How does that 34s compare to something like the 48 series? I think HP is still making those, right (under a different number)? I love mine, but it is going on 20 years old now. I certainly wouldn't mind a nicer display or processor, but I really like the display size and feature set. The screen on the 34s looks a bit limited with the mostly numeric display and a single line. How well does it handle things like units/etc?
I'll have to skim the manual I suppose. Thanks for pointing it out - I hadn't even heard of it, but I'm far from a calculator enthusiast.
Obviously a connection between a party with a 50Mbps and a 10Mbps connection is going to run at 10Mbps. However, it shouldn't run at 2Mbps, and that is the issue here.
Netflix obviously needs to pay for a connection to the internet capable of carrying their traffic. The problem is that traffic is being throttled on the client ISP side, and the client paid for a broadband connection.
I don't have a problem with throttling of non-interactive use on a residential service, since in theory non-interactive use isn't covered under the SLA. I do think that non-interactive use shouldn't be as expensive as it is, but that is a separate issue.
She went from only knowing maybe a few dozen words to posting on Facebook in less than a few years.
Wow. That's a pretty big set back. I feel so sorry for her.
Yup. She was an avid reader and had excellent verbal skills in general. It was a bit bizarre after the stroke as she would struggle with one-syllable words and then whip out an adverb like "evidently."
ctrl-S is still alive and well and suspending most things.
Yup. Drives me nuts that linux generally uses scroll lock to do the same thing. Guess what key my KVM uses to switch connections? Oh, and as an added bonus many programs halt when the scrollback buffer becomes full, which I think can include the kernel if it is trying to write to it.
Something else I'd emphasize is ensuring that the primary caregiver(s) form a practical relationship with the disabled woman that they can sustain. Keep in mind that beyond communications difficulties there could be emotional or behavioral issues resulting from a stroke.
I have a close relative who went through a stroke and besides the difficulty of coping with the disability itself there was a HUGE strain on relationships. We're talking about somebody who was generally fairly nice to everybody screaming four letter words and literally grinding teeth in frustration, or actually being moved to tears when hearing stories that would cause most people to simply say, "that's a sad story."
Anybody who lives with somebody who is disabled really does need to be supported as much as possible. They need to push back when they need to if the relationship becomes unsustainable. Nobody will be better off if something like this leads to estrangement/divorce/etc.
It is a challenge that never ends. However, it does tend to settle down and gradually improve over a fairly long period of time (in my experience). In the meantime continue doing everything you can to make her as independent as possible, and to find ways for everybody to accomodate each other.
For somebody who isn't an immediate caregiver but who is concerned, check in with the caregiver from time to time. From my experience people in this situation tend to get flooded with attention, meals, visits, etc for a week or two, and then they're on their own. If you're a relative, don't wait for them to bring things up - ask them if there is anything that you can be doing to help them. Even if they say no you've probably given them some encouragement.
I wish I could offer more practical advice. I know a fair bit about helping people with anomic aphasia now, but nothing about people who are locked in. I imagine that a common theme will be patience. If they need help with something you need to immediately resign yourself to the fact that whatever it is that you were planning to get done at that moment probably isn't going to get done, and just take your time. If there isn't time, then tell them that the best you can do is give them something to tide them over and that you'll get back to them later, at which time they'll get your full sustained attention. However, something like this will teach ANYBODY patience.
I have a close relative with who suffered a stroke which caused aphasia. She went from only knowing maybe a few dozen words to posting on Facebook in less than a few years. While many things frustrate her to no end (those cute memes you post on social networking would benefit from screen-reader-compatible text in the post), the fact is that she is fairly functional now and able to enjoy many things in life.
Oh, another little public service message to anybody who works in a government licensing examination capacity: somebody with anomic aphasia might be perfectly capable of understanding the driving laws but be unable to complete a multiple choice exam, even if the question and answers are read aloud without modification. There really should be an accommodation where somebody is allowed to be interviewed as long as they can demonstrate the necessary proficiency - somebody with anomic aphasia can often explain things in their own words rather well.
If she has higher brain function, and from the summary it seems she has full higher brain function, pulling the plug without asking her would be murder.
So ask. Hook her up with one of those Stephen Hawking eye-tracker things, and ask her what she wants.
Frankly, I would not do that until she has learned to cope with her condition. I have a close relative who went through a debilitating stroke and honestly I was about ready to drag her in to a psych ward I was so concerned about suicide risk. Today she gets incredibly frustrated with things, but for the most part is living happily and reasonably productively for somebody who is disabled. She needs a lot of help, but I think that a decision to commit suicide would have been a rash one.
