You're not going to take a 40 MPH delta-v hit from the rear when stopping at a traffic light, unless the person behind you was asleep at the wheel. And in that case, you have bigger problems than red light cameras, since such snoozers are going to slam into your car regardless of why you had to stop.
Yeah, I spose 40mph was a bit much for hypothesising. I don't have the time right now to track down more accident data, but I would be curious to see the average imapct velocity of rear end and signal/stop violation collisions. have any good sources by chance?
You like taxes on stupidity. I also like stupidity being somewhat painful. Not adjusting your head support to the right height (c'mon, that's not fscking rocket science) fits the bill just fine.
Unfortunately, pain means emergency response and hospitalization, both of which are heavily subsidized by non-stupid tax dollars.
The RLC ticket only taxes the person who runs the light. An accident taxes the whole society (or atleast the local and state geographical taxing areas). So IMO, improving safety (longer yellows, overlapping reds) should be the first priority, while punative attempts at correcting a social danger should be secondary.
What you didn't mention about those studies was that the increased accidents were people rear-ending the stopping cars
Way to not read the studies. Most of the studies showed that the fatality and severe injuries either did not change significantly, or actually increased. Most red-light running accidents (relating to people pushing throw a yellow) are not "t-bone" accidents. If someone blows through a red light while there is traffic already crossing there is nothing a camera or yellow light can do to stop them.
So red light cameras DO NOT reduce right angle impacts. They may reduce corner-to-corner impacts, and they have been shown to increase rear end impacts. More specifically I should say, the marketing of their existance on the drivers has caused...
If you get rid of the "camera enforced" signs, and the camera flash, we should see a slight improvement as people will be less likely to jam the brakes after seeing the "camera enforced" sign. And if we do that, then the sole perpose of the RLC becomes punative. Effectively, a tax on stupidity. Personally, I like taxing stupidity. But that is a far cry from the marketed 'RLCs save lives' BS the manufacturers and contractors are selling. And it is one that is less likely to pass a muster in a public vote.
However, when you think about it, the *least* dangerous accident you can be in is someone bumping the back of your car when you're slowing down. And the *most* dangerous accident is when someone slams into the side of your car when they floor it through a red light.
5 years ago I would totally agree with you. But as regulations and testing has improved, so have side impact protections. I'm not saying I'd rather get t-boned on my drivers side door, but taking a 40 MPH hit from the rear is almost a guaranty of whip lash. Most cars have crappy head supports, and most drivers and passengers never set their head supports to the appropriate level. That head rest is more than just something to lay your head in, it's a safety device. Unfortunately, most people leave them pushed all the way down. So in event of a rear end collision, instead of supporting their head, it supports their neck, leaving their head free to whip back and exagerate the effect of the whip lash.
Personally, even if the red light cameras don't reduce accidents, there needs to be some sort of visual deterrent preventing people from thinking that running red lights is ok.
I personally have never met a person who (so far as I know) has held the opinion that it is "ok" to run a red light. I would venture a guess that there are far far far far more red light running incidents due to driver inattentiveness than there are due to malice/greed. And as soon as you put a visual deterrent in there other than the stop light itself, you raise the rait of rear end accidents.
I'm not saying we should get rid of RLC, but that they need to not be advertised. People who are familiar with the road will hopefully be more attentive at that specific intersection after getting a ticket, and less familiar drivers will hopefully be more careful in general after getting a ticket. Not that such annecdotal experiences will have any dramatic effect on traffic, but if the trend carries on for a decade, along with improved drivers ed, you might see a reduction in red-light running.
What I am saying though, is that lengthening yellow lights, overlapping reds, and re-engineering bad intersections will save lives from day 1.
None of that solves the original problem GP mentioned: that of asshats running red lights.
Asshats will always be there to run red lights. Inattentiveness, greed, malice, what ever there reason there will always be people who push the yellow or blatently run the reds.
Putting up a camera will not stop them.
The camera will not jump down and yell "STOP!"
The camera will not warn them of cross traffic.
All that camera will do is take a picture after the fact. Even if that 1 person learns from their mistake and ticket, there will be another the next day, and the next, and the next, forever.
On the other hand, lengthening the yellow means that people pushing the yellow will be more likely to be clear of the intersection before cross traffic moves. The common argument against that is that people will just start blowing through the yellow knowing that they have more time to get through. And that argument could have merit. I've seen no data to support it though, and I have seen data to oppose it, and in my anecdotal experiences in Japan where 6 second yellows are the norm, I never saw anyone blow through a yellow more than a second after it changed.
Reducing the traffic speed also has been proven to help. I don't have the report any more, but a major 4-lane highway not far from my old office had a speed limit of 55 and two light controlled intersections. After years of treacherous navigation, they dropped the speed limit to 45 for the 1/4 mile preceding the intersections. And ya know what? The accident rate and fatality rate both dropped.
And finally, in my home town we had a pretty nasty intersection, 5 roads, a higher speed main way, crazy angles... It was in town, so traffic was slow, but there were always accidents. Head on from people turning left, rear-ends from people stopping in the traffic lane, right angles from people jumping out of the side street. Few fatalities thanks to the low speed. But a few years ago they dug up the whole intersection, they pulled one of the roads out, turned another one into 1-way traffic, and the accident rate has dropped significantly.
So yeah, there will always be people who make mistakes. The responsible thing to do is to mitigate the impact of those mistakes on their fellow motorists.
The profitable thing to do is to promote irresponsibility and to tax people for it.
1. I don't think that simply reducing accidents should be the goal. The goal should be reducing severe accidents, and thus deaths and severe injuries. If we manage to reduce the number of fatalities at a given intersection in exchange for suffering more fender-benders, that may be acceptable.
And by increasing yellow times, reducing road speed, and improving visibility and traffic control in dangerous intersections, you will reduce the number of accidents AND fatalities.
2. These studies seem to be pretty tricky to conduct properly. For example, in the fifth one on your linked page, it says:
I would agree with you on that one. There is a lot of variety between different intersections, local driving styles, average road conditions, etc... But the over all trend of data is pointing to RLC intersections having only marginal impacts on their performance, where as longer yellow light times have a more significant impact.
One of the problems with the reports though is the money. With RLC's it isn't a situation where the State buys and maintains the equipment. They lease the equipment and count on the contractor to maintain it. As a payment, the contractors get a payment for every red light ticket that is issued. So both the State and the contractors have a financial incentive in publishing reports that most favor their interests.
3. Everyone who chalks up red light running to poor timing/engineering is forgetting something: no matter how well-engineered an intersection is, there is always going to be some percentage of people who run red lights, not because they have a legitimate reason, but because they are irresponsible, irrational drivers who disregard the law. That is a fact of human nature that no amount of engineering is going to change.
Correct, either due to negligence, incompetence, or malice, there will always be those people who run red lights. Putting up a camera is not going to stop them. Putting up a camera is not going to save someone's life. But, pushing a yellow light from 3 seconds to 5 seconds is very likely to save lives.
