When even Google pulls back, it's a bad business model even with advertising-driven models.
Face it, 802.11 is a LAN technology, not a MAN technology. Lipstick on that pig, even with cool mesh network attempts, isn't going to make it better. It was designed for local radial-cellular access by its channelization, and it's not good for covering wide areas. My sentiments go out to Strix and Firetide; both have decent models to make it wider. Cities have to figure out that broadband access is a utility, not an option.
Just like in the UK, it'll work until it's cracked. Or the RFID data from passports. It is no business of the government who I am, or where I am without probable cause by a signed affidavit. There's a sufficient majority that would make sure that a national ID system is never used in the US that it's moot anyway. And for Larry Ellison and others that want to try it, they'll get laughed at, again, and just as loudly.
The question isn't unique IDs, it's tyranny. We hack tyranny first.
Life is now a widget in a browser. Cruise google, get a link to what you need, and move on. "Classical training" is becoming just that.... like the Programming in C by K&R sitting on my shelf. Can't find the arguments to a function you need? Five seconds later, you have it. It's seemingly a bit ad hoc, but with the right fundamentals, it gets the job done. Some might reel at the thought of the lack of deep-dive training, but it's become less necessary in many disciplines. That's not making people more stupid, rather, more productive. Beowulf in my English Lit was glorious; it's a classic. So is taking a look at Stallman's code, or an early sysconfig file. Some will dive deeper and be better for it.
Actually, they do. And I'm a member of the 1960's. And '50s. And agree that the TFA is riddled with half-truths. The basics and fundamentals are always there and needed. What's missing is the sense of reality vs the post dot-com boom/bust cycle. We need leaders. Some of them won't make it. Fine. Others will, and for the wrong reasons, but a net of good leaders will emerge. Opportunism isn't the dirty word it once was, and it's bred entrepreneurship. Some entrepreneurship has been world-changing. Other change was much more deliberate and a function of broader-based initiative. Both are necessary.
Data processing is still a science pioneered by lots of well-intentioned people. And while many practical fundamentals within that community are still needed, it also lead to the acceptance of platforms that were clearly single-vendor, and proprietary, hence monolithic and ultimately dead-ends (despite other positive qualities). Interns that I work with have many of the needed fundamentals. And some of them don't need to know the differences between EBSCDIC, Baudot, ASCII, and well, runes.
This is a generation that's more savvy with computing than any other; they've not known an era in their lives without decent computing machines likely in the home. USB and GUIs and broadband speeds are first nature. G/Net, ARCNet, Token Ring, Phone-Net, and other schemes have never been seen by these people. BBS is an 18" tire rim, not a dial-up service. USB drives, not floppy disks, are temporary storage devices. This generation can't read paper tape and doesn't care if we used to record data on cassette tapes, in fact, cassette tapes are curiosities when you can hold the contents of hundreds, even thousands of them in a single MP3 player device.
And therefore, it's nihilistic to impose at least a portion of seemingly ancient platitudes on generations that have no context for them. I find young IT people endlessly fascinating because their boundaries are far different from my generation-- the generation that could do binary front panel program loads in assembler.
In Scandia, they're big medicine. Let's see who drives off the cliff. Personally, I'd rather just route around them. Perhaps an evil subnet concoction would do it.
A good attitude if Telia's fixed & dchp'd clients don't mean anything to you. I get the feeling Telia's the one that's facing the most trouble. It's only a guess.
And the point is: we don't care. Cogent? Yank them. Telia? Ex-PTT that smells as bad as Deutsche Telekom (in this case, anyway).. Yank them. Misbehaving child-like ISPs? Goodbye. This 2008, not 1998.
It's like an old telecom SS7 spat. Tell them to get over it. In three more days, we pull all our servers from and move on. Can't get to what we need? As ISPs, they have precious little time to figure it out, then we split. Go ahead, try and enforce that five-9's contract. Providers are everywhere, drooling for business. Bye-bye, blackout. Hello loneliness.
