um, are you implying that this isn't news because all traffic signals are rigged with short yellow lights?
assuming that this is a common practice, the fact that those responsible for rigging the traffic lights are being prosecuted is still newsworthy. it's not everyday that 63 municipal police, 39 municipal government officials, and 7 government contractors are accused of conspiracy and corruption.
if nothing, this case has brought international media attention to a potentially widespread problem--and not just with rigged lights but all traffic camera systems. if journalists don't report on such stories, then the issue would probably be ignored rather than bringing traffic cameras under public scrutiny.
and if you know that your hometown has rigged traffic cameras, then maybe you should report the problem to the proper authorities or file a lawsuit against the city. acting as if government corruption should just be accepted (or ignored) is precisely the kind of public complacency that allows corrupt officials to remain in power.
Prisoners will communicate in (very complicated and secure, believe it or not) code with their "business associates" on the outside, it will lead to a big increase in gang violence.
gang members already communicate in code with other gang members on the outside. so I really don't see how giving prisoners access to computers would lead to a huge spike in gang violence. honestly, do you think that the Mexican Mafia is suddenly going to turn to AOL Instant Messenger or MySpace for their secret communications? I just don't see gang members on the outside going out and buying computers all of a sudden and sitting in front of computer screens in their motel rooms or slum apartments to e-mail or chat with their prison buddies.
secondly, having a computer in one's cell would be a privilege. you obviously wouldn't give them to prisoners with known gang affiliations. in many prisons there are specific wings and cell blocks dedicated to gang dropouts. this kind of privilege could be reserved for such inmates who demonstrate good behavior, and it would be taken away as soon as they violate any of the rules.
i don't know how much contact you've had with gang members and ex-cons personally, but i can tell you that your perception of them is neither grounded in reality nor self-consistent. first, you claim that inmates are too clever to have their internet communications controlled (and are smart enough to employ advanced steganography), then you simultaneously claim that they would be too stupid to use the computers for anything constructive but might build stun guns out of the capacitors and PSU.
ignoring the fact that most prisons already allow inmates to own TVs and other electronics without problem (as i've already stated), not all prisoners sit in their cells making shanks and devising ways to hurt people. if all (or even most) inmates really are unreformable as you claim, then we should just lock them up and throw away the key--and stop calling our prisons "correctional facilities."
i'm pretty sure most prisons (in the U.S.) allow their prisoners to have TVs and radios. in fact, my boss has Charles Ng's old TV set.
electron appliances must have clear plastic enclosures (so that contraband can't be hidden inside of them) and, like all other belongings inmates are allowed to have, must be ordered from the catalogs of special prison-approved suppliers--who no doubt enjoy lucrative profits from effectively cornering the market on all prisoner-purchased goods.
frankly, i think that prisons should just give the inmates a landline and bill them for usage. that would make it much easier to control/monitor inmate communications. it's not like giving them access to a phone is hurting anyone or puts the public in danger. granting them this privilege would also provide prison officials another point of leverage. it's one more privilege that can be revoked if an inmate breaks the rules. furthermore, giving inmates an easy means of communicating with the outside world also protects prisoners against potential abuses by the prison staff. places like prisons & mental hospitals, where one group of individuals is given total control over the lives of another group of individuals, create conditions which invite abuse, especially if the individuals locked up are completely cut off from the outside.
in fact, it would probably be best if every prison cell were furnished with a computer and internet access. not only would it give inmates (assuming they can read) plenty of mental stimuli and provide a great source of enrichment, which is especially important in maintaining the mental health of inmates in solitary confinement, but it would also give them access to the huge wealth of knowledge on the web and, both, encourage and facilitate learning & self-improvement. simply by providing inmates with a computer & internet connection you give them all the tools they need to pursue an education in almost any subject they want. they can teach themselves how to program, study law/philosophy/history/etc., or learn graphic design/digital media production and other vocational skills simply by availing themselves to online resources. and it's probably a lot cheaper than maintaining a prison library and offering real-life classes on only a limited number of subjects. not to mention that if you provide means for prisoners to keep busy in constructive ways, they will get into less trouble and be more cooperative/easier to control.
of course, all of this assumes that prisons are corrections facilities meant to ultimately rehabilitate inmates rather than to dehumanize them and lock them up forever. just like an educated person is less likely to turn to crime in the first place, an educated inmate is less likely to return to their previous life of crime when they are released. but at the rate we're locking people up, it's unlikely that our prison system will have the resources to actually rehabilitate prisoners.
i think what's worse is that every DVD title displays different menu behaviors. some DVDs will play automatically after the disc is inserted; some will take you to a menu. some will allow you to hit the "play" button on your remote to play; others make you actually select "play" form the menu and hit the "enter"/"ok"/"select" button on your DVD player remote. some DVDs make you watch copyright warnings multiple times; some play a bunch of previews/ads--which on some titles you can skip, but not on others.
ignoring the parent's incoherent and completely off-topic rant, the arguments raised by the author are somewhat flawed.
take for instance:
1. It's client-server all over again.
um, all over again? when did we ever stop using the client-server model? client-server architectures are so prolific because it's simple and it works. some of the greatest technological successes in recent decades have been based on the client-server application model--for instance, database servers and network services and their derivative technologies such as the world wide web, ATMs & EFT, cellular networks, instant messaging, IRC, all types of online gaming, and the list goes on.
commodity computing moved away from dumb terminals and thin clients perhaps, but things don't have to be one extreme or the other. you can have the best of both worlds. a modern MMORPG is a client-server application, but they're certainly too graphics-intensive to run on a thin client. but if you're developing an intranet application that already uses networking and databasing, two of the most prominent classes of client-server applications, then what is wrong with using a web front-end that is cheaper and faster to deploy?
with today's high speed networking and mature browser technologies, most enterprise applications gain no benefit from being developed as a standalone desktop app. an accounting application doesn't require a complex desktop interface or lots of processing power, same with CRM and other business applications. applications like 3D gaming, multimedia production, CAD software, scientific modeling, etc. still require a standalone desktop application. but business apps that consist solely of filling out text fields & electronic forms and outputting textual data with very basic graphics are perfect for web front-ends--especially if they're network applications.
there are good web apps and bad web apps, just like there are good/bad desktop apps.
using frameworks like jQuery, YUI, Prototype, etc. you can easily develop complex web apps with advanced interfaces that is cross-browser compatible. if the web apps at your workplace all require IE, then you need to talk to the person making the purchases. not only do they need to realize that there are better browsers (and the need to support open web standards), but also that any web developer oblivious to web standards and cross-browser compatibility is by definition incompetent, if not dangerously inept in other areas as well.
improvements in consumer broadband is hard to come by when all your major ISPs are plagued by internal corruption & incompetence. of course, the high prices & poor quality of service just get blamed on file-sharers and power users. that way nothing ever gets fixed, and you never have to improve your operations.
it's so bad that some communities have had to resort to simply sidestepping private ISPs and setting up municipally-run public ISPs. that's about the only way you can avoid being screwed over and protect public interest.
yep, South Korea is also rolling out 100 Mbps symmetric broadband to residential subscribers. FttH is the future, but there's pretty much zero deployment here in the U.S. 100Mbps symmetric FttH is the standard for municipal networks (something the U.S. is too backward to grasp, apparently) in Scandinavia and the "competitive bar" in France. it's the standard in Japan as well, but they're now upgrading residential connections to 1 Gbps.
