There's this idea in the US that you are never allowed to hurt anyone's feelings.
The problem with that is that people are irrational, oversensitive, and cannot control themselves. Interacting with such fragile daisies is like tiptoeing through a minefield.
It is not, to me, a foregone conclusion that assertive people should tolerate having to deal with sensitive people. That is the prevailing dogma in US business, but it's not clear why that should be the case.
The meta response to this entire conversation space should be "stop bothering me with your bullshit and submit some fucking code"
For many years, I ran an alix2d3 box with OpenBSD installed on it as my edge device. Excellent hardware, excellent OS.
pf.conf is simple for a basic configuration.
If you want to run off of a read-only flash file system, or have a router-style config experience, there are adaptations for that purpose also. But just plain old boring openBSD is a great place to start.
My favorite thing about openBSD is how lightweight the install is. There is very little garbage you'll want to shut off or remove.
For the canonical SOHO edge device, choose any x86 hardware you have, put 2 network interfaces on it, and you're done.
A basic pf.conf that gives you NAT and blocks everything evil from the outside is only a few lines, and well documented on the interwebs.
Put your samba server somewhere else.
Oddly enough, I finally retired my openbsd device and got a few Ubiquity EdgeRouters. My home network situation changed and I wanted a smallish device with POE support, but still wanted a real OS on it..
if you understand scalar assembly, understanding the basic "how" of vector/SIMD programming is conceptually similar
Actually, if you think back to pre-32bit x86 assembler, where the X registers (AX, BX) were actually addressable as half-registers (AH and AL were the high and low sections of AX), you already understand, to some extent, SIMD
SIMD just generalizes the idea that a register is very big (e.g. 512 bits), and the same operation is done in parallel to subregions of the register.
So, for instance, if you have a 512 bit vector register and you want to treat it like 64 separate 8 bit values, you could write code like follows:
C = A + B
If C, A, and B are all 512 bit registers, partitioned into 64 8 bit values, logically, the above vector/SIMD code does the below scalar code:
for (i == 1..64) {
c[i] = a[i] + b[i] }
If the particular processor you are executing on has 64 parallel 8-bit adders, then the vector code
C = A + B
Can run as one internal operation, utilizing all 64 adder units in parallel.
That's much better than the scalar version above - a loop that executes 64 passes..
A vector machine could actually be implemented with only 32 adders, and could take 2 internal ops to implement a 64 element vector add... that's still a 32x speedup compared to the scalar, looping version.
The Cray 1 was an amazing machine. It ran at 80mhz in 1976
I spent the last 10 years working on the unglamorous parts of the MS stack that deal with writing business software. I worked on ERP systems (big stuff, big money) and small stuff (VS Lightswitch).
It turns out that there are zillions of little apps that make businesses run. Some of them are no more robust than an excel workbook on a well known file share. Some are Access applications. Lots of VB6 apps are still keeping businesses running.
Integrating with existing systems is notoriously hard. The larger a system is, the more likely you are to need a VAR/integrator for an industry specific vertical to build customizations for you.
There is absolutely a need for tooling to build business critical apps - forms over data, basic workflow, reliable data storage, etc.
It is possible to roll-your-own on each of these pieces, but it turns out that tailoring any of them for business app usage, much less stitching them all together into some sort of recipe or middleware... is hard.
However, the smaller the problem domain is, the larger the advantage in NOT trying to integrate or use off-the-shelf software.
With LightSwitch, you can write a 1-5 form productivity app in a few minutes that will let a small team of people do data entry, with basic validation and reliable storage underneath. This makes it great for volunteer organizations and other low time / low budget endeavours...
I'm very interested to see if other people have had positive experiences apart from Lightswitch... our customers tell us its the only tool quite like it... unless you go back to PowerBuilder or something along those lines...
The problem is that the WebView is one of the remaining pieces that was still tied directly to the OS in those earlier versions, so it can't be updated directly
Wait. It sounds likes you're saying that on older versions of Android, the Browser Rendering Engine is part of the OS?
This sounds familiar. I think a very large software company has made a claim like this before... it was somewhere around 15 to 20 years ago...
The majority of electricity is produced by doing something that wrecks the planet somehow, according to somebody.
The point is that electricity is an interesting way to power a car because we can think of more ways of making electricity - both now and in the future - than we can of making gasoline.