The negativity towards profanity has lapsed. "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" broke that ice in the '30s. I wasn't around then, but I was in the '50s. The profane seem to have become common place. So much the worse, mostly. The obscene, however, are trying to justify themselves. I find truck with that. I prefer using 'proctological orifice'. And sometimes, I find that using such epithet is a sign of Type A Stress syndrome as defined by Friedman and Ulmer. Sometimes people are just people and categorizing them obscenely might temporarily diminish them in our minds to some odd but satisfying end, but is ultimately unsatisfactory, I find.
In discourse, before the bar or in the bar are two different environments with two different default permissions and contexts, just as the public airwaves are to a golf course. One starts with out hostility or offense, then continues as the context permits. We go from there. Politeness is lost, these in-your-face days. We've traded RW Emerson for HS Thompson.
Ah, but you see it's not the prim and proper. It's discourse that starts with, we don't say things that offend each other.
. If we agree that there's an idiom that we can agree on, we go there as it speeds and enhances communications, and gives them coloration. A well-placed will do well to convey emphasis, cadence, but importantly, meaning. On the public airwaves, we don't have the opportunity to weigh idiom. Therefore a denominator that eschews initial offense and considers sensibilities is in order.
I use the word 'fie' precisely because it conveys what I want it to. People will use the word 'fuck' to do the same thing. In my case, it has nothing to do with a euphemism regarding the sex act. Why the sex act must be used to banally emphasis is only part of that word-- it's a negative exclamatory. Bad word. Conveys negative meaning at best. There are better choices.
I contemplate instead, the proposition that we start by a state of not intentionally or unintentionally offending those that are offended by the default choices of occasional or often used public airwaves obscenity/profanity. Upon finding that this word choice is ok, fire away, else become the offender/offended. In the public airwaves, the context of the post, the FCC portends starting by not offending. I agree with that. If you take no offense in other discourse, then by all means, fire away. If you choose to offend, that is your choice, but it's not civil to do so. The boorish don't care, or if they do, the offense is committed anyway, often with the intention of shock or provoked result.
Why offend? Let me count the ways.... but I see the merits of providing a discourse in public media that starts with not provoking or offending in basis. It may happen anyway. We may not like the course of the war in Iraq (or even its basis and rationale) and it's horrible news each day it seems. Nonetheless, the news, bad or good or stipulated, can be conveyed free of the initial offense of scatalogical word choice, free from the initial taint of obscenity, and free from polarizing ad hominem choices. Start there. By consent, go somewhere else. Raise the denominator, not lower it, pandering.
There is esprit d'corp. There is the ability to find a common denominator with another random American, where the starting point is that we don't use obscene or profane language with each other. All else is negotiated or initiated from there. That's part of the basis for the crux of the FCC's argument, that obscenity and profanity is a consentual discourse, not a common one. We agree that it's ok to swear. No offense? We continue unabated. Not ok to swear? Then we screen our language if we choose not to offend. Or not. But at least we know then: it's not consensus and we have a probability of offense, whereas we didn't start with one.
Oh, that's a stretch. Fie on your sense that boorish language is somehow justified in this way, and that you don't give a fuck about the sensibilities of others by your references to sex, shit, and so on. Get off your high fucking horse and learn what the fuck the world's about. It's about the fact that there are others out there that are bereft of such horseshit. That they want to go through life with out scatalogical references, without pointing towards sex, or damnation, or a niggardly existence. Fie. Dipshit.
You see, this is the very distinction and argument between public airwaves, and those that are not public. The public ones imbue the right not to be disturbed by obscenity (which doesn't disturb me, so much as it disturbs others whom I respect). It's the entire crux of the issue at hand. And indeed, I do have the right not to be offended by obscenity in a pubic place. It's called disturbing the peace and tranquility and it's offensive.
Yes, there are blanket rules and that's what's at issue here-- in the specific context of the public airwaves, and no other place. Blacklists are for another purpose. Limiting provocative, incendiary, and obscene speech is within the scope of a civil society. You just don't want to live by these rules.
Consider for a moment, Kurt Vonnegut, who used to swear a lot, then humorously used the aphorism "ejaculate up the birth canal of a female" to represent the word 'fuck'. I don't care if you say it or not, but others do, and I must respect them if I also am able to ask for respect. Therefore, in the context of the public airwaves where this entire thread started, I respect others. My choice, as yours, is your own.
