That's true, however; there is still a "fairness" standard in most states, to the effect that even in an At Will state, that company policies must be applied equally.
The employer can simply state "your services are no longer required" and leave it at that.
Where they get into trouble is in attempting to avoid increases in their U/I premiums.
If they state that they fired Johnny because he was late 13 times, they'd best not have retained anyone who was late 14 times.
Even in an At Will state, that can lead to a wrongful termination action.
And UI benefits are *supposed* to be easy to get. The only people who are intended to be excluded from benefits are those whose actions essentially constitute willful abandonment of their employment.
A clerk dipping into the till is abandoning their duties willfully, whereas the clerk that can't add and hands out lots of extra change is merely incompetent, irrespective of the difficulty in distinguishing the two.
I actually helped a friend successfully defend her UI claim after she was fired after being caught stealing from her employer.
He fired her in lieu of reporting her to the police, and it was a small operation so there were no witnesses.
In a He Said/She Said, without corroborating evidence of gross misconduct, the employee prevails. This is how it must be.
I defended my own UI claim against an employer who suddenly discovered I was incompetent after close to three years with the company. In an amazing coincidence, this occurred immediately after I accidentally discovered massive fraud at the company.
I have no bias against any consensual activity, and no religious views other than thinking the whole concept of religion is ridiculous.
Still, I cringe a bit when I see two guys in a lip lock.
While I have no empirical evidence to support my assumption that there is a biological bias against homosexuality in most people, I am sticking with it as a working hypothesis.
It's not pseudoscientific to brainstorm based on objective observations.
There are a raft of factors that go into a person's psychosexual makeup, and there are so many rules now about one questions are even politically permissible that any real research wouldn't be possible anyway.
I think you're misinterpreting the point he was making in that one post:
Evolution relies on reproduction, therefore enough of the population must engage in heterosexual activity to maintain a birth rate sufficient to overcome the death rate.
He's stating that the "yuck factor" is a species survival trait that ensures a sufficient hetero population for this purpose.
There is no moral content in that concept.
He was merely stating his opinion the source of the "yuck factor."
OEM's (big ones) pay mere pennies on the dollar for licenses to ship windows on new pc's.
MS started that strategy long ago, along with really loose protections on piracy.
The whole goal has been to maximize the wintel boxes in the workplace by subsidizing the OS, then supplying the productivity software at a hefty profit.
Why hasn't anyone else developed an Office killer?
Because it's difficult, costly, and most likely to fail in the marketplace due to MS huge head start.
There is a huge user base for whom just turning on the pc is a challenge.
If most corps announced that they would be migrating to OpenOffice, complete with retraining and hand-holding techs, the legions of the dull would rise en masse and slay them.
While I understand that your tongue was firmly in cheek, there may be some truth to this.
The only mmorpg that I play currently is Two Moons, where to be an archer, one must also be female.
I constantly get invitations to join guilds, trade, etc.
Not for a moment do I attribute this to my gaming skills, which are meager at best.
No, I'm not undervaluing what I personally bring to the table.
I'm old and chit - so my reflexes are slow.
I play from my laptop, which puts me at a display and reaction disadvantage.
But my character has t&a.
Exactly the same t&a as every other female archer, which makes it even funnier.
It's just a continuation of the old irc warez channel trick of formulating a female personna so that peop0le would share freely.
In most cases, I could garner op status within a week, unlike my male persona which had contributed to the channels for months or years.
So....if there is a penalty to female characters - perhaps there should be.
In 2Moons, there is an advantage to being an archer - ranged weapons with pushback rock at lower levels.
But I digress....
The question isn't really whether there should be certain penalties against male or female genders, it's how those penalties play out in game play.
If social interaction plays a significant part, then penalize the females on strength and the males on charisma (or whatever you want to call it.)
I'm not even sure the playing field should be level anyway.
I mean really - how many female barbarian warriors have ever existed - and could they ever go toe to toe with their male counterparts?
Make deception and sexual manipulation part of the game play if you want it to mimic real life.
Prohibitions against racial and religious discrimination by one's own government makes sense.
I'm not sure they should apply to the private sector.
