Care to point out the part of the Patriot Act that would authorize the Government to jail me if I protested our policies towards some repressed/conquered ethic group (say Native Americans)?
People still want to screw with mother nature regardless of the dangers that it poses.
Hey I'm as leery of screwing with Mother Nature as the next guy, but let's not forget that Mother Nature was dangerous way before we had the technology to "screw with" her and will remain so regardless of any technological advances that we may make.
While I share the general sense of outrage at China's heavy-handed government oppression, including grotesque overspending on ill-conceived megaprojects that largely benefit a small number of high-placed stakeholders (three Gorges Damn, the Olympics) at the expense of the public good, I'm not sure that - at least in America - we're not living in a glass house. Let me rephrase the above to show why:
The difference between America and China is that you are free to speak your criticisms of the American Government without fear of punishment from said Government.
Is there some reason you are posting my email in clear text?
He's a troll'ish dickwad?
I don't recall complaining about not getting enough spam...
I wouldn't sweat it that much.... robots browsing/. don't generally see comments below +4 and his wound up at -1. Does kind of piss you off though, doesn't it?:(
The free market is providing phone service as cheaply as possible
Really? Is that why the cost of text messaging has gone from $0.02 to $0.05 to $0.10 to $0.15? Are we really supposed to be believe that it costs $0.15 to send 160 bytes of data across the country in the 21st century? Hell, the USPS can move a physical piece of mail across the country for $0.41.
If you're looking for free or almost-free cellphone service
I'm not looking for "free" or "almost-free". I'm looking to not get ripped off. Right now minute #451 is somehow worth 4.5 times as much as minute #450. Right now they can lock you into a contract with an early termination fee that costs twice what they paid for the el-cheapo phone that they still charged you something for. Right now they can force you to extend that contract just for changing your rate plan -- even though the only point to contracts in the first place was to protect them from people leaving with their carrier-subsidized phones.
Internet requires resources. Rubber/metal or glass for the cables. Labor to dig the ditches to lay the cable. Employees to maintain it. Electricity to power it.
You are ignoring the fact that after that cable is laid it costs the exact same amount of money regardless of whether it's running at 0% of capacity or 100%.
You are making a false assumption that "adding extra bandwidth" is somehow free. It is not.
And you are making the assumption that the ISP business isn't profitable enough for them to afford to do this without changing their pricing structure. I haven't seen Verizon griping about people using lots of bandwidth. In fact I recall a Verizon executive specifically coming out and saying that he didn't think metered access was a solution they would be using any time soon. Maybe that's because they don't have a video revenue stream to worry about?
If you want to download 1000 gigabytes a month, then your ISP is going to have to lay-down more cable to provide the extra bandwidth, and that's going to cost money
You don't have a clue what I download. Last month I ran about 70 gigs down and 9 up. I don't think that's particularly excessive, yet Time Warner's largest plan will be 40 gigs before overages kick in. You realize that (averaged out over a month) translates into ISDN speed (128kbits)? Do you really think that it's impossible for a cable company to provide better then ISDN service without making money? This wouldn't have anything to do with the emerging internet video market that threatens to undercut their cable packages, would it?
Furthermore, they don't have to "lay-down more cable". With DSL they'd have to turn up more connections at the central office, not run more cable to each house in the neighborhood. With cable they'd have to allocate more channels on the coax plant to HSI services or split the network into smaller nodes. Either way the actual work on the last mile (the most expensive part) is minimal in the case of cable and non-existent in the case of DSL -- most of the work would be at the backend.
This whole thing has less to do with the cost of bandwidth (which isn't even the biggest expense facing most decent-sized ISPs) and more with extracting revenue from the power users of their product and protecting existing revenue streams.
Either way, you need to accept the harsh reality that any ISP that offers broadband service (1+ Mbps) without transfer caps will go out of business within 2 years.
Yeah, I can't help but remember how Time Warner went out of business two years after they introduced Roadrunner.......
I also said, "Take more; pay more. Just like electrical service, cell service, water service, et cetera, et cetera."
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that internet service functions as a typical utility. A bit of data is not the same thing as a kilowatt hour or gallon of water -- both of those required resources to produce -- coal/gas for the electric and energy/treatment for the water.
Bits don't cost money -- the capacity to transfer them does. Those broadband lines don't cost less money to maintain if they are idle. The ISP has some sort of expense at the network edge for IP transit (but even this is becoming less of an issue as national ISPs build their own IP backbones) but those connections are typically billed at the 95% percentile so even there you don't have a direct correlation between bits and dollars.
