TFA didn't have hard evidence of manipulation. They reported one survey from well before the referendum. Surveys are not votes. Surveys often, as the article points out, ask questions in a way designed to get the answer the pollster desires. I've yet to hear a survey ask "if the ballot contained the question ... would you vote yes?", it is always biased towards whoever pays for the survey. It is so common there is a term for it: push-polling. The article tells us that the cable company survey asked "should taxpayers fund pornography ...", but they don't tell us what the survey that had a 72% favorable rate asked. How biased was the survey in favor of the referendum?

The result of the vote didn't match the survey data, so yes, the fact that the result didn't go the way they wanted it to is being used as proof that there was manipulation. And it didn't go they way they wanted it to not once, but twice.

By the way, someone else claimed that a municipal internet service would never be sold. TFA talks about one such service that was sold out to a commercial provider when it discusses the systems that the cable companies claim failed. So that BIG consideration isn't valid.

No, to get approved for debt you need one of two things:

1. A credit history. That's not necessarily debt, it is a history of handling small debts that you've paid off.

2. Belong to a demographic that the credit companies are chasing.

When I was in college, the stores were deluging me with offers of credit cards because of my age/college while the credit union followed rule 1 and repeatedly denied me a credit card. In recent years, the largest flood of credit card offers were when I had no debt at all, but had a paid-off car loan.

Nobody can force you to go into debt.

Why wouldn't anyone ever buy one out? Privatization is not a new buzzword. If an entire country's telecom can be privatized, why couldn't a municipal internet system? I've heard of cities selling off public utitlites before. Our trash collection used to be public, now it isn't.

And it is a BIG consideration for whom?

I'm not speaking for /.rs. I'm pointing out that /.rs speaking for the voters (by deciding what is "better", or your "BIG consideration") is the problem.

Right. If you can't argue facts, argue the person. There's a latin word for this that I cannot ever spell correctly, so I won't try now.

No government utility exists "for balance". It either uses the general tax fund so it can run cheaper and drive out the competition, is created explicitly as a monopoly, or it is run so incompetently that it becomes a white elephant. But "balance"? No.

I wasn't trying to scare people, and I wasn't talking about "health care". I was pointing to one recent, very glaring example of a failure of government to provide services to the taxpayers that cost a lot of money and did diddly squat, in contrast to the implicit assumption that a government service would be cheaper and better. (And, in fact, providing services for lower cost is a driving force behind privatization of government services. Were government services always cheaper, privatization would have no impetus.)

If your argument is "that was 'health care' and this is internet service so it will be different", I find it to be very very unconvincing. You'd have to come up with so many "that was X and this is different" excuses that Occam's Razor would say that the obvious answer is probably the right one: government management of complex systems is usually inefficient and costly.

No, I mean that the term "better" is a subjective term that depends on what weight and value one puts on objective measures, and in many cases, includes subjective measures like "happy with service".

"Better" is not a fact. "Meets specified connection speeds 95% of the time" is a fact. "Costs less than other similar services" is a fact. You assume that "faster and cheaper" (facts) means "better" is a fact, but that's simply not true.

I didn't try to show you that something wasn't "better" because "better" is subjective. The point is that the VOTERS who voted down the municipal service can, and do, have their own views of "better" that may not align with yours.

And those may be called "facts", but then you have to weigh the facts to come up with the subjective evaluation of "better". What is better for me may be a service that isn't as fast but comes with a static IP. Or I may consider it better if the service comes over existing wiring because I don't want installers mucking about my house and property. I may consider it better if I'm not forced as a taxpayer to fund a service for you because in your opinion the existing options are too slow/too expensive/provided by a company you hate.

1. Comcast has a financial interest in keeping customers, even if it is a small one. A government-run service has no financial interest in keeping subs. Any cost overruns will just be pulled from the general fund.

2. You can't vote out a civil service employee because their position isn't an elected one. I shouldn't have to point that out.

3. If the government is the ISP and has driven the competition out, then you have no choice. If the government has forced the competition to raise prices, then your choice is more expensive. And even if the competition is the same price, you're paying twice for service.

4. I pity more the people who face a true government monopoly on service. They have two choices: use the government service or go without. Why is a government monopoly better than this alleged private one (that really doesn't exist)?

This /. attitude that we're all smarter than the average voter and know what is "better" for him, to the point of calling your opinion of "better" an objective fact, is pretty arrogant. The point I'm trying to get across is that the voters have the right to decide what is best for them and what is "better". Saying that they're voting against their own best interests is rather presumptive, since I'm sure that many of the voters simply don't care about internet service or paying taxes so that you can get your downloads faster than you can already get them through any of the existing commercial services. And I expect that many of them do not share the "fuck Comcast" reason that apparently makes "anything else" a better choice.