The same is true of hydrogen. For instance, you can make hydrogen via electrolysis. If you are somewhere with abundant, cheap, clean electricity - like Iceland - then dumping off-peak electricity into electrolosys so you can store H-gas might be an interesting process.
In fact, I saw Shell stations in Iceland that were providing hydrogen refueling in the mid 2000s. I have no idea where they were getting the Hydrogen from, but experimenting with alternative energy/power production systems is a good idea.
I'm going on my 15th year at Microsoft. The first three were spent in Redmond. The rest have been at the office in Fargo, ND. For family reasons, I asked to be xferred to Fargo.
These days, not only do I not want to work in Redmond, I would prefer to not regularly go to a company office at all. Last year, I moved to a farmstead that is a bit outside of town. I've been working from home irregularly -- a few days here and there. Now that I have a new boss who is in Redmond, he doesn't care if I'm a remote employee in a Fargo office or a remote employee in my basement. So, I expect to be doing quite a bit more WFH.
It turns out that I am way more individually productive at completing tasks from home than I am when I am in the office.
However, there are definite advantages to getting some face to face time with the people you regularly work with. But not every day.
Every few months, Google, Netflix, Salesforce,etc will grab my linked in profile and ask if I'm interested. I tell them all the same thing - there is no condition under which I would move to the Bay Area. None at all. Furthermore, these companies are all based off of opensource software that was developed via distributed engineering - so what's their excuse to want to co-locate people into offices? Surely it isn't an engineering reason? Surely what they're building isn't more complicated than the linux kernel?
When something happens to my MS job out here, I plan on taking a 50% pay cut when I find whatever is next. That's not ideal, but I'm not willing to move to a big urban area again. There are people who are competent software engineers that don't want to live in large cities, or who don't want to commute to an office even if they do live in a large city. We're affordable to hire, we incur no facilities costs, and we're appreciative and loyal. Stop overlooking us.
Corporate culture is behind social and technical culture. Most of us interact daily with acquantances that live multiple timezones away. The reasons for forcing co-workers into the same building every day continue to shrink. It will be great when cube farms are levelled and other more interesting things are built in their place.
If you view this as an imperialist move by China as opposed to a western style company taking a risky bet, does that change things at all?
Recall that many Chinese "companies" are appendages of the Chinese government -- and sometimes, even the Chinese Military (acting with quasi-autonomy from the government itself).
So, if some fragile corrupt African government attempts to nationalize Chinese investments, there's a good chance that China will simply dispense with the problematic elements of said government in whatever way doesn't risk significant repercussions from other world powers. Given what China is willing to provoke between Taiwan and Japan -- two US allies with protection agreements -- I don't think China is going to lose any sleep if it needs to steamroll a few African governments. The US won't do anything about it, and neither will anyone else.
Finally, why are you still in SA? It sounds like a wretched mess. Turn off the lights on your way out....
My ILEC is CenturyLink, a national company. The neighboring ILEC is actually a locally owned company that is much smaller and is providing much better service.
The point is, even if I wanted wired IP service from a competing ISP, that's not possible because the ILEC owns the copper to my property and the ILEC cannot provide L2 connectivity over its existing infrastructure, and has no plans to upgrade that infrastructure.
Meanwhile, a neighboring, locally owned ILEC is running FTTH to its rural customers...
I haven't spoken enough with the competing ILEC to know if they'd be able to finance their fiber buildout without capturing the revenue from voice and data service on top of their plant.
I don't understand your reference to my state. I agree that we shouldn't make laws for everyone based on the conditions in a particular place.
That's actually a great reason to limit FCC oversight, since it is a federal entity and makes rules that are national in scope...
Why does Verizon have the right to saturate my property with 700mhz energy?
I didn't sell that to them.
If they want to shoot 700mhz energy across (and through!) my house, why don't they have to buy rights to that? If they are preventing me from being able to do anything in my own home with 700mhz because of their harmful emissions, why don't I have any recourse against them?
Nobody would let me park across the street from your house and shine lasers or even flashlights into your windows.
Why is Verizon given this same privilege, albeit in a section of non-visible spectrum?
The current RF energy governance framework we have in the US may not be appropriate. The spectrum licensees certainly benefit from legal protection from competition, and from legal usurpation of my property rights on a massive scale...