That's a similar structure to how electricity, water, and phone utilities are priced for consumers
Actually, the trend with phone service the last few years is to offer unlimited calling so that's a pretty bad example. You can still get pay-per-minute plans but virtually everyone has some sort of reasonably priced unlimited option. It's also an option for cellular customers too -- albeit not a "reasonably priced" one, IMHO. Electric and water is likewise a bad comparison -- you need to dig up and ship a specific amount of coal for each KwH consumed -- not so for data.
And the internet utility can take the extra dollars and use them to buy new servers and lay additional cable to support their high-demand customers, rather than block access to P2P or Itunes.com.
"And the internet utility can pay a higher dividend to it's investors"
A lovely suggestion if there was a better company. Unfortunately the "free market" has failed us utterly in this regard.
Pre-paid service is a crippled joke in the United States. It's not good for anything besides "keep it in the car and use it if I break down" type usage. And every single post-paid plan contains overages and hefty early termination fees. You won't find a national carrier (or even a local one with service in my area) without them. T-Mobile recently came out with something called "SmartAccess", which allows you to pre-pay your postpaid service and not have a contract -- but that's the exception to the rule and even that plan still comes with hefty overages.
I only pay $5 a month for my cellphone
That's nice. And how much do you use it? I use my cellphone as my sole phone line because I'd rather just have one phone number for everything. Pre-paid service isn't economical for that type of usage (min of $0.10/min, typically no nights and weekends) so I'm stuck in the post-paid world of overages and contracts.
When is the last time you hadn't thrown your vote away? Ron Paul even if its write-in!
You realize that for write-in votes to count that the candidate has to have filed his candidacy with the appropriate agencies (typically the State Board of Elections), right? For President he would also have to file a slate of Electors to cast votes for him in the Electoral College. He's on record as saying he has no intention of doing either of these things, so I'm honestly at a loss for why it wouldn't be "throwing your vote away" to vote for him -- if you really believe in his message then vote for the Libertarian candidate -- they are sure to have one in November and that vote will actually be counted.
That's entirely and completely fair. Take more; pay more.
Claiming that something is "entirely and completely fair" while using the cellular industry as your example strains creditability just a tad.
There is nothing fair about the billing system used by the wireless industry. It's a holdover to the early 90s when spectrum was limited and the underlying technology (AMPS) was grossly inefficient with it's use of said spectrum. Modern technology is drastically more efficient at cramming more calls into the same amount of spectrum and the carriers have much more spectrum now then at any point in the past.
Do you you think charging $0.15 for a 160 byte text message is "fair"? Do you think $0.40/min overages are "fair"? Why are the first 450 minutes worth 8.8 cents ($39.99 / 450) but minute #451 is worth four and a half times as much $0.40)? That's your model of fairness?
There is nothing fair about the way the wireless industry operates, least of all it's billing practices. This is seriously the model you want to see adopted for the internet? Charges for individual services way above the actual cost (*cough* SMS *cough*) and overages that bear no relation to the actual cost to the carrier and exist solely to pad the bottom line?
the ZDnet editor, and the author of the proposal have no grasp of reality.
Indeed. Here was my favorite bit: "They tell us that reining in bandwidth hogs is actually the ISP's way of killing the video distribution competition"
And it's not? Recall the recent news over Time Warner's announcement -- 40GB as the highest tier they plan on offering. How could a tier so low have any other purpose besides killing online video distribution? 40GB in one month is almost achievable with ISDN -- technology that's 20 years old. Can we really not do any better then that in 2008?
Ie here is a 10Mb/s connection, at 100:1 contention, we expect you to use 0.1Mb/s on average, or 240GB a month. If you are below that then fine, if you go above it then you get hit with per/GB charges
Shouldn't the customer get a bill credit if they use less then the 240GB? Why do overages only cut one way? If they want us to believe that bandwidth has a fixed cost then Grandma should probably be paying a lot less then $30 for her broadband connection.
You left out another major requirement -- that a reasonable person would expect anyone to take you seriously. Without that, you can suggest all kinds of heinous crimes and it still won't be incitement.
Cool! I'm off to the airport then. I'm gonna suggest all kinds of heinous crimes but I'm sure nobody will take me seriously. What could possibly go wro#TY&I@IO!&*()$&(*@(*!NO CARRIER
Yes, actually I am. I think you should get one choice in the voting booth. Vote for the guy you support. If people can't understand that concept then I don't see why we should change the election system to make it easier for them.
