Given that most corporations don't pay any taxes you are correct in that they are not directly linked. You'll also note that I didn't state they were directly linked. That is just the rationale used to justify taxation of corporations and its pretty fair. Why should a billionaire pay an arse load of money to build a road millions will use when the millions can pay a small amount to accomplish the same task. Of course a billionaire benefits more from the road millions travel on because at least some of those people are working for him in turn generating more wealth.
It would be nice if we could just scrap the entire tax code and start over with something no longer than 10 pages. Then you could reduce the tax rates because there wouldn't be any loop-holes and everyone would be happier. Everyone except for tax lawyers and H&R Block type places.
Where do people get this impression that the company owns everything you do?
This is simply not true by default in the U.S. legal system. It properly does vary a bit from state to state but for the most part things like email are owned by the employee unless specifically stated and agreed upon before employment began.
When you're in IT some things get gray real fast. For instance, my title is network engineer. I write a lot of my own scripts to automate tasks. That code is mine because the company isn't paying me to write code. Our programmer is of course under different restrictions based on who's equipment he's using. Of course it's further grayed by the fact that we both often use our own equipment on company time because it suits a particular need at the time. The issue is quite muddy then on who's is what as far as coding goes.
Things like root passwords should be locked in some sort of safe somewhere in case of emergency but personal passwords should never be stored for any reason and they can't require you to give it up although they can certainly change it anyway and impersonate you despite not giving up passwords. In the end its all about principle.
I half agree with you and half disagree. If a non-technical executive is giving you technical orders then disregarding is often the best policy. The owner of my current company wanted full admin access to all the files on the network. I knew this was inherently dangerous as he in the past has accidentally deleted over 200gigs of content while his computer wasn't behaving at home. Instead I built him a file-server and copied all the data over to it and gave him full access to that so he can't harm production.
There are situations where you do have to give in but in most situations I've ever been in at least standing your ground does a lot more to change things than just bending over and letting an idiot decide password should be the root password.
It doesn't sound like you are involved in network administration if you have such strong opinions about router access which is not something everyone should have access to. There are definitely a few types of devices where it does no good to give higher ups access because the only thing they can do with it is screw it up.
City managers were clearly screwing up as they should have had to at least two admins and both of the admins would then have the login information available to them. Some random Joe should not be logging into my router anymore than I should be monkeying with a nuclear reactor. If you're not trained on the hardware then you shouldn't be working on it in a production environment.
Childs' reaction was definitely in the wrong so there is clearly wrong on both sides but his manager clearly wasn't handling security seriously and had no business asking of Childs' what he did. I don't give my boss my personal passwords either nor does anyone in the company get access to personal passwords as there is no need.
Are you talking about Canada? Because the united states effective tax rate is no where near that high. I'm not sure where you got that impression either. Here's a source for you. And another and here which actually states the corporate tax rate as 35% for the upper end. Sorry, that doesn't sound very socialist. It's definitely on the upper end of world wide tax rates but dictatorships, communist countries, and the rest all seem to do roughly the same.
Also I fail to see how even tax rates on revenue relate to ownership in the company. You mean to say that all the money the government put into public works like roads, power, and telecomm shouldn't be compensated by the people that use it the most?
Humorous that it's a book store in Texas. So far it mostly just looks like Republicans are trying to raise the bar for Obama calling him The One or the messiah and so come re-election they can say how he didn't fix all these problems that are going to take decades to fix.
Fortunately I don't think this strategy will work as most people I know that voted for Obama didn't think he would fix everything so they will look at what progress he has made during the time of re-election and hopefully make an informed decision then to either re-elect or vote for someone new if he hasn't made sufficient progress.
I don't get it, where do you people get that everyone thought of Obama as a messiah? I don't know anyone that did and I know a lot of people that voted for him.
No one in their right mind thought Obama would solve all the problems but that he would cease the landslide that Bush was causing and so far this seems to be true with the closing of Gitmo.
Of course Gitmo isn't closed yet so the jury is still out there.
