"I'm not saying AIDS is the most important problem facing the world today. It's not. But to say funding AIDS research is pointless if it merely leaves the laptop project "underfunded" (not unfunded, mind you) is a gross underestimation of the seriousness of AIDS."
True enough. Overpopulation is an excellent example of a problem that has much more serious long term consequences than the problem of AIDS. But I must disagree about the laptop project, or more specifically about funding the general effort to improve education, critical thinking skills, and the general state of technology (particularly a global communication structure, and widespread adoption of technology in the third world is a big step toward strengthening that structure).
Improving education and the spread of technology will improve the liklihood of ALL the problems facing the world being resolved, including AIDS. And it will not merely improve that liklihood now, technology and education build on themselves, as they improve, they increase their own rate of growth and improvement. This means that any investment here will yield exponential returns that will pay off again and again.
My heart goes out to those suffering from and dying of AIDS. But I would hardly be willing to sacrifice benefits that will be realized again and again by each generation of man until the end of time for the benefit of a few people today.
I would especially like to see these efforts from the Gates foundation because Bill G. (via Microsoft) has used the windows monopoly to slow the progression of technology, and further, actually send it down a grossly inferior path on a global scale. Had IBM went with another system, Microsoft would not exist and it is hard telling how far technology could have advanced unleashed by Microsoft's greed.
Are you saying you and I should be free to do as we please without limits? Or do you believe there should be limits? Perhaps so long as we don't hurt others? If you impose a limit like that are you attempting to enslave me?
Do you perhaps believe that you have some kind of fundemental right to accumulate wealth and excess regardless of the consequences to others who must go without to accomodate your excess? What is your basis for this belief? What on earth makes you think you have ANY sort of fundemental right? And if you do believe in fundemental rights, how can you justify choosing the right to accumulate massive wealth and excess over the basic right to have food, shelter, and healthcare?
Believe it or not, there are very few rights that anyone would likely claim that DO NOT take precendence over your rights to do what you want with the resources you have hoarded.
"Buying DVD's causes children starve to death? I hope you didn't waste too much disposable income on whatever you're smoking."
Yup. Every step of the creation, advertisement, distribution, and the consumption of the content gathered wealth. We like to seperate money from the resources that money represents but it is perfectly valid to translate money into ears of corn. When you gain $5 and keep it, you have chosen to let someone else have fewer ears of corn than they need to survive. I would not be at all suprised to discover that difference between what was spent on movies, music, and TV 40 years ago (adjusted for inflation) and what is spent today would be enough in itself to eliminate hunger in the US and provide quality healthcare to the population. I would not be at all suprised if I were to discover that the sum was enough to not only solve those issues, but to put a dent in world hunger in general.
Those of us who live in temperate climates with vast natural resources (like the United States) like to pretend that we earn what we have and it is all about merit. That is simply false. Africa is poor because it is poor of natural resources. The people here are wealthy compared to there, not because of any superior government, economic or trade system, or work ethic. The people here are wealthy compared to there because we have land that can better exploited to produce food and have greater natural resources in general.
That is a wonderful strawman. It is easy to establish that it makes sense to develop an aids cure. But, nobody ever claimed otherwise.
Nothing you said successfully refuted any portion of my post. Statements like, 'AIDS is destroying Africa and devastating other countries as well. Even in the richest nations such as the United States AIDS is a huge public health problem.', are just hype. The FACT is that AIDS kills a fraction of one percent of the global population. That hardly puts it at the top of the global killer list so there are plenty of targets in that area alone that need more funding than AIDS. None of that changes that AIDS kills lots of people and is a serious health concern, it just puts it into a proper perspective.
Increasing education on a global scale and helping to industrialize third world countries would ultimately lead to greater public awareness of AIDS, not to mention reduce the number of idiots willing to engage in war, church, and rigged western politics.
"So the laptop project is the only way to "improve education and ultimately the quality of life"? Give me a break. There are plenty of other projects BMGF could fund to improve education other than the laptop one."
Hardly, but that isn't really relevant. My argument is equally well grounded if you insert another equally effective and comparably priced solution in its place.
"I'd also argue with saying that AIDS affects only a "statistically insignificant portion of humanity". Roughly one million sub-Saharan Africans died of AIDS last year (cite -- this site claims two million but we'll stick with one), out of a total population of around 650 million. That's 0.154% of the population. Compare that to the United States death rate due to cancer: 0.188% (565,000 deaths out of a population of 300 million). I'm sure you wouldn't say cancer affects a statistically insignificant portion of humanity."
Again, meaningless. Many people in of , that will never establish that a substantial portion of the global population dies of .
"Even when looking at the world population as a whole, it's not all that insignificant. The industrialized nations bring down the death rate. But since the laptop-for-everyone project specifically targets third-world nations, and most AIDS deaths occur in third-world nations, it's not entirely fair to take into account industrialized nations. This makes the disease that much more significant."
Your assertion simply does not follow your premises. The first sentence is simple horn tooting so we can safely ignore it, another poster trying to argue your side already made the laughable claim that the fraction of 1 percent of the global population that dies of aids is a significant portion. Further, industrialized nations are not what skews the numbers. Industrialized nations compose a small portion of the global population (unless you lower the bar for 'industrialized' to include something other than the US, the former USSR, the EU, and Japan).
You are right that the laptop project is primarily targeted at non-industrialized nations, but that is merely because it is to be a step toward industrializing them. When industrialized those nations will have an ever increasing global impact and the ultimate result is global change, not one isolated to third world nations. Just because a portion of the idea is targeted at a subgroup of nations does not mean that the ultimate goal is not global in scale.
The plan also targets children without laptops, should we then only count the percentage of aids deaths among third world children without laptops?
You would have a much better point if it weren't only the poor and middle class who pay the death tax. The wealthy dodge it with trusts. Actually the middle class would as well if they weren't ignorant (you can whip up suitable trusts yourself with half a brain and a couple hours reading); the poor (most of us) simply don't have anything worthwhile to put in the trusts whether they are ignorant of trusts or not.
