If you give money to the unemployed, they no longer have strong incentive to find a new job, and a once productive person produces less or nothing at all.
I think you're making a faulty assumption here. Social security/welfare provides people enough money to survive, not to avoid working. I think the number of people on welfare that do not want to work is tiny. It's not enjoyable feeling like a failure and just barely surviving. The purpose of welfare is that so those that find themselves going through a hard spot in their life don't end up on the street. It's very hard to find work when you're living on the street.
I think it's also faulty to assume that the only other place the US could be is total socialism. Look to your northern neighbor Canada (or to Europe). Up here our economy is hardly struggling, actually right now I think we're the envy of the G8. We haven't been hit by the credit crisis nearly as bad as the US. Down there you're nationalizing banks, here we haven't had (and probably wont have) any bank failures. We're also not completely socialist, we just recognize there's a role for government in moderating boom/bust cycles so they don't hit people so hard. You're working on the (I think faulty) assumption that raw capitalism is the perfect system. I don't think that's true, we've had other systems in the past and today we constantly experiment and tinker trying to find a better system. Canada's relative (not complete) absence from the current crisis combined with the fact we're still a G8 member says to me we've found a better system.
I'm on one of those plans (or well, the Rogers equivalent, it's one company) and you're misinterpreting that (not that I found it any easier at first). It just means that if you're in another region that would be long-distance to call you have to pay the long distance fees. That way you can't get a Toronto phone number in Vancouver and have all your Toronto friends phone it, bypassing long-distance charges for both of you. If you're in the same region as your phone number it's free, regardless of where the person calling you is.
In other words, an incoming long-distance call is a call where you're phone is outside the area code of your phone number.
The thing is it's 31% of Americans. This isn't an anti-US flame, but the truth is the numbers are different in other countries. I would personally expect them to be much lower based on my observations from living in another country, though I readily admit I have no evidence to back this up.
As an aside, not that statistics actually matter. There are too many ways to bias that final number, and I doubt anyone here would take the time to fully research a poll's methodology.
I don't think the GP was saying they don't believe in science, hence their claim "there are no YEC's on slashdot." The GP was merely pointing out that some people lack faith in the scientific method.
You say science doesn't require faith, but it does require a small bit, a belief that past trends are indicative future events. I personally consider this to be a simple obvious truth, and therefore I personally have complete faith in the scientific method. For some reason however not all people share my belief in the scientific method. The rest of the world can ridicule them and laugh at them, but so called "flat earthers" do exist, whether they should or not.
TekSavvy does use Bell's last-mile network and as a result has been throttled recently, the CRTC (government is regulator) is investigating and may rule the practice illegal. That's also what has lead TekSavvy to organize the rally for network neutrality.
Not that I know of, closest thing I've heard of down there is Speakeasy, but I'm guessing you've heard of them too.
TekSavvy is however considering an expansion into the US. I noticed the CEO (Rocky) asking questions about it on Broadband Reports. You could let them know you want to see it, if they knew there was demand might speed them up. Just send an e-mail or post on their Broadband Reports forum, the TekSavvy staff are always in that forum.
Just switch to TekSavvy. They're an ISP that believes in network neutrality, they've even organized a rally on parliament hill for next week. Prices beat Bell too.
I don't think I'm a self righteous prick for making a mistake. I strive for 0 errors (all my other pages were valid), and I correct errors as soon as I'm aware of them. I will come out and state that my website had an unacceptable number of errors. I'd be a self righteous prick if I thought it was okay for my page to have the 2 typos (which produced 10 errors), but not for other people to have errors. Mistakes happen, it's the people that think they don't need to be fixed I disagree with.
I stand by my point that 0 errors are acceptable, hence why it has been corrected. I'll admit you got me there, I made a typo on that one page and it wasn't valid. I actually wish browsers would follow the standard for XML and stop parsing once an error is encountered. I would have noticed without someone pointing it out or waiting until I re-checked it for standards compliance.
I would disagree, 0 errors are acceptable. And I don't just do website design as a hobby, I run a business doing it.
Without standards you can't have real competition in the browser market, and it makes it harder to make websites. It's also not hard to write sites that have 0 errors.
