There was a guy on here the other day telling me he was the most conservative Republican conservative going.
At the same time he was saying about how welfare should be about giving everyone the exact same amount regardless of who they are (i.e. he was advocating communist ideas).
He was completely unable to grasp that was he was advocating was most definitely not conservative given that by definition conservatism is about resisting change, and he was advocating massive change, and was very much a communist idea - i.e. the complete opposite of the right which he claimed to proudly represent.
I never cease to be amazed how messed up the political views and comments of many Americans are. So many wear their supposed leaning like a badge of honour whilst spouting views that completely contradict it and similarly declaring things about other leanings that make absolutely zero sense. From the libertarians that rally against gay marriage and the freedom to have abortions, to the conservatives that demand profound change, to the tea partiers who claim to be all about the constitution and free speech whilst turning up at opposition rallies armed to try and stifle discussion of opposing views with implied threats. It's insane and it's so painfully hypocritical.
I have more respect for people who at least come out and say what they are. I can't stand Nigel Farage in the UK because he refuses to admit he's far right whilst advocating primarily far right policy - at least Nick Griffin of the BNP for all his flaws had the courage of his convictions to admit what he was even if I think his views are sickening. It's like a denial people have because they fear being associated with Nazism if they openly admit they're far right even though in practice they do in fact often align politically with them. If you don't have the courage to admit what you believe in, whether that's far left communism, or far right fascism or something in between then the implication is simply that you know deep down that there's something wrong with your beliefs. Don't try and dress yourself up as something your not, because either you believe what you believe, or you know full well you're just being selfish, ignorant, and full of shit.
Of course the problem is it works - there's so much confusion especially in the US that you can claim to be a libertarian and people see you as a freedom fighter when in reality you're advocating primarily anti-libertarian policy. It's as if some people see the political leaning people label themselves with as more important in defining what they stand for than the actual policies they're pushing in practice.
People need to learn what different leanings mean and start evaluating candidates on what they actually stand for rather than obscure paranoia over terms that aren't dirty like "liberal" and "socialist" contrary to what the idiot squad likes to pretend. They think by saying "he's a liberal" they're being nasty and slagging them off, when in reality they're saying "he's a guy that supports protecting people's rights and freedoms and ensuring equality" as if that's somehow a bad thing. The opposite of classic liberalism is basically fascism, so by decrying someone for being a liberal with the implication that you oppose liberalism you're effectively aligning yourself with fascism. If only they knew how fucking stupid it made them sound to those of us who know what things like socialism, and liberalism actually are.
The fact is pretty much the entirety of the Western world is primarily liberal with a hint of socialism and a focus on capitalism in them more general economy so to decry that is to decry the bulk of what stands behind Western ideology.
It's also quite possible he simply believes his own bullshit.
This is the guy who was quick to cry terrorism in response to the Lee Rigby murder but at least initially refused to call it terrorism when a Ukrainian far right extremist stabbed a muslim and bombed two mosques in the UK.
Certainly he has a very warped perspective on threats and terrorism so I could quite believe he believes his own bullshit about how Snowden's revelations help terrorists and will be the end of civilisation as we know it.
a) I think it's Russia Today b) Russia Today is like Fox News, it spouts wild conspiracy theories constantly
The fact one of them just happens to have now turned out to be correct doesn't mean they had any special knowledge, they were just slagging off the West as usual with their conspiracies and one of them just turned out to be right.
It doesn't mean they'll ever be right again though, or they may be. Who knows, either way, if you assume they were saying it because they knew about it you run the risk of believing them when they're just talking bollocks.
It will have been happy coincidence and nothing more.
"Uh, what? Did you forget your Prozac this morning or something? You just stated you're not a Citizen so why the fuck would you have any protections under US law? Why the fuck would someone in Russia think that they are protected from Chinese spies under Chinese Law? Do you have ANY idea what the concept of a Sovereign Nation is? It means that each country makes its own rules, which only apply within that countries jurisdiction. That jurisdiction ends at their borders, no matter how much you'd like it to mean otherwise. Treaties aren't worth jack shit if a nation doesn't enshrine the treaty conditions specifically within their own legal structure. All they amount to in most cases is a "Gentleman's Agreement"."
Except America has done exactly that when it ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1992. Article 17 states:
1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation.
2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Yet that is exactly what America is doing. The covenant doesn't distinguish between American and non-American, it's specifically a treaty about every person in the world, and America signed and ratified that.
So calm down and stop talking about things you don't understand. You make yourself look stupid, especially when you make statements about Prozac whilst going off on one like a clueless madman.
"I'll say that real businesses run by competent people rarely have web hosting and email run on the same place."
This is nonsense use of the no-true Scotsman fallacy. There are different companies of different scale, most large and medium sized corporations just host their own e-mail and website outright.
Beyond that there's no fixed pattern of web and e-mail being run in the same place, that's my anecdote, it contradicts yours, but what can't be avoided is the very fact you're trying to argue against - that providers provide web and e-mail hosting together, they do that precisely because regardless of our anecdotes that's what the majority of customers whether they're private individuals or actual businesses want. You're assuming it's this way because of some obscure trait of history, but it's not, it's because it's what the market calls for.
"On the contrary, I'd quess that the market includes these things not because it's what people want, but because it's what's easy to provide. If you're setting up a web server, it's not very hard to throw on support for IMAP/POP/SMTP."
I don't know what kind of dodgy hosting you're using, but that's not how most hosting providers work. Most have clusters of e-mail servers, and clusters of web servers, each providing that service independently of the other service. When you sign up for hosting you rarely have a situation where they create a server for you (virtual or physical) and then stick your web server and e-mail on that one dedicated box - they use their specific server clusters to provide you with those services.
"As far as "paying for services that you don't use", they could get around that by charging a certain amount for al la carte, and then a different amount for a package deal, so it's not really a sensible objection."
Well it is, because it costs to even do that. It costs them to have staff on hand to support those services I may choose, but then opt not to, it costs them to produce a bespoke set of tools to allow me to select from some fancy web interface what I do and don't want. All that costs the host money, and the host has to pass that on to the customer, which means they'll never be cheaper than one that just provides me what I want.
"I believe the answer to those questions is 'No!!". So that might explain why Americans tend to think that Europeans are a bunch of anti-Semtes."
Actually the answer is yes to all of them, so if America thinks otherwise then it's classic American ignorance of the world.