Lets see, help a statistically insignificant portion of humanity with a terrible and incurable disease because that disease makes big headlines... or improve education and ultimately the quality of life on a global scale. You are right, spending money on AIDS research would be pointless IF it left the laptop project underfunded.
Of course, $38 billion should be able to comfortably fund both.
Your post oozes the rabid consumerism that plagues modern western society. Expensive things are not any more enjoyable than less expensive things. Good does not equate to expensive. The rich are not happier than the poor, they are just miserable about different things.
If you are amused, how is it better to be amused by something that cost a lot of money instead of something that did not cost money? Explain how spending $20 on the latest idiotic black comedy and watching it is in any possible way better than spending 2 hours reading this http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/?
If you think that expensive things are the same thing as the finer things in life then you have a great deal to learn. The expensive things, especially in the modern western world, are the things that advertising and capitalists have told you to want. They are false needs, invented by the capitalists and then filled by the capitalists.. IF you are willing to enslave yourself to them or worse, become one yourself.
Spend 3 days camping next to the rotting carcass of a child that starved to death then explain again why your DVD was better entertainment than some other activity that could bring equal or greater enjoyment AND allow that child to eat tonight.
The purpose of life is not blowing money and extreme waste. Skip the DVD, contemplate the meaning of life a bit, then play again next week.
Being pro-consumer would mean refusing to the hurt the consumer when it doesn't benefit their bottom line. It would also mean changing their business model when it conflicts with the interests of the consumer.
One example is the itunes DRM. It is not really the least restrictive. There are companies that have DRMless files. Apple made a show about fighting for less restrictive DRM but what they were really doing is making sure there was some kind of DRM on their files, they don't want you using apple content with non-apple hardware players. That is the purpose of Apple's DRM regardless of what they hyped in the media. Apple gives lip service to the consumer, that is it.
If apple were pro-consumer, MacOS X would be opensource and apple would profit from support contracts and hardware sales. Apple would depend on the quality of its products to sell hardware, instead of DRM and software lockdowns that restrict their software to their hardware. Since OSX would only be SUPPORTED on Mac hardware and would have fewer driver issues, almost all spenders would be buying Apple Hardware anyway.
Apple is no different than any other corporation. They give the absolute minimum to the consumer that is neccesary to get the consumers money. If they can create the illusion of a gift without really giving the consumer anything, all the better. You are right about one thing, this is the best that Capitalism will ever give us when combined with zero liability, shareholder protection, and paper entities given the rights of humans.
YES. This is exactly why I support raising domesticated sex slave females. Selective breeding will insure that they are extremely successful from an evolutionary standpoint.
"Unless you are only ever accessing US content you would care since that cost would be passed on to you."
What else would I be accessing? The US is where all the content is, including the site we are having this discussion on now.
"This is only true in a market with no effective competition. Here in the UK the ISP market has a lot of active competition and the profit margins are very tight. If this is not the case with the US market then *that* is the problem and can be solved by introducing more competition - that would result in reduced costs for the end user, which is good for the majority of customers. Your "solution" is to force the ISP to keep the same high prices but spend their excess profit on things only a minority of customers actually want."
Here real competition only exists between a small number of very large corporations. There are numerous smaller ISPs but they are purchasing bandwidth from those large corporations and therefore can not realistically compete. Of course the small number of corporations share a common interest in a large bottom line and the result is very limited competition. Forcing competition would mean requiring the telcos to give new parties their phone wiring or appropriating the telcos networks and making them a public resource that all telcos must pay equally to access. That sort of government is called socialism and those sort of measures violate the free market that is found in the US.
As for ISP's, you forget, the telcos in the US are not paying anyone for their links, they ARE the primary internet hubs. Smaller ISP's are paying the rates set by those large telcos to get fast links to the telcos. If the telcos let off their stranglehold the ISPs would not being paying as high of rates and could pass that off in extra bandwidth to the end user. Your statements make it sound as if ISP's charge high prices, which they do not. The prices are quite reasonable, nobody especially needs a price cut at the minimum service level, improvement is needed in quality of service. If the quality of service is improved then first tier priced customers will enjoy higher quality service and current second and third tier customers can as well.
Being forced to pay thousands for a consumer level connection of dedicated bandwidth is ridiculous and you if you are claiming that rates should be cut at the consumer paying $19.95/month instead of cutting the prices for the END USER who would have to pay $500/month for what advertising implies they are getting for $19.95/month then you are truely hopeless. Contended connections are a bad thing that the consumer who forced to deal with. They are no better for you than me. They hurt numerous classes of user who aren't even aware they exist. Obviously the technical class like myself (I don't use BT often btw and that isn't actually why I want the full speed my connection is rated at), and the high schoolers of today will ALL have an interest in uncontended connections. Almost one forth of the US population participates in filesharing, that is a substantial enough to warrant attention whether they are the 'majority' or not. But also VOIP, games, and other real time traffic are all hurt by contended connections.
"Like it or not, net neutrality affects the whole world - not just your small corner of it."
Net neutrality in general yes, the US law the story in question talks about being discussed on a US internet forum affects the US.
"If it *wasn't* advertised as contended then you have cause for complaint, but I suspect that wasn't the case (if it really wasn't sold as contended, sue them for fraudulent marketting)."
Obviously you don't live in the US. If you really are in the UK then you would do well to take look at the US since the UK is moving more and more toward a US style of businesses daily. Here consumers have very little power and everything is geared in favor of the business rather than the individual. False advertising must be extremely blatant. Typically US companies advertise unlimited X s
"You clearly don't understand what it means when the ISP sells you a "contended internet connection" - that means that you don't have exclusive access to the bandwidth. If the ISP doesn't do QoS then that means my BitTorrent traffic can wipe out your VoIP connection."