As for the stimulus bill you seem to be confused about who's pushing for what. The vast majority of Americans are asking for a giant pork bill. Whether that is good or bad for the population should be debated heavily as there are far reaching consequences to borrowing that much money which was previously something the former administration liked doing. Obama never asked for 800 billion, that all came from Pelosi as you say and I've seen a number of republicans acting quite childishly about how it is being developed without their input. If they didn't act like such babies about it I'd be more inclined to believe them or at least feel bad for them since it's good to have opposing viewpoints in a debate.
Of course the idea of borrowing several billion dollars to give people a tax cut is also quite absurd as we have to pay that money back somehow which will be in higher taxes down the road. This is of course what the republican agenda is all sore about right now as they want more tax cuts.
I think we can all agree that fear and panic are emotions that should not be involved in bill making especially with a stimulus bill as large as the one on the table. It's forcing all of congress to move too quickly and they will end up making even more poor decisions. Remember, congress had an even lower approval rating than Bush did and for good reason! I wish I could say Pelosi was helping to change that but she is just as ineffective as the republican she replaced.
Well written and I agree completely. It's easy to overreact to situations where a lot of wrong clearly happened and instead we should focus on helping the kids that were wrongly imprisoned in addition to whatever punishment is deemed fit for the judge which appears to be substantial jail-time. Seems pretty tempered to me.
I don't know how you can write that and be serious. OpenOffice is not a very well developed product, is not very flexible, and durability is in question because a lot of people end up throwing it out.
I'll give you a classic example which actually happened to me recently when I had way too many windows open on my Ubuntu setup. I opened my document with Openoffice, made some changes, hit save. Then went about doing other tasks. At that point I had probably 30 windows open so I couldn't see that I had left the document open so I just opened it again and started documenting more about our network. It was really more of a spreadsheet if I recall. Long story short, I hit save on the new document, at some point ended up editting the original that was still open and lost all the work in the second window.
MS Office would have opened it in read-only mode telling you the file was already in use which would have given the user a clue of what happened. Autosave is also a feature that is not on by default for some reason. Then of course there is the whole close button matter how it won't warn you about the document not being saved. It will just go ahead and close anyway leaving you none the wiser.
It has basic functionality that one would expect from an office suite but OpenOffice has a long way to go before it's going to be a true replacement for a great many people. I haven't seen that many content management systems integration nor have I seen change tracking which are all features users expect from MS Office and use rather regularly.
Of course in my environment I go one further with spreadsheets that are dynamically driven by our database which is still functionality lacking in OpenOffice. Combine all that with the fact that it loads slow as all get out and I clearly have a low opinion of OO.org
That said, now that I've learned a few gotchas I can work just fine in OO but the user seems to have to learn everything the hard way and that doesn't strike me as either a quality or flexible application.
Other than that I agree with your general principle that better is very subjective as one person my care so much about the cost of MS Office that OO.org being free and able to do the basic stuff suits them just fine, in that case then the product is indeed better for them than MS Office would have been.
If you forget your password then I will use my recovery key to change your password for you. This is of course why you wouldn't give them the tools to change the master key.
There is still a password to use the flash key. You would never expect an end-user to end a 1024bit key themselves after-all. It's not near as bad as you make it out to be especially since there are multiple authentication techniques which you can perform.
You are correct in that there are a lot of logistics that have to get worked out before such a system can be deployed. Probably why I've spent a year testing different scenarios and how to handle recovery. I'm finally looking at deploying it company wide even though I'm moving towards virtual desktops anyways which are more about strong authentication beside strong encryption.
I can't tell, are you joking? With all the sarcasm around Slashdot it's sometimes difficult to tell if someone is being snarky.
The scenario you mention wouldn't happen unless a half-baked encryption scheme was used. HP, RSA, IBM, and even Truecrypt all have recovery options ranging in levels of difficulty to implement. RSA's key management tools are quite handy but you definitely pay a premium for them. HP's are clunky like all HP software, IBM has been doing it for years but again you pay and arm and a leg.
With Truecrypt you create two to three thumbdrives when you do the initial encryption, two of them store the master encryption key and the third has whatever key is needed for authentication depending on how you want to deploy it. The only fault I have with Truecrypt is that there are a dozen ways to deploy it so you have to read and plan very carefully before deploying it on any level.
