely unsuspecting targets?
Lets face it, even with a small payload, like 600 lbs, that's two reasonably effective gravity bombs from an aircraft that is not even made of metal, so practically invisible to radar.
Of course it's a convenience, because someone elses choice of health care is going to be different than my choice in health care.
Or do you expect me to be happy to pay for someone elses accupuncture at gun-point?
What about Chinese medicine? Powdered Tiger Claw, paid for by taxes?
The alternative is to have someone else decide what is or is not health care. As with all taxes, someone else decides what to pay for with my money. Or, if I'm lucky, I get something I want paid for by your money, whether you like it or not.
Oregon took the most intelegent aproach to "socialized" medicine I've ever heard of. They used logic and reason, and the plan failed.
They ranked all diseases and procedures by cost and effectiveness. The greatest benefit/cost items, such as medical checkups for pregnant women and immunizations, ranked highest. The most costly and least effective, such as keeping newborn babies with serious birth defects alive artificially until they died anyway, were ranked lowest.
They then took their proposed budget, and started at the top of the list. When they ran out of money, they said, "We can cover all this, and nothing else."
When people saw the kinds of things that didn't make the list, the project was scrapped. There were a large number of people who thought what didn't make the list was vital "health care", and rejected it due to what could not be covered.
Places like Canada have discovered that trying to cover everything will bankrupt a system, because people will use it for everything.
Health of the individual is the individuals business. Yours is not mine, so don't even try to make me like paying for your convenience.
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Don't get me wrong, I find most "conservatives" to be clueless hypocrites, just as most "liberals" are clueless hypocrites. Some very few are actually principled individuals, Shumer is not.
However, as per Chuckies voting record, he is a socialist. An "International Socialist" as opposed I guess to a "National Socialist".
Bob-
"Potter books: Wicked witchcraft? New documentary claims tales lead kids to the occult"
And the "documentary" video, of course.
It is to giggle.
Bob-
There is no "except". You are paying. Part of the calculation for the cost of your "unlimited" service is the fact that there is no personal "100%" use. You sleep some time. Or, as you put it, "while I'm not at home".
Your service provider, if they are capable of charging a price you're likely to pay, did not provision their backbone, or contract with their circuit/service/peering/long-haul providers, with 100% (or even 25%) utilization in mind.
As people such as yourself, by "allowing passers-by to use my 802.11b", increase the agrigate use of resources, either the greater use of resources will have to be paid for by raising the fees you pay, or your provider will go out of business.
Yes, in fact I have performed network engineering for just such providers, in just such enterprises, with just such issues at stake. One such enterprise may have been your present service provider.
That is one reason that business (multi-person) IP services generally cost more than personal (single person, family) IP services. They utilize greater resources.
So you are wrong to say it "doesn't cost me". It certainly DOES cost you. Because in the final reconing, There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
It likely also violates your service agreement, so don't bother crying about it if they shut you off for "sharing".
Bob-
Those that have used and enjoyed the 802.11 services will find another provider and likely pay for it this time.
The doom-and-gloom fails to recognize that the vast majority of internet use is pay already, those ISP's pay their interconnect providers, the interconnect providers use that money to pay their long-haul providers, and so forth.
As long as there is demand for some offered service, someone will provide that service.
Nothing is free, as in beer. Someone pays for it. At this moment it may not be you. Some other time, it will be.
Bob-
Was this just too obvious?
Just such a political theory exists today.
The present American incarnation is "Libertarian." There are such incarnations in most every country on earth, where people defend the rights of others.
Before you freak out and knee-jerk with "anti-government extremists" or "drug using hippy-freaks", "gun-toting militia members" or even "home schooling fundamentalists", be aware that EVERYONE believes there is something that is sacred.
When someone finally realizes that everyone has something that is sacred, they are one step away from freedom. That one step is recognition of others rights to choose what it is that is sacred for them. Some people think they recognize freedom of religion, but still choose to limit how others may pray.
Some people believe in "free speach" while choosing to limit what others may say, or read, or write.
The idea of "private property" is restricted in what I may do with my property, where or when or to whom I may sell it, or destroy it. Or even what I am allowed to own.
