Is there like a 12 step program to become an effective troll? The general lame-o psuedo-news and five or six people who try to make it sound like they have something intelligent to say, along with the modero-nazis, have taken the fun and usefulness out of this site. So, troll on!
Calm down. Can't you see that the moderators can't be bothered with news from the tech sector, especially news that has any bearing at all on anything current and tech. Now, if you find a story about cloning chickens, they might run that...
1/2 billion users does not the internet infrastructure make. Do you know how many big boxes there are? DNS, gateways, the parts that allow almost 500 million humans to looks at porn sites? How hard would it be for our government, in the name of security, or because Jesus Ashcroft thinks it's better for our souls to simply decree that the plug will be pulled?
Thankfully, a lot harder than you might think. Most of the infrastructure is owned and managed by large corporations. Thank goodness large corporations own and manage the government. As long as corporations can make money from the internet they will not allow governments to pull the plug.
So surf on, all 1/2 billion! If your hand gets tired, check out http://www.howtheinternetruns.com
This dork is making it sound like Linux and the rest of Open Source don't stand a chance because they are not commercial (e.g., closed source) and therefore cannot mature and develop.
But wait!!
How is it that Linux and the rest of Open Source have gained so much ground in so little time? Mundie claims it can't happen, but the truth is that it already has. Open Source development has outpaced closed source, not in theory, but in fact. Mundie can make all the claims and suppositions he wants to, the truth of what is actually happening is showing a different story.
On the other hand, I say that Open Source needs Microsoft. The new XP licensing scheme has generated more business than I can handle; meaning I am going to have to hire someone to keep up. And I need Microsoft for comparison and contrast, but mostly for comic relief; every time someone like Mundie makes an ominous announcement or poorly thought out invective declaration against Open Source, my customers get a jolly laugh (laughing relieves stress, you know) because they have all been dragged down the NT road of promises before switching to Open Source and they know the truth from experience.
"Look at the funny clown mommy. Why is the clown so angry?"
Reducing its lifetime? What? Oh yeah, it's the same thing as being anti-excersize because "god gives me x number of heartbeats, I want to use them carefully..." Now don't get excited.
Gee. I can hardly wait for the release of this thing they called KDE. I wonder if it will work with my 2.4.9-31 kernel?
But seriously, while teaching MCSE prep courses last year, I always tried to balance the official Micrsoft line with alternatives. This sort of discussion was so popular that I put together a Linux+ course. The interest in any viable alternative OS was there. I noticed that most students were not, per se, anti-Microsoft, but, in line with the article, they were more prone to be anti-totalitarian; they wanted alternatives. Many of my students are still using Linux and at least one of them was responsible for moving a small manufacturing operation away from NT and into the Linux fold. Mostly the movement was a result of angst caused by Microsoft's new license policy, coincidental with this student's new skills and confidence with Open Source software.
Besides, penguins are way more cool than the microsoft mascot (which is what, Bill?)...
Take a look at our system. A huge pack of lawyers make the laws. Most of those lawyers are paid by corporations. Surprise, the corporations get all the "rights" in the system. If I think that XYZ biometrics corporation sucks, I should have the right to say so. Trouble is, my puny 1st amendment rights can't hold up to the laws made by lawyers to protect corporations. We should all get used to it, because you and I, the non-corporate citizen, don't have lobbyists in government. We don't make the laws and we have very little influence on what laws are made. The message from all this? BE QUIET. CONSUME. WATCH TELEVISION.
An odd Pay Pal thing happened to me about three months ago. I own a small corporation that, at the time, offered only a very narrow range of technical services to life science researchers at only three US universities. A woman called me at around 6:00 am on the morning this all went down and told me that Pay Pal had given her my website URL because they had credited my account with some money she had paid for software (she said it was some kind of shareware or something). Very strange. I have never had any sort of an account with Pay Pal, and only really heard about them when she called. So is this an indicator of some sort of shell game they play with customers? I don't know, but it all just sort of sounds odd.
