Actually, the evidence is overwhelming that we are in global warming; Glaciers melting at a rate unknown.
"at an unknown rate" is great scientific evidence.
GLobal temp for 100+ years obviously climbing.
What temperature readings are you using from 100+ years ago? They were using satellites to take accurate complete temperature measurements 100+ years ago?
Heck, I have been watching watching weather.com and comparing the actual to predicted daily temps and for the last 5 years, more than 98% of the time the actuals are ABOVE predicted.
Huh...that's strange. Did you know that most global warming models predict that global warming will actually cause temperature to drop in a number of areas. So you weren't watching the temperature in those areas? So not being able to predict the weather is actually evidence in support of accurate global warming models?
Heck, just 10 years ago, nearly ALL THE REPUBLICAN PARTY said that it was not occurring.
Ahhh...so the republicans caused global warming. According to my faith it's the pirates but pirates, republicans, it's all the same to the democrats.
Now, as to the models, there are many factors in it. Things that are unknown have experiments being designed for it. This was one of them. There was underlying assumptions here that lead to others to design experiments to confirm it. And it did not. BUT, other aspects of the models have held up. I am sure that within a month, we will see what the models show.
So every other aspect of every model showing global warming has been tested and there was just this one little thing they hadn't gotten around to yet. Don't you see the idiocy in that? Can you even begin to grasp the complexity of whet they are trying to model? Who created the model? Were they an expert in every scientific area that effects global climate? Were they also an expert in programing that they could recreate all those interactions accuratly in a computer model? even the experts in one given area will tell you that we really don't understand to the point of exactly mathematically modeling their area of expertise much less every interaction of the area with every other area. But you have 100% faith in those models.
In the end......Fertilizer; plastics; base chemicals; etc.
Now this is all reasonable. (except that I don't have kids. I'd be in jail for child abuse these days. I believe in spanking.) But even more I want an advancing economy and technology. And both are an absolute requirement for getting off fossil fuels. One thing that has been historically and scientifically proven over the last few centuries is that short of greatly reducing the world population economic and technological advancement are the most effective tools for improving the environment. That's the point the GGP was making. Don't try to force radical changes and disruptions on a system (the economy and environment) that is far more complex than we can possible currently understand. The results, while they may include some of those you predicted, are certain to include many that were never even imagined and it's pretty much guaranteed that some of those will be bad likely to the point that you're worse off than when you started.
Really? What makes them preliminary state? The simple fact is, that the majority of data that feeds these models ARE known.
Ahhh...the faithful. Even in the face of SCIENTIFIC evidence that the models are flawed and based on untested assumptions they cling to the conclusions. But we know that every OTHER factor used in the models are absolutely correct. It was just this one little thing we hadn't tested. Just like yesterday this was absolutely known.
GP was correct that we shouldn't cause major disruption of the global economy based on a problem so little understood that our attempts to correct it may actually make it worse. Should we try and shift away from a fossil fuel base economy? Sure. But slowly and surely as technologies that allow it come online. Not forced such that we have no idea of the consequences either economically or environmentally.
Broken model? What broken model? The model for global warming is fully intact. The fact that one small part of an accessory needs some adjustment in no way breaks the model for global warming.
The only thing this study shows is that water that circulates in depths of 700 to 1500 meters under the surface travels in wider and slower paths than had been previously thought. The total flux of water is, naturally, the same, water isn't accumulating in the Arctic.
Wait...you mean the ocean currents have no effect on global climate? Oh, they do but this major misunderstanding of how the global currents function doesn't matter because the water isn't accumulating in the arctic? Let's face it. You are one of the faithful. Even in the face of SCIENTIFIC evidence that our understanding of the ocean currents, which by SCIENTIFIC evidence affects the global climate, was significantly wrong you STILL BELIEVE.
...when confronted with a choice, you choose money over the only known planet that sustains human life in the entire universe.
It's not choosing one over the other, money (and technology which is a directly by availability of money) is the most significant factor in the solution. If the world economy collapses I guarantee that people will be just a little less focused on being green and more focused on surviving. People like you seem to think you can magically completely shift the economic/industrial system of the world without having significant effect on it. You think if everyone drove electric cars today it would be a good thing? Batteries are made of nasty toxic and in many cases rare materials. The disposal problem would be far worse than that for nuclear energy. Actions have consequences and those are often ones you didn't expect. 20 years ago it was much worse. 10 years from now it'll most likely be much better.