It is simply unwise to make any life decision just after going through a traumatic event. If in a year nothing has changed somebody in this condition would be in a much better place to make a thoughtful evaluation. Maybe less time is required. However, it is foolish to contemplate something like assisted suicide a short time after something like this.
Could it just be that children are really good at adapting, and they're adapting to a world that you and I haven't fully figured out how to live in?
Motor skills are useful when you have to spear a boar to eat, or drive a car. When your job is to design a machine that can kill 100 pigs at once and process the meat, or operate your self-driving car, motor skills are less important.
About the only time I actually sit face-to-face with a human being and talk is when I have meals with my wife - in a few hours I'll be in meetings at work which consists of putting on a headset and looking at my laptop. A few of us were in a meeting discussing requirements elicitation in an agile environment and marveling at just how much easier it is to communicate when we're all in the same room - it was my only in-person meeting this week. The two people I meet most often with in my biggest project at work live 150mi and 470mi away, and the software vendor we're working with lives 500mi away in a different direction. We're fortunate enough to actually see each other maybe once a month or so, which is a bit unusual for these kinds of projects at work.
When people think of sci-fi concepts like uploading your consciousness to a computer the tendency is to think of it as being very depersonalizing. When I think about the realities of how we tend to communicate these days, sometimes I think that if anything such a world would be far more personal than what we're doing today.
The best way to deal with the situation is for cities to encourage new ISP's to build out last mile connections. Make it easy without a lot of red tape. Phone companies and cable companies will yell and scream, but there is nothing they can do legally. It is up to the city to manage right-of-way so that things don't get messy. So instead of complaining to the FCC, go to your city council and see what can be done to encourage Google Fiber to come to your city.
Yeah, anybody going to their local city council will be told that the state has already barred the city from offering municipal data service.
There is no money in building out additional last mile connections. If you do it the local cable company will just cut rates until you go out of business, and then raise them again. Even if there were no red tape at all I doubt anybody would invest private money in it.
If the local electric utility wanted to charge 20 cents/kWh the solution wouldn't be to encourage private companies to build competing electric grids. Nobody would take you up on that. The solution is what every state in the US already does - just tell them that all rate changes have to be approved, and this one is not.
Don't get me wrong - I'd love to be able to choose between 5 different electric power providers, and such a system would be far more robust than the one we have today. The problem is that it just isn't economically feasible, which is why nobody anywhere does it this way. Cellular data service is far easier to roll out than cable/fiber/wires to each home and yet even that is minimally competitive.
While it is most certainly valid for Comcast users to expect reasonable upgrades, it is most definitely not up to Level 3, Netflix or anyone else to dictate to Comcast whether or not to invest in a particular area.
When I bought service from my ISP the level of service I paid for was 50Mbps symmetric. Now, I'm fine with the fine print saying that the connection is for interactive client use only - this is a consumer level service and is oversold. However, if I'm sitting in front of a network-connected device, I should be able to connect to any arbitrary server on the internet and achieve 50Mbps transfer rates at any time of day.
If my ISP can't deliver me the level of service they sold to me, then they are not keeping up their end of the contract. The reason for this really isn't relevant. I think most would give them the benefit of the doubt if hurricane Sandy just blew through and half the telephone poles in the state are down. I think most would tolerate issues if some super-popular event is hosted online and 75% of the US is trying to stream it (especially if those hosting the event didn't make any provision for multicasting/etc). However, there simply should not be day-to-day issues with accessing sites like Youtube or Netflix. I wouldn't have bought a 50Mbps connection if I didn't expect to be able to stream HD video.
They're not advertising that they're selling last-mile connections to a CO. They're advertising that they're selling internet access. That means that they need to provide the advertised bandwidth TO THE INTERNET, not to the local CO.
You say you don't want to make money from the peering, but you also don't want to lose money. The costs have to go somewhere, and the customer is the most likely recipient.
I don't really see the problem with charging the customers for the bandwidth/volume that they consume. Sony doesn't have to pay the electric company an extra fee for the power needed to run my TV, but that doesn't mean that I can just set my air conditioner to 60F and let somebody else worry about the bill.
If I stream more, I should pay more. It shouldn't matter where I stream it from.