Perhaps not everything is a conspiracy, but conspiracy theory does have a certain explanitory power that is hard to match...
And... If the gov't can get more people into the prison systems (instead of addressing the causes) and then under official state supervision, society will be easier to control. As it is, there is a clear divide that is getting wider; between the 2 SUV, 2 job, 2 mesmorized by the big-screen to see anything else, idiotic, platitude spouting, non-thinking, "average American" and those who have the capacity and the drive to think for themselves.
David Brin? Maybe he should stick to "science," or writing fantasy, because his trick of simply trying to redefine freedom, liberty, and privacy will not work. What he is really saying is, "a police state is not too bad if you are one of the police."
Thank you for being clear-headed. There is still some hope that the platitudes and assault of stupid slogans has not gotten to every citizen of this nation. It is the dissidents and communicators of alternative views that will keep this country alive, not airport anal probes and corporate tax breaks...
Interesting stuff, but by no means new.
While serving with specials weapons battalions in Europe in the mid-seventies, during the height of terrorism there, our military intelligence advisors sounded the alarm then about our (the US) vulnerability to terrorist attack.
Typically, our government does not respond proactively to these sorts of threats, only reactively when something happens here at home. There is now a terrorist threat under every bed, but lets all at least try to keep in mind that as awful as the terrorist attack in New York was, the structure of our nation was never in danger. Part of the reason for the continued health of our system (individuals like Cheney and Bush aside) is that it is spread out over a large land area. We can still take some fairly small steps to help safeguard things like our power grid, but I doubt that industry or government will be proactive to a reasonable degree; they will either go overboard and focus on the wrong area, or simply wait for something to happen, and then panic.
All in all, though, we have survived a time when terrorism was much more advanced, composed of much more educated and well-funded group of European terrorists, and we have survived the attack on New York. Now, instead of realistically looking at simple measures we could take to help maintain our security, Bush and company have decided to start a world war for revenge; or perhaps a world war to draw attention away from his own lack of ethics or economic leadership ability.
Wait a minute, using a tragic and senseless act of violence to fool people into thinking he is a powerful leader, isn't that sort of a working definition of a terrorist?
The Net and Isolation
on
Browsing Alone
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Thanks for bringing up a very timely and important topic (or group of topics).
The corporatized media in this country has done its best to take over as much of the internet as possible; if they can just make the internet more like TV, where content is absolutely controlled and people are constantly bombarded with "the correct messages" (consume, be silent) then that media machine will be a little less nervous about the internet in general. Forget about television; it has already been bought and paid for by that same insane machine.
Take a look at the big Internet providers. What do they offer in the way of content? CNBC, CNN, TBS, all big players in the big machine of the media. But the internet has something TV does not; there are still some alternative sites out there on the net that give a less filtered view of reality.
My wife and I do not own a television. Not because we are poor (not that poor anyway), but because there is nothing to the TV except frontal lobe occupation. We made a decision to spend what would have been our "TV money" (cable, etc) on high speed Internet. This has caused a problem that you touched on in your essay; we are out of touch with the TV culture.
People that we sort of know sometimes make allusions and references to some popular TV show or another and we just don't "get it." Or we will hear people repeating what we find out to be advertisement slogans as a substitute for conversation. We find, as you pointed out, that we do not spend time talking face-to-face with people because people have largely forgotten how to talk.
The TV has turned this whole country into the land of platitudes: "united we stand, pledge allegiance to the corporations that own this land, in god we trust, cleansing crystals," and a plethora of other silly and mostly meaningless slogans that are supposed to stand in the place of reason and discourse. You wonder why people don't have conversations? I believe it is because people don't have anything to say and cannot remember how to say it. I believe TV has taken away most people's ability to think.
Will the Internet be next to be seized and "tamed?" If we allow it to be completely absorbed by the machine of corporatization, yes, it will become as useless of a medium as television. If, on the other hand, we (the users of the internet) can see past empty promises and hype and vote (with our $$$) we can keep the net around in a renegade, untamed, and fun iteration that will remain dynamic and useful.