Unfortunately, I'm ill equipped to even define 'private sector.'
Obviously (to me anyway) I should be free to hate anyone or anything I like, and to express that hatred appropriately.
It would be appropriate for me to paint "I Hate Fundies" on my car, but not on a Baptist church, unless I own it.
The problem is that the lines blur very quickly.
What happens if my car is also a taxi cab?
Does the banner then violate someone's perceived rights, or is my right to expression supreme?
I guess I have to take the position that since we currently treat businesses as real people (minus the accountability) that we should not require them to observe equal opportunity laws and reserve our coercion for the government.
Yeah - some things would suck more - some less.
I expect it would be a zero sum proposition, but at least then our policies would have at least some internal consistency.
Re:Anything else out there?
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
I think what you're running into speaks to design goals more than anything else.
Efficiency in execution and low system resource requirements are core to the original linux design philosophy.
The question is - is linux best served by sticking with the old school tight, efficient, difficult to maintain structure, or move to an easy to maintain, self documented, but much higher resource requirement structure of of windows?
Arguments can be made for each, and I'm sure that what actually exists is a compromise.
Nonetheless, there is a point where ya gotta go one direction or the other.
The other issue is the talent pool for FOSS in general.
I suspect it's running more shallow these days than in years previous.
That may in fact be a good thing.
It used to be that a pretty fair coder that wanted to use his skills in *nix coding had very limited opportunities, so they worked commercial projects to pay the bills and did open source projects in their spare time.
That trend is shifting now with the growth of commercial *nix applications.
Maybe with that talent pool sucked into the commercial sector we'll see better, more stable alternatives to MS/Apple products.
Linux certainly hasn't been rock solid up to now.
There was a huge glib.c bug in RH6.2 that persisted through, afair, the entire lifespan of that release.
It made the OS useless for multithreaded multiprocessor number crunching.
Perhaps now we'll start to see a more mature, if less exciting crop of distros - rather than the mix of utter brilliance and abject incompetence that is endemic to any amateur endeavor.
If any code monkeys feel slighted, just assume you're one of the brilliant folk and that the world is shiny and pretty.
Is it targeted manually, or is it a specifically directed attack?
If it's out in the wild being spread [cough] virally, rather than being inserted into specific targets, then what happens when a mobster's double book accounting system gets infected.
Some people have mentioned ruthless CEO's - but if this infected the wrong system, these folks could have someone after them with no restraint, deep pockets, and the resources and experience to root them out.
Do I smell a TV movie in the offing?
If Intelligent Design were not so analogous to Military Intelligence, I might make the effort to click the link.
Then again, my mind is not so open that my brain is in danger of falling out.
My father was a Chem/Physics instructor until he retired.
When I was about 12, I asked how he reconciled evolutionary theory with his system of faith.
He explained to me then that the christian bible merely points to the christian deity as a prime mover - it doesn't anywhere purport to be a tech manual for the universe, and that there is absolutely nothing in it to disprove (or support) the notion that evolution was his methodology.
In other words - never the twain shall meet.
So...I can see the merit in ID as a purely religious outlook, as a very generalized amorphous construct.
It's when the creation 'science' proponents attack the basic mechanisms of science that I take issue.
Even if they were correct, it would be a straw man argument at best.
---
Apologies for the ramble - I'm drinking sake at work to take the edge off - I think it's damned well off by now.
They're outsourcing intolerance.
Since the government can't officially demonize gays or atheists, they do so by proxy.
It's hard to get funding pulled from a Mom and Apple Pie organization.
Would I want to?
I dunno.
I was in Scouts when I was a preteen.
Can't say I learned much from it other than that other people's houses smelled funny.
OTOH, I was never touched by a Scoutmaster, nor did I have fundie nonsense shoved at me.
It was, after all, Teh Seventies, where no one really took any stance seriously other than nihilism.
You hit the nail on the head there.
What's lacking in FOSS is a fully functional Exchange replacement.
The lack of one pretty much drives MS currently.
Exchange and the associated client licensing are a huge cash cow, and nothing in the FOSS arena approaches it, though I haven't searched this month.
