1) Your PC currently runs Windows 98, an operating system you've been using for, presumably, 9 years or so.
2) The PC in question is also about that old?
3) Ubuntu installed as advertised on this (presumably) older hardware -- including an older network card? -- after you used one of the options on the initial installation screen. If I remember installing Windows 98 correctly, this would still mean installing Ubuntu required less user input than Windows would.
4) When you played a chess game you had never used before, on an operating system you had never used before, you did not know how to do everything you wanted.
5) When your internet connection did not work, on an operating system you'd never used before, you did not know how to fix it.
"Very user friendly" != "Absolutely no learning curve." A more rational strategy would be to dual boot Win 98 and Ubuntu for a little while, and give yourself as much time to learn Linux as you spent learning how to do things in Windows all those years ago. It would also let you post on a user forum for help with your internet problem.
If nothing else, you'd learn a little something, and potentially save a lot of time not having to defrag drives, update antivirus software, and other assorted things. Not to mention that you'd actually be able to find some help with your OS when you need it. How many Windows 98 help forums are available these days?
She was guilty. She tried to destroy evidence (hard disk). She claimed she didn't have a Kazaa account; in fact she had one with the same name she used for email. This woman was about like my 6-year-old when caught red-handed.
She didn't settle, it went to trial, and her defense rivalled the Chewbacca defense. And she was found guilty, and was ordered to pay less than half the maximum damages for willful copyright infringement. How, exactly, is that "no justice?"
Still you miss the point. Can you point to even one example of someone who has loaned money at negative interest? Just one?
In deflation, my $1 will have $1+ in purchasing power next year. My choices are:
1) Put my $1 in a mattress. Next year I have $1, which is now worth more goods/services, let's say now its purchasing power is $1.10. My gain: 10%. My cost: 0. My risk: 0. 2) Loan you money at say -5% negative interest. Next year, I have $.95, and you have a nickel. My $.95 is now worth $1.045 in purchasing power. My gain: 4.5%. My cost: $.05. My risk: next year you might be broke and not pay me back, and I lose my $1.
What rational economic decision says #2 is EVER of ANY advantage to me? Higher risk, higher cost, lower return than the mattress.
Remember Microsoft's numerous attempts to define a networking standard so that they could crush the TCP/IP network protocol? NetBUI anyone?
Umm, no. NetBUI was developed for IBM in 1983; originally the LAN technology had a hard limit of under 100 machines. Token Ring was an evolution on the hardware side, designed with a protocol like NetBUI in mind, and got you toward more like 250 machines on a ring. Obviously, MS had to support whatever network protocol IBM chose.
The IBM world was the mainframe model with a few PC's thrown in. In that world, there was deterministic polling instead of random access to the network medium. NIC's are smart (beaconing, tracking upstream/downstream neighbors, etc.), and the network infrastructure is dumb -- no routing, no IP-style any-to-any internetworking.
TCP/IP was relatively new. It was used in the academic world, not in business. It couldn't talk to big IBM iron. SLIP on a PC was a pipedream -- early dialup internet was dialling into a UNIX box as a terminal. There were no ISP's selling internet access. BBS's, Compuserve and AOL got you something like email and online community. In the later 80's, Novell IPX/SPX was the network protocol choice if you wanted file and print services on a LAN on x86 hardware. Appletalk did much the same for Macs.
MS products give me as much heartburn as anyone. But in the early and middle 1980's, Apple was the overpriced upstart visionary monopolist trying to corner the market, and IBM was the bigger, less overpriced, "PC's are text-based like our mainframes" monopolist. IBM tried to monopolize the market by suing anyone who cloned the BIOS, the only proprietary part of the IBM PC. That worked until Phoenix a) Clean room reverse engineered the BIOS, and b) had $gazillion in litigation insurance from Lloyds of London to discourage IBM from suing them into oblivion.
MS had no hardware business. Once the PC was cloned, MS fuelled cheap computing by selling to anyone, and giving you instant access to same apps IBMs ran. (In the early 80's, CP/M ran on more hardware than DOS, including IBM and non-IBM-BIOS 8086 hardware, but there weren't many decent apps for it.) 20-25 years ago, if you wanted non-monopoly-dominated personal computing, you were running MS software on Compaq or Taiwanese knock-off hardware. (There was, AFAIK, no *nix option at all before the 386, since the 8086/8 and 286 couldn't multitask.) The other choices -- Commodore, Atari, Timex-Sinclair, Radio Shack TRS-80, were also proprietary platforms, and died when PC's got cheap enough to take the low end of the market.