That said, current broadband providers are monopolies and costs should be both regulated and reduced regularly as technology marches on, at least for anybody who doesn't have a choice of at least 4 independent high-volume broadband providers. I shouldn't be paying by the megabyte in today's day and age.
Critical API like the new sensor agnostic Location API in android 4.4 is not open anymore. It's part of the closed source Google Play services. They even changed the sdk licence a while back.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of that trend.
On the one hand I like the fact that they can update play services even if the base OS isn't being updated, which means more updated APIs for everybody to use. On the other hand, I wish that this could be done via an open-source layer that does the same thing. That said, if it were open source nothing would prevent everybody and their uncle from forking it and preventing updates, which is what happened with the base APIs.
No: however it becomes a SINGLE collection point of all our data.
Making it even easier for Uncle Sam to server a single NSL and collect all our data in return.
I'd rather make it harder on the old bugger.
They're going to get your data no matter what online server you use. If you don't talk to anybody else, then they probably don't care about you. If for whatever reason they think they do care about you, then they will know everything there is to know about you no matter what you do about it.
I run a tor relay and I'd be shocked if the NSA didn't have root access to the machine I'm typing this on. Whatever - I don't do anything they'd care about, and if I thought there was some way to keep them out of it I would, but short of commissioning private code reviews for everything I run that just isn't possible.
Yup - I spent all of a few minutes messing with this streaming from Windows to a Linux box. This linux box has decent RAM/CPU, but the video card probably cost me all of $20 (or maybe it is integrated - I forget offhand but you get the picture). It struggles just to play 1080p video.
I found the streaming reasonably decent. It would be fine for turn-based games like Civilization, or even RTS. It might be a bit more wanting for FPS, but it probably would be usable.
Having this feature would definitely be a selling point if I wanted to think about buying a steambox. It would mean that my windows-only games would suddenly be more playable from the living room.
Agreed, in which case most people in most cultures wouldn't believe it. It was your example.
The point is, herd mentality is often poisonous. Any 'benefits' it has is overshadowed by the detriments. The detriment is often nothing more than the promotion of extreme ignorance.
Lots of species herd - clearly forming herds is often a survival advantage.
If you take a group of apes you might observe that one male gets to sleep with all the females, and he gets to beat up anybody who doesn't fall into line. From a traditional sense of fairness that seems pretty lousy for just about everybody other than the alpha male. On the other hand, from a species survival standpoint it seems to work out fairly well.
The problem is that this doesn't seem to translate as well into a world where the alpha male has enough intelligence to decide to implement purges/etc.
And if most people in most cultures believed that 1+1=3, I'd think it would be an interesting experiment to try to determine if that belief confers an advantage.
If they had something that basic wrong, their society would most likely be a technology-free wasteland.
Agreed, in which case most people in most cultures wouldn't believe it. It was your example.
There's no reason that I see that it has to be some sort of "creator," and history shows that it doesn't really make a difference; if someone doesn't like you, you'll be destroyed if they have more power.
The fact that you can't see a reason doesn't mean that a reason doesn't exist. Most people in most cultures seem to believe in the existence of a creator. Why is that?
Maybe it is because the belief confers some kind of advantage on a culture.
Maybe it is for the same reason that people used to think the world was flat - just a tendency with no real advantage.
It really isn't possible to say for sure short of human experimentation.
the company that owns The History Channel also runs a lot of other channels and tells the cable companies they have to license all of them or none
Yup, but that isn't the "point of cable." Since there are many stakeholders with conflicting interests I don't know how you can say there is any one "point of cable." The point of the cable companies is to make money, and providing service seems to be a byproduct of what they do. The point of consumers is to watch the shows they like, and getting channels they don't like is a side effect, and an undesirable one insofar as it costs them more.
that's the point of cable, lots of niche channels where you only watch a few that you like
From a customer standpoint, the point of cable is that I want to watch the History channel, and it isn't available OTA.
Maybe if you're a cable exec the point of cable is to find ways to charge people for services they don't want. That is more the point of the guy who runs up to your car and washes your window while you're stopped at a light.
The only way cable companies can get away with it is that there is no competition. If the local Walmart forced everybody to buy at least 24 different products every time they walked in the door they'd go out of business. Amazon sells like gangbusters by giving people honest reviews, decent prices, a catalog that includes just about everything that is sold anywhere, and a few options for paying for the shipping. Real businesses have to strip out the non-value-adds to stay in business. Utilities that are allowed to run like conventional businesses become scam operations.