I am near the edge of my ILEC's territory. If I wanted a different ILEC from a neighboring territory to be able to provide service at my address, I would need to petition for the two ILECs in question to agree to "hand me off" from the current ILEC to a different one.
This comes directly from the state public service commission in my state (North Dakota).
Legally, only one ILEC is allowed to run copper pairs to my property. They have no interested in upgrading their plant.
They have a protected monopoly.
In many jurisdictions, only one cable company can put coax in the ground.
They have a protected monopoly.
IP protections, like copyright, are a government protected monopoly.
Frequency allocations, overseen by the FCC, are a government protected monopoly.
Access Easements on private property for incumbent wire owners (e.g. the cable company can put a truck or a box on your property if they like) are a government grant of special privilege.
Given all of the government collusion with the current infrastructure, asking if government can address its own problems seems a bit silly. Of course it could. It could stop enabling all of the stuff it currently enables, for one.
If you try to factor the residential broadband problem into an OSI-type layer model, perhaps what makes sense is to limit vertical integration.
E.g. if there is physical plant, IP transit, content delivery, and content production, it would be problematic to allow, for instance, SONY, to own all 4 of those layers in some specific area.
Ideally there would be robust competition at each layer.
Another action the government could take would be to stop approving merger/consolidation deals that have the net effect of consolidating layers and/or markets in such a way that overall marketplace competition suffers.
In some communities, public utility ownership of layer 1 (physical plant) would make a lot of sense and would be voter supported. In others, it wouldn't, and wouldn't. Both models are worth trying.
As you go up the stack, there are lots of opportunities for different business models. Community owned IP transit? Why not? This is, in some regards, the case at current internet peering points. The members co-own the exchanges. It is in some respects like the agricultural co-ops that are so common in rural America - the land of rugged individualists.
People are, after all, not opposed to working in groups when they like the group and when the cooperation makes sense (as opposed to being coercive in nature)
I currently live on a farm 3.5 miles from the nearest town. The copper pair running to my property is so noisy that the phone company asks me if it always sounds so bad. It is actually provisioned out of a different town a bit further away. Of course it is not possible to get a DSL connection where I am. In fact, it is impossible to get any kind of wired broadband service where I am.
I have been making due with a Verizon LTE puck for the last year, and it is truly terrible. The key problem is that it is a metered connection; I pay for every byte that "allegedly" goes in or out of the box. I say allegedly because I know enough about tcpdump to suspect that Verizon is being a bit optimistic about my usage (and therefore, my bill). In addition to the high cost of a metered connection, the reliability is not very good.
So, I have taken it upon myself to build my own wireless link from the nearby town, where DSL service is available. I tested the p2p wireless link this weekend and it provided 25MBit of aggregate bandwidth -- more than the DSL service feeding it is actually providing.
In your world of government monopoly, do you think it would be easier or harder for me to have working and affordable un-metered broadband at my property?
Because while I had to build it my damn self, at least I was able/allowed to build it my damn self.
I buy my electricity and water from county-level rural cooperatives. It is clear that local, small scale operations can do an effective job of providing good services. I am amenable to the idea that perhaps last-mile infrastructure could be common carrier and community owned/operated.
I am a bit more hesitant to say that I want my choices dictated entirely by the machinery of government. I am currently in that situation and it is unpleasant.
Also, Somalia currently has the cheapest and best cell phone service in Africa.
The "move to Somalia" argument is a pretty standard trope when having conversations about the proper size and scope of government. Of course, there are lots of reasons why overweight white software engineers from America wouldn't necessarily thrive in Somalia irrespective of what kind of government it did or didn't have, but that doesn't really seem to diminish how often the trope is pulled out, so let's try something else -- you know, actual data.
Rather than repeating an unsubstantiated bias, I encourage you to read the paper I linked.
I'll spoil it a little bit: The conclusion, of course, isn't that all governments are bad (that's a philosophical conjecture, not a testable hypothesis). It is, however, quite apparent that some governments are so bad that no government is actually preferable.
This is actually the case in Somalia.
Somalia may at some point transition to a government that is objectively better than their current situation, but their current arrangement is, as the paper argues, objectively better than their previously governed condition.
Short Version: Stan Lee has had nothing to do with SLM for over a decade - since his former friend and co-founder fled to South America to avoid federal securities fraud prosecution.
