And I don't even mind them complaining. They probably have reason to complain. But continuing to complain won't get much done. Laying their own cables might.
And is that not what they intend to do? And why would it be a problem for you if a US company wants to lay those non-US cables and lease them to them?
Besides, doesn't leasing imply that Brazil is still paying for them? It sounds like a normal business arrangement, rather than something "the US" picked up the tab for.
The most common reasons governments want to have non-US "internet governance" these days are that they want to restrict free speech and free reading by their citizens, or restrict some kinds of commerce by their citizens (US restricts gambling, drugs, etc.)
There already was good reason for countries who wanted less freedom to want independence from the US, but now there's also a very clear reason for countries who want more freedom to want independence.
Anyway, get some big backbones from Brazil to Europe to Canada to China to Australia and back to Brazil again, and I don't see why any non-US traffic would have to pass through the US anymore.
The absolute asshole arrogance to think that anything man does will have a long-term effect on climate is unbelievable
Because your unfounded disbelief make for such a better argument than science, doesn't it?
Just another manufactured crisis to grab grant money and headlines
Have you actually looked at where the money is in this debate? Are those poor, poor oil giants so strapped for cash that they can't counter the manufactured PR campaign by publicly funded scientists?
- and the beauty is, if anyone disagrees, just claim they are not "educated" enough to understand....
That's certainly what it looks like. That, or they're simply bought by the people with the real money.
So you declare without proof that everyone who disagrees with the AGW narrative is paid by evil corporations? *yawn* So dissent from your side of a political disagreement can automatically be dismissed with no further thought?
No, in this particular case, it can be dismissed exactly because of all the thought, not to mention calculation and observation, that has already gone into it. There's this thing called science, and I'm aware it's very popular to dismiss, belittle or ridicule it, but bad PR is not refutation.
How convenient, especially since that talking point was invented by the dried-gourd rattling witch doctor, give-me-a-virgin-to-sacrifice hucksters who cooked up the AGW scam in the first place.
You've got a nice view of scientists. Call your doctor a dried-gourd rattling witch doctor next time you're ill.
GP was talking about monarchies between 1000 and 1900, those were absolute monarchies.
They usually weren't. They were often still very dependent on support from nobility, church and/or bourgeoisie.
A better comparison would be democracy versus autocracy. A benevolent, informed dictator can be very efficient, whether he's a monarch or not. But if he's malicious or ignorant, you get a big mess.
Outrageous statements? Maybe, but his claim that the US is not a functional democracy was not false.
He may not have been the most effective president, but he's the most noble person to have occupied the White House in recent years. Instead of getting dirtier politicians into office, Americans should work on cleaning up the rest of Washington to people like Carter can have more impact.
Hillary is the only one in the administration who's arguing against censorship and for privacy. In other countries, admittedly (as that's her job), but at least I hear more positive things from her on the subject than from anyone else there.
A good anti-dust trick I recently learned from SPCR, is to put two case fans in the front, and none or one in the back. Create some over-pressure in the case, which keeps a lot of dust out.
Silent PC Review helped me assemble my (now over 5 year old) PC. Still an excellent machine, and while it's not quite as quiet as it was (the fan accumulates some dust and grease, and I added a fan to the CPU heatsink which used to be passively cooled), it's still reasonably quiet, and still very cool.
No, you can fire people right away when they're actively malicious. You can fire them for being grossly incompetent if you've got that incompetence well documented. You can fire them for practically any reason (as long as you dress it up nicely) if you pay them a month's salary for every year they worked for you. And as long as they don't have a permanent contract, you can always decide not to renew the contract.
And I've been in a startup where people got fired, not even for gross incompetence, but simply for having a job that turned out to not really be necessary.
But I think the most important thing for startups is not just the laws, but also the culture. The US definitely has a more entrepreneurial culture. Netherland less so, but it's slowly turning around.
And I'm sorry for misunderstanding what you meant. You're absolutely right that amusing is not the same thing as inappropriate. I admit I was pleasantly surprised to see Amsterdam up there. I want it to be up there. But I'm also very likely biased.