Once you have your flash disk you copy its contents to an encrypted folder on your SAN somewhere and keep the flash drive in a properly fire-proof safe. One flash drive has the keys for over a hundred machines with room for plenty more, keeping two copies ensures that a flash drive dying won't leave your data inaccessible during transport to the server and should the SAN experience some sort of data loss you can go back to the flash drive to recover keys.
Encryption is pretty scary as your keys are extremely important as you mention, once the key is lost then so is the data. So you take a few precautions ahead of time and then you don't need to worry.
You are correct, although I get much faster Internet here in Arizona than I can in Florida where I just activated 4 3meg DSL lines to combine with 2 3meg DSL lines that the fairgrounds are providing us. I went from fiber Internet and Microwave here in AZ to DSL being my only option in FL.
I'm thinking about getting fiber to an apartment within Microwave distance from my location at the fairgrounds but it's going to kill me having such slow Internet. That's only 3meg down too, it's 384k up and that's just simply terrible.
The state of Vermont disagrees with your assessment about dealing with rural poverty.
15 years ago the governor helped get massive funding to bring DSL to rural Vermont enabling thousands to improve their education and develop marketable skills. It didn't solve the problem completely but I am a product of that legislation which ultimately got me DSL in 1997 where my knowledge took off with so much at my fingertips. Telecommuting is also very common in the state.
I would say Internet access should rank high on the list of combating poverty everywhere as it gives people access to tons of information for free which would ordinarily cost them lots of money to get. Of course this can't come at the cost of libraries in such communities but the two are fundamentally linked at least in my mind.
So what? I just installed the madwifi drivers on Ubuntu for my Acer netbook and yep! I had to reboot for it to stop using the wrong HAL for the Atheros chipset.
Given that such things rarely ever change once setup why should we care if you have to reboot or not? An IP address on both changes regularly depending on your profession so at least that is good that you don't have to reboot any platform at this point.
Around here the newspaper is even more sensationalist than local TV news. That why you have to consume from multiple sources and come to your own opinions about what's going on. It's funny how news is actually getting harder and harder to get as technology improves.
Of course at the same time some things are easier. Never used to hear about child predator cases and rape certainly never made it into the news, hell, there was a time the word pregnant would get them a fee from the FCC.
Depending on which Aspire One you have it will run fine but of course XP will faster. Personally I think Ubuntu 8.10 runs great on mine but I wouldn't install the netbook remix as that only seems to slow it down. It's been my savior with the 9-cell battery as I often have to run around temporary sites setting up managed switches on the fly. Handy with a little usb-to-serial adapter and putty. Of course the radios seem to be pretty damned good as well.
You are correct in that I combined the two ideas because I can't imagine wanting to carry that much cash unless I was buying something big which would require me to fill out the form.
Not to actually carry it, but to do anything with it. It is the responsibility of the receiving party to file this form which requires your social security number or some other tax identifier.
No, to carry more than $10k in cash you have to file an IRS form. I work for a car auction company and we routinely have people trying to buy cars with cash to hide their money. It never works as we're legally required to report it which is easy since there are police officers literally 50 feet from our office at all times during our event.
Except that you have to file an IRS form to carry any amount of cash over $10k.
Also when carrying even that much cash it really sucks to get mugged as you simply won't be getting that money back as opposed to carrying an insured debit or credit card.
For large purchases there's no reason wire transfers don't work which is how most people conduct large transactions these days anyways. Between wire and checks you've got what you need for large purchases so its all about the smaller purchases. Should you be able to buy a TV with your cell phone? I wouldn't trust the current phone companies to add up the bill reliably as they can even bill reliably for what they currently provide. That just means it's more of a hassle instead of less when compared to a credit card that is.
Most people I know have broadband on their cell phone with 3G networks or even 2.5G networks like Sprint.
Unless you have AT&Ts/T-Mobile's Edge service you get broadband speeds even on your cell phone.
Slashdot is full of examples of people that never appreciated the Internet until they got enough bandwidth to make it something useful. When it takes 5 minutes just to get a phone number then it's a waste of time. When I can comparison shop for a new refrigerator in just minutes I save real money and real time.