Any time something does start to look promising, it's captured one way or another by the existing profit streams.
Either it goes commercial, or is bought out by a commercial concern.
What this tells me is that when it comes right down to it, people want to get paid.
At the point when a FOSS app has that combination of packagability, profitability, and ownability - it immediately leaves the FOSS community.
I don't ever make the claim that our connection is secure in any sense.
I do use the OpenDns phishing group because it's one click to cut way down on folks accidentally ending up somewhere they shouldn't be.
I make BT more of a pain, simply as part of due diligence.
I use client isolation, so that the customers can't browse each others drives, but that it in terms of security.
I think there was one occasion where a manager had to explain to a customer that he would need to be a bit more discreet with his screen full of porn.
We're an 'indy' coffee company. Our customers would be disappointed if I went too far in trying to make the web a safe experience for them.
Suits me - I don't have the inclination to micromanage the internet.
I don't even consider whether wifi users are making purchases or not.
For us, it's irrelevant.
I do want to add a brief splash/tos that would be displayed once per user per day, but even that isn't a real high priority.
Her mental defects are probably as much due to bad parenting as bad genetics, but we really are better off with her not having the opportunity to reproduce.
If online bullying is the only way we have left to cull the runts, why are we trying to suppress it?
I ran into a company online (acnodes.com) that was revealing full customer credit info, card numbers,k billing address - the whole package. It was just very shoddy web design performed by the lowest bidder.
All that was required was to put in an order number and up popped everyone's info.
I had to cancel the card I used, and then I spent 4 hours trying to get someone interested.
Getting in touch with the site owner in SoCal took a couple of hours, including me explaining the issue repeatedly, and threatening dire legal action before he finally agreed to shut the site down until the hole was fixed.
The local bank that issued that issued the card was closed, so in between attempts to reach the site owner, I tried to interest Visa in the issue.
They couldn't care less. I finally google for the Visa fraud line, but since this was a security breach, rather than fraud, they weren't interested.
They suggested contacting the local police, who suggested the FB-freakin-I, who suggested Homeland Security.
In the end, no one gave a shit.
ID theft laws won't improve the situation in which I found myself, since it wasn't ID theft - just simple incompetence, and the banks aren't interested unless laws force them to be.
You would think there would be some sort of hotline where consumers could report a breech, the card company could briefly investigate, and on confirmation suspend transactions to that merchant id.
I agree that Sbux coffee is utter ass.
I give kudos to Bux for educating people that there is coffee beyond what the grocer offers, but they are now doomed by their own success.
They didn't build their business on being the best - they built it on being better than what was currently available.
They still are better than what was available - in the '70's.
Specialty roasters have moved on.
Dark roasted coffee's are generally bunk.
I can tell you that at least one roaster (not us) uses dark roasts for all their misroasted coffees, on the assumption that anyone buying dark roasted coffee has such an undifferentiated palate that they'll never know the difference.
SB:Coffee::McD's:burgers
Fortunately, I still have a taste for generic slapped together burgers.
I have no taste for overroasted generic beans brewed by generic baristas that have no clue what's going on under the hood when they brew.
I was explaining what I do - not offering a solution.
If I had a problem with a couple of bandwidth pigs, I'd first try publically disallowing high bandwidth activities that I truly don't want - ie: unencrypted Bittorrent.
Next would be to use proto based qos and drop high bw protos to the bottom of the heap.
Following that would be to isolate any individual troublemakers and use mac based qos to slow their connection to unusability.
There are *lot* of things that can be done to discourage certain types of usage.
Again, I likely have a better class of user than most cafes, so it was a trivial matter to trim out the unwanted usage.
If this is beyond the means of an individual cafe owner, it is easy to get help.
Most localities of any size have some sort of volunteer group dedicated to ubiquitous free wifi.
We have a group here that will go so far as providing the ap and supporting it as long as the owner springs for the internet connection. I've even seen them arrange a sponsor to pay for the connection in key areas where there are no existing free ap's.
If the issue is one of simply too many freeloaders physically crowding out the paying customers, then, yes - you have a thorny problem if the cafe operators are technically challenged.
