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I didn't mean to come across as prickish. My TV is from 2001 as well. It will weather this change just fine, because it's hooked up to cable. "Approximately 70 percent of all households subscribe to cable television service. Only 15 percent of Americans now receive TV solely from over-the-air ("free") broadcasting. The remaining 15 percent subscribe to direct broadcast satellite services. " http://www.democraticmedia.org/resources/filings/c aucusMemo.html I'm guessing that of the 15% who don't have cable, a vast majority don't have internet access either. That is what I was refering to when I mentioned the digital divide. The poorest of our country who don't have home computers or internet access, they miss out on alot more than what is broadcast "on air". I meant to say that giving eveyone access to the learning and social networking abilities of the internet might be more important than a token reimbursment on a digital- to analog converter. To the middle class who doesn't have cable: Get a cable package with your broadband, if you don't like it, then push for better streaming media.

Effectively 'Rewritten' (that is to say, very 'creatively interpreted'), or openly disregarded, in many instances, yes.

The Bill of Rights was too inconvenient for the Shrubinator, so thanks to Patriot, and other absurdly dangerous legislation, they have systematically attempted to create a 'new, convenient, streamlined legislative environment' free of such cumbersome restrictions, all, they would have it, in the name of 'national security'.

To be very clear, I agree with the quote generally attributed to Benjamin Franklin:
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Who's been paying attention? Let's take a quick inventory to see where we stand.

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Freedom of speech, and the right to peaceably assemble
This now appears to apply only if you're in a 'designated free-speech *zone*' far away from the Shrub, or other government officials.

Similar aggressive tactics have been employed when confronted with any public opposition to administration positions. Steven Howards was arrested for simply voicing disagreement with Administration polices during a chance meeting with Cheney during a mall photo-op. Howards was taking his son to a piano lesson, and took the time to voice his opinion.

Another example is of the peaceful protesters ejected and threatened with arrest at the Ohio State commencement where Dubya spoke, simply because they attempted to peacfully and non-disruptively express disagreement with the Shrub and his his policies.

Still another is when two women, one the wife of a Congressman, were ejected from the Capitol building, simply for wearing T-Shirts with anti-Bush slogans into the Congressional Gallery. (The article references numerous other examples, as well.)

Freedom of the Press
Mostly, journalism from major news outlets in the US appears to be in significant danger from numerous sources. While it is still possible to find information if you dig for it, many of the significant stories never make major headlines, if they even see the light of day.

The Shrub has significantly reduced press events, and when holding them, has required journalists to submit questions in advance, selecting only those questions he chooses to answer, and calling only upon reporters who agree to 'stick to script'. Rather than challenge these policies, reporters have agreed to these stipulations, resulting in chilling effect, effectively self-censorship, rather than ask questions the President didn't like, at the risk of press room access.

Concurrently, starting in 2001, regulations limiting the scope of ownership of media outlets, designed to maintain diversity of opinion, so as to prevent control of too much of the media by a small number of individuals have been systematically attacked and dismantled. The result is that now most major media outlets in the US are owned by a small number of conservatives. (This has bee

instead of linking to an advert laden pseudo IT site, try the real source

http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/privacy/FTCa dlinks.html

That is a remarkably disingenuous statement. You're trying to remove the distinction between bandwidth as a commodity service, and bandwidth which is tailored per site, depending on whether or not the website owners have paid their tithe to the telcos. These are fundamentally different things, and only the latter has any relevance whatsoever to this discussion.

I can only conclude that either you've utterly missed the point of the whole article, or that you're deliberately seeking to confuse the issue.

Let's put your point another way ... here is one of the devices under consideration. It limits bandwidth based on packet content. So I agree with you: it makes it possible for telcos to limit bandwidth to "silver" level sites. On the other hand, how is that different from the situation that exists now? My business only gets a certain amount of bandwidth from Comcast, even though the pipes could receive more. Most cable users get more download bandwidth than upload bandwidth, even though the pipes could handle more. Verizon forbids me to run a website using my residential service, which is essentially an upload bandwidth restriction. Those are all bandwidth restrictions based on the fees paid.

My complaint with the article is that it claims that the telcos want to place hard caps on #s of downloads, #s of e-mails, etc.

FTA, ...establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.

Some execs may be considering those schemes, but they won't work. Schemes like that were tried back in the days of dial-up, and the consumers balked. The largest complaint was that users' e-mail quotas were taken up with spam. Similar complaints would be made now about bandwidth consumed by unwanted pop-ups or DOS attacks.

Look, I don't like the telcos' marketing ideas either. It's just that the article overstates the dangers. A more straightforward article, like "Telcos to raise fees for bandwidth" would have made more sense and been more defensible.

"In other words: No primary source material. No proof other than innuendo and hype."

This statement is either remarkably misinformed or downright deceptive. The web page on the Center for Digital Democracry site offers fourteen links to primary sources, such as original marketing materials that describe the new 'service offering' as well as FEC filings by AT&T, Bell South and Verizon. If those don't count as primary sources, I don't know what does.

