swalve insisted;

So, your proposed solution is that I either give up Internet access altogether, or switch to using my ILEC (which means giving up my VoIP landline) for access?

Purely symbolic personal actions are easy - as long as you don't care about self-harm.

The problem is that I have no other choices of ISP. This is not just my personal problem. It is a problem of US national policy. Depriving TW of my monthly fee won't accomplish ANYTHING useful. Changing national policy - making cable ISPs common carriers, being the most obviously useful immediate change - WILL. So I argue in favor of that change, because pursuing that change by publicly advocating it as a response to Comcast's bid to become an effective monopoly player in the US cable industry IS useful.

Denying Comcast's attempt to acquire TW would also be useful - but only in the short run. Making acceptance of common carrier status for their combined ISP business a condition for approval of their merger would be more useful, long-term.

swalve sneered:

Is English not your natal language? Because I thought I was pretty clear about being stuck in a local duopoly where the alternative is the ILEC - whose upstream limit on DSL is ~100 kbps.

So, basically, you're suggesting I trade a shit sandwich for diahrrea soup?

Kindly fuck the hell off and die.

TrekkieGod warned:

I agree.

An earlier version of the NYT story quoted Comcast's CEO as stating the combined company would only control 30% of the US pay TV market - a claim which purposefully conflates cable MSOs with SATELLITE TV providers. The difference (and it is crucial) between those two delivery models is that virtually every member of Comcast's customer base, and the 8 million net subscribers they expect to acquire from TW also depend on their cable operator as their broadband ISP, whereas almost NONE of DirectTV's customers also use it for Internet service. There's an excellent reason for that: their satellite Internet service is VERY expensive, AND IT SUCKS. It's dogshit slow, monthly data transfer quotas are ludicrously tiny, it's unusably laggy for online gaming and VoIP service (plus, your uplink requires POTS), and rain- or snow-storms make it impossible to use altogether.

Still worse, Comcast has already been caught extorting money from Level 3 Communications to keep Netflix from being throttled, and it counts Netflix streams against customers' monthly data caps, but does not do the same for its own Xfinity app for the Xbox.

Nor, in all fairness, is TW anything approaching a model corporate citizen. This month TW raised my Internet access bill by $5, from $39.99 to $44.99. That's in excess of an 11% increase. Has TW's cost of providing service increased to my rural duopoloy increased by any even marginally-significant amount recently? Oh, HELL NO. That increase was shoved down my throat purely to pump up TW's stock price, SO THAT COMCAST WOULD HAVE TO PAY MORE FOR THE COMPANY. And, of course, Comcast will insist on additional ratepayer robbery to increase the stock price of the combined company, because increased, short-term shareholder return is the ONLY goal of capitalism.

Just ask any MBA.

This scumbaggery must not be allowed to spread.

icebike conjectured:

The summary is completely wrong (surprise!)

Google is NOT building the satellite (note the singular) in question. It will merely be a customer of DigitalGlobe - one of many, including the US government.

Not that the US goverment needs DigitalGlobe's images. After all, the NSA has a fleet of its own satellites with far better image resolution capability than the DigitalGlobe effort.

Slushdot: come for the misleading summaries, stay for the uninformed commentary!

wonkey_monkey pointed out:

To which wonkey_monkey responded:

Thanks for calling my attention to his post.

An Anonymous Coward commented:

I sit corrected.

However, I'd like to point out that nothing in your analysis validates wisnoskij's contention that the mass of a black hole has to be considered as existing entirely within this universe, therefore preventing it from acting as a "wormhole" to another one. As I understand it, whether the event horizon is actually a hard boundary or a more diffuse one, we don't currently have a solid cosmological model of what's "on the other side" of that boundary. AFAIK, Hawking's position on the issue of whether information is, in fact, lost once it passes an event horizon has evolved over the years, and his most recent thoughts are more conceptual arguments than mathematical models. (That's apparently more a factor of his increasing communications disability than necessarily a weakness in his logic, but still ... I don't believe he's provided the math to back up his current mental model, yet.)

I'd be happy to have my grasp of the subject debunked by those who truly do understand the math involved. I make no claim whatsoever to that ability, myself - I just contend that wisnoskij was harumphing ex cathedra on the subject from the depths of his hat./p>

wisnoskij blathered:

Sorry, but you can't prove that contention. Period.

In the Standard Model, black holes are singularities. BY DEFINITION, the laws of physics as we observe and understand them break down in singularities. The SM can't explain what is going on inside a black hole, AND NEITHER CAN YOU.

Unless you have a doctorate in cosmology or astrophysics, you doubtless are profoundly unqualified even to have an OPINION on the topic ... so, kindly STFU.

Thank you.

The article to which this piece points is an opinion piece. The author points out that Snowden's "latest revelations" may compromise current field operations and/or operatives.

The central problem with that claim is that SNOWDEN HAS MADE NO NEW REVELATIONS. *All* of the revelations from "Snowden" are actually revelations made by one or more of the journalists to whom Snowden gave copies of his stolen documents. All of them. Snowden himself has refused to reveal ANYTHING that THEY have not already published, on the grounds that he considers himself to be unqualified to properly strike the balance between preserving national security and revealing information that is clearly in the public interest. Instead, he has left it ENTIRELY up to the journalists to whom he gave the information to make those decisions.

But don't take my word for it. Listen to the man himself.

Seriously.

It's not bad enough that these scumbags have a stranglehold on scientific research publishing. The primary website to which the summary points requires the reader to allow so many third-party scripts to run that I simply gave up on the article altogether.

Oh, and FUCK SLASHDOT for pointing me to such a piece-of-shit website in the first place.

an Anonymous Coward plaintively asked:

Yes.

In response to my comment about the Alienware M17X, roc97007 commented:

A friend of mine who does process control automation for a living is working on his second (the first one was stolen from his truck). Gorgeous machine. Top-notch graphics performance, full-HD display, dual quad CPUs, 7200 rpm data drive and a 256 GB flash memory boot drive. POST to Windows 7 desktop in 3 seconds flat. And built like a tank. Plus a full 101-key keyboard, mad I/O, and cool, customizable lighting zones.

Weighs a ton and drinks a battery dry in 2.5 hours or so - but, man, what a beautiful muscle machine!

Orthancstone observed:

You've obviously never driven an Alienware M17X.