We have a pretty tightly knit community and this has never been an issue, other than the cars in the lot sucking up free wifi in the wee hours of the morning. And even those are merely a curiosity. They don't displace paying customers. I suspect they are too embarrassed to occupy a seat without making a purchase.
I'm glad we have such a community. I can walk into the cafe - announce that I need to reboot the router, and my customers have no problem asking me to wait a few minutes while they finish a quiz for their distance learning class. They have no problem approaching me about issues connecting, etc.
And I'm not even in the cafes that much, other than to grab some nice french pressed single origin to start my day.
Maybe I'm just lucky that my employer knows what he's doing, and our customers are generally fiercely loyal and wouldn't do anything to damage the community we enjoy.
Every day I wake up happy to go to work, and consider myself fortunate to be well paid to do what I would be willing to do for free.
You would think so, but there are market oddities that I've never been able to grok.
Seattle is one of the more unwired cities, yet charging for wifi is the semi-accepted norm there.
Portland, while arguably the most unwired, has an environment where charging for cafe wifi is culturally unacceptable.
Starbucks still charges for it here, but being a corp controlled entity that receives marching orders from distant overlords, they really don't count.
So, in some markets, charging for wifi may make business sense.
A lot depends on the ethic your company has and what drives it.
We're coffee driven - best beans our buyer can find, roasted by the best roasters in the world, prepared by baristas who have been selected for their passion for coffee.
That's not meant as an advertisement or anything.
It's just that we have one focus, and selling wifi, or panini, or anything else that detracts from serving the best cup possible just isn't going to happen.
So our free wifi is in place because of both who we are and where we are.
It costs virtually nothing to maintain a free access point. Granted, the company I work for is just large enough to employ me as a 3/4 time net admin, but any independent that doesn't have their own IT structure could easily have their isp set it up. I spend maybe an hour a week per ap peeking and poking, but that's only because I'm around anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true, however; there is still a "fairness" standard in most states, to the effect that even in an At Will state, that company policies must be applied equally.
The employer can simply state "your services are no longer required" and leave it at that.
Where they get into trouble is in attempting to avoid increases in their U/I premiums.
If they state that they fired Johnny because he was late 13 times, they'd best not have retained anyone who was late 14 times.
Even in an At Will state, that can lead to a wrongful termination action.
And UI benefits are *supposed* to be easy to get.
The only people who are intended to be excluded from benefits are those whose actions essentially constitute willful abandonment of their employment.
A clerk dipping into the till is abandoning their duties willfully, whereas the clerk that can't add and hands out lots of extra change is merely incompetent, irrespective of the difficulty in distinguishing the two.
I actually helped a friend successfully defend her UI claim after she was fired after being caught stealing from her employer.
He fired her in lieu of reporting her to the police, and it was a small operation so there were no witnesses.
In a He Said/She Said, without corroborating evidence of gross misconduct, the employee prevails.
This is how it must be.
I defended my own UI claim against an employer who suddenly discovered I was incompetent after close to three years with the company.
In an amazing coincidence, this occurred immediately after I accidentally discovered massive fraud at the company.
can you fax me some?
I respectfully disagree.
I have no bias against any consensual activity, and no religious views other than thinking the whole concept of religion is ridiculous.
Still, I cringe a bit when I see two guys in a lip lock.
While I have no empirical evidence to support my assumption that there is a biological bias against homosexuality in most people, I am sticking with it as a working hypothesis.
It's not pseudoscientific to brainstorm based on objective observations.
There are a raft of factors that go into a person's psychosexual makeup, and there are so many rules now about one questions are even politically permissible that any real research wouldn't be possible anyway.
I think you're misinterpreting the point he was making in that one post: Evolution relies on reproduction, therefore enough of the population must engage in heterosexual activity to maintain a birth rate sufficient to overcome the death rate. He's stating that the "yuck factor" is a species survival trait that ensures a sufficient hetero population for this purpose. There is no moral content in that concept. He was merely stating his opinion the source of the "yuck factor."
MS only has one - Office
Their OS marketing is all about market share.
