take helpdesk calls for a corporation for like 20 minutes. you will learn that companies don't train their employees to use windows, why would they train them to use linux?
I agree that boycotting a record label might seem like a good idea but we've been over the catch-22 before. They just assign the decline in sales to piracy and then enact legislation to fight this piracy hence hurting the consumer more.
the dead kennedys talked about the music industry and how it was killing music in 1985 with "MTV get off the air". the end of the song went something like "but sales are slumping...and no one will say why... could it be they put out one too many lousy records?"
it's ironic that 20 years later, DK is gone, but the music industry is still here, doing far worse to consumers than in 1985.
the US has had a rocky ride capturing a small isolated middle eastern country, let alone a well developed, wealthy western nation, or an entire coalition of them.
there is a significant difference between overthrowing one governement and setting up another and simply capturing a country. the US "captured" iraq in 6 weeks with very few losses. that's the kind of shit we excel at. it's fighting the insurgency and the civil war that has cost america so dearly.
the US *SUCKS* at nation building. our one success was japan, and we had a lot of help with germany. hell, we couldn't put ourselves back together after our own civil war. vietnam still has yet to recover from our presence there. when it comes to nation wrecking, the US is the best in the business. if the goal in 2003 was to just wipe the country out, iraq wouldn't have lasted a month since they had relatively little airpower, and as it turns out, no weapons of mass destruction.
Why can't your fellow paisanos run Mono [wikipedia.org], the Linux.NET CLR? No flame intended, but it seems that the.NET 'lock in' is dissolving.
i would imagine that business in uraguay is similar to business in the states in that taxes are the last thing in the world that you would want to take a chance on. if the gubmint says "use.NET" then you need to use.NET for fear of your taxes being filed improperly or not filed at all.
TFA is a little light on techinical specifics, but ut looks like an internet phone wizard that plugs into the speaker and mike plugs on the board instead of using a USB connection. i would imagine that it requires similar a similar windows specific helper program as the vosky.
no one in hollywood wants downloadable movies. you kids today with your ipods think that you do, but clearly you don't understand that there is a very large industry that we really can't jeopardize. the sooner you consumers figure that out, the sooner we can get past all of this "internet" nonsense. we here in hollywood have taken many measures to be certain that downloading is too expensive, too slow, and too inconvenient to compete with our firmly established business. if you want to watch a movie, go to the theater, if you want to watch something at home, buy the DVD (once the movie is no longer in theaters) or wait for it to come out on cable. those are your options. you get nothing! you lose! good day sir!
perhaps my subtle irony was a little too subtle... using software to make a discriminatory practice seem impartial is just as wrong as using humans to do it... if anything it's worse becuse you are using the guise of "impartiality" to push your agenda.
if you get a letter signed by the president on whitehouse letterhead that says "you're an asshole", the presidential seal doesn't doesn't make it true, nor does it change the fact that someone you don't know just called you an asshole. in both cases all it does is make a person's opinion look more official.
This is like the no-fly list only worse then, isn't it? An algorithm kicks out the belief that you must be a terrorist, and anytime you go anywhere it's gonna beep and you get cold hands and lube once again.
no, this is way better, it uses computers to racially profile. computers can't be racist... they're computers.
Now suppose the trade was being done in Euros. The Florin guy buys Euros, gives them to the Guilder guy, who changes them into guilders. What's changed, from the US point of view? As far as I can tell, pretty much nothing. Why should they care?
in that scenario, the US can't buy favor with guilder just by printing money. paying your debts in your own currency is way cheaper than paying them in someone else's.
it's like this: if a barrel of oil sells for 80USD, then the US economy is worth XXXbillion barrels of oil. not everyone needs dollars, and the value of a dollar changes... but everyone needs oil, and it's value can only go up thanks to supply and demand. if gold and/or oil gets traded in euros now, then the value of the US economy in terms of barrels of oil is now based on the strength of the dollar compared to the euro. since the world wants to change over to euros because of the weakness of the dollar,
make changes today? hell no, why would they? make chages in 5 years after the vendor has gone out of business/got bought by a competitor/stopped making or supporting your product? hell yes
it's not the 20 year old zitface's money they are after. they are after the intimidation. your average hardcore pirate isn't going to be affected, but your average computer user will be. shutting down napster/kazaa/whatever and hitting anyone and everyone in sight is how they intimidate the leigons of would be downloaders.