Defending your own ability to choose means also defending other peoples ability to choose, even if you disagree with that choice. This recognition of the equal rights of others is the root of "libertarian", and directly opposes the abuses of force that are being objected to here at Slashdot.
Yet look at the backlash that the word LIBERTARIAN causes. A backlash from people who still believe that only what they themselves believes is sacred actually is.
The fact that blatently abusive groups continue to win popular elections is a perfect demonstration that the "majority" is still very much in favor of that abuse. It may be time to revisit the idea of "majority rule".
Bob-
I'd say that's better than the endlessly repeating "government is everything to everyone, solves all problems" that the kids get in public schools.
Bob-
Oh great. Another "technical advance" in making ticket prices higher.
...ten times...
When StarWars was released on 70mm, ticket prices went up to pay for the new projectors. I really hated having to pay $2.50 just to see that movie.
Bob-
Beauty and the Beast, Titan AE, I can think of a lot more scenes but I can't remember what shows they were from. Now "Blood". Gee golly, something new?
No.
And if you don't like violent people in school uniforms, don't watch Japanese cartoons! Shall I complain about the awful special effects in I Dream Of Jeannie? Why bother?
Pokimon has one great aspect: Young people with concealed weapons going around helping people and defeating badguys. Morally speaking, it's a gun-control freak's nightmare!
Bob-
"Patents will be issued so that inventors have exclusive rights to their inventions for a limited time." -paraphrased
Yet what do we actually have? A system of tyrany, where the courts bow to the wiliest lawyer as to what is or is not patentable, enforcable, or "right". Someone recently patented the wheel!
The DMCA makes use of material illegal, not just making a profit off of other peoples work.
Do Freedom. Use ideas, and give credit where credit is due.
Bob-
Paramount would have a fit, though. Copyright, don't you know....
I think this whole copyright thing is utter crap. Every few years since 1910, "copyright" is extended so that nothing enters the public domain unless deliberately thrown into it.
Fear the Corporate/Government alliance!
Bob-
Yes, they cost more, but what are you really paying for?
I'd also be curious about recycle potential. There is much less material in an LCD, how about polution from disposal? How much of that can be reused and recycled? How about compared to a CRT?
Bob-
Teachers Unions: No merit pay, no efficiency, no competence, just time served.
Funding by Failure: "They're doing well, they don't need any more money."
Funding by Force: A student, no matter how completely unsuited, is required to go because the school system is paid by number of students who are in the building. I was told, for instance, that if I didn't come to school they would put my mother in jail. How's that for motivation?
Massive Overhead: Administration costs continue to endlessly rise, while "test scores" fall, and "not enough teachers" is the hue and cry.
Why are home schooled kids so over-represented in spelling bee's and science fairs? Why is the average home schooled kids standard test scores 35 percentage points higher than average?
To a teacher, with rare exceptions, this is just a job. They get paid anyway. To the parent, this has a *reason*.
Private schools either do a good job, or loose paying customers. Paying customers also means they can GET PHD and guest lecturers, if the parents want them. Private schools, like the ones that Al Gore Jr. as well as most all of the rest of the children of those who make and set policy and budgets for "public schools", consistantly turn out better educated students.
I found a page with an 8th grade final exam from 1895. Read it and imagine having to take the same one yourself at that age. Would you have passed? Could you pass it NOW? Here it is, completed, so you can check yourself.
Want your children taught that creation is fact?
Want to ensure that your children are never taught that creation is fact?
The sword of forced and centrally planned policy cuts all ways, folks. It fails to provide service.
Bob-
This may also be a simptom of the "microsoft" disease: creeping bloat, reliance on hardware to make up for shortcomings in software, endless features.
The "cost" of making that little bit of effort to optimize for use might be substantial on a titanic project like MS Office, but I cannot imagine that a non-Borg developer would not take pride in their work and at least try.
And then there's Steve Gibson who takes the principle of optimized code to its extreme. Good for him!
Bob-
Bob-
A free market tends toward the most efficient and effective answers, it does not gurantee them. A company or style that YOU like is not ensured success just because YOU like it.
When "we revive the ancient pracitice of protecting our old industries", we are thereby ensuring that the market tendency toward efficiency is destroyed, and the demonstrably better AMD chips will be relegated to the same pile as the DEC Alpha, also a demonstrably better technology than anything built at its time.
