Does Japan Capitalism = Shanek Capitolism?

[Solitaire]

I got a 50kbaud account with all2east.net for five bucks a month, good service by the way, I used to pay thirty bucks a month for 0.6Kbaud. I mentioned it to someone else who thought it make a nice back up to their high speed internet. Well last night on the Charlie Rose show they mention that the japanese government forced the cable companies there to open their lines up to competitors five years ago. They pay like twenty bucks a month for a 20.0Mbaud. Ouch! Here we pay like fifty for a 2.0Mbaud line and have a 4Gbit monthly limit. How long would that last at 20Mbaud?

It resembles Shanek’s Capitalism. Imagine a company builds a road. They charges people to use it. The cost in the old way would be like $5.00 a gallon. But if other companies could sell the road the cost would fall to like $0.50 a gallon. That’s the secret to the method. Since all the companies share in the success of the road. Imagine if drugs sold like this.... Really excited about this, really...

[Grammatron]

To answer your question: No ***** way.

shanek might elaborate as to why.

[Kerberos]

Quote:

Originally posted by Synchronicity
I got a 50kbaud account with all2east.net for five bucks a month, good service by the way, I used to pay thirty bucks a month for 0.6Kbaud. I mentioned it to someone else who thought it make a nice back up to their high speed internet. Well last night on the Charlie Rose show they mention that the japanese government forced the cable companies there to open their lines up to competitors five years ago. They pay like twenty bucks a month for a 20.0Mbaud. Ouch! Here we pay like fifty for a 2.0Mbaud line and have a 4Gbit monthly limit. How long would that last at 20Mbaud?

It resembles Shanek’s Capitalism. Imagine a company builds a road. They charges people to use it. The cost in the old way would be like $5.00 a gallon. But if other companies could sell the road the cost would fall to like $0.50 a gallon. That’s the secret to the method. Since all the companies share in the success of the road. Imagine if drugs sold like this.... Really excited about this, really...

As Grammy said, most certainly not. The Government is using FORCE to violate the Companies PROPERTY RIGHTS. That is TYRRANICAL and probably violates the CONSTITUTION.

P.S. What's that about a 4Gbit monthly limit? You don't mean 4 Gigabyte do you? I've downloaded 13 GB since this morning.

[Grammatron]

Quote:

Originally posted by Kerberos
As Grammy said, most certainly not. The Government is using FORCE to violate the Companies PROPERTY RIGHTS. That is TYRRANICAL and probably violates the CONSTITUTION.

P.S. What's that about a 4Gbit monthly limit? You don't mean 4 Gigabyte do you? I've downloaded 13 GB since this morning.

4Gbit, if Synchronicity is correct in the bit part then it's even less since a bit is 1/8th of a byte.

[Kerberos]

Quote:

Originally posted by Grammatron
4Gbit, if Synchronicity is correct in the bit part then it's even less since a bit is 1/8th of a byte.

I know, but you almost never use Gigabits to describe an amount of information. At least that's the way it is in Denmark and besides 4 Gbits would be ridiculously little. Of course so is 4 Gbytes. Gigabytes are used to describe the amount of data while kilo- and megabits (per second) are used to indicate the speed of data transfer, especially internet connections. I actually had to look up what exactly a baud was.

[Grammatron]

Quote:

Originally posted by Kerberos
I know, but you almost never use Gigabits to describe an amount of information. At least that's the way it is in Denmark and besides 4 Gbits would be ridiculously little. Of course so is 4 Gbytes. Gigabytes are used to describe the amount of data while kilo- and megabits (per second) are used to indicate the speed of data transfer, especially internet connections. I actually had to look up what exactly a baud was.

Well I have very high speed DSL and no limit on that. Limits seem very 1990's to me.

[shanek]

Quote:

Originally posted by Synchronicity
I got a 50kbaud account with all2east.net for five bucks a month, good service by the way, I used to pay thirty bucks a month for 0.6Kbaud. I mentioned it to someone else who thought it make a nice back up to their high speed internet. Well last night on the Charlie Rose show they mention that the japanese government forced the cable companies there to open their lines up to competitors five years ago. They pay like twenty bucks a month for a 20.0Mbaud. Ouch! Here we pay like fifty for a 2.0Mbaud line and have a 4Gbit monthly limit. How long would that last at 20Mbaud?