I also noted how you suggested an index of published articles available however that is not even close to complete nor is it fast enough without broadband as movies takes serious time to download over dial-up, same with photos of any resolution, not much research these days is purely text and the nature of publishing to an index like that means it won't be up to date, neither will the whole of the Internet but it's a lot closer and the latency of information sharing is a lot smaller.
To use a famous car analogy you're basically saying no one needs a car that can go faster than 20mph because it will still get you where you need to go. Although at that pace you could ride a horse there and still get where you intended. Of course those 20mph cars of yesteryear also fell apart and were incredibly unsafe as they were prone to failures.
The people that say they don't want broadband even if it is cheaper than dialup are indeed ignorant people as you gain nothing and lose a lot. The same goes for the academic community which gains nothing by staying at slow speeds and loses a lot of ability to collaborate. Ever try using a webcam with audio on dial-up? 320x240 you might have a prayer of it working for a few minutes at a time. 800x600, forget it.
Of course not all research depends on collaboration so it might not effect the works of some people although the odds are it would improve their work significantly if they used it properly and to its potential.
Parent specifically mentioned academic researchers not the whole 2/3rds of the populous and that was what I was replying to.
As for the rest of your arguments they the same examples people used to say they didn't need computers. I can find a phone number faster sitting at my computer than you can reaching into your cabinet or wherever you keep your phonebook. My method also works just as well when I'm not at home.
You hit on the exact statement I was making. There is no question that people are missing out, whether or not it is worth it to them is something they can't judge unless they try it. Those of us that have tried understand what we're missing while we're missing it.
I also don't live in an area where the power company can't tell we don't have power automatically but more importantly I have the Internet on my cell phone so I can look up their number even when the power is out. The phone-book is good for emergencies but that's it. Of course in those situations I only have a cell phone anyways so I wouldn't be able to take advantage of having the number but I imagine I would have other more pressing concerns at that moment.
Of course when it comes to CNN.com I agree with you, I rarely visit it but the parent again specifically mentioned news sites and that is the most prominent news site I could think of which was correct in that you knew exactly what I was talking about.
When it comes to scientific research if you are restricting yourself to what's published in front of you then you are not doing any cutting edge research and are selling your efforts short because there are answers to your questions out there already which can help you shape a better hypothesis and more importantly share your results with others in your field.
Yes we should call them ignorant. Just because they grew up with gopher doesn't mean they have any clue about what has developed since. Take an average news site like CNN. It takes quite some time to come up on dial-up while coming up instantly with my broadband at least.
Now, go to searching for phone numbers online, with broadband I get instant results through searching multiple sites simultaneously. With dial-up I might as well thumb through the yellow pages.
Even getting directions and maps are a pain in the ass with dial-up. You simply can appreciate all that the Internet has to offer unless you have a fast enough connection to actually access it. Streaming TV, radio, movies all for free instead of paying ridiculous amounts on satellite TV even means they'll save money especially now that there are legal ways to enjoy all the media.
Academic types that don't cross-reference their research over the Internet are also not doing their jobs very well as they are likely missing huge pieces of information which would take significantly longer to find using dial-up.
I can live without the Internet no problem but I am definitely missing out on a lot when I do. For when I go camping for instance I am there and don't need ready access to the Internet although my GPS knowing where the nearest hospital is sure can be handy.
I can't tell, are you being sarcastic? My meter appears to be broken as you can't possibly think that the Internet infrastructure would be in any way nearly as developed today if billions of tax payer dollars hadn't gone towards building infrastructure.
The only problem is the federal government paying without any strings attached or general oversight. Otherwise places like rural VT would never have gotten DSL and thus introduced someone like me to the world of networking once I had greater access to the outside world. Sharing DSL was a lot easier than sharing dial-up, this was in the days when linksys only made switches.
Where do people get this idea? The concept of streaming means the overall file-size is irrelevent as bit-rate determines the capability of the medium. The highest encoded 1080p you'll encounter is the regular world is 24mbps which is more than sufficient for 802.11g especially since you referred to 720p which is usually less than 5.5mbps.
In short, in a home, you don't need gig speeds to stream HD video. A business multicasting content will need significantly more bandwidth streaming to multiple clients but in a home this is a highly unlikely scenario.
