(This post is very rambly and starts off subject, but does get back to SF wireless eventually:) )
For everyone that wanks off over the greatness of competition and the private sector, think about how worthless America's cellular phone infrastructure is. I lived in China back in 2000 and they already had much better service, coverage, and prices in a crappy 3rd world country than we have NOW. The reason was because they didn't let a bunch of corporate asses each roll out redundant but incompatible network infrastructure while rewarding execs with massive paychecks and handouts. (those good old private sector telecoms fought for 5 years to keep cellphone users from having number portability and various other consumer rights)
A similar private sector redundant waste exists in our healthcare system where the number of parasites (aka insurance people, administrators and paperwork handlers) increased by about 2,500% in 30 years while the number of VALUABLE WORKERS (docs and nurses) didn't even double. That massive waste and inefficiency would be eliminated with a single payer health insurance system which means the government is the ONLY HEALTH INSURER and EVERYONE BUYS(if able) AND HAS INSURANCE (it doesn't mean the government has any control over doctors or hospitals, only with paying the bills). Here are some benefits of single payer (eliminating for-profit health insurance):
no more problem with rising number of uninsured patient emergencies bankrupting trauma centers
no more problems with employers cutting insurance benefits as EVERYONE has them regardless of job (for a cheaper price too)
no more problems with massive health INEQUALITY (short life expectancy, bad infant mortality, poor treatment) for the poor
no more problems of Uncle Sam footing the bill for the sick & old & poor while private insurers GET RICH INSURING THE HEALTHY & WEALTHY.
no more cruelty of people being denied insurance for "pre-existing conditions" which is a term that ONLY EXISTS IN AMERICA ! (since in other nations insurance is universal)
(i consider it an evil when massive profit is made by insurance executives and shareholders while 45 million Americans lack insurance)
It's all about a SHARED RISK POOL.
Now, LET'S GET ON WITH THE WIRELESS. First of all, wireless is powerful because of its 2 or 3 dimensional nature. A single access point doesn't just serve one room or outlet but instead blankets a large area. SF is a TINY CITY of only 49 square miles (SF is squished on a peninsula). So relatively few access points are needed to cover the entire city with decent bandwidth.
NOW, SOMETHING YOU PROBABLY DON'T KNOW is that SF will be excavating and replacing its ancient sewer system over the next five years. It will be easy for the city to lay fiber optic cable trunks simultaneously and get THE CITY ITSELF into the ISP business, bypassing the current cable & phone utilities. For most of the 750,000 San Francisco citizens some sort of "free" (small taxation) wireless access would be perfectly adequate since they just check email or browse internet. For the bandwidth hogging downloaders and low-latency craving gamers, they could pay a nominal fee for a wired city ISP (it's predicted the city could offer city broadband for only $5 / month). This undercuts the $40-$50 charged by the cable and DSL thieves.
SO WHY IS IT PROBABLY VALUABLE FOR SAN FRANCISCO TO PROVIDE WIRELESS TO THE CITY? Societies build value by building infrastructure. For 95% of San Francisco citizens the ISP is a total parasite that rips them off for way more $$$ than they really use on the network. How else do crapheads like Comcast have enough SPARE $$$ to nearly purchase Disney (though Eisner fought them off i think) ?? It's simple. Our municipalities sell off the rights to monopolize and then these private utilities in turn rip off consumers and dole out dividends, options, and huge pay to their own
you CAN use MSN messenger internet phone service from China though... That gives you the choice of 3 providers for voice...
of course, this means SOMEONE needs to have a CREDIT CARD to pay for the service.. and damn near no Chinese have credit cards... the country is fascinating but pretty ghetto and disorganized..
dude... this has nothing to do with blocking "capitalism".. China IS capitalist... Ask anyone who has lived there.. There is almost nothing socialized or communalized in the nation....
what it fears is DEMOCRACY and dissent and gathering. Americans need to stop masturbating over capitalism, there is nothing virtuous about it. A nation can be a capitalist dictatorship or a socialist democracy. The capitalism does NOT make a thing good OR bad..
But I'll be damned if that democracy doesn't make life better!
Just buy yourself a DOMAIN for only $15 / year at DirectNIC or a number of other BARGAIN domain registrars. DirectNIC offers your domain UNLIMITED numbers of both web addresses and email addresses...