Here's a job you might be suited for:
Help wanted: applicant must have 10 years IT management experience, PhD in computer science, good working knowledge of Unix, MS Windows NT, fluent in English, Spanish, and Urdu. Must be COBOL, C++, and Java master programmer. Willing to work and live in Greenland. No housing. No benefits. Starting pay $3.75 per hour. No paid overtime. Must be under 20 years old. Spelling not important.
I teach computer science at a local college. I teach MCSE cert courses and I teach Linux courses. The corporation I own helps businesses and individuals migrate (usually for a fee) to open source solutions from MS. The single biggest complaint I hear from businesses that are considering migration is dissatisfaction with the zillions of MCSE dipshits that can spout the official MS line about this or that "feature" of Windows, but have no ability beyond being able to regurgitate the MS line. All they want is somebody to fix the problem; they don't want to hear a 20-minute explanation of how pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete is a security feature. So there are two types of MS guru's: the one's that can only spout the MS line, and the one's that can fix the problem.
Linux has the same sort of division. The true open source prophet and the false prophet. Most of the false Linux guru's that I have run across hide behind a very thin veil of ignorance and just a little bit of jargon knowledge. On the other hand, most of the true Linux guru's I've run across are people who are enthusiastic about the OS (and often about open source in general). The true guru's come in all shapes and sizes and in all levels of ability, but have a common trait; they are all interested in how somebody got such and such to work and I have yet to talk to one of the true sort that was not willing to offer a suggestion or point out a potential source of information.
I sent an offer to Red Hat to do as much FREE consulting and training as I am humanly able to do for the schools they want to donate software to. I have course material and curriculum that works and I am offering it for free to any school that wants to implement an open source enterprise solution and does not have the resources to pay for these materials. I bet there will be many others who are willing to help out if some of the poorer school districts want to challenge the boys and girls from Redmond.
Some of the Linux beginners get frustrated because they cannot just call someone and quack about how they are not able to get their CD to mount and get an instant solution; they are required to learn a little. But even the new user's who are not willing or able to learn the intricacies of the OS can get help (if they are willing to suspend hostility and expend a small amount of effort) from the open source community IF THEY KNOW WHERE TO GO FOR HELP. How should they find out where to go for help? Try asking... Something in the form of, "hey, I'm new at this. Can you help me?" Trouble is, they are not used to that sort of thing because it is a concept foreign to most MS users.
I didn't turn this into a partisan issue, the supporters of this crazy notion did. I paid my dues by fighting for this country -- as a volunteer when volunteering was an unpopular thing to do. I am saying that every single one of us citizens MUST make our voices heard in OUR government and not allow a great tragedy to be a license for government running rough-shod over our freedoms (liberal democratic freedoms).
Take a look at the record of national ID card abuses in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, Israel, Singapore, Guatemala, China, and Taiwan. Not to mention the formaer Soviet block. Those are only the one's I am sure of; there likely are more cases where the notion of a national identity card started out being advertised as "for your own good, loyal citizen." So long as these people did nothing contrary to law, they had nothing to fear. Trouble is, what was contrary to law changed.
Sometimes the change was slow and carefully planned; often the change came about due to some incident that destabilized the government (or the people's voice in government). We are currently facing a situation that should make the average member of our vulgar mass of citizens sit bolt upright and drop their tv remote. Your elected officials, those politicians that are IN FACT funded by the McWorld corporate machine, are taking this crisis as the perfect opportunity to eliminate liberal democracy and replace it with intolerant conservatism.
Now is the time to guard against threats to American ideals. Not vulgar American ideas of an SUV or two in every garage and a big-screen intellect-destroying machine in every living room or ideas that are instruments of corporations gone crazy with power, but IDEALS of American freedom.
A basic freedom to pursue my life (a peaceful and non-criminal life, by the way) without fear of unreasonable interferance.