And just to throw in some anecdotal evidence, despite the number of people I see running red lights in this city, somehow, I've never found the need to do so at the very same intersections. That makes me question the assertions that they are improperly timed, etc.
I hear you there. I've been guilty of creeping out and pushing the yellow on left hand turns with out turn lights, but that's pretty much an excepted norm in the US these days, and everyone involved is either stationary or moving at very low speeds.
I'm also not one of the crazed anti-RLC jobs who claims that cameras cause accidents. Even if there is an increase in accidents/fatalities in intersections with RLCs, it isn't the camera jumping into people's cars, hitting the gas or break that is causing the issue. The fault still lies with the driver. Maybe they thought they could make it, but saw the "Camera Enforced" sign and slammed on the breaks. Maybe they were tailgating someone else. Maybe they were just driving too fast. What ever their reason, they were the responsible party.
That said, if extending the yellow light time by 1-2 seconds has been proven to improve the safety of an intersection, and reducing the yellow time to 3 seconds or less has been proved to decrease the safety, would it not make more sense to increase the yellow time?
Sure, you and I, as good and safe drivers would wind up taking an addition 14 seconds to get to work if we hit every light at the wrong time. But isn't 28 seconds a day with saving a life or two over the life of the intersection?
I'd be totally for unadvertised RLC (no flash, no signs) at intersections with red-light running issues so long as 2 changes take place: 1) The yellow light time is set to 5 seconds minimum. 2) The profit from the tickets goes to drivers education programs for the state.
For intersections with high rates of run through, the answer is to send an engineer out and rework the light timings to make sure they work in conjunction with surrounding lights and have a sufficient yellow time, to reduce the travel speed on the road close to the intersection, or to re-engineer the intersection to better control traffic.
They are a gimmick designed to turn a profit for the state and the private contractors who operate them. They have a vested interest in making intersections LESS safe by inducing more revenue generating red light tickets.
A) Recording the song, today though, with a small investment anyone can record songs that sound about as good as professionally done songs.
With a small investment you can record things that are roughly acceptable when encoded at a low bit rate MP3. But really, for a professional sounding recording, you need a studio with proper acoustics, high quality mics and processing gear, and someone with the experience and ear to help master the whole thing. And that's going to cost you a fair bit of money. Sure, you're not going to drop $20k on studio time for your first release, you can probably get an el-cheepo recording booth/studio for $100 an hour, but your albumn will come out sounding like a freshman effort.
B) Giving the song air time. Today, radio is a dead medium. Sure, it reaches some people, but internet radio, music video games (Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Tap Tap, etc), online promotions, YouTube, etc will reach a larger number of people, and all those do not require a record label.
The US is a nation of drivers. Internet radio, music video games, online promotions, YouTube, etc... are not available while you are driving. Until we get ubiquitous wifi coverage and better hot swap controls, radio will continue to be a significant market.
C) Giving the album store space. Today, most music sales are digital, its not too hard to put a song on iTunes, Amazon MP3, etc. And while a record label will certainly help getting you into a physical store, that is not the only way.
iTunes has what, 3 million + songs? With more coming in every day. Shelf space is still going to be extremely important. Getting your albumn to come up in "more like this", getting advertising, getting your name known to a larger group of people than your family and friends is going to cost money.
Again, I would absolutely love to agree with you that the RIAA is in it's death throws, but it's not. Yeah, they'll do some restructuring, but so long as there is a large body of musicians looking to get into the market and consumers looking for quality audio recordings, the RIAA will have a market for its services.
Publishing would protect against being sued for this particular "invention". What defensive means in this context is to have a portfolio of patents - if another software vendor sues for violating their patents, Red Hat can point at their portfolio and say "you are violating ours!" and use these to negotiate a deal.
Which leaves us in the position that we should all patent more things, even the most incredibly inane things, just so that if anyone sues us we can sue them back for a negotiating point. Fighting patent trolls by trolling.
I think you raise a great point for the current climate. But I think we can all concur that the current IP climate is fubared. Of course, if the USPTO and courts don't come around before the companies, any company that tries to do the right thing will likely get eaten alive by trolls and competitors.
If we agree that bad patents are bad for innovation, economic growth and advances in technology, it's rather poor form to say "Well, it's okay if Redhat does it, because we like them now". Heck, 20 years ago Microsoft was a rocking little tech company fighting off the big dogs. 20 years from now we could be cursing Redhat for their IP abuses and market influence;)
If Bush were still in office people would be talking about how Bush is just giving hand-outs to his rich buddies that head giant corporations.
If Bush were in office right now the Libertarian movement would be storming Washington, the National Guard would be activated, and what few troops we have not on tour in Afghanistan, Iraq, or deployed in other forward posts would be attempting to quell the revolt.
Bush believed in the Unitarian Executive and has done more to move this country in the direction of Fascism over 8 years than any other President in our history as a nation.
If Bush were still in office today, the Constitution would be burning in the oval office.
All against people who broke now law, people who were LAWFULLY owed the money.
Correction: people who were CONTRACTUALLY owed the money.
There is a whole lot of difference there.
And they are still getting their money. AIG is fulfilling their contractual obligation to pay bonuses. It just so happens that the US Government is increasing its tax rate on large bonuses from companies that have received significant government funds.
The recipients, being US Citizens, are LEGALLY obligated to pay those taxes.
The difference between Contractually and Legally obligated is pretty simple. Breach of contract is a Torte, a civil suit in which someone may be required to pay damages. Refusing to pay taxes (in most cases) is a federal offense, which often results in someone being required to pay damages, putative fines, and possibly jail time.
If AIG refuses to pay their contracts, they can be sued. If the Bonus Recipients refuse to pay their taxes, they can be jailed.
This is nothing new anyways. Anytime the good of the people out weighs the contractual rights of an individual, the State wins. Eminent Domain, as crappy as it is, has existed for a lot longer than Obama's term in office.
In any case, that whole line is off topic. The court case isn't about the tax on bonuses. Over the last 12 years AIG has been using questionable accounting in order to reduce their tax liability. Over the last few years the IRS has begun monitoring some of these questionable acts and has decided to close some of the loop holes.
AIG is suing because they think their their tax liability at different times over the last 12 years is different than what the IRS thinks it is. Which is something they are legally entitled to do and has absolutely no relation to the Bonus tax plan that is in the Senate now.
A patentee owning the whole or any sectional interest in a patent may disclaim any complete claim or claims in a patent. In like manner any patentee may disclaim or dedicate to the public the entire term, or any terminal part of the term, of the patent granted. Such disclaimer is binding upon the grantee and its successors or assigns.
Again, the only reason to hold on to the patent is for offensive reasons. There is nothing stopping them from publishing or dedicating the patent to the public. The prior protecting them in 49 1/2 states, the later protecting them in that 1/2 a remaining state of ethically challenged judges.
These are defensive patents. You have to file them if you're in the US software business, or else risk getting sued for $billions.
I disagree.
If their only concern were defense, then the solution is obvious! PUBLISH. The only difference between publishing your invention and patenting your invention is that you can sue someone for violating your IP rights associated with the patent.