SLM is currently a few leeches who have nothing to do with the comics industry are trying to sink their claws into the profits of the creative class.
I understand that creative people need money to work, and the entities that front that money are due a return on their investment.
Actually, what I want people to come away with is that they should stop assuming equality of outcomes.
When there is evidence of negative behaviors causing undesirable outcomes in specific instances, acting to rememdy that is of course a reasonable thing to do.
My point is just that we should be specific and honest about the goal posts. If your goal post is "women should be represented at 50% within profession blah", that is a claim that requires a lot of unpacking and justification. We should automatically reject claims like this until sufficient argument and evidence is presented.
We shouldn't automatically expect a 50/50 split -- if for no other reason than because men and women are biologically different.
So if the claim is that some women who wish to be programmers aren't doing so because of undesirable social factor X, how do you know when you've "succeeded" ?
Is it when no more women complain? Is it when the gender ratio in the industry is 50/50? 55/45? 45/55?
And, to open an entirely different can of worms -- why is helping women get the job they want supposed to be anyone else's problem?
Or, suppose that there was a _social cost_ or an economic cost to achieving an (X/100-X) gender ratio in a specific industry? How would you decide if that cost was worth paying? Why is it your decision?
Well, I'd say "fewer men should die" if I were going to make that statement.
It turns out, actually, that certain jobs are dangerous and unpleasant, and men seem to self-select for these jobs more often than do females.
There are a number of interesting possible explanations for this, but none of them are terribly surprising unless you've thought for most of your conscious life that the two genders are truly and completely identical, and any differences are only the result of social conditioning.
Of course, this is absurd.
Biologically, men are expendable and women are not. Biologically, the humans of today come from a narrower range of paternal ancestors, because human breeding was selective. Men who had power, prowess, ambition, and ruthlessness passed on their genes AND shaped the socities that men and women lived in.
In considering distributions of male size, strength, intelligence, and so on, the distributions are wider than when considering females. The smartest men appear to be much smarter than the smartest women; the dumbest men appear to be much dumber than the dumbest women.
Males simply have higher expressed variability.
Men need less sleep than women; men are not as attuned to empathy as are women; men engage in much riskier behavior than do women, and their neural reward and risk center works differently than it does in women.
You can continue to pretend that gender is a social construct, or that male and female distributions and outcomes should be identical, but here on the real world, they aren't and they won't be.
In the event that any public entity (e.g. a government) has a policy that would prevent an individual woman from doing some job merely on account of her being a woman, we should repeal that policy.
In the event that any private entity (e.g. a business) has a policy that would prevent an individual woman from doing some job merely on account of her being a woman, we should think that business owner is a jerk.
Individuals in a free society should be free to do as they like.
But what we should stop assuming is that men and women are interchangeable and will have broadly identical social preferences and outcomes.
They won't, and that's not because anything is standing in their way. They're just different.
Dial-up is functionally unusable in 2014. Hitting facebook.com pulls down several MB of data just to draw the page, load the JS, etc.
That said, my home phone line is so noisy even the phone company asks me if it always sounds so bad. They're not sure why the line is noisy. It just is. I don't think I'd be able to sustain a 56k connection.
Satellite also has monthly xfer limits -- that are much lower than Verizon. Most people that have had Satellite switch to LTE and don't switch back.
There is a WISP in the area but he is very busy, isn't very reliable, (e.g. blows off appointments, doesn't answer emails) and his tower is pretty far away and several forests block LOS between my place and his tower. To have any chance of using his tower I'd need to do some significant work -- more than I am doing to actually do my own custom backhaul.
Customers of his have told me that they have a few days of downtime a year while he has to go climb a tower and re-aim something. It sounds very shoe-stringy to me.
Slashdot Mirror
There's this idea in the US that you are never allowed to hurt anyone's feelings.
The problem with that is that people are irrational, oversensitive, and cannot control themselves. Interacting with such fragile daisies is like tiptoeing through a minefield.
It is not, to me, a foregone conclusion that assertive people should tolerate having to deal with sensitive people. That is the prevailing dogma in US business, but it's not clear why that should be the case.
The meta response to this entire conversation space should be "stop bothering me with your bullshit and submit some fucking code"
For many years, I ran an alix2d3 box with OpenBSD installed on it as my edge device. Excellent hardware, excellent OS.
pf.conf is simple for a basic configuration.
