On 4/12/2010 8:49 PM, Stuart Jansen wrote: > > Look how universal education transformed our country. Look how rural > mail delivery transformed our country. Look how the interstate road > system transformed our country. Why is universal, unpolluted Internet a > line too far? > > Your two examples are a bad fit for the point you're trying to express. a) Universal education is a requirement, not a right, and only one we enforce on children whom we deem too young to decide that the rule should not apply to them. It's something we enforce poorly, something they arguably don't provide well, and something we have healthy competition in the market thereof. b) The interstate road system is for a largely different use, something provided from one entity (with the exception of toll roads from private entities), and that entity has vastly different goals from the entities providing the internet access.
(more on topic): My opinion on all this is simple: If you don't like the way ISP X is doing something, leave ISP X. If you don't think you have options, you just lost the game. Have a view of the southern sky? Congrats, you can get broadband via satellite from a number of vendors. Have a phone line? Congrats, you can get dial-up. Don't like that there's high latency, dns hijacking, slow speeds, P2P blocking, or some other thing you hate in all of your ISP options? Well, shut up, put your money where your mouth is, and start your own ISP. No, you can't say it's a money problem. Money's out there for this sort of thing, you just have to sell it to the right investors. People will give you money for anything if you sell it right. Can't sell it? Find someone who can who will. Think that's too much work? Well, now we're at the real issue, aren't we. Oh, laziness. (Do note that I'm not saying everything here is complaining. Voicing an opinion is very different, and there's been a lot of intelligent discourse in this and many other topics here, so I'm not picking on anyone in particular here. It just tends to happen in human groups where people are unhappy, and most people are anyway. This thread seems to be steering to that direction.) Don't be lazy, and don't complain. About anything. Ever. Just do something about it or be quiet. No, complaining is not doing something about it. That's the opposite of doing something. It's worse than being quiet, because it makes your cause look like the cause of whiners. Change is simple to bring about. It's just a crap ton of work. Don't think it's worth that much work, but still want to do something? Tough. All or nothing in this game of life. Go big or go home, I suppose. -Tod Hansmann /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