My fear might stem from the fact that I support liberal democracy and individual rights. I do not support anarchy and lawlesness and I maintain there must be laws to protect each citizen, but how long will it be before supporting liberal democracy is a crime? If the McWorld corporation figgures out a way to do it, I will be silenced because I would rather defend my rights as a free citizen than be hypnotized by the big-screen.
My fear might stem from the fact that I am a philosopher, and philosophers are usually in the first group to be put against the wall by a government out of control. Double jeapordy, so are teachers and I teach.
If you are willing to give up one iota of the freedom that I fought for (I am an honorably discharged veteran of the US Army), then shame on you. One of your responsibilities as a citizen, perhaps the most urgent and basic, is to keep a watchful eye on your government (which is supposed to be made up of the citizens, not artificial citizens called corporations) and make absolutely certain your rights and freedoms are not eroded.
As for educating you, perhaps you should read the Constitution of the United States and The Bill of Rights, along with a concise history of humanity (I suggest Arnold Toynbee). Compare what has been the form of governments in the world (and how they crumbled) with the American ideals summed up in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. It will be harder for you now, you should have learned all this in grade school, but the effort will be worthwhile.
It may cause you to proudly proclaim yourself a free American. It may cause you to insist that no part of your rights be taken from you.
You live in an odd town. 20' from end-to-end. Could I suggest a 20' chunk of cat 5? Heck, swing by the office and I'll give you 30', then you can name a street in the town after me...
I am hopefully about finished with a monumental cluster-fork from SBC/SW Bell and can tell you for certain that any amount of customer service would compete with the idiots at Bell. I would gladly pay a little extra to get away from SWB, but there is no other choice. Charter just bought ATT cable here and, even though I can see three of Charter's (brand-new) billboards touting high speed cable Internet connections out my window at home, they will not take orders or give details of cable Internet service. If there was an alternative, I would jump on it and I know that there must be others out there who would do likewise.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there like a 12 step program to become an effective troll? The general lame-o psuedo-news and five or six people who try to make it sound like they have something intelligent to say, along with the modero-nazis, have taken the fun and usefulness out of this site. So, troll on!
Good, the things are getting smaller. Now there should be no problem for you to shove your cell phone up your butt while you are driving.
Calm down. Can't you see that the moderators can't be bothered with news from the tech sector, especially news that has any bearing at all on anything current and tech. Now, if you find a story about cloning chickens, they might run that...
1/2 billion users does not the internet infrastructure make. Do you know how many big boxes there are? DNS, gateways, the parts that allow almost 500 million humans to looks at porn sites? How hard would it be for our government, in the name of security, or because Jesus Ashcroft thinks it's better for our souls to simply decree that the plug will be pulled?
Thankfully, a lot harder than you might think. Most of the infrastructure is owned and managed by large corporations. Thank goodness large corporations own and manage the government. As long as corporations can make money from the internet they will not allow governments to pull the plug.
So surf on, all 1/2 billion! If your hand gets tired, check out http://www.howtheinternetruns.com
This dork is making it sound like Linux and the rest of Open Source don't stand a chance because they are not commercial (e.g., closed source) and therefore cannot mature and develop.
But wait!!
How is it that Linux and the rest of Open Source have gained so much ground in so little time? Mundie claims it can't happen, but the truth is that it already has. Open Source development has outpaced closed source, not in theory, but in fact. Mundie can make all the claims and suppositions he wants to, the truth of what is actually happening is showing a different story.
On the other hand, I say that Open Source needs Microsoft. The new XP licensing scheme has generated more business than I can handle; meaning I am going to have to hire someone to keep up. And I need Microsoft for comparison and contrast, but mostly for comic relief; every time someone like Mundie makes an ominous announcement or poorly thought out invective declaration against Open Source, my customers get a jolly laugh (laughing relieves stress, you know) because they have all been dragged down the NT road of promises before switching to Open Source and they know the truth from experience.
"Look at the funny clown mommy. Why is the clown so angry?"