"You clowns can't even defend yourselves without massive American aid. Fix your own fouled nest before criticizing others."
Sorry? Which country has required European support for pretty much every war in it's history? From your dependence on France in your war of independence, through to the fact the British had already destroyed much of the Luftwaffe and German navy, and had it's colonies striking the Japanese before you even came close to entering World War II to your inability to have the war you wanted in Syria because you couldn't get British backing.
I don't think it's Europe that's dependent on America for military action, quite the opposite - in fact when you have gone it alone or at least, almost entirely gone it alone like Somalia, Lebanon, Vietnam, and Cambodia you've been defeated almost every time.
Stop being ignorant and get a clue before making a fool of yourself next time.
"That's cute and all, except European antisemitism is as endemic and as ingrained in their culture as racism is in America."
I've lived in Europe all my life and never seen any evidence of this. The closest thing I've seen is South park and people making Cartman parody anti-semitic comments based on that.
There are anti-semites here, but I see far more hatred between Europeans simply for being from different parts of Europe than I do any anti-semitism - people from Eastern European nations get far more of a hard time in Western Europe when they emigrate there after each EU expansion for example, the unfair attitude towards Polish people being an obvious one that comes to mind. I'd wager the Jews are a group that suffers much less prejudice than most, especially compared to various gypsy groups, or many of the African immigrant groups such as Somalians, or groups of people from countries new into the EU. Muslims are another obvious example of people who suffer far more prejudice in Europe than Jewish people do.
What Europe does speak out about much more than the US however is Israeli aggression in the middle east and illegal annexing of territory that is not Israel's, but hopefully you're not confusing that for anti-semitism.
I think it's less about functional overlap and more about the core sets of things people want when they're looking for hosting.
Normally if you want a website, you buy a domain, and you'll want e-mail on that domain too so it all fits. Few people want XMPP and VOIP with that.
At least this is my experience, when I've gone looking for a host it's for a website (if I just wanted mail I'd use gmail or whatever). I also want an address to go with that. If I've got the address, I'd at very least like to be able to forward e-mail from it (e.g. admin@mynewname.whatever).
If a provider grouped VOIP, XMPP and so forth with my e-mail and had my web and DNS as separate things I'd go elsewhere because I don't want to end up paying for shit I don't need.
I'd wager it is the way it is because my experience is typical of the market - the money is in people looking for web hosting and a hostname and e-mail address to go with that so ISPs have optimised for offering that.
I agree and I've seen it here in the UK. I hate the fact that the only remaining option for books I'm interested in round here seems to be Amazon and that their prices have definitely gone up since the likes of Borders went out of business.
I wish our government had done this sort of thing quite frankly, but it's too late now, they do have a monopoly on almost entire categories of some types of book nowadays.
But what happens when a client wants half those services plus some others that aren't supported?
What services exactly do you deem to fulfil the criteria of being complete? What if someone wants an IRC server instead of XMPP?
If you really mean what you say then you can pay for it, if you don't want to set it up yourself you can hire someone to do all that for you and provide the arbitrary set of services and develop the bespoke software you need to integrate it all.
But what you're really saying in essence is "I want a bespoke easily managed server setup with integrated login, but I don't want to set it up myself and I don't want to pay enough for someone else to do it, I want it to be free like Google, or cheap". This isn't practical, Google can only offer what it does because it has a massive data mining operation and ad farm sat behind that to monetise it.
Contrary to your assertion otherwise, there is competition too, there's Microsoft with it's Office 365, Outlook.com and Skype offering but again they can only offer it because they have a massive amount of resources to do so and can monetise it through ads and data mining and tie in to their other offerings and it's not entirely free anyway - IIRC Office 365 is subscription based.
So again what exactly are you looking for? Seemingly you want to move away from Google because you don't like the NSA revelations, the data mining, or whatever else. You wont want Microsoft for the same reasons then I would guess given that it's at least as supportive. There's no business in anyone else doing it without that data mining operation behind it because no one will pay what it would cost then, most are happy to put up with the mining and ads if they get their stuff cheap or free. So the only option is for you to offer bespoke to your clients, but bespoke costs, and you don't want to set it all up yourself so you need to up the costs by hiring someone else but I'd wager you don't want this either?
What exactly is your position? it doesn't seem to make any sense. It sounds like you want to offer all in one services to people (clients?) but you don't want to actually do any work to earn your money from them. It sounds like you want to get a client and give them some turnkey bespoke solution, but a bespoke solution that you neither want to spend the effort to create, or presumably pay someone else to create. Are you asking to just make money as a middleman without putting the slightest bit of effort in to adding value to that position? That's what it sounds like.
If you are willing to pay someone else to do it then ask any number of bespoke software development houses. It's not going to be cheap though which again is going to return you to the question of whether there's even a business model in it, and if you return there you'll probably have your reason as to why no one else is doing it because you're again going to be outcompeted by Google's ad supported model.
I suspect this isn't the answer you wanted, but does it give you the answer you were looking for?
National identity is nonsense anyway. You have no more kinship with the guy you've never spoken to down the road than you do some random bloke over in Sao Paolo.
Just because you live in the same country is meaningless. My whole family line is as English as they come, we've always lived here, my family has always lived here but I frankly associate more with the Scandinavian way of thinking on most issues than I do middle England with their Daily Mail and UKIP fascism.
National identity is exactly the kind of nonsense jingoism being spoken about above. It's a tool of populism for the simple minded, those who vote BNP and UKIP. You are who you are, you live in the country you live in and you want it to be run the way you want it to run, you want it to be a good country in what in your eyes constitutes good, and that's okay. You can even keep your national history and be proud of it or not. None of that needs the great mythical national identity though. National identity is just a way of pretending you're special as a person as opposed to those of other nations. You're not.
"The public is never going to be able to be safe from terrorism, and total surveillance would help make us safer, from terrorism at least."
I don't think that's true, the danger is you just end up with more data than you can evaluate and actually miss more threats. I suspect this is exactly what happened with both the Boston bombers and the Lee Rigby killers - in both cases the perpetrators were known to the security services, but they were placed at lower priority - a priority choice that had to be made simply because there weren't enough resources to keep track of every possible threat. If you end up with more potential threats you just end up having to spread your resources even more thinly and risk assigning resources to people who aren't actual threats whilst deprioritising those that are.
It makes more sense to target your surveillance by infiltrating agents into high risk groups and communities or spying on them specifically.