How can this be???? Because each email address/URL merely redirects the mail/URL to your chosen account/site...
SO, you can get your own DOMAIN, HOSTING, REDIRECTION, URL PARKING, and PERMANENT UNLIMITED EMAIL ADDRESSES for the $15 / year bargain.
DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT CHINA, or just the propaganda and images that exist in your head...
There are not forced abortions to meet the "one child" limit.. the penalties are merely financial and government assistance related.. as far as being shot in the head, why don't you ask a few Chinese students at american universities if they fear this??
sure the Tiannenman Square massacre 10+ years ago was a dark point in recent history, but that's merely because, the handful of remaining conservative old men/dictators saw it as a threat.
why don't you just look at pictures of China from the 60s/70s Cultural Revolution and compare the people and cities to the Chinese of the 90s!! There is NO resemblance at all.. 30 years ago the chinese all wore the same uniforms, the education system was shut down, and anarchy ruled.. CHINA IS MAKING DEFINITE PROGRESS!!! Why don't you tell us how to try and change an ancient civilization that just celebrated the Year 4,768 (Year of the Dragon) on its Lunar Calendar.... We heterogeneous US Immigrants with absolutely no history or traditions have little right to evaluate a culture so foreign to ours without some real education/experience.
Re:Communism is incompatable with the internet
on
China's Internet Boom
·
· Score: 1
Maybe you should stop being brainwashed by American media and paranoid isolationist congressman (and Pat Buchanan). Contrary to popular belief, the Chinese have many freedoms and live their lives in an amazing way compared to the the past 150 years of western exploitation, totalitarianism and starvation. The corruption of the last emperors/empress of the final (Qing) dynasty (1600s-1909), the despotic warlords of the 10s and 20s, the Japanese slaughter and mass rapes of the 30s and 40s, the civil war at mid century, the starvations of the 50s "Great Leap Forward", and worst of all, the ugliness and destruction of the 1960s Cultural Revolution have all been weathered by this hearty people. Thanks to the late reformist communist Deng Xiaoping's original reforms and a gradual evolution to "western-style commerce", China is becoming a veritable force and much more civil than westerners believe. I love your comment: "socialism and communism are utter failures." Just remember, there is no country like the great capitalist America with so many rich people controlling so much of the wealth and still so much crime and poverty per capita. Instead of revering our billionaires, we should be ashamed at this warped distribution of wealth among yuppies and priveleged Americans, many of which have never had a hard day of work in their lives. Additionally, capitalism and greed in America has produced a prison system with many times MORE jailed citizens per capita than communist China. Your claim that: "we should be encouraging a democratic/capitalist counter-revolution to restore the chinese nationalist government based in taiwan to power." is foolish too. The whole Taiwanese government is illegitimate and born out of half a century of DICTATORSHIP/FASCISM by the family of Chiang Kaishek and other privileged Chinese. The theft of the riches of mainland China by the Taiwanese was outrageous. When it really mattered at midcentury, the old Nationalist government was busy embezzling and fighting rural communists instead of feeding her own people. Regarding your comment how: "as long as a socialist/commmunist nation exists, the internet can never be 100% free", maybe you should realize that socialism/communism have NOTHING to do with censorship. Last I heard, these were basically monetary policies and intent on distributing wealth, not censoring. Look at all the piece of shit fundamentalist right wing religious fanatic Republicans trying to censor everything in our "glorious" capitalist mecca of America. There is no reason why a socialized country or even a mildly communist country can not ALSO be a democracy since in their purist forms, these are democratic systems. Canada and France are largely socialist and have much fairer distribution of wealth and are generally far more civil than America. I'm proud of China's recent andvances, and most importantly it is obvious that the information exchange facilitated by the internet will only become a vehicle for greater freedom in China. The PRC can not censor everything, and I don't doubt that sometime in the future China may even have a larger economy and fairer government than the USA has.
All PCI Modems are NOT WinModems. Contrary to popular belief, an increasing number of new PCI modems are being released with controllers and hence with some configging WILL be compatible with Linux. There are even 2 companies (Actiontec & forgot the other one) which actively promote or even support their PCI modems as Linux-compatible.