Because sometimes you want granularity in your check-ins, or you might want to make a local branch. This way you can check things in bit by bit to your local repository and then sync it up to the main one when you're done. That way a major change doesn't come in one mammoth commit.
IE6 (and others, but none so widely used today) do make a real muck of the standards, but it is always possible to still follow them. I use conditional comments (they appear like comments to any non-MS browser) to include special (but still valid) style sheets designed specifically for IE6.
These custom style sheets do pass validation, but if parsed by any browser that followed the standards would make a muck of things. For example IE6 doesn't understand auto margins for centering, but setting text-align to center will center divs. In a standards compliant browser you'd end up with centered text and no centered divs, but it displays right in IE6.
I design my sites by first doing the design in Firefox, which will also cover all other standards compliant browsers. Then I write my IE6 (and sometimes IE7) custom style sheets.
However the regulatory environment in Canada is different. That competitive approach is what you have in the US, and it results in deals like the Qwest/MSN deal you mentioned. In Canada the contracts are government regulated, all ISPs pay the same fee to Bell and receive the same service, no preferential treatment. And the fee is set by the government at Cost + 15% profit, so that Bell can't set prices so high no one can compete.
Actually in this case you're a bit behind, Canada does have a system for letting small independent ISPs setup with low cost exactly so there is competition in the marketplace. The big players are required to wholesale their last mile at government regulated prices. There are independent ISPs that oppose traffic shaping, TekSavvy is one of them, the problem here is that the big players are throttling in the last mile so that independent ISPs have throttling like it or not. TekSavvy plans to fight this one to the end, but right now they're throttled by Bell. What Bell is doing is likely illegal, but they don't give a crap, TekSavvy has been stealing Bell's customers since Bell started throttling their own customers. Bell didn't like that so they decided they would take TekSavvy's competitive advantage away.
Bell is split up into two sections, Bell Nexxia which provides DSL connectivity and Bell Sympatico which provides internet connectivity using DSL lines from Bell Nexxia. Nexxia doesn't sell their DSL connectivity service just to Sympatico, any company can buy service from them. The most common is use is for other DSL ISPs to offer internet service, but it would also be possible for a large company (it's expensive) to create a private WAN using this service. When you perform PPPoE authentication Nexxia examines the domain and determines which network to send your traffic too, with a TekSavvy login it goes there, with a Sympatico login it's routed to Sympatico's network. Nexxia doesn't throttle (this would really piss off their enterprise customers), it's Sympatico that does. So your last mile isn't really Bell Sympatico, it's Bell Nexxia. As long as someone is paying Nexxia for your DSL connectivity, they don't care about what PPPoE login you use. Nexxia owns the regional ATM network that DSL service connects to and all ISPs get gig-e links into the network to connect customers to their transit. It's between the gig-e and the transit that Sympatico throttles.
When you buy standard ($30/month) internet service from TekSavvy you're basically paying $20/month for the DSL and $10/month for the login. Sympatico works the same way, $20/month is paid to Nexxia. Sympatico doesn't offer the login without the DSL service, TekSavvy (and other resellers) do.
You can get a TekSavvy login-only account for $10/month. Your line is still with Bell but they give you a PPPoE login to their network so you use their transit and avoid throttling. It's not advertised but if you phone in and ask you can get it.
As a mathie I don't know if I could join the Imprint and betray mathNews. Besides, as good as the Imprint is at what they do mathNews is hilarious and that's worth a lot.
It's not that I'm looking for some serious partying, I'm definitely nerdy. I mean, I'm on Slashdot. But spending my Friday night doing my math homework because I can't wait is just too nerdy for me. On Friday night I want to relax and procrastinate my math homework.
I think what the GP was getting at was that most laws are written by congressional aides. It's surprising how little those elected to congress do, or even know about what they're voting on. Most of them don't read half the bills.
You make a good point about ISPs being upfront about their policies. If they're reasonable and clearly explained so I can make an informed decision I am understanding about many restrictions. My current ISP does have a bandwidth cap, but set at a reasonable 200GB/month with more available for a decent price. They don't rip me off on overages, $0.25/GB, and they average over two months so if I lose track one month overages aren't automatic.