OEM's (big ones) pay mere pennies on the dollar for licenses to ship windows on new pc's.
MS started that strategy long ago, along with really loose protections on piracy.
The whole goal has been to maximize the wintel boxes in the workplace by subsidizing the OS, then supplying the productivity software at a hefty profit.
Why hasn't anyone else developed an Office killer?
Because it's difficult, costly, and most likely to fail in the marketplace due to MS huge head start.
There is a huge user base for whom just turning on the pc is a challenge.
If most corps announced that they would be migrating to OpenOffice, complete with retraining and hand-holding techs, the legions of the dull would rise en masse and slay them.
[Apologies to Lewis Black]
Bastard! I had a line floating around that involved an ECC mutation... Now, you've gone and thrown it all away....
With respect to Mr. Barnum, where are you gong to find a buyer for a Vista key - used?
While I understand that your tongue was firmly in cheek, there may be some truth to this. The only mmorpg that I play currently is Two Moons, where to be an archer, one must also be female. I constantly get invitations to join guilds, trade, etc. Not for a moment do I attribute this to my gaming skills, which are meager at best. No, I'm not undervaluing what I personally bring to the table. I'm old and chit - so my reflexes are slow. I play from my laptop, which puts me at a display and reaction disadvantage. But my character has t&a. Exactly the same t&a as every other female archer, which makes it even funnier. It's just a continuation of the old irc warez channel trick of formulating a female personna so that peop0le would share freely. In most cases, I could garner op status within a week, unlike my male persona which had contributed to the channels for months or years. So....if there is a penalty to female characters - perhaps there should be. In 2Moons, there is an advantage to being an archer - ranged weapons with pushback rock at lower levels. But I digress.... The question isn't really whether there should be certain penalties against male or female genders, it's how those penalties play out in game play. If social interaction plays a significant part, then penalize the females on strength and the males on charisma (or whatever you want to call it.) I'm not even sure the playing field should be level anyway. I mean really - how many female barbarian warriors have ever existed - and could they ever go toe to toe with their male counterparts? Make deception and sexual manipulation part of the game play if you want it to mimic real life.
How they are classified means what to whom? Someone needs their grant pulled for gross misuse of time.
Last Spammer Standing Hosted by Richard Dawson.
Prohibitions against racial and religious discrimination by one's own government makes sense. I'm not sure they should apply to the private sector. Unfortunately, I'm ill equipped to even define 'private sector.' Obviously (to me anyway) I should be free to hate anyone or anything I like, and to express that hatred appropriately. It would be appropriate for me to paint "I Hate Fundies" on my car, but not on a Baptist church, unless I own it. The problem is that the lines blur very quickly. What happens if my car is also a taxi cab? Does the banner then violate someone's perceived rights, or is my right to expression supreme? I guess I have to take the position that since we currently treat businesses as real people (minus the accountability) that we should not require them to observe equal opportunity laws and reserve our coercion for the government. Yeah - some things would suck more - some less. I expect it would be a zero sum proposition, but at least then our policies would have at least some internal consistency.
I think what you're running into speaks to design goals more than anything else. Efficiency in execution and low system resource requirements are core to the original linux design philosophy. The question is - is linux best served by sticking with the old school tight, efficient, difficult to maintain structure, or move to an easy to maintain, self documented, but much higher resource requirement structure of of windows? Arguments can be made for each, and I'm sure that what actually exists is a compromise. Nonetheless, there is a point where ya gotta go one direction or the other. The other issue is the talent pool for FOSS in general. I suspect it's running more shallow these days than in years previous. That may in fact be a good thing. It used to be that a pretty fair coder that wanted to use his skills in *nix coding had very limited opportunities, so they worked commercial projects to pay the bills and did open source projects in their spare time. That trend is shifting now with the growth of commercial *nix applications. Maybe with that talent pool sucked into the commercial sector we'll see better, more stable alternatives to MS/Apple products. Linux certainly hasn't been rock solid up to now. There was a huge glib.c bug in RH6.2 that persisted through, afair, the entire lifespan of that release. It made the OS useless for multithreaded multiprocessor number crunching. Perhaps now we'll start to see a more mature, if less exciting crop of distros - rather than the mix of utter brilliance and abject incompetence that is endemic to any amateur endeavor. If any code monkeys feel slighted, just assume you're one of the brilliant folk and that the world is shiny and pretty.