If they publish their invention, it is out there in the wild acting as prior art. If anyone else were to come along and try to sue them over a patent that the plaintiff had been issued after the defendant had published, all they have to do is point to the published article and show the prior art.
In 2004 my capstone project was a TV/DVR remote control software package that ran on a wireless PDA. It worked by sending SOAP requests to a web server that would execute command line instructions on a media service and return XML data based on the result and state of the device.
Their patent sounds like it is almost an exact duplication of my capstone.
I'm sure I have the source floating around somewhere, but I still have images from the app up on the web:
Your argument appears to be that you believe it should illegal for an ISP to throttle traffic below the maximum advertised rate with out just cause. You further argue that a Net Neutrality bill would reinforce the legal requirement of ISPs to provide service at the maximum advertised rate.
My argument is that I believe it is illegal for an ISP to throttle traffic below the maximum advertised rate with out just cause. I further argue that excess traffic is a short term justification, but long term deferment of corrective measures is actionable under a variety of existing consumer protection laws. And finally I argue that Net Neutrality has nothing to do with whole-sale throttling.
Imagine if you will, an ISP that was over leveraged on it's upstream provider, like the original author to 70:1. In order to deal with the volume the ISP does at the OA's boss suggests and throttles traffic at peek times. Unsurprisingly, with in a week customers start calling in complaining. In response to the customer complaints the ISP comes up with a new billing idea. For $25 a month you get the same old 3Mb connection, but you will be throttled at peek times. For $30 a month you get the same 3Mb connection, but you will not be throttled at prime time.
The ISP is now getting an extra $5 a month from a bunch of customers. They haven't increased their bandwidth, and as more and more people make the jump to the "fast lane" the worse and worse the discount connection becomes. Eventually, if enough people jump to the fast lane, it too will start to degrade.
Now think about it from the other direction. In addition to charging users more for un-throttled connections, they can turn around and tell Google, either you pay us $50,000 a month, or all of your services will be throttled. Effectively creating a fast lane for content providers as well.
To go even further with that, there are thousands of ISPs in the US, imagine if everyone of them had the power to force Google to pay extra for maintaining the same connection speed they already enjoy to every one of their US users.
And then you get into the corruption areas, since the ISPs are already filtering fast lane/slow lane communications depending on other services willingness to pay, what's to stop them from just refusing to offer the fast lane to competitors? Imagine if Comcast/Charter put Vonage connections into the slow lane and refused to offer them access to the fast lane no matter how much they were willing to pay since they offer their own VOIP package.
THAT is what Net Neutrality is for. It prevents the creation of favoritism in the ISPs and backbone. If those providers do not remain neutral, they can shape the future of technology by effectively tanking smaller organizations that don't have the financial ability to pay for favored services or compete against the ISP's own services.
Imagine if the cable industry had a significant interest in Facebook while the phone industry had a significant interest in MySpace, and due to those interests they provided favorable services to the customers using those services. Cable modem users would be able to fly around on Facebook, but loading a MySpace page could take a full minute. And just the opposite for customers of the phone companies. Or heck, imagine both providers offered their own social networking site, MySpace and Facebook may never have come to exist as they do today because as soon as they started gaining any bandwidth, the would have been dropped to a low performance category and pretty much all US users would get fed up with slow page loads and turn to other options (like the ones provided by the ISPs).
So long as the original author does not create separate traffic shaping algorithms depending on the consumers' or providers' willingness to pay, Net Neutrality will never effect him.
I'm sure you have some good points in there, unfortunately I got to this part and pretty much gave up.
This is 100% legal and expected. Net Neutrality has nothing to do with this.
Actually, once we are on the same page, I think you will agree with me that it is illegal and net neutrality has everything to do with it.
I said it is legal and has nothing to with Net Neutrality. You said the opposite. I can not in good concience find a way in which those two points of view could both be accepted as being on the same page.
I agree with you that throttling sucks, and that if a vendor fails to provide their advertised service, that there should be ramifications for it, but again, that is not an issue of net neutrality, it is an issue for lawyers to hash out over the exiting case law of consumer rights, marketing, fraud, and the like.
First, I have to ask, are they really selling you a connection with a maximum speed when they limit it.
Absolutely. Go look at your ISP contract. Heck, go look at the advertisements. AT&T's Pro DSL Packages is listed as:
Downstream Speed: Up to 3.0 Mbps Upstream Speed: Up to 512 Kbps
(Emphasis mine)
You are not being sold a Minimum speed, you are being sold a Maximum speed. Even if you are the only person on a switch connected to an OC3, you will still only get 3 Mbps. If you are on a OC3 with 15,000 active users, you are going to be lucky to get get 14.4 Kbps. Your contract is still for access with a maximum speed of 3Mbps, but congestion is drastically reducing the effective speed. No where on AT&T's DSL site is a minimum connection speed ever listed. No guarantees of 3Mbps is ever made, just that the connection you are paying for is capable of transfer rates "Up To" 3.0Mbps.
This is 100% legal and expected. Net Neutrality has nothing to do with this. There are other consumer protection laws and regulations that are involved. Gross overselling of the pipe such that the average consumer will never see their max rate is likely something the BBB and FCC should be involved in, but it is not in the realm of Net Neutrality.
To see why Net Neutrality is so critical though, and why deep packet inspection and throttling is so dangerous, we only have to take a slight step into theory.
Lets say you are a VOIP phone company, say like Vonage. Your service depends on people having solid internet connections. Lets say one of your customers is on a cable modem. Many cable/internet providers are now also offering VOIP home phone systems. If your customer's ISP is inspecting packets and seeing that there are VOIP packets coming from the customer that are not part of their phone system, what's to stop them from throttling it?
Nothing.
They can claim that it is a high bandwidth consuming application, lump it in with P2P and FTP and throttle it back to nothing while allowing their own VOIP services to run either unhindered in a dedicated range of the bandwidth ensuring higher quality. They can then contact you and demand payment for getting your services out of the throttled block, or contact their users and demand more money to prevent their connection from being throttled.
Net Neutrality slams that door shut. It says that the ISP must treat all traffic the same. That means that if they do traffic shaping it has to be the same across the board, they can't give preference to their own services or to 3rd party services who pay more. They can't alter traffic shaping rules based on how much a customer pays. etc...
So we want to avert ISPs from going down the traffic shaping and packet inspection route, not because it is inherently bad, but because it opens up a huge avenue for abuse. And once that technology is in place, it is going to be virtually impossible to get rid of.
I understand your position, and I think you are correct, but, if you look at the fine print of your ISP contract, you'll see that they aren't (for the most part) garunteeing you a minimum speed, or a % of time at the maximum speed. All they are selling you is a connection with a maximum speed.
To go with a car analogy: You buy a ferrari from a local dealership that just happens to own the toll road you drive on every day. They tell you that the ferrari can do 200 MPH like its cool. And sure enough, one morning at 4AM you get out onto that toll road and wind it up to 200MPH.