I don't get the paranoia people have with regards to bandwidth caps, the truth is it costs ISPs a certain amount per gigabyte. A heavy user should be paying more, this isn't unreasonable. What is unreasonable is when ISPs advertise unlimited and then put a cap in the fine print.
I will however disagree the idea that is okay for ISPs to throttle traffic just because they're upfront about it. Network neutrality is what made the internet the force it is today, without it the internet cannot thrive.
(and if anyone's wondering, my ISP is TekSavvy. No this is not a advertisement, if it was I'd ask you to mention me so I get referral credit)
Those HDs should be fine, I've run all Western Digital (except one machine that included Hitachis) for the past 4 years without issues. At home I've never had a drive fail, but from where I work I conclude again Western Digital is the best. We have about 300 HDs, mostly in client machines but with 4 servers. They're about 45%/45%/10% Maxtor/WD/Seagate. I've only seen one WD fail, but 60+ Maxtors in the past four years. I've experienced 100% failure rate with Segate, but I blame that on the machines. The 1Ghz IBM NetVistas were serious lemons, 80%+ have had at least one warranty claim other than the HD.
I live in Canada and personally I love the idea of roundabouts but most people have no idea what they are. They installed one in my neighborhood a few years ago and all they put there was the roundabout sign. A very large number of drivers went the wrong way around, didn't signal, didn't yield to those in the roundabout, etc. because no one had every seen one before. Now it has a roundabout sign, a do not enter sign on the left, a yield sign, and a one-way sign at every entrance and people still get it wrong. Although the intersection was the perfect place for one, and it would have worked great in Europe, it hasn't helped the flow of traffic with all the people it confuses. That's probably the single greatest reason they aren't used more often.
Slashdot Mirror
If you give money to the unemployed, they no longer have strong incentive to find a new job, and a once productive person produces less or nothing at all.
I think you're making a faulty assumption here. Social security/welfare provides people enough money to survive, not to avoid working. I think the number of people on welfare that do not want to work is tiny. It's not enjoyable feeling like a failure and just barely surviving. The purpose of welfare is that so those that find themselves going through a hard spot in their life don't end up on the street. It's very hard to find work when you're living on the street.
I think it's also faulty to assume that the only other place the US could be is total socialism. Look to your northern neighbor Canada (or to Europe). Up here our economy is hardly struggling, actually right now I think we're the envy of the G8. We haven't been hit by the credit crisis nearly as bad as the US. Down there you're nationalizing banks, here we haven't had (and probably wont have) any bank failures. We're also not completely socialist, we just recognize there's a role for government in moderating boom/bust cycles so they don't hit people so hard. You're working on the (I think faulty) assumption that raw capitalism is the perfect system. I don't think that's true, we've had other systems in the past and today we constantly experiment and tinker trying to find a better system. Canada's relative (not complete) absence from the current crisis combined with the fact we're still a G8 member says to me we've found a better system.
I'm on one of those plans (or well, the Rogers equivalent, it's one company) and you're misinterpreting that (not that I found it any easier at first). It just means that if you're in another region that would be long-distance to call you have to pay the long distance fees. That way you can't get a Toronto phone number in Vancouver and have all your Toronto friends phone it, bypassing long-distance charges for both of you. If you're in the same region as your phone number it's free, regardless of where the person calling you is.
In other words, an incoming long-distance call is a call where you're phone is outside the area code of your phone number.
The thing is it's 31% of Americans. This isn't an anti-US flame, but the truth is the numbers are different in other countries. I would personally expect them to be much lower based on my observations from living in another country, though I readily admit I have no evidence to back this up.
As an aside, not that statistics actually matter. There are too many ways to bias that final number, and I doubt anyone here would take the time to fully research a poll's methodology.
I don't think the GP was saying they don't believe in science, hence their claim "there are no YEC's on slashdot." The GP was merely pointing out that some people lack faith in the scientific method.