As far as 3Com/USRobotics PCI modems are concerned, MOST of their PCI modems are WinModems (all of them until August 99). The 3CP5610 released in August is a notable exception that has already been configured for DOS & Linux by many. Its apparent "Voice" version, the 3CP5609 is unknown compatability, but it is EXPECTED to work with Linux.
The brand new "Internet Gaming Modem" is model 3CP5613 which follows the above naming pattern which MAY indicate its non-WinModem status. Please note that all previous 56K 3Com modems (before 3CP5610) had a naming scheme of: 00056XX or 00056XX-XX whereas these NEW modems are: 3CP56XX.
Additionally, I'd like to add that I called 3Com over a week ago to ask them what PCI modems were NON-WinModems and they basically had no clue. Two different Tech Service people had never even heard of the Gaming Modem. One person told me the above-mentioned 3CP5610 wasn't a WinModem, and one told me that it it was. (it's NOT a WinModem since its already been used in Linux). Additionally, one tech person told me the 0005690 PCI Voice Modem is a hardware (controller modem) and should work in Linux since the box doesn't say "WinModem", but this is totally FALSE since according to both the above Linux Modem Database and other sources, this modem is NOT LINUX COMPATIBLE... What does this mean? Basically you can't trust the 3Com sources because they don't know what the hell they're talking about. And you can't be sure if a modem without the "WinModem" or "for Windows" designation is really Linux-compatible.
BTW: If anyone is interested in getting either the 3CP5610 (LinuxCompatible) or Gaming Modem 3CP5613 PCI Modems for cheap, go to www.valueamerica.com and use your ValueDollars for 1/2 price (assuming you already knew about that scam, since your chance for 120 free ValueDollars ended Thursday night). You could buy either modem for $60 using ValueDollars. The sweet Linux-compatible 5605 External Serial&USB modem could be purchased for $200/2 = $100 also. VA also has a ton of other modems that may or may not be Linux Compatible. Just note that of the 4 3Com modems with $20 rebates (that expire October 30!!) only the 5687 Internal ISA and the 5686 External Serial are Linux-compatible.
On a final note: I will agree that a 56k PCI Modem is a bit overkill for a low bandwidth device, but ISA seems to be going the way of the dodo, which leaves us PCI, external Serial (is this being phased out too??), or external USB (with Linux USB support in dev)... You make the call!
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For everyone that wanks off over the greatness of competition and the private sector, think about how worthless America's cellular phone infrastructure is. I lived in China back in 2000 and they already had much better service, coverage, and prices in a crappy 3rd world country than we have NOW. The reason was because they didn't let a bunch of corporate asses each roll out redundant but incompatible network infrastructure while rewarding execs with massive paychecks and handouts. (those good old private sector telecoms fought for 5 years to keep cellphone users from having number portability and various other consumer rights)
A similar private sector redundant waste exists in our healthcare system where the number of parasites (aka insurance people, administrators and paperwork handlers) increased by about 2,500% in 30 years while the number of VALUABLE WORKERS (docs and nurses) didn't even double. That massive waste and inefficiency would be eliminated with a single payer health insurance system which means the government is the ONLY HEALTH INSURER and EVERYONE BUYS(if able) AND HAS INSURANCE (it doesn't mean the government has any control over doctors or hospitals, only with paying the bills). Here are some benefits of single payer (eliminating for-profit health insurance):
(i consider it an evil when massive profit is made by insurance executives and shareholders while 45 million Americans lack insurance)
It's all about a SHARED RISK POOL.
Now, LET'S GET ON WITH THE WIRELESS. First of all, wireless is powerful because of its 2 or 3 dimensional nature. A single access point doesn't just serve one room or outlet but instead blankets a large area. SF is a TINY CITY of only 49 square miles (SF is squished on a peninsula). So relatively few access points are needed to cover the entire city with decent bandwidth.
NOW, SOMETHING YOU PROBABLY DON'T KNOW is that SF will be excavating and replacing its ancient sewer system over the next five years. It will be easy for the city to lay fiber optic cable trunks simultaneously and get THE CITY ITSELF into the ISP business, bypassing the current cable & phone utilities. For most of the 750,000 San Francisco citizens some sort of "free" (small taxation) wireless access would be perfectly adequate since they just check email or browse internet. For the bandwidth hogging downloaders and low-latency craving gamers, they could pay a nominal fee for a wired city ISP (it's predicted the city could offer city broadband for only $5 / month). This undercuts the $40-$50 charged by the cable and DSL thieves.
