I should write a bot to monitor slashdot and just repost the best of my rants about cable monopolies whenever a story pops up about the FCC or broadband or whatever. Here is the short version.
FIND OUT WHAT PART OF GOVERNMENT IS CAUSING THE MONOPOLY IN YOUR AREA AND FIX IT.
For the vast, vast majority of American slashdot readers, your area is economically viable for two or more systems. There are cable companies that are eager to expand into your area. They have the money. They know how to build a fiber plant. They know how to run a successful ISP and/or cable company. They probably already have blueprints showing exactly what and where they would build in your neighborhood. Find out what regulator is telling them "NO". Is it your local city board? The state public utility commissions? County zoning? Landlord in your apartment building?
Personally, I live several miles outside of a small town, in a semi-rural area. The closest city is ~40 miles away. The closest MSA (big city) is about 100 miles away. I have three fiber drops from two cable companies in my yard, and I pay 50% less than people in the nearest monopoly zone.
Hard drives are a sort of exception. The block sizes presented to the interface are powers of two so that they can align with memory sizes, but there is nothing naturally binary in the physical structure of the stored data. It would be no problem to reprogram a drive's interface to view a 4 TB drive as a ~35 trillion bit array, if there was some application for that.
Disk sizes tend to be funny hybrids. The old 1.44 MB 3.5" floppy had 1440 * 1024 bytes capacity. 2 sides * 80 tracks/side * 18 sectors/track = 2880 sectors. 2880 sectors * 512 bytes/sector = 1440. The "megabytes" in 1.44 MB is really funny. Mega is a kilo of kilos, but in this case, one of the kilos is 2^10 and the other is 10^3. If the mega was 2^20, or (2^10)^2, it would be a 1.41 MB disk, and if the mega was 10^6, or (10^3)^2, it would be a 1.47 MB disk.
Flash is funny too. The chips are laid out like RAM, with a rectangular array of blocks of cells. But the controller reports it as a linear array, with fewer actual blocks than exist on the chip. In that circumstance, it is somewhat understandable to mix units. No one really cares that your device has 64*2^30 cells internally if you actually use it as if it were a 250,000 blocks of 4096 bytes, or whatever.
This seems to be an industry practice, not specific to any particular store or sawmill. I redid my front porch two years ago, and the flooring (decking) boards needed to be exactly 6 feet. None of the "6 foot" boards were actually 6 feet. Some were short by as much as an inch. I had to buy 8 foot decking and cut them down to exactly 6'. I talked to some people who do construction and they all looked at me like I was stupid for thinking that I'd be able to buy 6' pieces and use them to span a 6 foot space.
The one exception appears to be studs that have been pre-cut to odd lengths. Those are the 92 5/8" studs, etc. Those are pretty close because the point of them is that construction crews can put them up without having to trim them at the job site. (They have funny lengths to make the ceiling end up at the right height after everything is finished.)
All plumbing is like that. I don't think I've ever in my life come across any type or size of pipe that has any dimension that comes close to the nominal size. 1/8" pipes are hilariously huge. Ditto electrical conduit. Ditto particle boards. Hell, almost nothing involved in building a house has any size that matches the name.
I guess I haven't measured HVAC ducting, but it appears that the industry follows a very very broad tolerance, which may quite possibly include the nominal sizes. Oh, and paint gallons are probably pretty accurate.
Build or rent a server, load it up. Fetchmail can fetch mail from any POP or IMAP provider, if you want to go that route. Or, you can accept mail directly through sendmail, which is not trivial and requires a domain.
If you don't want to lose control of your email address ever again, you can register a domain and either host it yourself, or find a commercial host that will work with customer domains.
Outgoing with sendmail is easy, or your incoming host will usually provide it too, if you prefer that.
Horde works great with activesync devices, or with browsers. It can also manage your calendar, contacts, notes, todo list, etc.
Advanced topics for the DIY crowd: greylisting, spamassassin, DNS-rbls, SPF, SRS
I think you might be wandering into the realm of hyperbole here. I mean sure, his character could be cruel sometimes, but not always. Often, it was done in good fun. And it was obvious that in his heart, he believed that he was doing what he thought was best for everyone, in the long run.
And besides, how evil is it, really, to trick people into saying the magic word? And it isn't like his chair was actually eating anyone.
Wait, which one were we talking about again?