You also fail to account that when deflation is expected, competition among bankers could possibly result in negative interest rate loans.
Ummmmm, no. No one will ever lend money at "negative interest." Why pay someone for the privilege of loaning them money? It's much safer, and more profitable, to stick the money in a mattress. You really don't understand much, do you?
In this whole discussion, I see no one discussing the bad things a gold standard has caused.
1. Americans, remember William Jennings Bryan, "We must not crucify mankind on a cross of gold?" In the late 1800's the U.S. economy was expanding exponentially, far faster than growth of the gold supply. The result was falling prices -- very good for banks, very bad for farmers and businesses. Every year, the farmer with a mortgage would make his payments with dollars more valuable than the dollars he borrowed, and pay interest besides! His wheat/corn/eggs/milk/etc. brought ever-lower income, but his debt payments remained. Millions of people were ruined, or eked out a precarious, poverty-stricken existence. This was not due to market conditions for or overproduction of farm products. It happened because the money supply wasn't growing as fast as the economy.
2. 16th Century Europe experienced a dangerous and destabilizing rise in prices, which contributed to peasant revolts and other very bad things. Martin Luther (mostly mistakenly) attributed it to greedy merchants. The real problem was a sudden rise in Europe's money supply. Spanish conquests in South and Central America brought many tons of bullion to Spain. A lot more money chasing the same amount of stuff == inflation.
Ironically, all that bullion probably contributed to Spain's decline as a great power. Money was easy, work was hard. It became much easier to import foreign goods with all that Incan gold than to produce them in Spain.
With a global economy, problem #1 becomes a virtual certainty. China and India are rapidly industrializing. Global production of goods is expanding very quickly. The gold supply is not. On a gold standard, we'd be seeing worldwide price declines on almost everything. In that environment, the rich get richer just by putting money in a mattress and doing nothing.
Yes, the Fed is very powerful. But put away the tinfoil hats. Except for 1929-1940 (a bubble burst sparked by the Smoot Hawley tariff bill, made worse by government attempts to fix it) and 1970-1982, when rising energy prices and misguided Keynesian policies made a mess of things, the U.S. economy has experienced incredible growth throughout our history. The national debt, as a percentage of the economy, is lower now than in 1980. The greatest health problem of the poor is obesity. Things are certainly not perfect, but clearly, the Fed's policies have been superior to the problems we'd have had on the gold standard. What happens on the gold standard when the GDP doubles after inflation, as has happened in the U.S. since the early 1980's?
Relax and wait. Over time, ISPs will start to get seriously annoyed by this waste of bandwidth. As soon as customers start calling and complain about their crawling download speed, ISPs will have to start to act.\
Hate to burst your bubble, but spam doesn't seriously impact consumer ISP bandwidth. The bots use upstream bandwidth. But consumer ISP's have extra upstream at their peering points, because they give customers so little upstream to start with (ADSL and cable). Do they really see any congestion because some guy's infected PC is swamping its 256 kbit/s upload pipe? Not really. It costs more to help the clueless user clean the box than it does to just ignore it. As for downstream, spam is a drop in the bucket compared to P2P and video.
Take my home server as an example. My personal domain sends 0 spam. About 80% of my inbound is spam. Since March 22, my spam directory has accumulated ~15K individual spam messages. Total disk usage: 18 megs. That is an utterly meaningless number to my ISP. Over 2 months, even 18 gigs wouldn't be very meaningful.
doc
Why the hell should the consumers get any right to content I create?
1) Because society as a whole benefits from the wide distribution of ideas,
2) Because your work relies, in its turn, on concepts and ideas created by others. Every creative act relies on other people's works and ideas to one degree or another.
The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the authority "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." (Article I, Section 8) The only reason you get a monopoly on your content "for limited Times," according to the U.S. Constitution, is to motivate you to create it in the first place.
Only in the modern U.S. Judicial system is 100+ years even conceivably what "limited Times" means.
How are copyright laws currently unfair to consumers?
Because not even their grandchildren will see works that are already 50 years old pass into the public domain, and become a part of our cultural inheritance, where the Constitution says they should already be.
The only people upset about current copyright laws are the people that want to take power away from the producers (without which there will be by definition no content) and give it to the leaches, who consume but do not produce.