Thank you for disclosing your idiocy club membership. In 50-100 years the cost will not be the same, it will be MUCH MUCH higher even adjusted for inflation.
You must be president.
And you know this because of the climate computer models that were just invalidated?
The cost could be insignificant 50 years hence due to technological advancements or due to naturally occurring events. Since I'm guessing neither of us are psychic that's as likely of a prediction as your's is. One thing's for sure, you can only be as green as you can afford to be. Destroy the economy because of completely wrong models based on a misunderstanding of the most complex system man has yet encountered and the consequences will be much sooner and much more predictable. It won't be pretty and green won't be anywhere in sight. Hmmm...unless you'd count the death of billions as green. Actions have consequences and not understanding the environment those actions are taken in means the consequences are unpredictable. What you think may help may actually cause much worse damage than if you had taken no action.
I'm always amazed that people in a computer based technology forum put so much faith in computer models. A computer model only models what the programmer coded it to model (not even accounting for bugs). On top of that the people doing the coding either aren't the experts in the system being modeled or aren't experts in coding. Why the hell do people put that much faith in computer models that are attempting to model something as complex as an entire planet?
Cow farts have a significant effect on the climate. How do you measure the methane produced by a cow fart? You take samples. What a cow eats can have a major effect. So now you have to both get data on what cows eat everywhere in the world and how each diet effects there farts. Then you have to add this information to the model. This is one relatively small factor that significantly effects the planets climate. There are trillions of trillions of these many of which (like ocean currents) we don't even have an understanding how they function much less how they effect the climate. But we can make a model that not only predicts the climate for centuries but also accuratly determines all the factors that effect the climate.
Short of huge reductions in the world population, a strong world economy and rapidly advancing technology are the best bet for both understanding and effecting our environment positively. This has been historically and scientifically proven over the last couple centuries.
I'm not sure I agree with this. There are plenty of ways to hack all OSs. Maybe a generic underhardened Windows install has more know ways...but how would one even quantify what is know and not know. Public is one thing, but given that Linux is open source and even compiled code can be broken down there is likely many known ways to hack products that are not public yet.
Ummm...The code is public and it's known but not to the public...hmmm...yeah, makes perfect sense.
biggest competition to Windows on Desktop is pirated Windows
Well, at least Mr. Ballmer has a clue. Too bad this this contest is over and done with in most third world countries. Where pirated Windows is worth less than a pirated DVD copy of Faster and Furiouser part 13.
No he doesn't. The only reason Microsoft is used at all in the places it's pirated the worse is because it's free or nearly so. That's the only way they'll get the lock in that'll get them any revenue in those places. If people there had to pay full price from the start Linux would be king.
If it achieves 100% technical compliance with the standard, but zero interoperability, this is certainly a problem with the standard itself.
You obviously didn't RTFA and don't have much experience in this area. I could list half a dozen standards from my experience but I'll just quote the one from article:
Remember, it is not particularly difficult or clever to to take an adverse reading of a standard to make an incompatible, non-interoperable product. Take HTML, for example. It does not define the attributes of unstyled (default) text. So I could create a perfectly conformant browser implementation that makes all default text be 4-point Zapf Dingbats, white text on a white background. It would conform with the standard, but it would be perfectly unusable by anyone. If you try hard enough you can create 100% conformant, but non-interoperable, implementations of almost most standards. Standards are voluntary, written to help coordinate multiple parties in their desires for interoperability. Standards are not written to compell interoperability by parties who do not wish to be interoperable.
Acknowledging that you were trying to be funny, Win7 (and to a slightly lesser extent Vista) have pretty much removed the whole "hunt down and install drivers" part of upgrading.
I can't believe I'm defending him, but judges are also citizens. He should have the right to be a member of most any organization he chooses.
And they are also human. If they feel strongly enough about something that they spend their spare time lobbing to get laws passed supporting it there is almost certainly going to be bias in judgments they make involving those issues. It may not be conscious but it's only human that it'll be there. It's a judge's job to impartially interpret the law.