Blanket surveillance simply drastically increases the noise and further hides the signal.
I have to agree to some extent, there have been a number of incidents in the news over the years that just seem all too convenient to be the result of mere chance.
The problem is that we can't even tell if "an anonymous tip off from a member of the public leading to his capture and conviction" isn't a security services agent just tipping off the police with knowledge gained from interception.
It's quite possible that the police wouldn't even know the security services had tipped them off.
Right and how does that work exactly, how do they even know you're uploading?
By connecting to you and receiving the files? Well there's a problem again, as the copyright owners you're simply uploading content to the people who own the rights to it which again doesn't break the law.
The only way they can come close to making it work is by getting someone who doesn't have permission to accept the upload from you and sue selectively, but I'm not sure a court would buy this given that they'd still have given implicit permission to that person to have that content by asking him to let you upload it to him and then not suing him over it so even that's a very weak case.
They'd need to do a MITM attack on two people who don't have permission, but then they'd be facing criminal proceedings themselves for illegal interception of data.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there aren't dumb judges/juries that will convict on these sorts of actions, but if the law is followed to the letter and a proper examination of evidence with a competent objective judge running the case, then the law shouldn't side with the industry on this. The law as it's written just doesn't swing in their favour.
The only problem currently is that the law as it's written isn't the law that all too many corrupt judges follow, or all too many dumb juries understand.
"No one? I'd think if you had political aspirations you should pretty much assume you're explicitly targeted. Low level politician Merkel wasn't chosen at random, her family and friends weren't added to the list at random, they were added because she'd called them from her number."
I'm pretty sure Merkel doesn't post on Slashdot.
"Snowden is still free, the Guardian is still reporting leaks. The Washington Post hasn't been shut down despite General 'censor the press's requests."
I don't think any of these post on Slashdot either.
The group I was talking about is the group of Slashdot posters the GP referred to - people on Slashdot who want to take efforts to make NSA monitoring more difficult. These are also people who are not likely to be able to evade the NSA.
"If they had waited until the winner was announced, they would have never known the bribes happened in the first place, so preemptive spying saved jobs, which protects the economy."
Right, and in the US European companies won the tanker and Marine One deals but the US jumped in with protectionism and also reversed those rulings and handed them to US companies.
Should Europe hence sabotage Boeing to protect their jobs given the corruption in US procurement?
The fact is Saudi Arabia is a sovereign nation, Airbus is not a US company. What happens between the two is not the business of the US and if the US can't play by Saudi's corrupt standards then tough shit - it has no problem playing the corruption game at home when it comes to favouring Boeing,
You can't on one hand support corruption at home and then pretending you're fighting it abroad to "protect jobs".
Perhaps if America is upset about the potential loss of jobs abroad because of corruption it should do something about it's own internal corrupt procurement process that favour US firms, maybe then non-US firms wouldn't feel obliged to play it at it's own game outside it's borders.
That's a much better solution than spying and claiming it's to "protect jobs". Those jobs were only at risk in the first place because of corruption back home forcing competition to play the game in the same way US firms do to be able to compete in the global market.
Also spying doesn't prevent an immediate threat. Look at the Boston bombings, despite the US having a dragnet, at the time unknown, covering just about every communication going they were still unable to spot the pair of suicide bombers that had traveled to militant hotspots and whom they had been warned about by Russian security services. If the NSA doesn't have anyone intelligent enough to interpret all the information that's coming to them then what the fuck is the point in gathering all that information in the first place?
"however, usa can't embargo antigua over this. without risking wto falling apart totally."
Exactly, and that can't happen because the whole reason the WTO exists is because America created it to try and control the world trade agenda after it became unhappy that African nations, South America and so forth outvoted it in demanding shorter terms for medical patents at WIPO so that their citizens didn't have to die from curable disease and illness.
America didn't like a democratic trade organisation that stood for what most people wanted so it created the WTO. If it undermines that now I doubt it'll have much luck convincing people to move to yet another global trade organisation.
Re:It was already a dangerous site to visit ...
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PHP.net Compromised
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· Score: 1
"Yes, it's lack of cross-platform support is pretty much the biggest issue here."
But that's not an inherent problem with it, it's a design choice of the technology and it has advantages and disadvantages - whilst you can't easily use it on non-Windows platforms, you do get to do things Java simply can't do easily because Java can't assume what functionality an OS will provide so can only encompass the lowest common denominator as standard whereas.NET can provide access to everything the OS offers.
"You require thousands of dollars in Windows license to run a single.NET site."
This is just nonsense. A Windows Server license doesn't cost thousands of dollars, even standard edition costs only $882 and that's direct from MS. You can get it cheaper or use a lesser edition if need be. It's not free, but it's certainly not thousands of dollars. IIS and.NET are bundled in that and that's all you need to pay to host a site.
"The tools are proprietary and costly and having used Visual Studio, I think Eclipse and even Xcode still beats the pants of off it as far as usability goes."
This is what people always say who haven't got reasonable experience with both. I have, and Visual Studio is far superior. Eclipse isn't even a good IDE, it's just the go to IDE people jump to when they want to slag of Visual Studio even when they don't know much about it - NetBeans is better. No one who has used a wealth of IDEs to a decent degree would imply Eclipse is somehow the king of the crop (which is the implication if you're going to claim it's better than Visual Studio), far from it.
".NET is also (or at least should be) a compiled language very similar to Java and it has the same downfalls as Java (if you've ever supported anything-Beans or Tomcat, you know what I'm talking about) - overly complex and way too heavy for websites."
What websites exactly? I agree it's far too heavy for your grandmas blog or whatever, but if we're after some kind of enterprise level web site then you shouldn't use anything less. It's complex to manage because it's designed for complex software not "My First Website" style setups but here's the thing - try using PHP for complex software, I have, and it's an absolute nightmare - that Java complexity suddenly becomes simplicity in contrast. When you find out you need true multi-threading support in your application, suddenly PHP becomes a road block whilst Java and.NET let you sail right along. Your talk of.NET is or should be a compiled languages gives way to the fact you clearly have no real understanding of it yet you seem to feel qualified to declare PHP better regardless - that's mindless nonsense.
"Another problem with.NET/IIS stacks is it's lack of isolation from other sites or the hardware, I worked for a hosting company several years ago, shared.NET hosts were a nightmare to support as one site could easily bring the entire application pool down and separating each site in a separate Application Pool gobbled up insane amounts of memory."