The gist of my thinking was that while the country as a whole does not excuse having individual cities fail to appear on the list, how easy it is to provide Internet within a country can have an overall effect of raising or lowering its cities on a list of this sort. Basically, as backbone infrastructure is more difficult to provide at a country level, it drives the cost of service up which pushes adoption down. That's why I was surprised that any US cities appeared on the list, since, frankly, the country-level infrastructure is far below the standard enjoyed in other parts of the developed world.
Is it? Everybody always claims that the most important internet backbones are in the US. My impression is that the problem in the US is not so much the backbones, but the unwillingness of internet providers to give people a good yet affordable connection to them.
That's also why I was looking at things at more of a country level than at a city level. I think the city-level comparisons only make sense if the country is small enough that they really only have one or two urban clusters, or is developing certain cities to the exclusion of much of the rest of their country. If a country is attempting to provide a decent level of service to everyone within its borders, however, and has a massive amount of terrain to cover, it should come as no surprise that individual cities lag behind cities in other countries where they don't have to contend with those issues and can concentrate their efforts in fewer locations.
Somehow it sounds more like the US to let Nebraska fall behind in connectivity while LA gets the good stuff, than like Sweden to give Stockholm precedence over all the (massive!) rural parts of that country. Really, Sweden is not a densely populated country. It's big, but has a fairly low population. But it's also very egalitarian and equal opportunities for everybody, while the US is much more "corporations can do what they like". Are US corporations held back from connection LA and New York because they also need to connect Nebraska?
But as far as the claim that the large cities in the US are more concentrated than Europe? Perhaps, but only if you ignore everything outside of the Northeast region of the US. To put it in perspective, it's a 40-hour drive from Los Angeles to New York. In comparison, you could go from London to Moscow in 30 hours. Or, in terms of area, the US is 9.8M km^2, while the whole of the European continent is 10.2M km^2. If you're going to be comparing the US against Europe as a whole, as you just did, then make sure you actually consider ALL of Europe.
I didn't do anything like that. I'm comparing US cities to European cities. Because that's where people actually live. A dense concentration of people is cheaper to connect than a thinly spread out population. The distance between LA and New York is irrelevant. It's the connectivity within LA that's relevant.
Compare just LA to the entire country of Sweden. The conglomeration of LA has twice as many people as all of Sweden, but within a much, much smaller area. LA proper has 4 times the population as Stockholm. Why would a small capital of a mostly rural country be easier to connect than one of the biggest conglomerations in the world? And on top of that LA is a lot closer to Silicon Valley, where a lot of internet companies are based.
Not only is most of the population of Europe concentrated in Western Europe, but so is most of the development. Because Europe is made up of numerous nations that are independent of each other, they've been able to concentrate the wealth and development in ways that the US cannot, and when you look across the whole of Europe, there are plenty of countries that are lagging behind the standard enjoyed by the wealthier nations in the western side of the continent.
Is the problem that the richest parts of the US are poorer than the richest parts of Europe? Are we
Whenever I hear about free Wifi, the first thing I think of is Cabo Verde. It's a bunch of islands off the coast of Africa, not remotely rich or anything, but every main square in every town has free Wifi that just works, with no fuss whatsoever. It's great. It's brilliant. It makes me wonder why we can't have free Wifi in the city parks in Amsterdam. We do have free wifi in a number of places, but you usually first have to check a checkbox on a webpage before you can actually use it.
There are definitely a few issues. For example, the Amsterdam entry touts T-Mobile's upcoming 4G rollout as a plus for Amsterdam, but neglects to mention that KPN and Vodafone have already rolled out their 4G networks here. T-Mobile is notorious for having the crappiest network.
How is the size of the country relevant? This isn't a list of the most connected countries, but cities. And since we're talking cities, shouldn't it be the population size of the conglomeration be the most important factor? Stockholm is tiny compared to most US conglomerations. Why is New York not on the list? Or LA? Surely you should be able to connect people fairly cheaply in metropoles like that?