If Swedish copyright is anything like US copyright, he probably didn't need to twist the law to come down hard on TPB. Most of their activities are technically illegal, and technically illegal is what a judge should rule on. They usually have the ability to grant a little mercy, but there is no reason they must.
You need to point out what US law they were violating cause everything done by Pirate Bay is being done by Google and any other search engine out there. Plus in the US they'd have the DMCA safe harbor laws. They RIAA/MPAA haven't payed off quite enough people yet to make search engines illegal although the way the Obama administration is going it looks like they are getting close.
If he firmly believes in copyright as a matter of law and principle, I don't think it's much different than a judge being a member of an organization lobbying for tougher murder penalties, etc.
Well there's your problem. A judge's job is to impartially interpret the law not to enforce his principles from the bench. A law is not something you believe in. Subjective interpretation should not, ideally, be involved. And being a member of such an organization implies a strong bias towards changing the laws to support those principles (the purpose of a lobbing group). And you don't think those biases, strong enough that he spends his spare time enforcing them, are going to creep into any cases he presides over involving those principles? Yeah, it's glaring.
Look, one way or the other, almost every broadband ISP has overbuilt their network and was not prepared for the advent of HD video and streaming services. The hard fact is that they cannot (and never could) deliver "unlimited" bandwidth.
Can you explain why every US ISP is failing at this while internet service in pretty much every other civilized country in the world has unlimited capacity at much faster throughput for the same or in some cases much cheaper than internet service in the US?
It certainly has nothing to do with over building. The monopoly access to the physical network allows them to to charge more without having to actually invest any money in improving their service. So the richest nation in the world sits a decade behind the rest of the world in internet service.
PS. Linux needs a real installer / uninstaller for applications too, and that really means you need to suck it up and implement some sort of a registry for all of your settings. Woops, did I say that?
You just blew any credibility you may have had. The registry was the single worst feature ever implemented in a mainstream OS and has nothing to do with an installer. On top of that it's way easier to install most software under Linux. No CDs, no license keys. Just select the software you want and it's downloaded and installed automajically. Worst case you have to add a URL for a repository.
In the case of cellular, this isn't so easy. The amount of usable EM spectrum is finite, and most speed improvements using the already-allocated frequencies will either break compatibility with existing devices, or require a reallocation of the spectrum. Improvements are possible, though they're much more difficult to implement.
I'm tired of retyping it. If your argument was valid why does the rest of the civilized world have much better and cheaper cellular broadband? Is there more spectrum in Europe and Japan?
Now if they were artificially limiting supply (like what oil companies do) I might have a problem with it.
They are. The limits are due to a single T1 running to every cell tower. The radio technology has surpassed this limit.
Why actually run fiber to the towers when they can charge outrageous prices to keep profits up and bandwidth usage down while not having to spend a dime on infrastructure?
To be fair, cellular bandwidth is fundamentally limited, and has been extremely costly to deploy. It's not particularly surprising that the carriers want to recoup their investment.
Except the bandwidth bottlenecks with cellular come from having a single T1 line going to each cell tower rather than limits between the tower and the phone. The radio technology has far surpassed that constraint.
As technology improves, and competing companies become more ambitious, we'll likely see prices slowly begin to fall. It's all a matter of economics.
Technology isn't the problem. Monopoly (or oligarchical) control is. Why actually run fiber to the towers when they can charge outrageous prices to keep profits up and bandwidth usage down while not having to spend a dime on infrastructure? That's why the US is so far behind the rest of the world in broadband speed and access.
The only wisdom I have to share at this point is : if you find out your ISP is in league with the RIAA, change ISP's, and let them know why you left.
The only problem being that for most people the options are very limited and the way it's set up now it's nigh on impossible to start an ISP outside of the incumbent cable and phone companies. So if both members in your area (most people are lucky if they have 2 options: cable and phone company) of the current oligarchy opt into the RIAA system your options are much slower broadband at best or dialip.
They're getting to the point they don't need the litigation anymore. They're setting it up so either everyone is forced to pay into their welfare system for a failed industry through a tax on all internet connectivity or they can, without proof or recourse, have you disconnected from the internet.