4 hours later, you're heading in to work at rush hour. Your car is still capable of going 200 MPH, but there are 80,000 other people trying to use that same road and everyone is stuck goig 55MPH. Now, you could try weaving through traffic to maintain a 65+ MPH speed, but since that causes issues for other drivers (and likely an accident) the owner of the road sets the speed limit to 55MPH during the day.
Perfectly legal and logical.
The problem comes when intensions go south.
If while driving on that road, you are driving a car that you did not buy from the dealership, they may try to set your speed limit to 55 while others are unlimited (Skype VS ISP VOIP services). Or if you are driving a large truck filled with random things that a 3rd party doesn want you to move (P2P).
Net Neutrality to me doesn't matter for the peek time throttling so much as it matters for unfair technical and business practices that allow ISPs and their partners to destroy small business and inventive software at the push of a button.
The reason is simple, if you wanted to sell 5Mb service to 2000 people, and you wanted to be able to offer all 2000 people 5Mb at any moment in time, you would need a 10Gb connection to your provider. Which means you are looking at an OC192 or Sonnet-10 connection.
Realistically though, you will never ever have all 2000 customers online at the exact same moment attempting to use their full 5Mb bandwidth.
So while you would need an OC192 to provide the max cap, you can realistically offer everyone their 5Mb bandwidth using only an OC3.
With residential services though, you hit a peek usage. Between 4:30-9:30pm your demand skyrockets. The challenge then is to generate solid reporting data on the usage and find a way to either increase capacity or decrease usage. And that's exactly the boat that the original author is in.
I am no industry insider, but at 70:1, they are likely over sold for the connection. The only way to maintain the promised performance is to either motivate people to consume less bandwidth at peek times, or to reduce the number of customers.
The other option is to decrease usage through traffic shaping. By slowing P2P traffic at the router during peek hours you can reduce the load on your provider, allowing more people to enjoy the expected performance while still allowing P2P users to get the full 5Mb performance during non-peek hours.
As much as I dislike traffic shaping, it is the cheapest and easiest answer, and it will have a positive effect on most user experiences, a negative effect on some, and only be detectable by a slim minority of users. Personally, I, like the author, would much prefer to see more bandwidth. But until traffic shaping become illegal, I don't see anyone making jumps in that direction other than their already established growth plans.
Alternatively, a MB download limit based on credits that have a flexible value based on time of day would likely be a legal way to manipulate usage. From 4:30-9:30 1 credit = 1 MB, from 9:30-4:30 1 credit = 3 MB. Get people to queue up their downloads for non-peek time and the issue largely disappears.
So he (Obama) was focusing on immediate pressing issues (Stimulus, unemployment, taxes, education, health care) while delegating responsibility to the appropriate departments...
As part of that delegation he explicitly states that FOIA requests should be honored when ever possible and should be erred on the side of transparency.
OK, not seeing anything too scary yet.
A Bush appointee working in one of those appropriate department refuses a FOIA request on the grounds of National Security.
Again, nothing surprising. There are multiple possibilities:
1) The appointee is still following marching orders from Bush (doubtful) 2) The appointee is a corporate shill that is trying to hide corporate influence (less doubtful) 3) The appointee feels that there is something in the documentation that exposes information that could lead to a threat against US interests (compromising financial secrecy, negotiation arguments, etc...) (possible) 4) All parties involved are contractually obligated to NOT release any information under penalty of international sanctions (highly likely)
The question though, is what will Obama do about it? Will he demand the department to release the documents? Will he issue a statement explaining that they can not release the documents until the negotiations are complete? Will he comment that due to international responsibilities they can not show anything? Or will he do nothing until the treaty goes to the house for a vote?
Your best bet, other than whining about it on/., would be to contact a reporter who has access to the president and lobby them to ask about this specific situation and see if they can get an answer out of him.
When I was in the Marine Corps as a 4067 (Computer Programmer), I lived the life of a Marine. I went to the range, I did my field training, I stood watch, I PTed, my life was almost identical to any other other POG on the base.
That said, as a Corporal in the Marine Corps in 2000, gross salary was about $14,400 a year. We had the barracks to live in, which was effectively a studio apartment with 3 guys crammed into it. The chow hall, which was operated by the lowest bidder, "shoe-leather steak" is not an exaggeration. And Navy Corpsmen for our medical needs, and I had only once seen a Corpsmen bend a needle while it was in someone's arm.
Compared to grunts and a lot of the menial labor guys, we had it easy in the office. AC, computers, internet access...
But sitting right along side of us were civilian contractors, often with bill rates about a factor of 10 larger than our pay rates, doing the exact same job.
We had one guy, an absolute wiz with Unix and Oracle. He got out as a Corporal making his 14.4k a year. The next day after his EAS he started working for the Marine Corps as a contractor, billing $125k/year. He did the exact same job, sat in the exact same seat. He had to do none of the extra military related work, no uniform, no risk of being sent off to war, and his pay-rate had over quintupled.
So anyway, not a whole lot of incentive for people to stay in the military as a nerd unless they are getting into one of these new programs.
There is an incentive to the military IMO of having long term personnel in these programs instead of short term contractors though. Trust, control, and tons of screening. You'll never have the level of control over a civilian contractor that you have over an active duty member of the military.
So.. if I smash a window to pull your unconscious body out of your burning house, that should be illegal just cause I should have ASKED you first?
Poor analogy.
This would be more akin to noticing that your door was unlocked, entering your house, helping themselves to the fridge, prank calling their friends, then waking you up and letting you know that your door was unlocked.
If this exercise had been done with criminal intent it would be breaking the law.
So if I install software on your machine that you paid for, consume the bandwidth that you are paying for, burn extra electricity that is paid for by you, all with out ever even letting you know about it, so long as I'm doing it for finding a cure for cancer, it's perfectly legal?
What if I use that bot net to distribute the load of rendering animated gaping anal gay midget porn movies? It's not a crime to render animated gaping anal gay midget porn movies, so I have no criminal intent, so it must be legal, right?
No joke. I wrote a web application for a group of our users that displays a dynamically generated complex hierarchy of data and allows for line by line editing and updating using JS and AJAX for a smooth user experience.
Since the page is dynamically generated, depending on the users search criteria, they could load 10 objects, or 10,000.
With really small queries, all three of the browsers (IE6, IE7, FF3) render in about the same amount of time. With moderately sized results, say like up to 500, IE6 and FF are almost identical and IE7 trails by just a second. Once you get up above 6,000 objects, IE6 renders incredibly fast (45 seconds).
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You're not going to take a 40 MPH delta-v hit from the rear when stopping at a traffic light, unless the person behind you was asleep at the wheel. And in that case, you have bigger problems than red light cameras, since such snoozers are going to slam into your car regardless of why you had to stop.
Yeah, I spose 40mph was a bit much for hypothesising. I don't have the time right now to track down more accident data, but I would be curious to see the average imapct velocity of rear end and signal/stop violation collisions. have any good sources by chance?