Wrong. I'm upset about current copyright laws, for example, because it is impossible to obtain many out-of-print books I wish I could own at affordable cost, if at all. If the work was published after 1921, it's off-limits. Copyright owners neither reprint such books nor give permission for others to do so. So... if I want to add such material to my library, how do I do so? If Congress would bother with the Constitution, those books would no longer be under copyright, and could be added to Project Gutenberg. Much the same applies to all kinds of other content, which is effectively locked in a vault where no one can get at it, to no one's benefit and to the detriment of anyone who doesn't live near a University-class library.
If you create one thing, then sit back and milk it for decades instead of continuing to innovate, write, and create, who's the leech?
The consumer already has all the power they need, the power of the purse.
Actually, the content producers have the power of the purse, because they have a monopoly on the content and can charge whatever they like. Yes, if BigGreedyRecordLabel Inc charges too much for the music recorded by Dead60'sRockStar, they won't sell much of it. However, the fact remains that BGRL Inc. is holding part of our culture hostage, because neither Congress nor the Courts can read and understand the plain, simple meaning of words in the U.S. Constitution.
It doesn't matter what degrees you have under your belt, it's what you DO that matters.
I agree. It's what you do that matters. This guy lies.
If anyone thinks lying about credentials doesn't matter, you're wrong. My Master of Divinity degree required learning to read Latin, German, Koine Greek, and Biblical Hebrew, then basing research conclusions on the linguistic and historical setting of documents written in those languages.
If we're talking theology, or you read something I've written, you need to be able to trust that I do indeed have those skills, and have used them honestly. Like any other kind of specialized knowledge, it's rather easy to put one over on the non-specialist.
Come to think of it, that's been the problem in the theological world for a very long time.
The infrastructure is already in place to support the current use. But how much MORE use could that infrastructure withstand before major and costly upgrades?
1) In the summer the current infrastructure is mostly idle.
2) Increase the amount of storage reasonably close to major urban areas.
3) IF there is even a capacity issue, use the summer slow time to build up supplies relatively close to the end user, and the demand for long-haul pipline capacity should not cause issues.
4) Storage facilities could certainly include a few pressure tanks in the yard/garage. Rural areas still have lots of propane tanks where there are no natural gas lines.
Umm, no. 100% of the energy is dissipated as heat. Some of it does useful work first -- runs your PC for instance. But the PC dissipates the electricty as waste heat -- every last bit of it. Cf. Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Law of Conservation of Energy. The windmill does not cool off the environment.
The windmill may displace electricity that would otherwise be generated by fossil fuels, and therefore your hour of playing Halo would not increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere. If that's the goal, as I said, nuclear will get you a lot more CO2 reduction than windmills in the real world, especially if you assume that the energy used to make the windmill in the first place (mine the ores, refine the metals, manufacturing, etc. etc.) comes from fossil fuels.
For the greatest environmental advantage, turn off the PC and read a book that's illuminated by sunlight.:-)
2) The resulting electricity powers your PC, toaster oven, and alarm clock.
3) The PC, toaster oven, and alarm clock turn the electricity back into heat.
This process cannot cool the environment. It simply moves the heat energy to a different location, which the wind was doing in the first place. It does let you stay up too late playing Halo, cook a pizza, and set your alarm clock in the meantime.
The energy required to manufacture the windmill puts the (small) reduction in atmospheric CO2 compared to burning coal many years into the future. If you want energy without generating CO2, nuclear gives you a lot more bang for the buck, kills fewer birds, and is a lot less ugly.
One concept you do not grasp is "Barriers to Entry/Cost of Entry." The capital costs to build the railroads were staggering. The government gave huge swaths of land to the railroad companies, because otherwise those railroads could not have been built. Everybody won. The railroad got to make money. The government got to have homesteaders settle big parts of the country and start paying taxes. The homesteaders got to own land.
Try building a railroad to compete with one that's already there. You'll go bankrupt really fast. Try entering the telecommunications industry to compete with AT&T. Before you can earn a dime, you have to spend $BIGBUKU stringing wires/fibers to your potential customers. Just to do business in the Chicago metro area (where I live), you'd have to spend more than the GDP of many nations. Who's going to loan/invest that kind of money when two huge competitors (AT&T, Comcast) already have wires in the ground? Who's going to invest in your company? Not me, that's for sure.
You don't own the land your fibers need to cross. You need attorneys and lobbyists to get permission from every municipality in the Chicago area to use their rights of way. What, exactly, gives you the right to just use this property you don't own for your private interest (opening a new telco), without promising something back to compensate the public for your private use of public resources? How well do you think that's really going to go? I sure don't want your crews tearing up my streets. My commute sucks already, and by the time you're done spending $BIGBUKU, you will never be able to offer me quality service at a competitive price. Your new telco will have WAY too much debt to do so.
