My wife and I have been playing WoW from the first day of retail. We play a few hours every night, and it's a blast. It's incredibly easy to play "casual", which is an important feature for all of us working professionals. I can't play 8 hours a day, I get a few hours after work, yet my character is progressing just fine.
It will take a few months to hit 60, then I can spend another month getting gear, then maybe I'll do some PvP. Who knows. I'm glad that I get to experience the whole game, rather than the first few levels as I would on many other MMORPGs.
As for the appeal of the game. My wife and I started, then mentioned we were playing to a friend who lives nearby. He bought the game. Over the last month or so, we've been mentioning the game to our old college friends, who have all gotten online. A couple of their wives have mentioned an interest in playing (these are women who have never played a computer game before).
My wife and I played DAoC a little, didn't get into it too much. Blizzard is very good at making very user friendly games, and I agree that it will probably do a lot for the entire field. All of these people who are playing these types of games for the first time are most likely now confident enough to try out new games in the same field.
As for complaints about the game. I'd say that most of the complaints I've heard about WoW is from the "hard core" gamers. They've complained about how easy it is to level, how much of the game is for "carebears", or those who want to play and cook dinner at the same time. I think Blizzard has hit their market pretty well. They may have sent away a few hard core gamers who will "beat" the game within a month, but in return they've caught the wives, parents, and children of those who normally wouldn't play.
Let's say you make $100,000/year for 60 years. That's $6,000,000. Let's say that you save enough and get a high enough return on investments that you retire with about 20% of that value saved. $1,200,000 is your retirement nest egg. That is not enough to live on indefinately. And this was ignoring all the taxes you'd have to pay, etc.
Lets not be silly. Have you done any research into investing? I make less than $100,000 per year, and after around 20 years I can still have over $1,000,000. I surely hope that someone making more, for 60 years can handle it. IE, save 20% of your salary ($20,000 for your example per year). Assume 8% on your money (middle of the road guess, some say 11%, some say 6%)
Year 1 you have $20,000. Year 2 you have $41,600. Year 3 you have $64,928. Continue on, year 21 you have $1,008,458. Work for 60 years at this rate, you'll have a bit over $25 million. Now of course you can save more than 20% as well.
Simplistic calculation, but don't be silly saying that you'll only have a bit over a million after 60 years.
Perhaps when you're making your own personal webpages, you can feel free to ignore IE, but if you're working for a corporation, you don't have a choice.
My company works in the financial industry, and has the normal people you would expect visiting their websites. Bankers, high level management, marketing, etc. Over 90% of our browsers are IE. The only browser we are forced to support on every single page is IE. Once in awhile we can let slip a feature that will display oddly in Mozilla or Safari, but IE we're forced to have 100% compliance with. We therefore all have many versions of IE installed on our machines and do our day to day development using IE. While I wouldn't mind having another browser compete with IE once again, I don't see Mozilla or any other browser competing any time soon for the standard population.
Student made hybrid gets 1,600 mpg. Sounds like the car companies better get moving. Story Link
I would personally prefer an all electric car. My commute is 15 miles each way and that's the only drive I make most days. It would be much better to just plug the car in each night. The electricity coming from my house costs less for me, and overall created less pollution.
What's really funny about this is that I also ran a search and got the results in a few seconds, as did hundreds of other slashdotters. I don't know if that's more embarassing for the Guardian that they don't know how to search, or for us geeks that instantly jumped to google saying:
There's a very nice summary at the bottom of page 4. I will karma-whore it for you, since I know most people won't be able to maintain their concentration for so many pages.
How Smart Breeding Works
The mission: Develop rice that's resistant to bacterial blight and will thrive around the globe.
SEARCH Food scientists scour the rice gene bank, consisting of 84,000 seed types, in search of varieties with blight immunity.
INSERT MARKER Scientists extract DNA from selected varieties and tag the blight-immunity gene - previously identified by researchers - with a chemical dye.
CROSSBREED A network of researchers around the world cross disease-resistant varieties with thousands of local versions. With some plants, this means merely putting two varieties in a room. Self-pollinating rice requires manual pollen insertion.
ANALYZE The offspring are analyzed to detect the presence of the immunity gene. Those containing the gene are planted in a field.
TEST Mature plants are exposed to bacterial blight to confirm resistance. Those that don't die, and maintain desired traits from the local variety, are distributed. Unless
REPEAT Sometimes, the process reveals several genes responsible for a trait. Three genes confer resistance to different blight strains. In such cases, breeders repeat the crossbreeding until all genes are turned on.