You like taxes on stupidity. I also like stupidity being somewhat painful. Not adjusting your head support to the right height (c'mon, that's not fscking rocket science) fits the bill just fine.
Unfortunately, pain means emergency response and hospitalization, both of which are heavily subsidized by non-stupid tax dollars.
The RLC ticket only taxes the person who runs the light. An accident taxes the whole society (or atleast the local and state geographical taxing areas). So IMO, improving safety (longer yellows, overlapping reds) should be the first priority, while punative attempts at correcting a social danger should be secondary.
-Rick
What you didn't mention about those studies was that the increased accidents were people rear-ending the stopping cars
Way to not read the studies. Most of the studies showed that the fatality and severe injuries either did not change significantly, or actually increased. Most red-light running accidents (relating to people pushing throw a yellow) are not "t-bone" accidents. If someone blows through a red light while there is traffic already crossing there is nothing a camera or yellow light can do to stop them.
So red light cameras DO NOT reduce right angle impacts. They may reduce corner-to-corner impacts, and they have been shown to increase rear end impacts. More specifically I should say, the marketing of their existance on the drivers has caused...
If you get rid of the "camera enforced" signs, and the camera flash, we should see a slight improvement as people will be less likely to jam the brakes after seeing the "camera enforced" sign. And if we do that, then the sole perpose of the RLC becomes punative. Effectively, a tax on stupidity. Personally, I like taxing stupidity. But that is a far cry from the marketed 'RLCs save lives' BS the manufacturers and contractors are selling. And it is one that is less likely to pass a muster in a public vote.
However, when you think about it, the *least* dangerous accident you can be in is someone bumping the back of your car when you're slowing down. And the *most* dangerous accident is when someone slams into the side of your car when they floor it through a red light.
5 years ago I would totally agree with you. But as regulations and testing has improved, so have side impact protections. I'm not saying I'd rather get t-boned on my drivers side door, but taking a 40 MPH hit from the rear is almost a guaranty of whip lash. Most cars have crappy head supports, and most drivers and passengers never set their head supports to the appropriate level. That head rest is more than just something to lay your head in, it's a safety device. Unfortunately, most people leave them pushed all the way down. So in event of a rear end collision, instead of supporting their head, it supports their neck, leaving their head free to whip back and exagerate the effect of the whip lash.
Personally, even if the red light cameras don't reduce accidents, there needs to be some sort of visual deterrent preventing people from thinking that running red lights is ok.
I personally have never met a person who (so far as I know) has held the opinion that it is "ok" to run a red light. I would venture a guess that there are far far far far more red light running incidents due to driver inattentiveness than there are due to malice/greed. And as soon as you put a visual deterrent in there other than the stop light itself, you raise the rait of rear end accidents.
I'm not saying we should get rid of RLC, but that they need to not be advertised. People who are familiar with the road will hopefully be more attentive at that specific intersection after getting a ticket, and less familiar drivers will hopefully be more careful in general after getting a ticket. Not that such annecdotal experiences will have any dramatic effect on traffic, but if the trend carries on for a decade, along with improved drivers ed, you might see a reduction in red-light running.
What I am saying though, is that lengthening yellow lights, overlapping reds, and re-engineering bad intersections will save lives from day 1.
-Rick
None of that solves the original problem GP mentioned: that of asshats running red lights.
Asshats will always be there to run red lights. Inattentiveness, greed, malice, what ever there reason there will always be people who push the yellow or blatently run the reds.
Putting up a camera will not stop them.
The camera will not jump down and yell "STOP!"
The camera will not warn them of cross traffic.
All that camera will do is take a picture after the fact. Even if that 1 person learns from their mistake and ticket, there will be another the next day, and the next, and the next, forever.
On the other hand, lengthening the yellow means that people pushing the yellow will be more likely to be clear of the intersection before cross traffic moves. The common argument against that is that people will just start blowing through the yellow knowing that they have more time to get through. And that argument could have merit. I've seen no data to support it though, and I have seen data to oppose it, and in my anecdotal experiences in Japan where 6 second yellows are the norm, I never saw anyone blow through a yellow more than a second after it changed.
Reducing the traffic speed also has been proven to help. I don't have the report any more, but a major 4-lane highway not far from my old office had a speed limit of 55 and two light controlled intersections. After years of treacherous navigation, they dropped the speed limit to 45 for the 1/4 mile preceding the intersections. And ya know what? The accident rate and fatality rate both dropped.
And finally, in my home town we had a pretty nasty intersection, 5 roads, a higher speed main way, crazy angles... It was in town, so traffic was slow, but there were always accidents. Head on from people turning left, rear-ends from people stopping in the traffic lane, right angles from people jumping out of the side street. Few fatalities thanks to the low speed. But a few years ago they dug up the whole intersection, they pulled one of the roads out, turned another one into 1-way traffic, and the accident rate has dropped significantly.
So yeah, there will always be people who make mistakes. The responsible thing to do is to mitigate the impact of those mistakes on their fellow motorists.
The profitable thing to do is to promote irresponsibility and to tax people for it.
-Rick
1. I don't think that simply reducing accidents should be the goal. The goal should be reducing severe accidents, and thus deaths and severe injuries. If we manage to reduce the number of fatalities at a given intersection in exchange for suffering more fender-benders, that may be acceptable.
And by increasing yellow times, reducing road speed, and improving visibility and traffic control in dangerous intersections, you will reduce the number of accidents AND fatalities.
2. These studies seem to be pretty tricky to conduct properly. For example, in the fifth one on your linked page, it says:
I would agree with you on that one. There is a lot of variety between different intersections, local driving styles, average road conditions, etc... But the over all trend of data is pointing to RLC intersections having only marginal impacts on their performance, where as longer yellow light times have a more significant impact.
One of the problems with the reports though is the money. With RLC's it isn't a situation where the State buys and maintains the equipment. They lease the equipment and count on the contractor to maintain it. As a payment, the contractors get a payment for every red light ticket that is issued. So both the State and the contractors have a financial incentive in publishing reports that most favor their interests.
3. Everyone who chalks up red light running to poor timing/engineering is forgetting something: no matter how well-engineered an intersection is, there is always going to be some percentage of people who run red lights, not because they have a legitimate reason, but because they are irresponsible, irrational drivers who disregard the law. That is a fact of human nature that no amount of engineering is going to change.
Correct, either due to negligence, incompetence, or malice, there will always be those people who run red lights. Putting up a camera is not going to stop them. Putting up a camera is not going to save someone's life. But, pushing a yellow light from 3 seconds to 5 seconds is very likely to save lives.
And just to throw in some anecdotal evidence, despite the number of people I see running red lights in this city, somehow, I've never found the need to do so at the very same intersections. That makes me question the assertions that they are improperly timed, etc.
I hear you there. I've been guilty of creeping out and pushing the yellow on left hand turns with out turn lights, but that's pretty much an excepted norm in the US these days, and everyone involved is either stationary or moving at very low speeds.
