That's what I'm hearing here....

...but of course I totally get his point that more people also means more morons.

As I understood it, the point of "the wisdom of crowds" was not that *everyone* contributes value, but that by opening the forum you improve the likelihood that *someone* will contribute value.

Am I missing something or did Drew's knock over his beer again?

Anyone found any similar useful hacks with them newfangled radio water meters?

My city put 'em in last year and this dude comes out to the house to install it and I'm like, "...so this let you drive past the house and pick up the meter reading without coming to the side of the house, right?" And the dude is like, "No. This radios your water usage directly to the central office every twelve hours."

Every twelve hours.

I know slashdot makes you paranoid, but this bothers me. I simply cannot imagine how it could be useful to monitoring this frequently when they still bill my usage monthly. Plus, any dude with access to the database can hack together an SQL query to find out which houses have a total water usage under a gallon over the past three days and know who's not home.

Don't buy your first point. PRICE is affected by scarcity, not value. Air is valuable and free.

No, no, no! You don't put the beer in the fridge, you put the fridge in the beer! Take that disk thingy Guinness uses in their cans to make it all foamy and add the refrigerator to that! Take it off the shelf, pop it open, wait two minutes and Voila! -- it's ice cold AND foamy! Brilliant!

The only real point to this is keeping their cable TV business viable. (IMHO, of course.)

Heh, heh... 30 years ago, you were lucky to have **GRAPHICS** and a keyboard that typed in lower-case.

You know what's missing? The mom and pop broadband market like we had with dialup in the 90's. We should do communications like we do roads.

We won't ever have actual competition in any of the broadband or communications markets because pulling physical cables is expensive and difficult. (Wireless *might* be an exception if it pans out...) There are permits, zoning rules, capacity/buildout planning and all kinds of "who really wants five cables from five different providers running into their house?!" issues that give communication markets exceptionally high natural barriers to entry. The problem is that all these services share a common cable that should be centralized.

If local government were to seize ownership and operation of the physical network layer -- the cabling and routing -- from the phone and cable companies under eminent domain, then any company that wanted to sell ISP, VOIP or TVIP service could do so by paying the city a simple access fee to use the public network infrastructure. We could stop wasting money running redundant cables to everyone's house, we could stop letting service providers leverage their networks to strongarm customers with unfair policies, and we could stop letting them use their existing regional monopolies to lock out competition and cherry pick their customers.

BONUS: Since the service providers would be freed of the burden of being a 'dumb wire' (I'm looking at you, TWC!), they could instead focus on providing stellar competitive services.

For those of you concerned about "government efficiency", consider that your city government could contract out the network management and maintenance if they didn't want to do it themselves; we just wouldn't let them sell ownership. Besides, this is exactly how we handle most of the other infrastructure we depend on anyway. Are roads that everyone uses really that big a problem? If we did roads the way we do data, you'd need to sign a five year contract and agree to have the roads around your house torn up and rebuilt to shop at Target instead of Walmart.

Meh... I think the problem is that about fifteen-some-odd years ago, Microsoft decided against all convention that storing auto-executable code and scripts inside data files was a great idea.

Ha-ha!

Looking over your list, not only have they been doing this forever, they are also remarkably inept at it.

You'd think they'd have figgered out that they have no business making up their own formats by now, not only because it's sociopathic, but because it makes them look like asses.

-G

I agree that the FCC is not seeing the real problem here, but I have a better solution.

Video=Voice=Data. It's all bits. Barring (maybe) wireless we will not ever have actual competition in the current system because the market has a naturally high barrier to entry: the high cost and difficulty of pulling physical cables. (permits, zoning rules, capacity/buildout planning, "who really wants five cables from five different providers running into their house?!", etc...) That's why there is no mom and pop broadband market.

So, let's allow local government to seize ownership (eminent domain) and operation of the physical layer from the phone and cable companies, and lease access to anyone that wants to provide voice, video or data service. We stop running redundant cables, we stop letting service providers leverage their networks to strongarm their customers, and we stop letting them use their existing regional monopolies to lock out competition.

If we did roads the way we do data, you'd need to sign a five year contract and agree to have the roads around your house torn up and rebuilt to shop at Target instead of Walmart.

Yep, you have to choose your distractions. I've even been known to take the phone off the hook and close Outlook when I'm under deadlines.

All music downloading is stealing?!

What about trampling all over the registered trademarks of Hewlett-Packard and CNN?!

(*sigh*)

Oh, and I think we should just switch the whole language to acronyms, KWIM?

I don't think technology has much to do with it beyond making "the watchers" more efficient. Do you think there would be a problem if the police were following you around all day manually? If subby's summary is accurate, this judge's perspective is out of whack.