This is outright false. Of course you can isolate the Microsoft stack, if you're doing it to a large enough degree then Microsoft provide Windows Datacentre Edition for precisely that purpose and if one site could bring the entire application pool down then what the fuck were you thinking? The whole point of application pools is to provide separate worker processes for each pool - of course if you stick everything in the same worker process then if one brings it down so will all the others. It's also nonsense to claim that it gobbles up insane amounts of memory because we're comparing to PHP here, which is far less resource efficient again.
You've reaffirmed my point that those who defend PHP against the likes of Java, C++, and.NET do so out of inexperience. Much of what you say appears to be based on hearsay rather than real actual experience of working with th
You don't need to stop them, you just need to make their life too difficult for it to be worth chasing you when you've got nothing worth chasing for.
The more people that do this the more it eats into NSA resources, if you force a real person into the loop to decide if you're worth chasing then you really cause a massively disproportionate impact on the NSA's resources compared to if you just let them farm your data automatically from unencrypted services they have a tap on like Google.
Then eventually when things like the Boston bombings keep happening despite the NSA has a mass of financing from the US government behind it and taps on most the world someone in congress is finally going to have to ask "What the fuck is the point in all this expenditure?" and the plug is going to get pulled.
If the NSA ends up chasing, expensively, because of the cost of intervention of human resources, people who are entirely irrelevant and innocent of everything, then eventually they're going to have to change tact. Eventually they're going to have to realise that universal snooping is ineffective and just makes it even harder to tell who really is and isn't a threat. They'll have to go back to what they should be doing in the first place - focusing on the hard work of identifying real actual threats rather than hoping a mass computer network will somehow figure that out for them, something the Boston case showed it absolutely can't.
No one here is paranoid about being explicitly targetted by the NSA and I think everyone agrees if they were then the NSA could get what they want.
What people want to stop is arbitrary interception of their data as part of some dragnet operation that human eyes do not explicitly see unless it's flagged up as part of some data mining algorithm.
If the NSA were really after me I could care less, they'd get what they wanted. They're not, but that doesn't mean I want them sweeping up my data. I want to make it as cost prohibitive as possible for them to do so as I've neither done anything wrong, nor am I a US citizen under their jurisdiction and as such they have no right to infringe my legally protected right to privacy as a near universally accepted human right enshrined in numerous global treaties. If they're going to do that anyway I want to leave them with a choice of it either costing them much more to deal with as a human has to enter the loop and figure out if it's worthwhile to chase me or not, or just accept that I'm irrelevant to them and not bother to access my data.
These are the only two outcomes from me enforcing protection on my data that they do not have easy access to bypass, and I'm happy with either of them. So are many people, and that is why they're going out of their way to protect their data - not because they think it gives them some theoretical immunity from the NSA, but that it either inconveniences the NSA, or makes the NSA's job too cost prohibitive to pursue.
It's about not wanting to have your data mined by an automated dragnet operation as much as anything and if you make sure your data isn't low hanging unencrypted fruit passing through a fully wiretapped service then unless you are a specific key target of the NSA then you can fairly trivially make sure you're not a target of exactly that.
I don't get the question in the summary. It sounds like the guy is asking for a host he can pay that will automatically set up some arbitrary services that he's decided constitute "complete hosting"?
I don't really see how an ISP can cater to such an arbitrary definition when there's literally millions of different services an ISP could be expected to provide.
Isn't the solution just to get your own VPS or dedicated server and just install everything you want on it or am I missing something here?
Is there some defintion of "Complete Hosting Provider" whereby said provider to conform must provide the services the summary is asking for even though it's a rather obscure combination of things to provide on one host?
From what I can fathom the answer to the question is: "You are not the only person on the internet, different people have different use cases, no ISP could possibly cater to ever combination people may want, nor would they probably want to because it would require having experts in each of those millions of technologies to manage them all hence why they stick to their areas of expertise or provide you a blank server you can install whatever the hell you want to on". Unless there is some definition of "Complete Hosting" that encompasses only a fringe handful of available services then I can't see this changing.
Sega has gone from gaming great to frankly being an also-ran since it resorted to just whoring Sonic out to any old Joe who wanted a piece of the blue hedgehog.
I'd hate to see Nintendo suffer the same fate.
Re:It was already a dangerous site to visit ...
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PHP.net Compromised
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· Score: 1
"Who runs that and.NET? Really?"
I'm intrigued to know your justification for disparaging.NET over PHP. Care to elaborate and expand upon that?
Apart from it's lack of cross-platform support it's much better. It performs better, it has better tools, a much better framework, the language is much better thought out and has far less issues, allows for much faster development on all but the most trivial of projects, has a much healthier feature set (i.e. proper threading support) and it's got a far better track record of security. This all pretty much applies to Java too apart from the recent security track record though that does of course have the additional advantage of being portable.
Where exactly do you think these two languages are lacking compared to PHP and do you have any actual experience of them or are you just going by hearsay? I ask because I do have real actual experience of running large projects in all three of these languages and can't fathom why someone would think PHP is superior unless they don't have any practical experience. It's really not, by pretty much any measure.
I'm happy to work with whatever technology the constraints of a project push me too, but PHP would not be close to my number one choice if I had the freedom to select technology precisely because I have seen it's downsides stand out rather glaringly in the real world and I've yet to see anyone with a similar or greater depth and breadth of experience with various technologies use it by choice - those that do so are often doing so out of inexperience, either because they've barely used anything else, or because they're not developing anything large or important enough for it's flaws to matter - in other words it seems almost universally the reason that PHP gets chosen is naivety and seemingly never the result of a well informed decision.
Given that the whole reason this agreement was set up in the first place is because it was data the US felt it desperately needed and couldn't get then I think that lock is already there.
You're assuming the cost of bandwidth is uniform across the world, it's most certainly not.
BT actually publish their wholesale prices which the ISPs have to pay so it's not an unknown as to how much it costs. The fact is it's too expensive for ISPs to offer dedicated lines to everyone in the UK.
So I do know what I'm talking about, I'm just not making the mistake you are in believing that if there is cheap unused bandwidth somewhere, that there must be cheap unused bandwidth everywhere. The reality is that some places have much less spare capacity and are in much greater need of investment which costs money.