If you want to run off of a read-only flash file system, or have a router-style config experience, there are adaptations for that purpose also. But just plain old boring openBSD is a great place to start.
My favorite thing about openBSD is how lightweight the install is. There is very little garbage you'll want to shut off or remove.
For the canonical SOHO edge device, choose any x86 hardware you have, put 2 network interfaces on it, and you're done.
A basic pf.conf that gives you NAT and blocks everything evil from the outside is only a few lines, and well documented on the interwebs.
Put your samba server somewhere else.
Oddly enough, I finally retired my openbsd device and got a few Ubiquity EdgeRouters. My home network situation changed and I wanted a smallish device with POE support, but still wanted a real OS on it..
if you understand scalar assembly, understanding the basic "how" of vector/SIMD programming is conceptually similar
Actually, if you think back to pre-32bit x86 assembler, where the X registers (AX, BX) were actually addressable as half-registers (AH and AL were the high and low sections of AX), you already understand, to some extent, SIMD
SIMD just generalizes the idea that a register is very big (e.g. 512 bits), and the same operation is done in parallel to subregions of the register.
So, for instance, if you have a 512 bit vector register and you want to treat it like 64 separate 8 bit values, you could write code like follows:
C = A + B
If C, A, and B are all 512 bit registers, partitioned into 64 8 bit values, logically, the above vector/SIMD code does the below scalar code:
for (i == 1..64) {
c[i] = a[i] + b[i]
}
If the particular processor you are executing on has 64 parallel 8-bit adders, then the vector code
C = A + B
Can run as one internal operation, utilizing all 64 adder units in parallel.
That's much better than the scalar version above - a loop that executes 64 passes..
A vector machine could actually be implemented with only 32 adders, and could take 2 internal ops to implement a 64 element vector add... that's still a 32x speedup compared to the scalar, looping version.
The Cray 1 was an amazing machine. It ran at 80mhz in 1976
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
According to WP, the only patent on the Cray 1 was for its cooling system...
Actually, I'm going to disagree here.
I spent the last 10 years working on the unglamorous parts of the MS stack that deal with writing business software. I worked on ERP systems (big stuff, big money) and small stuff (VS Lightswitch).
It turns out that there are zillions of little apps that make businesses run. Some of them are no more robust than an excel workbook on a well known file share. Some are Access applications. Lots of VB6 apps are still keeping businesses running.
Integrating with existing systems is notoriously hard. The larger a system is, the more likely you are to need a VAR/integrator for an industry specific vertical to build customizations for you.
There is absolutely a need for tooling to build business critical apps - forms over data, basic workflow, reliable data storage, etc.
It is possible to roll-your-own on each of these pieces, but it turns out that tailoring any of them for business app usage, much less stitching them all together into some sort of recipe or middleware... is hard.
However, the smaller the problem domain is, the larger the advantage in NOT trying to integrate or use off-the-shelf software.
With LightSwitch, you can write a 1-5 form productivity app in a few minutes that will let a small team of people do data entry, with basic validation and reliable storage underneath. This makes it great for volunteer organizations and other low time / low budget endeavours...
I'm very interested to see if other people have had positive experiences apart from Lightswitch... our customers tell us its the only tool quite like it... unless you go back to PowerBuilder or something along those lines...
Wait. It sounds likes you're saying that on older versions of Android, the Browser Rendering Engine is part of the OS?
This sounds familiar. I think a very large software company has made a claim like this before... it was somewhere around 15 to 20 years ago...
The majority of electricity is produced by doing something that wrecks the planet somehow, according to somebody.
The point is that electricity is an interesting way to power a car because we can think of more ways of making electricity - both now and in the future - than we can of making gasoline.
The same is true of hydrogen. For instance, you can make hydrogen via electrolysis. If you are somewhere with abundant, cheap, clean electricity - like Iceland - then dumping off-peak electricity into electrolosys so you can store H-gas might be an interesting process.
In fact, I saw Shell stations in Iceland that were providing hydrogen refueling in the mid 2000s. I have no idea where they were getting the Hydrogen from, but experimenting with alternative energy/power production systems is a good idea.
I'm going on my 15th year at Microsoft. The first three were spent in Redmond. The rest have been at the office in Fargo, ND. For family reasons, I asked to be xferred to Fargo.