You know nothing of the industry. There are hundreds of ISPs for sale in the United States RIGHT NOW. Go buy one. It'll cost you a few million for a small one.
We're talking about residential broadband. I doubt that more than 0.1% of the population is served by anybody other than one of the major phone or cable companies.
If you're talking about businesses buying dedicated lines then that is a different story. In such volumes the last mile problem isn't so much of a problem - you can just run a single line to them and bill them $10k for it, and the business doesn't care because they're paying that much every month. If you try to offer residential broadband with a $10k start-up fee you'll never get a single customer, and it isn't any cheaper to run a cable to a residence than to a skyscraper.
Oh, and I'm sure there are resellers out there who offer some kind of value-add on top of one of the big phone/cable companies, and they just pay the phone/cable company to use their existing infrastructure.
why aren't the big ISPs like Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T buying up all these ISPs?
Because they aren't in the same business. The ISPs you talk of are probably in actual competition. If my employer got a call that the ISP wanted to raise rates by 10% at the next contract renewal, they'd get to go through the usual procurement dog and pony show all over again. At significant volumes the up-front costs to switch are fairly low. The professional negotiators would also ensure the contracts are neutral at worst, but most likely slanted towards my employer. Big corporations don't sign contracts of adhesion.
The big telecoms do get into that business as well, but the rates are fairly competitive. When the data volumes are significant they don't really have any last-mile advantages either - even the local phone company will probably need to run a dedicated line as there is unlikely to be sufficient capacity already on the poles. At best they only have advantages of scale.
If most people in a society believe that 1 + 1 = 3, does that society have a competitive advantage over those which do not?
It isn't a matter of whether most people in a society believe something. The more relevant factor is whether most people in most societies believe something.
And if most people in most cultures believed that 1+1=3, I'd think it would be an interesting experiment to try to determine if that belief confers an advantage. Granted, I'm not sure how you could perform such an experiment in a controlled and ethical fashion. The best you could do is the usual sort of historical comparison study, and you could never be sure what the results mean.
People tend to have a herd mentality. If you want to get them to do something in their own collective interests the most effective way to go about it may not be to give them all the facts and let them make individual informed decisions. That's why people like you and I will probably never succeed in politics - I don't have any more stomach for this sort of thing than you appear to have.
Well, I'm not sure if we can conclude whether accepting reality does or doesn't cause more abuse.
Again, given history, we have no reason to believe it does. One can claim that their rights exist in some form no matter what, but history shows that it's trivial for those with power to ignore their pleas and just do as they please.
Many examples of this exist, but those in power get their power because people are willing to follow them. Ideology has the potential to influence people.
Think about it another way - commonly held beliefs are commonly held for a reason. Do societies that hold to them have a competitive advantage over those which do not?
No matter how much you whine and cry about how you have creator-given rights... [emphasis mine]
When did I ever claim such a thing? I'm merely saying that this was the perspective the US Constitution was written from, and to understand what was meant you need to understand what the writers were thinking.
Accepting reality (that rights don't just magically exist) does not cause more abuse, and even if it did, that would, to me, be no excuse to back away from the truth.
Well, I'm not sure if we can conclude whether accepting reality does or doesn't cause more abuse. I don't know that anybody has actually done the experiment. Whether the truth being unpleasant is reason to back away from it depends on your values. Is a convenient lie that saves lives better than an inconvenient truth?
My point was just that if I told you that the job I finished was a piece of cake you'd be a fool to conclude that I'm a professional baker, even though that would be reasonably deduced from my statement on the face of it. That's all.
You said: "People in general have rights because they banded together and decided to create governments that have certain limits on their powers, among other things."
So, just what rights do you have, exactly? How do you know that you have them? What would it take for you to no longer have those rights?
If your argument is that you only have rights insofar as other people grant them to you, then there is nothing immoral about everybody banding together and deciding that you don't have those rights. That is what I meant by "which can be used to justify all kinds of abuse."
Now, you asked, "Furthermore, explain how the government is currently infringing upon nearly everyone's rights in one way or another, even though most people believe in that creator nonsense in the US."
The answer is that in reality if everybody bands together and decides that you don't have rights, then there is nothing you can do about it. Whether or not that is justifiable depends on where you think rights come from. Whether or not you think it is justified, there is still nothing you can do about it.
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How does that 34s compare to something like the 48 series? I think HP is still making those, right (under a different number)? I love mine, but it is going on 20 years old now. I certainly wouldn't mind a nicer display or processor, but I really like the display size and feature set. The screen on the 34s looks a bit limited with the mostly numeric display and a single line. How well does it handle things like units/etc?