if you will pardon the invocation of godwin's law for a moment, these are terrorist tactics. in military terms terrorism accomplishes little. targets for terrorism are political or psychological in nature. militarily, 9/11 didn't accomplish much. a large number of civillian casualties, yes, but in strategic terms it's not like ground zero was a beach head from which al quaeda could launch further operations into the continental US, nor did they significantly cripple the US from a communications or logistical standpoint. on the other hand, politically and pschologically 9/11 was devastating.
so, the RIAA files pointless lawsuit after pointless lawsuit not for financial gain, but for political and psychological gain. they have gotten joe and jane sixpack to equate downloading and copyright infringement with theft and have many people concerned that they could be raided as well if they don't stop. for every high profile lawsuit that they pay thousands for, how many people tacitly agree to stop downloading forever? my question is, is it working? will the music industry, despite it's many efforts, still be able to keep itself going?
the US would totally use nukes way earlier than anyone else in full on military conflict. why do you think we are so desperate to stop the rest of the world from getting them? the US wins wars by using *way* more firepower than the enemy. that's why grunts say "if at first you don't succeed, call in an airstrike". in the case of japan, the firepower escalated to the atomic bomb because we were not sure we could succeed in a full scale invasion of the japanese mainland. that's how our boys play the game, they fight until they are worried about losing, and then they double the amount of firepower. pretty much all US military doctorine involves bringing artillery to gunfight.
that is also why the US *sucks* at policing actions... our war machines are designed to enable a realtively small number of troops to inflict massive casualties in situations where they are greatly outnumbered. you can't police people with the same weapons and tactics that you use to hunt and kill them. look at the 2003 invasion of iraq, or fallujia, mogadishu or even the american invasion of afghanistan. in all of those cases, US servicemen died, but the enemy and civilian casualties were significantly higher. that is to be expected when you are using laser guided bombs to fight people armed with AK47's. coincidentally, that's why iraq has become such a sore subject, the world's most sophisticated military can't keep control over a bunch of guys who make bombs in their basements.
you have forgotten the USA's most powerful weapon: economics. americans import and consume so much from the rest of the world that going to war with us would be ecconomic suicide. the dollar is used as the reserve for many foreign currencies. america's military actions can have serious effects on international markets. also, a lot of the military hardware in the third world was once owned and has hence been sold off by the US. half of any fight is knowing your enemy and his capabilities, giving him your hand-me-downs to defend himself with means that you understand his capabilities fairly well.
the truth is that at one point, the US was the ecconomic backbone for a lot of the developed world. this is why costly ventures like the war in iraq are so dangerous to our ecconomic standing and why being reliant on foreign energy sources is just not a good idea. developed nations fear the us not for it's military power, but for it's ecconomic power. we americans believe that we are invulnerable, but if our ecconomy becomes too weak we could find out just how vulnerable we really are once our "allies" don't find us as useful as we once were.
Because the overhead of monitoring every single one of their customers might cost more than they'd make....It's just too broken in practice.
that's precisely my point. either bandwidth is too cheap to meter or it isn't. the telcos and cableco's want to create a tiered internet in order to give us the bandwidth intensive services we want on a fee scale that benefits them... as if bandwidth was some finite resource that you have to drill in the ground for. the truth is that they have oversold the service as unlimited, and now that we everyone who wants broadband has it, we are pushing those limits. they need to build out their networks to support their existing userbase, with not much promise for new customers. so now they need to raise prices and need an excuse to justify it. they believe that it is in their best interest to protect their businesses of scarcity by putting lower paying packets on hold in order to guarantee that the higher paying ones get delivered first, rather than just compete with other providers in terms of price or service.
in the greater cincinnati area, you have at least one sometimes two cable companies doing battle with the local phone company (cincinnati bell, which is to my knowlege the only remaining RBOC). competition is high and while the prices are still rising, so are the services provided.
