A webmaster without the high-speed Web
(CNN) -- Like a photographer without a camera, or a mechanic who doesn't own a car, Kelli Fields is a webmaster without high-speed Internet access.
By day, the 42-year-old uses a broadband connection at work to update a university's Web site, which she built and codes from scratch.
But when she goes home at night, the rural Oklahoman struggles with a dial-up Internet connection so slow, she does chores to pass the time while Web sites load. Her high school-age son is so fed up with the glacial pace of their Internet connection that he asks his mom to update his Facebook page from the office.
[Jay blinks at teh stoopid]
[Takes a deep breath]
HIGH SPEED INTERNET ACCESS IS NOT A BASIC HUMAN RIGHT.
Stop it. Right fucking now. ELECTRICITY is not a basic human right. HOUSING is not a basic human right. Stuff you need to live is not the government's to give you, not in this country. Not now, ideally not ever. And luxuries like high-speed internet are abso-fucking-lutely best left the hell alone by Washington. Remember, the US Federal government LOST MONEY operating a whorehouse. Only the Feds could be so grossly incompetent as to be inable to sell sex. Why, oh why, do we want them mucking around in our interwebz?
As I said in comments at Tam's, "Ah, yes. Life, liberty, and 5 MPS upload speeds. Right there in the Bill of Rights..."
That is all.
13 comments:
How about some High Speed
Gun Pron?? :)
Check out the video links ..
http://www.onlythebestfirearms.com/index2.html
I guess you would have opposed rural electrification, back in the day...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electrification
(I agree the story is pretty chuckleheaded.)
Jay, until you live somewhere really rural, please think before you rant.
There are giant swathes of the country which are very important economically, including food production, where there is such a low population that the private sphere can't make any profit delivering internet service much better than 44k. Today's 'net simply doesn't function much past email at that point. Kids don't have access to on-line resources for school, etc. and lots of people have to leave for more urban areas in order to do anything that requires higher speeds. -Like start businesses.
Today high-speed internet isn't a lot different from electrical service or roads. It's in everyone's interest to equalize information access.
And by the way, once the lines are laid, private enterprise does 99% of the work at a profit. I know my sister wouldn't even have had dial up until recently unless the REA had done the infrastructure work. -And it's not free to the consumers.
Bill said: "It's in everyone's interest to equalize information access."
Says who? And coming from the other side, information access *is* equal, it just takes a little more effort for some. Hell, I could claim that it's in "everyone's interest" that MaggieSue in Outer ButtMunch, WS provide me with free organic milk and cheese. Am I going to get it? Should I? I already have access to organic stuff if I want it - it's just a little harder to get and a little more pricey.
Bill,
Where I live, I have only recently been able to get high speed internet via land line. Many of my co-workers still cannot get it.
Heck, in my last house, we couldn't even get decent DIAL-UP internet, becuase of crappy lines.
Yet, every single person who wants a higher speed around here and is willing to pay for it, has it. It's this thing called a "satellite".
As for dial up speed, it sucks. But, unless you HAVE to go on Hulu and YouTube and similar sites, you can manage. Hell, this time last year, I was accessing dial-up at well under 56K, on a crapped out Pentium running Win98. Made out fine. . .
That's not even considering the FREE high speed offered at the public library. . .
Of course, if you look into the case in this article, THIS chick HAS access to satellite. She doesn't want to pay the $300 connection.
She's a professional WEB DESIGNER. It's a BUSINESS EXPENSE, if she wants it to be.
FUCK HER
Oh, and when I was commuting to DC three days a week (up to about two years ago), my ONLY access in DC was via dial up at 36K. even though I was IN an office with both Ethernet high speed and wireless.
I was a government contractor, holding down the Navy desk at teh design site located in another company's DC office. If I wanted to get permission to access their network, I needed to submit my computer for security inspection EVERYTIME I plugged it in after having left the office. Average time per inspection -- about two hours.
If I wanted to print something, I had to either EMAIL it to a fellow denizen in one of the other cubicles who was an employee of teh host company, or I had to sneakernet it to him on a memory stick.
It's not like we were doing anything all that big, after all, only engineering drawings that printed out at 36x48 plotters, full of circuit diagrams, blueprints, and system block drawings.
Of course, if I needed to access something that took some serious bandwidth (like video from tests), I had to either sneakernet it over from a colleague, or arrange to hit my home office after about 1800hrs on the way home or before 0500hrs on the way to work.
My sympathy for this parasite is somewhat, what is the word. . . lacking.
The really sad thing is she's complaining about not having $300 to pay for Satellite yet she's been waiting 5 YEARS for broadband.
Save $60/yr over that 5 years and wa-la, you've got your satellite money. But I guess saving $60 per year is a hardship, so someone else should pay for it.
Bill: Satellite is available everywhere.
And people are going to leave rural areas even if they have abundant internet access. Not going to change.
(And "think of the children"?
Well, I managed to learn better than most of them today seem to, without internet access at all, since there wasn't any such thing in practical terms when I graduated at the start of the '90s.
Dialup will get you Wikipedia pretty well, and Google searches...)
Yes, a $300 setup fee is kinda expensive.
No, that doesn't mean the State should spend far more to Give Everyone Broadband.
(And what about wireless broadband, non-satellite?
As I said over at Tam's, she's basically in suburban Tulsa, looking at a map, and from "not a mile away there's fiber optic to the houses"... and maps say she should be thoroughly covered for wireless broadband.)
The title of this post should be crimea river or some such... Jesus wept, I work for the largest IT company in the world and live in a town that has absolutely 0 cable TV or other broadband. Somehow I manage to drag my victimized ass to work in a home office most days via satellite or EvDO because the company has closed most of its presence in New England.
Like health insurance, this is another example of I want booze, ipods, or fill in the blank rather than spend my cash on something that someone else should buy my cheap lazy ass.
And won't it be all fun and games with the .gov supplying that broadband she (and her fellow parasites) are demanding.
Did she actually *say* that Internet is a right? Is she asking that the .gov supply it for her?
I defer to the IRS. Specifically, the fucking part where they ask for business deductions.
Sorry about the F bomb. Someone please sterilize and de-bark the writer, editor and subject of this story!
{snark}If health care is a right, so is electricity, food, water, and so on. Why not cable TV and Al Gore's Information Superhighway?
I think everything should be free. Then there won't any bills and I can stop working to pay the taxes. {/snark}
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