But the problem isn't the cables in most cases, its the service. I no longer have to deal with Cogeco's policies, I get Teksavvy's instead. Cogeco still gets paid, although obviously not as much as before -- and Teksavvy becomes a much larger customer of Cogeco's and therefore has more pull to get things fixed that need it.

You might want to look up what 'socialism' means ... it refers to "a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."

The problem of course is that slightly more socialist countries like Canada or some of northern Europe are just *barely* socialist, having socialized medicine, schooling, care for the poor, etc. but not nearly so much as advised by Marx. Unfortunately the American anti-socialist view sees these very useful values as being a slippery slope into 1970s communism and reject all of it.

Throwing out the baby with the bath water, so to speak.

cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

I agree, watching from north of the border here in Canada, I find all these rants more disturbing than amusing.

i'm also frequently confused as a Christian how it is that American Christianity has aligned itself with the selfish "don't help others" ethos rather than the more socialist "lets get together and help each other" view of the world.

Religion aside, the whole thing is just silly -- no country can be great when is nothing but individuals.

NB here in Canada, the large cable and telephone providers basically *must* license their connections to your home to other service providers. This is a regulation of course, and not just a 'free market' concept, but it does mean not having sixteen companies all trying to run their own copper down your street.

My local service provider is Cogeco for instance, and I switched to Teksavvy without having a single piece of coax changed in my house. Teksavvy pays Cogeco, Cogeco still maintains the wire, and I pay Teksavvy instead of Cogeco.

Does this fix all the problems? No, but it does mean that ISPs have to deal with customer service or simply be switched off by users.

How much time have you spent managing backbone BGP routers? Just curious ...

You're either confused or you've read some purposely disseminated misinformation. Please do more research so you understand the actual issue, and please share where you got this terrible data from so we can criticize it at the source.

Net neutrality has nothing to do with what you're arguing about.

Hi, I'm a volunteer for the Poetic License bureau, and we'd like to inform you that you've violated rule #8; taking something too literally when an obvious point is being made.

You're welcome.

Except they do http://www.forbes.com/sites/je... ... even if they shouldn't.

The battle is between the distros who decided to ship systemd and the users who didn't realize they were having their OS tools they know how to use thrown out.

The vast majority of users are not involved in the development of their distros ... they find out the hard way *after* things become default, like this.

I'm confused; you reboot your laptop?
Mine runs in suspended state continually ... I just open the lid and hit escape to bring up the password dialog a couple seconds later.

I run remote GUI apps over ssh all the time, don't you?

ssh -X remotehost is a fantastic command that people should really learn. I don't want to run a 'desktop' in a window on my desktop, I just want to run applications.

That said, VNC does have an advantage over X11 forwarding -- it survives restarts of the server side (the one you type on in X terminology) without additional fuss.

I use daemontools on my servers to auto-restart services and can't stand working with systemd as-is yet. Alas.

You can't list all the things systemd does in one line, it does not do "one thing well" ... in fact its frequently touted benefit is that it does so many things.

"How WP is run, is supposed to be decided by the community." citation please.

I don't recall this ever being true. Wikipedia is about freely contributing to something with rules and an architecture that's not always subject to democracy. You're always free to mirror it elsewhere and do your own thing any time though.

Actually if you read a lot of Wikipedia articles and history on them, the world was wrong and the system usually works.

The rules are there for a reason, and contentious subjects have issues (cf. Abortion, Israel, Nazi, etc.) but for the most part articles grow and become better and more thoroughly fact-checked with time.

Part of this is the much-hated reference requirement -- all facts in a Wikipedia page must have an external source to back them up. This rule alone causes a huge amount of strife among those who don't understand, but it also creates the most harmony by requiring reputable citations.