P.S. You might want to read the new testament again. And this time, pay attention.
Other than your irrational hatred, do you actually know anything about this topic at all? I only ask because you are making predictions about things that happened in the past, but you seem to be unaware that doomsday never came.
There was a time several years ago when new crypto-coins were popping up nearly daily, and speculators were indeed driving the exchange prices of those coins up and down to fleece suckers. Dogecoin was one of those, but I haven't heard of any of those gaining any traction to speak of for several years now. What followed Dogecoin was not catcoin, but bitcoin. The trend has been towards more stability, not less. And towards older coins, not newer.
If you are interested in an honest debate, I strongly urge you to consider formulating an opening argument that doesn't refute itself.
This is good. The website end has always been able to store visitor information and do whatever the hell it wants with it. So, this guy writes a tool that uses the #1 privacy invasion in the world today to protest letting ISPs store which IP addresses clients on your home network connect to, which doesn't even crack the top 100, thanks to SSL and browsers pushing auto-SSL.
Just for comparison, Facebook knows who you are, where you live, what and where you like to eat, who your friends are, what your politics are, what websites you visit, what products you purchase, and everything else about you. What does you ISP know about you? They know that you spend a lot of time on Facebook.
Oh, but Zuckerberg is a progressive and Trump is a Republican. Everyone get your pitchforks and torches so we can go protest the second one.
even though AFAIC USD is inherently flawed and failing as money, it is still more stable in intraday trading so far, it doesn't jump up and down by 20% in a day
Then again, there was that one day when the dollar lost nearly 70% of its value.
But that was an intentional act of government. Shifts in the value of bitcoin happen by market forces.
The "price" of bitcoin is the result of people trying to buy and sell it. Naturally, the bigger the market, the less effect any one transaction has on the price. Dollar markets are gigantic, so the value doesn't move a whole lot from day to day. Bitcoin markets are small, just barely big enough to be considered small by the standards of financial professionals. A few million dollars can push the price around a fair bit. And because the markets are small, people don't have the capital to allocate to price points much beyond the expected range, so a breakout can overrun quite a bit before settling back down.
In short, the swings in the price of bitcoin are the result of you being born when you were, and not because bitcoin has any sort of inherent instability. If you had been born a few decades later, either you'd see a much larger and more stable bitcoin market, or you'd only ever see the name in the history books.
Ethereum seems to be different, by the way. I haven't been following it closely, but it isn't just another Dogecoin or other clone-of-bitcoin-with-different-magic like used to pop up so often. It is trying to do something completely different, and in my opinion, it is far too early to tell if it will succeed in doing so, or for that matter, if that different thing is a good idea or not. There have been problems encountered along the way, to be sure.
How much of the interest in Ethereum is because it is special, and how much is because it is new(er) - I have no idea.
You may be thinking of OWS, the "fractal compression program". The "compressed" file was nothing more than a list of blocks on the disk that the original file occupied. You could test it by compressing a file, deleting the original, then decompressing (=undeleting) it.
But if you copied it to a floppy and took it to your friends house, it mysteriously failed...
Internet references to it are spotty. It got passed around on BBSs and sneakernet back before home PCs really started connecting to the internet in a big way.
You may also be thinking of WIC, which I didn't encounter, so I tend to assume that it didn't achieve as wide a distribution as OWS. The mechanism described for WIC sounds more like what you are describing. Either way, you are off by about 10 years. They were in the mid 90s, not the mid 80s.
Actually, I think they are very good at both things, which are really the same thing. The general rule is that if you are reading a poll in the press, it was not designed to learn something, but to sell something. The accurate polls are the internal polls, the ones that the campaigns use to target their volunteers - the ones you never see the results from.
So the people who carefully crafted polls that would show everyone that Trump had no chance to win in 2016 are now carefully crafting polls to push a wedge between his supporters and Republicans up for re-election in 2018. When that fails, they'll switch to polls showing that he has no chance of reelection in 2020.
If you don't understand this process, you probably spent too much time letting the fake news tell you what you wanted to hear, and not enough time researching how polling is actually conducted in the real world. The good news is that it isn't too late. You can still, if you choose to do so, head over to your favorite search engine and read as much as you can stand to about how the sausage is made.
Or you can start practicing now for your next crying video. You are going to be making a lot of them if you keep letting the fake news get your hopes up.