I'll have to skim the manual I suppose. Thanks for pointing it out - I hadn't even heard of it, but I'm far from a calculator enthusiast.
Obviously a connection between a party with a 50Mbps and a 10Mbps connection is going to run at 10Mbps. However, it shouldn't run at 2Mbps, and that is the issue here.
Netflix obviously needs to pay for a connection to the internet capable of carrying their traffic. The problem is that traffic is being throttled on the client ISP side, and the client paid for a broadband connection.
I don't have a problem with throttling of non-interactive use on a residential service, since in theory non-interactive use isn't covered under the SLA. I do think that non-interactive use shouldn't be as expensive as it is, but that is a separate issue.
She went from only knowing maybe a few dozen words to posting on Facebook in less than a few years.
Wow. That's a pretty big set back. I feel so sorry for her.
Yup. She was an avid reader and had excellent verbal skills in general. It was a bit bizarre after the stroke as she would struggle with one-syllable words and then whip out an adverb like "evidently."
ctrl-S is still alive and well and suspending most things.
Yup. Drives me nuts that linux generally uses scroll lock to do the same thing. Guess what key my KVM uses to switch connections? Oh, and as an added bonus many programs halt when the scrollback buffer becomes full, which I think can include the kernel if it is trying to write to it.
Something else I'd emphasize is ensuring that the primary caregiver(s) form a practical relationship with the disabled woman that they can sustain. Keep in mind that beyond communications difficulties there could be emotional or behavioral issues resulting from a stroke.
I have a close relative who went through a stroke and besides the difficulty of coping with the disability itself there was a HUGE strain on relationships. We're talking about somebody who was generally fairly nice to everybody screaming four letter words and literally grinding teeth in frustration, or actually being moved to tears when hearing stories that would cause most people to simply say, "that's a sad story."
Anybody who lives with somebody who is disabled really does need to be supported as much as possible. They need to push back when they need to if the relationship becomes unsustainable. Nobody will be better off if something like this leads to estrangement/divorce/etc.
It is a challenge that never ends. However, it does tend to settle down and gradually improve over a fairly long period of time (in my experience). In the meantime continue doing everything you can to make her as independent as possible, and to find ways for everybody to accomodate each other.
For somebody who isn't an immediate caregiver but who is concerned, check in with the caregiver from time to time. From my experience people in this situation tend to get flooded with attention, meals, visits, etc for a week or two, and then they're on their own. If you're a relative, don't wait for them to bring things up - ask them if there is anything that you can be doing to help them. Even if they say no you've probably given them some encouragement.
I wish I could offer more practical advice. I know a fair bit about helping people with anomic aphasia now, but nothing about people who are locked in. I imagine that a common theme will be patience. If they need help with something you need to immediately resign yourself to the fact that whatever it is that you were planning to get done at that moment probably isn't going to get done, and just take your time. If there isn't time, then tell them that the best you can do is give them something to tide them over and that you'll get back to them later, at which time they'll get your full sustained attention. However, something like this will teach ANYBODY patience.
Couldn't agree more.
I have a close relative with who suffered a stroke which caused aphasia. She went from only knowing maybe a few dozen words to posting on Facebook in less than a few years. While many things frustrate her to no end (those cute memes you post on social networking would benefit from screen-reader-compatible text in the post), the fact is that she is fairly functional now and able to enjoy many things in life.
Oh, another little public service message to anybody who works in a government licensing examination capacity: somebody with anomic aphasia might be perfectly capable of understanding the driving laws but be unable to complete a multiple choice exam, even if the question and answers are read aloud without modification. There really should be an accommodation where somebody is allowed to be interviewed as long as they can demonstrate the necessary proficiency - somebody with anomic aphasia can often explain things in their own words rather well.
If she has higher brain function, and from the summary it seems she has full higher brain function, pulling the plug without asking her would be murder.
So ask. Hook her up with one of those Stephen Hawking eye-tracker things, and ask her what she wants.
Frankly, I would not do that until she has learned to cope with her condition. I have a close relative who went through a debilitating stroke and honestly I was about ready to drag her in to a psych ward I was so concerned about suicide risk. Today she gets incredibly frustrated with things, but for the most part is living happily and reasonably productively for somebody who is disabled. She needs a lot of help, but I think that a decision to commit suicide would have been a rash one.