You can provide a lot of bandwidth on old unused dark fibre that's being sold bargain basement to ISPs, but not so much when a cable needs to be run from scratch and the market is charging a premium to do exactly that.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a guy on here the other day telling me he was the most conservative Republican conservative going.
At the same time he was saying about how welfare should be about giving everyone the exact same amount regardless of who they are (i.e. he was advocating communist ideas).
He was completely unable to grasp that was he was advocating was most definitely not conservative given that by definition conservatism is about resisting change, and he was advocating massive change, and was very much a communist idea - i.e. the complete opposite of the right which he claimed to proudly represent.
I never cease to be amazed how messed up the political views and comments of many Americans are. So many wear their supposed leaning like a badge of honour whilst spouting views that completely contradict it and similarly declaring things about other leanings that make absolutely zero sense. From the libertarians that rally against gay marriage and the freedom to have abortions, to the conservatives that demand profound change, to the tea partiers who claim to be all about the constitution and free speech whilst turning up at opposition rallies armed to try and stifle discussion of opposing views with implied threats. It's insane and it's so painfully hypocritical.
I have more respect for people who at least come out and say what they are. I can't stand Nigel Farage in the UK because he refuses to admit he's far right whilst advocating primarily far right policy - at least Nick Griffin of the BNP for all his flaws had the courage of his convictions to admit what he was even if I think his views are sickening. It's like a denial people have because they fear being associated with Nazism if they openly admit they're far right even though in practice they do in fact often align politically with them. If you don't have the courage to admit what you believe in, whether that's far left communism, or far right fascism or something in between then the implication is simply that you know deep down that there's something wrong with your beliefs. Don't try and dress yourself up as something your not, because either you believe what you believe, or you know full well you're just being selfish, ignorant, and full of shit.
Of course the problem is it works - there's so much confusion especially in the US that you can claim to be a libertarian and people see you as a freedom fighter when in reality you're advocating primarily anti-libertarian policy. It's as if some people see the political leaning people label themselves with as more important in defining what they stand for than the actual policies they're pushing in practice.
People need to learn what different leanings mean and start evaluating candidates on what they actually stand for rather than obscure paranoia over terms that aren't dirty like "liberal" and "socialist" contrary to what the idiot squad likes to pretend. They think by saying "he's a liberal" they're being nasty and slagging them off, when in reality they're saying "he's a guy that supports protecting people's rights and freedoms and ensuring equality" as if that's somehow a bad thing. The opposite of classic liberalism is basically fascism, so by decrying someone for being a liberal with the implication that you oppose liberalism you're effectively aligning yourself with fascism. If only they knew how fucking stupid it made them sound to those of us who know what things like socialism, and liberalism actually are.
The fact is pretty much the entirety of the Western world is primarily liberal with a hint of socialism and a focus on capitalism in them more general economy so to decry that is to decry the bulk of what stands behind Western ideology.
It's also quite possible he simply believes his own bullshit.
This is the guy who was quick to cry terrorism in response to the Lee Rigby murder but at least initially refused to call it terrorism when a Ukrainian far right extremist stabbed a muslim and bombed two mosques in the UK.
Certainly he has a very warped perspective on threats and terrorism so I could quite believe he believes his own bullshit about how Snowden's revelations help terrorists and will be the end of civilisation as we know it.
a) I think it's Russia Today
b) Russia Today is like Fox News, it spouts wild conspiracy theories constantly
The fact one of them just happens to have now turned out to be correct doesn't mean they had any special knowledge, they were just slagging off the West as usual with their conspiracies and one of them just turned out to be right.
It doesn't mean they'll ever be right again though, or they may be. Who knows, either way, if you assume they were saying it because they knew about it you run the risk of believing them when they're just talking bollocks.
It will have been happy coincidence and nothing more.
"Uh, what? Did you forget your Prozac this morning or something? You just stated you're not a Citizen so why the fuck would you have any protections under US law? Why the fuck would someone in Russia think that they are protected from Chinese spies under Chinese Law? Do you have ANY idea what the concept of a Sovereign Nation is? It means that each country makes its own rules, which only apply within that countries jurisdiction. That jurisdiction ends at their borders, no matter how much you'd like it to mean otherwise. Treaties aren't worth jack shit if a nation doesn't enshrine the treaty conditions specifically within their own legal structure. All they amount to in most cases is a "Gentleman's Agreement"."
Except America has done exactly that when it ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1992. Article 17 states:
1. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation.
2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
Yet that is exactly what America is doing. The covenant doesn't distinguish between American and non-American, it's specifically a treaty about every person in the world, and America signed and ratified that.
So calm down and stop talking about things you don't understand. You make yourself look stupid, especially when you make statements about Prozac whilst going off on one like a clueless madman.
"I'll say that real businesses run by competent people rarely have web hosting and email run on the same place."
This is nonsense use of the no-true Scotsman fallacy. There are different companies of different scale, most large and medium sized corporations just host their own e-mail and website outright.
Beyond that there's no fixed pattern of web and e-mail being run in the same place, that's my anecdote, it contradicts yours, but what can't be avoided is the very fact you're trying to argue against - that providers provide web and e-mail hosting together, they do that precisely because regardless of our anecdotes that's what the majority of customers whether they're private individuals or actual businesses want. You're assuming it's this way because of some obscure trait of history, but it's not, it's because it's what the market calls for.
"On the contrary, I'd quess that the market includes these things not because it's what people want, but because it's what's easy to provide. If you're setting up a web server, it's not very hard to throw on support for IMAP/POP/SMTP."
I don't know what kind of dodgy hosting you're using, but that's not how most hosting providers work. Most have clusters of e-mail servers, and clusters of web servers, each providing that service independently of the other service. When you sign up for hosting you rarely have a situation where they create a server for you (virtual or physical) and then stick your web server and e-mail on that one dedicated box - they use their specific server clusters to provide you with those services.
"As far as "paying for services that you don't use", they could get around that by charging a certain amount for al la carte, and then a different amount for a package deal, so it's not really a sensible objection."
Well it is, because it costs to even do that. It costs them to have staff on hand to support those services I may choose, but then opt not to, it costs them to produce a bespoke set of tools to allow me to select from some fancy web interface what I do and don't want. All that costs the host money, and the host has to pass that on to the customer, which means they'll never be cheaper than one that just provides me what I want.
"I believe the answer to those questions is 'No!!". So that might explain why Americans tend to think that Europeans are a bunch of anti-Semtes."