If bandwidth use was a real concern they should run an ftp with all the big important files people might want so people can get them on the network. A lot of forign ISPs do this and then only charge for bandwidth that leaves the country.
in another post in this thread i recommended offering a caching/colocation service where content and application providers could host servers in large metropolitan areas so large numbers of thier subscribers could access their servers with relatively low latency and few hops, without hitting the internet at large. i don't think any ISP will go for it tho.
Hosting servers in every city? That's a great answer for a handful of companies. Unless you're the scale of Blizzard or Microsoft, that's just not an option. Small projects simply don't have the revenue or client base to support millions of dollars in monthly server farm costs. Even somewhat successful projects like EVE Online which has over 100,000 users last I heard is based on a single server. (Multiple physical servers obviously, but all users use are in a single universe)
isn't that the point of a tiered internet? to sell preferential access to higher paying customers? isn't this the new revenue stream that the telcos are claiming will help them finance their fiber rollout? (you know, the one they promised us in 1996 if we deregulated)
the tiered internet wasn't my idea, it was theirs and i don't think it's a good one. personally, i don't really care if the telcos and the cablecos stay afloat or go under. the local phone company in my town is getting it's ass kicked by mobile phones, cable internet access, and VOIP, so they are cutting prices and increasing services in response. my cable operator just countered by kicking up my download speed to 10mbit not long after jacking up my cable bill. ain't competition wonderful?
now, if only a magical third competitor, say municipal fiber or wifi, or some competitive offering from my mobile operator, things in my neighborhood would really heat up. i feel sorry for the poor blokes that only have one if any highspeed access option.
that legitimate industry could very easily keep things the way that they are and still sell better latency connections to clients that want them simply by letting them host servers at the central offices/headquarters in major cities where their clients can access them without hitting the internet at large.
you know, google hosts a few boxes with verizon's central office in downtown l.a. and no everyone in LA can search google at 10mbit and next to no latency. if you ping google, it's ip is 10.x.x.x and if you traceroute to it, it's like 4 hops away. verizon can offer this same service to yahoo, if yahoo chooses to take part, and time warner can offer the same service to google or yahoo as well. this clears up the rest of LA's outgoing bandwidth to access the rest of the internet for other stuff (no need to buy more bandwidth).
everyone wins this way. google/yahoo pays less for bandwidth, telcos make more money providing quality service to their customers, and no one has to worry about having their bits put on hold to service higher paying customers. you can't discriminate against one party's packets, but you can let one party host it's packets closer to your customers. there is no need for QOS, no need for anti-competitive deep packet inspection. just old fashioned TCP/IP delivering the bits like it always has.
want a working example? look at internet2. participating universities connect to eachother way faster without restricting access to the world at large.
i know, it's fiendishly simple. since it doesn't involve unfair practices, coin operated legislation, or abusing monopoly power, the telcos and cable co's will never go for it.
let me guess, that $15 a month after ponying up $30 or more for phone service.
if you spend just $15 a month for internet access without also buying cable or telephone service i will be amazed, since that is how these industries have managed to stay afloat long past their primes.
how about just selling internet access and charging you for the bandwidth that you *do* use. as long as the typical resident's bills don't go up *too* much, i don't think that many will complain. then all broadband services could charge based on a measurable and easily understood metric: the monthly dollar fee per gig of monthly transfer. wait, the telcos will never go for that, then there might actually be competition.
well, being ex-military doesn't automatically make you an asshole... it just may not make you an ideal candidate for using potentially lethal force to deal with unarmed combatants. in law enforcement, lethal force is the absolute last resort. on the other hand, soldiers are taught to shoot as a means of forcing the enemy to move or otherwise react, I.E. supressive fire or using a grenade to "clear" an entryway. don't even get me started on use of artillery.
the only time fired a gun outside of the army was one trip to shoot skeet. i was amazed that the shotguns we used only held 4 shells and how much time was spent reloading them. i guess birds don't need "two in the chest and one in the head" to go down quietly.
what is this? the lunchroom at my old highschool?