This reminds me about a post in alt.sysadmin.recovery many years ago. The post was asking about what precautions one should take when firing a sysadmin and had a fair amount of details of the environment. The first reply was "Don't post about it in alt.sysadmin.recover." I'm guessing that'd be applicable here.
Ummm...ODF is a vendor? I think not. Microsoft is more than welcome to join the rest of the world and support ODF. How many vendors offer products that support ODF versus how many vendors support Microsoft's proprietary formats? You say Microsoft supports ODF. If I'm not mistaken that's through a third party add-on. But if they support ODF with their products, what's the problem? How is requiring ODF excluding them or favoring any other vendor? Is it because Microsoft would actually have to compete based on performance and price? Oh what a travesty that would be. Microsoft actually having to compete.
Quote from the article:
At a hearing on the bill then, Microsoft national technology officer Stuart McKee described it as anti-competitive and warned that it could be the equivalent of the state "picking Betamax when everyone else goes with VHS."
How can using a format that is free and unencumbered, that anyone can implement and is implemented in a number of different products "anti-competitive"?
No, it is "Those who have talent" (allegedly) who have the flawed model. It hasn't been working for them for 20 years, most bands see mere pennies from each CD sale. Young, penniless, and desperate, they sign ridiculous contracts only to be raped for the rest of their lives.
You don't seem to understand. The "industry" is having their paid pets in government pass laws making any business model they don't control illegal. Did you know that if you stream your own music on the internet you have to pay a fee to one of the incumbents puppet companies created by the government? The money is supposed to be distributed to the artists but they get to keep any of the money for artists they can't seem to find. So you know they look REAL hard.
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Actually, the evidence is overwhelming that we are in global warming; Glaciers melting at a rate unknown.
"at an unknown rate" is great scientific evidence.
GLobal temp for 100+ years obviously climbing.
What temperature readings are you using from 100+ years ago? They were using satellites to take accurate complete temperature measurements 100+ years ago?
Heck, I have been watching watching weather.com and comparing the actual to predicted daily temps and for the last 5 years, more than 98% of the time the actuals are ABOVE predicted.
Huh...that's strange. Did you know that most global warming models predict that global warming will actually cause temperature to drop in a number of areas. So you weren't watching the temperature in those areas? So not being able to predict the weather is actually evidence in support of accurate global warming models?
Heck, just 10 years ago, nearly ALL THE REPUBLICAN PARTY said that it was not occurring.
Ahhh...so the republicans caused global warming. According to my faith it's the pirates but pirates, republicans, it's all the same to the democrats.
Now, as to the models, there are many factors in it. Things that are unknown have experiments being designed for it. This was one of them. There was underlying assumptions here that lead to others to design experiments to confirm it. And it did not. BUT, other aspects of the models have held up. I am sure that within a month, we will see what the models show.
So every other aspect of every model showing global warming has been tested and there was just this one little thing they hadn't gotten around to yet. Don't you see the idiocy in that? Can you even begin to grasp the complexity of whet they are trying to model? Who created the model? Were they an expert in every scientific area that effects global climate? Were they also an expert in programing that they could recreate all those interactions accuratly in a computer model? even the experts in one given area will tell you that we really don't understand to the point of exactly mathematically modeling their area of expertise much less every interaction of the area with every other area. But you have 100% faith in those models.
In the end... ...Fertilizer; plastics; base chemicals; etc.
Now this is all reasonable. (except that I don't have kids. I'd be in jail for child abuse these days. I believe in spanking.) But even more I want an advancing economy and technology. And both are an absolute requirement for getting off fossil fuels. One thing that has been historically and scientifically proven over the last few centuries is that short of greatly reducing the world population economic and technological advancement are the most effective tools for improving the environment. That's the point the GGP was making. Don't try to force radical changes and disruptions on a system (the economy and environment) that is far more complex than we can possible currently understand. The results, while they may include some of those you predicted, are certain to include many that were never even imagined and it's pretty much guaranteed that some of those will be bad likely to the point that you're worse off than when you started.
Really? What makes them preliminary state? The simple fact is, that the majority of data that feeds these models ARE known.