It's not an all-or-nothing sort of sentiment. The rules are currently pretty clear. That's what's in court.
In terms of civility, it's the center, not the edges that count. One must always listen to the edges, but even though I personally use the occasional swear word now and then, it's never in a place where I can make offense. Those that lack what I perceive to be sensitivity in this regard, stand out like beacons. Listen around you. Soon you'll find a lot of noise with the signal. Some of the noise fouls the signal.
We agree in the nudity context. I still don't want to hear obscenity/profanity shouting matches on the public airwaves. Can you imagine untethered shock-jocks if the airwaves were open? Imagine what Bob & Tom, with their borderline misogynistic diatribe might be like with bitch, cunt, asshole, and every other anatomical euphenism sprinkled in. Those that accept that this might happen can subscribe to other venues. I don't want to hear Dick Cheney's 'get fucked' and I don't want to hear it from anyone else on the radio or public TV stations, either. I strongly hope that we can lift other content, too. One mountain at a time.
Civility is a transient property. You can be civil, or not. Lacking these cooperative properties, there is no civility. How long until an uncivil attitude becomes even more divisive? Consider the public airwaves, as this is the context of aforementioned arguments; how would your family react to hear fuck-you matches, or people calling each other dicks on the radio tomorrow morning?
That's the crux of the matter, isn't it? We're going to the Supreme Court to argue the issue. I have to use the references I see as my context to discern what's obscene and not. My definition is more liberal than most, but I respect the fact that others find such utterances abhorrent. It is the respect, within the context of being civil, that I use this sentiment to defend the FCC-- which is a body that I otherwise have little respect for. Is it equally applied, this judgment on the part of the FCC that various publicly uttered obscenities are found and fined? Not in my opinion. Yet the shock value and the repugnancy of obscenities over public airways needs to be dealt with by the FCC, or some-body of government as society and culture cannot service the need.
Slashdot Mirror
When even Google pulls back, it's a bad business model even with advertising-driven models.
Face it, 802.11 is a LAN technology, not a MAN technology. Lipstick on that pig, even with cool mesh network attempts, isn't going to make it better. It was designed for local radial-cellular access by its channelization, and it's not good for covering wide areas. My sentiments go out to Strix and Firetide; both have decent models to make it wider. Cities have to figure out that broadband access is a utility, not an option.
Just like in the UK, it'll work until it's cracked. Or the RFID data from passports. It is no business of the government who I am, or where I am without probable cause by a signed affidavit. There's a sufficient majority that would make sure that a national ID system is never used in the US that it's moot anyway. And for Larry Ellison and others that want to try it, they'll get laughed at, again, and just as loudly.
The question isn't unique IDs, it's tyranny. We hack tyranny first.
And neither does dBase at the dot prompt.
We'll have to disagree. None of the criteria you use develops good whiz-kids, just more savvy users.
Life is now a widget in a browser. Cruise google, get a link to what you need, and move on. "Classical training" is becoming just that.... like the Programming in C by K&R sitting on my shelf. Can't find the arguments to a function you need? Five seconds later, you have it. It's seemingly a bit ad hoc, but with the right fundamentals, it gets the job done. Some might reel at the thought of the lack of deep-dive training, but it's become less necessary in many disciplines. That's not making people more stupid, rather, more productive. Beowulf in my English Lit was glorious; it's a classic. So is taking a look at Stallman's code, or an early sysconfig file. Some will dive deeper and be better for it.
Actually, they do. And I'm a member of the 1960's. And '50s. And agree that the TFA is riddled with half-truths. The basics and fundamentals are always there and needed. What's missing is the sense of reality vs the post dot-com boom/bust cycle. We need leaders. Some of them won't make it. Fine. Others will, and for the wrong reasons, but a net of good leaders will emerge. Opportunism isn't the dirty word it once was, and it's bred entrepreneurship. Some entrepreneurship has been world-changing. Other change was much more deliberate and a function of broader-based initiative. Both are necessary.
Data processing is still a science pioneered by lots of well-intentioned people. And while many practical fundamentals within that community are still needed, it also lead to the acceptance of platforms that were clearly single-vendor, and proprietary, hence monolithic and ultimately dead-ends (despite other positive qualities). Interns that I work with have many of the needed fundamentals. And some of them don't need to know the differences between EBSCDIC, Baudot, ASCII, and well, runes.
