I'm a mathematician, and I'm afraid I really don't know what you're talking about.

Mathematics is often pictured as a very isolated practice -- a person sitting alone at a desk. But it's surprisingly social, and while there is a fair amount of desk time, there's a lot of interpersonal relationships (as you put it) in the actual doing of math. Asking questions, explaining your results, mentoring students, even teaching classes -- a lot of math involves other people.

Anyway, I know lots of mathematicians, and I think generally they're pretty happy people.

c'mon, someone mod this funny

All we need is 1000 slashdotters and etherpad!

BTW Moca (cable) is 400mps cap vs 100 eth, Don't know what real world sustained bandwith is .

All the new builds are GPON as well as any expansion in existing offices, Old Stuff is BPON, dont rememember the bandwith offhand. they also switched vendors , tellabs to that French company you might have heard of, Lucent(alcatel) :) and man the OLTs (co end) is incredibly compact 8U ~30k subs!

Mostly because Verizon does not compress, The feeds from the sat farms are exactly what goes to your home, and it's fiber all the way (well, except for the electronics in the distribution equipment :P ), Comcast currently has a last mile bandwith problem ~200-500 homes on the distribution fiber to the nodes and lots of amplifiers/splitters on the last mile coax where verizon runs 32 homes on the last mile fiber 1>32 optical splitter in the field passive network (no electronics in the field) with enough dark fiber in the f1 runs to drop to a 1>16 split if necessary without running more fiber in the field..

Your post is very thoughtful.

You are right about exclusivity, that is a pretty fundamental difference. But even so, it's not the one that necessitates the monopoly institution. The reason is: the first copy still commands a higher price than every subsequent copy. That is how artists can (and, imho, should) make money, and that is a sufficient incentive to create. Copyright is an unnecessary evil; not a great evil, but a somewhat major annoyance and an overhead on all art production.

In practical terms, I totally agree with you: our first priority today should be to take a moderate political position and to reduce terms to sensible levels. We can do so gradually over the next decade or two. In the end, a term of under 2 years would be great, and anything over 5 is just plain overkill. Make that retroactive (apparently, it is OK for extending the term). This will create an entire new world of free culture, while giving big players a cushion as they adjust their business process.

Gagh! Who the fuck cares what those militant sociopaths think? Let them stew in their own juices. They're as fundamentally psychotic as the Scientologists ... both groups should be put into a room under lock and key, and then somebody should throw away the room.

All it would take for PETA to start attacking anyone that tries to mass-produce vat-grown meat is for some researcher somewhere to "prove" that said lumps of flesh have feelings (unlike the leaders of PETA, who for all intents and purposes are conscienceless.)

Yes, that is how unions start out. Most unions *used* to be that way in the US as well. People have good reason to moan about US unions now though, and it's *you* who has no knowledge of how US unions work.

That's why contracts with big, faceless, corporations are full of clauses that ultimately allow the corp. to do what they want. They do things like say that the agreement can be changed at any time by VM, and that you agree to be bound by documents other than just the contract, like terms and conditions, acceptable usage policies, etc..

I think VM will have made sure they covered their arses this time, after the Phorm bullshit.

Once Apple gets to OS X v.10.9.9, they'll be going hexadecimal with the next version: OS X v.B.0.

I have 25/25 FiOS with the actiontec router. The Actiontec would often lock up after heavy BitTorrent sessions. (something about memory leaks in the routing tables i heard) Anyway I had the internet connetion switched from Moca (cable output) to ethernet and I run it through an old pentium 200 with 3 nics running ipcop 1.4.21 a 24 port switch and hung the router on after for wireless and Moca for the stbs. It has yet to crash, been up for over 2 years and I get full bandwith on nat on the clients . and over 10/10 on the wireless.