The problem the US has with connecting its population has nothing to do with its geography. Well, maybe if you live in South Dakota or something, but the large cities in the US are more concentrated than in Europe. The problem is political and economic. Competition doesn't really work the way it should. Too many telcos have effective monopolies, and there's not enough drive to innovate.
It's amusing to see Amsterdam making the list. I've dealt with their ex-state phone company, KPN, and it's always a world of pain to get them to do anything.
KPN isn't the only telco. Although I'm mystified why the article explicitly mentions T-Mobile's 4G rollout this fall, when KPN and Vodafone already have 4G coverage in Amsterdam.
Amsterdam's inclusion on this list isn't inappropriate at all. There are several glass fiber networks in the city (though not every neighbourhood has been connected yet), one of the most important internet exchanges in Europe, there are a lot of internet companies, and a lot of projects to create a good environment for startups, like Appsterdam, which tries to make Amsterdam a central hub for mobile app development, by holding free lectures every week and organizing lots of other events to bring people together.
And you want to disqualify it because of a single bad experience with a single company?
This is such a wonderful argument... against automated cars.
...
Imagine a row of automated cars, all accelerating in unison from a traffic light. Somewhere down the street they'll all be going at 30MPH, and all still be separated by 3 feet.
You realize you're now inventing problems that don't exist, just so you have something imaginary to complain about, right? Or do you honestly believe that the people working on autonomous cars are ignoring these kind of situations?
Same here, and please put a bed in the car. At the moment, my son is the only one who gets to sleep during long trips. I'd love to get some sleep as well. Or maybe read, or something. Time behind the wheel is time wasted.
Slashdot Mirror
And I don't even mind them complaining. They probably have reason to complain. But continuing to complain won't get much done. Laying their own cables might.
And is that not what they intend to do? And why would it be a problem for you if a US company wants to lay those non-US cables and lease them to them?
Besides, doesn't leasing imply that Brazil is still paying for them? It sounds like a normal business arrangement, rather than something "the US" picked up the tab for.
What exactly is there to be gained by making harmful lies legal? Should shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre be legal too?
How are you currently paying for Brazilian internet connections?
The most common reasons governments want to have non-US "internet governance" these days are that they want to restrict free speech and free reading by their citizens, or restrict some kinds of commerce by their citizens (US restricts gambling, drugs, etc.)
There already was good reason for countries who wanted less freedom to want independence from the US, but now there's also a very clear reason for countries who want more freedom to want independence.
Anyway, get some big backbones from Brazil to Europe to Canada to China to Australia and back to Brazil again, and I don't see why any non-US traffic would have to pass through the US anymore.
The absolute asshole arrogance to think that anything man does will have a long-term effect on climate is unbelievable
Because your unfounded disbelief make for such a better argument than science, doesn't it?
Just another manufactured crisis to grab grant money and headlines
Have you actually looked at where the money is in this debate? Are those poor, poor oil giants so strapped for cash that they can't counter the manufactured PR campaign by publicly funded scientists?
- and the beauty is, if anyone disagrees, just claim they are not "educated" enough to understand....
That's certainly what it looks like. That, or they're simply bought by the people with the real money.
So you declare without proof that everyone who disagrees with the AGW narrative is paid by evil corporations? *yawn* So dissent from your side of a political disagreement can automatically be dismissed with no further thought?
No, in this particular case, it can be dismissed exactly because of all the thought, not to mention calculation and observation, that has already gone into it. There's this thing called science, and I'm aware it's very popular to dismiss, belittle or ridicule it, but bad PR is not refutation.
How convenient, especially since that talking point was invented by the dried-gourd rattling witch doctor, give-me-a-virgin-to-sacrifice hucksters who cooked up the AGW scam in the first place.
You've got a nice view of scientists. Call your doctor a dried-gourd rattling witch doctor next time you're ill.
Discrediting people is much more efficient than torturing them.
GP was talking about monarchies between 1000 and 1900, those were absolute monarchies.