most of these countries with advanced infrastructures have per-megabit rates well below $1.00--i think japan is around $0.22 per megabit, though KDDI is planning to offer (or is already offering) 1 Gbps at ¥5985/month, which translates to $66.21/month at the current exchange rate, or $0.06/Mbps. compare that with 60 Mbps at $129/month = $2.15/Mbps. though i suppose that's better than Comcast's 50 Mbps "wideband" service that's $150/month = $3.00/Mbps--and that's for asymmetric bandwidth.
and yet there are still people defending American ISPs' outmoded business model & outmoded thinking. instead of updating our communications infrastructure to accommodate the growing number of high bandwidth applications coming into the mainstream, ISPs are trying to artificially suppress the demand for bandwidth through packet shaping, bandwidth throttling, and generally controlling how people use their internet connections.
of course, those ISP apologists argue that residential internet connections should only be used for checking e-mail and surfing the web, which apparently doesn't include streaming media. it's like we're still stuck in the 90's. apparently, instead of the ISPs building/adapting their business model around consumer habits and current usage trends, it's the consumers who are supposed to change their internet usage habits to fit the ISPs' business model (of overselling & charging more for less).
we're basically sacrificing our society's technological progress to preserve the obsolete business models of companies with outdated attitudes about the internet. if it weren't for their near-unregulated monopolies, most of these companies would have tanked a long time ago.
why would a USB external hard drive be any less reliable than an internal SATA drive?
we're a small indie label, so i'm not sure the cost of an external RAID enclosure is justified. we do have a lot of hi-res graphics to back up, such as album artwork, print layouts, poster/sticker/clothing designs, etc., as well as e-mails, invoices, and our retail & radio mailing/contact lists. but i think weekly backups onto one or two 750GB~1TB drives should be sufficient.
and as you said, consumer wireless technology is severely limited. so being able to just plug the USB hard drive into a workstation to perform backups is pretty handy. i'd prefer if they were FireWire, but it's still a heck of a lot better than trying to do backups over the network.
though perhaps we should wire up the workstations in the office, and just leave the wireless for the laptops and TiVos. in that case we may be able to work directly off of the file server again, which we'll keep an external USB or FireWire hard drive plugged into for nightly backups.
well, we do have an aging file server at the office that needs to be re-purposed. it used to house two 120GB hard drives in firmware RAID 1, but one of the drives died recently and the other is about to kick the bucket (they're both about 7-years-old). and with external hard drives costing less and less these days, it seems more practical and cost-efficient to simply use a few pairs of external hard drives for back-ups. also, ever since we switched to wireless, working over the network (with 20~100MB hi-res images) has become a pain in the ass--though maybe Adobe Drive/Version Cue will help in that regard.
i only hesitate to set up a Linux server because i'm not familiar with the OS. i've only run SUSE and RedHat briefly on the desktop, and that was ages ago in high school (i also never got my sound card to work). i'd be more willing to go through the trouble if there was a possibility of using the linux box as a wireless router and somehow speed up our WLAN speeds. we have a Linksys Wireless G router, but using Windows XP file sharing is pitiful. it's almost impossible to get a 2GB transfer to complete without an error. it usually takes several tries and 6-7 hrs or more.
so it's greedy to expect an ISP to deliver to you the service they advertised and that you've paid for? don't confuse your own solipsism & selfishness with other people's being greed. right now you're saying that VoIP should have priority over P2P because presumably "ordinary" people like you use VoIP but don't use P2P (a rather questionable assumption). so just because someone else's internet usage patterns are different from yours, your traffic should be given priority over theirs, even though you both pay the same monthly rate?
you also seem to be the one confusing the issue of file-sharing with so-called "bandwidth hogs." first of all, congratulations on buying into (or trying to perpetuate) the ISP's scapegoating of power users and file-sharers for their poor service--i'm sure all those Asian countries with cheap, symmetric high-speed broadband connections don't have file sharers or power users. secondly, even if we assume that a broadband provider has to oversell in order to remain profitable (an unlikely case), why could a simple bandwidth cap be implemented regardless of the type of traffic one has? protocol discrimination and deep packet analysis (which simply adds more network overhead) is not necessary even if you're trying to perform damage control after having over-sold by too much.
at our office i use BitTorrent maybe once a month to download 30-40 MB Photoshop brush sets, or an 18 MB Ad-Aware install file (the LavaSoft site requires you to sign up for Trialplay, and give out your personal information and CC# to get the Anniversary edition), and only very occasionally an up-to-date Windows XP disc image (700~800MB). on average, our monthly BitTorrent traffic totals less than 100MB on a 10Mbps connection.
on the other hand, we're a record label so we listen to band demos all day long, and these days most of it is done via MySpace, which is very convenient; we can see how many plays each artist has received that day, what shows they've played recently, and just gauge their popularity more easily. it also cuts down on the demo CDs being pressed/burnt/shipped, which is good for the environment. however, this means we're streaming music all day long (from 9 AM to 5 PM). assuming the average audio quality frm myspace is 96kbps, that's about 330MB of traffic from streaming audio alone, not to mention all the banners, photos, and other graphics on these bands' MySpace pages.
so if 2 people each consume, say, 500~600MB of network bandwidth each day, but one person uses it solely for BitTorrent while the other uses it solely for sending large files via e-mail, why should the BitTorrent user's network packets have lower priority than the e-mail user? how is he being greedy or asking others to subsidize his bandwidth?
ISPs have no business dictating how a broadband subscriber uses his internet connection. if they want to throttle people's connections after a bandwidth cap is exceeded, fine--don't advertise the service as unlimited, make the cap clear to your customers, and apply it equally to everyone regardless of whether they're an old grandma who's watching the Food Network in HD on her cable TV, or if it's a teenager downloading the latest Slackware ISO via BitTorrent.
lastly, if an ISP cannot meet the demands of their customers, they need to do one of two things: a.) upgrade their infrastructure to increase network capacity, or b.) don't oversell so much. the basic concept of overselling is sound. on average not everyone is going to use 100% of their pipe 100% of the time. but it's up to the ISP to calculate what their average network usage is going to be, and provide enough total network bandwidth so that the network doesn't become saturated during peak hours. what you don't do is try to scapegoat power users for your own miscalculations and continue to oversell while trying to dictate how the public uses the internet.
most countries are offering faster broadband at lower costs, following the usage trends that are shifting towards high bandwidth applications
those tools seem pretty useful, but i don't know how user-friendly some of them are. personally, i'm looking for a tool to see if our ISP (at the office) is hijacking our DNS errors, or all of our computers are just infected with malware.
also, is anyone else seeing a bunch of "" characters on the Network Diagnostic Tester homepage? is my browser/system screwed up, or are there a bunch of a little boxes with "FF FD" in them scattered all over the page?
that sames more appropriate for an IDE. if you have the spell check in the IDE, you can easily identify and immediately fix typos as you code. waiting for the compiler to spell check your code is like building a spell-checker into your printer driver or PostScript interpreter.
since most modern IDEs already feature syntax highlighting, which typically comes with function lists, symbol databases, and a live parser, it would just be a simple matter of integrating an additional user dictionary to the parser so that misspelled variables, comments, literals/output messages, etc. get highlighted.
