With the unbundled network element provisions of the Telecom Act of 1996 they had to give access away below cost.
Below cost is a very debatable point.
The prices that CLECs were getting charged were pretty outrageous in some cases.
But there's a lot of room for argument, because the RBOCs could say that the colocation fees should include costs of certain other parts of their businesses that monopoly regulations required them to do. If it costs them, then it should cost the CLECs, goes the reasoning. But 20K per month to stick a box in a CO?
Those kinds of debatable issues are why I think a publicly-owned data link might be a good idea.
Insofar as regulation stifling innovation, I wouldn't worry too much. Innovation will work its way around regulations like water works around rocks in the middle of the stream. Even as innovators have room to come up with more efficient cars and trucks to run on public roads, the people producing content and new protocols for IP or IPv6 traffic can continue to do so, independent of whether the government owns and maintains the last mile fiber lines to millions of houses.
Shoot, a sizable chunk of my local phone bill from the local monopoly includes tacked on fees (let's call them for what they are - taxes), one supposedly for something caled "universal connectivity."
It's not much of a leap to make the government actually responsible for installing and maintaining the lines for that universal connectivity that is suggested by the name given to that current tax.
On a related note, consider this readable account of how genetic engineering to insert IL-4 into an otherwise fairly innocuous mousepox transformed this disease to where it would effectively kill all the mice, even those mice that had been previously vaccinated to protect them against mousepox.
Finding the balance between gift and money economies
An effective policy in the direction of achieving this balance is having 50% inheritence taxes, but allowing those people who accumulate a lot of money to avoid taxes on amounts given to a charitable foundation.
Moving onto philanthropy is really just the next level of achievement for these people.
Once they realize that they have enough talent to "win" at life in the money world, and feel comfortable with achieving that goal, the next challenge is to use their talents to improve more than just one life for just one lifetime.
Problems only arise when there is only one company offering broadband in a given location.
And that often seems to be the case.
I remember years ago when cable infrastructure was being put in and cable companies would negotiate exclusive contracts with communities to provide cable service.
On the surface, it was a good and necessary thing: you didn't want multiple cable companies building parallel lines all over the place (remember the 19th century railroads building tracks parallel to one another?) and the company needed enough of a customer base to justify the investment. But in practice, there were sometimes problems, like sweetheart deals where alderman X gained financially, etc.
So now many of us are left with the choice of only one provider at the other end of the coaxial line and with a local government that got some cash out of a deal and therefore less prone to upsetting the status quo.
I fear the remaining last mile options in wireless access will be also gobbled up and consolidated to the point where it crowds out competition.
We need some more innovations in how to properly regulate last mile providers, be it phone companies or cable companies to provide more competition.
It may just be that data lines might better be owned publicly, like the roads...
The moderation model of a journal doesn't have to change (though it may be convenient for the journal to take advangage of the technology to make changes the believe to be desirable at the same time, or shortly thereafter).
While reviewers are often the ones that really perform the hard work of assuring accepted papers are high quality, they often don't get much recognition.
It's when they get to "Editor of $SUBJECT" that their names appear in the cover of the journal that their prestige increases and that their chances of tenure increase, etc.
Slashdot's moderators operate in anonymity, getting the occassional accusations of smoking crack due to the few percent of errant Trolls being awarded Moderator points.
If Slashdot awarded diligent good moderators with some badge of honor (degree of goodness being measured by MetaModerator approval, or disapproval, if the MetaModerator is a troll), maybe it would encourage more good moderation.
Unlike the case of dead-tree peer-reviewed technical journals, however, I don't entertain any hope whatsoever that my Slashdot moderating activities will factor into any kind of improved pay raise.
Methinks many sysadmins would switch professions if only the whore houses would have them.
Just guessing here, but most sysadmins, as much as they might like to get paid to have lots of sex, would rather have a different set of clients that what comes through the door in Nevada...
From what little I understood, it was an extremely challenging, perhaps even overly ambitious effort to get all 192 lasers to be sufficiently well-focussed in a perfect sphere and with perfect timing, perfect power levels etc.
Have any hard promises or milestones been met about Tera-Watt-seconds/mm^3 that the hohlraum will experience?