Ok, Mike Flynn (by the way, he is the only person known to be the victim of an actual crime here) had contact with a Russian ambassador, which was pretty much his job definition (Incoming National Security Adviser) at the time.
You really need to figure out if your state public utility commission or some local body is preventing competition.
I live in a semi-rural area outside of a small town. (town is ~2500 pop year-round, 2x 15k pop 20 miles in opposite directions, 120k pop 40 miles away, and a major metro 80 miles away) I have two fiber plants in my yard. Plus DSL available, plus long range wifi, plus cellular - but I don't consider them practical options. One of the fiber ISPs is a new-ish cable company. They have financing locked in and already have plans drawn up to build a new fiber plant in every town and city in the area they aren't already in.
What is holding them back is not the allegedly insurmountable expense of building brand new fiber plant. It isn't a need or desire to only hit high density areas. No, the only thing holding them back is monopoly franchise agreements the incumbents hold with the local governments. Every time they kill one of those, not only do they build a new plant in that area, but the incumbent does too. Sometimes the incumbent announces their plans a month or so after swearing (to the city board or whatever) that it is too expensive to do.
Figure out what is really preventing competition in your area, and fix it if you want things to get better.
1 - climate changes 2 - we are causing it 3 - the changes will be bad (for us)
The image I posted is about #2. Your post is about #3. An argument regarding #3, even one much better than the one you made, even the best argument ever heard by human ears, says nothing about #2.
Obama needed a deal with Iran. He would not take no for an answer. The Iranians noticed this and held him upside down by the ankles and shook a billion dollars out of his (our) pockets.
Slashdot Mirror
I should write a bot to monitor slashdot and just repost the best of my rants about cable monopolies whenever a story pops up about the FCC or broadband or whatever. Here is the short version.
FIND OUT WHAT PART OF GOVERNMENT IS CAUSING THE MONOPOLY IN YOUR AREA AND FIX IT.
For the vast, vast majority of American slashdot readers, your area is economically viable for two or more systems. There are cable companies that are eager to expand into your area. They have the money. They know how to build a fiber plant. They know how to run a successful ISP and/or cable company. They probably already have blueprints showing exactly what and where they would build in your neighborhood. Find out what regulator is telling them "NO". Is it your local city board? The state public utility commissions? County zoning? Landlord in your apartment building?
Personally, I live several miles outside of a small town, in a semi-rural area. The closest city is ~40 miles away. The closest MSA (big city) is about 100 miles away. I have three fiber drops from two cable companies in my yard, and I pay 50% less than people in the nearest monopoly zone.
Hard drives are a sort of exception. The block sizes presented to the interface are powers of two so that they can align with memory sizes, but there is nothing naturally binary in the physical structure of the stored data. It would be no problem to reprogram a drive's interface to view a 4 TB drive as a ~35 trillion bit array, if there was some application for that.
Disk sizes tend to be funny hybrids. The old 1.44 MB 3.5" floppy had 1440 * 1024 bytes capacity. 2 sides * 80 tracks/side * 18 sectors/track = 2880 sectors. 2880 sectors * 512 bytes/sector = 1440. The "megabytes" in 1.44 MB is really funny. Mega is a kilo of kilos, but in this case, one of the kilos is 2^10 and the other is 10^3. If the mega was 2^20, or (2^10)^2, it would be a 1.41 MB disk, and if the mega was 10^6, or (10^3)^2, it would be a 1.47 MB disk.
Flash is funny too. The chips are laid out like RAM, with a rectangular array of blocks of cells. But the controller reports it as a linear array, with fewer actual blocks than exist on the chip. In that circumstance, it is somewhat understandable to mix units. No one really cares that your device has 64*2^30 cells internally if you actually use it as if it were a 250,000 blocks of 4096 bytes, or whatever.
This seems to be an industry practice, not specific to any particular store or sawmill. I redid my front porch two years ago, and the flooring (decking) boards needed to be exactly 6 feet. None of the "6 foot" boards were actually 6 feet. Some were short by as much as an inch. I had to buy 8 foot decking and cut them down to exactly 6'. I talked to some people who do construction and they all looked at me like I was stupid for thinking that I'd be able to buy 6' pieces and use them to span a 6 foot space.