These days, not only do I not want to work in Redmond, I would prefer to not regularly go to a company office at all. Last year, I moved to a farmstead that is a bit outside of town. I've been working from home irregularly -- a few days here and there. Now that I have a new boss who is in Redmond, he doesn't care if I'm a remote employee in a Fargo office or a remote employee in my basement. So, I expect to be doing quite a bit more WFH.
It turns out that I am way more individually productive at completing tasks from home than I am when I am in the office.
However, there are definite advantages to getting some face to face time with the people you regularly work with. But not every day.
Every few months, Google, Netflix, Salesforce,etc will grab my linked in profile and ask if I'm interested. I tell them all the same thing - there is no condition under which I would move to the Bay Area. None at all. Furthermore, these companies are all based off of opensource software that was developed via distributed engineering - so what's their excuse to want to co-locate people into offices? Surely it isn't an engineering reason? Surely what they're building isn't more complicated than the linux kernel?
When something happens to my MS job out here, I plan on taking a 50% pay cut when I find whatever is next. That's not ideal, but I'm not willing to move to a big urban area again. There are people who are competent software engineers that don't want to live in large cities, or who don't want to commute to an office even if they do live in a large city. We're affordable to hire, we incur no facilities costs, and we're appreciative and loyal. Stop overlooking us.
Corporate culture is behind social and technical culture. Most of us interact daily with acquantances that live multiple timezones away. The reasons for forcing co-workers into the same building every day continue to shrink. It will be great when cube farms are levelled and other more interesting things are built in their place.
If you view this as an imperialist move by China as opposed to a western style company taking a risky bet, does that change things at all?
Recall that many Chinese "companies" are appendages of the Chinese government -- and sometimes, even the Chinese Military (acting with quasi-autonomy from the government itself).
So, if some fragile corrupt African government attempts to nationalize Chinese investments, there's a good chance that China will simply dispense with the problematic elements of said government in whatever way doesn't risk significant repercussions from other world powers. Given what China is willing to provoke between Taiwan and Japan -- two US allies with protection agreements -- I don't think China is going to lose any sleep if it needs to steamroll a few African governments. The US won't do anything about it, and neither will anyone else.
Finally, why are you still in SA? It sounds like a wretched mess. Turn off the lights on your way out....
If you look up "appeal to authority" logical fallacy, there is an exception for Donald Knuth:
"footnote: It is never fallacious to properly cite Donald Knuth in lieu of providing your own argument."
My ILEC is CenturyLink, a national company. The neighboring ILEC is actually a locally owned company that is much smaller and is providing much better service.
The point is, even if I wanted wired IP service from a competing ISP, that's not possible because the ILEC owns the copper to my property and the ILEC cannot provide L2 connectivity over its existing infrastructure, and has no plans to upgrade that infrastructure.
Meanwhile, a neighboring, locally owned ILEC is running FTTH to its rural customers...
I haven't spoken enough with the competing ILEC to know if they'd be able to finance their fiber buildout without capturing the revenue from voice and data service on top of their plant.
I don't understand your reference to my state. I agree that we shouldn't make laws for everyone based on the conditions in a particular place.
That's actually a great reason to limit FCC oversight, since it is a federal entity and makes rules that are national in scope...
Why does Verizon have the right to saturate my property with 700mhz energy?
I didn't sell that to them.
If they want to shoot 700mhz energy across (and through!) my house, why don't they have to buy rights to that? If they are preventing me from being able to do anything in my own home with 700mhz because of their harmful emissions, why don't I have any recourse against them?
Nobody would let me park across the street from your house and shine lasers or even flashlights into your windows.
Why is Verizon given this same privilege, albeit in a section of non-visible spectrum?
The current RF energy governance framework we have in the US may not be appropriate. The spectrum licensees certainly benefit from legal protection from competition, and from legal usurpation of my property rights on a massive scale...
I am near the edge of my ILEC's territory. If I wanted a different ILEC from a neighboring territory to be able to provide service at my address, I would need to petition for the two ILECs in question to agree to "hand me off" from the current ILEC to a different one.
This comes directly from the state public service commission in my state (North Dakota).
Legally, only one ILEC is allowed to run copper pairs to my property. They have no interested in upgrading their plant.
They have a protected monopoly.
In many jurisdictions, only one cable company can put coax in the ground.
They have a protected monopoly.
IP protections, like copyright, are a government protected monopoly.