None of this makes any sense to me. It's like jibberish. If I assume you mean bps for "baud" (they aren't anywhere near the same thing, although at one time the two numbers were equivalent), I get the idea that high speed access is cheaper in Japan than here. But what does it mean that they opened up their lines? Did the Japanese government own the lines, or grant the companies a monopoly in exchange for putting the lines in as they did here?

Quote:

It resembles Shanek’s Capitalism. Imagine a company builds a road. They charges people to use it. The cost in the old way would be like $5.00 a gallon. But if other companies could sell the road the cost would fall to like $0.50 a gallon. That’s the secret to the method. Since all the companies share in the success of the road. Imagine if drugs sold like this.... Really excited about this, really...

I must be daft today, because I can't follow this either. I can tell you that before the government got into the road business, the car and tire companies funded them. In fact, it was mostly Ford and Firestone that funded the first transcontinental road. Since they profited directly from more people driving greater distances, it was an investment for them.

What that has to do with broadband I couldn't begin to tell you.

[Solitaire]

Quote:

Originally posted by shanek
But what does it mean that they opened up their lines?
Did the Japanese government own the lines, or grant the companies
a monopoly in exchange for putting the lines in as they did here?

I cannot find a transcript of the show, so I'll do this from memory.
The internet service was a monopoly owned by Nippon Telephone
And Telegraph. The government ordered that competitors could
use those lines too. Here's an article, but it's vauge.

[shanek]

Quote:

Originally posted by Synchronicity
I cannot find a transcript of the show, so I'll do this from memory.
The internet service was a monopoly owned by Nippon Telephone
And Telegraph. The government ordered that competitors could
use those lines too. Here's an article, but it's vauge.

Good enough...since it's a government system, it's not a capitalist creation. Capitalism would have meant that competing phone companies could have gotten in on the act as the lines were being laid, and therefore competed on a level playing field. That wasn't allowed to happen. Opening up the lines to competition is a step towards capitalism, and being closer to capitalism it's starting to see more of its benefits, but it's still far from "my" capitalism.

Does that answer your question?

[peptoabysmal]

I thought kbaud was a term reserved for special leased lines and refers to encryption speed, not necessarily through-put? The greater the encryption speed, the greater the error in transmission with current technology, IIRC. And does gigabit refer to gigabits per second? Does the Japanese firm have a speed limit and you are penalized if exceeding the speed limit?

Sorry 'bout the OT, but it's more interesting than the debate about Libertarianism vs. Technocracy.

[Kerberos]

Quote:

Originally posted by peptoabysmal
I thought kbaud was a term reserved for special leased lines and refers to encryption speed, not necessarily through-put?

Baud is often, if erropniously used to mean bits/s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baud

[shanek]

Quote:

Originally posted by peptoabysmal
I thought kbaud was a term reserved for special leased lines and refers to encryption speed, not necessarily through-put?

Baud refers to the speed of encoding on a communications line. For example, if you have a line that communicates using state-transition encoding, the baud rate is the number of times a second the signal on the line is measured to see if it changed states. In the olden days, you could only store one bit for each sample (in the really olden days, it was one Morse code dot). Nowadays, there are ways of encoding multiple bits per baud. Modern 56kbps modems really only run at 2400 baud.

[Solitaire]

Quote:

Originally posted by shanek
Good enough...since it's a government system, it's not a capitalist creation. Capitalism would have meant that competing phone companies could have gotten in on the act as the lines were being laid, and therefore competed on a level playing field. That wasn't allowed to happen. Opening up the lines to competition is a step towards capitalism, and being closer to capitalism it's starting to see more of its benefits, but it's still far from "my" capitalism.

Does that answer your question?

Hm. I guess. It's just odd that high speed internet hasn't fallen in price.
I wonder why Walter S. Mossberg refered to the big cable companies
as soviet polit-beauros. What do you think about about goverment
going into providing wireless internet? A lot of companies have been
passing laws against that.

P.S. I turns out that a company called NTL has a one gigabyte per day
download limit. I'm not sure where I got the 4 gig number.

[shanek]

Quote:

Originally posted by Synchronicity
Hm. I guess. It's just odd that high speed internet hasn't fallen in price.
I wonder why Walter S. Mossberg refered to the big cable companies
as soviet polit-beauros. What do you think about about goverment
going into providing wireless internet? A lot of companies have been
passing laws against that.

Government shouldn't be providing wireless access, but neither should it be stopping all of the private efforts to do so. It should also not be giving cable companies a monopoly.