You clearly missed or ignored the fact that my statements are in the context of dedicated bandwidth allotments. Your arguements against those kind of allotments ignored the fact that we are talking about US ISP's and not foreign ISP's. The telco's network is hardwired to the other telcos in a couple of large facilities along with everyone else who can afford a large enough pipe, having a fast pipe to the telco here means you have a fast pipe to almost all the US Internet. Actually since most foreign content is found on US servers as well, you get a speedy link to almost all of the web. In the UK you would have to worry about pipes across the water and into the US for a vast portion of your content and bandwidth on those pipes is dear. To be frank, I couldn't care less if they charge $5 a kilobyte for bandwidth outside the US.
"If the ISP doesn't do QoS then that means my BitTorrent traffic can wipe out your VoIP connection."
Not if the ISP has properly throttled my link and given me exactly the amount of bandwidth they have sold me and done the same for you. Then I can use up my full pipe on bittorrent and it will not impact you in the slightest. Yes, at some theoretical point upstream someone may have sold bandwidth they don't have but my bittorrent, and joe's bittorrent, and earl's bittorrent, they are not all DDOSING a single link after they pass out from ISP, they are distributed around the web and all hitting different pipes.
You can't make an effective counter-argument simply by claiming that somewhere down the pipe in the branches of interconnections some random and minor node of the web is going to be saturated. The most likely places to be saturated at the ends where clients are participating and they aren't concerned that you can't load the web pages they are serving, the major pipes between them certainly aren't going to be saturated if ISP's stop selling more bandwidth than they have.
"So why the hell would I want to subsidise your 686GB per month when the costs associated with your bandwidth vastly outweigh the costs associated with mine?"
So why the hell would I want to subsidise your 686GB per month when the costs associated with your bandwidth vastly outweigh the costs associated with mine? Because if I suddenly stop using any bandwidth at all the ISP is going to keep the difference as profit, not give it back the consumer. The principle you are spouting is called capitalism and it suffers the same fundemental problem as communism. People are NOT honest, they are greedy, evil, and stingy. Corporations charge you as much as you are willing to pay, period. What I do has nothing to do with what they charge you. They do NOT merely pass along expenses, that is just an excuse for what they charge you. If $39.95/month is what consumers will pay for internet then the ISP's will charge exactly that no matter how low their expenses become. This extends to government too, you constantly see tolls that go in to pay for road construction projects, after the construction projects are paid off the tolls still never go away. That vast interconnected network that is the internet meets together at a few very large central nodes and all those branches outward are leased from few players who control those central nodes. Those players do not find it to be in their best interests to let people have links at a fair cost, instead they charge as much as they feel they can get someone to pay and redefine fair as 'as much as possible'.
"I don't care what your ideals are - mine certainly don't involve me being forced to subsidise other people's downloading habits."
I have already successfully disputed your 'subsidizing' argument. As for ideals, individual freedom is the concept behind all that
"1. How the hell are you going to implement QoS when you don't have access to the ISP's routers?"
Using my own router? I don't need to prioritize anybody elses traffic, only my own. MY voip traffic gets priority over MY BT traffic, but YOUR voip is your own problem and shouldn't be allowed to interfer with my connection. Simply because you use your connection for y that is latency sensitive and I use mine for x that is bandwidth intensive does not mean that my connection should come at the expense of yours. If you add up all the y users they amount to a fairly substantial amount of traffic that doesn't leave much for the rest of us and we always get the leftovers. If I perform the QoS at the end user level then my own voip traffic is negligable and won't impact the other services I run on my network.
"A significant point is - why should *I* pay extra for my internet connection so that *you* can use yours in an uncontended way?"
Because it is not just *I* who can use my connection in an uncontended way. It is you, me, and everyone else. It is a form of individual freedom. Management through regulation instead of leaving power in the hands of the individual opposes one of the cores ideals of society.
"Welcome to America buddy. Why should anyone think that Apple would be different than any other company? By this standard all corporations are vile anti-consumer monsters. Why the double standard?"
What double standard? Corporations ARE vile anti-consumer monsters. I am talking about apple in the above post because the GP was suggesting that Apple is not in line with the rest. Apple is no less evil than the rest of them.
Here we go, we should have known the apple apologizers would come out. Look, Apple is one of the most vile anti-consumer monster corporations out there. Learn to the live with that. Apple gives not one flying fluck about its 'loyal fans' but it knows a buck when it sees one. If Apple fought more restrictive DRM it was because they thought it would hurt their bottom line not for the sake of their customers.
As for which DRM to attack, it makes the most sense to complain about the least obtrusive DRM you can find. That way things start off on the basis that, that minimal DRM is too much. Otherwise that minimal DRM would become the best compromise we could hope for.
"I started playing an MMORPG about a month ago in order to "medicate" the bad feelings of a recent breakup. It works wonders. Some people would consider my gaming habits to be addictive and dangerous. I say they can go screw themselves. I work my 8 hours a day, I pay my taxes, I still hang out with my friends."
My wife plays because she has Fibromyalgia and it is an escape from chronic pain. She is no longer able to work but is only a few years shy of normal retirement age. She earned better than average income most of her life and has certainly done her share as far as society goes. Of course, that would still be true if she picked up a crack pipe today.
"I just watch less tv and play more on the computer."
So you traded one addiction for another. Just because TV is socially acceptable does not make it any less an addiction or anymore healthy. TV used to be recognized as a serious epidemic like gaming is being recognized as now. Of course the generation addicted to TV simply excused the previous generations as being old fashioned or afraid of technology; truth is, they were just afraid to see people spending the day staring at a hypnotic box instead of socializing.
"When the next semester starts I'll go to school more and play less, but at least by that time I'll be over her."
Maybe, for your sake I hope so. I know 3 people who have failed classes due to gaming. That is a substantial number since I don't live in a college town and only know 3 people in college... and none of them know eachother.
'If I start skipping classes and my 4.0 GPA starts slipping cause of my gaming habits, then you can talk to me about having an "addiction"'
That would make you another of the masses that this has affected yes. I don't know (or care frankly) whether you personally are addicted. You can skip the quote around addicted though, as I said addicted is a neurochemical reaction and is objective not subjective (of course diagnosis is subjective, there are no financially feasible tests). Either is occuring or not. When you are addicted to gaming you are addicted to the same brain chemicals that any street junky is addicted to.