Is it targeted manually, or is it a specifically directed attack? If it's out in the wild being spread [cough] virally, rather than being inserted into specific targets, then what happens when a mobster's double book accounting system gets infected. Some people have mentioned ruthless CEO's - but if this infected the wrong system, these folks could have someone after them with no restraint, deep pockets, and the resources and experience to root them out. Do I smell a TV movie in the offing?
If Intelligent Design were not so analogous to Military Intelligence, I might make the effort to click the link. Then again, my mind is not so open that my brain is in danger of falling out.
My father was a Chem/Physics instructor until he retired. When I was about 12, I asked how he reconciled evolutionary theory with his system of faith. He explained to me then that the christian bible merely points to the christian deity as a prime mover - it doesn't anywhere purport to be a tech manual for the universe, and that there is absolutely nothing in it to disprove (or support) the notion that evolution was his methodology. In other words - never the twain shall meet. So...I can see the merit in ID as a purely religious outlook, as a very generalized amorphous construct. It's when the creation 'science' proponents attack the basic mechanisms of science that I take issue. Even if they were correct, it would be a straw man argument at best. --- Apologies for the ramble - I'm drinking sake at work to take the edge off - I think it's damned well off by now.
They're outsourcing intolerance. Since the government can't officially demonize gays or atheists, they do so by proxy. It's hard to get funding pulled from a Mom and Apple Pie organization. Would I want to? I dunno. I was in Scouts when I was a preteen. Can't say I learned much from it other than that other people's houses smelled funny. OTOH, I was never touched by a Scoutmaster, nor did I have fundie nonsense shoved at me. It was, after all, Teh Seventies, where no one really took any stance seriously other than nihilism.
You hit the nail on the head there. What's lacking in FOSS is a fully functional Exchange replacement. The lack of one pretty much drives MS currently. Exchange and the associated client licensing are a huge cash cow, and nothing in the FOSS arena approaches it, though I haven't searched this month. Any time something does start to look promising, it's captured one way or another by the existing profit streams. Either it goes commercial, or is bought out by a commercial concern. What this tells me is that when it comes right down to it, people want to get paid. At the point when a FOSS app has that combination of packagability, profitability, and ownability - it immediately leaves the FOSS community.
I don't ever make the claim that our connection is secure in any sense. I do use the OpenDns phishing group because it's one click to cut way down on folks accidentally ending up somewhere they shouldn't be. I make BT more of a pain, simply as part of due diligence. I use client isolation, so that the customers can't browse each others drives, but that it in terms of security. I think there was one occasion where a manager had to explain to a customer that he would need to be a bit more discreet with his screen full of porn. We're an 'indy' coffee company. Our customers would be disappointed if I went too far in trying to make the web a safe experience for them. Suits me - I don't have the inclination to micromanage the internet. I don't even consider whether wifi users are making purchases or not. For us, it's irrelevant. I do want to add a brief splash/tos that would be displayed once per user per day, but even that isn't a real high priority.
Her mental defects are probably as much due to bad parenting as bad genetics, but we really are better off with her not having the opportunity to reproduce.
If online bullying is the only way we have left to cull the runts, why are we trying to suppress it?
I ran into a company online (acnodes.com) that was revealing full customer credit info, card numbers,k billing address - the whole package. It was just very shoddy web design performed by the lowest bidder.
All that was required was to put in an order number and up popped everyone's info.
I had to cancel the card I used, and then I spent 4 hours trying to get someone interested.
Getting in touch with the site owner in SoCal took a couple of hours, including me explaining the issue repeatedly, and threatening dire legal action before he finally agreed to shut the site down until the hole was fixed.
The local bank that issued that issued the card was closed, so in between attempts to reach the site owner, I tried to interest Visa in the issue.
They couldn't care less.
I finally google for the Visa fraud line, but since this was a security breach, rather than fraud, they weren't interested.