It is perfectly normal for companies to fail as technology changes. To try to shore-up inefficient processes and corporations is hubris, the sin of pride.
Bob-
There's no question that the most effective and efficient form of "governance" is a benevolent dictatorship.
Two problems: It's never benevolent for long, and it's never benevolent to dissent.
It's also illustrative to consider the concept of "governance", and why efficient "governance" is a really lousy thing anyway.
That's why the U.S. "government" is designed at its inception to be as inefficient as possible, and why it took four-score and seven years before someone was able to install an efficient "governance" under it. And that brought war.
Bob-
It's unique, convenient, and everyone has one, right?
The idiocy is using force to do what has been done many times before in many different places by interested individuals.
Re-inventing the wheel with someone elses money is an old tradition among bureaucrats, if they have the power to gather other peoples money in the first place.
Bob-
Oh, and get it right: Governments have POWERS, individuals have rights.
Bob-
I see no boundry with "real" or "virtual" property. It is all the result of my volitional labor, to dispose of as I see fit.
There's the rub: As I see fit. Not RMS, not Bill Gatus of Borg, not the U.S. Patent Office.
If I rob another of their property to produce mine, it is no less theft than if I stole a tree to manufacture a chair.
Simple property laws have been in place for thousands of years. The idiocy of all these arguments is that they try to re-invent the wheel, to invent "new" rules when the old rules work every day just fine.
Bob-
I was not referring to its kenetic energy as its weapons potential, I was referring to a maximum explosive payload with minimum waste.
Atomics can also be used in a "gravity bomb" configuration.
Steigler also uses kenetic "crowbars" dropped from orbit in his book, litteral "gravity" bombs, but he goes to great pains to differentiate their effectiveness from those of the explosive nature.
Bob-
When I decided to try Linux, I picked Debian because of the cooperative development project. I liked that I would be accessing, and maybe helping, the work of truely interested software engineers and advocates.
I learned to keep, and read, the manuals for my hardware! Why? Because I had to learn what the questions were before I could answer them. Now that I know what the ethernet drivers are looking for,and sound, and tools for configuring X have improved dramatically everywhere, it's become very easy to "pick the right one."
This familiarity is true for every flavor of Linux, but the quirks of Slackware, RedHat, and the other flavors I've tried send me back to Debian to see if it works at all, before returning to the other flavor.
I've also been very, very pleased with the package maintainers efforts. Company needs some network monitoring fast, MRTG? Yep, it's in there. Hear of a neat freeware Linux game like X-ShipWars? A quick "dselect" search shows that it's available, and choosing it will get all the needed drivers and support software versions at the same time.
I would say that Debian works very well as a beginners distribution, because you don't have to work hard to install working software.
Bob-
Lets face it, even with a small payload, like 600 lbs, that's two reasonably effective gravity bombs from an aircraft that is not even made of metal, so practically invisible to radar.
Bob-
Networks exist irrespective of the data that flows through them, a cluster is defined by that very data.
Bob-
Or do you expect me to be happy to pay for someone elses accupuncture at gun-point?
What about Chinese medicine? Powdered Tiger Claw, paid for by taxes?
The alternative is to have someone else decide what is or is not health care. As with all taxes, someone else decides what to pay for with my money. Or, if I'm lucky, I get something I want paid for by your money, whether you like it or not.
Oregon took the most intelegent aproach to "socialized" medicine I've ever heard of. They used logic and reason, and the plan failed.
They ranked all diseases and procedures by cost and effectiveness. The greatest benefit/cost items, such as medical checkups for pregnant women and immunizations, ranked highest. The most costly and least effective, such as keeping newborn babies with serious birth defects alive artificially until they died anyway, were ranked lowest.
They then took their proposed budget, and started at the top of the list. When they ran out of money, they said, "We can cover all this, and nothing else."
When people saw the kinds of things that didn't make the list, the project was scrapped. There were a large number of people who thought what didn't make the list was vital "health care", and rejected it due to what could not be covered.
Places like Canada have discovered that trying to cover everything will bankrupt a system, because people will use it for everything.
Health of the individual is the individuals business. Yours is not mine, so don't even try to make me like paying for your convenience.
Bob-