That's where this economists' term, "natural monopoly," comes from. When the barriers to entry are that high, when it's not economically efficient to build multiple infrastructures, you permit the monopoly. Why? *Market forces* will create the monopoly anyway. That's why they call em "natural" monopolies -- get it?
You also need to regulate the hell out of it. Because if you don't, the natural monopolist will screw as many people as much as possible to make more cash. Witness Comcast, which has *doubled* my cost for *less* service in just 8 years. Have their costs doubled? Absolutely not. Their profits are going through the roof. How do they get away with it? There's no other cable company competing with them, and for various reasons dish isn't an option for me.
So no, government intervention isn't the problem here. As far as wanting to require AT&T to follow franchise agreements... that's the price they ought to pay for their monopoly, and for using all the public resources they need to do business. Instead, they've whined/lobbied/bribed/whatever their way into getting to do what they want, while the nature of their market *prevents* rather than encourages competition too keep the greed and inefficiency under control.
Be a conservative -- I'm a conservative too. Just don't deny economic realities in favor of ideology. Sound economics != laissez faire capitalism when you're talking about high barriers to entry and natural monopolies.
Only a very few of the first 70 posts show any understanding at all of what's involved. I live in the western Chicago suburbs. Here's the deal.
1) AT&T wants to deploy fiber which will carry the triple play everyone's been drooling over for the last 10 years: Video, Phone, and Internet on one bill.
2) Comcast just got done with a very expensive infrastructure buildout in the last 3-4 years in my city, so that their network could deliver triple play services. Before that, large parts of the city could get NO broadband service at all, except from some (necessarily expensive) wireless ISP's that sprang up or $125+/mo IDSL at a whopping 144 kbps.
3) Comcast, by the franchise agreement, must serve all homes in the city or none. It's the ONLY consumer-friendly provision of the franchise agreement, IMO. So they were required to run the upgraded infrastructure to ALL parts of the city. We have an older downtown full of lower-income, mostly Hispanic residents, and newer, higher-income subdivisions. Guess which residents are very profitable to serve? Guess which residents would be left in the digital dark ages if Comcast weren't bound by the franchise agreement?
4) AT&T wants it both ways. They want to compete with Comcast. But they refuse to be bound by the ONLY consumer-friendly part of the franchise agreement -- serve everyone, or serve no one.
5) They also claim the right to drop their ugly green boxes wherever they want. Comcast doesn't get to do that.
Comcast sucks -- it's expensive, and their internet service blows compared to top-of-the-line DSL, let alone FIOS. But at least everyone can get service, and at least there aren't butt-ugly 5' dark-green steel cubes for Comcast all over the place. AT&T is fighting in court for the right not to serve everyone, and to put their butt-ugly, way too big green boxes wherever they want.
The moral of the story: Not all super-highspeed-broadband rollouts are good. Some of us here don't want AT&T ramming their accountant-driven priorities down our communities' throats because it's for our own good. "Our" own good is defined as "any household that is most likely to be most profitable for AT&T, and to hell with the rest. Oh yeah, and aren't those 5' dark green steel cubes really attractive?"
There is virtually no user security. Any authenticated user has full rights to all data on the system. Fine for home, but until they get user security figured out, not ready for anything more than that. And given that it wants to play nice with Windoze, *Nix, and Apple, the security is gonna be the hard part.
*NIX without maddeningly granular security... who'da thunk?
doc
FTFA: "Word and Excel still perform automated changes that you may not want or expect, and you still have to learn their sometimes-obscure inner logic before you can master them."
It still thinks it can create my document better than I can. No thanks.
doc
What would have happened if Japan instead of attacking pearl harbor had attacked russia like the germans wanted them to and left the US alone (till later).
They would have run out of oil, and been unable to invade Russia. America embargoed oil shipments to Japan in the summer of 1941. Japan's choices were
1) Give in to American demands to stop the war of aggression in China,
2) Invade the Dutch East Indies to replace the oil the Americans wouldn't sell them.
However, invading the Dutch East Indies would certainly bring an American declaration of war.
Therefore, Tojo's choices were simple. Call the army home and buy American oil, go to war with the U.S., or try to fight a war with no oil supplies. We all know which one he picked.