They suggested contacting the local police, who suggested the FB-freakin-I, who suggested Homeland Security.
In the end, no one gave a shit.
ID theft laws won't improve the situation in which I found myself, since it wasn't ID theft - just simple incompetence, and the banks aren't interested unless laws force them to be.
You would think there would be some sort of hotline where consumers could report a breech, the card company could briefly investigate, and on confirmation suspend transactions to that merchant id.
Nope.
You mean the way that light telephone land line customers subsidize the usage of the heavy phone users?
This is the way it works with any 'flat rate' service, and it's not inherently evil - it's just one business model.
I vacillate between canonizing Comcast for providing stable cheap bandwidth, and demonizing them for traffic shaping and outsourced tech support.
They still suck less than telcos and dsl providers.
Dark roasted coffee's are generally bunk. I can tell you that at least one roaster (not us) uses dark roasts for all their misroasted coffees, on the assumption that anyone buying dark roasted coffee has such an undifferentiated palate that they'll never know the difference.
SB:Coffee::McD's:burgers
Fortunately, I still have a taste for generic slapped together burgers.
I have no taste for overroasted generic beans brewed by generic baristas that have no clue what's going on under the hood when they brew.
I was explaining what I do - not offering a solution.
If I had a problem with a couple of bandwidth pigs, I'd first try publically disallowing high bandwidth activities that I truly don't want - ie: unencrypted Bittorrent.
Next would be to use proto based qos and drop high bw protos to the bottom of the heap.
Following that would be to isolate any individual troublemakers and use mac based qos to slow their connection to unusability.
There are *lot* of things that can be done to discourage certain types of usage.
Again, I likely have a better class of user than most cafes, so it was a trivial matter to trim out the unwanted usage.
If this is beyond the means of an individual cafe owner, it is easy to get help.
Most localities of any size have some sort of volunteer group dedicated to ubiquitous free wifi.
We have a group here that will go so far as providing the ap and supporting it as long as the owner springs for the internet connection. I've even seen them arrange a sponsor to pay for the connection in key areas where there are no existing free ap's.
If the issue is one of simply too many freeloaders physically crowding out the paying customers, then, yes - you have a thorny problem if the cafe operators are technically challenged.
We have a pretty tightly knit community and this has never been an issue, other than the cars in the lot sucking up free wifi in the wee hours of the morning. And even those are merely a curiosity. They don't displace paying customers. I suspect they are too embarrassed to occupy a seat without making a purchase.
I'm glad we have such a community. I can walk into the cafe - announce that I need to reboot the router, and my customers have no problem asking me to wait a few minutes while they finish a quiz for their distance learning class. They have no problem approaching me about issues connecting, etc.
And I'm not even in the cafes that much, other than to grab some nice french pressed single origin to start my day.
Maybe I'm just lucky that my employer knows what he's doing, and our customers are generally fiercely loyal and wouldn't do anything to damage the community we enjoy.
Every day I wake up happy to go to work, and consider myself fortunate to be well paid to do what I would be willing to do for free.
You would think so, but there are market oddities that I've never been able to grok.
Seattle is one of the more unwired cities, yet charging for wifi is the semi-accepted norm there.
Portland, while arguably the most unwired, has an environment where charging for cafe wifi is culturally unacceptable. Starbucks still charges for it here, but being a corp controlled entity that receives marching orders from distant overlords, they really don't count.
So, in some markets, charging for wifi may make business sense.
A lot depends on the ethic your company has and what drives it.
We're coffee driven - best beans our buyer can find, roasted by the best roasters in the world, prepared by baristas who have been selected for their passion for coffee.
That's not meant as an advertisement or anything.
It's just that we have one focus, and selling wifi, or panini, or anything else that detracts from serving the best cup possible just isn't going to happen.
So our free wifi is in place because of both who we are and where we are.
It costs virtually nothing to maintain a free access point.
Granted, the company I work for is just large enough to employ me as a 3/4 time net admin, but any independent that doesn't have their own IT structure could easily have their isp set it up.
I spend maybe an hour a week per ap peeking and poking, but that's only because I'm around anyway.