This is a generation that's more savvy with computing than any other; they've not known an era in their lives without decent computing machines likely in the home. USB and GUIs and broadband speeds are first nature. G/Net, ARCNet, Token Ring, Phone-Net, and other schemes have never been seen by these people. BBS is an 18" tire rim, not a dial-up service. USB drives, not floppy disks, are temporary storage devices. This generation can't read paper tape and doesn't care if we used to record data on cassette tapes, in fact, cassette tapes are curiosities when you can hold the contents of hundreds, even thousands of them in a single MP3 player device.
And therefore, it's nihilistic to impose at least a portion of seemingly ancient platitudes on generations that have no context for them. I find young IT people endlessly fascinating because their boundaries are far different from my generation-- the generation that could do binary front panel program loads in assembler.
In Scandia, they're big medicine. Let's see who drives off the cliff. Personally, I'd rather just route around them. Perhaps an evil subnet concoction would do it.
A good attitude if Telia's fixed & dchp'd clients don't mean anything to you. I get the feeling Telia's the one that's facing the most trouble. It's only a guess.
And the point is: we don't care. Cogent? Yank them. Telia? Ex-PTT that smells as bad as Deutsche Telekom (in this case, anyway).. Yank them. Misbehaving child-like ISPs? Goodbye. This 2008, not 1998.
It's like an old telecom SS7 spat. Tell them to get over it. In three more days, we pull all our servers from and move on. Can't get to what we need? As ISPs, they have precious little time to figure it out, then we split. Go ahead, try and enforce that five-9's contract. Providers are everywhere, drooling for business. Bye-bye, blackout. Hello loneliness.
George Boole himself would be proud of your logic.
Yes, but they didn't start by throwing shit in your face first. Therein lies the difference: start with civility; negotiate, continue.
The negativity towards profanity has lapsed. "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" broke that ice in the '30s. I wasn't around then, but I was in the '50s. The profane seem to have become common place. So much the worse, mostly. The obscene, however, are trying to justify themselves. I find truck with that. I prefer using 'proctological orifice'. And sometimes, I find that using such epithet is a sign of Type A Stress syndrome as defined by Friedman and Ulmer. Sometimes people are just people and categorizing them obscenely might temporarily diminish them in our minds to some odd but satisfying end, but is ultimately unsatisfactory, I find.
In discourse, before the bar or in the bar are two different environments with two different default permissions and contexts, just as the public airwaves are to a golf course. One starts with out hostility or offense, then continues as the context permits. We go from there. Politeness is lost, these in-your-face days. We've traded RW Emerson for HS Thompson.
Ah, but you see it's not the prim and proper. It's discourse that starts with, we don't say things that offend each other.
. If we agree that there's an idiom that we can agree on, we go there as it speeds and enhances communications, and gives them coloration. A well-placed will do well to convey emphasis, cadence, but importantly, meaning. On the public airwaves, we don't have the opportunity to weigh idiom. Therefore a denominator that eschews initial offense and considers sensibilities is in order.
I use the word 'fie' precisely because it conveys what I want it to. People will use the word 'fuck' to do the same thing. In my case, it has nothing to do with a euphemism regarding the sex act. Why the sex act must be used to banally emphasis is only part of that word-- it's a negative exclamatory. Bad word. Conveys negative meaning at best. There are better choices.
I contemplate instead, the proposition that we start by a state of not intentionally or unintentionally offending those that are offended by the default choices of occasional or often used public airwaves obscenity/profanity. Upon finding that this word choice is ok, fire away, else become the offender/offended. In the public airwaves, the context of the post, the FCC portends starting by not offending. I agree with that. If you take no offense in other discourse, then by all means, fire away. If you choose to offend, that is your choice, but it's not civil to do so. The boorish don't care, or if they do, the offense is committed anyway, often with the intention of shock or provoked result.
