I find $99 quite excessive considering the only things I've seen on a.Mac blog are the "bandwidth exceeded" banner because it was linked in from Digg or Boingboing.
What's the point, then?
If you want raw storage and unlimited bandwidth, Proxad offers dedicated boxes with 160G of storage, complete administrator access for 30 EUR a month. No filtering/shaping whatsoever, 100Mbps ethernet connectivity per box. They have plenty of bandwidth, being a major ISP that basically only offers (unthrottled, unmetered, unshaped) 28 Mbps ADSL links. I don't think you can order this directly from the US, but I believe there's 3rd party services that resell it. I use one of those boxes to download Democracy Now's torrents, and I routinely reach 3MBps (that's megaBytes) of upload speed.
Just like intaveinous drug using transvestite prostitutes, password protected zip files should be assumed to be virus positive. I've never encountered one instance of them serving a legitimate purpose, for privacy there's GPG and friends.
In the US, every time the topic of Universal Health Care comes up, "they" trot out the bogeymen of long lines, poor service, unmotivated poorly paid doctors, etc. Then one goes to see Michael Moore's "Sicko" and those bad things don't appear to be there - it actually does seem to work.
Where is the truth? You're living it, please tell us your perspective.
In cheese eating surrender monkey land, I've never experienced or heard of lines or rationing, there are experimental procedures you can't get in the US, not the other way around, and nobody's ever gone bankrupt because of medical bills.
(Well truth be told, you can't actually file personal bankruptcy (except in Alsace/Moselle), instead lenders usually get to foot the bill if they are found to have been lending irresponsibly. And if a libertarian starts yapping right now, I'm going to stick some of those subprime mortgages that are going so well those days down his throat).
Doctors make a lot less money than US ones, but then med school is free, and they don't have to employ 12 assistants to deal with insurers (it's all done electronically).
A visit to the doctor is 21 EUR. That's before insurance. You just pay 1 EUR in the end.
In socialist cheese eating surrender monkey land, 28 Mbps DSL is less 30 EUR a month.
Thing is, in socialist cheese eating surrender monkey land, we don't spend trillions committing war crimes. Well, not yet, Bush-cock sucking Sarkozy might fix that soon.
In Paris, France, 29.9 a month gets me 28Mbps down / 1Mbps up ADSL2+, free modem included, free PVR with 40G hard drive included, HDTV over ADSL included, FREE phone calls to several dozen countries included, 2G of web hosting with NO AD and *unlimited* bandwidth (how much d'you pay for that alone in the US?), and there is NO, I repeat ABSOLUTELY NO shaping, filtering or mangling of any kind.
What's the quality of service? Apart from the occasional outage (I'd say on average a couple hours of downtime every few months), I can pretty much saturate my link anytime I want, that means downloading from a Gentoo or Ubuntu mirror at close to 3MB/s.
The same provider is beginning to roll out FTTH, so that means that in 6 to 12 months, I will be getting 50Mbps *symmetrical* fiber at no extra cost.
Granted, that's in Paris. But that's available in almost all French cities, and while rural areas are getting increaslingly covered, they have access to slightly lesser speed, that are still beyong what you get in NYC anyway.
So yeah, nitpick all you want on that OECD report, but face it: the USA, as a nation, are being sapped to rubbles by corruption. Your health care sucks, your police is corrupt, your justice system is a joke, your bridges are collapsing, your schools fail, your food is poisonous, and your military... oh yeah c'm'on bring 'em on 'em surrender monkey jokes... you can't even win a war against an enemy a 1/10 your size.
Do you think cities are going to put outputs in front of every parking spot in a city?
Why not? There's already electricity all over. Just pull a wire and bolt an ATM with a current meter instead of a cash dispenser.
Who is going to pay to install them?
Who is paying for electricity used to recharge the cars?
Look, there are places where you can rent a bike for 1 a day with a credit card; thousands of stations installed throughout a major city in a few months time. The project is financed by a billboard operator in exchange for advertising space in the city.
Frankly, a plug-in car can really only be charged at your house. And until they can go 200 miles (100 mile each way) before a recharge, I don't believe they are feasible.
Well I agree with you that it probably can't get done in the US where corruption is so rampant that oil companies and gasoline car makers will probably a few senators to prevent this from happening, but in the developped world, governments actually have some modicus of record for actually doing what's right.
As a matter of fact, I do know what I'm talking about.
The carbon used to mine uranium is several orders of magnitude less than what's saved. There are many issues with nuke power, quite a few very serious, and this is not one of them.
All it takes is enough plugs to be available. You don't have to refill, just to plug the thing in when you park. Surely you can spare 30s of your time every day?
Current technologies exist to generate electricity carbon free.