Actually the answer is yes to all of them, so if America thinks otherwise then it's classic American ignorance of the world.
"You clowns can't even defend yourselves without massive American aid. Fix your own fouled nest before criticizing others."
Sorry? Which country has required European support for pretty much every war in it's history? From your dependence on France in your war of independence, through to the fact the British had already destroyed much of the Luftwaffe and German navy, and had it's colonies striking the Japanese before you even came close to entering World War II to your inability to have the war you wanted in Syria because you couldn't get British backing.
I don't think it's Europe that's dependent on America for military action, quite the opposite - in fact when you have gone it alone or at least, almost entirely gone it alone like Somalia, Lebanon, Vietnam, and Cambodia you've been defeated almost every time.
Stop being ignorant and get a clue before making a fool of yourself next time.
"That's cute and all, except European antisemitism is as endemic and as ingrained in their culture as racism is in America."
I've lived in Europe all my life and never seen any evidence of this. The closest thing I've seen is South park and people making Cartman parody anti-semitic comments based on that.
There are anti-semites here, but I see far more hatred between Europeans simply for being from different parts of Europe than I do any anti-semitism - people from Eastern European nations get far more of a hard time in Western Europe when they emigrate there after each EU expansion for example, the unfair attitude towards Polish people being an obvious one that comes to mind. I'd wager the Jews are a group that suffers much less prejudice than most, especially compared to various gypsy groups, or many of the African immigrant groups such as Somalians, or groups of people from countries new into the EU. Muslims are another obvious example of people who suffer far more prejudice in Europe than Jewish people do.
What Europe does speak out about much more than the US however is Israeli aggression in the middle east and illegal annexing of territory that is not Israel's, but hopefully you're not confusing that for anti-semitism.
I think it's less about functional overlap and more about the core sets of things people want when they're looking for hosting.
Normally if you want a website, you buy a domain, and you'll want e-mail on that domain too so it all fits. Few people want XMPP and VOIP with that.
At least this is my experience, when I've gone looking for a host it's for a website (if I just wanted mail I'd use gmail or whatever). I also want an address to go with that. If I've got the address, I'd at very least like to be able to forward e-mail from it (e.g. admin@mynewname.whatever).
If a provider grouped VOIP, XMPP and so forth with my e-mail and had my web and DNS as separate things I'd go elsewhere because I don't want to end up paying for shit I don't need.
I'd wager it is the way it is because my experience is typical of the market - the money is in people looking for web hosting and a hostname and e-mail address to go with that so ISPs have optimised for offering that.
I agree and I've seen it here in the UK. I hate the fact that the only remaining option for books I'm interested in round here seems to be Amazon and that their prices have definitely gone up since the likes of Borders went out of business.
I wish our government had done this sort of thing quite frankly, but it's too late now, they do have a monopoly on almost entire categories of some types of book nowadays.
But what happens when a client wants half those services plus some others that aren't supported?
What services exactly do you deem to fulfil the criteria of being complete? What if someone wants an IRC server instead of XMPP?
If you really mean what you say then you can pay for it, if you don't want to set it up yourself you can hire someone to do all that for you and provide the arbitrary set of services and develop the bespoke software you need to integrate it all.
But what you're really saying in essence is "I want a bespoke easily managed server setup with integrated login, but I don't want to set it up myself and I don't want to pay enough for someone else to do it, I want it to be free like Google, or cheap". This isn't practical, Google can only offer what it does because it has a massive data mining operation and ad farm sat behind that to monetise it.
Contrary to your assertion otherwise, there is competition too, there's Microsoft with it's Office 365, Outlook.com and Skype offering but again they can only offer it because they have a massive amount of resources to do so and can monetise it through ads and data mining and tie in to their other offerings and it's not entirely free anyway - IIRC Office 365 is subscription based.
So again what exactly are you looking for? Seemingly you want to move away from Google because you don't like the NSA revelations, the data mining, or whatever else. You wont want Microsoft for the same reasons then I would guess given that it's at least as supportive. There's no business in anyone else doing it without that data mining operation behind it because no one will pay what it would cost then, most are happy to put up with the mining and ads if they get their stuff cheap or free. So the only option is for you to offer bespoke to your clients, but bespoke costs, and you don't want to set it all up yourself so you need to up the costs by hiring someone else but I'd wager you don't want this either?
What exactly is your position? it doesn't seem to make any sense. It sounds like you want to offer all in one services to people (clients?) but you don't want to actually do any work to earn your money from them. It sounds like you want to get a client and give them some turnkey bespoke solution, but a bespoke solution that you neither want to spend the effort to create, or presumably pay someone else to create. Are you asking to just make money as a middleman without putting the slightest bit of effort in to adding value to that position? That's what it sounds like.
If you are willing to pay someone else to do it then ask any number of bespoke software development houses. It's not going to be cheap though which again is going to return you to the question of whether there's even a business model in it, and if you return there you'll probably have your reason as to why no one else is doing it because you're again going to be outcompeted by Google's ad supported model.
I suspect this isn't the answer you wanted, but does it give you the answer you were looking for?
National identity is nonsense anyway. You have no more kinship with the guy you've never spoken to down the road than you do some random bloke over in Sao Paolo.
Just because you live in the same country is meaningless. My whole family line is as English as they come, we've always lived here, my family has always lived here but I frankly associate more with the Scandinavian way of thinking on most issues than I do middle England with their Daily Mail and UKIP fascism.
National identity is exactly the kind of nonsense jingoism being spoken about above. It's a tool of populism for the simple minded, those who vote BNP and UKIP. You are who you are, you live in the country you live in and you want it to be run the way you want it to run, you want it to be a good country in what in your eyes constitutes good, and that's okay. You can even keep your national history and be proud of it or not. None of that needs the great mythical national identity though. National identity is just a way of pretending you're special as a person as opposed to those of other nations. You're not.
"The public is never going to be able to be safe from terrorism, and total surveillance would help make us safer, from terrorism at least."
I don't think that's true, the danger is you just end up with more data than you can evaluate and actually miss more threats. I suspect this is exactly what happened with both the Boston bombers and the Lee Rigby killers - in both cases the perpetrators were known to the security services, but they were placed at lower priority - a priority choice that had to be made simply because there weren't enough resources to keep track of every possible threat. If you end up with more potential threats you just end up having to spread your resources even more thinly and risk assigning resources to people who aren't actual threats whilst deprioritising those that are.