END RESULT A rice plant with broad resistance to bacterial blight that will thrive in local conditions.
Something to remember though. If we have the tags to broadcast our locations while wearing these computers on our heads, the cops will be ahead of us all the way. You won't be able to dodge them, you'll have the ticket scrolling on your eyeballs as soon as you hit 56 on the highway.
While I like free trade, couple things bother me.
1. I just cancelled my pretty expensive static IP dsl line from Ameritech that I've had for 3 years because I just spent 12 hours straight talking to customer service to go through a pretty simple issue. Main problems: They couldn't speak English and followed scripts far too much. While people in the US still follow scripts, not speaking much english on phone customer support is not acceptable.
2. I have a problem with cheap products being sent from countries that have no environmental rules to speak of. They can dump their waste into the ocean that washes up on our beaches eventually, but if we have purely free trade, their goods will simply cost less.. there need to be some limits put in place to regulate countries that harm others. Beat your own workers, but don't dump in my ocean or pollute the air I breath.
Simply put, our group wrote our own struts type framework. This was around 4 years ago when struts wasn't quite as hyped, and we wanted something that did exactly what we wanted, without extra baggage or cost. Four members in our group, it took us around a week to write the basic components.
Other groups (sitting a few feet away from us), have gone through a couple framework tools, ending up with struts.
I really don't see a difference in either approach. So many times writing your own tools is frowned upon, but when you're talking about small scale projects, why not? Do you really need every feature of struts to display a fairly simple website? A few forms, polls, etc.. why install such a massive package?
For my home machine, I wanted a couple forms, a photo album, and fairly simple navigation. I wrote it in a night. It would have taken me just as long to download the tools, install them, and set them up.
I think the problem is that it's a very "in thing" to use the latest tools. The technology lead for the other team was pushing for one open source solution before, then was pushing for struts, now is pushing for some other "cool" tool. I would rather focus on writing for what is needed, rather than for what is a cool solution.
I found soldat a year ago or so, it was mentioned on a "free" game site as one of the best, and I definately agree.
It's similar to worms in gameplay. You're a small 2d person standing around in a large 2d map. You have a selection of around 8 (don't remember the exact number) different types of weapons. Rocket launchers, machine guns, hand guns, etc. All have different properties and reasons you would use them. You then fight against the other people on the map to see who can live the longest/get the most kills. Adding to the fun is the jetpack on your back for short flights.
I think the graphics are great for a 2d game. The physics work well. A rocket hit directly to your body can throw your limp form flopping across the terrain, perhaps ending up hanging over the edge of a cliff. A direct shot in the head with a sniper rifle will knock off the character's head, letting the body to crumble to the ground.
Cartoonish, but enjoyable, similar to worms.. a lot of fun for no bucks:)
As geeky as it sounds, this touches upon the idea that was featured in a Star Trek (TNG?) episode awhile ago. In it, some guy was addicted to the holo-deck. Being able to be in a fantasy world seemed more appealing to him than being in the real world. Personally, I've always thought they didn't explain well enough how people resisted the holo-deck appeal.
I think a lot of the attraction of these types of games comes from how close they mimic real life. If you can be a smith and sit in a shop, it's more realistic than everyone being forced to be a warrior. If you can chat with people, have relationships, need to eat, etc etc.. all of these things make the game more immersive/addictive.
It's simply that technology can convince your mind that you're not just sitting in a tiny room, waiting to go to work the next day, but instead you're a warrior out on the open plains, looking for the next evil creature to slay. It's similar to how some people can sit for 8 hours at a time reading some book.. in their head they've entered the book's world.
As technology improves, I think that we'll need to worry more & more about this type of problem. If we ever do get to the holodeck type style of games, I can imagine plenty of people will be incredibly addicted to that type of experience.. a life without the boring parts.
The Star Trek previews sucked. It had no 'new' plot, it seemed like an extension of any normal weekday movie. You weren't going back to earth, you weren't doing anything original. Didn't seem to be an exciting movie, so I skipped it. Get a better plot and people will watch Star Trek again.
It's a vaccine for a very specific type of cancer. While this is great, I highly doubt we shall have a vaccine for lung cancer, skin cancer, or the other types that are not necessarily caused by a virus.
See, what they're going to do next, is make nano-bots with some great AI built in. They then tell the nanobots exactly what a cancerous cell looks like, how to replicate, how much to replicate, and how to kill the cancerous cell. Now hurry up scientists, I want to live forever today.. I don't have a lot of patience.