It is simply unwise to make any life decision just after going through a traumatic event. If in a year nothing has changed somebody in this condition would be in a much better place to make a thoughtful evaluation. Maybe less time is required. However, it is foolish to contemplate something like assisted suicide a short time after something like this.
Could it just be that children are really good at adapting, and they're adapting to a world that you and I haven't fully figured out how to live in?
Motor skills are useful when you have to spear a boar to eat, or drive a car. When your job is to design a machine that can kill 100 pigs at once and process the meat, or operate your self-driving car, motor skills are less important.
About the only time I actually sit face-to-face with a human being and talk is when I have meals with my wife - in a few hours I'll be in meetings at work which consists of putting on a headset and looking at my laptop. A few of us were in a meeting discussing requirements elicitation in an agile environment and marveling at just how much easier it is to communicate when we're all in the same room - it was my only in-person meeting this week. The two people I meet most often with in my biggest project at work live 150mi and 470mi away, and the software vendor we're working with lives 500mi away in a different direction. We're fortunate enough to actually see each other maybe once a month or so, which is a bit unusual for these kinds of projects at work.
When people think of sci-fi concepts like uploading your consciousness to a computer the tendency is to think of it as being very depersonalizing. When I think about the realities of how we tend to communicate these days, sometimes I think that if anything such a world would be far more personal than what we're doing today.
The best way to deal with the situation is for cities to encourage new ISP's to build out last mile connections. Make it easy without a lot of red tape. Phone companies and cable companies will yell and scream, but there is nothing they can do legally. It is up to the city to manage right-of-way so that things don't get messy. So instead of complaining to the FCC, go to your city council and see what can be done to encourage Google Fiber to come to your city.
Yeah, anybody going to their local city council will be told that the state has already barred the city from offering municipal data service.
There is no money in building out additional last mile connections. If you do it the local cable company will just cut rates until you go out of business, and then raise them again. Even if there were no red tape at all I doubt anybody would invest private money in it.
If the local electric utility wanted to charge 20 cents/kWh the solution wouldn't be to encourage private companies to build competing electric grids. Nobody would take you up on that. The solution is what every state in the US already does - just tell them that all rate changes have to be approved, and this one is not.
Don't get me wrong - I'd love to be able to choose between 5 different electric power providers, and such a system would be far more robust than the one we have today. The problem is that it just isn't economically feasible, which is why nobody anywhere does it this way. Cellular data service is far easier to roll out than cable/fiber/wires to each home and yet even that is minimally competitive.
So maybe the problem is with Comcast's business model?
It seems to be working rather well for them, mainly because we're idiots for letting our elected representatives let them get away with it.
While it is most certainly valid for Comcast users to expect reasonable upgrades, it is most definitely not up to Level 3, Netflix or anyone else to dictate to Comcast whether or not to invest in a particular area.
When I bought service from my ISP the level of service I paid for was 50Mbps symmetric. Now, I'm fine with the fine print saying that the connection is for interactive client use only - this is a consumer level service and is oversold. However, if I'm sitting in front of a network-connected device, I should be able to connect to any arbitrary server on the internet and achieve 50Mbps transfer rates at any time of day.
If my ISP can't deliver me the level of service they sold to me, then they are not keeping up their end of the contract. The reason for this really isn't relevant. I think most would give them the benefit of the doubt if hurricane Sandy just blew through and half the telephone poles in the state are down. I think most would tolerate issues if some super-popular event is hosted online and 75% of the US is trying to stream it (especially if those hosting the event didn't make any provision for multicasting/etc). However, there simply should not be day-to-day issues with accessing sites like Youtube or Netflix. I wouldn't have bought a 50Mbps connection if I didn't expect to be able to stream HD video.
They're not advertising that they're selling last-mile connections to a CO. They're advertising that they're selling internet access. That means that they need to provide the advertised bandwidth TO THE INTERNET, not to the local CO.
You say you don't want to make money from the peering, but you also don't want to lose money. The costs have to go somewhere, and the customer is the most likely recipient.
I don't really see the problem with charging the customers for the bandwidth/volume that they consume. Sony doesn't have to pay the electric company an extra fee for the power needed to run my TV, but that doesn't mean that I can just set my air conditioner to 60F and let somebody else worry about the bill.
If I stream more, I should pay more. It shouldn't matter where I stream it from.