In your opinion, there is a right answer. In their opinion, there is a different right answer.

Sorry, but no. AFSCME and SEIU are very large unions that cover a very large number of state, county, and municipal employees. It is most likely that all the unionized employees in a municipality are members of one of those two, except perhaps for specialized unions that cover specific occupations. "City employee" is not a specific occupation, and clerical workers in the cop shop are not police union members. In our city it is SEIU, and it was big news a week ago that a contract was finally signed a year after the last one expired. Disgruntled city employees running your internet service? What a great idea. A union slowdown that stops work on the internet service? Great!

Of course it could. One employee sees it happening. They tell it to another, who tells it to someone who gets a warrant. Bingo. The law that protects your privacy at an ISP includes exemptions for admins seeing things in the course of their duties (like investigating email problems). Or they just start investigating you based on the word of mouth and come up with other evidence. It doesn't have to be used directly in a trial for it to make your life difficult. Do you really think that one city employee telling another one who works in the cop shop that "I think John Doe is downloading CP" would be ignored because the information came informally? Even if John Doe isn't actually doing that, he's low hanging fruit that can be used to show the community that the cops/prosecutors are tough on crime.

You have such great faith in the honesty of the government. Here's a fact that hasn't gotten a lot of press but should put the "consequences" claim in its proper context. The NSA monitoring of cell calls? Ron Wyden, the Senator from Oregon, admits that he was briefed on the program months before it became public BUT HE DID NOTHING. A US Senator who has a reputation for standing up for "the little guy" knew it was going on and said nothing about it and did nothing to stop it.

This is the government you think would consider the "consequences" of handing data about you across the aisle to a co-worker too great for it to ever happen.

Every franchise I've seen has them. Because of the changes to the federal laws for local regulation of such companies, the local municipalities have very little stick anymore.

The fact that the actual equation is a ratio between a proposed compression implementation and a reference is a hint that it is not a "figure of merit" in absolute terms, but only with respect to some common standard. Yeah, you get to pick your standard, but simply reporting r/log(t) is meaningless. The actual measurement is unitless simply because, as you point out, units of 1/log(s) is meaningless.

It's done that way so things can be repeatable. If I create a compressor and report a Weissman of 3, then you should be able to repeat that on your computer, even if you've got a 3GHz I7 and mine is only 2.7GHz. Here's the data I used, here's the executables for both compressors, you run it. Now you can play with the source and see what happens. But first you need to be able to reproduce my results. That's called "scientific method".

The underlying equation is a ratio between two compression implementations, not an absolute measure of one.

I'm not here to argue whether the metric is meaningful or not. The value of a metric is in the eye of the beholder. You don't think it has any value, and I really don't care if it does or not. I'm just pointing out that the actual metric is unitless. You can't throw half an equation out and then complain that the units on the result don't mean anything. Sometimes equations are constructed the way they are so that the units DO come out right, and there are many examples of equations that have empirical constants that have meaningless units just so the equation they are used in come out right. That's especially true in physical modeling where someone sees a relationship between the data and tries to create an equation to represent that. If the fit is best with some variable taken to the 8/3 power, that's how it winds up, and the constants get units to make it all come out right. A more common example is R in PV=nRT.

Now, you're correct, the alpha constant is useless because the only purpose it could serve is to correct the units, and since it is unitless it doesn't even do that. So laugh at that part of it, but don't throw out the important parts and laugh at what's left when the units don't work anymore.

No, the government just failed to manage the project to a successful completion, like they would have to manage a municipal internet service.

You mean, someone in the government? The same government that would create a perfect internet service?

I'm pointing to repeated examples of government failure to do technological things, you don't see it, and I'M myopic?

I would have thought it rare to find a /. user who believes the promises of the government and thinks that the government handling all his data is a good thing, but there sure seem to be a lot of them posting today.

You seem to assume that a government-run ISP would be cheaper and better (e.g. faster and less congested) just because they say it would be. You seem to ignore all the examples of cost overruns and incompetence that government systems demonstrate on a regular basis and think that just this once it will be different. You seem to ignore that it is not just "internet users" who pay for a government-run internet service, and there are those who don't care if you can't download the latest warez or movie torrent as fast as you'd like. Those are the people who have other considerations than just "congestion and download speed" that you limit yourself to.

And you seem to think that reducing competition in an already limited market is a good thing. I find that an interesting shift in the environment here.

Neither of those are fact. "Better" is a purely subjective term, and there is no evidence that a government-run anything will be automatically cheaper. When you say "cheaper", you mean it may cost direct users less. That's not the total cost of the product, however. A "company" that can simply dip its hand into the general fund of a city when revenues don't cover expenses isn't worried too much about keeping costs down and those costs wind up coming from people who have no desire to be subscribers. A government-run anything is typically run by civil servants covered by a union, so they have no reason to care about the service they provide and have a union driving up the costs of their employment. (In our fair town, the largest cost increase in government is the increase in cost of union employees, most specifically for their pension and healthcare.)