I'm also not one of the crazed anti-RLC jobs who claims that cameras cause accidents. Even if there is an increase in accidents/fatalities in intersections with RLCs, it isn't the camera jumping into people's cars, hitting the gas or break that is causing the issue. The fault still lies with the driver. Maybe they thought they could make it, but saw the "Camera Enforced" sign and slammed on the breaks. Maybe they were tailgating someone else. Maybe they were just driving too fast. What ever their reason, they were the responsible party.
That said, if extending the yellow light time by 1-2 seconds has been proven to improve the safety of an intersection, and reducing the yellow time to 3 seconds or less has been proved to decrease the safety, would it not make more sense to increase the yellow time?
Sure, you and I, as good and safe drivers would wind up taking an addition 14 seconds to get to work if we hit every light at the wrong time. But isn't 28 seconds a day with saving a life or two over the life of the intersection?
I'd be totally for unadvertised RLC (no flash, no signs) at intersections with red-light running issues so long as 2 changes take place:
1) The yellow light time is set to 5 seconds minimum.
2) The profit from the tickets goes to drivers education programs for the state.
You appear to be under the misconception that red light cameras reduce accidents.
It simply isn't the case. http://www.motorists.org/blog/red-light-cameras-increase-accidents-5-studies-that-prove-it/
For intersections with high rates of run through, the answer is to send an engineer out and rework the light timings to make sure they work in conjunction with surrounding lights and have a sufficient yellow time, to reduce the travel speed on the road close to the intersection, or to re-engineer the intersection to better control traffic.
They are a gimmick designed to turn a profit for the state and the private contractors who operate them. They have a vested interest in making intersections LESS safe by inducing more revenue generating red light tickets.
-Rick
I would love to believe you, but:
A) Recording the song, today though, with a small investment anyone can record songs that sound about as good as professionally done songs.
With a small investment you can record things that are roughly acceptable when encoded at a low bit rate MP3. But really, for a professional sounding recording, you need a studio with proper acoustics, high quality mics and processing gear, and someone with the experience and ear to help master the whole thing. And that's going to cost you a fair bit of money. Sure, you're not going to drop $20k on studio time for your first release, you can probably get an el-cheepo recording booth/studio for $100 an hour, but your albumn will come out sounding like a freshman effort.
B) Giving the song air time. Today, radio is a dead medium. Sure, it reaches some people, but internet radio, music video games (Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Tap Tap, etc), online promotions, YouTube, etc will reach a larger number of people, and all those do not require a record label.
The US is a nation of drivers. Internet radio, music video games, online promotions, YouTube, etc... are not available while you are driving. Until we get ubiquitous wifi coverage and better hot swap controls, radio will continue to be a significant market.
C) Giving the album store space. Today, most music sales are digital, its not too hard to put a song on iTunes, Amazon MP3, etc. And while a record label will certainly help getting you into a physical store, that is not the only way.
iTunes has what, 3 million + songs? With more coming in every day. Shelf space is still going to be extremely important. Getting your albumn to come up in "more like this", getting advertising, getting your name known to a larger group of people than your family and friends is going to cost money.
Again, I would absolutely love to agree with you that the RIAA is in it's death throws, but it's not. Yeah, they'll do some restructuring, but so long as there is a large body of musicians looking to get into the market and consumers looking for quality audio recordings, the RIAA will have a market for its services.
-Rick
Publishing would protect against being sued for this particular "invention". What defensive means in this context is to have a portfolio of patents - if another software vendor sues for violating their patents, Red Hat can point at their portfolio and say "you are violating ours!" and use these to negotiate a deal.
Which leaves us in the position that we should all patent more things, even the most incredibly inane things, just so that if anyone sues us we can sue them back for a negotiating point. Fighting patent trolls by trolling.
I think you raise a great point for the current climate. But I think we can all concur that the current IP climate is fubared. Of course, if the USPTO and courts don't come around before the companies, any company that tries to do the right thing will likely get eaten alive by trolls and competitors.
If we agree that bad patents are bad for innovation, economic growth and advances in technology, it's rather poor form to say "Well, it's okay if Redhat does it, because we like them now". Heck, 20 years ago Microsoft was a rocking little tech company fighting off the big dogs. 20 years from now we could be cursing Redhat for their IP abuses and market influence ;)
-Rick
If Bush were still in office people would be talking about how Bush is just giving hand-outs to his rich buddies that head giant corporations.
If Bush were in office right now the Libertarian movement would be storming Washington, the National Guard would be activated, and what few troops we have not on tour in Afghanistan, Iraq, or deployed in other forward posts would be attempting to quell the revolt.
Bush believed in the Unitarian Executive and has done more to move this country in the direction of Fascism over 8 years than any other President in our history as a nation.
If Bush were still in office today, the Constitution would be burning in the oval office.
-Rick
All against people who broke now law, people who were LAWFULLY owed the money.
Correction: people who were CONTRACTUALLY owed the money.
There is a whole lot of difference there.
And they are still getting their money. AIG is fulfilling their contractual obligation to pay bonuses. It just so happens that the US Government is increasing its tax rate on large bonuses from companies that have received significant government funds.
The recipients, being US Citizens, are LEGALLY obligated to pay those taxes.
The difference between Contractually and Legally obligated is pretty simple. Breach of contract is a Torte, a civil suit in which someone may be required to pay damages. Refusing to pay taxes (in most cases) is a federal offense, which often results in someone being required to pay damages, putative fines, and possibly jail time.
If AIG refuses to pay their contracts, they can be sued. If the Bonus Recipients refuse to pay their taxes, they can be jailed.
This is nothing new anyways. Anytime the good of the people out weighs the contractual rights of an individual, the State wins. Eminent Domain, as crappy as it is, has existed for a lot longer than Obama's term in office.
In any case, that whole line is off topic. The court case isn't about the tax on bonuses. Over the last 12 years AIG has been using questionable accounting in order to reduce their tax liability. Over the last few years the IRS has begun monitoring some of these questionable acts and has decided to close some of the loop holes.
AIG is suing because they think their their tax liability at different times over the last 12 years is different than what the IRS thinks it is. Which is something they are legally entitled to do and has absolutely no relation to the Bonus tax plan that is in the Senate now.
-Rick
37 CFR 1.321
A patentee owning the whole or any sectional interest in a patent may disclaim any complete claim or claims in a patent. In like manner any patentee may disclaim or dedicate to the public the entire term, or any terminal part of the term, of the patent granted. Such disclaimer is binding upon the grantee and its successors or assigns.
Again, the only reason to hold on to the patent is for offensive reasons. There is nothing stopping them from publishing or dedicating the patent to the public. The prior protecting them in 49 1/2 states, the later protecting them in that 1/2 a remaining state of ethically challenged judges.
-Rick
These are defensive patents. You have to file them if you're in the US software business, or else risk getting sued for $billions.
I disagree.
If their only concern were defense, then the solution is obvious! PUBLISH. The only difference between publishing your invention and patenting your invention is that you can sue someone for violating your IP rights associated with the patent.