Reducing its lifetime? What? Oh yeah, it's the same thing as being anti-excersize because "god gives me x number of heartbeats, I want to use them carefully..." Now don't get excited.
Gee. I can hardly wait for the release of this thing they called KDE. I wonder if it will work with my 2.4.9-31 kernel?
But seriously, while teaching MCSE prep courses last year, I always tried to balance the official Micrsoft line with alternatives. This sort of discussion was so popular that I put together a Linux+ course. The interest in any viable alternative OS was there. I noticed that most students were not, per se, anti-Microsoft, but, in line with the article, they were more prone to be anti-totalitarian; they wanted alternatives. Many of my students are still using Linux and at least one of them was responsible for moving a small manufacturing operation away from NT and into the Linux fold. Mostly the movement was a result of angst caused by Microsoft's new license policy, coincidental with this student's new skills and confidence with Open Source software.
Besides, penguins are way more cool than the microsoft mascot (which is what, Bill?)...
Take a look at our system. A huge pack of lawyers make the laws. Most of those lawyers are paid by corporations. Surprise, the corporations get all the "rights" in the system. If I think that XYZ biometrics corporation sucks, I should have the right to say so. Trouble is, my puny 1st amendment rights can't hold up to the laws made by lawyers to protect corporations. We should all get used to it, because you and I, the non-corporate citizen, don't have lobbyists in government. We don't make the laws and we have very little influence on what laws are made. The message from all this? BE QUIET. CONSUME. WATCH TELEVISION.
An odd Pay Pal thing happened to me about three months ago. I own a small corporation that, at the time, offered only a very narrow range of technical services to life science researchers at only three US universities. A woman called me at around 6:00 am on the morning this all went down and told me that Pay Pal had given her my website URL because they had credited my account with some money she had paid for software (she said it was some kind of shareware or something). Very strange. I have never had any sort of an account with Pay Pal, and only really heard about them when she called. So is this an indicator of some sort of shell game they play with customers? I don't know, but it all just sort of sounds odd. Perhaps not everything is a conspiracy, but conspiracy theory does have a certain explanitory power that is hard to match...
Did you say a complete Netscape clone? Oh, that's what I thought you said...
Serious answer: http://www.borg.com/~warrend/guru.html
And... If the gov't can get more people into the prison systems (instead of addressing the causes) and then under official state supervision, society will be easier to control. As it is, there is a clear divide that is getting wider; between the 2 SUV, 2 job, 2 mesmorized by the big-screen to see anything else, idiotic, platitude spouting, non-thinking, "average American" and those who have the capacity and the drive to think for themselves. David Brin? Maybe he should stick to "science," or writing fantasy, because his trick of simply trying to redefine freedom, liberty, and privacy will not work. What he is really saying is, "a police state is not too bad if you are one of the police."
Thank you for being clear-headed. There is still some hope that the platitudes and assault of stupid slogans has not gotten to every citizen of this nation. It is the dissidents and communicators of alternative views that will keep this country alive, not airport anal probes and corporate tax breaks...
Interesting stuff, but by no means new. While serving with specials weapons battalions in Europe in the mid-seventies, during the height of terrorism there, our military intelligence advisors sounded the alarm then about our (the US) vulnerability to terrorist attack. Typically, our government does not respond proactively to these sorts of threats, only reactively when something happens here at home. There is now a terrorist threat under every bed, but lets all at least try to keep in mind that as awful as the terrorist attack in New York was, the structure of our nation was never in danger. Part of the reason for the continued health of our system (individuals like Cheney and Bush aside) is that it is spread out over a large land area. We can still take some fairly small steps to help safeguard things like our power grid, but I doubt that industry or government will be proactive to a reasonable degree; they will either go overboard and focus on the wrong area, or simply wait for something to happen, and then panic. All in all, though, we have survived a time when terrorism was much more advanced, composed of much more educated and well-funded group of European terrorists, and we have survived the attack on New York. Now, instead of realistically looking at simple measures we could take to help maintain our security, Bush and company have decided to start a world war for revenge; or perhaps a world war to draw attention away from his own lack of ethics or economic leadership ability. Wait a minute, using a tragic and senseless act of violence to fool people into thinking he is a powerful leader, isn't that sort of a working definition of a terrorist?