It's a very hard problem. I would guess it would take even more time and money than it has already.
For one, I have emacs key bindings hardwired into my hands. Not only Windows, but occassionally other applications using the newer desktop toolkits like GTK and QT in their default settings seem to collide with these key bindings.
In particular, in Word, if I type "Ctrl-B" to go back one character and get presented with some option to Bold something I start cussing.
It's partially my fault, though. There are evidently customizations not only in KDE and Gnome, but someone knowledgeable about Word once referred me to some way of customizing keys. If I were forced to use Word more often I might learn how to remap key bindings. As it is, I just make due with the default and "get by". And I don't feel guilty if the output in Word, Excel, or Powerpoint doesn't look pretty - it's not worthy my sanity to try to polish things up in those tarpit applications.
A default quick command line environment would be nice. If I had Admin access to our shared Windows box and felt confident about not trashing something valuable in the registry or the security settings, etc. I might install cygwin or mingwin to get some of that...
Then there's all the product activation and licensing hassles that in a Linux free beer environment are nonexistant...
I only do Windows under duress. It's my personal Abu Ghraib.
That means that while they're turning a profit, the market is forcing them to give customers good deals.
Walmart is no longer a good example of a competitive player.
They have become so large that they can dictate special terms to their suppliers and obtain special prices from them that smaller buyers cannot hope to obtain.
Likewise, they can squash smaller retailers by offering low prices and economies of scale on selected items while keeping prices higher on other items that consumers will still buy from time to time.
A 3% profit margin is higher than what many grocery stores enjoy. Not as large a profits on revenue as what MS gets for its products or what big pharmaceutical companies get, but respectable for what is typically considered a very competitive marketplace.
I'm semi-happy to have "from a dynamic IP" as a factor in blocking,
I'd settle for an improved public key augmented SMTP exchange like
>>> EHLO spam-candidate.aol.com
250-bigserver.com Hello spam-candidate.aol.com [123.456.789.012], pleased to meet you
HELO... Here's my certificate; digitally signed by Authorities You Might Trust To Various Levels
Realistically, how many regular readers of Linux Today would click click an MS-sponsored Ad about "TCO of Linux? Get the Facts!"
We already know the facts and how it differs from the various kinds of hype.
But given the growth of Linux and the number of newbies trying to find out what it's all about, there is still a danger they will be exposed to commercial propaganda that they might assume credible. But even noobs more likely to be looking at content instead of ads.
If they've made it to Linux Today, newbies are a lot more likely to be one or two links away from Linux zealots who can actually get linked, at zero cost, into the valuable content section of the web site, something advertisers would love to have but don't.
Either the MS sponsored ads or the temptation of foaming at the mouth because of oppression of the masses represents a potentially inefficient diversion, but rational people will still be able to find reasonable descriptions of what Linux is, where it can help them and where it can't.
The "load up the operands" and, at the end, execute multiple operators reminds me of the German language.
Kind of like,
Let us the stage with players set and, at the end, execute.
Till there be but one briefly shining result,
Soon to be vanquished with his fellows upon a clear eks.
Fear not, valued intermediate result!
Enjoy ye forever the sanctuary of stow zero!
[I wish I could find a worthy replacement for my HP-15C but the newer models seem to have sacrificed the "landscape" form factor.]
>>Of course that sort of long term solution requires much more persistence, humility, dedication and sacrifice
>all it takes is 0.00000001% deviants
Introduction of a religious algorithm into our species seems to have been of some benefit in that initial objective.
Unfortunately, religions seem to be afflicted by small but persistent fringe elements that will justify anti-social actions, even actions contrary to the core teachings of their religion, but in the name of the religion.
A good start would be if we were all truly connected mentally, so that the pleasure and pain of each individual was communicated to the collective. A lot of the problems today can pretty well be explained by the simple observation that
"I don't feel your pain. Or, what makes you feel happy doesn't make me feel as happy as the pain I feel."
We'd still need measures to guard against deliberate self-destruction that causes collective pain.
Old email should be deleted, it was a private conversation.
If it really is nothing more than a private conversation, one individual to another.