I would note though, that even if I supported Instant Runoff Voting I would not think it reason enough to vote for John McCain. His stance on foreign policy and the war merits voting against him no matter what his other attributes may be. As I previously said I admire and respect his position on the torture debate -- but Hillary and Obama are also against it and they happen to not be "batshit insane" (to borrow your words) on foreign policy.
I thinks he's batshit insane, but only for the war in iraq/foreign policy shit
Oh, well if it's just something as unimportant as foreign policy then I guess it's ok if he's "batshit insane";)
I used to have a lot of respect for him but I lost it after he started kissing the ass of the religious right. I miss the John McCain from 2000..... what happened to him? About the only thing I can agree with McCain 2.0 on is his steadfast opposition to torture. On virtually every other issue he stands opposed to what I believe in.
Hosting an online game is probably not allowed on purpose, the rest are probably accidental - which means they're clueless.)
Why wouldn't hosting a game be allowed? I can understand why they wouldn't want you running a game server 24/7 (though a 24/7 game server would have little network impact compared to any p2p application) but if you want to kick back and play with some friends for a few hours I really don't see why they'd have any right to complain about that.
Actually, blue is one of the minor parties -- either the Conservative Party or the Independence Party as I recall. The colors that they use are actually spelled out in the state Election Law -- no, I'm not making that up and yes our state legislators really need a hobby;)
Here's a random bit of political trivia: Those colors (blue for the Democrats, red for the Republicans) used to be reversed by most media outlets. The current 'scheme' started to be used in 2000 and gave rise to the notion of a red-state/blue-state divide.
I'm not sure if its just laziness on the part of the poll runners
That's possible. I've come close to pulling out my hair during past elections trying to get the other three people in my polling place to follow proper procedure.
As a random example, we aren't supposed to sign in more then two or three voters at a time. If you sign in more of them then that you'll invariably wind up with someone standing in line at the machine who realizes that he needs to be somewhere and decides to duck out of line without voting. Since we've already signed him in this screws up our public counter and effectively costs him his vote -- we have no way of knowing that he hasn't already voted (he signed the book) when he comes back.
I stress this point to my fellow inspectors every single election, yet if I'm called away for something (usually to do an affidavit ballot) I'll come back and discover 10 people waiting behind the machine to vote, all mixed in with other people who have already voted and yet more people who can't vote (spouses who aren't registered, SOs from other districts, etc, etc) mixed in with the same mass of humanity.
The solution to these problems (IMHO) is to get more young people to volunteer to work as Elections Inspectors. I encourage people to do this whenever I have the opportunity. Call up your Board of Elections and volunteer. It requires two days a year (the Primary and the General) plus a few hours to attend a training class. Most Counties in NYS will even pay you for doing it -- here in Broome we get $10/hr or $11/hr for the supervisor.
Slashdot Mirror
Care to point out the part of the Patriot Act that would authorize the Government to jail me if I protested our policies towards some repressed/conquered ethic group (say Native Americans)?
Hey I'm as leery of screwing with Mother Nature as the next guy, but let's not forget that Mother Nature was dangerous way before we had the technology to "screw with" her and will remain so regardless of any technological advances that we may make.
The difference between America and China is that you are free to speak your criticisms of the American Government without fear of punishment from said Government.
Left, right, right, down, down, left, up, right, up, up, left, down, down, right, up, down, left, right, up, left, down, down, right, up, left.
Just a guess ;)
Google doesn't seem to think so....
People in stone houses shouldn't throw bricks moron.Indeed.
He's a troll'ish dickwad?
I don't recall complaining about not getting enough spam...I wouldn't sweat it that much.... robots browsing /. don't generally see comments below +4 and his wound up at -1. Does kind of piss you off though, doesn't it? :(
Really? Is that why the cost of text messaging has gone from $0.02 to $0.05 to $0.10 to $0.15? Are we really supposed to be believe that it costs $0.15 to send 160 bytes of data across the country in the 21st century? Hell, the USPS can move a physical piece of mail across the country for $0.41.
If you're looking for free or almost-free cellphone serviceI'm not looking for "free" or "almost-free". I'm looking to not get ripped off. Right now minute #451 is somehow worth 4.5 times as much as minute #450. Right now they can lock you into a contract with an early termination fee that costs twice what they paid for the el-cheapo phone that they still charged you something for. Right now they can force you to extend that contract just for changing your rate plan -- even though the only point to contracts in the first place was to protect them from people leaving with their carrier-subsidized phones.
You are ignoring the fact that after that cable is laid it costs the exact same amount of money regardless of whether it's running at 0% of capacity or 100%.