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Given that most corporations don't pay any taxes you are correct in that they are not directly linked. You'll also note that I didn't state they were directly linked. That is just the rationale used to justify taxation of corporations and its pretty fair. Why should a billionaire pay an arse load of money to build a road millions will use when the millions can pay a small amount to accomplish the same task. Of course a billionaire benefits more from the road millions travel on because at least some of those people are working for him in turn generating more wealth.
It would be nice if we could just scrap the entire tax code and start over with something no longer than 10 pages. Then you could reduce the tax rates because there wouldn't be any loop-holes and everyone would be happier. Everyone except for tax lawyers and H&R Block type places.
Where do people get this impression that the company owns everything you do?
This is simply not true by default in the U.S. legal system. It properly does vary a bit from state to state but for the most part things like email are owned by the employee unless specifically stated and agreed upon before employment began.
When you're in IT some things get gray real fast. For instance, my title is network engineer. I write a lot of my own scripts to automate tasks. That code is mine because the company isn't paying me to write code. Our programmer is of course under different restrictions based on who's equipment he's using. Of course it's further grayed by the fact that we both often use our own equipment on company time because it suits a particular need at the time. The issue is quite muddy then on who's is what as far as coding goes.
Things like root passwords should be locked in some sort of safe somewhere in case of emergency but personal passwords should never be stored for any reason and they can't require you to give it up although they can certainly change it anyway and impersonate you despite not giving up passwords. In the end its all about principle.
I half agree with you and half disagree. If a non-technical executive is giving you technical orders then disregarding is often the best policy. The owner of my current company wanted full admin access to all the files on the network. I knew this was inherently dangerous as he in the past has accidentally deleted over 200gigs of content while his computer wasn't behaving at home. Instead I built him a file-server and copied all the data over to it and gave him full access to that so he can't harm production.
There are situations where you do have to give in but in most situations I've ever been in at least standing your ground does a lot more to change things than just bending over and letting an idiot decide password should be the root password.
It doesn't sound like you are involved in network administration if you have such strong opinions about router access which is not something everyone should have access to. There are definitely a few types of devices where it does no good to give higher ups access because the only thing they can do with it is screw it up.
City managers were clearly screwing up as they should have had to at least two admins and both of the admins would then have the login information available to them. Some random Joe should not be logging into my router anymore than I should be monkeying with a nuclear reactor. If you're not trained on the hardware then you shouldn't be working on it in a production environment.
Childs' reaction was definitely in the wrong so there is clearly wrong on both sides but his manager clearly wasn't handling security seriously and had no business asking of Childs' what he did. I don't give my boss my personal passwords either nor does anyone in the company get access to personal passwords as there is no need.
Are you talking about Canada? Because the united states effective tax rate is no where near that high. I'm not sure where you got that impression either. Here's a source for you. And another and here which actually states the corporate tax rate as 35% for the upper end. Sorry, that doesn't sound very socialist. It's definitely on the upper end of world wide tax rates but dictatorships, communist countries, and the rest all seem to do roughly the same.
Also I fail to see how even tax rates on revenue relate to ownership in the company. You mean to say that all the money the government put into public works like roads, power, and telecomm shouldn't be compensated by the people that use it the most?
Humorous that it's a book store in Texas. So far it mostly just looks like Republicans are trying to raise the bar for Obama calling him The One or the messiah and so come re-election they can say how he didn't fix all these problems that are going to take decades to fix.
Fortunately I don't think this strategy will work as most people I know that voted for Obama didn't think he would fix everything so they will look at what progress he has made during the time of re-election and hopefully make an informed decision then to either re-elect or vote for someone new if he hasn't made sufficient progress.
I don't get it, where do you people get that everyone thought of Obama as a messiah? I don't know anyone that did and I know a lot of people that voted for him.
No one in their right mind thought Obama would solve all the problems but that he would cease the landslide that Bush was causing and so far this seems to be true with the closing of Gitmo.
Of course Gitmo isn't closed yet so the jury is still out there.
