"Only if you aren't a consumer about to get arse raped by this government aproved monopoly. I'm willing to bet that if the next president is a republican that this megacorp will get to be as bad or worse than Ma Bell, the ultimate in "please sir may I have another" customer relations."
Ya know, right up until the point were people wanted to do slightly more that just voice with their phones, old Ma Bell did pretty damn well. Everyone (and that is key) had reliable, affordable voice service.
Eventually it became a hindrance to market forces, so we altered the system slightly in the so-called "break-up", but the monopoly served to establish a strong infrastructure.
Right now, I'd kill for broadband if I thought it would help. Nope. No can do. I don't add up on some vestige of the monopolies spreadsheets.
Frankly, at this point, I'm all done being patient. I want an adult in charge, put the fist down and say, "universal broadband access, no excuses." If welding together enough of these separate bean-counter telecoms creates the opportunity at the national level for this to occur, I'm all for it.
What I don't like is that we were making fair progress through deregulation. It would have taken only a little more access by third parties to the "last mile" infrastructure to get it effectively done. Now, we change administrations and go 180 degrees the other way.
Is the working theory (excuse, apology, whatever) that if the service provider is allowed to become big enough it can improve service through economies of scale and having enough capital to handle build-out?
My visions of the results of telecommunication deregulation remain visions. At every step where small providers have made progress, obstacles are created by the legacy monopolies. Progress toward telecom dereg was made under Clinton, and it is being quickly reversed under Bush. I'd like to know how they justify it.
Frankly, I don't care how it gets done. I want cheap, reliable, wide bandwidth. Whether it gets to me via Joe's KickAss Wires Inc. or COMCASTATTMEGOPOLY doesn't mean a lot, except that in the former case there would be a lot fewer bean counters micro managing my usage, for a time. Eventually it'll all end up in the hands of a small number of large companies anyhow; economies of scale for a commodity product.
My 5500 has an outstanding display. It's only of the best features of the machine!
The Zaurus has an intermediate "dimmed" mode that it enters when it's been idle for a bit. Perhaps you saw a display model that was stuck in that mode.
Something is wrong, because the Zaurus display is very nice.
"doesn't change the fact that the FBI can still bug libraries as freely as the CIA can assassinate with impunity, or that more McCarthyism is on the way."
You diminish the tragedy of McCarthy with your excited little exaggerations.
As for the CIA capping terrorists: "..hey man, nice shot!" - Filter
How my favourite bug [mozilla.org] was turned into a feature is the best example I have of how easy it is to get off the track with big projects like this.
I'm familiar with this issue and I read through the entire bug thread.
I agree with you. This is a consequence of letting pedantic standards zealots run the show. If Mozilla had a tiny bit of enlightened self interest mixed in with all the zealotry, the view might be; yes, it sucks that the market leading browser has foisted this crap behavior onto web designers, but that's how it is and because we would like to compete in the hearts and minds of designers, we'll concede this corner case. Instead, it is; we know best, we don't care that 99% of the web designs that test this corner case will get it wrong with our browser due to our preference, tough.
Thus, Mozilla fails to gain share against the Microsoft product. It will remain that way until some adults appear on the scene to take the wheel.
This means that all ideas can be represented at the election, and influence the big parties, without hindering their chances.In a 2-turn election, Ralph Nader would have been ejected at the first round, and the world's future would not depend on a man that watches Korea through closed binoculars !
History began with the 2000 election from the perspective of the Left.
If your marvelous system had been in place in 1992, Perot wouldn't have sucked off votes from Bush Sr., and the Clinton/Gore mess would never have happened. Thus, Gore would not have likely been the VP in 2000.
Please try to remember that Clinton/Gore were always minority candidates. Clinton won in 1992 with 42%. The Right had to accept the consequences of that tragedy for 8 damn years.
No you get to eat it. Like?
Re: More people on the same damn planet
on
Pipeline Mass Transit?