the parser could even make sure that your variables are named consistently according to naming conventions you specify. so if you have a long named strAge or you forget to use CamelCase, or use it incorrectly (e.g. fetchNExt() instead of fetchNext()), on a function or variable, the parser should be able to point that out to you. that would be more useful than getting warnings from the compiler about lexical code issues.
first off, just because its litany of bugs, nonstandard implementations, and lack of standard features have been thoroughly documented does not mean they're no longer an issue. secondly, cumbersome hacks and awkward workarounds are not "fixes." a 'fix' would be a patch released by Microsoft that actually fixes those issues.
like i said, depending on the complexity of the site/layout you're working on, that percentage may vary. but for most reasonably intricate professional layouts, that is about the time ratio you should expect to devote to kludging IE support into your site. naturally, this doesn't include application development time, which can vary greatly from site to site. but if you spend 2hrs implementing your layout in Firefox/Safari/etc. then you're liable to spend 30hrs trying to get the site to render properly in IE--or give up half-way and simply change the design.
if you're developing a complex web application, it's generally a good idea to use some kind of framework that will handle certain aspects of cross-browser compatibility for you. and that will certainly save you a lot of time and trouble. but no matter what framework or toolkit you use, you're not going to make IE6 render tiled PNG backgrounds that support alpha-channel transparency. the only "fix" is to not use PNG backgrounds with alpha-channel transparency.
Kennedy died in 1963. U.S. combat units weren't sent into Vietnam until 1965 (after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident). and if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, it's likely that the United States would have withdrawn from Vietnam completely rather than escalate the conflict.
the Korean war ended in a stalemate (ultimately, the North-South border moved little from where it was in May 1950--though the South did gain a little bit of land). U.S. involvement was again partly the result of the Red Scare, but considering the current state of North Korea compared to South Korea, i think U.S. involvement was ultimately a good thing in this instance. i'm sorry Truman (and Eisenhower) didn't achieve a total victory at the cost of more lives. but this was a war, not a football game. there are more important things than "winning" or "losing"--things like having a just cause, maintaining ethical conduct, and achieving a lasting peace. by seizing an opportunity to end a futile conflict before things escalated into a full-on war with China, Truman served the nation's interest more than he would have by letting MacArthur nuke Korea. Likewise, Eisenhower should be applauded for following through on his campaign promise to end what had become an unpopular war (the head of a democracy carrying out the wishes of his constituency--what a novel idea!).
and are you honestly trying to compare an unprovoked invasion of another nation for oil with fighting a fascist takeover of Europe? i'm just trying to figure out if your blatant sophistry is a desperate attempt to grasp at straws or if you're just that cognitively challenged.
as a web developer, i definitely agree that not having to support IE saves a lot of development time. on most projects i've worked on, about 20% of the development time is spent going back and forth with the client to come up with a layout design that they're happy with. only 5% of the time is used to cut up the graphics and actually implement the layout for standards-compliant browsers like Firefox/Safari/Opera/etc., which is pretty straight forward; just follow the W3C specs, and if it works in one browser, it'll pretty much work in all of them.
but the most painful part of any project is trying to get your site, which validates and renders properly in all other browsers, to render correctly in IE--which takes up the remaining 75% of the development time. not only is it a huge PITA for web developers (who are forced to mangle their previously elegant & well-formed code with a patchwork of unwieldy CSS hacks and clumsy JavaScript), but it also costs website owners a ton of money (if your designer/developer charges by the hour--which most smart freelance web developers do) as well. sure, the percentage may be less if it's a relatively simple site, or the designer creates the layout with tables, or if they simply design the site just for IE, standards be damned. but on the whole, supporting IE takes more time, effort, and money than is required for all other browsers added together.
however, in this case i think SUSE is a large enough company that they can afford to spend the money on IE support. so if their site doesn't work in IE, it's probably done on purpose to, either, a.) support web standards (and send a message to IE users), b.) support Firefox (and send a message to IE users), or c.) filter out clueless IE users that don't belong on their site. i mean, this service isn't exactly aimed at the typical computer novice who accidentally wandered out of their AOL/MSN playpen. anyone who's expected to use this site would know better than to use IE.
i don't think it has anything to do with entitlement. entitlement is thinking that you deserve an unearned/unwarranted reward or benefit--especially something that others are not entitled to.
for instance, Americans often complain about immigrants, especially Latinos "stealing" their jobs. that is entitlement. they feel that because they happen to be born in the U.S. (by no merit of their own) that they are automatically entitled to employment opportunities that they have not earned in any way. likewise, the rich often feel entitled to preferential treatment and express irritation at the lower class receiving the same basic necessities of life (such as food, shelter, and healthcare care) as them. they feel that because they happen to be born into relative comfort and privilege, their socioeconomic status entitles them to better living standards than those who were perhaps born into less fortuitous circumstances.
someone spending beyond their means using credit cards is not demonstrating entitlement. they are demonstrating an addiction to consumption. that is the unfortunate side-effect of our consumer culture. when you live in a society that bombards you with advertisements and images of conspicuous consumption, you begin to feel that you need to own those things to be happy. that is why people become obsessed with the accumulation of wealth and possessions. someone who shops compulsively doesn't feel entitled to their purchases any more than a compulsive gambler feels entitled to losing money to the casinos.
unpleasant, perhaps. violent? i have yet to see any evidence of that. i think the activists in question went a little too far and perhaps let their emotions cloud their judgment. but conducting vivisection like the draize test on live animals is more violent and "unpleasant" than phone harassment, graffiti, and bomb hoaxes. violence implies doing physical harm to someone. and in this case, HLS merits that term more than the convicted activists.
in any case, Indymedia is merely an independent news outlet and online forum. you don't confiscate a newspaper company's documents, proofs, and printing equipment just because they report on someone who is "violent or unpleasant." CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC, etc. report on violent criminals all the time. but you wouldn't consider shutting down those news networks.
you've also neglected to show any evidence that Indymedia posted any information that could be used to make threats against the judge. it is more likely that a commenter posted some private info and/or made threats, but that it was quickly removed by the editors. in any case, that does not warrant seizing Indymedia's servers (and backup servers).
regardless of your political views, this recurring pattern of unwarranted police harassment and seizing of web servers targeted at Indymedia should be disturbing to anyone who believes in free speech and the right to dissent. currently, right-wing elements within the political establishment are capitalizing on these targeted groups' unpopular political views (and their perceived affiliation with radical groups by the public) to encroach on civil liberties under the guise of fighting "terrorism." but if these increasingly routine abuses of power are accepted by the public, then it won't be long before any public forum can be shutdown and have their servers seized just because a guest posts someone's private information or makes a vague threat against a public figure.
law enforcement regularly use agent provocateurs to incite riots and arrest otherwise peaceful activists. do you think they'd even think twice about posting an anonymous threat to an independent news site or liberal-leaning forum to get it shut down?
if such abuses of power are tolerated by the public, the end result will be that online forums & message boards will require all guests to register with their real name, eliminating any shred of internet anonymity, and all messages will have to be pre-approved by site moderators before they are actually posted on the site, destroying free speech. after all, if site owners are going to be held responsible for all messages posted on their site, then that's the only way they can keep their site up. part of the reason Indymedia and ThePirateBay's servers keep getting seized is because they don't keep longterm logs of user activity. so i guess all site owners will have to log everyone's IPs and retain those logs for however many years law enforcement demand.