It makes more sense to target your surveillance by infiltrating agents into high risk groups and communities or spying on them specifically.
Blanket surveillance simply drastically increases the noise and further hides the signal.
I have to agree to some extent, there have been a number of incidents in the news over the years that just seem all too convenient to be the result of mere chance.
The problem is that we can't even tell if "an anonymous tip off from a member of the public leading to his capture and conviction" isn't a security services agent just tipping off the police with knowledge gained from interception.
It's quite possible that the police wouldn't even know the security services had tipped them off.
Right and how does that work exactly, how do they even know you're uploading?
By connecting to you and receiving the files? Well there's a problem again, as the copyright owners you're simply uploading content to the people who own the rights to it which again doesn't break the law.
The only way they can come close to making it work is by getting someone who doesn't have permission to accept the upload from you and sue selectively, but I'm not sure a court would buy this given that they'd still have given implicit permission to that person to have that content by asking him to let you upload it to him and then not suing him over it so even that's a very weak case.
They'd need to do a MITM attack on two people who don't have permission, but then they'd be facing criminal proceedings themselves for illegal interception of data.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there aren't dumb judges/juries that will convict on these sorts of actions, but if the law is followed to the letter and a proper examination of evidence with a competent objective judge running the case, then the law shouldn't side with the industry on this. The law as it's written just doesn't swing in their favour.
The only problem currently is that the law as it's written isn't the law that all too many corrupt judges follow, or all too many dumb juries understand.
"No one? I'd think if you had political aspirations you should pretty much assume you're explicitly targeted. Low level politician Merkel wasn't chosen at random, her family and friends weren't added to the list at random, they were added because she'd called them from her number."
I'm pretty sure Merkel doesn't post on Slashdot.
"Snowden is still free, the Guardian is still reporting leaks. The Washington Post hasn't been shut down despite General 'censor the press's requests."
I don't think any of these post on Slashdot either.
The group I was talking about is the group of Slashdot posters the GP referred to - people on Slashdot who want to take efforts to make NSA monitoring more difficult. These are also people who are not likely to be able to evade the NSA.
"If they had waited until the winner was announced, they would have never known the bribes happened in the first place, so preemptive spying saved jobs, which protects the economy."
Right, and in the US European companies won the tanker and Marine One deals but the US jumped in with protectionism and also reversed those rulings and handed them to US companies.
Should Europe hence sabotage Boeing to protect their jobs given the corruption in US procurement?
The fact is Saudi Arabia is a sovereign nation, Airbus is not a US company. What happens between the two is not the business of the US and if the US can't play by Saudi's corrupt standards then tough shit - it has no problem playing the corruption game at home when it comes to favouring Boeing,
You can't on one hand support corruption at home and then pretending you're fighting it abroad to "protect jobs".
Perhaps if America is upset about the potential loss of jobs abroad because of corruption it should do something about it's own internal corrupt procurement process that favour US firms, maybe then non-US firms wouldn't feel obliged to play it at it's own game outside it's borders.
That's a much better solution than spying and claiming it's to "protect jobs". Those jobs were only at risk in the first place because of corruption back home forcing competition to play the game in the same way US firms do to be able to compete in the global market.
Also spying doesn't prevent an immediate threat. Look at the Boston bombings, despite the US having a dragnet, at the time unknown, covering just about every communication going they were still unable to spot the pair of suicide bombers that had traveled to militant hotspots and whom they had been warned about by Russian security services. If the NSA doesn't have anyone intelligent enough to interpret all the information that's coming to them then what the fuck is the point in gathering all that information in the first place?
"however, usa can't embargo antigua over this. without risking wto falling apart totally."
Exactly, and that can't happen because the whole reason the WTO exists is because America created it to try and control the world trade agenda after it became unhappy that African nations, South America and so forth outvoted it in demanding shorter terms for medical patents at WIPO so that their citizens didn't have to die from curable disease and illness.
America didn't like a democratic trade organisation that stood for what most people wanted so it created the WTO. If it undermines that now I doubt it'll have much luck convincing people to move to yet another global trade organisation.
"Yes, it's lack of cross-platform support is pretty much the biggest issue here."
But that's not an inherent problem with it, it's a design choice of the technology and it has advantages and disadvantages - whilst you can't easily use it on non-Windows platforms, you do get to do things Java simply can't do easily because Java can't assume what functionality an OS will provide so can only encompass the lowest common denominator as standard whereas .NET can provide access to everything the OS offers.
"You require thousands of dollars in Windows license to run a single .NET site."
This is just nonsense. A Windows Server license doesn't cost thousands of dollars, even standard edition costs only $882 and that's direct from MS. You can get it cheaper or use a lesser edition if need be. It's not free, but it's certainly not thousands of dollars. IIS and .NET are bundled in that and that's all you need to pay to host a site.
"The tools are proprietary and costly and having used Visual Studio, I think Eclipse and even Xcode still beats the pants of off it as far as usability goes."
This is what people always say who haven't got reasonable experience with both. I have, and Visual Studio is far superior. Eclipse isn't even a good IDE, it's just the go to IDE people jump to when they want to slag of Visual Studio even when they don't know much about it - NetBeans is better. No one who has used a wealth of IDEs to a decent degree would imply Eclipse is somehow the king of the crop (which is the implication if you're going to claim it's better than Visual Studio), far from it.
".NET is also (or at least should be) a compiled language very similar to Java and it has the same downfalls as Java (if you've ever supported anything-Beans or Tomcat, you know what I'm talking about) - overly complex and way too heavy for websites."
What websites exactly? I agree it's far too heavy for your grandmas blog or whatever, but if we're after some kind of enterprise level web site then you shouldn't use anything less. It's complex to manage because it's designed for complex software not "My First Website" style setups but here's the thing - try using PHP for complex software, I have, and it's an absolute nightmare - that Java complexity suddenly becomes simplicity in contrast. When you find out you need true multi-threading support in your application, suddenly PHP becomes a road block whilst Java and .NET let you sail right along. Your talk of .NET is or should be a compiled languages gives way to the fact you clearly have no real understanding of it yet you seem to feel qualified to declare PHP better regardless - that's mindless nonsense.
"Another problem with .NET/IIS stacks is it's lack of isolation from other sites or the hardware, I worked for a hosting company several years ago, shared .NET hosts were a nightmare to support as one site could easily bring the entire application pool down and separating each site in a separate Application Pool gobbled up insane amounts of memory."