OTOH, if your money is invested in a company with unscrupulous employees who plan a fraud via email and those emails are deleted quickly due to some limited retention policy, then you might be out of luck recovering your money.
Likewise, if your government, which your taxes supports, decides unilaterally to authorize a new policy such as data-mining your credit card information for terrorist connections and the only record of this new policy is in email form, then you might want those government records available.
Not just personal communication, but a much greater fraction of business and government is conducted electronically. With paper constituting an ever-diminishing fraction of total records, and paper being the only enduring evidence, we can expect fewer successful investigations and prosecutions of fraud in business and in government.
Microsoft was required to unbundle Media Player, so that other third-party players would have a chance at getting in on the average user market.
This will be useful exercise in shutting the barn door, covering the well after the baby's drowned, etc.
At least the EU bureaucracy gets some cash:)
I'd like to see correct, effective and appropriate action against Microsoft.
The deliberate, slow-moving legal systems in the US and EU seem to be effectively delivering some nominal punishment to the drug dealer after he's turned 65 years old, made his fortune, and his addicts are providing a solid income stream, and he's moving into entirely new lines of business.
Slashdot Mirror
but I'm having to fight a little too hard to find neat things to do with Bluetooth.
Obviously you haven't been paying attention to the latest anonymous sex trend with Bluetooth nicknamed "toothing".
With the unbundled network element provisions of the Telecom Act of 1996 they had to give access away below cost.
Below cost is a very debatable point.
The prices that CLECs were getting charged were pretty outrageous in some cases.
But there's a lot of room for argument, because the RBOCs could say that the colocation fees should include costs of certain other parts of their businesses that monopoly regulations required them to do. If it costs them, then it should cost the CLECs, goes the reasoning. But 20K per month to stick a box in a CO?
Those kinds of debatable issues are why I think a publicly-owned data link might be a good idea.
Insofar as regulation stifling innovation, I wouldn't worry too much. Innovation will work its way around regulations like water works around rocks in the middle of the stream. Even as innovators have room to come up with more efficient cars and trucks to run on public roads, the people producing content and new protocols for IP or IPv6 traffic can continue to do so, independent of whether the government owns and maintains the last mile fiber lines to millions of houses.
Shoot, a sizable chunk of my local phone bill from the local monopoly includes tacked on fees (let's call them for what they are - taxes), one supposedly for something caled "universal connectivity."
It's not much of a leap to make the government actually responsible for installing and maintaining the lines for that universal connectivity that is suggested by the name given to that current tax.
On a related note, consider this readable account of how genetic engineering to insert IL-4 into an otherwise fairly innocuous mousepox transformed this disease to where it would effectively kill all the mice, even those mice that had been previously vaccinated to protect them against mousepox.
Finding the balance between gift and money economies
An effective policy in the direction of achieving this balance is having 50% inheritence taxes, but allowing those people who accumulate a lot of money to avoid taxes on amounts given to a charitable foundation.
Moving onto philanthropy is really just the next level of achievement for these people.
Once they realize that they have enough talent to "win" at life in the money world, and feel comfortable with achieving that goal, the next challenge is to use their talents to improve more than just one life for just one lifetime.
Problems only arise when there is only one company offering broadband in a given location.
And that often seems to be the case.
I remember years ago when cable infrastructure was being put in and cable companies would negotiate exclusive contracts with communities to provide cable service.
On the surface, it was a good and necessary thing: you didn't want multiple cable companies building parallel lines all over the place (remember the 19th century railroads building tracks parallel to one another?) and the company needed enough of a customer base to justify the investment. But in practice, there were sometimes problems, like sweetheart deals where alderman X gained financially, etc.
So now many of us are left with the choice of only one provider at the other end of the coaxial line and with a local government that got some cash out of a deal and therefore less prone to upsetting the status quo.
I fear the remaining last mile options in wireless access will be also gobbled up and consolidated to the point where it crowds out competition.
We need some more innovations in how to properly regulate last mile providers, be it phone companies or cable companies to provide more competition.
It may just be that data lines might better be owned publicly, like the roads...
Historically, a lot of interesting developements in computational fluid dynamics, particularly compressible aerodynamics, have come out of NASA Ames.