Nuclear (70%+ of all electricity around here)
Wind is already competitive price-wise with coal. Its main problems are that they require massive initial investment, and that it takes A LOT of time to get over all the Nimbys. Wind also happens to be unpredictable, but that's a non issue as far as battery charging is concerned. All that's required is a broadcast flag to tell the charger to stop sucking current when not enough power is available.
As I said somewhere else, overhead for private insurer = 15 to 30%; overhead for public universal healthcare: less than 2% (true of, for instance, Medicare of French Social Security).
It's less regulated than European countries. Said European countries' health care system is an order of magnitude more efficient. Connect the fucking dots.
How do you become a libertarian? Does it involve being hit on the back of the head repeatedly as a child?
Private health insurance overhead: 15 to 30% (in other words, for each $100 paid in premiums by insurees, $15 to $30 doesn't go to health care, but instead to marketing, advertising, legal, accounting and executive's yachts)
Public health insurance overhead: less than 2% (no advertising, little legal BS, no shareholders to pay dividends to, no marketing geniuses needed to figure that everyone needs health insurance...)
But don't take my word for it. Look at the stats.
Developed country with mostly private health insurance (the US): - Life expectancy lower than all other developed countries - Infant mortality highest - Total cost more than twice
Developed countries with mostly public health insurance (all the others) - Higher life expectancy - Lowest infant mortality - Cost at least half
Yes Apple is good at marketing, but Microsoft forces things down your throat? Really? To force things down your throat means to do things to have one company do things to ONESELF without being asked. Microsoft has not done that EVER, because it would be illegal.
Do you realize we're talking about Microsoft, the company that's been under investigation by the DOJ for years, until the corrupt Bush administration came in and yanked the plug, and the same company that's being fined hundreds of millions of euro by the EC for monopoly abuses?
You know, that company who has PC Manufacturers pay for Windows for each PC it sells, even if it runs Linux... yeah, I know, they're not forcing this down their throat, it's just that if they don't comply they get to pay 3 times more.
And then, even if you meant "copyrighted", it still would be a completely stupid thing to say. As as been pointed earlier, per the Berne convention, everything is copyrighted. See, this message you're reading now, and which you have therefore downloaded, is copyrighted by me.
So right now, I'm calling your ISP and having your account cancelled.
Direct analog signals are baseband. IE they are not modulated, or you could also say, by extension, that they are modulated at 0 Hz. Example: POTS (Plain Old Telephone) ISDN lines are baseband too.
DSL and Cable aren't baseband, OTOH. (Even analog cable TV isn't baseband -- it's modulated around a carrier frequency. That's why you can have several channels on one cable.) They're actually transmitted in several frequencies at a time, definitely qualifies for broadband.
10BaseT, 100BaseT and thinnet are baseband. No modulation either, direct signal. Probably same for 1000BaseT, except that it uses more wire.
Oh and leased copper lines (T1, etc...) are base band, too.
It's rated for 24Mbps. I usually get around 1-2 Mbyte/s on a single download TCP stream. I can basically max out the bandwidth with multiple simultaneous downloads anytime.
"This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband. "
Because we have an aggressively pro-competition regulating agency in France, you have a dozen way to get broadband in most cities. And you basically can't get anything below ADSL2+ those days.
At the moment I pay 29 euros a month for 24/1Mbps, HDTV service, and free international phone (analog and voip). They also provide me with a free router, Wifi AP, HDTV PVR set top box and analog telephone adaptor.
No cap on data, no filtering whatsoever, no shaping. Quality of service is good, and has been improving steadily. You have the occasional day long outage (two last years, none this year so far), but other than that downloading speeds are stable and pretty much max out my line 24/7.
And the reason for this is that ARCEPT has been given a lot of power to enforce competition in the broadcast market. None of those services are subsidised. They haven't been so successful with cellphone, OTOH. But they're working on it.
29.99, ADSL2+, includes TV and free international calls (VoIP). Free modem and HDTV PVR set top box provided.
All that in socialist France. The only gov't improvement is in aggressively enforcing competition. You know, the real free market thing, not that corrupt semi-fascist oligarchy you have in the US.
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I find $99 quite excessive considering the only things I've seen on a .Mac blog are the "bandwidth exceeded" banner because it was linked in from Digg or Boingboing.
What's the point, then?
If you want raw storage and unlimited bandwidth, Proxad offers dedicated boxes with 160G of storage, complete administrator access for 30 EUR a month. No filtering/shaping whatsoever, 100Mbps ethernet connectivity per box. They have plenty of bandwidth, being a major ISP that basically only offers (unthrottled, unmetered, unshaped) 28 Mbps ADSL links. I don't think you can order this directly from the US, but I believe there's 3rd party services that resell it. I use one of those boxes to download Democracy Now's torrents, and I routinely reach 3MBps (that's megaBytes) of upload speed.