You say science doesn't require faith, but it does require a small bit, a belief that past trends are indicative future events. I personally consider this to be a simple obvious truth, and therefore I personally have complete faith in the scientific method. For some reason however not all people share my belief in the scientific method. The rest of the world can ridicule them and laugh at them, but so called "flat earthers" do exist, whether they should or not.
TekSavvy does use Bell's last-mile network and as a result has been throttled recently, the CRTC (government is regulator) is investigating and may rule the practice illegal. That's also what has lead TekSavvy to organize the rally for network neutrality.
As for their US equivalent, you may want to see my above post: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=561862&cid=23514422 . Basically they're considering expanding to the US, let them know you want it.
Not that I know of, closest thing I've heard of down there is Speakeasy, but I'm guessing you've heard of them too.
TekSavvy is however considering an expansion into the US. I noticed the CEO (Rocky) asking questions about it on Broadband Reports. You could let them know you want to see it, if they knew there was demand might speed them up. Just send an e-mail or post on their Broadband Reports forum, the TekSavvy staff are always in that forum.
Just switch to TekSavvy. They're an ISP that believes in network neutrality, they've even organized a rally on parliament hill for next week. Prices beat Bell too.
If you want to attend the rally, see http://www.netneutralityrally.ca/ .
I don't think I'm a self righteous prick for making a mistake. I strive for 0 errors (all my other pages were valid), and I correct errors as soon as I'm aware of them. I will come out and state that my website had an unacceptable number of errors. I'd be a self righteous prick if I thought it was okay for my page to have the 2 typos (which produced 10 errors), but not for other people to have errors. Mistakes happen, it's the people that think they don't need to be fixed I disagree with.
I stand by my point that 0 errors are acceptable, hence why it has been corrected. I'll admit you got me there, I made a typo on that one page and it wasn't valid. I actually wish browsers would follow the standard for XML and stop parsing once an error is encountered. I would have noticed without someone pointing it out or waiting until I re-checked it for standards compliance.
I would disagree, 0 errors are acceptable. And I don't just do website design as a hobby, I run a business doing it.
Without standards you can't have real competition in the browser market, and it makes it harder to make websites. It's also not hard to write sites that have 0 errors.
Because sometimes you want granularity in your check-ins, or you might want to make a local branch. This way you can check things in bit by bit to your local repository and then sync it up to the main one when you're done. That way a major change doesn't come in one mammoth commit.
You are correct, my mistake. But the point that IE6 has random rendering bugs is still valid.
IE6 (and others, but none so widely used today) do make a real muck of the standards, but it is always possible to still follow them. I use conditional comments (they appear like comments to any non-MS browser) to include special (but still valid) style sheets designed specifically for IE6.
These custom style sheets do pass validation, but if parsed by any browser that followed the standards would make a muck of things. For example IE6 doesn't understand auto margins for centering, but setting text-align to center will center divs. In a standards compliant browser you'd end up with centered text and no centered divs, but it displays right in IE6.
I design my sites by first doing the design in Firefox, which will also cover all other standards compliant browsers. Then I write my IE6 (and sometimes IE7) custom style sheets.
However the regulatory environment in Canada is different. That competitive approach is what you have in the US, and it results in deals like the Qwest/MSN deal you mentioned. In Canada the contracts are government regulated, all ISPs pay the same fee to Bell and receive the same service, no preferential treatment. And the fee is set by the government at Cost + 15% profit, so that Bell can't set prices so high no one can compete.
Actually in this case you're a bit behind, Canada does have a system for letting small independent ISPs setup with low cost exactly so there is competition in the marketplace. The big players are required to wholesale their last mile at government regulated prices. There are independent ISPs that oppose traffic shaping, TekSavvy is one of them, the problem here is that the big players are throttling in the last mile so that independent ISPs have throttling like it or not. TekSavvy plans to fight this one to the end, but right now they're throttled by Bell. What Bell is doing is likely illegal, but they don't give a crap, TekSavvy has been stealing Bell's customers since Bell started throttling their own customers. Bell didn't like that so they decided they would take TekSavvy's competitive advantage away.