SO WHY IS IT PROBABLY VALUABLE FOR SAN FRANCISCO TO PROVIDE WIRELESS TO THE CITY? Societies build value by building infrastructure. For 95% of San Francisco citizens the ISP is a total parasite that rips them off for way more $$$ than they really use on the network. How else do crapheads like Comcast have enough SPARE $$$ to nearly purchase Disney (though Eisner fought them off i think) ?? It's simple. Our municipalities sell off the rights to monopolize and then these private utilities in turn rip off consumers and dole out dividends, options, and huge pay to their own
you CAN use MSN messenger internet phone service from China though... That gives you the choice of 3 providers for voice...
of course, this means SOMEONE needs to have a CREDIT CARD to pay for the service.. and damn near no Chinese have credit cards... the country is fascinating but pretty ghetto and disorganized..
They already did that LONG AGO..
(for any free web hosting site they KNOW of..)
Geocities and most of those type sites were blocked in China over 2 years ago.. ALL redirection sites are blocked (cjb.net, surf.to, come.to, etc)
dude...
this has nothing to do with blocking "capitalism"..
China IS capitalist... Ask anyone who has lived there.. There is almost nothing socialized or communalized in the nation....
what it fears is DEMOCRACY and dissent and gathering. Americans need to stop masturbating over capitalism, there is nothing virtuous about it. A nation can be a capitalist dictatorship or a socialist democracy. The capitalism does NOT make a thing good OR bad..
But I'll be damned if that democracy doesn't make life better!
Here's a BETTER idea for how to spend your $15:
Just buy yourself a DOMAIN for only $15 / year at DirectNIC or a number of other BARGAIN domain registrars. DirectNIC offers your domain UNLIMITED numbers of both web addresses and email addresses...
How can this be???? Because each email address/URL merely redirects the mail/URL to your chosen account/site...
SO, you can get your own DOMAIN, HOSTING, REDIRECTION, URL PARKING, and PERMANENT UNLIMITED EMAIL ADDRESSES for the $15 / year bargain.
DO YOU KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT CHINA, or just the propaganda and images that exist in your head...
There are not forced abortions to meet the "one child" limit.. the penalties are merely financial and government assistance related.. as far as being shot in the head, why don't you ask a few Chinese students at american universities if they fear this??
sure the Tiannenman Square massacre 10+ years ago was a dark point in recent history, but that's merely because, the handful of remaining conservative old men/dictators saw it as a threat.
why don't you just look at pictures of China from the 60s/70s Cultural Revolution and compare the people and cities to the Chinese of the 90s!! There is NO resemblance at all.. 30 years ago the chinese all wore the same uniforms, the education system was shut down, and anarchy ruled.. CHINA IS MAKING DEFINITE PROGRESS!!! Why don't you tell us how to try and change an ancient civilization that just celebrated the Year 4,768 (Year of the Dragon) on its Lunar Calendar.... We heterogeneous US Immigrants with absolutely no history or traditions have little right to evaluate a culture so foreign to ours without some real education/experience.