i am certainly in favor of government owned backbones so that peering disputes (which drive costs up for consumers and cause network problems) would be eliminated. but i still think that municipally run open wireless networks and local ISPs would be preferable than leaving it up to the private sector.
imagine if you and ~50,000 people were suddenly relocated to a large island. now this island has a trunk line to the mainland network. but you have a small island that's 30-square-kilometers, or about half the size of Manhattan, that you need to provide connectivity to. you're not stranded on the island. you can purchase resources from the mainland or even invite or contract major ISPs to set up broadband services. however, your resources are limited, and you need to make the best of the limited resources you have at your disposal.
now, let's say we want to deploy FttC (fibre-to-the-cabinet/curb) connections to each neighborhood to minimize deployment costs while still achieving 100 Mbps residential connection speeds. and each cabinet can service a 300m radius area, or roughly.28km^2. assuming that residences and businesses needing internet access cover about 75% of the island, we'll need about 80 backhaul connections to street cabinets to service all residential and business areas. but for the public WiMax network we want cover the entire island, which will take about 2~3 base stations and perhaps a handful of remote repeaters to give ~10 Mbps wireless broadband access from anywhere on the island.
if this is all done through a municipal initiative, we can still hire private contractors to build the actual network, and obviously we'd still have to buy the necessary equipment & hardware from private companies as well. so if you believe in the free market, then there's still free market competition between wireless equipment manufacturers. the difference here is that, since it's a municipal network, the subscribers actually have a voice in how it's run, and if they don't like certain policies they can lobby or petition to have those policies changed.
now, if you want to bank on the free market to provide the best internet service to the public, you'd need to change several things. instead of building a single public communications network, you'd have to build several overlapping private networks. so if you want 4 ISPs to choose from, you would then need 4X the infrastructure. not only that, but with 4 overlapping wireless networks competing for the same radio spectrum, you could run into problems of interference.
moreover, a commercial enterprise's primary concern is profit. they're obligated to their shareholders, not to the consumers or the public. so while they will be competing with each another, it's not to serve public interest. so instead of distributing network infrastructure where it's needed, it will instead be distributed where there's the most money to made. and the most efficient way to make money is not necessarily the most efficient way to provide broadband access to a community. and just like we have now, you'll end up with all the wireless base stations and COs concentrated in few rich metropolitan areas with the most lucrative markets while less financially attractive areas are left high and dry.
worst case scenario you'll have a situation analogous to the state of wireless access at airports. each airport provides a commercial wireless network that you have to pay a subscription for. so if you fly a lot and want to have internet access wherever you go, you'll need to buy a dozen subscriptions, each of which you'll only use maybe a couple of days a years. now imagine doing that for wireless access on the road. i can't imagine VoIP or internet radio taking off if every few miles you need to pay a different company for wireless access.
why not? you would have 1 Gbps fibre to residences and offices and wireless broadband everywhere else. some people like to access the internet outside of the home or office.
besides, there are a lot of open wireless applications beyond web surfing. if you have a nationwide open wireless network, people could eventually switch to carrier-neutral VoIP handsets. you'd also be able to stream internet radio from within your car or by a portable media player.
math deals with a priori knowledge. empirical science by definition is a posteriori.
and even math proofs only demonstrate that a mathematical statement/theorem/postulate is logically consistent within a formal system.
it's like saying: given that the world is a flat 10x10 square in 2D euclidean space, the closest distance between any 2 points is a straight line less than 102. i can prove this absolutely because i have defined the formal system in which the problem resides. if the world is a 2D euclidean space, then by definition certain axioms must hold. so i can construct proofs through deductive reasoning based on these givens.
if i were to postulate about 7-D euclidean space, i could still come up with absolute proofs regarding that formal system. but those proofs would only be true in the context of the formal system i've defined. i would not be able to prove that there is in fact a 7th dimension, and my proofs would not apply to the physical world we live in.
empirical science on the other hand is grounded on reality through empirical observations. but because scientific proofs make use of inductive reasoning, they are not absolute. comparing inductive reasoning used in scientific "proofs" with mathematical proofs is simply ridiculous.
well, "we" don't give out local monopolies. it's the laws of economics and the nature of telecommunications that creates natural monopolies. there are no laws stating that X county must only have one ISP/telecom. but communications networks work best as a single large monopoly rather than a handful of small disjointed competing networks. so even if you start off with a couple of competing networks in an area, over time the larger ones will absorb the smaller ones, giving them an even greater competitive advantage over the other small networks until eventually there's just a single carrier left. if it weren't for government regulations that force major communications carriers to lease out a portion of their networks to smaller second-tier carriers, there'd be even fewer ISPs/telecoms for consumers to choose from.
just look at the Japanese model. they have a single national telecom & ISP, NTT, which the Japanese government as a 1/3rd control in. they are leading the world in FttH penetration, offering residential users 1 Gbps symmetric broadband connections at $51.40/month--$0.05 per megabit (symmetric). compare that to Comcast's 50 Mbps "wideband" service that costs $150/month--$3.00 per megabit for asymmetric access.
while American ISPs are wasting money on traffic monitoring & packet shaping technology, lobbying against net neutrality, trying to convince the public that open wireless & municipal wifi will never work, and bitching about consumers actually making full use of their measly 3.5Mbps downstream connections, other countries in Europe and Asia are leaving us in the dust. and to make matters worse, we have all the tier-1 networks trying to extort money out of one another on peering agreements that would actually benefit everyone by making internet routing more efficient.
in other words, have tax payers fork out the money for the infrastructure, and then let the telecoms charge the public to use the infrastructure that they "own"? that's pretty much what we've got now.
if you want to harness the power of free market competition, then have private companies develop the actual physical technologies that would increase transfer rates, increase the reliability and range of wireless broadband, etc.
but have the national government set up the trunk connections that connect the nation, and then let local governments manage their own local ISP offering FttH to residences and municipal WiFi for everywhere else. that would put control over the ISPs into the hands of the local community. if residents don't like how the local ISP is run, they can change it. that is the only way you can ensure that the ISPs have the best interest of the public at heart.
that's just the way our society has come to think. in most people's minds (including many regular citizens) the masses are simply too stupid, selfish, immoral, and irrational to be treated as mature & rational adults and allowed to govern themselves. therefore they must be ruled over by others who are more trustworthy and level-headed, which coincidentally are the rich & powerful. and following this kind of thinking, information that can potentially be used for evil must necessarily be suppressed and hidden from the public at all costs.
but the knowledge that allows one to make nuclear weapons is the same knowledge that allows one to develop nuclear power plants. the only way you can suppress "dangerous" knowledge in this case is by suppressing nuclear research and forbidding anyone from teaching/studying nuclear physics. so unless we want to become a totalitarian state that promotes ignorance, a different approach must be found.
rather than throwing people in jail (or threatening to) for possessing "dangerous information," and trying to keep the public in the dark, it would be easier and more desirable just to create an enlightened society where people have no reason to blow each other or themselves up. this isn't something that can be achieved through force or coercion. granted, it's not something that will produce results over night, but it makes much more sense than our current approach.
similarly, changes in our foreign policy and ending the exploitation of other nations (for our own commercial interests) would do far more to increase our nation's security than any amount of military intervention and killing more innocent civilians. rather than abusing our position as the world's only superpower to ignore diplomacy and take whatever we want by force, we could simply be a better global citizen. then we wouldn't have to have a conniption fit every time a developing country builds a nuclear power plant.