The one exception appears to be studs that have been pre-cut to odd lengths. Those are the 92 5/8" studs, etc. Those are pretty close because the point of them is that construction crews can put them up without having to trim them at the job site. (They have funny lengths to make the ceiling end up at the right height after everything is finished.)
All plumbing is like that. I don't think I've ever in my life come across any type or size of pipe that has any dimension that comes close to the nominal size. 1/8" pipes are hilariously huge. Ditto electrical conduit. Ditto particle boards. Hell, almost nothing involved in building a house has any size that matches the name.
I guess I haven't measured HVAC ducting, but it appears that the industry follows a very very broad tolerance, which may quite possibly include the nominal sizes. Oh, and paint gallons are probably pretty accurate.
Build or rent a server, load it up. Fetchmail can fetch mail from any POP or IMAP provider, if you want to go that route. Or, you can accept mail directly through sendmail, which is not trivial and requires a domain.
If you don't want to lose control of your email address ever again, you can register a domain and either host it yourself, or find a commercial host that will work with customer domains.
Outgoing with sendmail is easy, or your incoming host will usually provide it too, if you prefer that.
Horde works great with activesync devices, or with browsers. It can also manage your calendar, contacts, notes, todo list, etc.
Advanced topics for the DIY crowd: greylisting, spamassassin, DNS-rbls, SPF, SRS
I think you might be wandering into the realm of hyperbole here. I mean sure, his character could be cruel sometimes, but not always. Often, it was done in good fun. And it was obvious that in his heart, he believed that he was doing what he thought was best for everyone, in the long run.
And besides, how evil is it, really, to trick people into saying the magic word? And it isn't like his chair was actually eating anyone.
Wait, which one were we talking about again?
P.S. You might want to read the new testament again. And this time, pay attention.
Other than your irrational hatred, do you actually know anything about this topic at all? I only ask because you are making predictions about things that happened in the past, but you seem to be unaware that doomsday never came.
There was a time several years ago when new crypto-coins were popping up nearly daily, and speculators were indeed driving the exchange prices of those coins up and down to fleece suckers. Dogecoin was one of those, but I haven't heard of any of those gaining any traction to speak of for several years now. What followed Dogecoin was not catcoin, but bitcoin. The trend has been towards more stability, not less. And towards older coins, not newer.
If you are interested in an honest debate, I strongly urge you to consider formulating an opening argument that doesn't refute itself.
This is good. The website end has always been able to store visitor information and do whatever the hell it wants with it. So, this guy writes a tool that uses the #1 privacy invasion in the world today to protest letting ISPs store which IP addresses clients on your home network connect to, which doesn't even crack the top 100, thanks to SSL and browsers pushing auto-SSL.
Just for comparison, Facebook knows who you are, where you live, what and where you like to eat, who your friends are, what your politics are, what websites you visit, what products you purchase, and everything else about you. What does you ISP know about you? They know that you spend a lot of time on Facebook.
Oh, but Zuckerberg is a progressive and Trump is a Republican. Everyone get your pitchforks and torches so we can go protest the second one.
Then again, there was that one day when the dollar lost nearly 70% of its value.
But that was an intentional act of government. Shifts in the value of bitcoin happen by market forces.
The "price" of bitcoin is the result of people trying to buy and sell it. Naturally, the bigger the market, the less effect any one transaction has on the price. Dollar markets are gigantic, so the value doesn't move a whole lot from day to day. Bitcoin markets are small, just barely big enough to be considered small by the standards of financial professionals. A few million dollars can push the price around a fair bit. And because the markets are small, people don't have the capital to allocate to price points much beyond the expected range, so a breakout can overrun quite a bit before settling back down.
In short, the swings in the price of bitcoin are the result of you being born when you were, and not because bitcoin has any sort of inherent instability. If you had been born a few decades later, either you'd see a much larger and more stable bitcoin market, or you'd only ever see the name in the history books.
Ethereum seems to be different, by the way. I haven't been following it closely, but it isn't just another Dogecoin or other clone-of-bitcoin-with-different-magic like used to pop up so often. It is trying to do something completely different, and in my opinion, it is far too early to tell if it will succeed in doing so, or for that matter, if that different thing is a good idea or not. There have been problems encountered along the way, to be sure.
How much of the interest in Ethereum is because it is special, and how much is because it is new(er) - I have no idea.