The main reason the scramjets are melting is the friction with the air correct? Why not use them in a vacuum?
Build large systems of vacuum tunnels (overseas would be difficult) for continent travel. Inside the vacuum you wouldn't have friction, so you could get to these higher speeds easily yes? Magnet levitation and all that should make them fairly efficient. Imagine having an hour trip from New York to California.. I gotta imagine that would bring in some extra business. I'd sure as hell go on vacations every weekend if I could be back in time for supper.
Of course if you read further.
on
Energizer Mouse
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You would find out that they were breeding the mice with the new muscle materials. They don't seem to have found a way to actually put this into an existing animal and change it's muscle concentration. So sure, they can breed long distance runners, but they can't make a sprinter into one.
I've taught a computer how to play tic-tac-toe and checkers using basically the same technique. It's very entertaining actually.
1. Give it rules, IE you cannot move off of the board, you must only move once per turn, etc.
2. Set up 2 seperate AI's to play against each other.
3. Give it winning conditions, so that it knows if the moves it picked let it win.
4. Give it cool graphics ala wargames.
After letting it run overnight, come back and play checkers against it. Beat us pretty nicely (I suck at checkers).
Heh, love how science works
on
Flying Snakes
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Quote from the article:
"Occasionally, when the snake wouldn't move, I'd give it a prod", Socha says, "and sit there and wait and hope it would jump off." Socha says none of the reptiles got hurt during these flying exercises, done at the Singapore Zoological Gardens.
Science words translated as: The stupid snake wouldn't fly for me, so I pushed him off the branch.
Read "The Truth Machine". It basically follows the idea that technology will eventually become so powerful and in so many people's hands that it will be simple to destroy all life. So they have to come up with a solution, which ends up being a perfect lie detector test. With a perfect lie detector, they could just ask someone "are you planning on hurting people with your experiments" and find out. Quite a good book in either case.
I'm sure they haven't missed something so obvious since they say they already have some of the areas covered, but how exactly do they keep these floats in the same place? Our hollywood actors keep getting lost in the ocean in rafts, and they keep floating into shipping lanes.. so I don't see why detection floating devices wouldn't float around either.
I have to imagine that the ocean's a bit too deep to be tying them all down to the bottom everywhere.
Either way, I'm wondering if the data will be publically available at some point in time, or if it will just be used by this one group.
What's all the fuss about?
on
Megapnosaurus?
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Come now, who's ever heard of a "Syntarsus" before? If it was a T-rex or a triceratops getting renamed, I could see the problem.. but personally the difference between a fused ankle dino and a dead lizard doesn't make a whole lotta difference. Comeon, they're dead.
I remember reading a good 15-20 years ago in my Highlights magazine (good tech info) that the scientists were working on a holographic storage device. Instead of storing things in 2d, they store things in 3d, thus drastically increasing the storage available. They supposedly would be able to store terabites of information in a re-recordable media. Don't tell me my Highlights magazine was wrong!
Of course we can't expect companies / universities / people to run free access for the rest of the world to share. Look what happens when slashdot posts one link.. most independant web sites get slashdotted. What would happen if one site opened up access to all the newsgroups they had?
No one company has the bandwidth to support the entire internet's access. Once places started closing their doors, it was a run for the hills. Just like most public services, if there aren't enough outlets to support the drain on resources, we overtax what we have and cause it to close down too. The only way to get access opened again on public servers would be to have a few really large companies open up.. that would be the only way to lower the drain on everyone.
Truthfully, the bill is a good idea. While the telcoms are always looking out for their own pockets, we have to realize that progress is not made without profit. If we want global internet access to all people with infinate bandwidth (sounds good to me), then we need someone to build that bandwidth. Why would they build it? Because they see a profit in it. Why would they see a profit in fixing cable, laying more lines, etc? Because they have control over their new additions, so they're able to charge more. A company has one purpose, to make money. If we don't allow companies to make profits on their actions, then we won't see progress.
I don't see much likelyhood of a opensource fiberoptic laying company coming anytime soon.. "Honey, I'm going out for a few hours, the local ACM is going to lay a few miles of cable today.". If we want big progress, we need to let big business do what it does best.. big projects.
Maybe that label on the rear-view mirror should have said:
Don't be silly, it's always the side mirror that has the problem with perception.. so the Side mirror would need to warn about T-Rexs being slower than they appear.