"if I want to spend 12 hours on a Saturday in front of my PC and I'm not hurting anybody, so what?"
So it is unhealthy. Nobody is saying you can't do it, we are saying you shouldn't do it. There is a difference. I don't care if you want to spend your saturdays gaming, or flying on acid. It makes absolutely no difference to me. It is your life to use or abuse as you please.
I mostly don't like addictions for myself because I prefer to be my own master rather than having the illusion of making my own choices left by the addiction. I had a particularly strong addiction when I smoked, I remember believing I was making my own choices for years. Of course, now that I no longer smoke I can look back at those choices and realized that the addiction made the choices, not me. For instance, there were times my wife and I were short on money and ate only bread... of course, after buying smokes that as that was left. While smoking our bank balance was ALWAYS figured in terms of what remained after buying cigerettes. Those came first, then bills and food or whatever. I was also addicted to gaming. I played Sierra's The Realm (2d mmorpg that eq borrowed the idea from) for a good 5 years, then played Dark Ages of Camelot, finally I played WOW for a bit.
"If I spent that time at a bar getting liquored up (taking a cab home of course) would you--read as: society--have more or less respect for me?"
The same, either way you are wasting your life away and just taking up space.
"People who run around labeling behaviors "addictions" and addictions "diseases" need to be smacked in the head with a clue-by-four."
I already explained that addictions have an objective neuro-chemical condition. They are not open to interpretation by the addicted.
"Contention ("selling 30 small pipes and attaching them to a pipe that is only large enough for 5 small pipes to be used to capacity") is the only way to offer a service that doesn't cost more than any consumer would pay, so there's hardly an option."
All I can say is refer to the same part of my post that you quote after this.
"Not so in the UK (where the parent's post refers)."
Why would the parent post refer to the UK? There is nothing in it that refers to the UK, in fact I just clicked the whole series of 'parent' 'parent' 'parent' until I was back at the main article and no nation is referred to by any of the posters in this thread (aside from you of course). The closest thing to a mention of a nation is a reference to the article, which is discussing Net Neutrality in the US. It goes without saying of course that we are talking about the US by default on a US based forum, particularly when commenting on a development that impacts internet service in the US and the US alone.
Real addiction is the result of neuro-chemicals produced in the brain. There are habitual drinkers, and then there are true alcoholics. An alcoholic is not someone who is drunk all the time, an alcoholic is someone with a physical condition that causes the alcohol in their bloodstream to be converted into a heroin like substance in the brain. It is possible to have never touched alcohol and be an alcoholic. Marijuana has been tested time and again and is no more habit forming than table sugar.
Anything can be a real addiction, including behavior patterns. You enjoy gaming, so your brain produces pleasure chemicals. The parts of the brain receiving these chemcials don't know if they came from crack or Quake and don't care. They stimulate you to do more of this thing that produced the chemicals forming a habit and ultimately an addiction.
Actually the 'former' cause neuro-chemicals to be created in the brain and the brain literally becomes addicted to these substances changing your thoughts and tastes to match those things to which you are 'mentally' addicted. Most physical substances convert to these same neuro-chemicals.
Within the brain there is ultimately no difference between a crack addict and a ArmageddonMUD addict, you personally are no longer in control (and probably think otherwise in either case) and the effect is negative either way.
That is NOT improvement. If I want QoS then it is for ME to implement that over the pipe I have purchased. I purchased a pipe of x speed up and x speed down and I have every right to saturate that pipe entirely both ways with whatever traffic I desire.
True your ISP might be greedy and selling 30 small pipes and attaching them to a pipe that is only large enough for 5 small pipes to be used to capacity but that is hardly the fault of the end user. The solution is not to use QoS.
QoS is like firewalling and port blocking, something that should be left in the hands of the end user to use as they see fit.
This reminds me of ISPs that blocked users who were infected with blaster/sasser/etc because they clogged the pipes. But they only clogged the pipes because the ISP's sold more bandwidth than they had!
Before anyone chimes in with the cost of bandwidth issues. I know bandwidth is expensive for smaller ISPs. But it isn't expensive for the telcos, in fact they pull numbers out of a hat. They get to artificially inflate the costs of bandwidth as much as they want. So the first step to fixing this is the release the telco stranglehold on bandwidth. This will make bandwidth affordable for smaller ISPs and distribute the profits. ISPS will give consumers more bandwidth so consumers will win. ISPS will of course buy more bandwidth from the telcos and the telcos will at worst make the same profits they make now (on the bottom line). Everybody wins.
Then, I will use QoS on my network. At every moment my 100/100Mbps pipe will be completely saturated with various kinds of traffic. But my web browsing will be responsive, my BT will be fast, and my VoIP calls (with any provider I choose) will work out just fine. My webserver and mailserver will remain responsive on their public and (requested but free) static IP since I won't have blocked the ports for my own services of course. And this will have no negative impact on other users because my pipe will be dedicated to me.
Interesting, for some reason it doesn't seem to be syncing to my network time source or that of my ISP as would be appropriate. Are they trying to DDOS time.nist.gov?
Would you arsehats stop repeating this. First your post is redundant, gobs of people repeated the same rumour ahead of you. Second, each of them has a thread under it debunking the myth. They only cut the copper if they are installing phone service (which is not required) and they won't do it if you ask the installer not to.
You ignored this one "Can you run Skype and Vonage, or are they blocked? Can you run mulitple QoS- VoIP streams without raising eyebrows? Nope." that is a pretty serious issue.
In fact, blocked ports and throttled services in general is a serious issue where I am concerned.
How is that? Or do you only mean if you are purchasing verizon phone service? My phone service runs through copper and is with another company, I would have no intention of letting them cut off another service when they install the fiber for my internet connection.