Frequency allocations, overseen by the FCC, are a government protected monopoly.
Access Easements on private property for incumbent wire owners (e.g. the cable company can put a truck or a box on your property if they like) are a government grant of special privilege.
Given all of the government collusion with the current infrastructure, asking if government can address its own problems seems a bit silly. Of course it could. It could stop enabling all of the stuff it currently enables, for one.
If you try to factor the residential broadband problem into an OSI-type layer model, perhaps what makes sense is to limit vertical integration.
E.g. if there is physical plant, IP transit, content delivery, and content production, it would be problematic to allow, for instance, SONY, to own all 4 of those layers in some specific area.
Ideally there would be robust competition at each layer.
Another action the government could take would be to stop approving merger/consolidation deals that have the net effect of consolidating layers and/or markets in such a way that overall marketplace competition suffers.
In some communities, public utility ownership of layer 1 (physical plant) would make a lot of sense and would be voter supported. In others, it wouldn't, and wouldn't. Both models are worth trying.
As you go up the stack, there are lots of opportunities for different business models. Community owned IP transit? Why not? This is, in some regards, the case at current internet peering points. The members co-own the exchanges. It is in some respects like the agricultural co-ops that are so common in rural America - the land of rugged individualists.
People are, after all, not opposed to working in groups when they like the group and when the cooperation makes sense (as opposed to being coercive in nature)
I currently live on a farm 3.5 miles from the nearest town. The copper pair running to my property is so noisy that the phone company asks me if it always sounds so bad. It is actually provisioned out of a different town a bit further away. Of course it is not possible to get a DSL connection where I am. In fact, it is impossible to get any kind of wired broadband service where I am.
I have been making due with a Verizon LTE puck for the last year, and it is truly terrible. The key problem is that it is a metered connection; I pay for every byte that "allegedly" goes in or out of the box. I say allegedly because I know enough about tcpdump to suspect that Verizon is being a bit optimistic about my usage (and therefore, my bill). In addition to the high cost of a metered connection, the reliability is not very good.
So, I have taken it upon myself to build my own wireless link from the nearby town, where DSL service is available. I tested the p2p wireless link this weekend and it provided 25MBit of aggregate bandwidth -- more than the DSL service feeding it is actually providing.
In your world of government monopoly, do you think it would be easier or harder for me to have working and affordable un-metered broadband at my property?
Because while I had to build it my damn self, at least I was able/allowed to build it my damn self.
I buy my electricity and water from county-level rural cooperatives. It is clear that local, small scale operations can do an effective job of providing good services. I am amenable to the idea that perhaps last-mile infrastructure could be common carrier and community owned/operated.
I am a bit more hesitant to say that I want my choices dictated entirely by the machinery of government. I am currently in that situation and it is unpleasant.
You should read this paper very carefully:
http://www.peterleeson.com/Bet...
Also, Somalia currently has the cheapest and best cell phone service in Africa.
The "move to Somalia" argument is a pretty standard trope when having conversations about the proper size and scope of government. Of course, there are lots of reasons why overweight white software engineers from America wouldn't necessarily thrive in Somalia irrespective of what kind of government it did or didn't have, but that doesn't really seem to diminish how often the trope is pulled out, so let's try something else -- you know, actual data.
Rather than repeating an unsubstantiated bias, I encourage you to read the paper I linked.
I'll spoil it a little bit: The conclusion, of course, isn't that all governments are bad (that's a philosophical conjecture, not a testable hypothesis). It is, however, quite apparent that some governments are so bad that no government is actually preferable.
This is actually the case in Somalia.
Somalia may at some point transition to a government that is objectively better than their current situation, but their current arrangement is, as the paper argues, objectively better than their previously governed condition.
The person in question was ultimately extradited to the US and convicted. The point was that the company turned shady very quickly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Short Version: Stan Lee has had nothing to do with SLM for over a decade - since his former friend and co-founder fled to South America to avoid federal securities fraud prosecution.
SLM is currently a few leeches who have nothing to do with the comics industry are trying to sink their claws into the profits of the creative class.
I understand that creative people need money to work, and the entities that front that money are due a return on their investment.
That's not what's going on here.
We've been waiting for you.
http://www.openbsd.org/
I don't think people like Elon musk worry about being out of a job.