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 1
ever since the population of the united states figured out that computer literacy is a survival trait, geeks haven't had nearly as tough a time as they had in molly ringwald movies in the 80's. do healthy adults really still see the world in terms of who the "cool kids" are? from where i am sitting, smart people run shit.
i have known several leaders who don't make decisions without consulting someone that they trust. many often surround themselves with people they consider to be "good people". those people are often smart, at least in the eyes of the people who consult them.
as far as politics go, real intellectuals steer clear of the stuff, which is why washington is saturated with idiots. if you ask me, we just need to figure out how to upgrade the collective IQ of the people washington counts on to do their reading for them.
maybe then, businessmen and politiicans would stop looking at the world like a football game, and thinking just one quarter at a time. with a little serious long term thinking, perhaps there could be some real progress made towards finding a solution.
Slashdot Mirror
my hope is that "beneath the battle for the planet of the apes^H^H^H^Hgoogle" will be the point at which google jumps the shark.
i just got my router, bridge, and laptop moved over to 54g, it figures that things would change.
take helpdesk calls for a corporation for like 20 minutes. you will learn that companies don't train their employees to use windows, why would they train them to use linux?
the dead kennedys talked about the music industry and how it was killing music in 1985 with "MTV get off the air". the end of the song went something like "but sales are slumping...and no one will say why... could it be they put out one too many lousy records?"
it's ironic that 20 years later, DK is gone, but the music industry is still here, doing far worse to consumers than in 1985.
well, seeing as how the concept is nearly 500 years old i would imagine maybe another 500 years will finally see it's demise.
there is a significant difference between overthrowing one governement and setting up another and simply capturing a country. the US "captured" iraq in 6 weeks with very few losses. that's the kind of shit we excel at. it's fighting the insurgency and the civil war that has cost america so dearly.
the US *SUCKS* at nation building. our one success was japan, and we had a lot of help with germany. hell, we couldn't put ourselves back together after our own civil war. vietnam still has yet to recover from our presence there. when it comes to nation wrecking, the US is the best in the business. if the goal in 2003 was to just wipe the country out, iraq wouldn't have lasted a month since they had relatively little airpower, and as it turns out, no weapons of mass destruction.
i would imagine that business in uraguay is similar to business in the states in that taxes are the last thing in the world that you would want to take a chance on. if the gubmint says "use .NET" then you need to use .NET for fear of your taxes being filed improperly or not filed at all.
TFA is a little light on techinical specifics, but ut looks like an internet phone wizard that plugs into the speaker and mike plugs on the board instead of using a USB connection. i would imagine that it requires similar a similar windows specific helper program as the vosky.
i seriously doubt it. skype and asterisk are like oil and water, always have been and presumably, always will be.
no one in hollywood wants downloadable movies. you kids today with your ipods think that you do, but clearly you don't understand that there is a very large industry that we really can't jeopardize. the sooner you consumers figure that out, the sooner we can get past all of this "internet" nonsense. we here in hollywood have taken many measures to be certain that downloading is too expensive, too slow, and too inconvenient to compete with our firmly established business. if you want to watch a movie, go to the theater, if you want to watch something at home, buy the DVD (once the movie is no longer in theaters) or wait for it to come out on cable. those are your options. you get nothing! you lose! good day sir!
perhaps my subtle irony was a little too subtle... using software to make a discriminatory practice seem impartial is just as wrong as using humans to do it... if anything it's worse becuse you are using the guise of "impartiality" to push your agenda.
if you get a letter signed by the president on whitehouse letterhead that says "you're an asshole", the presidential seal doesn't doesn't make it true, nor does it change the fact that someone you don't know just called you an asshole. in both cases all it does is make a person's opinion look more official.
no, this is way better, it uses computers to racially profile. computers can't be racist... they're computers.
in that scenario, the US can't buy favor with guilder just by printing money. paying your debts in your own currency is way cheaper than paying them in someone else's.
it's like this: if a barrel of oil sells for 80USD, then the US economy is worth XXXbillion barrels of oil. not everyone needs dollars, and the value of a dollar changes... but everyone needs oil, and it's value can only go up thanks to supply and demand. if gold and/or oil gets traded in euros now, then the value of the US economy in terms of barrels of oil is now based on the strength of the dollar compared to the euro. since the world wants to change over to euros because of the weakness of the dollar,
make changes today? hell no, why would they? make chages in 5 years after the vendor has gone out of business/got bought by a competitor/stopped making or supporting your product? hell yes
[reference status="obligatory" source="movie"]You hear me talkin', internet archive? I ain't through with you by a damn sight.[/reference]
it's not the 20 year old zitface's money they are after. they are after the intimidation. your average hardcore pirate isn't going to be affected, but your average computer user will be. shutting down napster/kazaa/whatever and hitting anyone and everyone in sight is how they intimidate the leigons of would be downloaders.