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Even if you do manage to invent a method of tranportation that uses "less than 2%" of the energy of "current methods," all you're doing is enabling the same old planet to support that many more warm bodies. You're still gonna run out of other things, like fresh water, a place to put the trash, coal, tolerance, etc, etc...
At what point does the species introspect and note that it probably isn't necessary to have 6, 8, 15 or 20 billion copies of itself stumbling around munching on stuff? Hmm?
Well, they are certainly a lot cheaper to store and ship in volume. I imagine that's the motivation behind mailorder vendors being so keen on LCD. That, and the RMA reductions. CRTs are almost always flawed slightly, and the mailorder vendors really can't argue much with the customer. LCDs have problems too, but at least the edges line up.
Until these academics start talking about population growth they will have no support from me. Yes, North America consumes many times the resources per capita. That is bad. Outside North America, populations are growing at net rate of over 100 million a year. That is much, much worse. Population growth in North America is due primarily to immigration and NOT obscene birth rates. Address this and you have credibility with me. Otherwise, you're just another leftist with a collectivist agenda, and I'll continue to ignore you. I'm afraid that won't happen however. If ridiculous birth rates were brought under control and our population was actually sustainable, these folks would have nothing to beat you over the head with. You would be free to drive your SUV, build your house and take nice long showers without answering to them, and that's just not acceptable.
Some collection of lawyers called "Access Now" is the stand-in for the ADA this time around. I refer to the ADA as an institution. It's actually a body of law, created to provide a revenue source for trial lawyers.
So either the judge was stupid or corrupt. These are the only options you allow in your judgment of his conclusion?
Might it simply be that the judge ruled for the reasons he cited; a lack of standards? Some of us are quite satisfied with this sort of conclusion because we've grown very tired of courts legislating from the bench. That this particular judge feels no compelling need to invent the necessary standards in a court room is no shame, as far as I'm concerned.
The ADA knows damn well the necessary level of detail required in standards used for regulation. They wrote most of them. They knew better than to throw this into a court room expecting some judge to wave his magic wand. If their goal was motivated by achieving greater accessibility, I'm sure they would have approached it differently. That isn't the goal.
The goal of the ADA is to grow in influence and resources. Their particular modus operandi is blackmailing institutions, thereby building credibility as a political force. The real story isn't the heinous cretin of a judge backhanding the disabled. The real story is the massive failure of the ADA in their attempt to railroad their latest bad guy of the month. The only tragedy here is lost potential billable hours for ADA and private claimant lawyers. I guess the judge didn't feel like playing along.
So get over yourself and your self-righteous indignance. You're a fool pawn played like a violin by leftist marketing.
"Just so we can nuke 11 million chinese with one warhead instead of only 10 million?"
The US isn't developing new warheads or ICBMs. The stock we have we will live with. By the middle of this century, some of these warheads will be close to 100 years old. Sandia is busy simulating warhead decay.
Despite popular perception of vast quantities of cheap devices surrounded by evil Generals slobbering for a chance to use them, nuclear warheads are very complex and require intense maintenance by sober professionals. Making sure these weapons actually function is a big part of the freedom you enjoy, whether or not you actually live in Sandia's country.
It's a question of usage patterns and necessary capacity. The common Best Buy PC used in a typical manner does not tax a garden variety Chinese PSU enough to ruin it.
A SMP box with a Gig or more of RAM, used to compile kernels, run FPSs at high resolution, host a couple extra drives of various sorts, get frequently booted between multiple OSes (startup loads are extraordinary,) run benchmarks, and basically do a bunch of other crap, will need a LOT more power. I fried an Antec 300W PSU in 3 months like this. Give yourself a fright and watch the case temperature during a FreeBSD "makeworld" sometime.
Tom's caters to people that push high end hardware to it's limit. You're basically reading hotrod magazine and wondering what's wrong with your Accord.
Good question. My "came with the case" Antec PSU died and I replaced it with a PCP&C unit, 450W. The machine is dual P3,.5GB RAM, dual HDDs, SCSI, GForce, etc. Uses its share of power.