If they publish their invention, it is out there in the wild acting as prior art. If anyone else were to come along and try to sue them over a patent that the plaintiff had been issued after the defendant had published, all they have to do is point to the published article and show the prior art.
-Rick
In 2004 my capstone project was a TV/DVR remote control software package that ran on a wireless PDA. It worked by sending SOAP requests to a web server that would execute command line instructions on a media service and return XML data based on the result and state of the device.
Their patent sounds like it is almost an exact duplication of my capstone.
I'm sure I have the source floating around somewhere, but I still have images from the app up on the web:
http://ringdev.com/images/BlueSkinListing.bmp
http://ringdev.com/images/RedLineSkinListing.bmp
http://ringdev.com/images/RedLineSkinDetail.bmp
-Rick
Your argument appears to be that you believe it should illegal for an ISP to throttle traffic below the maximum advertised rate with out just cause. You further argue that a Net Neutrality bill would reinforce the legal requirement of ISPs to provide service at the maximum advertised rate.
My argument is that I believe it is illegal for an ISP to throttle traffic below the maximum advertised rate with out just cause. I further argue that excess traffic is a short term justification, but long term deferment of corrective measures is actionable under a variety of existing consumer protection laws. And finally I argue that Net Neutrality has nothing to do with whole-sale throttling.
Imagine if you will, an ISP that was over leveraged on it's upstream provider, like the original author to 70:1. In order to deal with the volume the ISP does at the OA's boss suggests and throttles traffic at peek times. Unsurprisingly, with in a week customers start calling in complaining. In response to the customer complaints the ISP comes up with a new billing idea. For $25 a month you get the same old 3Mb connection, but you will be throttled at peek times. For $30 a month you get the same 3Mb connection, but you will not be throttled at prime time.
The ISP is now getting an extra $5 a month from a bunch of customers. They haven't increased their bandwidth, and as more and more people make the jump to the "fast lane" the worse and worse the discount connection becomes. Eventually, if enough people jump to the fast lane, it too will start to degrade.
Now think about it from the other direction. In addition to charging users more for un-throttled connections, they can turn around and tell Google, either you pay us $50,000 a month, or all of your services will be throttled. Effectively creating a fast lane for content providers as well.
To go even further with that, there are thousands of ISPs in the US, imagine if everyone of them had the power to force Google to pay extra for maintaining the same connection speed they already enjoy to every one of their US users.
And then you get into the corruption areas, since the ISPs are already filtering fast lane/slow lane communications depending on other services willingness to pay, what's to stop them from just refusing to offer the fast lane to competitors? Imagine if Comcast/Charter put Vonage connections into the slow lane and refused to offer them access to the fast lane no matter how much they were willing to pay since they offer their own VOIP package.
THAT is what Net Neutrality is for. It prevents the creation of favoritism in the ISPs and backbone. If those providers do not remain neutral, they can shape the future of technology by effectively tanking smaller organizations that don't have the financial ability to pay for favored services or compete against the ISP's own services.
Imagine if the cable industry had a significant interest in Facebook while the phone industry had a significant interest in MySpace, and due to those interests they provided favorable services to the customers using those services. Cable modem users would be able to fly around on Facebook, but loading a MySpace page could take a full minute. And just the opposite for customers of the phone companies. Or heck, imagine both providers offered their own social networking site, MySpace and Facebook may never have come to exist as they do today because as soon as they started gaining any bandwidth, the would have been dropped to a low performance category and pretty much all US users would get fed up with slow page loads and turn to other options (like the ones provided by the ISPs).
So long as the original author does not create separate traffic shaping algorithms depending on the consumers' or providers' willingness to pay, Net Neutrality will never effect him.
-Rick
I'm sure you have some good points in there, unfortunately I got to this part and pretty much gave up.
This is 100% legal and expected. Net Neutrality has nothing to do with this.
Actually, once we are on the same page, I think you will agree with me that it is illegal and net neutrality has everything to do with it.
I said it is legal and has nothing to with Net Neutrality. You said the opposite. I can not in good concience find a way in which those two points of view could both be accepted as being on the same page.
I agree with you that throttling sucks, and that if a vendor fails to provide their advertised service, that there should be ramifications for it, but again, that is not an issue of net neutrality, it is an issue for lawyers to hash out over the exiting case law of consumer rights, marketing, fraud, and the like.
-Rick
It's just like Windows, Microsoft has to put all that annoying crap in there to force people to be better users.
err.... wait a second...
-Rick
First, I have to ask, are they really selling you a connection with a maximum speed when they limit it.
Absolutely. Go look at your ISP contract. Heck, go look at the advertisements. AT&T's Pro DSL Packages is listed as:
Downstream Speed: Up to 3.0 Mbps
Upstream Speed: Up to 512 Kbps
(Emphasis mine)
You are not being sold a Minimum speed, you are being sold a Maximum speed. Even if you are the only person on a switch connected to an OC3, you will still only get 3 Mbps. If you are on a OC3 with 15,000 active users, you are going to be lucky to get get 14.4 Kbps. Your contract is still for access with a maximum speed of 3Mbps, but congestion is drastically reducing the effective speed. No where on AT&T's DSL site is a minimum connection speed ever listed. No guarantees of 3Mbps is ever made, just that the connection you are paying for is capable of transfer rates "Up To" 3.0Mbps.
This is 100% legal and expected. Net Neutrality has nothing to do with this. There are other consumer protection laws and regulations that are involved. Gross overselling of the pipe such that the average consumer will never see their max rate is likely something the BBB and FCC should be involved in, but it is not in the realm of Net Neutrality.
To see why Net Neutrality is so critical though, and why deep packet inspection and throttling is so dangerous, we only have to take a slight step into theory.
Lets say you are a VOIP phone company, say like Vonage. Your service depends on people having solid internet connections. Lets say one of your customers is on a cable modem. Many cable/internet providers are now also offering VOIP home phone systems. If your customer's ISP is inspecting packets and seeing that there are VOIP packets coming from the customer that are not part of their phone system, what's to stop them from throttling it?
Nothing.
They can claim that it is a high bandwidth consuming application, lump it in with P2P and FTP and throttle it back to nothing while allowing their own VOIP services to run either unhindered in a dedicated range of the bandwidth ensuring higher quality. They can then contact you and demand payment for getting your services out of the throttled block, or contact their users and demand more money to prevent their connection from being throttled.
Net Neutrality slams that door shut. It says that the ISP must treat all traffic the same. That means that if they do traffic shaping it has to be the same across the board, they can't give preference to their own services or to 3rd party services who pay more. They can't alter traffic shaping rules based on how much a customer pays. etc...
So we want to avert ISPs from going down the traffic shaping and packet inspection route, not because it is inherently bad, but because it opens up a huge avenue for abuse. And once that technology is in place, it is going to be virtually impossible to get rid of.
-Rick
I understand your position, and I think you are correct, but, if you look at the fine print of your ISP contract, you'll see that they aren't (for the most part) garunteeing you a minimum speed, or a % of time at the maximum speed. All they are selling you is a connection with a maximum speed.
