K.V. Collucci said:
Care to elaborate on that Deacon?
Sure Ken. Although I know from past experience that merely pointing out the factual inaccuracies of Chuck's contentions and the absurdity of his arguments will not cause him to do more and better research in the future.
Chuck's proclivity for posting pompous pontifications, taking strong positions on topics about which he is either totally uninformed, or abysmally misinformed, normally make reading anything posted by him on any topic other than balisongs amusing. Howeve, one of his posts manages to irritate me occasionally. Can't put a finger on why, it just happens, may be the weather, or the state of my lower bowel, or perhaps the errors are just more egregious than most, but it happens. Whatever the reason, such was the case the other day.
Chuck states that users outside the USA are more likely to be "bandwidth challenged". Incorrect! While the United States leads the world in total Internet connections, and ranks reasonably high in percentage of residents with Internet access, it ranks quite low in the percentage of those connections which are broadband. To put it another way, BladeForum's members here in the USA are, statistically, LESS likely to connect to it via broadband than members almost anywhere else on the planet. To put it yet another, out of the 20 countries with the highest number (not percentage, just quantity) of Internet connections, the USA ranks LOWEST in the percentage of those connections which are broadband. Not second, not third, dead last!
So much for the accuracy of the single piece of Chuck's argument that is based on something tangible. He then postulates the rather broad and more that somewhat insulting generalization that members outside of the US would be not care about this issue. While members outside the US may have different perspectives on, and thus disagree with "our" position on many issues, there is perhaps nothing more universally feared an loathed that the theft of a child. Unlike Chuck, I sincerely doubt that a significant percentage of international members would be offended by Amber Alerts. Anything on these forums, or anywhere else for that matter, is going to offend someone. I am offended at least once almost every time I visit BladeForums. Case in point Ken: your avatars have offended me to the point that they, coupled with some of the other trash that BladeForums not only tolerates, but celebrates, have led me to decide not to renew my gold membership when it expires this May. And yes Ken, before you point out the obvious, I'd bet there's at least one member here offended by my avatar.
One could even contend that by making that statement, Chuck has, however unintentionally, given the most jingoistic US members here the excuse to say "because of you forigner's we can't have Amber Alerts". Why put this onus on our international members? Would it not be equally reasonable to ask "Does a member in California care if there's been a kidnapping in Texas?" Oh, and the answer is the same regardless of whether the member is in Singapore or California - "Perhaps, perhaps not, but perhaps more that 90% of the population of Texas if the child that was kidnapped is a relative, or the offspring of a friend."
Finally, and perhaps worse, in his rush to judgment, he ignores the alternative possibility. Displaying these alerts in more "international" venues such as this might act as a catalyst and eventually result in the "amber alert" program itself becoming international. Why not? Could be wrong, but from my admitted limited reading of their information, I saw nothing that would rule out participation by law enforcement agencies and individuals in other nations. The Internet has broken down borders and barriers before, is it so unreasonable to speculate that this might happen again.
So, all in all, IMHO, his post was a pack of crap. As with most things in this life, YMMV. Unfortunately for me, I find it nearly impossible to NOT read something once it is in my line of vision. Call this intellectual curiosity, or just plain lack of will power. His status as a moderator here makes it impossible to just place him on my ignore list, and thus avoid the potential for annoyance.
Time constraints, coupled with the above mentioned belief that presenting them was a waste of time, kept me from searching for a link to the data that would refute his "bandwidth challenged" statement. Finally had a free moment and tracked it down. If you're interested, that link appears below. You will need to "do the math" yourself.
Broadband Statistics