This is outright false. Of course you can isolate the Microsoft stack, if you're doing it to a large enough degree then Microsoft provide Windows Datacentre Edition for precisely that purpose and if one site could bring the entire application pool down then what the fuck were you thinking? The whole point of application pools is to provide separate worker processes for each pool - of course if you stick everything in the same worker process then if one brings it down so will all the others. It's also nonsense to claim that it gobbles up insane amounts of memory because we're comparing to PHP here, which is far less resource efficient again.
You've reaffirmed my point that those who defend PHP against the likes of Java, C++, and .NET do so out of inexperience. Much of what you say appears to be based on hearsay rather than real actual experience of working with th
You don't need to stop them, you just need to make their life too difficult for it to be worth chasing you when you've got nothing worth chasing for.
The more people that do this the more it eats into NSA resources, if you force a real person into the loop to decide if you're worth chasing then you really cause a massively disproportionate impact on the NSA's resources compared to if you just let them farm your data automatically from unencrypted services they have a tap on like Google.
Then eventually when things like the Boston bombings keep happening despite the NSA has a mass of financing from the US government behind it and taps on most the world someone in congress is finally going to have to ask "What the fuck is the point in all this expenditure?" and the plug is going to get pulled.
If the NSA ends up chasing, expensively, because of the cost of intervention of human resources, people who are entirely irrelevant and innocent of everything, then eventually they're going to have to change tact. Eventually they're going to have to realise that universal snooping is ineffective and just makes it even harder to tell who really is and isn't a threat. They'll have to go back to what they should be doing in the first place - focusing on the hard work of identifying real actual threats rather than hoping a mass computer network will somehow figure that out for them, something the Boston case showed it absolutely can't.
You're missing the point completely.
No one here is paranoid about being explicitly targetted by the NSA and I think everyone agrees if they were then the NSA could get what they want.
What people want to stop is arbitrary interception of their data as part of some dragnet operation that human eyes do not explicitly see unless it's flagged up as part of some data mining algorithm.
If the NSA were really after me I could care less, they'd get what they wanted. They're not, but that doesn't mean I want them sweeping up my data. I want to make it as cost prohibitive as possible for them to do so as I've neither done anything wrong, nor am I a US citizen under their jurisdiction and as such they have no right to infringe my legally protected right to privacy as a near universally accepted human right enshrined in numerous global treaties. If they're going to do that anyway I want to leave them with a choice of it either costing them much more to deal with as a human has to enter the loop and figure out if it's worthwhile to chase me or not, or just accept that I'm irrelevant to them and not bother to access my data.
These are the only two outcomes from me enforcing protection on my data that they do not have easy access to bypass, and I'm happy with either of them. So are many people, and that is why they're going out of their way to protect their data - not because they think it gives them some theoretical immunity from the NSA, but that it either inconveniences the NSA, or makes the NSA's job too cost prohibitive to pursue.
It's about not wanting to have your data mined by an automated dragnet operation as much as anything and if you make sure your data isn't low hanging unencrypted fruit passing through a fully wiretapped service then unless you are a specific key target of the NSA then you can fairly trivially make sure you're not a target of exactly that.
What actually is a complete hosting provider?
I don't get the question in the summary. It sounds like the guy is asking for a host he can pay that will automatically set up some arbitrary services that he's decided constitute "complete hosting"?
I don't really see how an ISP can cater to such an arbitrary definition when there's literally millions of different services an ISP could be expected to provide.
Isn't the solution just to get your own VPS or dedicated server and just install everything you want on it or am I missing something here?
Is there some defintion of "Complete Hosting Provider" whereby said provider to conform must provide the services the summary is asking for even though it's a rather obscure combination of things to provide on one host?
From what I can fathom the answer to the question is: "You are not the only person on the internet, different people have different use cases, no ISP could possibly cater to ever combination people may want, nor would they probably want to because it would require having experts in each of those millions of technologies to manage them all hence why they stick to their areas of expertise or provide you a blank server you can install whatever the hell you want to on". Unless there is some definition of "Complete Hosting" that encompasses only a fringe handful of available services then I can't see this changing.
Sega has gone from gaming great to frankly being an also-ran since it resorted to just whoring Sonic out to any old Joe who wanted a piece of the blue hedgehog.
I'd hate to see Nintendo suffer the same fate.
"Who runs that and .NET? Really?"
I'm intrigued to know your justification for disparaging .NET over PHP. Care to elaborate and expand upon that?
Apart from it's lack of cross-platform support it's much better. It performs better, it has better tools, a much better framework, the language is much better thought out and has far less issues, allows for much faster development on all but the most trivial of projects, has a much healthier feature set (i.e. proper threading support) and it's got a far better track record of security. This all pretty much applies to Java too apart from the recent security track record though that does of course have the additional advantage of being portable.
Where exactly do you think these two languages are lacking compared to PHP and do you have any actual experience of them or are you just going by hearsay? I ask because I do have real actual experience of running large projects in all three of these languages and can't fathom why someone would think PHP is superior unless they don't have any practical experience. It's really not, by pretty much any measure.
I'm happy to work with whatever technology the constraints of a project push me too, but PHP would not be close to my number one choice if I had the freedom to select technology precisely because I have seen it's downsides stand out rather glaringly in the real world and I've yet to see anyone with a similar or greater depth and breadth of experience with various technologies use it by choice - those that do so are often doing so out of inexperience, either because they've barely used anything else, or because they're not developing anything large or important enough for it's flaws to matter - in other words it seems almost universally the reason that PHP gets chosen is naivety and seemingly never the result of a well informed decision.
Given that the whole reason this agreement was set up in the first place is because it was data the US felt it desperately needed and couldn't get then I think that lock is already there.
You're assuming the cost of bandwidth is uniform across the world, it's most certainly not.
BT actually publish their wholesale prices which the ISPs have to pay so it's not an unknown as to how much it costs. The fact is it's too expensive for ISPs to offer dedicated lines to everyone in the UK.
So I do know what I'm talking about, I'm just not making the mistake you are in believing that if there is cheap unused bandwidth somewhere, that there must be cheap unused bandwidth everywhere. The reality is that some places have much less spare capacity and are in much greater need of investment which costs money.
You can provide a lot of bandwidth on old unused dark fibre that's being sold bargain basement to ISPs, but not so much when a cable needs to be run from scratch and the market is charging a premium to do exactly that.