Bell is split up into two sections, Bell Nexxia which provides DSL connectivity and Bell Sympatico which provides internet connectivity using DSL lines from Bell Nexxia. Nexxia doesn't sell their DSL connectivity service just to Sympatico, any company can buy service from them. The most common is use is for other DSL ISPs to offer internet service, but it would also be possible for a large company (it's expensive) to create a private WAN using this service. When you perform PPPoE authentication Nexxia examines the domain and determines which network to send your traffic too, with a TekSavvy login it goes there, with a Sympatico login it's routed to Sympatico's network. Nexxia doesn't throttle (this would really piss off their enterprise customers), it's Sympatico that does. So your last mile isn't really Bell Sympatico, it's Bell Nexxia. As long as someone is paying Nexxia for your DSL connectivity, they don't care about what PPPoE login you use. Nexxia owns the regional ATM network that DSL service connects to and all ISPs get gig-e links into the network to connect customers to their transit. It's between the gig-e and the transit that Sympatico throttles.
When you buy standard ($30/month) internet service from TekSavvy you're basically paying $20/month for the DSL and $10/month for the login. Sympatico works the same way, $20/month is paid to Nexxia. Sympatico doesn't offer the login without the DSL service, TekSavvy (and other resellers) do.
The latter. It's driving people nuts, VPNs are throttled, HTTPS is throttled, etc.
TekSavvy BBR-user groupthink, you beat me to posting about logins by 1 minute.
You can get a TekSavvy login-only account for $10/month. Your line is still with Bell but they give you a PPPoE login to their network so you use their transit and avoid throttling. It's not advertised but if you phone in and ask you can get it.
As a mathie I don't know if I could join the Imprint and betray mathNews. Besides, as good as the Imprint is at what they do mathNews is hilarious and that's worth a lot.
It's not that I'm looking for some serious partying, I'm definitely nerdy. I mean, I'm on Slashdot. But spending my Friday night doing my math homework because I can't wait is just too nerdy for me. On Friday night I want to relax and procrastinate my math homework.
I think what the GP was getting at was that most laws are written by congressional aides. It's surprising how little those elected to congress do, or even know about what they're voting on. Most of them don't read half the bills.
You make a good point about ISPs being upfront about their policies. If they're reasonable and clearly explained so I can make an informed decision I am understanding about many restrictions. My current ISP does have a bandwidth cap, but set at a reasonable 200GB/month with more available for a decent price. They don't rip me off on overages, $0.25/GB, and they average over two months so if I lose track one month overages aren't automatic.
I don't get the paranoia people have with regards to bandwidth caps, the truth is it costs ISPs a certain amount per gigabyte. A heavy user should be paying more, this isn't unreasonable. What is unreasonable is when ISPs advertise unlimited and then put a cap in the fine print.
I will however disagree the idea that is okay for ISPs to throttle traffic just because they're upfront about it. Network neutrality is what made the internet the force it is today, without it the internet cannot thrive.
(and if anyone's wondering, my ISP is TekSavvy. No this is not a advertisement, if it was I'd ask you to mention me so I get referral credit)
Those HDs should be fine, I've run all Western Digital (except one machine that included Hitachis) for the past 4 years without issues. At home I've never had a drive fail, but from where I work I conclude again Western Digital is the best. We have about 300 HDs, mostly in client machines but with 4 servers. They're about 45%/45%/10% Maxtor/WD/Seagate. I've only seen one WD fail, but 60+ Maxtors in the past four years. I've experienced 100% failure rate with Segate, but I blame that on the machines. The 1Ghz IBM NetVistas were serious lemons, 80%+ have had at least one warranty claim other than the HD.
I live in Canada and personally I love the idea of roundabouts but most people have no idea what they are. They installed one in my neighborhood a few years ago and all they put there was the roundabout sign. A very large number of drivers went the wrong way around, didn't signal, didn't yield to those in the roundabout, etc. because no one had every seen one before. Now it has a roundabout sign, a do not enter sign on the left, a yield sign, and a one-way sign at every entrance and people still get it wrong. Although the intersection was the perfect place for one, and it would have worked great in Europe, it hasn't helped the flow of traffic with all the people it confuses. That's probably the single greatest reason they aren't used more often.