As for the stimulus bill you seem to be confused about who's pushing for what. The vast majority of Americans are asking for a giant pork bill. Whether that is good or bad for the population should be debated heavily as there are far reaching consequences to borrowing that much money which was previously something the former administration liked doing. Obama never asked for 800 billion, that all came from Pelosi as you say and I've seen a number of republicans acting quite childishly about how it is being developed without their input. If they didn't act like such babies about it I'd be more inclined to believe them or at least feel bad for them since it's good to have opposing viewpoints in a debate.
Of course the idea of borrowing several billion dollars to give people a tax cut is also quite absurd as we have to pay that money back somehow which will be in higher taxes down the road. This is of course what the republican agenda is all sore about right now as they want more tax cuts.
I think we can all agree that fear and panic are emotions that should not be involved in bill making especially with a stimulus bill as large as the one on the table. It's forcing all of congress to move too quickly and they will end up making even more poor decisions. Remember, congress had an even lower approval rating than Bush did and for good reason! I wish I could say Pelosi was helping to change that but she is just as ineffective as the republican she replaced.
Well written and I agree completely. It's easy to overreact to situations where a lot of wrong clearly happened and instead we should focus on helping the kids that were wrongly imprisoned in addition to whatever punishment is deemed fit for the judge which appears to be substantial jail-time. Seems pretty tempered to me.
I don't know how you can write that and be serious. OpenOffice is not a very well developed product, is not very flexible, and durability is in question because a lot of people end up throwing it out.
I'll give you a classic example which actually happened to me recently when I had way too many windows open on my Ubuntu setup. I opened my document with Openoffice, made some changes, hit save. Then went about doing other tasks. At that point I had probably 30 windows open so I couldn't see that I had left the document open so I just opened it again and started documenting more about our network. It was really more of a spreadsheet if I recall. Long story short, I hit save on the new document, at some point ended up editting the original that was still open and lost all the work in the second window.
MS Office would have opened it in read-only mode telling you the file was already in use which would have given the user a clue of what happened. Autosave is also a feature that is not on by default for some reason. Then of course there is the whole close button matter how it won't warn you about the document not being saved. It will just go ahead and close anyway leaving you none the wiser.
It has basic functionality that one would expect from an office suite but OpenOffice has a long way to go before it's going to be a true replacement for a great many people. I haven't seen that many content management systems integration nor have I seen change tracking which are all features users expect from MS Office and use rather regularly.
Of course in my environment I go one further with spreadsheets that are dynamically driven by our database which is still functionality lacking in OpenOffice. Combine all that with the fact that it loads slow as all get out and I clearly have a low opinion of OO.org
That said, now that I've learned a few gotchas I can work just fine in OO but the user seems to have to learn everything the hard way and that doesn't strike me as either a quality or flexible application.
Other than that I agree with your general principle that better is very subjective as one person my care so much about the cost of MS Office that OO.org being free and able to do the basic stuff suits them just fine, in that case then the product is indeed better for them than MS Office would have been.
If you forget your password then I will use my recovery key to change your password for you. This is of course why you wouldn't give them the tools to change the master key.
There is still a password to use the flash key. You would never expect an end-user to end a 1024bit key themselves after-all. It's not near as bad as you make it out to be especially since there are multiple authentication techniques which you can perform.
You are correct in that there are a lot of logistics that have to get worked out before such a system can be deployed. Probably why I've spent a year testing different scenarios and how to handle recovery. I'm finally looking at deploying it company wide even though I'm moving towards virtual desktops anyways which are more about strong authentication beside strong encryption.
I can't tell, are you joking? With all the sarcasm around Slashdot it's sometimes difficult to tell if someone is being snarky.
The scenario you mention wouldn't happen unless a half-baked encryption scheme was used. HP, RSA, IBM, and even Truecrypt all have recovery options ranging in levels of difficulty to implement. RSA's key management tools are quite handy but you definitely pay a premium for them. HP's are clunky like all HP software, IBM has been doing it for years but again you pay and arm and a leg.
With Truecrypt you create two to three thumbdrives when you do the initial encryption, two of them store the master encryption key and the third has whatever key is needed for authentication depending on how you want to deploy it. The only fault I have with Truecrypt is that there are a dozen ways to deploy it so you have to read and plan very carefully before deploying it on any level.