"Dude, I'm going to overclock my T-Rex, get him up to 40 mph!"
Slashdot Mirror
My wife and I have been playing WoW from the first day of retail. We play a few hours every night, and it's a blast. It's incredibly easy to play "casual", which is an important feature for all of us working professionals. I can't play 8 hours a day, I get a few hours after work, yet my character is progressing just fine.
It will take a few months to hit 60, then I can spend another month getting gear, then maybe I'll do some PvP. Who knows. I'm glad that I get to experience the whole game, rather than the first few levels as I would on many other MMORPGs.
As for the appeal of the game. My wife and I started, then mentioned we were playing to a friend who lives nearby. He bought the game. Over the last month or so, we've been mentioning the game to our old college friends, who have all gotten online. A couple of their wives have mentioned an interest in playing (these are women who have never played a computer game before).
My wife and I played DAoC a little, didn't get into it too much. Blizzard is very good at making very user friendly games, and I agree that it will probably do a lot for the entire field. All of these people who are playing these types of games for the first time are most likely now confident enough to try out new games in the same field.
As for complaints about the game. I'd say that most of the complaints I've heard about WoW is from the "hard core" gamers. They've complained about how easy it is to level, how much of the game is for "carebears", or those who want to play and cook dinner at the same time. I think Blizzard has hit their market pretty well. They may have sent away a few hard core gamers who will "beat" the game within a month, but in return they've caught the wives, parents, and children of those who normally wouldn't play.
Let's say you make $100,000/year for 60 years. That's $6,000,000. Let's say that you save enough and get a high enough return on investments that you retire with about 20% of that value saved. $1,200,000 is your retirement nest egg. That is not enough to live on indefinately. And this was ignoring all the taxes you'd have to pay, etc.
Lets not be silly. Have you done any research into investing? I make less than $100,000 per year, and after around 20 years I can still have over $1,000,000. I surely hope that someone making more, for 60 years can handle it. IE, save 20% of your salary ($20,000 for your example per year). Assume 8% on your money (middle of the road guess, some say 11%, some say 6%)
Year 1 you have $20,000. Year 2 you have $41,600. Year 3 you have $64,928. Continue on, year 21 you have $1,008,458. Work for 60 years at this rate, you'll have a bit over $25 million. Now of course you can save more than 20% as well.
Simplistic calculation, but don't be silly saying that you'll only have a bit over a million after 60 years.
Perhaps when you're making your own personal webpages, you can feel free to ignore IE, but if you're working for a corporation, you don't have a choice.
My company works in the financial industry, and has the normal people you would expect visiting their websites. Bankers, high level management, marketing, etc. Over 90% of our browsers are IE. The only browser we are forced to support on every single page is IE. Once in awhile we can let slip a feature that will display oddly in Mozilla or Safari, but IE we're forced to have 100% compliance with. We therefore all have many versions of IE installed on our machines and do our day to day development using IE. While I wouldn't mind having another browser compete with IE once again, I don't see Mozilla or any other browser competing any time soon for the standard population.
Technies maybe, but Bankers? No chance.
Student made hybrid gets 1,600 mpg. Sounds like the car companies better get moving. Story Link
I would personally prefer an all electric car. My commute is 15 miles each way and that's the only drive I make most days. It would be much better to just plug the car in each night. The electricity coming from my house costs less for me, and overall created less pollution.
What's really funny about this is that I also ran a search and got the results in a few seconds, as did hundreds of other slashdotters. I don't know if that's more embarassing for the Guardian that they don't know how to search, or for us geeks that instantly jumped to google saying:
"Hell, I can get the results faster than that".
There's a very nice summary at the bottom of page 4. I will karma-whore it for you, since I know most people won't be able to maintain their concentration for so many pages.
How Smart Breeding Works
The mission: Develop rice that's resistant to bacterial blight and will thrive around the globe.
SEARCH Food scientists scour the rice gene bank, consisting of 84,000 seed types, in search of varieties with blight immunity.
INSERT MARKER Scientists extract DNA from selected varieties and tag the blight-immunity gene - previously identified by researchers - with a chemical dye.
CROSSBREED A network of researchers around the world cross disease-resistant varieties with thousands of local versions. With some plants, this means merely putting two varieties in a room. Self-pollinating rice requires manual pollen insertion.
ANALYZE The offspring are analyzed to detect the presence of the immunity gene. Those containing the gene are planted in a field.