That said, current broadband providers are monopolies and costs should be both regulated and reduced regularly as technology marches on, at least for anybody who doesn't have a choice of at least 4 independent high-volume broadband providers. I shouldn't be paying by the megabyte in today's day and age.
Critical API like the new sensor agnostic Location API in android 4.4 is not open anymore. It's part of the closed source Google Play services. They even changed the sdk licence a while back.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of that trend.
On the one hand I like the fact that they can update play services even if the base OS isn't being updated, which means more updated APIs for everybody to use. On the other hand, I wish that this could be done via an open-source layer that does the same thing. That said, if it were open source nothing would prevent everybody and their uncle from forking it and preventing updates, which is what happened with the base APIs.
No: however it becomes a SINGLE collection point of all our data.
Making it even easier for Uncle Sam to server a single NSL and collect all our data in return.
I'd rather make it harder on the old bugger.
They're going to get your data no matter what online server you use. If you don't talk to anybody else, then they probably don't care about you. If for whatever reason they think they do care about you, then they will know everything there is to know about you no matter what you do about it.
I run a tor relay and I'd be shocked if the NSA didn't have root access to the machine I'm typing this on. Whatever - I don't do anything they'd care about, and if I thought there was some way to keep them out of it I would, but short of commissioning private code reviews for everything I run that just isn't possible.
Yup - I spent all of a few minutes messing with this streaming from Windows to a Linux box. This linux box has decent RAM/CPU, but the video card probably cost me all of $20 (or maybe it is integrated - I forget offhand but you get the picture). It struggles just to play 1080p video.
I found the streaming reasonably decent. It would be fine for turn-based games like Civilization, or even RTS. It might be a bit more wanting for FPS, but it probably would be usable.
Having this feature would definitely be a selling point if I wanted to think about buying a steambox. It would mean that my windows-only games would suddenly be more playable from the living room.
Agreed, in which case most people in most cultures wouldn't believe it. It was your example.
The point is, herd mentality is often poisonous. Any 'benefits' it has is overshadowed by the detriments. The detriment is often nothing more than the promotion of extreme ignorance.
Lots of species herd - clearly forming herds is often a survival advantage.
If you take a group of apes you might observe that one male gets to sleep with all the females, and he gets to beat up anybody who doesn't fall into line. From a traditional sense of fairness that seems pretty lousy for just about everybody other than the alpha male. On the other hand, from a species survival standpoint it seems to work out fairly well.
The problem is that this doesn't seem to translate as well into a world where the alpha male has enough intelligence to decide to implement purges/etc.
And if most people in most cultures believed that 1+1=3, I'd think it would be an interesting experiment to try to determine if that belief confers an advantage.
If they had something that basic wrong, their society would most likely be a technology-free wasteland.
Agreed, in which case most people in most cultures wouldn't believe it. It was your example.
There's no reason that I see that it has to be some sort of "creator," and history shows that it doesn't really make a difference; if someone doesn't like you, you'll be destroyed if they have more power.
The fact that you can't see a reason doesn't mean that a reason doesn't exist. Most people in most cultures seem to believe in the existence of a creator. Why is that?
Maybe it is because the belief confers some kind of advantage on a culture.
Maybe it is for the same reason that people used to think the world was flat - just a tendency with no real advantage.
It really isn't possible to say for sure short of human experimentation.
the company that owns The History Channel also runs a lot of other channels and tells the cable companies they have to license all of them or none
Yup, but that isn't the "point of cable." Since there are many stakeholders with conflicting interests I don't know how you can say there is any one "point of cable." The point of the cable companies is to make money, and providing service seems to be a byproduct of what they do. The point of consumers is to watch the shows they like, and getting channels they don't like is a side effect, and an undesirable one insofar as it costs them more.
that's the point of cable, lots of niche channels where you only watch a few that you like
From a customer standpoint, the point of cable is that I want to watch the History channel, and it isn't available OTA.
Maybe if you're a cable exec the point of cable is to find ways to charge people for services they don't want. That is more the point of the guy who runs up to your car and washes your window while you're stopped at a light.
The only way cable companies can get away with it is that there is no competition. If the local Walmart forced everybody to buy at least 24 different products every time they walked in the door they'd go out of business. Amazon sells like gangbusters by giving people honest reviews, decent prices, a catalog that includes just about everything that is sold anywhere, and a few options for paying for the shipping. Real businesses have to strip out the non-value-adds to stay in business. Utilities that are allowed to run like conventional businesses become scam operations.