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"I'm not saying AIDS is the most important problem facing the world today. It's not. But to say funding AIDS research is pointless if it merely leaves the laptop project "underfunded" (not unfunded, mind you) is a gross underestimation of the seriousness of AIDS."
True enough. Overpopulation is an excellent example of a problem that has much more serious long term consequences than the problem of AIDS. But I must disagree about the laptop project, or more specifically about funding the general effort to improve education, critical thinking skills, and the general state of technology (particularly a global communication structure, and widespread adoption of technology in the third world is a big step toward strengthening that structure).
Improving education and the spread of technology will improve the liklihood of ALL the problems facing the world being resolved, including AIDS. And it will not merely improve that liklihood now, technology and education build on themselves, as they improve, they increase their own rate of growth and improvement. This means that any investment here will yield exponential returns that will pay off again and again.
My heart goes out to those suffering from and dying of AIDS. But I would hardly be willing to sacrifice benefits that will be realized again and again by each generation of man until the end of time for the benefit of a few people today.
I would especially like to see these efforts from the Gates foundation because Bill G. (via Microsoft) has used the windows monopoly to slow the progression of technology, and further, actually send it down a grossly inferior path on a global scale. Had IBM went with another system, Microsoft would not exist and it is hard telling how far technology could have advanced unleashed by Microsoft's greed.
Are you saying you and I should be free to do as we please without limits? Or do you believe there should be limits? Perhaps so long as we don't hurt others? If you impose a limit like that are you attempting to enslave me?
Do you perhaps believe that you have some kind of fundemental right to accumulate wealth and excess regardless of the consequences to others who must go without to accomodate your excess? What is your basis for this belief? What on earth makes you think you have ANY sort of fundemental right? And if you do believe in fundemental rights, how can you justify choosing the right to accumulate massive wealth and excess over the basic right to have food, shelter, and healthcare?
Believe it or not, there are very few rights that anyone would likely claim that DO NOT take precendence over your rights to do what you want with the resources you have hoarded.
"Buying DVD's causes children starve to death? I hope you didn't waste too much disposable income on whatever you're smoking."
Yup. Every step of the creation, advertisement, distribution, and the consumption of the content gathered wealth. We like to seperate money from the resources that money represents but it is perfectly valid to translate money into ears of corn. When you gain $5 and keep it, you have chosen to let someone else have fewer ears of corn than they need to survive. I would not be at all suprised to discover that difference between what was spent on movies, music, and TV 40 years ago (adjusted for inflation) and what is spent today would be enough in itself to eliminate hunger in the US and provide quality healthcare to the population. I would not be at all suprised if I were to discover that the sum was enough to not only solve those issues, but to put a dent in world hunger in general.
Those of us who live in temperate climates with vast natural resources (like the United States) like to pretend that we earn what we have and it is all about merit. That is simply false. Africa is poor because it is poor of natural resources. The people here are wealthy compared to there, not because of any superior government, economic or trade system, or work ethic. The people here are wealthy compared to there because we have land that can better exploited to produce food and have greater natural resources in general.
That is a wonderful strawman. It is easy to establish that it makes sense to develop an aids cure. But, nobody ever claimed otherwise.
Nothing you said successfully refuted any portion of my post. Statements like, 'AIDS is destroying Africa and devastating other countries as well. Even in the richest nations such as the United States AIDS is a huge public health problem.', are just hype. The FACT is that AIDS kills a fraction of one percent of the global population. That hardly puts it at the top of the global killer list so there are plenty of targets in that area alone that need more funding than AIDS. None of that changes that AIDS kills lots of people and is a serious health concern, it just puts it into a proper perspective.
Increasing education on a global scale and helping to industrialize third world countries would ultimately lead to greater public awareness of AIDS, not to mention reduce the number of idiots willing to engage in war, church, and rigged western politics.
"So the laptop project is the only way to "improve education and ultimately the quality of life"? Give me a break. There are plenty of other projects BMGF could fund to improve education other than the laptop one."
Hardly, but that isn't really relevant. My argument is equally well grounded if you insert another equally effective and comparably priced solution in its place.
"I'd also argue with saying that AIDS affects only a "statistically insignificant portion of humanity". Roughly one million sub-Saharan Africans died of AIDS last year (cite -- this site claims two million but we'll stick with one), out of a total population of around 650 million. That's 0.154% of the population. Compare that to the United States death rate due to cancer: 0.188% (565,000 deaths out of a population of 300 million). I'm sure you wouldn't say cancer affects a statistically insignificant portion of humanity."
Again, meaningless. Many people in of , that will never establish that a substantial portion of the global population dies of .
"Even when looking at the world population as a whole, it's not all that insignificant. The industrialized nations bring down the death rate. But since the laptop-for-everyone project specifically targets third-world nations, and most AIDS deaths occur in third-world nations, it's not entirely fair to take into account industrialized nations. This makes the disease that much more significant."
Your assertion simply does not follow your premises. The first sentence is simple horn tooting so we can safely ignore it, another poster trying to argue your side already made the laughable claim that the fraction of 1 percent of the global population that dies of aids is a significant portion. Further, industrialized nations are not what skews the numbers. Industrialized nations compose a small portion of the global population (unless you lower the bar for 'industrialized' to include something other than the US, the former USSR, the EU, and Japan).
You are right that the laptop project is primarily targeted at non-industrialized nations, but that is merely because it is to be a step toward industrializing them. When industrialized those nations will have an ever increasing global impact and the ultimate result is global change, not one isolated to third world nations. Just because a portion of the idea is targeted at a subgroup of nations does not mean that the ultimate goal is not global in scale.
The plan also targets children without laptops, should we then only count the percentage of aids deaths among third world children without laptops?
You would have a much better point if it weren't only the poor and middle class who pay the death tax. The wealthy dodge it with trusts. Actually the middle class would as well if they weren't ignorant (you can whip up suitable trusts yourself with half a brain and a couple hours reading); the poor (most of us) simply don't have anything worthwhile to put in the trusts whether they are ignorant of trusts or not.