Once you have your flash disk you copy its contents to an encrypted folder on your SAN somewhere and keep the flash drive in a properly fire-proof safe. One flash drive has the keys for over a hundred machines with room for plenty more, keeping two copies ensures that a flash drive dying won't leave your data inaccessible during transport to the server and should the SAN experience some sort of data loss you can go back to the flash drive to recover keys.
Encryption is pretty scary as your keys are extremely important as you mention, once the key is lost then so is the data. So you take a few precautions ahead of time and then you don't need to worry.
You are correct, although I get much faster Internet here in Arizona than I can in Florida where I just activated 4 3meg DSL lines to combine with 2 3meg DSL lines that the fairgrounds are providing us. I went from fiber Internet and Microwave here in AZ to DSL being my only option in FL.
I'm thinking about getting fiber to an apartment within Microwave distance from my location at the fairgrounds but it's going to kill me having such slow Internet. That's only 3meg down too, it's 384k up and that's just simply terrible.
The state of Vermont disagrees with your assessment about dealing with rural poverty.
15 years ago the governor helped get massive funding to bring DSL to rural Vermont enabling thousands to improve their education and develop marketable skills. It didn't solve the problem completely but I am a product of that legislation which ultimately got me DSL in 1997 where my knowledge took off with so much at my fingertips. Telecommuting is also very common in the state.
I would say Internet access should rank high on the list of combating poverty everywhere as it gives people access to tons of information for free which would ordinarily cost them lots of money to get. Of course this can't come at the cost of libraries in such communities but the two are fundamentally linked at least in my mind.
So what? I just installed the madwifi drivers on Ubuntu for my Acer netbook and yep! I had to reboot for it to stop using the wrong HAL for the Atheros chipset.
Given that such things rarely ever change once setup why should we care if you have to reboot or not? An IP address on both changes regularly depending on your profession so at least that is good that you don't have to reboot any platform at this point.
Around here the newspaper is even more sensationalist than local TV news. That why you have to consume from multiple sources and come to your own opinions about what's going on. It's funny how news is actually getting harder and harder to get as technology improves.
Of course at the same time some things are easier. Never used to hear about child predator cases and rape certainly never made it into the news, hell, there was a time the word pregnant would get them a fee from the FCC.
Depending on which Aspire One you have it will run fine but of course XP will faster. Personally I think Ubuntu 8.10 runs great on mine but I wouldn't install the netbook remix as that only seems to slow it down. It's been my savior with the 9-cell battery as I often have to run around temporary sites setting up managed switches on the fly. Handy with a little usb-to-serial adapter and putty. Of course the radios seem to be pretty damned good as well.
You are correct in that I combined the two ideas because I can't imagine wanting to carry that much cash unless I was buying something big which would require me to fill out the form.
Citation
Not to actually carry it, but to do anything with it. It is the responsibility of the receiving party to file this form which requires your social security number or some other tax identifier.
No, to carry more than $10k in cash you have to file an IRS form. I work for a car auction company and we routinely have people trying to buy cars with cash to hide their money. It never works as we're legally required to report it which is easy since there are police officers literally 50 feet from our office at all times during our event.
Here is my citation IRS 8300
This form requires that you submit your social security number along with cash so that you may be identified.
Except that you have to file an IRS form to carry any amount of cash over $10k.
Also when carrying even that much cash it really sucks to get mugged as you simply won't be getting that money back as opposed to carrying an insured debit or credit card.
For large purchases there's no reason wire transfers don't work which is how most people conduct large transactions these days anyways. Between wire and checks you've got what you need for large purchases so its all about the smaller purchases. Should you be able to buy a TV with your cell phone? I wouldn't trust the current phone companies to add up the bill reliably as they can even bill reliably for what they currently provide. That just means it's more of a hassle instead of less when compared to a credit card that is.
Most people I know have broadband on their cell phone with 3G networks or even 2.5G networks like Sprint.
Unless you have AT&Ts/T-Mobile's Edge service you get broadband speeds even on your cell phone.
Slashdot is full of examples of people that never appreciated the Internet until they got enough bandwidth to make it something useful. When it takes 5 minutes just to get a phone number then it's a waste of time. When I can comparison shop for a new refrigerator in just minutes I save real money and real time.