TEST Mature plants are exposed to bacterial blight to confirm resistance. Those that don't die, and maintain desired traits from the local variety, are distributed. Unless
REPEAT Sometimes, the process reveals several genes responsible for a trait. Three genes confer resistance to different blight strains. In such cases, breeders repeat the crossbreeding until all genes are turned on.
END RESULT A rice plant with broad resistance to bacterial blight that will thrive in local conditions.
"Cops ahead, slow down and hide the bottles".
Something to remember though. If we have the tags to broadcast our locations while wearing these computers on our heads, the cops will be ahead of us all the way. You won't be able to dodge them, you'll have the ticket scrolling on your eyeballs as soon as you hit 56 on the highway.
While I like free trade, couple things bother me. 1. I just cancelled my pretty expensive static IP dsl line from Ameritech that I've had for 3 years because I just spent 12 hours straight talking to customer service to go through a pretty simple issue. Main problems: They couldn't speak English and followed scripts far too much. While people in the US still follow scripts, not speaking much english on phone customer support is not acceptable. 2. I have a problem with cheap products being sent from countries that have no environmental rules to speak of. They can dump their waste into the ocean that washes up on our beaches eventually, but if we have purely free trade, their goods will simply cost less.. there need to be some limits put in place to regulate countries that harm others. Beat your own workers, but don't dump in my ocean or pollute the air I breath.
Simply put, our group wrote our own struts type framework. This was around 4 years ago when struts wasn't quite as hyped, and we wanted something that did exactly what we wanted, without extra baggage or cost. Four members in our group, it took us around a week to write the basic components.
Other groups (sitting a few feet away from us), have gone through a couple framework tools, ending up with struts.
I really don't see a difference in either approach. So many times writing your own tools is frowned upon, but when you're talking about small scale projects, why not? Do you really need every feature of struts to display a fairly simple website? A few forms, polls, etc.. why install such a massive package?
For my home machine, I wanted a couple forms, a photo album, and fairly simple navigation. I wrote it in a night. It would have taken me just as long to download the tools, install them, and set them up.
I think the problem is that it's a very "in thing" to use the latest tools. The technology lead for the other team was pushing for one open source solution before, then was pushing for struts, now is pushing for some other "cool" tool. I would rather focus on writing for what is needed, rather than for what is a cool solution.
I found soldat a year ago or so, it was mentioned on a "free" game site as one of the best, and I definately agree.
:)
It's similar to worms in gameplay. You're a small 2d person standing around in a large 2d map. You have a selection of around 8 (don't remember the exact number) different types of weapons. Rocket launchers, machine guns, hand guns, etc. All have different properties and reasons you would use them. You then fight against the other people on the map to see who can live the longest/get the most kills. Adding to the fun is the jetpack on your back for short flights.
I think the graphics are great for a 2d game. The physics work well. A rocket hit directly to your body can throw your limp form flopping across the terrain, perhaps ending up hanging over the edge of a cliff. A direct shot in the head with a sniper rifle will knock off the character's head, letting the body to crumble to the ground.
Cartoonish, but enjoyable, similar to worms.. a lot of fun for no bucks
As geeky as it sounds, this touches upon the idea that was featured in a Star Trek (TNG?) episode awhile ago. In it, some guy was addicted to the holo-deck. Being able to be in a fantasy world seemed more appealing to him than being in the real world. Personally, I've always thought they didn't explain well enough how people resisted the holo-deck appeal.
I think a lot of the attraction of these types of games comes from how close they mimic real life. If you can be a smith and sit in a shop, it's more realistic than everyone being forced to be a warrior. If you can chat with people, have relationships, need to eat, etc etc.. all of these things make the game more immersive/addictive.
It's simply that technology can convince your mind that you're not just sitting in a tiny room, waiting to go to work the next day, but instead you're a warrior out on the open plains, looking for the next evil creature to slay. It's similar to how some people can sit for 8 hours at a time reading some book.. in their head they've entered the book's world.
As technology improves, I think that we'll need to worry more & more about this type of problem. If we ever do get to the holodeck type style of games, I can imagine plenty of people will be incredibly addicted to that type of experience.. a life without the boring parts.
The Star Trek previews sucked. It had no 'new' plot, it seemed like an extension of any normal weekday movie. You weren't going back to earth, you weren't doing anything original. Didn't seem to be an exciting movie, so I skipped it. Get a better plot and people will watch Star Trek again.