To go with a car analogy:
You buy a ferrari from a local dealership that just happens to own the toll road you drive on every day. They tell you that the ferrari can do 200 MPH like its cool. And sure enough, one morning at 4AM you get out onto that toll road and wind it up to 200MPH.
4 hours later, you're heading in to work at rush hour. Your car is still capable of going 200 MPH, but there are 80,000 other people trying to use that same road and everyone is stuck goig 55MPH. Now, you could try weaving through traffic to maintain a 65+ MPH speed, but since that causes issues for other drivers (and likely an accident) the owner of the road sets the speed limit to 55MPH during the day.
Perfectly legal and logical.
The problem comes when intensions go south.
If while driving on that road, you are driving a car that you did not buy from the dealership, they may try to set your speed limit to 55 while others are unlimited (Skype VS ISP VOIP services). Or if you are driving a large truck filled with random things that a 3rd party doesn want you to move (P2P).
Net Neutrality to me doesn't matter for the peek time throttling so much as it matters for unfair technical and business practices that allow ISPs and their partners to destroy small business and inventive software at the push of a button.
-Rick
Most of us will still refer to it as SF
Which we all know is an acronym for "Shitty Flicks"
-Rick
The reason is simple, if you wanted to sell 5Mb service to 2000 people, and you wanted to be able to offer all 2000 people 5Mb at any moment in time, you would need a 10Gb connection to your provider. Which means you are looking at an OC192 or Sonnet-10 connection.
Realistically though, you will never ever have all 2000 customers online at the exact same moment attempting to use their full 5Mb bandwidth.
So while you would need an OC192 to provide the max cap, you can realistically offer everyone their 5Mb bandwidth using only an OC3.
With residential services though, you hit a peek usage. Between 4:30-9:30pm your demand skyrockets. The challenge then is to generate solid reporting data on the usage and find a way to either increase capacity or decrease usage. And that's exactly the boat that the original author is in.
I am no industry insider, but at 70:1, they are likely over sold for the connection. The only way to maintain the promised performance is to either motivate people to consume less bandwidth at peek times, or to reduce the number of customers.
The other option is to decrease usage through traffic shaping. By slowing P2P traffic at the router during peek hours you can reduce the load on your provider, allowing more people to enjoy the expected performance while still allowing P2P users to get the full 5Mb performance during non-peek hours.
As much as I dislike traffic shaping, it is the cheapest and easiest answer, and it will have a positive effect on most user experiences, a negative effect on some, and only be detectable by a slim minority of users. Personally, I, like the author, would much prefer to see more bandwidth. But until traffic shaping become illegal, I don't see anyone making jumps in that direction other than their already established growth plans.
Alternatively, a MB download limit based on credits that have a flexible value based on time of day would likely be a legal way to manipulate usage. From 4:30-9:30 1 credit = 1 MB, from 9:30-4:30 1 credit = 3 MB. Get people to queue up their downloads for non-peek time and the issue largely disappears.
-Rick
So he (Obama) was focusing on immediate pressing issues (Stimulus, unemployment, taxes, education, health care) while delegating responsibility to the appropriate departments...
As part of that delegation he explicitly states that FOIA requests should be honored when ever possible and should be erred on the side of transparency.
OK, not seeing anything too scary yet.
A Bush appointee working in one of those appropriate department refuses a FOIA request on the grounds of National Security.
Again, nothing surprising. There are multiple possibilities:
1) The appointee is still following marching orders from Bush (doubtful)
2) The appointee is a corporate shill that is trying to hide corporate influence (less doubtful)
3) The appointee feels that there is something in the documentation that exposes information that could lead to a threat against US interests (compromising financial secrecy, negotiation arguments, etc...) (possible)
4) All parties involved are contractually obligated to NOT release any information under penalty of international sanctions (highly likely)
The question though, is what will Obama do about it? Will he demand the department to release the documents? Will he issue a statement explaining that they can not release the documents until the negotiations are complete? Will he comment that due to international responsibilities they can not show anything? Or will he do nothing until the treaty goes to the house for a vote?
Your best bet, other than whining about it on /., would be to contact a reporter who has access to the president and lobby them to ask about this specific situation and see if they can get an answer out of him.
-Rick
Pay rate != Bill rate
-Rick
When I was in the Marine Corps as a 4067 (Computer Programmer), I lived the life of a Marine. I went to the range, I did my field training, I stood watch, I PTed, my life was almost identical to any other other POG on the base.
That said, as a Corporal in the Marine Corps in 2000, gross salary was about $14,400 a year. We had the barracks to live in, which was effectively a studio apartment with 3 guys crammed into it. The chow hall, which was operated by the lowest bidder, "shoe-leather steak" is not an exaggeration. And Navy Corpsmen for our medical needs, and I had only once seen a Corpsmen bend a needle while it was in someone's arm.
Compared to grunts and a lot of the menial labor guys, we had it easy in the office. AC, computers, internet access...
But sitting right along side of us were civilian contractors, often with bill rates about a factor of 10 larger than our pay rates, doing the exact same job.
We had one guy, an absolute wiz with Unix and Oracle. He got out as a Corporal making his 14.4k a year. The next day after his EAS he started working for the Marine Corps as a contractor, billing $125k/year. He did the exact same job, sat in the exact same seat. He had to do none of the extra military related work, no uniform, no risk of being sent off to war, and his pay-rate had over quintupled.
So anyway, not a whole lot of incentive for people to stay in the military as a nerd unless they are getting into one of these new programs.
There is an incentive to the military IMO of having long term personnel in these programs instead of short term contractors though. Trust, control, and tons of screening. You'll never have the level of control over a civilian contractor that you have over an active duty member of the military.
-Rick
So.. if I smash a window to pull your unconscious body out of your burning house, that should be illegal just cause I should have ASKED you first?
Poor analogy.
This would be more akin to noticing that your door was unlocked, entering your house, helping themselves to the fridge, prank calling their friends, then waking you up and letting you know that your door was unlocked.
-Rick
If this exercise had been done with criminal intent it would be breaking the law.
So if I install software on your machine that you paid for, consume the bandwidth that you are paying for, burn extra electricity that is paid for by you, all with out ever even letting you know about it, so long as I'm doing it for finding a cure for cancer, it's perfectly legal?
What if I use that bot net to distribute the load of rendering animated gaping anal gay midget porn movies? It's not a crime to render animated gaping anal gay midget porn movies, so I have no criminal intent, so it must be legal, right?
-Rick
No joke. I wrote a web application for a group of our users that displays a dynamically generated complex hierarchy of data and allows for line by line editing and updating using JS and AJAX for a smooth user experience.
Since the page is dynamically generated, depending on the users search criteria, they could load 10 objects, or 10,000.
With really small queries, all three of the browsers (IE6, IE7, FF3) render in about the same amount of time. With moderately sized results, say like up to 500, IE6 and FF are almost identical and IE7 trails by just a second. Once you get up above 6,000 objects, IE6 renders incredibly fast (45 seconds).
-Rick