Just like intaveinous drug using transvestite prostitutes, password protected zip files should be assumed to be virus positive. I've never encountered one instance of them serving a legitimate purpose, for privacy there's GPG and friends.
They're one of the worst. It is they who persuaded Microsoft to let them charge Zune users a Zune-tax. Let them lift that tax first.
Here's a secret tip: you can decline to pay the Zune-tax. I did it, and surprisingly, it works like a charm!
Follow these steps carefully:
1. Do not buy a fucking Zune
2. ???
3. Profit!
Plus, with this method, you don't have yet another piece of plastic junk littering your living quarters.
if Jesus Haploid Christ had been impaled instead of crucified. Tons of fun.
In the US, every time the topic of Universal Health Care comes up, "they" trot out the bogeymen of long lines, poor service, unmotivated poorly paid doctors, etc. Then one goes to see Michael Moore's "Sicko" and those bad things don't appear to be there - it actually does seem to work.
Where is the truth? You're living it, please tell us your perspective.
In cheese eating surrender monkey land, I've never experienced or heard of lines or rationing, there are experimental procedures you can't get in the US, not the other way around, and nobody's ever gone bankrupt because of medical bills.
(Well truth be told, you can't actually file personal bankruptcy (except in Alsace/Moselle), instead lenders usually get to foot the bill if they are found to have been lending irresponsibly. And if a libertarian starts yapping right now, I'm going to stick some of those subprime mortgages that are going so well those days down his throat).
Doctors make a lot less money than US ones, but then med school is free, and they don't have to employ 12 assistants to deal with insurers (it's all done electronically).
A visit to the doctor is 21 EUR. That's before insurance. You just pay 1 EUR in the end.
In socialist cheese eating surrender monkey land, 28 Mbps DSL is less 30 EUR a month.
Thing is, in socialist cheese eating surrender monkey land, we don't spend trillions committing war crimes. Well, not yet, Bush-cock sucking Sarkozy might fix that soon.
As a bonus to my thirty bucks a month 28Mbps ADSL2+ line, I get free phone calls to 45 countries (all of Europe, USA, China, etc ...)
Where do you get that in the US nowadays?
Oh that's right, you don't!
In Europe, Japan and Korea, consumers are willing to pay for this service.
Thing is, thanks to actual FREE MARKET enforced by ANTI CARTEL provisions in the law, customers are being charged a fair price.
In my case, that's 30 EUR a month for 28Mbps DSL. Phone, TV etc included.
Some providers offer basic ADSL2+ at 15 EUR a month. That's like 20M down / 512k or 1M up.
In Paris, France, 29.9 a month gets me 28Mbps down / 1Mbps up ADSL2+, free modem included, free PVR with 40G hard drive included, HDTV over ADSL included, FREE phone calls to several dozen countries included, 2G of web hosting with NO AD and *unlimited* bandwidth (how much d'you pay for that alone in the US?), and there is NO, I repeat ABSOLUTELY NO shaping, filtering or mangling of any kind.
... oh yeah c'm'on bring 'em on 'em surrender monkey jokes ... you can't even win a war against an enemy a 1/10 your size.
What's the quality of service? Apart from the occasional outage (I'd say on average a couple hours of downtime every few months), I can pretty much saturate my link anytime I want, that means downloading from a Gentoo or Ubuntu mirror at close to 3MB/s.
The same provider is beginning to roll out FTTH, so that means that in 6 to 12 months, I will be getting 50Mbps *symmetrical* fiber at no extra cost.
Granted, that's in Paris. But that's available in almost all French cities, and while rural areas are getting increaslingly covered, they have access to slightly lesser speed, that are still beyong what you get in NYC anyway.
So yeah, nitpick all you want on that OECD report, but face it: the USA, as a nation, are being sapped to rubbles by corruption. Your health care sucks, your police is corrupt, your justice system is a joke, your bridges are collapsing, your schools fail, your food is poisonous, and your military
Do you think cities are going to put outputs in front of every parking spot in a city?
Why not? There's already electricity all over. Just pull a wire and bolt an ATM with a current meter instead of a cash dispenser.
Who is going to pay to install them?
Who is paying for electricity used to recharge the cars?
Look, there are places where you can rent a bike for 1 a day with a credit card; thousands of stations installed throughout a major city in a few months time. The project is financed by a billboard operator in exchange for advertising space in the city.
Frankly, a plug-in car can really only be charged at your house. And until they can go 200 miles (100 mile each way) before a recharge, I don't believe they are feasible.
Well I agree with you that it probably can't get done in the US where corruption is so rampant that oil companies and gasoline car makers will probably a few senators to prevent this from happening, but in the developped world, governments actually have some modicus of record for actually doing what's right.
As a matter of fact, I do know what I'm talking about.