The most useful part of the Tom's Hardware writeup is the breakdown of estimated power consumption for a "high end" machine. Based on that, I figure the 450W part I have is just a bit over the necessary capacity. Maybe 15% or so, assuming the rating is accurate.
Anyhow, like you, I was disappointed to see Tom skip PCP&C in a rare PSU test. Sometimes I wonder a lot about Tom's. The AMD bias is obvious to me. OTOH, it's possible PCP&C wouldn't play ball and submit units for testing. Not unheard of. It's an American company, possibly with enough lawyers employed to govern a State.
rc nonesense? No offense but how does splitting up rc into 32 different files in 6 directories with sym links to yet another directory make SYS V style startup scripts _EASIER_ to deal with?
It doesn't. I didn't suggest that it did.
About the only real advantage of SYSV init is that it gives third party vendors a slightly easy means of spamming their crap startup code into approximately correct locations without doing grievous damage to what is already there. Of course, any admin that would actually rely on this has far greater issues anyhow, so it's not a terribly significant gain.
I would never suggest the SYSV crap is in any way "easier" than the rc crap. I wouldn't even suggest that "easy" is a worthy goal. I merely suggested that the twit from the original post consider dealing with the situation....and it's nonsense, mkay?
What does SYSV init even have to do with Linux? The kernel doesn't care how the crap it's expected to support gets started!
If you're really so worked up about the trivia of SYSV init, go wander over to FreeBSD's CVS site and grab the etc module. Snag the rc files out'a there and smear them bodily into Gentoo or Debian (or whatever.) You're probably looking at 2-3 hours work to port that rc nonsense over.
This is O P E N source. You are free to have what you want. But, whatever you do, please stop your stoopid whining... k thx.
Nazi-esque.... wut a dink. You badly need to spend some time with real nazi folk.
Were you required to submit your fingerprints when you signed up for your broadband connection? I understand your local jackboots have made it nearly, if not actually, compulsory in the UK.
Did your House of "Lords" have any influence in the availability of broadband? It is amazing that you still tolerate this sort of feudal governance. Guess a brit just wouldn't feel right if he didn't have some nobles around to keep the peasants in line.
Hehe, the propaganda we've been feeding ourselves for 25 years about the Japanese is astounding. The Japanese are raising a generation of americanized blithering idiots, taking out 99 year multi-generational mortgages on small corners of buildings, and dealing with a social structure is still basically feudal. I don't believe the figures on academic performance published by the Japanese government. Why should I? If it wasn't for our abject power and wealth, Japan would still be invading it's neighbors.
I have one. 256Kbps. It's a 802.11b network. I live in the sticks, and I don't add up on QWest's spreadsheets with regard to DSL deployment. So, for $60/month, QWest can kiss my American ass.
The US built a high quality, universal (meaning everyone got it if they wanted it, period) nationwide phone service while the better part of Asia was still worshipping emperors. We did this by creating and heavily subsidizing a monopoly. The momentum of this monopoly (the AT&T breakup being meaningless in this regard,) is still very significant. Blaming the broadband mess in the States on our supposed "free market" approach is a laugh. There is nothing free about telecom in the US. Never has been. It's all about political influence and who is in power at the moment.
On the bright side, the pendulum is likely to swing the other way in the near future. It's an inevitability we are just taking a bit longer to get to for legacy reasons.
Phone service was wisely perceived as essential early on. The necessary force to achieve a solid phone network was applied. Broadband is not an essential. Some people might even claim measure of pride that our nation feels no particular urgency suddenly gubament the thing, and instead remain patient while the whole deal works it's own way out.
When we do get there, I have every faith we'll stomp the rest of the world. We always do. Try to remember, the USSR got to space first. They still lost.
Slashdot Mirror
"Only if you aren't a consumer about to get arse raped by this government aproved monopoly. I'm willing to bet that if the next president is a republican that this megacorp will get to be as bad or worse than Ma Bell, the ultimate in "please sir may I have another" customer relations."