You are making a false assumption that "adding extra bandwidth" is somehow free. It is not.And you are making the assumption that the ISP business isn't profitable enough for them to afford to do this without changing their pricing structure. I haven't seen Verizon griping about people using lots of bandwidth. In fact I recall a Verizon executive specifically coming out and saying that he didn't think metered access was a solution they would be using any time soon. Maybe that's because they don't have a video revenue stream to worry about?
If you want to download 1000 gigabytes a month, then your ISP is going to have to lay-down more cable to provide the extra bandwidth, and that's going to cost moneyYou don't have a clue what I download. Last month I ran about 70 gigs down and 9 up. I don't think that's particularly excessive, yet Time Warner's largest plan will be 40 gigs before overages kick in. You realize that (averaged out over a month) translates into ISDN speed (128kbits)? Do you really think that it's impossible for a cable company to provide better then ISDN service without making money? This wouldn't have anything to do with the emerging internet video market that threatens to undercut their cable packages, would it?
Furthermore, they don't have to "lay-down more cable". With DSL they'd have to turn up more connections at the central office, not run more cable to each house in the neighborhood. With cable they'd have to allocate more channels on the coax plant to HSI services or split the network into smaller nodes. Either way the actual work on the last mile (the most expensive part) is minimal in the case of cable and non-existent in the case of DSL -- most of the work would be at the backend.
This whole thing has less to do with the cost of bandwidth (which isn't even the biggest expense facing most decent-sized ISPs) and more with extracting revenue from the power users of their product and protecting existing revenue streams.
Yeah, I can't help but remember how Time Warner went out of business two years after they introduced Roadrunner.......
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that internet service functions as a typical utility. A bit of data is not the same thing as a kilowatt hour or gallon of water -- both of those required resources to produce -- coal/gas for the electric and energy/treatment for the water.
Bits don't cost money -- the capacity to transfer them does. Those broadband lines don't cost less money to maintain if they are idle. The ISP has some sort of expense at the network edge for IP transit (but even this is becoming less of an issue as national ISPs build their own IP backbones) but those connections are typically billed at the 95% percentile so even there you don't have a direct correlation between bits and dollars.
That's a similar structure to how electricity, water, and phone utilities are priced for consumersActually, the trend with phone service the last few years is to offer unlimited calling so that's a pretty bad example. You can still get pay-per-minute plans but virtually everyone has some sort of reasonably priced unlimited option. It's also an option for cellular customers too -- albeit not a "reasonably priced" one, IMHO. Electric and water is likewise a bad comparison -- you need to dig up and ship a specific amount of coal for each KwH consumed -- not so for data.
And the internet utility can take the extra dollars and use them to buy new servers and lay additional cable to support their high-demand customers, rather than block access to P2P or Itunes.com."And the internet utility can pay a higher dividend to it's investors"
There, fixed that for you.
A lovely suggestion if there was a better company. Unfortunately the "free market" has failed us utterly in this regard.
Pre-paid service is a crippled joke in the United States. It's not good for anything besides "keep it in the car and use it if I break down" type usage. And every single post-paid plan contains overages and hefty early termination fees. You won't find a national carrier (or even a local one with service in my area) without them. T-Mobile recently came out with something called "SmartAccess", which allows you to pre-pay your postpaid service and not have a contract -- but that's the exception to the rule and even that plan still comes with hefty overages.
I only pay $5 a month for my cellphoneThat's nice. And how much do you use it? I use my cellphone as my sole phone line because I'd rather just have one phone number for everything. Pre-paid service isn't economical for that type of usage (min of $0.10/min, typically no nights and weekends) so I'm stuck in the post-paid world of overages and contracts.
You realize that for write-in votes to count that the candidate has to have filed his candidacy with the appropriate agencies (typically the State Board of Elections), right? For President he would also have to file a slate of Electors to cast votes for him in the Electoral College. He's on record as saying he has no intention of doing either of these things, so I'm honestly at a loss for why it wouldn't be "throwing your vote away" to vote for him -- if you really believe in his message then vote for the Libertarian candidate -- they are sure to have one in November and that vote will actually be counted.
Yeah, think of the load on that poor FTP server..... they should have used Bittorrent to push out their patch ;)
The bold/highlighted statement clearly shows his lack of knowledge about America ;)
Claiming that something is "entirely and completely fair" while using the cellular industry as your example strains creditability just a tad.
There is nothing fair about the billing system used by the wireless industry. It's a holdover to the early 90s when spectrum was limited and the underlying technology (AMPS) was grossly inefficient with it's use of said spectrum. Modern technology is drastically more efficient at cramming more calls into the same amount of spectrum and the carriers have much more spectrum now then at any point in the past.