Ahhh...the faithful. Even in the face of SCIENTIFIC evidence that the models are flawed and based on untested assumptions they cling to the conclusions. But we know that every OTHER factor used in the models are absolutely correct. It was just this one little thing we hadn't tested. Just like yesterday this was absolutely known.
GP was correct that we shouldn't cause major disruption of the global economy based on a problem so little understood that our attempts to correct it may actually make it worse. Should we try and shift away from a fossil fuel base economy? Sure. But slowly and surely as technologies that allow it come online. Not forced such that we have no idea of the consequences either economically or environmentally.
You speak as if we weren't already spending hundreds of billions to keep companies [chrysler.com] that cause global warming [gm.com] alive.
Yeah, that'll take care of it. We'll just get rid of all the car companies.
Broken model? What broken model? The model for global warming is fully intact. The fact that one small part of an accessory needs some adjustment in no way breaks the model for global warming.
The only thing this study shows is that water that circulates in depths of 700 to 1500 meters under the surface travels in wider and slower paths than had been previously thought. The total flux of water is, naturally, the same, water isn't accumulating in the Arctic.
Wait...you mean the ocean currents have no effect on global climate? Oh, they do but this major misunderstanding of how the global currents function doesn't matter because the water isn't accumulating in the arctic? Let's face it. You are one of the faithful. Even in the face of SCIENTIFIC evidence that our understanding of the ocean currents, which by SCIENTIFIC evidence affects the global climate, was significantly wrong you STILL BELIEVE.
...when confronted with a choice, you choose money over the only known planet that sustains human life in the entire universe.
It's not choosing one over the other, money (and technology which is a directly by availability of money) is the most significant factor in the solution. If the world economy collapses I guarantee that people will be just a little less focused on being green and more focused on surviving. People like you seem to think you can magically completely shift the economic/industrial system of the world without having significant effect on it. You think if everyone drove electric cars today it would be a good thing? Batteries are made of nasty toxic and in many cases rare materials. The disposal problem would be far worse than that for nuclear energy. Actions have consequences and those are often ones you didn't expect. 20 years ago it was much worse. 10 years from now it'll most likely be much better.
Thank you for disclosing your idiocy club membership. In 50-100 years the cost will not be the same, it will be MUCH MUCH higher even adjusted for inflation.
You must be president.
And you know this because of the climate computer models that were just invalidated?
The cost could be insignificant 50 years hence due to technological advancements or due to naturally occurring events. Since I'm guessing neither of us are psychic that's as likely of a prediction as your's is. One thing's for sure, you can only be as green as you can afford to be. Destroy the economy because of completely wrong models based on a misunderstanding of the most complex system man has yet encountered and the consequences will be much sooner and much more predictable. It won't be pretty and green won't be anywhere in sight. Hmmm...unless you'd count the death of billions as green. Actions have consequences and not understanding the environment those actions are taken in means the consequences are unpredictable. What you think may help may actually cause much worse damage than if you had taken no action.
I'm always amazed that people in a computer based technology forum put so much faith in computer models. A computer model only models what the programmer coded it to model (not even accounting for bugs). On top of that the people doing the coding either aren't the experts in the system being modeled or aren't experts in coding. Why the hell do people put that much faith in computer models that are attempting to model something as complex as an entire planet?
Cow farts have a significant effect on the climate. How do you measure the methane produced by a cow fart? You take samples. What a cow eats can have a major effect. So now you have to both get data on what cows eat everywhere in the world and how each diet effects there farts. Then you have to add this information to the model. This is one relatively small factor that significantly effects the planets climate. There are trillions of trillions of these many of which (like ocean currents) we don't even have an understanding how they function much less how they effect the climate. But we can make a model that not only predicts the climate for centuries but also accuratly determines all the factors that effect the climate.
Short of huge reductions in the world population, a strong world economy and rapidly advancing technology are the best bet for both understanding and effecting our environment positively. This has been historically and scientifically proven over the last couple centuries.
I'm not sure I agree with this. There are plenty of ways to hack all OSs. Maybe a generic underhardened Windows install has more know ways...but how would one even quantify what is know and not know. Public is one thing, but given that Linux is open source and even compiled code can be broken down there is likely many known ways to hack products that are not public yet.