If you actually go read
Mark 15:2 and John 18:37 in the New International Version, which was not first published until the late 1970's, you'll find out that the previous poster is misinformed.
Slashdot Mirror
So what you're saying is:
1) Your PC currently runs Windows 98, an operating system you've been using for, presumably, 9 years or so.
2) The PC in question is also about that old?
3) Ubuntu installed as advertised on this (presumably) older hardware -- including an older network card? -- after you used one of the options on the initial installation screen. If I remember installing Windows 98 correctly, this would still mean installing Ubuntu required less user input than Windows would.
4) When you played a chess game you had never used before, on an operating system you had never used before, you did not know how to do everything you wanted.
5) When your internet connection did not work, on an operating system you'd never used before, you did not know how to fix it.
"Very user friendly" != "Absolutely no learning curve." A more rational strategy would be to dual boot Win 98 and Ubuntu for a little while, and give yourself as much time to learn Linux as you spent learning how to do things in Windows all those years ago. It would also let you post on a user forum for help with your internet problem.
If nothing else, you'd learn a little something, and potentially save a lot of time not having to defrag drives, update antivirus software, and other assorted things. Not to mention that you'd actually be able to find some help with your OS when you need it. How many Windows 98 help forums are available these days?
doc
She was guilty. She tried to destroy evidence (hard disk). She claimed she didn't have a Kazaa account; in fact she had one with the same name she used for email. This woman was about like my 6-year-old when caught red-handed.
She didn't settle, it went to trial, and her defense rivalled the Chewbacca defense. And she was found guilty, and was ordered to pay less than half the maximum damages for willful copyright infringement. How, exactly, is that "no justice?"
doc
Still you miss the point. Can you point to even one example of someone who has loaned money at negative interest? Just one?
In deflation, my $1 will have $1+ in purchasing power next year. My choices are:
1) Put my $1 in a mattress. Next year I have $1, which is now worth more goods/services, let's say now its purchasing power is $1.10. My gain: 10%. My cost: 0. My risk: 0.
2) Loan you money at say -5% negative interest. Next year, I have $.95, and you have a nickel. My $.95 is now worth $1.045 in purchasing power. My gain: 4.5%. My cost: $.05. My risk: next year you might be broke and not pay me back, and I lose my $1.
What rational economic decision says #2 is EVER of ANY advantage to me? Higher risk, higher cost, lower return than the mattress.
doc
Umm, no. NetBUI was developed for IBM in 1983; originally the LAN technology had a hard limit of under 100 machines. Token Ring was an evolution on the hardware side, designed with a protocol like NetBUI in mind, and got you toward more like 250 machines on a ring. Obviously, MS had to support whatever network protocol IBM chose.
The IBM world was the mainframe model with a few PC's thrown in. In that world, there was deterministic polling instead of random access to the network medium. NIC's are smart (beaconing, tracking upstream/downstream neighbors, etc.), and the network infrastructure is dumb -- no routing, no IP-style any-to-any internetworking.
TCP/IP was relatively new. It was used in the academic world, not in business. It couldn't talk to big IBM iron. SLIP on a PC was a pipedream -- early dialup internet was dialling into a UNIX box as a terminal. There were no ISP's selling internet access. BBS's, Compuserve and AOL got you something like email and online community. In the later 80's, Novell IPX/SPX was the network protocol choice if you wanted file and print services on a LAN on x86 hardware. Appletalk did much the same for Macs.
MS products give me as much heartburn as anyone. But in the early and middle 1980's, Apple was the overpriced upstart visionary monopolist trying to corner the market, and IBM was the bigger, less overpriced, "PC's are text-based like our mainframes" monopolist. IBM tried to monopolize the market by suing anyone who cloned the BIOS, the only proprietary part of the IBM PC. That worked until Phoenix a) Clean room reverse engineered the BIOS, and b) had $gazillion in litigation insurance from Lloyds of London to discourage IBM from suing them into oblivion.