Why offend? Let me count the ways.... but I see the merits of providing a discourse in public media that starts with not provoking or offending in basis. It may happen anyway. We may not like the course of the war in Iraq (or even its basis and rationale) and it's horrible news each day it seems. Nonetheless, the news, bad or good or stipulated, can be conveyed free of the initial offense of scatalogical word choice, free from the initial taint of obscenity, and free from polarizing ad hominem choices. Start there. By consent, go somewhere else. Raise the denominator, not lower it, pandering.
There is esprit d'corp. There is the ability to find a common denominator with another random American, where the starting point is that we don't use obscene or profane language with each other. All else is negotiated or initiated from there. That's part of the basis for the crux of the FCC's argument, that obscenity and profanity is a consentual discourse, not a common one. We agree that it's ok to swear. No offense? We continue unabated. Not ok to swear? Then we screen our language if we choose not to offend. Or not. But at least we know then: it's not consensus and we have a probability of offense, whereas we didn't start with one.
Oh, that's a stretch. Fie on your sense that boorish language is somehow justified in this way, and that you don't give a fuck about the sensibilities of others by your references to sex, shit, and so on. Get off your high fucking horse and learn what the fuck the world's about. It's about the fact that there are others out there that are bereft of such horseshit. That they want to go through life with out scatalogical references, without pointing towards sex, or damnation, or a niggardly existence. Fie. Dipshit.
There. How was that? Feel better now?
Don't judge your thick skin as the skin others have. Epithets are epithets, and boorishness abounds even without the utterance of obscenity.
You see, this is the very distinction and argument between public airwaves, and those that are not public. The public ones imbue the right not to be disturbed by obscenity (which doesn't disturb me, so much as it disturbs others whom I respect). It's the entire crux of the issue at hand. And indeed, I do have the right not to be offended by obscenity in a pubic place. It's called disturbing the peace and tranquility and it's offensive.
Yes, there are blanket rules and that's what's at issue here-- in the specific context of the public airwaves, and no other place. Blacklists are for another purpose. Limiting provocative, incendiary, and obscene speech is within the scope of a civil society. You just don't want to live by these rules.
Consider for a moment, Kurt Vonnegut, who used to swear a lot, then humorously used the aphorism "ejaculate up the birth canal of a female" to represent the word 'fuck'. I don't care if you say it or not, but others do, and I must respect them if I also am able to ask for respect. Therefore, in the context of the public airwaves where this entire thread started, I respect others. My choice, as yours, is your own.
It's not an all-or-nothing sort of sentiment. The rules are currently pretty clear. That's what's in court.
In terms of civility, it's the center, not the edges that count. One must always listen to the edges, but even though I personally use the occasional swear word now and then, it's never in a place where I can make offense. Those that lack what I perceive to be sensitivity in this regard, stand out like beacons. Listen around you. Soon you'll find a lot of noise with the signal. Some of the noise fouls the signal.
We agree in the nudity context. I still don't want to hear obscenity/profanity shouting matches on the public airwaves. Can you imagine untethered shock-jocks if the airwaves were open? Imagine what Bob & Tom, with their borderline misogynistic diatribe might be like with bitch, cunt, asshole, and every other anatomical euphenism sprinkled in. Those that accept that this might happen can subscribe to other venues. I don't want to hear Dick Cheney's 'get fucked' and I don't want to hear it from anyone else on the radio or public TV stations, either. I strongly hope that we can lift other content, too. One mountain at a time.
Civility is a transient property. You can be civil, or not. Lacking these cooperative properties, there is no civility. How long until an uncivil attitude becomes even more divisive? Consider the public airwaves, as this is the context of aforementioned arguments; how would your family react to hear fuck-you matches, or people calling each other dicks on the radio tomorrow morning?
That's the crux of the matter, isn't it? We're going to the Supreme Court to argue the issue. I have to use the references I see as my context to discern what's obscene and not. My definition is more liberal than most, but I respect the fact that others find such utterances abhorrent. It is the respect, within the context of being civil, that I use this sentiment to defend the FCC-- which is a body that I otherwise have little respect for. Is it equally applied, this judgment on the part of the FCC that various publicly uttered obscenities are found and fined? Not in my opinion. Yet the shock value and the repugnancy of obscenities over public airways needs to be dealt with by the FCC, or some-body of government as society and culture cannot service the need.