I also noted how you suggested an index of published articles available however that is not even close to complete nor is it fast enough without broadband as movies takes serious time to download over dial-up, same with photos of any resolution, not much research these days is purely text and the nature of publishing to an index like that means it won't be up to date, neither will the whole of the Internet but it's a lot closer and the latency of information sharing is a lot smaller.
To use a famous car analogy you're basically saying no one needs a car that can go faster than 20mph because it will still get you where you need to go. Although at that pace you could ride a horse there and still get where you intended. Of course those 20mph cars of yesteryear also fell apart and were incredibly unsafe as they were prone to failures.
The people that say they don't want broadband even if it is cheaper than dialup are indeed ignorant people as you gain nothing and lose a lot. The same goes for the academic community which gains nothing by staying at slow speeds and loses a lot of ability to collaborate. Ever try using a webcam with audio on dial-up? 320x240 you might have a prayer of it working for a few minutes at a time. 800x600, forget it.
Of course not all research depends on collaboration so it might not effect the works of some people although the odds are it would improve their work significantly if they used it properly and to its potential.
Parent specifically mentioned academic researchers not the whole 2/3rds of the populous and that was what I was replying to.
As for the rest of your arguments they the same examples people used to say they didn't need computers. I can find a phone number faster sitting at my computer than you can reaching into your cabinet or wherever you keep your phonebook. My method also works just as well when I'm not at home.
You hit on the exact statement I was making. There is no question that people are missing out, whether or not it is worth it to them is something they can't judge unless they try it. Those of us that have tried understand what we're missing while we're missing it.
I also don't live in an area where the power company can't tell we don't have power automatically but more importantly I have the Internet on my cell phone so I can look up their number even when the power is out. The phone-book is good for emergencies but that's it. Of course in those situations I only have a cell phone anyways so I wouldn't be able to take advantage of having the number but I imagine I would have other more pressing concerns at that moment.
Of course when it comes to CNN.com I agree with you, I rarely visit it but the parent again specifically mentioned news sites and that is the most prominent news site I could think of which was correct in that you knew exactly what I was talking about.
When it comes to scientific research if you are restricting yourself to what's published in front of you then you are not doing any cutting edge research and are selling your efforts short because there are answers to your questions out there already which can help you shape a better hypothesis and more importantly share your results with others in your field.
Yes we should call them ignorant. Just because they grew up with gopher doesn't mean they have any clue about what has developed since. Take an average news site like CNN. It takes quite some time to come up on dial-up while coming up instantly with my broadband at least.
Now, go to searching for phone numbers online, with broadband I get instant results through searching multiple sites simultaneously. With dial-up I might as well thumb through the yellow pages.
Even getting directions and maps are a pain in the ass with dial-up. You simply can appreciate all that the Internet has to offer unless you have a fast enough connection to actually access it. Streaming TV, radio, movies all for free instead of paying ridiculous amounts on satellite TV even means they'll save money especially now that there are legal ways to enjoy all the media.
Academic types that don't cross-reference their research over the Internet are also not doing their jobs very well as they are likely missing huge pieces of information which would take significantly longer to find using dial-up.
I can live without the Internet no problem but I am definitely missing out on a lot when I do. For when I go camping for instance I am there and don't need ready access to the Internet although my GPS knowing where the nearest hospital is sure can be handy.
I can't tell, are you being sarcastic? My meter appears to be broken as you can't possibly think that the Internet infrastructure would be in any way nearly as developed today if billions of tax payer dollars hadn't gone towards building infrastructure.
The only problem is the federal government paying without any strings attached or general oversight. Otherwise places like rural VT would never have gotten DSL and thus introduced someone like me to the world of networking once I had greater access to the outside world. Sharing DSL was a lot easier than sharing dial-up, this was in the days when linksys only made switches.
Where do people get this idea? The concept of streaming means the overall file-size is irrelevent as bit-rate determines the capability of the medium. The highest encoded 1080p you'll encounter is the regular world is 24mbps which is more than sufficient for 802.11g especially since you referred to 720p which is usually less than 5.5mbps.
In short, in a home, you don't need gig speeds to stream HD video. A business multicasting content will need significantly more bandwidth streaming to multiple clients but in a home this is a highly unlikely scenario.