I didn't see any of those codes showcased on the webpage, though:(
It's also known as "Windows Explorer", or just "Explorer".
I've even heard a few people call it "Netscape".
The moderation model of a journal doesn't have to change (though it may be convenient for the journal to take advangage of the technology to make changes the believe to be desirable at the same time, or shortly thereafter).
While reviewers are often the ones that really perform the hard work of assuring accepted papers are high quality, they often don't get much recognition.
It's when they get to "Editor of $SUBJECT" that their names appear in the cover of the journal that their prestige increases and that their chances of tenure increase, etc.
Slashdot's moderators operate in anonymity, getting the occassional accusations of smoking crack due to the few percent of errant Trolls being awarded Moderator points.
If Slashdot awarded diligent good moderators with some badge of honor (degree of goodness being measured by MetaModerator approval, or disapproval, if the MetaModerator is a troll), maybe it would encourage more good moderation.
Unlike the case of dead-tree peer-reviewed technical journals, however, I don't entertain any hope whatsoever that my Slashdot moderating activities will factor into any kind of improved pay raise.
I wanted an appliance that just worked, that I didn't need to build from scratch or support.
That's what is really nice about the TiVo.
It "just works" very intuitively out of the box, but if you want to get a little bit more out of it then you can gradually learn to do more and more.
Eg, I felt comfortable upgrading to 2 * 100 GB hard drives, but haven't yet attempted to do Ethernet.
You don't have to get out a soldering iron to upgrade your TiVo, just have some time to read and take things at your own pace.
what happens when the 'latest blockbuster' is released an everyone tries to download it at once.
It will suddenly create an awareness and a demand for even better broadband connections for the last mile.
The telcos that overbuild 4 years ago might finally see some advantage to all that infrastructure.
Methinks many sysadmins would switch professions if only the whore houses would have them.
Just guessing here, but most sysadmins, as much as they might like to get paid to have lots of sex, would rather have a different set of clients that what comes through the door in Nevada...
Which is 100% true on UNIX systems also.
Don't know about UNIX systems where you live, but none of mine have /etc/rc world writable:)
From what little I understood, it was an extremely challenging, perhaps even overly ambitious effort to get all 192 lasers to be sufficiently well-focussed in a perfect sphere and with perfect timing, perfect power levels etc.
Have any hard promises or milestones been met about Tera-Watt-seconds/mm^3 that the hohlraum will experience?
It's a very hard problem. I would guess it would take even more time and money than it has already.
For one, I have emacs key bindings hardwired into my hands. Not only Windows, but occassionally other applications using the newer desktop toolkits like GTK and QT in their default settings seem to collide with these key bindings.
In particular, in Word, if I type "Ctrl-B" to go back one character and get presented with some option to Bold something I start cussing.
It's partially my fault, though. There are evidently customizations not only in KDE and Gnome, but someone knowledgeable about Word once referred me to some way of customizing keys. If I were forced to use Word more often I might learn how to remap key bindings. As it is, I just make due with the default and "get by". And I don't feel guilty if the output in Word, Excel, or Powerpoint doesn't look pretty - it's not worthy my sanity to try to polish things up in those tarpit applications.
A default quick command line environment would be nice. If I had Admin access to our shared Windows box and felt confident about not trashing something valuable in the registry or the security settings, etc. I might install cygwin or mingwin to get some of that...
Then there's all the product activation and licensing hassles that in a Linux free beer environment are nonexistant...
I only do Windows under duress. It's my personal Abu Ghraib.
That means that while they're turning a profit, the market is forcing them to give customers good deals.
Walmart is no longer a good example of a competitive player.
They have become so large that they can dictate special terms to their suppliers and obtain special prices from them that smaller buyers cannot hope to obtain.
Likewise, they can squash smaller retailers by offering low prices and economies of scale on selected items while keeping prices higher on other items that consumers will still buy from time to time.
A 3% profit margin is higher than what many grocery stores enjoy. Not as large a profits on revenue as what MS gets for its products or what big pharmaceutical companies get, but respectable for what is typically considered a very competitive marketplace.