They usually weren't. They were often still very dependent on support from nobility, church and/or bourgeoisie.
A better comparison would be democracy versus autocracy. A benevolent, informed dictator can be very efficient, whether he's a monarch or not. But if he's malicious or ignorant, you get a big mess.
Obama won the prize for the achievement of not being Bush.
Undeserved. It turns out he's not much different than Bush.
Outrageous statements? Maybe, but his claim that the US is not a functional democracy was not false.
He may not have been the most effective president, but he's the most noble person to have occupied the White House in recent years. Instead of getting dirtier politicians into office, Americans should work on cleaning up the rest of Washington to people like Carter can have more impact.
Hillary is the only one in the administration who's arguing against censorship and for privacy. In other countries, admittedly (as that's her job), but at least I hear more positive things from her on the subject than from anyone else there.
I would love to read that article. Any idea where you saw it or what the title was?
A good anti-dust trick I recently learned from SPCR, is to put two case fans in the front, and none or one in the back. Create some over-pressure in the case, which keeps a lot of dust out.
Silent PC Review helped me assemble my (now over 5 year old) PC. Still an excellent machine, and while it's not quite as quiet as it was (the fan accumulates some dust and grease, and I added a fan to the CPU heatsink which used to be passively cooled), it's still reasonably quiet, and still very cool.
Not just overclocking, but noise. Many high end coolers are very quiet (some even passive), whereas stock coolers tend to be very noisy.
No, you can fire people right away when they're actively malicious. You can fire them for being grossly incompetent if you've got that incompetence well documented. You can fire them for practically any reason (as long as you dress it up nicely) if you pay them a month's salary for every year they worked for you. And as long as they don't have a permanent contract, you can always decide not to renew the contract.
And I've been in a startup where people got fired, not even for gross incompetence, but simply for having a job that turned out to not really be necessary.
But I think the most important thing for startups is not just the laws, but also the culture. The US definitely has a more entrepreneurial culture. Netherland less so, but it's slowly turning around.
And I'm sorry for misunderstanding what you meant. You're absolutely right that amusing is not the same thing as inappropriate. I admit I was pleasantly surprised to see Amsterdam up there. I want it to be up there. But I'm also very likely biased.
The gist of my thinking was that while the country as a whole does not excuse having individual cities fail to appear on the list, how easy it is to provide Internet within a country can have an overall effect of raising or lowering its cities on a list of this sort. Basically, as backbone infrastructure is more difficult to provide at a country level, it drives the cost of service up which pushes adoption down. That's why I was surprised that any US cities appeared on the list, since, frankly, the country-level infrastructure is far below the standard enjoyed in other parts of the developed world.
Is it? Everybody always claims that the most important internet backbones are in the US. My impression is that the problem in the US is not so much the backbones, but the unwillingness of internet providers to give people a good yet affordable connection to them.
That's also why I was looking at things at more of a country level than at a city level. I think the city-level comparisons only make sense if the country is small enough that they really only have one or two urban clusters, or is developing certain cities to the exclusion of much of the rest of their country. If a country is attempting to provide a decent level of service to everyone within its borders, however, and has a massive amount of terrain to cover, it should come as no surprise that individual cities lag behind cities in other countries where they don't have to contend with those issues and can concentrate their efforts in fewer locations.
Somehow it sounds more like the US to let Nebraska fall behind in connectivity while LA gets the good stuff, than like Sweden to give Stockholm precedence over all the (massive!) rural parts of that country. Really, Sweden is not a densely populated country. It's big, but has a fairly low population. But it's also very egalitarian and equal opportunities for everybody, while the US is much more "corporations can do what they like". Are US corporations held back from connection LA and New York because they also need to connect Nebraska?
But as far as the claim that the large cities in the US are more concentrated than Europe? Perhaps, but only if you ignore everything outside of the Northeast region of the US. To put it in perspective, it's a 40-hour drive from Los Angeles to New York. In comparison, you could go from London to Moscow in 30 hours. Or, in terms of area, the US is 9.8M km^2, while the whole of the European continent is 10.2M km^2. If you're going to be comparing the US against Europe as a whole, as you just did, then make sure you actually consider ALL of Europe.