Maybe you should stop being brainwashed by American media and paranoid isolationist congressman (and Pat Buchanan). Contrary to popular belief, the Chinese have many freedoms and live their lives in an amazing way compared to the the past 150 years of western exploitation, totalitarianism and starvation. The corruption of the last emperors/empress of the final (Qing) dynasty (1600s-1909), the despotic warlords of the 10s and 20s, the Japanese slaughter and mass rapes of the 30s and 40s, the civil war at mid century, the starvations of the 50s "Great Leap Forward", and worst of all, the ugliness and destruction of the 1960s Cultural Revolution have all been weathered by this hearty people. Thanks to the late reformist communist Deng Xiaoping's original reforms and a gradual evolution to "western-style commerce", China is becoming a veritable force and much more civil than westerners believe. I love your comment: "socialism and communism are utter failures." Just remember, there is no country like the great capitalist America with so many rich people controlling so much of the wealth and still so much crime and poverty per capita. Instead of revering our billionaires, we should be ashamed at this warped distribution of wealth among yuppies and priveleged Americans, many of which have never had a hard day of work in their lives. Additionally, capitalism and greed in America has produced a prison system with many times MORE jailed citizens per capita than communist China. Your claim that: "we should be encouraging a democratic/capitalist counter-revolution to restore the chinese nationalist government based in taiwan to power." is foolish too. The whole Taiwanese government is illegitimate and born out of half a century of DICTATORSHIP/FASCISM by the family of Chiang Kaishek and other privileged Chinese. The theft of the riches of mainland China by the Taiwanese was outrageous. When it really mattered at midcentury, the old Nationalist government was busy embezzling and fighting rural communists instead of feeding her own people. Regarding your comment how: "as long as a socialist/commmunist nation exists, the internet can never be 100% free", maybe you should realize that socialism/communism have NOTHING to do with censorship. Last I heard, these were basically monetary policies and intent on distributing wealth, not censoring. Look at all the piece of shit fundamentalist right wing religious fanatic Republicans trying to censor everything in our "glorious" capitalist mecca of America. There is no reason why a socialized country or even a mildly communist country can not ALSO be a democracy since in their purist forms, these are democratic systems. Canada and France are largely socialist and have much fairer distribution of wealth and are generally far more civil than America. I'm proud of China's recent andvances, and most importantly it is obvious that the information exchange facilitated by the internet will only become a vehicle for greater freedom in China. The PRC can not censor everything, and I don't doubt that sometime in the future China may even have a larger economy and fairer government than the USA has.
All PCI Modems are NOT WinModems. Contrary to popular belief, an increasing number of new PCI modems are being released with controllers and hence with some configging WILL be compatible with Linux. There are even 2 companies (Actiontec & forgot the other one) which actively promote or even support their PCI modems as Linux-compatible.
Go to the semi-official Linux Modem Knowledge Base for more information on this:
http://www.o2.net/~gromitkc/winmodem.html
As far as 3Com/USRobotics PCI modems are concerned, MOST of their PCI modems are WinModems (all of them until August 99). The 3CP5610 released in August is a notable exception that has already been configured for DOS & Linux by many. Its apparent "Voice" version, the 3CP5609 is unknown compatability, but it is EXPECTED to work with Linux.
The brand new "Internet Gaming Modem" is model 3CP5613 which follows the above naming pattern which MAY indicate its non-WinModem status. Please note that all previous 56K 3Com modems (before 3CP5610) had a naming scheme of: 00056XX or 00056XX-XX whereas these NEW modems are: 3CP56XX.
Additionally, I'd like to add that I called 3Com over a week ago to ask them what PCI modems were NON-WinModems and they basically had no clue. Two different Tech Service people had never even heard of the Gaming Modem. One person told me the above-mentioned 3CP5610 wasn't a WinModem, and one told me that it it was. (it's NOT a WinModem since its already been used in Linux). Additionally, one tech person told me the 0005690 PCI Voice Modem is a hardware (controller modem) and should work in Linux since the box doesn't say "WinModem", but this is totally FALSE since according to both the above Linux Modem Database and other sources, this modem is NOT LINUX COMPATIBLE... What does this mean? Basically you can't trust the 3Com sources because they don't know what the hell they're talking about. And you can't be sure if a modem without the "WinModem" or "for Windows" designation is really Linux-compatible.
BTW: If anyone is interested in getting either the 3CP5610 (LinuxCompatible) or Gaming Modem 3CP5613 PCI Modems for cheap, go to www.valueamerica.com and use your ValueDollars for 1/2 price (assuming you already knew about that scam, since your chance for 120 free ValueDollars ended Thursday night). You could buy either modem for $60 using ValueDollars. The sweet Linux-compatible 5605 External Serial&USB modem could be purchased for $200/2 = $100 also. VA also has a ton of other modems that may or may not be Linux Compatible. Just note that of the 4 3Com modems with $20 rebates (that expire October 30!!) only the 5687 Internal ISA and the 5686 External Serial are Linux-compatible.
On a final note: I will agree that a 56k PCI Modem is a bit overkill for a low bandwidth device, but ISA seems to be going the way of the dodo, which leaves us PCI, external Serial (is this being phased out too??), or external USB (with Linux USB support in dev)... You make the call!