You know nothing of the industry. There are hundreds of ISPs for sale in the United States RIGHT NOW. Go buy one. It'll cost you a few million for a small one.
We're talking about residential broadband. I doubt that more than 0.1% of the population is served by anybody other than one of the major phone or cable companies.
If you're talking about businesses buying dedicated lines then that is a different story. In such volumes the last mile problem isn't so much of a problem - you can just run a single line to them and bill them $10k for it, and the business doesn't care because they're paying that much every month. If you try to offer residential broadband with a $10k start-up fee you'll never get a single customer, and it isn't any cheaper to run a cable to a residence than to a skyscraper.
Oh, and I'm sure there are resellers out there who offer some kind of value-add on top of one of the big phone/cable companies, and they just pay the phone/cable company to use their existing infrastructure.
why aren't the big ISPs like Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T buying up all these ISPs?
Because they aren't in the same business. The ISPs you talk of are probably in actual competition. If my employer got a call that the ISP wanted to raise rates by 10% at the next contract renewal, they'd get to go through the usual procurement dog and pony show all over again. At significant volumes the up-front costs to switch are fairly low. The professional negotiators would also ensure the contracts are neutral at worst, but most likely slanted towards my employer. Big corporations don't sign contracts of adhesion.
The big telecoms do get into that business as well, but the rates are fairly competitive. When the data volumes are significant they don't really have any last-mile advantages either - even the local phone company will probably need to run a dedicated line as there is unlikely to be sufficient capacity already on the poles. At best they only have advantages of scale.
If most people in a society believe that 1 + 1 = 3, does that society have a competitive advantage over those which do not?
It isn't a matter of whether most people in a society believe something. The more relevant factor is whether most people in most societies believe something.
And if most people in most cultures believed that 1+1=3, I'd think it would be an interesting experiment to try to determine if that belief confers an advantage. Granted, I'm not sure how you could perform such an experiment in a controlled and ethical fashion. The best you could do is the usual sort of historical comparison study, and you could never be sure what the results mean.
People tend to have a herd mentality. If you want to get them to do something in their own collective interests the most effective way to go about it may not be to give them all the facts and let them make individual informed decisions. That's why people like you and I will probably never succeed in politics - I don't have any more stomach for this sort of thing than you appear to have.
Well, I'm not sure if we can conclude whether accepting reality does or doesn't cause more abuse.
Again, given history, we have no reason to believe it does. One can claim that their rights exist in some form no matter what, but history shows that it's trivial for those with power to ignore their pleas and just do as they please.
Many examples of this exist, but those in power get their power because people are willing to follow them. Ideology has the potential to influence people.
Think about it another way - commonly held beliefs are commonly held for a reason. Do societies that hold to them have a competitive advantage over those which do not?
No matter how much you whine and cry about how you have creator-given rights... [emphasis mine]
When did I ever claim such a thing? I'm merely saying that this was the perspective the US Constitution was written from, and to understand what was meant you need to understand what the writers were thinking.
Accepting reality (that rights don't just magically exist) does not cause more abuse, and even if it did, that would, to me, be no excuse to back away from the truth.
Well, I'm not sure if we can conclude whether accepting reality does or doesn't cause more abuse. I don't know that anybody has actually done the experiment. Whether the truth being unpleasant is reason to back away from it depends on your values. Is a convenient lie that saves lives better than an inconvenient truth?
My point was just that if I told you that the job I finished was a piece of cake you'd be a fool to conclude that I'm a professional baker, even though that would be reasonably deduced from my statement on the face of it. That's all.
You said: "People in general have rights because they banded together and decided to create governments that have certain limits on their powers, among other things."
So, just what rights do you have, exactly? How do you know that you have them? What would it take for you to no longer have those rights?
If your argument is that you only have rights insofar as other people grant them to you, then there is nothing immoral about everybody banding together and deciding that you don't have those rights. That is what I meant by "which can be used to justify all kinds of abuse."
Now, you asked, "Furthermore, explain how the government is currently infringing upon nearly everyone's rights in one way or another, even though most people believe in that creator nonsense in the US."
The answer is that in reality if everybody bands together and decides that you don't have rights, then there is nothing you can do about it. Whether or not that is justifiable depends on where you think rights come from. Whether or not you think it is justified, there is still nothing you can do about it.
No, I'm saying that in most countries you need the permission of the government to sue the government.
I'm sure many countries try to record phone calls/etc, but I doubt any do so nearly as extensively as the NSA.