MS had no hardware business. Once the PC was cloned, MS fuelled cheap computing by selling to anyone, and giving you instant access to same apps IBMs ran. (In the early 80's, CP/M ran on more hardware than DOS, including IBM and non-IBM-BIOS 8086 hardware, but there weren't many decent apps for it.) 20-25 years ago, if you wanted non-monopoly-dominated personal computing, you were running MS software on Compaq or Taiwanese knock-off hardware. (There was, AFAIK, no *nix option at all before the 386, since the 8086/8 and 286 couldn't multitask.) The other choices -- Commodore, Atari, Timex-Sinclair, Radio Shack TRS-80, were also proprietary platforms, and died when PC's got cheap enough to take the low end of the market.
doc
Ummmmm, no. No one will ever lend money at "negative interest." Why pay someone for the privilege of loaning them money? It's much safer, and more profitable, to stick the money in a mattress. You really don't understand much, do you?
doc
In other news, this system would classify 0.09% of all activity as true positives which are also false, miring the poster in statistical fallacy.
doc
In this whole discussion, I see no one discussing the bad things a gold standard has caused.
1. Americans, remember William Jennings Bryan, "We must not crucify mankind on a cross of gold?" In the late 1800's the U.S. economy was expanding exponentially, far faster than growth of the gold supply. The result was falling prices -- very good for banks, very bad for farmers and businesses. Every year, the farmer with a mortgage would make his payments with dollars more valuable than the dollars he borrowed, and pay interest besides! His wheat/corn/eggs/milk/etc. brought ever-lower income, but his debt payments remained. Millions of people were ruined, or eked out a precarious, poverty-stricken existence. This was not due to market conditions for or overproduction of farm products. It happened because the money supply wasn't growing as fast as the economy.
2. 16th Century Europe experienced a dangerous and destabilizing rise in prices, which contributed to peasant revolts and other very bad things. Martin Luther (mostly mistakenly) attributed it to greedy merchants. The real problem was a sudden rise in Europe's money supply. Spanish conquests in South and Central America brought many tons of bullion to Spain. A lot more money chasing the same amount of stuff == inflation.
Ironically, all that bullion probably contributed to Spain's decline as a great power. Money was easy, work was hard. It became much easier to import foreign goods with all that Incan gold than to produce them in Spain.
With a global economy, problem #1 becomes a virtual certainty. China and India are rapidly industrializing. Global production of goods is expanding very quickly. The gold supply is not. On a gold standard, we'd be seeing worldwide price declines on almost everything. In that environment, the rich get richer just by putting money in a mattress and doing nothing.
Yes, the Fed is very powerful. But put away the tinfoil hats. Except for 1929-1940 (a bubble burst sparked by the Smoot Hawley tariff bill, made worse by government attempts to fix it) and 1970-1982, when rising energy prices and misguided Keynesian policies made a mess of things, the U.S. economy has experienced incredible growth throughout our history. The national debt, as a percentage of the economy, is lower now than in 1980. The greatest health problem of the poor is obesity. Things are certainly not perfect, but clearly, the Fed's policies have been superior to the problems we'd have had on the gold standard. What happens on the gold standard when the GDP doubles after inflation, as has happened in the U.S. since the early 1980's?
doctorcisco
Relax and wait. Over time, ISPs will start to get seriously annoyed by this waste of bandwidth. As soon as customers start calling and complain about their crawling download speed, ISPs will have to start to act.\ Hate to burst your bubble, but spam doesn't seriously impact consumer ISP bandwidth. The bots use upstream bandwidth. But consumer ISP's have extra upstream at their peering points, because they give customers so little upstream to start with (ADSL and cable). Do they really see any congestion because some guy's infected PC is swamping its 256 kbit/s upload pipe? Not really. It costs more to help the clueless user clean the box than it does to just ignore it. As for downstream, spam is a drop in the bucket compared to P2P and video. Take my home server as an example. My personal domain sends 0 spam. About 80% of my inbound is spam. Since March 22, my spam directory has accumulated ~15K individual spam messages. Total disk usage: 18 megs. That is an utterly meaningless number to my ISP. Over 2 months, even 18 gigs wouldn't be very meaningful. doc
1) Because society as a whole benefits from the wide distribution of ideas,
2) Because your work relies, in its turn, on concepts and ideas created by others. Every creative act relies on other people's works and ideas to one degree or another.
The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the authority "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." (Article I, Section 8) The only reason you get a monopoly on your content "for limited Times," according to the U.S. Constitution, is to motivate you to create it in the first place.
Only in the modern U.S. Judicial system is 100+ years even conceivably what "limited Times" means.
How are copyright laws currently unfair to consumers?
Because not even their grandchildren will see works that are already 50 years old pass into the public domain, and become a part of our cultural inheritance, where the Constitution says they should already be.
The only people upset about current copyright laws are the people that want to take power away from the producers (without which there will be by definition no content) and give it to the leaches, who consume but do not produce.