Ya know, right up until the point were people wanted to do slightly more that just voice with their phones, old Ma Bell did pretty damn well. Everyone (and that is key) had reliable, affordable voice service.
Eventually it became a hindrance to market forces, so we altered the system slightly in the so-called "break-up", but the monopoly served to establish a strong infrastructure.
Right now, I'd kill for broadband if I thought it would help. Nope. No can do. I don't add up on some vestige of the monopolies spreadsheets.
Frankly, at this point, I'm all done being patient. I want an adult in charge, put the fist down and say, "universal broadband access, no excuses." If welding together enough of these separate bean-counter telecoms creates the opportunity at the national level for this to occur, I'm all for it.
What I don't like is that we were making fair progress through deregulation. It would have taken only a little more access by third parties to the "last mile" infrastructure to get it effectively done. Now, we change administrations and go 180 degrees the other way.
Fuck.
Is the working theory (excuse, apology, whatever) that if the service provider is allowed to become big enough it can improve service through economies of scale and having enough capital to handle build-out?
My visions of the results of telecommunication deregulation remain visions. At every step where small providers have made progress, obstacles are created by the legacy monopolies. Progress toward telecom dereg was made under Clinton, and it is being quickly reversed under Bush. I'd like to know how they justify it.
Frankly, I don't care how it gets done. I want cheap, reliable, wide bandwidth. Whether it gets to me via Joe's KickAss Wires Inc. or COMCASTATTMEGOPOLY doesn't mean a lot, except that in the former case there would be a lot fewer bean counters micro managing my usage, for a time. Eventually it'll all end up in the hands of a small number of large companies anyhow; economies of scale for a commodity product.
My 5500 has an outstanding display. It's only of the best features of the machine!
The Zaurus has an intermediate "dimmed" mode that it enters when it's been idle for a bit. Perhaps you saw a display model that was stuck in that mode.
Something is wrong, because the Zaurus display is very nice.
"doesn't change the fact that the FBI can still bug libraries as freely as the CIA can assassinate with impunity, or that more McCarthyism is on the way."
You diminish the tragedy of McCarthy with your excited little exaggerations.
As for the CIA capping terrorists:
"..hey man, nice shot!" - Filter
How my favourite bug [mozilla.org] was turned into a feature is the best example I have of how easy it is to get off the track with big projects like this.
I'm familiar with this issue and I read through the entire bug thread.
I agree with you. This is a consequence of letting pedantic standards zealots run the show. If Mozilla had a tiny bit of enlightened self interest mixed in with all the zealotry, the view might be; yes, it sucks that the market leading browser has foisted this crap behavior onto web designers, but that's how it is and because we would like to compete in the hearts and minds of designers, we'll concede this corner case. Instead, it is; we know best, we don't care that 99% of the web designs that test this corner case will get it wrong with our browser due to our preference, tough.
Thus, Mozilla fails to gain share against the Microsoft product. It will remain that way until some adults appear on the scene to take the wheel.
This means that all ideas can be represented at the election, and influence the big parties, without hindering their chances.In a 2-turn election, Ralph Nader would have been ejected at the first round, and the world's future would not depend on a man that watches Korea through closed binoculars !
History began with the 2000 election from the perspective of the Left.
If your marvelous system had been in place in 1992, Perot wouldn't have sucked off votes from Bush Sr., and the Clinton/Gore mess would never have happened. Thus, Gore would not have likely been the VP in 2000.
Please try to remember that Clinton/Gore were always minority candidates. Clinton won in 1992 with 42%. The Right had to accept the consequences of that tragedy for 8 damn years.
No you get to eat it. Like?
Even if you do manage to invent a method of tranportation that uses "less than 2%" of the energy of "current methods," all you're doing is enabling the same old planet to support that many more warm bodies. You're still gonna run out of other things, like fresh water, a place to put the trash, coal, tolerance, etc, etc...
At what point does the species introspect and note that it probably isn't necessary to have 6, 8, 15 or 20 billion copies of itself stumbling around munching on stuff? Hmm?