Thanks for bringing up a very timely and important topic (or group of topics). The corporatized media in this country has done its best to take over as much of the internet as possible; if they can just make the internet more like TV, where content is absolutely controlled and people are constantly bombarded with "the correct messages" (consume, be silent) then that media machine will be a little less nervous about the internet in general. Forget about television; it has already been bought and paid for by that same insane machine. Take a look at the big Internet providers. What do they offer in the way of content? CNBC, CNN, TBS, all big players in the big machine of the media. But the internet has something TV does not; there are still some alternative sites out there on the net that give a less filtered view of reality. My wife and I do not own a television. Not because we are poor (not that poor anyway), but because there is nothing to the TV except frontal lobe occupation. We made a decision to spend what would have been our "TV money" (cable, etc) on high speed Internet. This has caused a problem that you touched on in your essay; we are out of touch with the TV culture. People that we sort of know sometimes make allusions and references to some popular TV show or another and we just don't "get it." Or we will hear people repeating what we find out to be advertisement slogans as a substitute for conversation. We find, as you pointed out, that we do not spend time talking face-to-face with people because people have largely forgotten how to talk. The TV has turned this whole country into the land of platitudes: "united we stand, pledge allegiance to the corporations that own this land, in god we trust, cleansing crystals," and a plethora of other silly and mostly meaningless slogans that are supposed to stand in the place of reason and discourse. You wonder why people don't have conversations? I believe it is because people don't have anything to say and cannot remember how to say it. I believe TV has taken away most people's ability to think. Will the Internet be next to be seized and "tamed?" If we allow it to be completely absorbed by the machine of corporatization, yes, it will become as useless of a medium as television. If, on the other hand, we (the users of the internet) can see past empty promises and hype and vote (with our $$$) we can keep the net around in a renegade, untamed, and fun iteration that will remain dynamic and useful.
Here's a job you might be suited for: Help wanted: applicant must have 10 years IT management experience, PhD in computer science, good working knowledge of Unix, MS Windows NT, fluent in English, Spanish, and Urdu. Must be COBOL, C++, and Java master programmer. Willing to work and live in Greenland. No housing. No benefits. Starting pay $3.75 per hour. No paid overtime. Must be under 20 years old. Spelling not important.
I teach computer science at a local college. I teach MCSE cert courses and I teach Linux courses. The corporation I own helps businesses and individuals migrate (usually for a fee) to open source solutions from MS. The single biggest complaint I hear from businesses that are considering migration is dissatisfaction with the zillions of MCSE dipshits that can spout the official MS line about this or that "feature" of Windows, but have no ability beyond being able to regurgitate the MS line. All they want is somebody to fix the problem; they don't want to hear a 20-minute explanation of how pressing Ctrl-Alt-Delete is a security feature. So there are two types of MS guru's: the one's that can only spout the MS line, and the one's that can fix the problem. Linux has the same sort of division. The true open source prophet and the false prophet. Most of the false Linux guru's that I have run across hide behind a very thin veil of ignorance and just a little bit of jargon knowledge. On the other hand, most of the true Linux guru's I've run across are people who are enthusiastic about the OS (and often about open source in general). The true guru's come in all shapes and sizes and in all levels of ability, but have a common trait; they are all interested in how somebody got such and such to work and I have yet to talk to one of the true sort that was not willing to offer a suggestion or point out a potential source of information. I sent an offer to Red Hat to do as much FREE consulting and training as I am humanly able to do for the schools they want to donate software to. I have course material and curriculum that works and I am offering it for free to any school that wants to implement an open source enterprise solution and does not have the resources to pay for these materials. I bet there will be many others who are willing to help out if some of the poorer school districts want to challenge the boys and girls from Redmond. Some of the Linux beginners get frustrated because they cannot just call someone and quack about how they are not able to get their CD to mount and get an instant solution; they are required to learn a little. But even the new user's who are not willing or able to learn the intricacies of the OS can get help (if they are willing to suspend hostility and expend a small amount of effort) from the open source community IF THEY KNOW WHERE TO GO FOR HELP. How should they find out where to go for help? Try asking... Something in the form of, "hey, I'm new at this. Can you help me?" Trouble is, they are not used to that sort of thing because it is a concept foreign to most MS users.