You may be thinking of OWS, the "fractal compression program". The "compressed" file was nothing more than a list of blocks on the disk that the original file occupied. You could test it by compressing a file, deleting the original, then decompressing (=undeleting) it.
But if you copied it to a floppy and took it to your friends house, it mysteriously failed...
Here is a mention of it here on slashdot back in 2006: https://slashdot.org/comments....
And a very brief mention in the compression FAQ: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/compr...
Internet references to it are spotty. It got passed around on BBSs and sneakernet back before home PCs really started connecting to the internet in a big way.
You may also be thinking of WIC, which I didn't encounter, so I tend to assume that it didn't achieve as wide a distribution as OWS. The mechanism described for WIC sounds more like what you are describing. Either way, you are off by about 10 years. They were in the mid 90s, not the mid 80s.
Actually, I think they are very good at both things, which are really the same thing. The general rule is that if you are reading a poll in the press, it was not designed to learn something, but to sell something. The accurate polls are the internal polls, the ones that the campaigns use to target their volunteers - the ones you never see the results from.
So the people who carefully crafted polls that would show everyone that Trump had no chance to win in 2016 are now carefully crafting polls to push a wedge between his supporters and Republicans up for re-election in 2018. When that fails, they'll switch to polls showing that he has no chance of reelection in 2020.
If you don't understand this process, you probably spent too much time letting the fake news tell you what you wanted to hear, and not enough time researching how polling is actually conducted in the real world. The good news is that it isn't too late. You can still, if you choose to do so, head over to your favorite search engine and read as much as you can stand to about how the sausage is made.
Or you can start practicing now for your next crying video. You are going to be making a lot of them if you keep letting the fake news get your hopes up.
Ahem.
Yup, Flynn was such a bad dude that Obama's administration renewed his security clearance.
And the recording of that meeting can't be released because of National Security.
The same people who told you Trump had a 2% chance of winning now give you his approval polls. Proceed accordingly.
https://i.redd.it/ujkzkpr6jf1z...
Ok, Mike Flynn (by the way, he is the only person known to be the victim of an actual crime here) had contact with a Russian ambassador, which was pretty much his job definition (Incoming National Security Adviser) at the time.
Name these people, please.
Monopolies inside an apartment building are the result of a franchise agreement between the cable company and the building owner.
Monopolies outside an apartment building are the result of a franchise agreement between the cable company and the municipal government.
Whatever tool they come up with for the first problem should apply equally well to the second.
You really need to figure out if your state public utility commission or some local body is preventing competition.
I live in a semi-rural area outside of a small town. (town is ~2500 pop year-round, 2x 15k pop 20 miles in opposite directions, 120k pop 40 miles away, and a major metro 80 miles away) I have two fiber plants in my yard. Plus DSL available, plus long range wifi, plus cellular - but I don't consider them practical options. One of the fiber ISPs is a new-ish cable company. They have financing locked in and already have plans drawn up to build a new fiber plant in every town and city in the area they aren't already in.
What is holding them back is not the allegedly insurmountable expense of building brand new fiber plant. It isn't a need or desire to only hit high density areas. No, the only thing holding them back is monopoly franchise agreements the incumbents hold with the local governments. Every time they kill one of those, not only do they build a new plant in that area, but the incumbent does too. Sometimes the incumbent announces their plans a month or so after swearing (to the city board or whatever) that it is too expensive to do.
Figure out what is really preventing competition in your area, and fix it if you want things to get better.
Who could have known that spending a few decades suing people left, right and center would make the rest of the people hesitant to embrace your group?
In the other panic thread, someone said that coastal condos in Florida were losing value, another "fact" that appears to be of rectal origin.
You sorta hit the mark. Just the wrong target.
1 - climate changes
2 - we are causing it
3 - the changes will be bad (for us)
The image I posted is about #2. Your post is about #3. An argument regarding #3, even one much better than the one you made, even the best argument ever heard by human ears, says nothing about #2.
You need look no further than the Iran deal.
Obama needed a deal with Iran. He would not take no for an answer. The Iranians noticed this and held him upside down by the ankles and shook a billion dollars out of his (our) pockets.
Oh noes! The world is going to end if the US doesn't transfer a bunch of money to other countries.
The same thing just happened to me. I saw this on CNN, so I looked for it on Fox and couldn't find it.