"I'm not sure whether or not you could use iChat to chat with ICQ firends; but you perhaps could chat with friends on ICQ"
What is this on ICQ? Is it injected or smoked? A pill perhaps?
Well, they are certainly a lot cheaper to store and ship in volume. I imagine that's the motivation behind mailorder vendors being so keen on LCD. That, and the RMA reductions. CRTs are almost always flawed slightly, and the mailorder vendors really can't argue much with the customer. LCDs have problems too, but at least the edges line up.
Because SUVs move themselves. The rest of that stuff you get to carry. Obviously. Now go hug a tree or something.
Anybody got quality concerns?
Nope.
Microsoft, McDonalds, domestic cars, Clintons...
No quality concerns here!
Fool. It's the guns.
Someday, us Canucks will all be rich I say!
You already are, Canuck.
Until these academics start talking about population growth they will have no support from me. Yes, North America consumes many times the resources per capita. That is bad. Outside North America, populations are growing at net rate of over 100 million a year. That is much, much worse. Population growth in North America is due primarily to immigration and NOT obscene birth rates. Address this and you have credibility with me. Otherwise, you're just another leftist with a collectivist agenda, and I'll continue to ignore you. I'm afraid that won't happen however. If ridiculous birth rates were brought under control and our population was actually sustainable, these folks would have nothing to beat you over the head with. You would be free to drive your SUV, build your house and take nice long showers without answering to them, and that's just not acceptable.
Some collection of lawyers called "Access Now" is the stand-in for the ADA this time around. I refer to the ADA as an institution. It's actually a body of law, created to provide a revenue source for trial lawyers.
So either the judge was stupid or corrupt. These are the only options you allow in your judgment of his conclusion?
Might it simply be that the judge ruled for the reasons he cited; a lack of standards? Some of us are quite satisfied with this sort of conclusion because we've grown very tired of courts legislating from the bench. That this particular judge feels no compelling need to invent the necessary standards in a court room is no shame, as far as I'm concerned.
The ADA knows damn well the necessary level of detail required in standards used for regulation. They wrote most of them. They knew better than to throw this into a court room expecting some judge to wave his magic wand. If their goal was motivated by achieving greater accessibility, I'm sure they would have approached it differently. That isn't the goal.
The goal of the ADA is to grow in influence and resources. Their particular modus operandi is blackmailing institutions, thereby building credibility as a political force. The real story isn't the heinous cretin of a judge backhanding the disabled. The real story is the massive failure of the ADA in their attempt to railroad their latest bad guy of the month. The only tragedy here is lost potential billable hours for ADA and private claimant lawyers. I guess the judge didn't feel like playing along.
So get over yourself and your self-righteous indignance. You're a fool pawn played like a violin by leftist marketing.
"Just so we can nuke 11 million chinese with one warhead instead of only 10 million?"
The US isn't developing new warheads or ICBMs. The stock we have we will live with. By the middle of this century, some of these warheads will be close to 100 years old. Sandia is busy simulating warhead decay.
Despite popular perception of vast quantities of cheap devices surrounded by evil Generals slobbering for a chance to use them, nuclear warheads are very complex and require intense maintenance by sober professionals. Making sure these weapons actually function is a big part of the freedom you enjoy, whether or not you actually live in Sandia's country.
It's a question of usage patterns and necessary capacity. The common Best Buy PC used in a typical manner does not tax a garden variety Chinese PSU enough to ruin it.
A SMP box with a Gig or more of RAM, used to compile kernels, run FPSs at high resolution, host a couple extra drives of various sorts, get frequently booted between multiple OSes (startup loads are extraordinary,) run benchmarks, and basically do a bunch of other crap, will need a LOT more power. I fried an Antec 300W PSU in 3 months like this. Give yourself a fright and watch the case temperature during a FreeBSD "makeworld" sometime.
Tom's caters to people that push high end hardware to it's limit. You're basically reading hotrod magazine and wondering what's wrong with your Accord.