Lets see, help a statistically insignificant portion of humanity with a terrible and incurable disease because that disease makes big headlines... or improve education and ultimately the quality of life on a global scale. You are right, spending money on AIDS research would be pointless IF it left the laptop project underfunded.
Of course, $38 billion should be able to comfortably fund both.
Your post oozes the rabid consumerism that plagues modern western society. Expensive things are not any more enjoyable than less expensive things. Good does not equate to expensive. The rich are not happier than the poor, they are just miserable about different things.
If you are amused, how is it better to be amused by something that cost a lot of money instead of something that did not cost money? Explain how spending $20 on the latest idiotic black comedy and watching it is in any possible way better than spending 2 hours reading this http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/?
If you think that expensive things are the same thing as the finer things in life then you have a great deal to learn. The expensive things, especially in the modern western world, are the things that advertising and capitalists have told you to want. They are false needs, invented by the capitalists and then filled by the capitalists.. IF you are willing to enslave yourself to them or worse, become one yourself.
Spend 3 days camping next to the rotting carcass of a child that starved to death then explain again why your DVD was better entertainment than some other activity that could bring equal or greater enjoyment AND allow that child to eat tonight.
The purpose of life is not blowing money and extreme waste. Skip the DVD, contemplate the meaning of life a bit, then play again next week.
Being pro-consumer would mean refusing to the hurt the consumer when it doesn't benefit their bottom line. It would also mean changing their business model when it conflicts with the interests of the consumer.
One example is the itunes DRM. It is not really the least restrictive. There are companies that have DRMless files. Apple made a show about fighting for less restrictive DRM but what they were really doing is making sure there was some kind of DRM on their files, they don't want you using apple content with non-apple hardware players. That is the purpose of Apple's DRM regardless of what they hyped in the media. Apple gives lip service to the consumer, that is it.
If apple were pro-consumer, MacOS X would be opensource and apple would profit from support contracts and hardware sales. Apple would depend on the quality of its products to sell hardware, instead of DRM and software lockdowns that restrict their software to their hardware. Since OSX would only be SUPPORTED on Mac hardware and would have fewer driver issues, almost all spenders would be buying Apple Hardware anyway.
Apple is no different than any other corporation. They give the absolute minimum to the consumer that is neccesary to get the consumers money. If they can create the illusion of a gift without really giving the consumer anything, all the better. You are right about one thing, this is the best that Capitalism will ever give us when combined with zero liability, shareholder protection, and paper entities given the rights of humans.
YES. This is exactly why I support raising domesticated sex slave females. Selective breeding will insure that they are extremely successful from an evolutionary standpoint.
"Unless you are only ever accessing US content you would care since that cost would be passed on to you."
What else would I be accessing? The US is where all the content is, including the site we are having this discussion on now.
"This is only true in a market with no effective competition. Here in the UK the ISP market has a lot of active competition and the profit margins are very tight. If this is not the case with the US market then *that* is the problem and can be solved by introducing more competition - that would result in reduced costs for the end user, which is good for the majority of customers. Your "solution" is to force the ISP to keep the same high prices but spend their excess profit on things only a minority of customers actually want."
Here real competition only exists between a small number of very large corporations. There are numerous smaller ISPs but they are purchasing bandwidth from those large corporations and therefore can not realistically compete. Of course the small number of corporations share a common interest in a large bottom line and the result is very limited competition. Forcing competition would mean requiring the telcos to give new parties their phone wiring or appropriating the telcos networks and making them a public resource that all telcos must pay equally to access. That sort of government is called socialism and those sort of measures violate the free market that is found in the US.
As for ISP's, you forget, the telcos in the US are not paying anyone for their links, they ARE the primary internet hubs. Smaller ISP's are paying the rates set by those large telcos to get fast links to the telcos. If the telcos let off their stranglehold the ISPs would not being paying as high of rates and could pass that off in extra bandwidth to the end user. Your statements make it sound as if ISP's charge high prices, which they do not. The prices are quite reasonable, nobody especially needs a price cut at the minimum service level, improvement is needed in quality of service. If the quality of service is improved then first tier priced customers will enjoy higher quality service and current second and third tier customers can as well.
Being forced to pay thousands for a consumer level connection of dedicated bandwidth is ridiculous and you if you are claiming that rates should be cut at the consumer paying $19.95/month instead of cutting the prices for the END USER who would have to pay $500/month for what advertising implies they are getting for $19.95/month then you are truely hopeless. Contended connections are a bad thing that the consumer who forced to deal with. They are no better for you than me. They hurt numerous classes of user who aren't even aware they exist. Obviously the technical class like myself (I don't use BT often btw and that isn't actually why I want the full speed my connection is rated at), and the high schoolers of today will ALL have an interest in uncontended connections. Almost one forth of the US population participates in filesharing, that is a substantial enough to warrant attention whether they are the 'majority' or not. But also VOIP, games, and other real time traffic are all hurt by contended connections.
"Like it or not, net neutrality affects the whole world - not just your small corner of it."
Net neutrality in general yes, the US law the story in question talks about being discussed on a US internet forum affects the US.
"If it *wasn't* advertised as contended then you have cause for complaint, but I suspect that wasn't the case (if it really wasn't sold as contended, sue them for fraudulent marketting)."
Obviously you don't live in the US. If you really are in the UK then you would do well to take look at the US since the UK is moving more and more toward a US style of businesses daily. Here consumers have very little power and everything is geared in favor of the business rather than the individual. False advertising must be extremely blatant. Typically US companies advertise unlimited X s
"You clearly don't understand what it means when the ISP sells you a "contended internet connection" - that means that you don't have exclusive access to the bandwidth. If the ISP doesn't do QoS then that means my BitTorrent traffic can wipe out your VoIP connection."