Wrong. I'm upset about current copyright laws, for example, because it is impossible to obtain many out-of-print books I wish I could own at affordable cost, if at all. If the work was published after 1921, it's off-limits. Copyright owners neither reprint such books nor give permission for others to do so. So ... if I want to add such material to my library, how do I do so? If Congress would bother with the Constitution, those books would no longer be under copyright, and could be added to Project Gutenberg. Much the same applies to all kinds of other content, which is effectively locked in a vault where no one can get at it, to no one's benefit and to the detriment of anyone who doesn't live near a University-class library.
If you create one thing, then sit back and milk it for decades instead of continuing to innovate, write, and create, who's the leech?
The consumer already has all the power they need, the power of the purse.
Actually, the content producers have the power of the purse, because they have a monopoly on the content and can charge whatever they like. Yes, if BigGreedyRecordLabel Inc charges too much for the music recorded by Dead60'sRockStar, they won't sell much of it. However, the fact remains that BGRL Inc. is holding part of our culture hostage, because neither Congress nor the Courts can read and understand the plain, simple meaning of words in the U.S. Constitution.
doc
I agree. It's what you do that matters. This guy lies.
If anyone thinks lying about credentials doesn't matter, you're wrong. My Master of Divinity degree required learning to read Latin, German, Koine Greek, and Biblical Hebrew, then basing research conclusions on the linguistic and historical setting of documents written in those languages.
If we're talking theology, or you read something I've written, you need to be able to trust that I do indeed have those skills, and have used them honestly. Like any other kind of specialized knowledge, it's rather easy to put one over on the non-specialist.
Come to think of it, that's been the problem in the theological world for a very long time.
doc
1) In the summer the current infrastructure is mostly idle.
2) Increase the amount of storage reasonably close to major urban areas.
3) IF there is even a capacity issue, use the summer slow time to build up supplies relatively close to the end user, and the demand for long-haul pipline capacity should not cause issues.
4) Storage facilities could certainly include a few pressure tanks in the yard/garage. Rural areas still have lots of propane tanks where there are no natural gas lines.
doctorcisco
The windmill may displace electricity that would otherwise be generated by fossil fuels, and therefore your hour of playing Halo would not increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere. If that's the goal, as I said, nuclear will get you a lot more CO2 reduction than windmills in the real world, especially if you assume that the energy used to make the windmill in the first place (mine the ores, refine the metals, manufacturing, etc. etc.) comes from fossil fuels.
For the greatest environmental advantage, turn off the PC and read a book that's illuminated by sunlight. :-)
doc
2) The resulting electricity powers your PC, toaster oven, and alarm clock.
3) The PC, toaster oven, and alarm clock turn the electricity back into heat.
This process cannot cool the environment. It simply moves the heat energy to a different location, which the wind was doing in the first place. It does let you stay up too late playing Halo, cook a pizza, and set your alarm clock in the meantime.
The energy required to manufacture the windmill puts the (small) reduction in atmospheric CO2 compared to burning coal many years into the future. If you want energy without generating CO2, nuclear gives you a lot more bang for the buck, kills fewer birds, and is a lot less ugly.
doc
Ummmmm ... you're no economist, that's for sure.
... that's the price they ought to pay for their monopoly, and for using all the public resources they need to do business. Instead, they've whined/lobbied/bribed/whatever their way into getting to do what they want, while the nature of their market *prevents* rather than encourages competition too keep the greed and inefficiency under control.
One concept you do not grasp is "Barriers to Entry/Cost of Entry." The capital costs to build the railroads were staggering. The government gave huge swaths of land to the railroad companies, because otherwise those railroads could not have been built. Everybody won. The railroad got to make money. The government got to have homesteaders settle big parts of the country and start paying taxes. The homesteaders got to own land.
Try building a railroad to compete with one that's already there. You'll go bankrupt really fast. Try entering the telecommunications industry to compete with AT&T. Before you can earn a dime, you have to spend $BIGBUKU stringing wires/fibers to your potential customers. Just to do business in the Chicago metro area (where I live), you'd have to spend more than the GDP of many nations. Who's going to loan/invest that kind of money when two huge competitors (AT&T, Comcast) already have wires in the ground? Who's going to invest in your company? Not me, that's for sure.
You don't own the land your fibers need to cross. You need attorneys and lobbyists to get permission from every municipality in the Chicago area to use their rights of way. What, exactly, gives you the right to just use this property you don't own for your private interest (opening a new telco), without promising something back to compensate the public for your private use of public resources? How well do you think that's really going to go? I sure don't want your crews tearing up my streets. My commute sucks already, and by the time you're done spending $BIGBUKU, you will never be able to offer me quality service at a competitive price. Your new telco will have WAY too much debt to do so.