I didn't do anything like that. I'm comparing US cities to European cities. Because that's where people actually live. A dense concentration of people is cheaper to connect than a thinly spread out population. The distance between LA and New York is irrelevant. It's the connectivity within LA that's relevant.
Compare just LA to the entire country of Sweden. The conglomeration of LA has twice as many people as all of Sweden, but within a much, much smaller area. LA proper has 4 times the population as Stockholm. Why would a small capital of a mostly rural country be easier to connect than one of the biggest conglomerations in the world? And on top of that LA is a lot closer to Silicon Valley, where a lot of internet companies are based.
Not only is most of the population of Europe concentrated in Western Europe, but so is most of the development. Because Europe is made up of numerous nations that are independent of each other, they've been able to concentrate the wealth and development in ways that the US cannot, and when you look across the whole of Europe, there are plenty of countries that are lagging behind the standard enjoyed by the wealthier nations in the western side of the continent.
Is the problem that the richest parts of the US are poorer than the richest parts of Europe? Are we
Whenever I hear about free Wifi, the first thing I think of is Cabo Verde. It's a bunch of islands off the coast of Africa, not remotely rich or anything, but every main square in every town has free Wifi that just works, with no fuss whatsoever. It's great. It's brilliant. It makes me wonder why we can't have free Wifi in the city parks in Amsterdam. We do have free wifi in a number of places, but you usually first have to check a checkbox on a webpage before you can actually use it.
Being better than something not on the list doesn't automatically make it belong on the list.
There are definitely a few issues. For example, the Amsterdam entry touts T-Mobile's upcoming 4G rollout as a plus for Amsterdam, but neglects to mention that KPN and Vodafone have already rolled out their 4G networks here. T-Mobile is notorious for having the crappiest network.
How is the size of the country relevant? This isn't a list of the most connected countries, but cities. And since we're talking cities, shouldn't it be the population size of the conglomeration be the most important factor? Stockholm is tiny compared to most US conglomerations. Why is New York not on the list? Or LA? Surely you should be able to connect people fairly cheaply in metropoles like that?
The problem the US has with connecting its population has nothing to do with its geography. Well, maybe if you live in South Dakota or something, but the large cities in the US are more concentrated than in Europe. The problem is political and economic. Competition doesn't really work the way it should. Too many telcos have effective monopolies, and there's not enough drive to innovate.
It's amusing to see Amsterdam making the list. I've dealt with their ex-state phone company, KPN, and it's always a world of pain to get them to do anything.
KPN isn't the only telco. Although I'm mystified why the article explicitly mentions T-Mobile's 4G rollout this fall, when KPN and Vodafone already have 4G coverage in Amsterdam.
Amsterdam's inclusion on this list isn't inappropriate at all. There are several glass fiber networks in the city (though not every neighbourhood has been connected yet), one of the most important internet exchanges in Europe, there are a lot of internet companies, and a lot of projects to create a good environment for startups, like Appsterdam, which tries to make Amsterdam a central hub for mobile app development, by holding free lectures every week and organizing lots of other events to bring people together.
And you want to disqualify it because of a single bad experience with a single company?
This is such a wonderful argument ... against automated cars.
...
Imagine a row of automated cars, all accelerating in unison from a traffic light. Somewhere down the street they'll all be going at 30MPH, and all still be separated by 3 feet.
You realize you're now inventing problems that don't exist, just so you have something imaginary to complain about, right? Or do you honestly believe that the people working on autonomous cars are ignoring these kind of situations?
Same here, and please put a bed in the car. At the moment, my son is the only one who gets to sleep during long trips. I'd love to get some sleep as well. Or maybe read, or something. Time behind the wheel is time wasted.
Don't defend the holding of Miranda. The US and UK both violate their own laws in order to crack down on the people.