The carbon used to mine uranium is several orders of magnitude less than what's saved. There are many issues with nuke power, quite a few very serious, and this is not one of them.
All it takes is enough plugs to be available. You don't have to refill, just to plug the thing in when you park. Surely you can spare 30s of your time every day?
Current technologies exist to generate electricity carbon free.
Nuclear (70%+ of all electricity around here)
Wind is already competitive price-wise with coal. Its main problems are that they require massive initial investment, and that it takes A LOT of time to get over all the Nimbys. Wind also happens to be unpredictable, but that's a non issue as far as battery charging is concerned. All that's required is a broadcast flag to tell the charger to stop sucking current when not enough power is available.
As I said somewhere else, overhead for private insurer = 15 to 30%; overhead for public universal healthcare: less than 2% (true of, for instance, Medicare of French Social Security).
That's an order of magnitude right there.
had the highest import duties of all the major countries.
Weird, eh.
US private healthcare is over-regulated.
It's less regulated than European countries. Said European countries' health care system is an order of magnitude more efficient. Connect the fucking dots.
How do you become a libertarian? Does it involve being hit on the back of the head repeatedly as a child?
Private health insurance overhead: 15 to 30% (in other words, for each $100 paid in premiums by insurees, $15 to $30 doesn't go to health care, but instead to marketing, advertising, legal, accounting and executive's yachts)
...)
Public health insurance overhead: less than 2% (no advertising, little legal BS, no shareholders to pay dividends to, no marketing geniuses needed to figure that everyone needs health insurance
But don't take my word for it. Look at the stats.
Developed country with mostly private health insurance (the US):
- Life expectancy lower than all other developed countries
- Infant mortality highest
- Total cost more than twice
Developed countries with mostly public health insurance (all the others)
- Higher life expectancy
- Lowest infant mortality
- Cost at least half
Yay, capitalism!
Yes Apple is good at marketing, but Microsoft forces things down your throat? Really? To force things down your throat means to do things to have one company do things to ONESELF without being asked. Microsoft has not done that EVER, because it would be illegal.
... yeah, I know, they're not forcing this down their throat, it's just that if they don't comply they get to pay 3 times more.
Do you realize we're talking about Microsoft, the company that's been under investigation by the DOJ for years, until the corrupt Bush administration came in and yanked the plug, and the same company that's being fined hundreds of millions of euro by the EC for monopoly abuses?
You know, that company who has PC Manufacturers pay for Windows for each PC it sells, even if it runs Linux
Copywritten is not a word. Even in bold.
And then, even if you meant "copyrighted", it still would be a completely stupid thing to say. As as been pointed earlier, per the Berne convention, everything is copyrighted. See, this message you're reading now, and which you have therefore downloaded, is copyrighted by me.
So right now, I'm calling your ISP and having your account cancelled.
stands for "Asynchronous".
Next year they're upgrading to 50/50Mbps FTTH anyway. At the same price, btw.
Direct analog signals are baseband. IE they are not modulated, or you could also say, by extension, that they are modulated at 0 Hz. Example: POTS (Plain Old Telephone) ISDN lines are baseband too.
DSL and Cable aren't baseband, OTOH. (Even analog cable TV isn't baseband -- it's modulated around a carrier frequency. That's why you can have several channels on one cable.) They're actually transmitted in several frequencies at a time, definitely qualifies for broadband.
10BaseT, 100BaseT and thinnet are baseband. No modulation either, direct signal. Probably same for 1000BaseT, except that it uses more wire.
Oh and leased copper lines (T1, etc...) are base band, too.
It's rated for 24Mbps. I usually get around 1-2 Mbyte/s on a single download TCP stream. I can basically max out the bandwidth with multiple simultaneous downloads anytime.
And I pay 29 euro a month.
"This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband. "
Because we have an aggressively pro-competition regulating agency in France, you have a dozen way to get broadband in most cities. And you basically can't get anything below ADSL2+ those days.
At the moment I pay 29 euros a month for 24/1Mbps, HDTV service, and free international phone (analog and voip). They also provide me with a free router, Wifi AP, HDTV PVR set top box and analog telephone adaptor.
No cap on data, no filtering whatsoever, no shaping. Quality of service is good, and has been improving steadily. You have the occasional day long outage (two last years, none this year so far), but other than that downloading speeds are stable and pretty much max out my line 24/7.
And the reason for this is that ARCEPT has been given a lot of power to enforce competition in the broadcast market. None of those services are subsidised. They haven't been so successful with cellphone, OTOH. But they're working on it.
29.99, ADSL2+, includes TV and free international calls (VoIP). Free modem and HDTV PVR set top box provided.
All that in socialist France. The only gov't improvement is in aggressively enforcing competition. You know, the real free market thing, not that corrupt semi-fascist oligarchy you have in the US.