That's where this economists' term, "natural monopoly," comes from. When the barriers to entry are that high, when it's not economically efficient to build multiple infrastructures, you permit the monopoly. Why? *Market forces* will create the monopoly anyway. That's why they call em "natural" monopolies -- get it?
You also need to regulate the hell out of it. Because if you don't, the natural monopolist will screw as many people as much as possible to make more cash. Witness Comcast, which has *doubled* my cost for *less* service in just 8 years. Have their costs doubled? Absolutely not. Their profits are going through the roof. How do they get away with it? There's no other cable company competing with them, and for various reasons dish isn't an option for me.
So no, government intervention isn't the problem here. As far as wanting to require AT&T to follow franchise agreements
Be a conservative -- I'm a conservative too. Just don't deny economic realities in favor of ideology. Sound economics != laissez faire capitalism when you're talking about high barriers to entry and natural monopolies.
doc
Only a very few of the first 70 posts show any understanding at all of what's involved. I live in the western Chicago suburbs. Here's the deal.
1) AT&T wants to deploy fiber which will carry the triple play everyone's been drooling over for the last 10 years: Video, Phone, and Internet on one bill.
2) Comcast just got done with a very expensive infrastructure buildout in the last 3-4 years in my city, so that their network could deliver triple play services. Before that, large parts of the city could get NO broadband service at all, except from some (necessarily expensive) wireless ISP's that sprang up or $125+/mo IDSL at a whopping 144 kbps.
3) Comcast, by the franchise agreement, must serve all homes in the city or none. It's the ONLY consumer-friendly provision of the franchise agreement, IMO. So they were required to run the upgraded infrastructure to ALL parts of the city. We have an older downtown full of lower-income, mostly Hispanic residents, and newer, higher-income subdivisions. Guess which residents are very profitable to serve? Guess which residents would be left in the digital dark ages if Comcast weren't bound by the franchise agreement?
4) AT&T wants it both ways. They want to compete with Comcast. But they refuse to be bound by the ONLY consumer-friendly part of the franchise agreement -- serve everyone, or serve no one.
5) They also claim the right to drop their ugly green boxes wherever they want. Comcast doesn't get to do that.
Comcast sucks -- it's expensive, and their internet service blows compared to top-of-the-line DSL, let alone FIOS. But at least everyone can get service, and at least there aren't butt-ugly 5' dark-green steel cubes for Comcast all over the place. AT&T is fighting in court for the right not to serve everyone, and to put their butt-ugly, way too big green boxes wherever they want.
The moral of the story: Not all super-highspeed-broadband rollouts are good. Some of us here don't want AT&T ramming their accountant-driven priorities down our communities' throats because it's for our own good. "Our" own good is defined as "any household that is most likely to be most profitable for AT&T, and to hell with the rest. Oh yeah, and aren't those 5' dark green steel cubes really attractive?"
doctorcisco
Rain is wet?
There is virtually no user security. Any authenticated user has full rights to all data on the system. Fine for home, but until they get user security figured out, not ready for anything more than that. And given that it wants to play nice with Windoze, *Nix, and Apple, the security is gonna be the hard part. *NIX without maddeningly granular security ... who'da thunk?
doc
FTFA: "Word and Excel still perform automated changes that you may not want or expect, and you still have to learn their sometimes-obscure inner logic before you can master them." It still thinks it can create my document better than I can. No thanks. doc
They would have run out of oil, and been unable to invade Russia. America embargoed oil shipments to Japan in the summer of 1941. Japan's choices were
1) Give in to American demands to stop the war of aggression in China,
2) Invade the Dutch East Indies to replace the oil the Americans wouldn't sell them.
However, invading the Dutch East Indies would certainly bring an American declaration of war. Therefore, Tojo's choices were simple. Call the army home and buy American oil, go to war with the U.S., or try to fight a war with no oil supplies. We all know which one he picked.
doc
If you actually go read Mark 15:2 and John 18:37 in the New International Version, which was not first published until the late 1970's, you'll find out that the previous poster is misinformed.
But really, the greatest source of household dirt, smut, filth, and sewage is, yes, the INTERNET. Therefore, coming RSN (like most apps are):
Ajax Web Development! We keep the internet clean!
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