With respect to the throttling, it probably is the city you're living in (anecdotally, it varies). It sounds like you're getting higher speeds than what you're paying for because you just switched and they're giving you the preferential new customer treatment.
I don't think that's the situation in Canada, but it doesn't matter, Internet access is a natural monopoly: it doesn't make economic sense for some other competitor to come in and build a big fiber network in the hopes of stealing business from the established players. The free market makes sense in situations where there are low barriers to entry, because in those cases, if profits are high, more competition will enter the market. It's obviously not going to be efficient to have e.g. competing fiber networks, so free market capitalism is not an efficient way to facilitate investment in network infrastructure. Governments should recognize this and deal with it accordingly.
The US may have started China's economic growth, but if they lost the US's business now, they would still have you by the balls. They've used the last couple of decades to reverse-engineer everything worth reverse engineering, and I'd be surprised if they couldn't sustain themselves and their economy going forward.
Yeah, we basically can only choose between Bell (phone) and Rogers (cable). The current regulation creates an illusion of competition by forcing Bell (and possibly Rogers as of late, I'm not sure what happened there) to provide wholesale access in some way to third parties. However, the CRTC isn't forcing Bell to offer access to the highest speeds of service, isn't preventing them from throttling the BitTorrent (et al) traffic from customers of third parties (e.g. TekSavvy), and is now allowing them to impose 60GB bandwidth caps on third party customers with big fees for going over. Basically, every possible differentiator for the third parties is being gradually eliminated by Bell. Meanwhile, Rogers made the news recently for trying so hard to throttle torrents that they're now throttling download traffic that is sometimes not even related to BitTorrent. We're not exactly third world, but our regulators are certainly failing us, and most people are too ignorant to make a fuss about it.
Mod parent up. Also, separation of wealth is important, because only the ultra-rich can be trusted to use their money to create jobs and invest in new ventures. It makes perfect economic sense.
Were any of those tablets wildly popular? Was anyone falling all over themselves trying to imitate those tablets? Is the iPad a clone of any of those products?
It would greatly support your point if you could link us to any example of a tablet that resembles the iPad but was announced before the iPad was.
Because imitating a market leader is always doomed to fail (by the time you come out, they will have innovated again, and you will be behind). However, this reminds me of the Pandora Handheld, which is a handheld computer/video game console with an extraordinary set of hardware features that has an open, Linux-based OS and was crowdfunded via pre-orders. Unfortunately, they've failed to avoid getting jerked around by their suppliers, so they have yet to completely ship all of the units in their first batch. They shipped about 1k units last May, but the joystick nubs were unreliable, which caused them to spend 6 months waiting for that supplier to make nubs that can last long enough in stress tests. They're finally getting back into mass production now, and I think they'd get through the first batch in the next two months if nothing else goes wrong. Anyway, this is the sort of open hardware that I'd like to see further development of, it does everything, has almost every possible feature (e.g. a full size USB port) and could be considered pocket sized by some standards.
Re: the first reply, I think OpenMoko failed because the hardware had next to no features. I would have bought one if it had an 800x480 screen and some buttons, for example.
I'd like to second the first reply with a link to Andrew Tridgell's talk on patent defence for free software developers. It's a must-read for anyone who bothers to look at the patents when they read these articles:
http://news.swpat.org/2010/03/transcript-tridgell-patents/
If Intel tried to market its tools to mainstream and OSS developers (yes, open source the tools), then maybe the stuff would catch on better. They are quite capable of making stuff user-friendly for the average developer, but they only seem to market to the HPC market, because that's where the high margin CPUs sell. I think if they spent more time increasing general awareness of anything, it would be easier to get people to use them in their target markets, which would help them sell high end CPUs anyway.
It's not entirely relevant to ask whether Fox News is lying in this article, the point is that when it's important enough to them, they will lie in an article, even if that contradicts their fundamental mandate as a news organization. Unless you trust yourself to be able to spot any possible conflict of interest that could have influenced their reporting, the safest and easiest thing to do is just not trust them. This is the same reason why I don't trust Microsoft, or Monsanto. If you know that an organization's ethics don't preclude them from deliberately misleading others, then it makes sense to just not trust what they say. Even something as innocuous as this article could have a political motivation to it.
Actually, I knew this already, but I chose to give you the benefit of the doubt about whether you were merely ignorant, or being condescendingly pedantic. Now I see it's definitely the latter.
You seem to be blissfully unaware of the difference between a theoretical, ideal voltage source, and any voltage source in the real world. A real voltage source cannot provide unlimited current, and as the current drawn by a load goes up, the voltage across the source will drop.
That shouldn't be a reason to stop trying. As awareness is raised, this behaviour will become unacceptable. Alternatively, if communities stop trying, nothing will change.
You would be right, except that it's more like what would happen if congress were replaced by a group where Russia and China have veto power. Definitely not the lesser of two evils.
Correlation doesn't always imply causation, but do you really think that being exposed to a constant stream of misinformation isn't going to have a causative effect on misinformed beliefs of viewers?
Also:
The effect was also not simply a function of partisan bias, as people who voted Democratic and watched Fox News were also more likely to have such misinformation than those who did not watch it--though by a lesser margin than those who voted Republican.
Depending on what you read and your willingness to read off of a screen, carrying around a mobile computer with a large enough screen and a reading (or video) backlog can eliminate the problem of not having something to read. I would say this is the main thing I use my N800 for, despite the multitude of other possible uses for it.
Slashdot Mirror
With respect to the throttling, it probably is the city you're living in (anecdotally, it varies). It sounds like you're getting higher speeds than what you're paying for because you just switched and they're giving you the preferential new customer treatment.