I'm semi-happy to have "from a dynamic IP" as a factor in blocking,
I'd settle for an improved public key augmented SMTP exchange like ... Here's my certificate; digitally signed by Authorities You Might Trust To Various Levels
>>> EHLO spam-candidate.aol.com
250-bigserver.com Hello spam-candidate.aol.com [123.456.789.012], pleased to meet you
HELO
No?
BOUNCE.
Realistically, how many regular readers of Linux Today would click click an MS-sponsored Ad about "TCO of Linux? Get the Facts!"
We already know the facts and how it differs from the various kinds of hype.
But given the growth of Linux and the number of newbies trying to find out what it's all about, there is still a danger they will be exposed to commercial propaganda that they might assume credible. But even noobs more likely to be looking at content instead of ads.
If they've made it to Linux Today, newbies are a lot more likely to be one or two links away from Linux zealots who can actually get linked, at zero cost, into the valuable content section of the web site, something advertisers would love to have but don't.
Either the MS sponsored ads or the temptation of foaming at the mouth because of oppression of the masses represents a potentially inefficient diversion, but rational people will still be able to find reasonable descriptions of what Linux is, where it can help them and where it can't.
The "load up the operands" and, at the end, execute multiple operators reminds me of the German language.
Kind of like,
[I wish I could find a worthy replacement for my HP-15C but the newer models seem to have sacrificed the "landscape" form factor.]
because some CS graduate is having a hard time finding that $100,000 a year job
Hey - this page of classified job ads is from 1998!
IE still freaks out with regular use, bloating up to tremendous size and crashing.
Mozilla used to do this to me a couple of years ago.
But now I'm going for weeks with the same invocation of Firefox, just screen saving, ending my user sessions maybe every few months.
Browser crashes are down to 1-2 per year in 2004 from 10-12 per year in 2003.
I'm happy, happy, happy with Firefox.
>>Of course that sort of long term solution requires much more persistence, humility, dedication and sacrifice
>all it takes is 0.00000001% deviants
Introduction of a religious algorithm into our species seems to have been of some benefit in that initial objective.
Unfortunately, religions seem to be afflicted by small but persistent fringe elements that will justify anti-social actions, even actions contrary to the core teachings of their religion, but in the name of the religion.
A good start would be if we were all truly connected mentally, so that the pleasure and pain of each individual was communicated to the collective. A lot of the problems today can pretty well be explained by the simple observation that
We'd still need measures to guard against deliberate self-destruction that causes collective pain.
Old email should be deleted, it was a private conversation.
If it really is nothing more than a private conversation, one individual to another.
OTOH, if your money is invested in a company with unscrupulous employees who plan a fraud via email and those emails are deleted quickly due to some limited retention policy, then you might be out of luck recovering your money.
Likewise, if your government, which your taxes supports, decides unilaterally to authorize a new policy such as data-mining your credit card information for terrorist connections and the only record of this new policy is in email form, then you might want those government records available.
Not just personal communication, but a much greater fraction of business and government is conducted electronically. With paper constituting an ever-diminishing fraction of total records, and paper being the only enduring evidence, we can expect fewer successful investigations and prosecutions of fraud in business and in government.
Microsoft was required to unbundle Media Player, so that other third-party players would have a chance at getting in on the average user market.
This will be useful exercise in shutting the barn door, covering the well after the baby's drowned, etc.
At least the EU bureaucracy gets some cash:)
I'd like to see correct, effective and appropriate action against Microsoft.
The deliberate, slow-moving legal systems in the US and EU seem to be effectively delivering some nominal punishment to the drug dealer after he's turned 65 years old, made his fortune, and his addicts are providing a solid income stream, and he's moving into entirely new lines of business.
A group of poor bastards have to read all of them. That takes a long time.
Anyone having to read and digest thousands of pages of legalese gets paid well to do it.
Maybe not as well paid as the people that wrote the appeal, but well enough compared to other lines of work.
Yes, I learned Emacs using a VT100 style keyboard before the IBM-PC keyboard became common.
The swap capslock and control is indispensible for me on a PC keyboard to avoid pinkie finger cramp.
Even better is just using one of these.