Industrial robots didn't unbolt themselves from the factory floors and go and kill the people that wanted to turn them off.
Because they couldn't. Because they couldn't have their own wills at all.
Mr. Musk is advising us to NOT create the kind of robots that could.
That's not true, and you know it.
You avoided the question of where the goal posts are.
How have you determined that there is a problem?
When will you be convinced that the problem has been addressed?
Actually, what I want people to come away with is that they should stop assuming equality of outcomes.
When there is evidence of negative behaviors causing undesirable outcomes in specific instances, acting to rememdy that is of course a reasonable thing to do.
My point is just that we should be specific and honest about the goal posts. If your goal post is "women should be represented at 50% within profession blah", that is a claim that requires a lot of unpacking and justification. We should automatically reject claims like this until sufficient argument and evidence is presented.
We shouldn't automatically expect a 50/50 split -- if for no other reason than because men and women are biologically different.
So if the claim is that some women who wish to be programmers aren't doing so because of undesirable social factor X, how do you know when you've "succeeded" ?
Is it when no more women complain? Is it when the gender ratio in the industry is 50/50? 55/45? 45/55?
And, to open an entirely different can of worms -- why is helping women get the job they want supposed to be anyone else's problem?
Or, suppose that there was a _social cost_ or an economic cost to achieving an (X/100-X) gender ratio in a specific industry? How would you decide if that cost was worth paying? Why is it your decision?
Well, I'd say "fewer men should die" if I were going to make that statement.
It turns out, actually, that certain jobs are dangerous and unpleasant, and men seem to self-select for these jobs more often than do females.
There are a number of interesting possible explanations for this, but none of them are terribly surprising unless you've thought for most of your conscious life that the two genders are truly and completely identical, and any differences are only the result of social conditioning.
Of course, this is absurd.
Biologically, men are expendable and women are not. Biologically, the humans of today come from a narrower range of paternal ancestors, because human breeding was selective. Men who had power, prowess, ambition, and ruthlessness passed on their genes AND shaped the socities that men and women lived in.
In considering distributions of male size, strength, intelligence, and so on, the distributions are wider than when considering females. The smartest men appear to be much smarter than the smartest women; the dumbest men appear to be much dumber than the dumbest women.
Males simply have higher expressed variability.
Men need less sleep than women; men are not as attuned to empathy as are women; men engage in much riskier behavior than do women, and their neural reward and risk center works differently than it does in women.
You can continue to pretend that gender is a social construct, or that male and female distributions and outcomes should be identical, but here on the real world, they aren't and they won't be.
In the event that any public entity (e.g. a government) has a policy that would prevent an individual woman from doing some job merely on account of her being a woman, we should repeal that policy.
In the event that any private entity (e.g. a business) has a policy that would prevent an individual woman from doing some job merely on account of her being a woman, we should think that business owner is a jerk.
Individuals in a free society should be free to do as they like.
But what we should stop assuming is that men and women are interchangeable and will have broadly identical social preferences and outcomes.
They won't, and that's not because anything is standing in their way. They're just different.
By Nature.
In your view, is it a problem that men are nearly 10x as likely as women to die on the job?
What systemic factors should we address so that the number of women dying in mine cave-ins rises to equal the number of men?
Oh, this isn't a priority for you? Why not?
Good approach.
The difficulty with the Verizon hotspot is that it has an internal battery. It is designed to be used when not plugged in.
To power cycle it you have to unplug the wall-wart, then use the power button to power cycle it, then plug it back in.
Simply cutting power doesn't help :(
Dial-up is functionally unusable in 2014. Hitting facebook.com pulls down several MB of data just to draw the page, load the JS, etc.
That said, my home phone line is so noisy even the phone company asks me if it always sounds so bad. They're not sure why the line is noisy. It just is. I don't think I'd be able to sustain a 56k connection.
Satellite also has monthly xfer limits -- that are much lower than Verizon. Most people that have had Satellite switch to LTE and don't switch back.
There is a WISP in the area but he is very busy, isn't very reliable, (e.g. blows off appointments, doesn't answer emails) and his tower is pretty far away and several forests block LOS between my place and his tower. To have any chance of using his tower I'd need to do some significant work -- more than I am doing to actually do my own custom backhaul.
Customers of his have told me that they have a few days of downtime a year while he has to go climb a tower and re-aim something. It sounds very shoe-stringy to me.