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um, are you implying that this isn't news because all traffic signals are rigged with short yellow lights?
assuming that this is a common practice, the fact that those responsible for rigging the traffic lights are being prosecuted is still newsworthy. it's not everyday that 63 municipal police, 39 municipal government officials, and 7 government contractors are accused of conspiracy and corruption.
if nothing, this case has brought international media attention to a potentially widespread problem--and not just with rigged lights but all traffic camera systems. if journalists don't report on such stories, then the issue would probably be ignored rather than bringing traffic cameras under public scrutiny.
and if you know that your hometown has rigged traffic cameras, then maybe you should report the problem to the proper authorities or file a lawsuit against the city. acting as if government corruption should just be accepted (or ignored) is precisely the kind of public complacency that allows corrupt officials to remain in power.
gang members already communicate in code with other gang members on the outside. so I really don't see how giving prisoners access to computers would lead to a huge spike in gang violence. honestly, do you think that the Mexican Mafia is suddenly going to turn to AOL Instant Messenger or MySpace for their secret communications? I just don't see gang members on the outside going out and buying computers all of a sudden and sitting in front of computer screens in their motel rooms or slum apartments to e-mail or chat with their prison buddies.
secondly, having a computer in one's cell would be a privilege. you obviously wouldn't give them to prisoners with known gang affiliations. in many prisons there are specific wings and cell blocks dedicated to gang dropouts. this kind of privilege could be reserved for such inmates who demonstrate good behavior, and it would be taken away as soon as they violate any of the rules.
i don't know how much contact you've had with gang members and ex-cons personally, but i can tell you that your perception of them is neither grounded in reality nor self-consistent. first, you claim that inmates are too clever to have their internet communications controlled (and are smart enough to employ advanced steganography), then you simultaneously claim that they would be too stupid to use the computers for anything constructive but might build stun guns out of the capacitors and PSU.
ignoring the fact that most prisons already allow inmates to own TVs and other electronics without problem (as i've already stated), not all prisoners sit in their cells making shanks and devising ways to hurt people. if all (or even most) inmates really are unreformable as you claim, then we should just lock them up and throw away the key--and stop calling our prisons "correctional facilities."
i'm pretty sure most prisons (in the U.S.) allow their prisoners to have TVs and radios. in fact, my boss has Charles Ng's old TV set.
electron appliances must have clear plastic enclosures (so that contraband can't be hidden inside of them) and, like all other belongings inmates are allowed to have, must be ordered from the catalogs of special prison-approved suppliers--who no doubt enjoy lucrative profits from effectively cornering the market on all prisoner-purchased goods.
frankly, i think that prisons should just give the inmates a landline and bill them for usage. that would make it much easier to control/monitor inmate communications. it's not like giving them access to a phone is hurting anyone or puts the public in danger. granting them this privilege would also provide prison officials another point of leverage. it's one more privilege that can be revoked if an inmate breaks the rules. furthermore, giving inmates an easy means of communicating with the outside world also protects prisoners against potential abuses by the prison staff. places like prisons & mental hospitals, where one group of individuals is given total control over the lives of another group of individuals, create conditions which invite abuse, especially if the individuals locked up are completely cut off from the outside.
in fact, it would probably be best if every prison cell were furnished with a computer and internet access. not only would it give inmates (assuming they can read) plenty of mental stimuli and provide a great source of enrichment, which is especially important in maintaining the mental health of inmates in solitary confinement, but it would also give them access to the huge wealth of knowledge on the web and, both, encourage and facilitate learning & self-improvement. simply by providing inmates with a computer & internet connection you give them all the tools they need to pursue an education in almost any subject they want. they can teach themselves how to program, study law/philosophy/history/etc., or learn graphic design/digital media production and other vocational skills simply by availing themselves to online resources. and it's probably a lot cheaper than maintaining a prison library and offering real-life classes on only a limited number of subjects. not to mention that if you provide means for prisoners to keep busy in constructive ways, they will get into less trouble and be more cooperative/easier to control.
of course, all of this assumes that prisons are corrections facilities meant to ultimately rehabilitate inmates rather than to dehumanize them and lock them up forever. just like an educated person is less likely to turn to crime in the first place, an educated inmate is less likely to return to their previous life of crime when they are released. but at the rate we're locking people up, it's unlikely that our prison system will have the resources to actually rehabilitate prisoners.
i think what's worse is that every DVD title displays different menu behaviors. some DVDs will play automatically after the disc is inserted; some will take you to a menu. some will allow you to hit the "play" button on your remote to play; others make you actually select "play" form the menu and hit the "enter"/"ok"/"select" button on your DVD player remote. some DVDs make you watch copyright warnings multiple times; some play a bunch of previews/ads--which on some titles you can skip, but not on others.
ignoring the parent's incoherent and completely off-topic rant, the arguments raised by the author are somewhat flawed.
take for instance:
um, all over again? when did we ever stop using the client-server model? client-server architectures are so prolific because it's simple and it works. some of the greatest technological successes in recent decades have been based on the client-server application model--for instance, database servers and network services and their derivative technologies such as the world wide web, ATMs & EFT, cellular networks, instant messaging, IRC, all types of online gaming, and the list goes on.
commodity computing moved away from dumb terminals and thin clients perhaps, but things don't have to be one extreme or the other. you can have the best of both worlds. a modern MMORPG is a client-server application, but they're certainly too graphics-intensive to run on a thin client. but if you're developing an intranet application that already uses networking and databasing, two of the most prominent classes of client-server applications, then what is wrong with using a web front-end that is cheaper and faster to deploy?
with today's high speed networking and mature browser technologies, most enterprise applications gain no benefit from being developed as a standalone desktop app. an accounting application doesn't require a complex desktop interface or lots of processing power, same with CRM and other business applications. applications like 3D gaming, multimedia production, CAD software, scientific modeling, etc. still require a standalone desktop application. but business apps that consist solely of filling out text fields & electronic forms and outputting textual data with very basic graphics are perfect for web front-ends--especially if they're network applications.
there are good web apps and bad web apps, just like there are good/bad desktop apps.
using frameworks like jQuery, YUI, Prototype, etc. you can easily develop complex web apps with advanced interfaces that is cross-browser compatible. if the web apps at your workplace all require IE, then you need to talk to the person making the purchases. not only do they need to realize that there are better browsers (and the need to support open web standards), but also that any web developer oblivious to web standards and cross-browser compatibility is by definition incompetent, if not dangerously inept in other areas as well.
things work differently here in the U.S.
improvements in consumer broadband is hard to come by when all your major ISPs are plagued by internal corruption & incompetence. of course, the high prices & poor quality of service just get blamed on file-sharers and power users. that way nothing ever gets fixed, and you never have to improve your operations.
it's so bad that some communities have had to resort to simply sidestepping private ISPs and setting up municipally-run public ISPs. that's about the only way you can avoid being screwed over and protect public interest.
yep, South Korea is also rolling out 100 Mbps symmetric broadband to residential subscribers. FttH is the future, but there's pretty much zero deployment here in the U.S. 100Mbps symmetric FttH is the standard for municipal networks (something the U.S. is too backward to grasp, apparently) in Scandinavia and the "competitive bar" in France. it's the standard in Japan as well, but they're now upgrading residential connections to 1 Gbps.