if you will pardon the invocation of godwin's law for a moment, these are terrorist tactics. in military terms terrorism accomplishes little. targets for terrorism are political or psychological in nature. militarily, 9/11 didn't accomplish much. a large number of civillian casualties, yes, but in strategic terms it's not like ground zero was a beach head from which al quaeda could launch further operations into the continental US, nor did they significantly cripple the US from a communications or logistical standpoint. on the other hand, politically and pschologically 9/11 was devastating.
so, the RIAA files pointless lawsuit after pointless lawsuit not for financial gain, but for political and psychological gain. they have gotten joe and jane sixpack to equate downloading and copyright infringement with theft and have many people concerned that they could be raided as well if they don't stop. for every high profile lawsuit that they pay thousands for, how many people tacitly agree to stop downloading forever? my question is, is it working? will the music industry, despite it's many efforts, still be able to keep itself going?
the US would totally use nukes way earlier than anyone else in full on military conflict. why do you think we are so desperate to stop the rest of the world from getting them? the US wins wars by using *way* more firepower than the enemy. that's why grunts say "if at first you don't succeed, call in an airstrike". in the case of japan, the firepower escalated to the atomic bomb because we were not sure we could succeed in a full scale invasion of the japanese mainland. that's how our boys play the game, they fight until they are worried about losing, and then they double the amount of firepower. pretty much all US military doctorine involves bringing artillery to gunfight.
that is also why the US *sucks* at policing actions... our war machines are designed to enable a realtively small number of troops to inflict massive casualties in situations where they are greatly outnumbered. you can't police people with the same weapons and tactics that you use to hunt and kill them. look at the 2003 invasion of iraq, or fallujia, mogadishu or even the american invasion of afghanistan. in all of those cases, US servicemen died, but the enemy and civilian casualties were significantly higher. that is to be expected when you are using laser guided bombs to fight people armed with AK47's. coincidentally, that's why iraq has become such a sore subject, the world's most sophisticated military can't keep control over a bunch of guys who make bombs in their basements.
you have forgotten the USA's most powerful weapon: economics. americans import and consume so much from the rest of the world that going to war with us would be ecconomic suicide. the dollar is used as the reserve for many foreign currencies. america's military actions can have serious effects on international markets. also, a lot of the military hardware in the third world was once owned and has hence been sold off by the US. half of any fight is knowing your enemy and his capabilities, giving him your hand-me-downs to defend himself with means that you understand his capabilities fairly well.
the truth is that at one point, the US was the ecconomic backbone for a lot of the developed world. this is why costly ventures like the war in iraq are so dangerous to our ecconomic standing and why being reliant on foreign energy sources is just not a good idea. developed nations fear the us not for it's military power, but for it's ecconomic power. we americans believe that we are invulnerable, but if our ecconomy becomes too weak we could find out just how vulnerable we really are once our "allies" don't find us as useful as we once were.
lots of countries in the world have nucler weapons. only one country in the world has actually used them.
that's precisely my point. either bandwidth is too cheap to meter or it isn't. the telcos and cableco's want to create a tiered internet in order to give us the bandwidth intensive services we want on a fee scale that benefits them... as if bandwidth was some finite resource that you have to drill in the ground for. the truth is that they have oversold the service as unlimited, and now that we everyone who wants broadband has it, we are pushing those limits. they need to build out their networks to support their existing userbase, with not much promise for new customers. so now they need to raise prices and need an excuse to justify it. they believe that it is in their best interest to protect their businesses of scarcity by putting lower paying packets on hold in order to guarantee that the higher paying ones get delivered first, rather than just compete with other providers in terms of price or service.
in the greater cincinnati area, you have at least one sometimes two cable companies doing battle with the local phone company (cincinnati bell, which is to my knowlege the only remaining RBOC). competition is high and while the prices are still rising, so are the services provided.