Ummm...The code is public and it's known but not to the public...hmmm...yeah, makes perfect sense.
biggest competition to Windows on Desktop is pirated Windows
Well, at least Mr. Ballmer has a clue. Too bad this this contest is over and done with in most third world countries. Where pirated Windows is worth less than a pirated DVD copy of Faster and Furiouser part 13.
No he doesn't. The only reason Microsoft is used at all in the places it's pirated the worse is because it's free or nearly so. That's the only way they'll get the lock in that'll get them any revenue in those places. If people there had to pay full price from the start Linux would be king.
It would be foolish to count downloads for this purpose. However, Canonical could surely count update requests to repositories, for example.
Why? That's how Microsoft counts their Vista sales. Units sold no matter how many were down-graded to XP. Oh...wait...you said it would be foolish.
If it achieves 100% technical compliance with the standard, but zero interoperability, this is certainly a problem with the standard itself.
You obviously didn't RTFA and don't have much experience in this area. I could list half a dozen standards from my experience but I'll just quote the one from article:
Remember, it is not particularly difficult or clever to to take an adverse reading of a standard to make an incompatible, non-interoperable product. Take HTML, for example. It does not define the attributes of unstyled (default) text. So I could create a perfectly conformant browser implementation that makes all default text be 4-point Zapf Dingbats, white text on a white background. It would conform with the standard, but it would be perfectly unusable by anyone. If you try hard enough you can create 100% conformant, but non-interoperable, implementations of almost most standards. Standards are voluntary, written to help coordinate multiple parties in their desires for interoperability. Standards are not written to compell interoperability by parties who do not wish to be interoperable.
Acknowledging that you were trying to be funny, Win7 (and to a slightly lesser extent Vista) have pretty much removed the whole "hunt down and install drivers" part of upgrading.
So it's finally caught up with Linux?
I can't believe I'm defending him, but judges are also citizens. He should have the right to be a member of most any organization he chooses.
And they are also human. If they feel strongly enough about something that they spend their spare time lobbing to get laws passed supporting it there is almost certainly going to be bias in judgments they make involving those issues. It may not be conscious but it's only human that it'll be there. It's a judge's job to impartially interpret the law.
If Swedish copyright is anything like US copyright, he probably didn't need to twist the law to come down hard on TPB. Most of their activities are technically illegal, and technically illegal is what a judge should rule on. They usually have the ability to grant a little mercy, but there is no reason they must.
You need to point out what US law they were violating cause everything done by Pirate Bay is being done by Google and any other search engine out there. Plus in the US they'd have the DMCA safe harbor laws. They RIAA/MPAA haven't payed off quite enough people yet to make search engines illegal although the way the Obama administration is going it looks like they are getting close.
If he firmly believes in copyright as a matter of law and principle, I don't think it's much different than a judge being a member of an organization lobbying for tougher murder penalties, etc.
Well there's your problem. A judge's job is to impartially interpret the law not to enforce his principles from the bench. A law is not something you believe in. Subjective interpretation should not, ideally, be involved. And being a member of such an organization implies a strong bias towards changing the laws to support those principles (the purpose of a lobbing group). And you don't think those biases, strong enough that he spends his spare time enforcing them, are going to creep into any cases he presides over involving those principles? Yeah, it's glaring.
Look, one way or the other, almost every broadband ISP has overbuilt their network and was not prepared for the advent of HD video and streaming services. The hard fact is that they cannot (and never could) deliver "unlimited" bandwidth.
Can you explain why every US ISP is failing at this while internet service in pretty much every other civilized country in the world has unlimited capacity at much faster throughput for the same or in some cases much cheaper than internet service in the US?
It certainly has nothing to do with over building. The monopoly access to the physical network allows them to to charge more without having to actually invest any money in improving their service. So the richest nation in the world sits a decade behind the rest of the world in internet service.
PS. Linux needs a real installer / uninstaller for applications too, and that really means you need to suck it up and implement some sort of a registry for all of your settings. Woops, did I say that?
You just blew any credibility you may have had. The registry was the single worst feature ever implemented in a mainstream OS and has nothing to do with an installer. On top of that it's way easier to install most software under Linux. No CDs, no license keys. Just select the software you want and it's downloaded and installed automajically. Worst case you have to add a URL for a repository.