It's a vaccine for a very specific type of cancer. While this is great, I highly doubt we shall have a vaccine for lung cancer, skin cancer, or the other types that are not necessarily caused by a virus. See, what they're going to do next, is make nano-bots with some great AI built in. They then tell the nanobots exactly what a cancerous cell looks like, how to replicate, how much to replicate, and how to kill the cancerous cell. Now hurry up scientists, I want to live forever today.. I don't have a lot of patience.
The main reason the scramjets are melting is the friction with the air correct? Why not use them in a vacuum?
Build large systems of vacuum tunnels (overseas would be difficult) for continent travel. Inside the vacuum you wouldn't have friction, so you could get to these higher speeds easily yes? Magnet levitation and all that should make them fairly efficient. Imagine having an hour trip from New York to California.. I gotta imagine that would bring in some extra business. I'd sure as hell go on vacations every weekend if I could be back in time for supper.
You would find out that they were breeding the mice with the new muscle materials. They don't seem to have found a way to actually put this into an existing animal and change it's muscle concentration. So sure, they can breed long distance runners, but they can't make a sprinter into one.
I've taught a computer how to play tic-tac-toe and checkers using basically the same technique. It's very entertaining actually. 1. Give it rules, IE you cannot move off of the board, you must only move once per turn, etc. 2. Set up 2 seperate AI's to play against each other. 3. Give it winning conditions, so that it knows if the moves it picked let it win. 4. Give it cool graphics ala wargames. After letting it run overnight, come back and play checkers against it. Beat us pretty nicely (I suck at checkers).
Science words translated as: The stupid snake wouldn't fly for me, so I pushed him off the branch.
Read "The Truth Machine". It basically follows the idea that technology will eventually become so powerful and in so many people's hands that it will be simple to destroy all life. So they have to come up with a solution, which ends up being a perfect lie detector test. With a perfect lie detector, they could just ask someone "are you planning on hurting people with your experiments" and find out. Quite a good book in either case.
Truth Machine Website
I'm sure they haven't missed something so obvious since they say they already have some of the areas covered, but how exactly do they keep these floats in the same place? Our hollywood actors keep getting lost in the ocean in rafts, and they keep floating into shipping lanes.. so I don't see why detection floating devices wouldn't float around either.
I have to imagine that the ocean's a bit too deep to be tying them all down to the bottom everywhere.
Either way, I'm wondering if the data will be publically available at some point in time, or if it will just be used by this one group.
Come now, who's ever heard of a "Syntarsus" before? If it was a T-rex or a triceratops getting renamed, I could see the problem.. but personally the difference between a fused ankle dino and a dead lizard doesn't make a whole lotta difference. Comeon, they're dead.
I remember reading a good 15-20 years ago in my Highlights magazine (good tech info) that the scientists were working on a holographic storage device. Instead of storing things in 2d, they store things in 3d, thus drastically increasing the storage available. They supposedly would be able to store terabites of information in a re-recordable media. Don't tell me my Highlights magazine was wrong!
Someone's going to pirate all my porn from my network.
Of course we can't expect companies / universities / people to run free access for the rest of the world to share. Look what happens when slashdot posts one link.. most independant web sites get slashdotted. What would happen if one site opened up access to all the newsgroups they had?
No one company has the bandwidth to support the entire internet's access. Once places started closing their doors, it was a run for the hills. Just like most public services, if there aren't enough outlets to support the drain on resources, we overtax what we have and cause it to close down too. The only way to get access opened again on public servers would be to have a few really large companies open up.. that would be the only way to lower the drain on everyone.
Truthfully, the bill is a good idea. While the telcoms are always looking out for their own pockets, we have to realize that progress is not made without profit. If we want global internet access to all people with infinate bandwidth (sounds good to me), then we need someone to build that bandwidth. Why would they build it? Because they see a profit in it. Why would they see a profit in fixing cable, laying more lines, etc? Because they have control over their new additions, so they're able to charge more. A company has one purpose, to make money. If we don't allow companies to make profits on their actions, then we won't see progress.
I don't see much likelyhood of a opensource fiberoptic laying company coming anytime soon.. "Honey, I'm going out for a few hours, the local ACM is going to lay a few miles of cable today.". If we want big progress, we need to let big business do what it does best.. big projects.
Maybe that label on the rear-view mirror should have said:
Don't be silly, it's always the side mirror that has the problem with perception.. so the Side mirror would need to warn about T-Rexs being slower than they appear.
"Dude, I'm going to overclock my T-Rex, get him up to 40 mph!"