Good question. My "came with the case" Antec PSU died and I replaced it with a PCP&C unit, 450W. The machine is dual P3, .5GB RAM, dual HDDs, SCSI, GForce, etc. Uses its share of power.
The most useful part of the Tom's Hardware writeup is the breakdown of estimated power consumption for a "high end" machine. Based on that, I figure the 450W part I have is just a bit over the necessary capacity. Maybe 15% or so, assuming the rating is accurate.
Anyhow, like you, I was disappointed to see Tom skip PCP&C in a rare PSU test. Sometimes I wonder a lot about Tom's. The AMD bias is obvious to me. OTOH, it's possible PCP&C wouldn't play ball and submit units for testing. Not unheard of. It's an American company, possibly with enough lawyers employed to govern a State.
rc nonesense? No offense but how does splitting up rc into 32 different files in 6 directories with sym links to yet another directory make SYS V style startup scripts _EASIER_ to deal with?
...and it's nonsense, mkay?
It doesn't. I didn't suggest that it did.
About the only real advantage of SYSV init is that it gives third party vendors a slightly easy means of spamming their crap startup code into approximately correct locations without doing grievous damage to what is already there. Of course, any admin that would actually rely on this has far greater issues anyhow, so it's not a terribly significant gain.
I would never suggest the SYSV crap is in any way "easier" than the rc crap. I wouldn't even suggest that "easy" is a worthy goal. I merely suggested that the twit from the original post consider dealing with the situation.
What does SYSV init even have to do with Linux? The kernel doesn't care how the crap it's expected to support gets started!
If you're really so worked up about the trivia of SYSV init, go wander over to FreeBSD's CVS site and grab the etc module. Snag the rc files out'a there and smear them bodily into Gentoo or Debian (or whatever.) You're probably looking at 2-3 hours work to port that rc nonsense over.
This is O P E N source. You are free to have what you want. But, whatever you do, please stop your stoopid whining... k thx.
Nazi-esque.... wut a dink. You badly need to spend some time with real nazi folk.
A few questions for you:
Were you required to submit your fingerprints when you signed up for your broadband connection? I understand your local jackboots have made it nearly, if not actually, compulsory in the UK.
Did your House of "Lords" have any influence in the availability of broadband? It is amazing that you still tolerate this sort of feudal governance. Guess a brit just wouldn't feel right if he didn't have some nobles around to keep the peasants in line.
Hehe, the propaganda we've been feeding ourselves for 25 years about the Japanese is astounding. The Japanese are raising a generation of americanized blithering idiots, taking out 99 year multi-generational mortgages on small corners of buildings, and dealing with a social structure is still basically feudal. I don't believe the figures on academic performance published by the Japanese government. Why should I? If it wasn't for our abject power and wealth, Japan would still be invading it's neighbors.
I have one. 256Kbps. It's a 802.11b network. I live in the sticks, and I don't add up on QWest's spreadsheets with regard to DSL deployment. So, for $60/month, QWest can kiss my American ass.
The US built a high quality, universal (meaning everyone got it if they wanted it, period) nationwide phone service while the better part of Asia was still worshipping emperors. We did this by creating and heavily subsidizing a monopoly. The momentum of this monopoly (the AT&T breakup being meaningless in this regard,) is still very significant. Blaming the broadband mess in the States on our supposed "free market" approach is a laugh. There is nothing free about telecom in the US. Never has been. It's all about political influence and who is in power at the moment.
On the bright side, the pendulum is likely to swing the other way in the near future. It's an inevitability we are just taking a bit longer to get to for legacy reasons.
Phone service was wisely perceived as essential early on. The necessary force to achieve a solid phone network was applied. Broadband is not an essential. Some people might even claim measure of pride that our nation feels no particular urgency suddenly gubament the thing, and instead remain patient while the whole deal works it's own way out.
When we do get there, I have every faith we'll stomp the rest of the world. We always do. Try to remember, the USSR got to space first. They still lost.