most of these countries with advanced infrastructures have per-megabit rates well below $1.00--i think japan is around $0.22 per megabit, though KDDI is planning to offer (or is already offering) 1 Gbps at ¥5985/month, which translates to $66.21/month at the current exchange rate, or $0.06/Mbps. compare that with 60 Mbps at $129/month = $2.15/Mbps. though i suppose that's better than Comcast's 50 Mbps "wideband" service that's $150/month = $3.00/Mbps--and that's for asymmetric bandwidth.
and yet there are still people defending American ISPs' outmoded business model & outmoded thinking. instead of updating our communications infrastructure to accommodate the growing number of high bandwidth applications coming into the mainstream, ISPs are trying to artificially suppress the demand for bandwidth through packet shaping, bandwidth throttling, and generally controlling how people use their internet connections.
of course, those ISP apologists argue that residential internet connections should only be used for checking e-mail and surfing the web, which apparently doesn't include streaming media. it's like we're still stuck in the 90's. apparently, instead of the ISPs building/adapting their business model around consumer habits and current usage trends, it's the consumers who are supposed to change their internet usage habits to fit the ISPs' business model (of overselling & charging more for less).
we're basically sacrificing our society's technological progress to preserve the obsolete business models of companies with outdated attitudes about the internet. if it weren't for their near-unregulated monopolies, most of these companies would have tanked a long time ago.
why would a USB external hard drive be any less reliable than an internal SATA drive?
we're a small indie label, so i'm not sure the cost of an external RAID enclosure is justified. we do have a lot of hi-res graphics to back up, such as album artwork, print layouts, poster/sticker/clothing designs, etc., as well as e-mails, invoices, and our retail & radio mailing/contact lists. but i think weekly backups onto one or two 750GB~1TB drives should be sufficient.
and as you said, consumer wireless technology is severely limited. so being able to just plug the USB hard drive into a workstation to perform backups is pretty handy. i'd prefer if they were FireWire, but it's still a heck of a lot better than trying to do backups over the network.
though perhaps we should wire up the workstations in the office, and just leave the wireless for the laptops and TiVos. in that case we may be able to work directly off of the file server again, which we'll keep an external USB or FireWire hard drive plugged into for nightly backups.
well, we do have an aging file server at the office that needs to be re-purposed. it used to house two 120GB hard drives in firmware RAID 1, but one of the drives died recently and the other is about to kick the bucket (they're both about 7-years-old). and with external hard drives costing less and less these days, it seems more practical and cost-efficient to simply use a few pairs of external hard drives for back-ups. also, ever since we switched to wireless, working over the network (with 20~100MB hi-res images) has become a pain in the ass--though maybe Adobe Drive/Version Cue will help in that regard.
i only hesitate to set up a Linux server because i'm not familiar with the OS. i've only run SUSE and RedHat briefly on the desktop, and that was ages ago in high school (i also never got my sound card to work). i'd be more willing to go through the trouble if there was a possibility of using the linux box as a wireless router and somehow speed up our WLAN speeds. we have a Linksys Wireless G router, but using Windows XP file sharing is pitiful. it's almost impossible to get a 2GB transfer to complete without an error. it usually takes several tries and 6-7 hrs or more.
so it's greedy to expect an ISP to deliver to you the service they advertised and that you've paid for? don't confuse your own solipsism & selfishness with other people's being greed. right now you're saying that VoIP should have priority over P2P because presumably "ordinary" people like you use VoIP but don't use P2P (a rather questionable assumption). so just because someone else's internet usage patterns are different from yours, your traffic should be given priority over theirs, even though you both pay the same monthly rate?
you also seem to be the one confusing the issue of file-sharing with so-called "bandwidth hogs." first of all, congratulations on buying into (or trying to perpetuate) the ISP's scapegoating of power users and file-sharers for their poor service--i'm sure all those Asian countries with cheap, symmetric high-speed broadband connections don't have file sharers or power users. secondly, even if we assume that a broadband provider has to oversell in order to remain profitable (an unlikely case), why could a simple bandwidth cap be implemented regardless of the type of traffic one has? protocol discrimination and deep packet analysis (which simply adds more network overhead) is not necessary even if you're trying to perform damage control after having over-sold by too much.
at our office i use BitTorrent maybe once a month to download 30-40 MB Photoshop brush sets, or an 18 MB Ad-Aware install file (the LavaSoft site requires you to sign up for Trialplay, and give out your personal information and CC# to get the Anniversary edition), and only very occasionally an up-to-date Windows XP disc image (700~800MB). on average, our monthly BitTorrent traffic totals less than 100MB on a 10Mbps connection.
on the other hand, we're a record label so we listen to band demos all day long, and these days most of it is done via MySpace, which is very convenient; we can see how many plays each artist has received that day, what shows they've played recently, and just gauge their popularity more easily. it also cuts down on the demo CDs being pressed/burnt/shipped, which is good for the environment. however, this means we're streaming music all day long (from 9 AM to 5 PM). assuming the average audio quality frm myspace is 96kbps, that's about 330MB of traffic from streaming audio alone, not to mention all the banners, photos, and other graphics on these bands' MySpace pages.
so if 2 people each consume, say, 500~600MB of network bandwidth each day, but one person uses it solely for BitTorrent while the other uses it solely for sending large files via e-mail, why should the BitTorrent user's network packets have lower priority than the e-mail user? how is he being greedy or asking others to subsidize his bandwidth?
ISPs have no business dictating how a broadband subscriber uses his internet connection. if they want to throttle people's connections after a bandwidth cap is exceeded, fine--don't advertise the service as unlimited, make the cap clear to your customers, and apply it equally to everyone regardless of whether they're an old grandma who's watching the Food Network in HD on her cable TV, or if it's a teenager downloading the latest Slackware ISO via BitTorrent.
lastly, if an ISP cannot meet the demands of their customers, they need to do one of two things: a.) upgrade their infrastructure to increase network capacity, or b.) don't oversell so much. the basic concept of overselling is sound. on average not everyone is going to use 100% of their pipe 100% of the time. but it's up to the ISP to calculate what their average network usage is going to be, and provide enough total network bandwidth so that the network doesn't become saturated during peak hours. what you don't do is try to scapegoat power users for your own miscalculations and continue to oversell while trying to dictate how the public uses the internet.
most countries are offering faster broadband at lower costs, following the usage trends that are shifting towards high bandwidth applications
those tools seem pretty useful, but i don't know how user-friendly some of them are. personally, i'm looking for a tool to see if our ISP (at the office) is hijacking our DNS errors, or all of our computers are just infected with malware.
also, is anyone else seeing a bunch of "" characters on the Network Diagnostic Tester homepage? is my browser/system screwed up, or are there a bunch of a little boxes with "FF FD" in them scattered all over the page?
that sames more appropriate for an IDE. if you have the spell check in the IDE, you can easily identify and immediately fix typos as you code. waiting for the compiler to spell check your code is like building a spell-checker into your printer driver or PostScript interpreter.
since most modern IDEs already feature syntax highlighting, which typically comes with function lists, symbol databases, and a live parser, it would just be a simple matter of integrating an additional user dictionary to the parser so that misspelled variables, comments, literals/output messages, etc. get highlighted.
the parser could even make sure that your variables are named consistently according to naming conventions you specify. so if you have a long named strAge or you forget to use CamelCase, or use it incorrectly (e.g. fetchNExt() instead of fetchNext()), on a function or variable, the parser should be able to point that out to you. that would be more useful than getting warnings from the compiler about lexical code issues.
first off, just because its litany of bugs, nonstandard implementations, and lack of standard features have been thoroughly documented does not mean they're no longer an issue. secondly, cumbersome hacks and awkward workarounds are not "fixes." a 'fix' would be a patch released by Microsoft that actually fixes those issues.
like i said, depending on the complexity of the site/layout you're working on, that percentage may vary. but for most reasonably intricate professional layouts, that is about the time ratio you should expect to devote to kludging IE support into your site. naturally, this doesn't include application development time, which can vary greatly from site to site. but if you spend 2hrs implementing your layout in Firefox/Safari/etc. then you're liable to spend 30hrs trying to get the site to render properly in IE--or give up half-way and simply change the design.
if you're developing a complex web application, it's generally a good idea to use some kind of framework that will handle certain aspects of cross-browser compatibility for you. and that will certainly save you a lot of time and trouble. but no matter what framework or toolkit you use, you're not going to make IE6 render tiled PNG backgrounds that support alpha-channel transparency. the only "fix" is to not use PNG backgrounds with alpha-channel transparency.