/month is what consumers will pay for internet then the ISP's will charge exactly that no matter how low their expenses become. This extends to government too, you constantly see tolls that go in to pay for road construction projects, after the construction projects are paid off the tolls still never go away. That vast interconnected network that is the internet meets together at a few very large central nodes and all those branches outward are leased from few players who control those central nodes. Those players do not find it to be in their best interests to let people have links at a fair cost, instead they charge as much as they feel they can get someone to pay and redefine fair as 'as much as possible'.
You clearly missed or ignored the fact that my statements are in the context of dedicated bandwidth allotments. Your arguements against those kind of allotments ignored the fact that we are talking about US ISP's and not foreign ISP's. The telco's network is hardwired to the other telcos in a couple of large facilities along with everyone else who can afford a large enough pipe, having a fast pipe to the telco here means you have a fast pipe to almost all the US Internet. Actually since most foreign content is found on US servers as well, you get a speedy link to almost all of the web. In the UK you would have to worry about pipes across the water and into the US for a vast portion of your content and bandwidth on those pipes is dear. To be frank, I couldn't care less if they charge $5 a kilobyte for bandwidth outside the US.
"If the ISP doesn't do QoS then that means my BitTorrent traffic can wipe out your VoIP connection."
Not if the ISP has properly throttled my link and given me exactly the amount of bandwidth they have sold me and done the same for you. Then I can use up my full pipe on bittorrent and it will not impact you in the slightest. Yes, at some theoretical point upstream someone may have sold bandwidth they don't have but my bittorrent, and joe's bittorrent, and earl's bittorrent, they are not all DDOSING a single link after they pass out from ISP, they are distributed around the web and all hitting different pipes.
You can't make an effective counter-argument simply by claiming that somewhere down the pipe in the branches of interconnections some random and minor node of the web is going to be saturated. The most likely places to be saturated at the ends where clients are participating and they aren't concerned that you can't load the web pages they are serving, the major pipes between them certainly aren't going to be saturated if ISP's stop selling more bandwidth than they have.
"So why the hell would I want to subsidise your 686GB per month when the costs associated with your bandwidth vastly outweigh the costs associated with mine?"
So why the hell would I want to subsidise your 686GB per month when the costs associated with your bandwidth vastly outweigh the costs associated with mine? Because if I suddenly stop using any bandwidth at all the ISP is going to keep the difference as profit, not give it back the consumer. The principle you are spouting is called capitalism and it suffers the same fundemental problem as communism. People are NOT honest, they are greedy, evil, and stingy. Corporations charge you as much as you are willing to pay, period. What I do has nothing to do with what they charge you. They do NOT merely pass along expenses, that is just an excuse for what they charge you. If $39.95
"I don't care what your ideals are - mine certainly don't involve me being forced to subsidise other people's downloading habits."
I have already successfully disputed your 'subsidizing' argument. As for ideals, individual freedom is the concept behind all that
"1. How the hell are you going to implement QoS when you don't have access to the ISP's routers?"
Using my own router? I don't need to prioritize anybody elses traffic, only my own. MY voip traffic gets priority over MY BT traffic, but YOUR voip is your own problem and shouldn't be allowed to interfer with my connection. Simply because you use your connection for y that is latency sensitive and I use mine for x that is bandwidth intensive does not mean that my connection should come at the expense of yours. If you add up all the y users they amount to a fairly substantial amount of traffic that doesn't leave much for the rest of us and we always get the leftovers. If I perform the QoS at the end user level then my own voip traffic is negligable and won't impact the other services I run on my network.
"A significant point is - why should *I* pay extra for my internet connection so that *you* can use yours in an uncontended way?"
Because it is not just *I* who can use my connection in an uncontended way. It is you, me, and everyone else. It is a form of individual freedom. Management through regulation instead of leaving power in the hands of the individual opposes one of the cores ideals of society.
"Welcome to America buddy. Why should anyone think that Apple would be different than any other company? By this standard all corporations are vile anti-consumer monsters. Why the double standard?"
What double standard? Corporations ARE vile anti-consumer monsters. I am talking about apple in the above post because the GP was suggesting that Apple is not in line with the rest. Apple is no less evil than the rest of them.
Here we go, we should have known the apple apologizers would come out. Look, Apple is one of the most vile anti-consumer monster corporations out there. Learn to the live with that. Apple gives not one flying fluck about its 'loyal fans' but it knows a buck when it sees one. If Apple fought more restrictive DRM it was because they thought it would hurt their bottom line not for the sake of their customers.
As for which DRM to attack, it makes the most sense to complain about the least obtrusive DRM you can find. That way things start off on the basis that, that minimal DRM is too much. Otherwise that minimal DRM would become the best compromise we could hope for.
"I started playing an MMORPG about a month ago in order to "medicate" the bad feelings of a recent breakup. It works wonders. Some people would consider my gaming habits to be addictive and dangerous. I say they can go screw themselves. I work my 8 hours a day, I pay my taxes, I still hang out with my friends."
My wife plays because she has Fibromyalgia and it is an escape from chronic pain. She is no longer able to work but is only a few years shy of normal retirement age. She earned better than average income most of her life and has certainly done her share as far as society goes. Of course, that would still be true if she picked up a crack pipe today.
"I just watch less tv and play more on the computer."
So you traded one addiction for another. Just because TV is socially acceptable does not make it any less an addiction or anymore healthy. TV used to be recognized as a serious epidemic like gaming is being recognized as now. Of course the generation addicted to TV simply excused the previous generations as being old fashioned or afraid of technology; truth is, they were just afraid to see people spending the day staring at a hypnotic box instead of socializing.
"When the next semester starts I'll go to school more and play less, but at least by that time I'll be over her."
Maybe, for your sake I hope so. I know 3 people who have failed classes due to gaming. That is a substantial number since I don't live in a college town and only know 3 people in college... and none of them know eachother.
'If I start skipping classes and my 4.0 GPA starts slipping cause of my gaming habits, then you can talk to me about having an "addiction"'
That would make you another of the masses that this has affected yes. I don't know (or care frankly) whether you personally are addicted. You can skip the quote around addicted though, as I said addicted is a neurochemical reaction and is objective not subjective (of course diagnosis is subjective, there are no financially feasible tests). Either is occuring or not. When you are addicted to gaming you are addicted to the same brain chemicals that any street junky is addicted to.