I don't think that's the situation in Canada, but it doesn't matter, Internet access is a natural monopoly: it doesn't make economic sense for some other competitor to come in and build a big fiber network in the hopes of stealing business from the established players. The free market makes sense in situations where there are low barriers to entry, because in those cases, if profits are high, more competition will enter the market. It's obviously not going to be efficient to have e.g. competing fiber networks, so free market capitalism is not an efficient way to facilitate investment in network infrastructure. Governments should recognize this and deal with it accordingly.
The US may have started China's economic growth, but if they lost the US's business now, they would still have you by the balls. They've used the last couple of decades to reverse-engineer everything worth reverse engineering, and I'd be surprised if they couldn't sustain themselves and their economy going forward.
Yeah, we basically can only choose between Bell (phone) and Rogers (cable). The current regulation creates an illusion of competition by forcing Bell (and possibly Rogers as of late, I'm not sure what happened there) to provide wholesale access in some way to third parties. However, the CRTC isn't forcing Bell to offer access to the highest speeds of service, isn't preventing them from throttling the BitTorrent (et al) traffic from customers of third parties (e.g. TekSavvy), and is now allowing them to impose 60GB bandwidth caps on third party customers with big fees for going over. Basically, every possible differentiator for the third parties is being gradually eliminated by Bell. Meanwhile, Rogers made the news recently for trying so hard to throttle torrents that they're now throttling download traffic that is sometimes not even related to BitTorrent. We're not exactly third world, but our regulators are certainly failing us, and most people are too ignorant to make a fuss about it.
Mod parent up. Also, separation of wealth is important, because only the ultra-rich can be trusted to use their money to create jobs and invest in new ventures. It makes perfect economic sense.
What are they cloning? Link me to a product that the iPad is a clone of.
Apple didn't clone any of those products. For better or worse, the iPad is different in ways that allowed Apple to market it to a wide audience.
Thank you. Mod parent up.
Were any of those tablets wildly popular? Was anyone falling all over themselves trying to imitate those tablets? Is the iPad a clone of any of those products?
It would greatly support your point if you could link us to any example of a tablet that resembles the iPad but was announced before the iPad was.
Because imitating a market leader is always doomed to fail (by the time you come out, they will have innovated again, and you will be behind). However, this reminds me of the Pandora Handheld, which is a handheld computer/video game console with an extraordinary set of hardware features that has an open, Linux-based OS and was crowdfunded via pre-orders. Unfortunately, they've failed to avoid getting jerked around by their suppliers, so they have yet to completely ship all of the units in their first batch. They shipped about 1k units last May, but the joystick nubs were unreliable, which caused them to spend 6 months waiting for that supplier to make nubs that can last long enough in stress tests. They're finally getting back into mass production now, and I think they'd get through the first batch in the next two months if nothing else goes wrong. Anyway, this is the sort of open hardware that I'd like to see further development of, it does everything, has almost every possible feature (e.g. a full size USB port) and could be considered pocket sized by some standards. Re: the first reply, I think OpenMoko failed because the hardware had next to no features. I would have bought one if it had an 800x480 screen and some buttons, for example.
I'd like to second the first reply with a link to Andrew Tridgell's talk on patent defence for free software developers. It's a must-read for anyone who bothers to look at the patents when they read these articles: http://news.swpat.org/2010/03/transcript-tridgell-patents/
I like this idea. I have no idea if it would gain momentum, but it would be pretty nice if it did.
I think you're missing the point. If the data is analyzed in a single pass as it is received, 1TB of RAM is not necessary.
If Intel tried to market its tools to mainstream and OSS developers (yes, open source the tools), then maybe the stuff would catch on better. They are quite capable of making stuff user-friendly for the average developer, but they only seem to market to the HPC market, because that's where the high margin CPUs sell. I think if they spent more time increasing general awareness of anything, it would be easier to get people to use them in their target markets, which would help them sell high end CPUs anyway.
It's not entirely relevant to ask whether Fox News is lying in this article, the point is that when it's important enough to them, they will lie in an article, even if that contradicts their fundamental mandate as a news organization. Unless you trust yourself to be able to spot any possible conflict of interest that could have influenced their reporting, the safest and easiest thing to do is just not trust them. This is the same reason why I don't trust Microsoft, or Monsanto. If you know that an organization's ethics don't preclude them from deliberately misleading others, then it makes sense to just not trust what they say. Even something as innocuous as this article could have a political motivation to it.
Actually, I knew this already, but I chose to give you the benefit of the doubt about whether you were merely ignorant, or being condescendingly pedantic. Now I see it's definitely the latter.
You seem to be blissfully unaware of the difference between a theoretical, ideal voltage source, and any voltage source in the real world. A real voltage source cannot provide unlimited current, and as the current drawn by a load goes up, the voltage across the source will drop.
Those are the endpoints. The network itself is mostly flat rate though.
That shouldn't be a reason to stop trying. As awareness is raised, this behaviour will become unacceptable. Alternatively, if communities stop trying, nothing will change.
You would be right, except that it's more like what would happen if congress were replaced by a group where Russia and China have veto power. Definitely not the lesser of two evils.
Correlation doesn't always imply causation, but do you really think that being exposed to a constant stream of misinformation isn't going to have a causative effect on misinformed beliefs of viewers?
Also:
Depending on what you read and your willingness to read off of a screen, carrying around a mobile computer with a large enough screen and a reading (or video) backlog can eliminate the problem of not having something to read. I would say this is the main thing I use my N800 for, despite the multitude of other possible uses for it.
I see your Internet education has turned you into a skilled debater.
It's called a positive externality. Sometimes the government does actually have a place doing this.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-april-22-2010/wham-o-moves-to-america
"Does that mean that, as Americans, we're gonna have to put our own antifreeze in our toothpaste?"
"..Yes."