Kennedy died in 1963. U.S. combat units weren't sent into Vietnam until 1965 (after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident). and if Kennedy hadn't been assassinated, it's likely that the United States would have withdrawn from Vietnam completely rather than escalate the conflict.
the Korean war ended in a stalemate (ultimately, the North-South border moved little from where it was in May 1950--though the South did gain a little bit of land). U.S. involvement was again partly the result of the Red Scare, but considering the current state of North Korea compared to South Korea, i think U.S. involvement was ultimately a good thing in this instance. i'm sorry Truman (and Eisenhower) didn't achieve a total victory at the cost of more lives. but this was a war, not a football game. there are more important things than "winning" or "losing"--things like having a just cause, maintaining ethical conduct, and achieving a lasting peace. by seizing an opportunity to end a futile conflict before things escalated into a full-on war with China, Truman served the nation's interest more than he would have by letting MacArthur nuke Korea. Likewise, Eisenhower should be applauded for following through on his campaign promise to end what had become an unpopular war (the head of a democracy carrying out the wishes of his constituency--what a novel idea!).
and are you honestly trying to compare an unprovoked invasion of another nation for oil with fighting a fascist takeover of Europe? i'm just trying to figure out if your blatant sophistry is a desperate attempt to grasp at straws or if you're just that cognitively challenged.
as a web developer, i definitely agree that not having to support IE saves a lot of development time. on most projects i've worked on, about 20% of the development time is spent going back and forth with the client to come up with a layout design that they're happy with. only 5% of the time is used to cut up the graphics and actually implement the layout for standards-compliant browsers like Firefox/Safari/Opera/etc., which is pretty straight forward; just follow the W3C specs, and if it works in one browser, it'll pretty much work in all of them.
but the most painful part of any project is trying to get your site, which validates and renders properly in all other browsers, to render correctly in IE--which takes up the remaining 75% of the development time. not only is it a huge PITA for web developers (who are forced to mangle their previously elegant & well-formed code with a patchwork of unwieldy CSS hacks and clumsy JavaScript), but it also costs website owners a ton of money (if your designer/developer charges by the hour--which most smart freelance web developers do) as well. sure, the percentage may be less if it's a relatively simple site, or the designer creates the layout with tables, or if they simply design the site just for IE, standards be damned. but on the whole, supporting IE takes more time, effort, and money than is required for all other browsers added together.
however, in this case i think SUSE is a large enough company that they can afford to spend the money on IE support. so if their site doesn't work in IE, it's probably done on purpose to, either, a.) support web standards (and send a message to IE users), b.) support Firefox (and send a message to IE users), or c.) filter out clueless IE users that don't belong on their site. i mean, this service isn't exactly aimed at the typical computer novice who accidentally wandered out of their AOL/MSN playpen. anyone who's expected to use this site would know better than to use IE.
i don't think it has anything to do with entitlement. entitlement is thinking that you deserve an unearned/unwarranted reward or benefit--especially something that others are not entitled to.
for instance, Americans often complain about immigrants, especially Latinos "stealing" their jobs. that is entitlement. they feel that because they happen to be born in the U.S. (by no merit of their own) that they are automatically entitled to employment opportunities that they have not earned in any way. likewise, the rich often feel entitled to preferential treatment and express irritation at the lower class receiving the same basic necessities of life (such as food, shelter, and healthcare care) as them. they feel that because they happen to be born into relative comfort and privilege, their socioeconomic status entitles them to better living standards than those who were perhaps born into less fortuitous circumstances.
someone spending beyond their means using credit cards is not demonstrating entitlement. they are demonstrating an addiction to consumption. that is the unfortunate side-effect of our consumer culture. when you live in a society that bombards you with advertisements and images of conspicuous consumption, you begin to feel that you need to own those things to be happy. that is why people become obsessed with the accumulation of wealth and possessions. someone who shops compulsively doesn't feel entitled to their purchases any more than a compulsive gambler feels entitled to losing money to the casinos.
unpleasant, perhaps. violent? i have yet to see any evidence of that. i think the activists in question went a little too far and perhaps let their emotions cloud their judgment. but conducting vivisection like the draize test on live animals is more violent and "unpleasant" than phone harassment, graffiti, and bomb hoaxes. violence implies doing physical harm to someone. and in this case, HLS merits that term more than the convicted activists.
in any case, Indymedia is merely an independent news outlet and online forum. you don't confiscate a newspaper company's documents, proofs, and printing equipment just because they report on someone who is "violent or unpleasant." CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC, etc. report on violent criminals all the time. but you wouldn't consider shutting down those news networks.
you've also neglected to show any evidence that Indymedia posted any information that could be used to make threats against the judge. it is more likely that a commenter posted some private info and/or made threats, but that it was quickly removed by the editors. in any case, that does not warrant seizing Indymedia's servers (and backup servers).
regardless of your political views, this recurring pattern of unwarranted police harassment and seizing of web servers targeted at Indymedia should be disturbing to anyone who believes in free speech and the right to dissent. currently, right-wing elements within the political establishment are capitalizing on these targeted groups' unpopular political views (and their perceived affiliation with radical groups by the public) to encroach on civil liberties under the guise of fighting "terrorism." but if these increasingly routine abuses of power are accepted by the public, then it won't be long before any public forum can be shutdown and have their servers seized just because a guest posts someone's private information or makes a vague threat against a public figure.
law enforcement regularly use agent provocateurs to incite riots and arrest otherwise peaceful activists. do you think they'd even think twice about posting an anonymous threat to an independent news site or liberal-leaning forum to get it shut down?
if such abuses of power are tolerated by the public, the end result will be that online forums & message boards will require all guests to register with their real name, eliminating any shred of internet anonymity, and all messages will have to be pre-approved by site moderators before they are actually posted on the site, destroying free speech. after all, if site owners are going to be held responsible for all messages posted on their site, then that's the only way they can keep their site up. part of the reason Indymedia and ThePirateBay's servers keep getting seized is because they don't keep longterm logs of user activity. so i guess all site owners will have to log everyone's IPs and retain those logs for however many years law enforcement demand.
i am certainly in favor of government owned backbones so that peering disputes (which drive costs up for consumers and cause network problems) would be eliminated. but i still think that municipally run open wireless networks and local ISPs would be preferable than leaving it up to the private sector.