The fact that this is all taxpayer supported means you lose choice. If you think having a choice between several commercial ISPs is too little choice, then consider that every taxpayer in that city will be an involuntary subscriber to what will probably become the defacto monopoly. If they don't manage to drive all the other players out by being able to undercut the prices, then the prices for all the others will have to go up to cover the fixed costs spread over fewer subscribers. (Do you see the parallel to the school system here? I do. You want to send your kids to a private school for a better education? You get to pay twice.)

I think less choice and forced participation is not better. I think having to get service from someone who doesn't really care is not better, especially when their supervisor will also be a civil servant who doesn't have to care. Example? I had a water leak. I got my bill and it said I had consumed some ridiculous amount of water. I did the calculations -- the volume of water they said I used would have covered my property to a depth of about a foot. It would have required a ridiculous flow. I got to fill out a report, they came out to calibrate my meter, and I ... heard nothing back ever. That's a government-run utility. Nobody cared because they didn't have to. I can't vote them out, they can't get fired, and I can't get service from anyone else.

Here in Oregon we've just lived through the Cover Oregon fiasco. A government-run website that was supposed to allow people to sign up for health insurance. It cost millions of dollars yet never managed to allow people to sign up for health insurance. You could download the forms, fill them in, then talk to an agent to find out what it would cost, but you couldn't sign up online. They could tell you the "partners" you could talk to -- mine was a three hour drive away in another state! They dumped a lot of money into cute jingles and ads months before the site was supposed to go online, but couldn't manage to get the job done. Better? Cheaper? Right.

Yes, democracy sucks. But as someone once said, it sucks less than everything else. The point I made, however, is that everyone is assuming that the voters were coerced into voting against their best interests, and that is not a fact in evidence.

Because the voters of those cities said they didn't want the government supplying it.

Here's a point I haven't seen anyone raise. When your ISP is managed by the same government that manages the police department, where do you think your right to privacy winds up? In the hands of someone who likely belongs to the same union that the police clerical staff belong to, and are probably on the same bowling team. And their paychecks come from the same mayor's office.

You mean when they vote against what you think their interests ought to be, you don't think they are "clever".

Not everyone believes that a government run ISP using taxpayer dollars to make up revenue shortfalls and to deliberately undercut the commercial providers is "in their interest".

But 200 miles certainly covers any and all local in-town and in-area travel possibilities, and nearly everything but very long distance travel.

Nope. You need 250 plus a safety margin - on mountains for part of the trip.

In my case that's half a commute between my Silicon Valley townhouse and my edge-of-Nevada ranch. But that's virtually the same trip as between Silicon Valley / San Francisco Bay Area and many weekend vacation spots: Lake Tahoe ski resorts, Reno gambling, gold country camping, etc.

Make a car that can do 30-mile-one-way commute efficiently and has this 250-and-chage range, and a Northern Californian who works near the coast and blows off steam near the CA/NV interface only needs ONE vehicle. (So it takes four to six hours to charge when you get there and when you get back - so what? It'll be parked longer than that anyhow.) Less and he/she needs TWO, with all the environmental impact of building both. Further, the long-range one is a gas hog by comparison.

The Weissman score is actually unitless. When one divides "log seconds" by "log seconds" the units cancel.

If one measures the compression ratios and times for the same data on different architectures, one is measuring the score of the different architecture, not "sidestepping" it.

Then algorithm A compared to B would have a higher Weissman score on a system with SSE.

Then the score would favor B over A when comparing the two processors. That's what the score is supposed to do. It compares two things.

Then for the former you would not care what the Weissman score is, and for the latter you would care.

That's not what the score measures. It also doesn't measure price (for commercial implementations of code), executable size, or whether the software salesman has BO or not.

Does a loaded F-150 even get 500 miles on a single tank of gas?

Yes, it does.

But it's a 37 galon tank.

I love everything about my F-150 Lariet EXCEPT the gas mileage (and the refusal to pan the weather map except when the vehicle is stopped). Unfortunately, when you have to haul several tons up and down a mountain or across an unpaved desert from time to time, it's hard to avoid a tradeoff in that department.

It's pretty insulting to the democratic process to accuse the winners of being "[expletive deleted] sheeple" when you don't agree with a result.

I suspect there are a lot of people who feel the same way. Some of them may have participated in the vote and not voted the way you wanted them to.

Were a corporation a person, it certainly could hold public office.

However, the people who make up corporations and who retain their civil and Constitutional rights despite being part of a corporation can, and sometimes do, hold public office. On our local city council, we've had people who work for the local newspaper, the local university, the local large manufacturer, and other corporations.