in another post in this thread i recommended offering a caching/colocation service where content and application providers could host servers in large metropolitan areas so large numbers of thier subscribers could access their servers with relatively low latency and few hops, without hitting the internet at large. i don't think any ISP will go for it tho.
isn't that the point of a tiered internet? to sell preferential access to higher paying customers? isn't this the new revenue stream that the telcos are claiming will help them finance their fiber rollout? (you know, the one they promised us in 1996 if we deregulated)
the tiered internet wasn't my idea, it was theirs and i don't think it's a good one. personally, i don't really care if the telcos and the cablecos stay afloat or go under. the local phone company in my town is getting it's ass kicked by mobile phones, cable internet access, and VOIP, so they are cutting prices and increasing services in response. my cable operator just countered by kicking up my download speed to 10mbit not long after jacking up my cable bill. ain't competition wonderful?
now, if only a magical third competitor, say municipal fiber or wifi, or some competitive offering from my mobile operator, things in my neighborhood would really heat up. i feel sorry for the poor blokes that only have one if any highspeed access option.
that legitimate industry could very easily keep things the way that they are and still sell better latency connections to clients that want them simply by letting them host servers at the central offices/headquarters in major cities where their clients can access them without hitting the internet at large.
you know, google hosts a few boxes with verizon's central office in downtown l.a. and no everyone in LA can search google at 10mbit and next to no latency. if you ping google, it's ip is 10.x.x.x and if you traceroute to it, it's like 4 hops away. verizon can offer this same service to yahoo, if yahoo chooses to take part, and time warner can offer the same service to google or yahoo as well. this clears up the rest of LA's outgoing bandwidth to access the rest of the internet for other stuff (no need to buy more bandwidth).
everyone wins this way. google/yahoo pays less for bandwidth, telcos make more money providing quality service to their customers, and no one has to worry about having their bits put on hold to service higher paying customers. you can't discriminate against one party's packets, but you can let one party host it's packets closer to your customers. there is no need for QOS, no need for anti-competitive deep packet inspection. just old fashioned TCP/IP delivering the bits like it always has.
want a working example? look at internet2. participating universities connect to eachother way faster without restricting access to the world at large.
i know, it's fiendishly simple. since it doesn't involve unfair practices, coin operated legislation, or abusing monopoly power, the telcos and cable co's will never go for it.
let me guess, that $15 a month after ponying up $30 or more for phone service.
if you spend just $15 a month for internet access without also buying cable or telephone service i will be amazed, since that is how these industries have managed to stay afloat long past their primes.
how about just selling internet access and charging you for the bandwidth that you *do* use. as long as the typical resident's bills don't go up *too* much, i don't think that many will complain. then all broadband services could charge based on a measurable and easily understood metric: the monthly dollar fee per gig of monthly transfer. wait, the telcos will never go for that, then there might actually be competition.
well, being ex-military doesn't automatically make you an asshole... it just may not make you an ideal candidate for using potentially lethal force to deal with unarmed combatants. in law enforcement, lethal force is the absolute last resort. on the other hand, soldiers are taught to shoot as a means of forcing the enemy to move or otherwise react, I.E. supressive fire or using a grenade to "clear" an entryway. don't even get me started on use of artillery.
the only time fired a gun outside of the army was one trip to shoot skeet. i was amazed that the shotguns we used only held 4 shells and how much time was spent reloading them. i guess birds don't need "two in the chest and one in the head" to go down quietly.
ever since the population of the united states figured out that computer literacy is a survival trait, geeks haven't had nearly as tough a time as they had in molly ringwald movies in the 80's. do healthy adults really still see the world in terms of who the "cool kids" are? from where i am sitting, smart people run shit.
i have known several leaders who don't make decisions without consulting someone that they trust. many often surround themselves with people they consider to be "good people". those people are often smart, at least in the eyes of the people who consult them.
as far as politics go, real intellectuals steer clear of the stuff, which is why washington is saturated with idiots. if you ask me, we just need to figure out how to upgrade the collective IQ of the people washington counts on to do their reading for them.
maybe then, businessmen and politiicans would stop looking at the world like a football game, and thinking just one quarter at a time. with a little serious long term thinking, perhaps there could be some real progress made towards finding a solution.