imagine if you and ~50,000 people were suddenly relocated to a large island. now this island has a trunk line to the mainland network. but you have a small island that's 30-square-kilometers, or about half the size of Manhattan, that you need to provide connectivity to. you're not stranded on the island. you can purchase resources from the mainland or even invite or contract major ISPs to set up broadband services. however, your resources are limited, and you need to make the best of the limited resources you have at your disposal.
now, let's say we want to deploy FttC (fibre-to-the-cabinet/curb) connections to each neighborhood to minimize deployment costs while still achieving 100 Mbps residential connection speeds. and each cabinet can service a 300m radius area, or roughly .28km^2. assuming that residences and businesses needing internet access cover about 75% of the island, we'll need about 80 backhaul connections to street cabinets to service all residential and business areas. but for the public WiMax network we want cover the entire island, which will take about 2~3 base stations and perhaps a handful of remote repeaters to give ~10 Mbps wireless broadband access from anywhere on the island.
if this is all done through a municipal initiative, we can still hire private contractors to build the actual network, and obviously we'd still have to buy the necessary equipment & hardware from private companies as well. so if you believe in the free market, then there's still free market competition between wireless equipment manufacturers. the difference here is that, since it's a municipal network, the subscribers actually have a voice in how it's run, and if they don't like certain policies they can lobby or petition to have those policies changed.
now, if you want to bank on the free market to provide the best internet service to the public, you'd need to change several things. instead of building a single public communications network, you'd have to build several overlapping private networks. so if you want 4 ISPs to choose from, you would then need 4X the infrastructure. not only that, but with 4 overlapping wireless networks competing for the same radio spectrum, you could run into problems of interference.
moreover, a commercial enterprise's primary concern is profit. they're obligated to their shareholders, not to the consumers or the public. so while they will be competing with each another, it's not to serve public interest. so instead of distributing network infrastructure where it's needed, it will instead be distributed where there's the most money to made. and the most efficient way to make money is not necessarily the most efficient way to provide broadband access to a community. and just like we have now, you'll end up with all the wireless base stations and COs concentrated in few rich metropolitan areas with the most lucrative markets while less financially attractive areas are left high and dry.
worst case scenario you'll have a situation analogous to the state of wireless access at airports. each airport provides a commercial wireless network that you have to pay a subscription for. so if you fly a lot and want to have internet access wherever you go, you'll need to buy a dozen subscriptions, each of which you'll only use maybe a couple of days a years. now imagine doing that for wireless access on the road. i can't imagine VoIP or internet radio taking off if every few miles you need to pay a different company for wireless access.
eh, i guess /. doesn't like unicode. that "102" should be 10*2^(1/2) or 10*sqrt(2)...
why not? you would have 1 Gbps fibre to residences and offices and wireless broadband everywhere else. some people like to access the internet outside of the home or office.
besides, there are a lot of open wireless applications beyond web surfing. if you have a nationwide open wireless network, people could eventually switch to carrier-neutral VoIP handsets. you'd also be able to stream internet radio from within your car or by a portable media player.
math deals with a priori knowledge. empirical science by definition is a posteriori.
and even math proofs only demonstrate that a mathematical statement/theorem/postulate is logically consistent within a formal system.
it's like saying: given that the world is a flat 10x10 square in 2D euclidean space, the closest distance between any 2 points is a straight line less than 102. i can prove this absolutely because i have defined the formal system in which the problem resides. if the world is a 2D euclidean space, then by definition certain axioms must hold. so i can construct proofs through deductive reasoning based on these givens.
if i were to postulate about 7-D euclidean space, i could still come up with absolute proofs regarding that formal system. but those proofs would only be true in the context of the formal system i've defined. i would not be able to prove that there is in fact a 7th dimension, and my proofs would not apply to the physical world we live in.
empirical science on the other hand is grounded on reality through empirical observations. but because scientific proofs make use of inductive reasoning, they are not absolute. comparing inductive reasoning used in scientific "proofs" with mathematical proofs is simply ridiculous.
well, "we" don't give out local monopolies. it's the laws of economics and the nature of telecommunications that creates natural monopolies. there are no laws stating that X county must only have one ISP/telecom. but communications networks work best as a single large monopoly rather than a handful of small disjointed competing networks. so even if you start off with a couple of competing networks in an area, over time the larger ones will absorb the smaller ones, giving them an even greater competitive advantage over the other small networks until eventually there's just a single carrier left. if it weren't for government regulations that force major communications carriers to lease out a portion of their networks to smaller second-tier carriers, there'd be even fewer ISPs/telecoms for consumers to choose from.
just look at the Japanese model. they have a single national telecom & ISP, NTT, which the Japanese government as a 1/3rd control in. they are leading the world in FttH penetration, offering residential users 1 Gbps symmetric broadband connections at $51.40/month--$0.05 per megabit (symmetric). compare that to Comcast's 50 Mbps "wideband" service that costs $150/month--$3.00 per megabit for asymmetric access.
while American ISPs are wasting money on traffic monitoring & packet shaping technology, lobbying against net neutrality, trying to convince the public that open wireless & municipal wifi will never work, and bitching about consumers actually making full use of their measly 3.5Mbps downstream connections, other countries in Europe and Asia are leaving us in the dust. and to make matters worse, we have all the tier-1 networks trying to extort money out of one another on peering agreements that would actually benefit everyone by making internet routing more efficient.
in other words, have tax payers fork out the money for the infrastructure, and then let the telecoms charge the public to use the infrastructure that they "own"? that's pretty much what we've got now.
if you want to harness the power of free market competition, then have private companies develop the actual physical technologies that would increase transfer rates, increase the reliability and range of wireless broadband, etc.
but have the national government set up the trunk connections that connect the nation, and then let local governments manage their own local ISP offering FttH to residences and municipal WiFi for everywhere else. that would put control over the ISPs into the hands of the local community. if residents don't like how the local ISP is run, they can change it. that is the only way you can ensure that the ISPs have the best interest of the public at heart.
that's just the way our society has come to think. in most people's minds (including many regular citizens) the masses are simply too stupid, selfish, immoral, and irrational to be treated as mature & rational adults and allowed to govern themselves. therefore they must be ruled over by others who are more trustworthy and level-headed, which coincidentally are the rich & powerful. and following this kind of thinking, information that can potentially be used for evil must necessarily be suppressed and hidden from the public at all costs.
but the knowledge that allows one to make nuclear weapons is the same knowledge that allows one to develop nuclear power plants. the only way you can suppress "dangerous" knowledge in this case is by suppressing nuclear research and forbidding anyone from teaching/studying nuclear physics. so unless we want to become a totalitarian state that promotes ignorance, a different approach must be found.
rather than throwing people in jail (or threatening to) for possessing "dangerous information," and trying to keep the public in the dark, it would be easier and more desirable just to create an enlightened society where people have no reason to blow each other or themselves up. this isn't something that can be achieved through force or coercion. granted, it's not something that will produce results over night, but it makes much more sense than our current approach.
similarly, changes in our foreign policy and ending the exploitation of other nations (for our own commercial interests) would do far more to increase our nation's security than any amount of military intervention and killing more innocent civilians. rather than abusing our position as the world's only superpower to ignore diplomacy and take whatever we want by force, we could simply be a better global citizen. then we wouldn't have to have a conniption fit every time a developing country builds a nuclear power plant.