I didn't turn this into a partisan issue, the supporters of this crazy notion did. I paid my dues by fighting for this country -- as a volunteer when volunteering was an unpopular thing to do. I am saying that every single one of us citizens MUST make our voices heard in OUR government and not allow a great tragedy to be a license for government running rough-shod over our freedoms (liberal democratic freedoms).
Take a look at the record of national ID card abuses in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, Israel, Singapore, Guatemala, China, and Taiwan. Not to mention the formaer Soviet block. Those are only the one's I am sure of; there likely are more cases where the notion of a national identity card started out being advertised as "for your own good, loyal citizen." So long as these people did nothing contrary to law, they had nothing to fear. Trouble is, what was contrary to law changed.
Sometimes the change was slow and carefully planned; often the change came about due to some incident that destabilized the government (or the people's voice in government). We are currently facing a situation that should make the average member of our vulgar mass of citizens sit bolt upright and drop their tv remote. Your elected officials, those politicians that are IN FACT funded by the McWorld corporate machine, are taking this crisis as the perfect opportunity to eliminate liberal democracy and replace it with intolerant conservatism.
Now is the time to guard against threats to American ideals. Not vulgar American ideas of an SUV or two in every garage and a big-screen intellect-destroying machine in every living room or ideas that are instruments of corporations gone crazy with power, but IDEALS of American freedom.
A basic freedom to pursue my life (a peaceful and non-criminal life, by the way) without fear of unreasonable interferance.
My fear might stem from the fact that I support liberal democracy and individual rights. I do not support anarchy and lawlesness and I maintain there must be laws to protect each citizen, but how long will it be before supporting liberal democracy is a crime? If the McWorld corporation figgures out a way to do it, I will be silenced because I would rather defend my rights as a free citizen than be hypnotized by the big-screen.
My fear might stem from the fact that I am a philosopher, and philosophers are usually in the first group to be put against the wall by a government out of control. Double jeapordy, so are teachers and I teach.
If you are willing to give up one iota of the freedom that I fought for (I am an honorably discharged veteran of the US Army), then shame on you. One of your responsibilities as a citizen, perhaps the most urgent and basic, is to keep a watchful eye on your government (which is supposed to be made up of the citizens, not artificial citizens called corporations) and make absolutely certain your rights and freedoms are not eroded.
As for educating you, perhaps you should read the Constitution of the United States and The Bill of Rights, along with a concise history of humanity (I suggest Arnold Toynbee). Compare what has been the form of governments in the world (and how they crumbled) with the American ideals summed up in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. It will be harder for you now, you should have learned all this in grade school, but the effort will be worthwhile.
It may cause you to proudly proclaim yourself a free American. It may cause you to insist that no part of your rights be taken from you.
You live in an odd town. 20' from end-to-end. Could I suggest a 20' chunk of cat 5? Heck, swing by the office and I'll give you 30', then you can name a street in the town after me...
I am hopefully about finished with a monumental cluster-fork from SBC/SW Bell and can tell you for certain that any amount of customer service would compete with the idiots at Bell. I would gladly pay a little extra to get away from SWB, but there is no other choice. Charter just bought ATT cable here and, even though I can see three of Charter's (brand-new) billboards touting high speed cable Internet connections out my window at home, they will not take orders or give details of cable Internet service. If there was an alternative, I would jump on it and I know that there must be others out there who would do likewise.