Shlrm.org Blag

I’ve my own meter now.

That’s using vnstat and the vnstat php frontend. It’s hooked up to watch the internet interface on my router. It’s also going to watch the VPN interface between a friend of mine and I. I’m just watching that because. No particular reason.

The one of interest, however, will be the Internet. I’m curious as to how much bandwidth I use in a month. It’ll be nice to use as protest material when ATT tries to implement metered lines. Of course, this is assuming that I actually use more than 40GB in a month. We’ll see.

OMG! People with money have expensive items, but people that don’t have money don’t!

I’d have never thought that people that don’t have money couldn’t afford to buy things. I mean come on! An item should be available to all if it’s available to those that can pay for it. Seriously!

 No, not seriously. Welcome to Economics 101. Supply and demand. Income and expense. If you make enough money, you can buy things. If you don’t make enough money, you can’t buy things. If you want to buy things, you work harder, spend less, or barter. It’s simple. You don’t ask for handouts. Handouts aren’t good. Especially government handouts. With government handouts, you’re forcing the people to give handouts, potentially against their beleifs. Taxes are only for funding the things the government needs to do. Not charity.

Good job California for having the most people with broadband internet connections. But apparently it’s bad that your poor people don’t have broadband :(.

Worst. Report. Ever.

The giant money grubbing telecom company, Time Warner, has started testing another way of raping their customers.

They’re planning on setting limits between 5 and 40 Gigabytes of transfer a month. Charges of up to $7 per Gig beyond your limit. They claim this isn’t to capitalize on the online movie industry (yeah, right). A 40 gigabyte transfer limit a month:

(40 gigabyte) / (30 days) = 16.1817284 kBps (thank you Google)

That’s ridiculous. That’s barely faster than dialup. A 40 gigabyte transfer limit can easily be exceeded in 30 days. Even if you’re not a heavy sharer of anything. If you’re downloading at your peak rate, you’ll exceed this in about 18 hours (at my internet speeds, which are slower than the fastest Time Warner offers)

(40 gigabyte) / (630 kBps) = 18.4934039 hours

That’s not very long. I’m going to have to find some open source software to watch my pipe and calculate some monthly totals. Anways, back to the issue.

Instead, it’s to penalize the heavy downloaders: those that download “terabytes” a month. Let’s do a bit of math here. 1 Terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes (Yeah, I know, technically it’s 1024 Gigabytes, but I doubt that Time Money-gru^H^H^H^H Warner is going to measure it that way). And to work on the conservative side we’ll say that someone that downloads “terabytes” is getting 2 Terabytes worth of data in that monthly billing period. And we’ll set a monthly billing period at 30 days.

(1 terabyte) / (30 days) = 414.252247 kBps

That’s feasible. I could maybe download constantly over 30 days 414 K/s and come up with 1 Terabyte worth of date. But going for “terabytes” of data in a month. That might be more difficult. I’d have to constantly be pushing 800 K/s. Right now I’ve got ATT’s U-Verse junk. (Their TV service isn’t all that great. It’s not quite soup yet.) Only the Internet service and I can’t get more than 630K/s.

(630 kBps) * 30 days = 1.52081251 terabytes

So their rate should be based on those numbers. If they want to penalyze heavy downloaders, like those that run torrent farms on thier computers, they should set the limits upwards of 100 – 200 Gigabytes of transfer a month. Time Warner is just trying to scrape more money from their already expensive internet rates.

Ron Paul’s beating Guliani and Thompson again.

I’d say it’s going well. The article discusses things like how various candidates get a head of steam in one or two of the primaries, but tend to peter out in other states. Ron paul “lingers like a cold.” I suppose consistency is better than surges of greatness.

I’ve personally never followed politics, so I don’t know how things will go. I don’t know what effect getting a constant 6-10% of the votes will mean. I hope that it means that Ron Paul will win the presidency. I hope it means that he’ll be able to take this country in a different direction than we’ve been going. I hope it means that we’ll have greater personal freedoms. I hope it means that the Federal Government will be smaller and have less of a grip on my personal life.

 I hope all those things happen. I have no way of predicting if they will. I can only do things to try to help make sure it happens. There are things you can do too. If you’re in favor of a smaller government, if you don’t think that the government owns your money, if you favor a government that follows the laws it sets….

Support the Ron Paul Campaign.

While donating is good, it’s not the only thing necessary. Lots of people see Ron Paul as a nutjob. The sound-bites of things he says are often put in a negative spin by the media to promote the candidate of their choice. (I don’t think one of them has chosen to support Ron Paul. Probably due to the fact that he wants to remove the government’s ability to influence the markets. Big corporations can buy off senators and congressman to help influence the market in their directon. Removing that ability weakens the corporation. Let’s face it, the “unbiased” “fair” media are corporations. They’re in it to make money. So if they report favorably on someone that isn’t going to help them make money…. I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now. Now what was I originally ranting about?) It takes a bit of thought to understand what Dr. Paul is trying to say; not a great deal, not a Ph. D. Just a bit more than an 30 second sound-bite, smashed in between a political pundit offering up loaded questions. Take some time and read the issues he’s presented. Watch the videos on YouTube. It might just open your eyes a bit.

But also, get up and do something. Even if it’s a small thing as putting a sign in your yard, a bumpersticker on your car, or a sign in your window. Let the common people know that you believe in Ron Paul and the message of small government.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/01/11/real.id.ap/index.html

 It starts. By 2011, we’ll all have to have a Federally issued Identification Card. If you haven’t figured it out. This is really, really bad. The majority of the yahoo’s that visit cnn.com think its a good idea! How on earth can you think that having the government track you is a good idea? Hasn’t the mistakes with the VA personal data taught you anything? The government doesn’t need to know everything. The governments job is to protect our rights. Not add additional restrictions.

By 2017 everyone in the US will be required to have a REAL ID issued to them. It’s not going to prevent any attacks. The only way it might stop immigration: People will quit wanting to be here, because they don’t want the government watching everything they do. Orwell’s 1984 was only 33 years too soon.

Ron Paul’s ideals need to live on. Even if he doesn’t make the presidency, the revolution he started must survive. Small government is the way of the republic. Need I remind you that the president’s job is to defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. This REAL ID system is a domestic enemy of the constitution. It takes away rights of the individual. In the pledge of allegiance you pledge to “the republic for which it stands.” A republic empowers and protects the individual. Democracys empower and protect the group, sacrificing the individual. We need to stay a republic. We need to stay free. We don’t need a national ID system. It won’t do anything except oppress the most free country in the world, possibly turning us into the least free.