In the case of cellular, this isn't so easy. The amount of usable EM spectrum is finite, and most speed improvements using the already-allocated frequencies will either break compatibility with existing devices, or require a reallocation of the spectrum. Improvements are possible, though they're much more difficult to implement.
I'm tired of retyping it. If your argument was valid why does the rest of the civilized world have much better and cheaper cellular broadband? Is there more spectrum in Europe and Japan?
Now if they were artificially limiting supply (like what oil companies do) I might have a problem with it.
They are. The limits are due to a single T1 running to every cell tower. The radio technology has surpassed this limit.
Why actually run fiber to the towers when they can charge outrageous prices to keep profits up and bandwidth usage down while not having to spend a dime on infrastructure?
To be fair, cellular bandwidth is fundamentally limited, and has been extremely costly to deploy. It's not particularly surprising that the carriers want to recoup their investment.
Except the bandwidth bottlenecks with cellular come from having a single T1 line going to each cell tower rather than limits between the tower and the phone. The radio technology has far surpassed that constraint.
As technology improves, and competing companies become more ambitious, we'll likely see prices slowly begin to fall. It's all a matter of economics.
Technology isn't the problem. Monopoly (or oligarchical) control is. Why actually run fiber to the towers when they can charge outrageous prices to keep profits up and bandwidth usage down while not having to spend a dime on infrastructure? That's why the US is so far behind the rest of the world in broadband speed and access.
The only wisdom I have to share at this point is : if you find out your ISP is in league with the RIAA, change ISP's, and let them know why you left.
The only problem being that for most people the options are very limited and the way it's set up now it's nigh on impossible to start an ISP outside of the incumbent cable and phone companies. So if both members in your area (most people are lucky if they have 2 options: cable and phone company) of the current oligarchy opt into the RIAA system your options are much slower broadband at best or dialip.
.
They're getting to the point they don't need the litigation anymore. They're setting it up so either everyone is forced to pay into their welfare system for a failed industry through a tax on all internet connectivity or they can, without proof or recourse, have you disconnected from the internet.
This reminds me about a post in alt.sysadmin.recovery many years ago. The post was asking about what precautions one should take when firing a sysadmin and had a fair amount of details of the environment. The first reply was "Don't post about it in alt.sysadmin.recover." I'm guessing that'd be applicable here.
That's favoring one vendor over another.
Ummm...ODF is a vendor? I think not. Microsoft is more than welcome to join the rest of the world and support ODF. How many vendors offer products that support ODF versus how many vendors support Microsoft's proprietary formats? You say Microsoft supports ODF. If I'm not mistaken that's through a third party add-on. But if they support ODF with their products, what's the problem? How is requiring ODF excluding them or favoring any other vendor? Is it because Microsoft would actually have to compete based on performance and price? Oh what a travesty that would be. Microsoft actually having to compete.
Quote from the article:
At a hearing on the bill then, Microsoft national technology officer Stuart McKee described it as anti-competitive and warned that it could be the equivalent of the state "picking Betamax when everyone else goes with VHS."
How can using a format that is free and unencumbered, that anyone can implement and is implemented in a number of different products "anti-competitive"?
If this were happening in Canada, I'd start publishing every link I could on every website I could, and ask (no, beg) for trial date, and with a jury.
Couldn't they just bring you before the Canadian Human Rights Commission? No jury there.
No, it is "Those who have talent" (allegedly) who have the flawed model. It hasn't been working for them for 20 years, most bands see mere pennies from each CD sale. Young, penniless, and desperate, they sign ridiculous contracts only to be raped for the rest of their lives.
You don't seem to understand. The "industry" is having their paid pets in government pass laws making any business model they don't control illegal. Did you know that if you stream your own music on the internet you have to pay a fee to one of the incumbents puppet companies created by the government? The money is supposed to be distributed to the artists but they get to keep any of the money for artists they can't seem to find. So you know they look REAL hard.
or find reasons _within the existing law_, why they were allowed to do what they did.
Wait...we need laws to allow us to do anything now? Did I miss a memo?