"if I want to spend 12 hours on a Saturday in front of my PC and I'm not hurting anybody, so what?"
So it is unhealthy. Nobody is saying you can't do it, we are saying you shouldn't do it. There is a difference. I don't care if you want to spend your saturdays gaming, or flying on acid. It makes absolutely no difference to me. It is your life to use or abuse as you please.
I mostly don't like addictions for myself because I prefer to be my own master rather than having the illusion of making my own choices left by the addiction. I had a particularly strong addiction when I smoked, I remember believing I was making my own choices for years. Of course, now that I no longer smoke I can look back at those choices and realized that the addiction made the choices, not me. For instance, there were times my wife and I were short on money and ate only bread... of course, after buying smokes that as that was left. While smoking our bank balance was ALWAYS figured in terms of what remained after buying cigerettes. Those came first, then bills and food or whatever. I was also addicted to gaming. I played Sierra's The Realm (2d mmorpg that eq borrowed the idea from) for a good 5 years, then played Dark Ages of Camelot, finally I played WOW for a bit.
"If I spent that time at a bar getting liquored up (taking a cab home of course) would you--read as: society--have more or less respect for me?"
The same, either way you are wasting your life away and just taking up space.
"People who run around labeling behaviors "addictions" and addictions "diseases" need to be smacked in the head with a clue-by-four."
I already explained that addictions have an objective neuro-chemical condition. They are not open to interpretation by the addicted.
"Contention ("selling 30 small pipes and attaching them to a pipe that is only large enough for 5 small pipes to be used to capacity") is the only way to offer a service that doesn't cost more than any consumer would pay, so there's hardly an option."
All I can say is refer to the same part of my post that you quote after this.
"Not so in the UK (where the parent's post refers)."
Why would the parent post refer to the UK? There is nothing in it that refers to the UK, in fact I just clicked the whole series of 'parent' 'parent' 'parent' until I was back at the main article and no nation is referred to by any of the posters in this thread (aside from you of course). The closest thing to a mention of a nation is a reference to the article, which is discussing Net Neutrality in the US. It goes without saying of course that we are talking about the US by default on a US based forum, particularly when commenting on a development that impacts internet service in the US and the US alone.
Real addiction is the result of neuro-chemicals produced in the brain. There are habitual drinkers, and then there are true alcoholics. An alcoholic is not someone who is drunk all the time, an alcoholic is someone with a physical condition that causes the alcohol in their bloodstream to be converted into a heroin like substance in the brain. It is possible to have never touched alcohol and be an alcoholic. Marijuana has been tested time and again and is no more habit forming than table sugar.
Anything can be a real addiction, including behavior patterns. You enjoy gaming, so your brain produces pleasure chemicals. The parts of the brain receiving these chemcials don't know if they came from crack or Quake and don't care. They stimulate you to do more of this thing that produced the chemicals forming a habit and ultimately an addiction.
Actually the 'former' cause neuro-chemicals to be created in the brain and the brain literally becomes addicted to these substances changing your thoughts and tastes to match those things to which you are 'mentally' addicted. Most physical substances convert to these same neuro-chemicals.
Within the brain there is ultimately no difference between a crack addict and a ArmageddonMUD addict, you personally are no longer in control (and probably think otherwise in either case) and the effect is negative either way.
That is NOT improvement. If I want QoS then it is for ME to implement that over the pipe I have purchased. I purchased a pipe of x speed up and x speed down and I have every right to saturate that pipe entirely both ways with whatever traffic I desire.
True your ISP might be greedy and selling 30 small pipes and attaching them to a pipe that is only large enough for 5 small pipes to be used to capacity but that is hardly the fault of the end user. The solution is not to use QoS.
QoS is like firewalling and port blocking, something that should be left in the hands of the end user to use as they see fit.
This reminds me of ISPs that blocked users who were infected with blaster/sasser/etc because they clogged the pipes. But they only clogged the pipes because the ISP's sold more bandwidth than they had!
Before anyone chimes in with the cost of bandwidth issues. I know bandwidth is expensive for smaller ISPs. But it isn't expensive for the telcos, in fact they pull numbers out of a hat. They get to artificially inflate the costs of bandwidth as much as they want. So the first step to fixing this is the release the telco stranglehold on bandwidth. This will make bandwidth affordable for smaller ISPs and distribute the profits. ISPS will give consumers more bandwidth so consumers will win. ISPS will of course buy more bandwidth from the telcos and the telcos will at worst make the same profits they make now (on the bottom line). Everybody wins.
Then, I will use QoS on my network. At every moment my 100/100Mbps pipe will be completely saturated with various kinds of traffic. But my web browsing will be responsive, my BT will be fast, and my VoIP calls (with any provider I choose) will work out just fine. My webserver and mailserver will remain responsive on their public and (requested but free) static IP since I won't have blocked the ports for my own services of course. And this will have no negative impact on other users because my pipe will be dedicated to me.
Interesting, for some reason it doesn't seem to be syncing to my network time source or that of my ISP as would be appropriate. Are they trying to DDOS time.nist.gov?
Would you arsehats stop repeating this. First your post is redundant, gobs of people repeated the same rumour ahead of you. Second, each of them has a thread under it debunking the myth. They only cut the copper if they are installing phone service (which is not required) and they won't do it if you ask the installer not to.
You ignored this one "Can you run Skype and Vonage, or are they blocked? Can you run mulitple QoS- VoIP streams without raising eyebrows? Nope." that is a pretty serious issue.
In fact, blocked ports and throttled services in general is a serious issue where I am concerned.
How is that? Or do you only mean if you are purchasing verizon phone service? My phone service runs through copper and is with another company, I would have no intention of letting them cut off another service when they install the fiber for my internet connection.
Not according to verizons website, that is 2Mbps up not 15.