Do you you think charging $0.15 for a 160 byte text message is "fair"? Do you think $0.40/min overages are "fair"? Why are the first 450 minutes worth 8.8 cents ($39.99 / 450) but minute #451 is worth four and a half times as much $0.40)? That's your model of fairness?
There is nothing fair about the way the wireless industry operates, least of all it's billing practices. This is seriously the model you want to see adopted for the internet? Charges for individual services way above the actual cost (*cough* SMS *cough*) and overages that bear no relation to the actual cost to the carrier and exist solely to pad the bottom line?
Umm, I won't argue about Hillary, but I'd like to know what you are basing that opinion of Obama on. As big of warhawk as John McCain???
Indeed. Here was my favorite bit: "They tell us that reining in bandwidth hogs is actually the ISP's way of killing the video distribution competition"
And it's not? Recall the recent news over Time Warner's announcement -- 40GB as the highest tier they plan on offering. How could a tier so low have any other purpose besides killing online video distribution? 40GB in one month is almost achievable with ISDN -- technology that's 20 years old. Can we really not do any better then that in 2008?
Ie here is a 10Mb/s connection, at 100:1 contention, we expect you to use 0.1Mb/s on average, or 240GB a month. If you are below that then fine, if you go above it then you get hit with per/GB chargesShouldn't the customer get a bill credit if they use less then the 240GB? Why do overages only cut one way? If they want us to believe that bandwidth has a fixed cost then Grandma should probably be paying a lot less then $30 for her broadband connection.
Cool! I'm off to the airport then. I'm gonna suggest all kinds of heinous crimes but I'm sure nobody will take me seriously. What could possibly go wro#TY&I@IO!&*()$&(*@(*!NO CARRIER
Yes, actually I am. I think you should get one choice in the voting booth. Vote for the guy you support. If people can't understand that concept then I don't see why we should change the election system to make it easier for them.
I would note though, that even if I supported Instant Runoff Voting I would not think it reason enough to vote for John McCain. His stance on foreign policy and the war merits voting against him no matter what his other attributes may be. As I previously said I admire and respect his position on the torture debate -- but Hillary and Obama are also against it and they happen to not be "batshit insane" (to borrow your words) on foreign policy.
Oh, well if it's just something as unimportant as foreign policy then I guess it's ok if he's "batshit insane" ;)
I used to have a lot of respect for him but I lost it after he started kissing the ass of the religious right. I miss the John McCain from 2000..... what happened to him? About the only thing I can agree with McCain 2.0 on is his steadfast opposition to torture. On virtually every other issue he stands opposed to what I believe in.
No he's not. He is in prison though ;)
Not with Vista you can't... or won't be able to in the future rather.
Why wouldn't hosting a game be allowed? I can understand why they wouldn't want you running a game server 24/7 (though a 24/7 game server would have little network impact compared to any p2p application) but if you want to kick back and play with some friends for a few hours I really don't see why they'd have any right to complain about that.
Actually, blue is one of the minor parties -- either the Conservative Party or the Independence Party as I recall. The colors that they use are actually spelled out in the state Election Law -- no, I'm not making that up and yes our state legislators really need a hobby ;)
Here's a random bit of political trivia: Those colors (blue for the Democrats, red for the Republicans) used to be reversed by most media outlets. The current 'scheme' started to be used in 2000 and gave rise to the notion of a red-state/blue-state divide.
That's possible. I've come close to pulling out my hair during past elections trying to get the other three people in my polling place to follow proper procedure.
As a random example, we aren't supposed to sign in more then two or three voters at a time. If you sign in more of them then that you'll invariably wind up with someone standing in line at the machine who realizes that he needs to be somewhere and decides to duck out of line without voting. Since we've already signed him in this screws up our public counter and effectively costs him his vote -- we have no way of knowing that he hasn't already voted (he signed the book) when he comes back.
I stress this point to my fellow inspectors every single election, yet if I'm called away for something (usually to do an affidavit ballot) I'll come back and discover 10 people waiting behind the machine to vote, all mixed in with other people who have already voted and yet more people who can't vote (spouses who aren't registered, SOs from other districts, etc, etc) mixed in with the same mass of humanity.
The solution to these problems (IMHO) is to get more young people to volunteer to work as Elections Inspectors. I encourage people to do this whenever I have the opportunity. Call up your Board of Elections and volunteer. It requires two days a year (the Primary and the General) plus a few hours to attend a training class. Most Counties in NYS will even pay you for doing it -- here in Broome we get $10/hr or $11/hr for the supervisor.