"Now: would Verizon actually profit from a tiered system? Well -- it already does. Business-class DSL offers twice the bandwidth of Consumer-class DSL. Would they love to charge even more for a higher-differentiated tier system? Sure. Anyone surprised?"

That is a remarkably disingenuous statement. You're trying to remove the distinction between bandwidth as a commodity service, and bandwidth which is tailored per site, depending on whether or not the website owners have paid their tithe to the telcos. These are fundamentally different things, and only the latter has any relevance whatsoever to this discussion.

I can only conclude that either you've utterly missed the point of the whole article, or that you're deliberately seeking to confuse the issue.

HTH. HAND.

According to Deploying Premium Services Using Cisco Service Control Technology, cisco looks at the application-layer aspect of each packet in order to determine which pricing strategy / routing technology to use. The solution is simple: use an encrypted transport protocol. This is really kind of silly - with privacy concerns completely rampant, I don't see why in the world we haven't widely adopted an encrypted transport protocol to begin with. Sure, we'll generate more traffic, but is that really a big deal? Of course, governments wouldn't like that solution for obvious reasons. And if cisco wanted to be an asshole, they can deny routing any transort protocol besides tcp and udp. We can still do encryption, but then it becomes an application-specific thing.

This

message is to every musician speaking out against file sharing:
get your facts straight, and stop regurgitating everything the major label tells you.
Anyone still clinging to the cage-format for music is either a middleman or lazy. Squidnecks

You major label suckers make me laugh
Do you really think your label would come out and say, "Hey we cut your paycheck in half because you've got to help pay for the 250 billion copies we give away. Have they mentioned when they cut new releases by 25% sales dropped 4.1% and they blamed it on P2P? Have they mentioned that they responded to that drop by raising the cost of your CD $1 every year? Does that seem like a good business move to you? Or does that smell like fear?
Ask yourself what kind of business would cut research and development first? I'll tell you: the business that's about to make it's bed up in a mother fuckin hearse.
While Hilary Rosen and the RIAA are trying to convince you that free listeners are a bad thing, those same five labels that pay them are charging you $500,000 to buy you spins
While you're negotiating whether or not the latest Napster pays you 1/3 of a cent per download, Comcast and AOL are turning the information highway into a toll road.
you know the end is near when Britney Spears is calling it a moral issue
they've positioned you right between their wallets and your fans
they can't really expect to turn the tide with a few pathetic lawsuits
So you gotta ask yourself how does one stop a flood? You build a damn.
IT'S THE ISPs, IT'S THE ISPs!
Comcast will have every last consumer on their knees
starting with 5.3 million subscribers to cable access high speed
they own the wires, so they can discriminate with bandwidth and queuing fees
guaranteed monopoly by the FCC so

We're standing on the verge of an artistic cleansing of biblical proportions I say bring it
when the wickedness of big business is great in the earth
and it will even try to sell the waters that it's drowning in
marching two rappers
two rockers
two composers
two programmers
onto a pirate ship
in a free-market flood
until businessmen are businessmen
and art is art again. Rock

this is not an issue of children not recognizing value in art
this is an issue of children recognizing value-less art
getting artists paid doesn't even play a part
The truth is
for the first time since it's creat

In case anyone else is wondering what common carriage means.

The gist is that Time Warner Cable can't QoS cnn.com traffic over foxnews.com traffic under a common carriage provision. This provision does not exist for data connection that do not run over telephone lines.

Yeah. And nobody will listen to it except other amateur radio enthusiasts. Meanwhile, thanks to the FCC, anyone who owns a newspaper in one town can now own a television station as well. The FCC's current leadership is making decisions which will lead to further media consolidation and stifle competition. I'm glad they're giving out wifi access, but I don't think it's consistent with the current administration's direction, and I certainly don't expect it to last. (Especially after some hacker uses the anonymous wifi entrance to alter the fcc.gov webpage...)

The specific rules which are on the chopping block are the TV/radio crossownership restriction, the TV/newspaper restriction, caps on ownership on numbers of tv and radio stations that one entity can own in a market and nationally. See the Association of Independent Film and Videomakers advocacy page.

Another good resource is at the Center for Digital Democracy.

This bill is not new news (see Wired article) and was introduced so late in the session of the 107th Congressthat it has no chance of passing (introduced on Oct 10 with only 6 working days left). Basically, it is a feel good measure for chest-thumping politicians with no real expectation of the bills passage. Neither Kyl or Wyden are up for re-election this year but opposing "repressive regimes" and supporting the "free world" always makes good sound bites.

If you based "repressive" on the laws passed, we would qualify... CIPA (Child Internet Protection Act - 106th H.R.4577 - law 106-554), COPA (Child Online Protection Act - 105th H.R.4328 - law 105-277), CPPA (The Child Pornography Protection Act - 104th H.R.3610 - law 104-208), CDA (Communications Decency Act - 104th S.652 - law 104-104), USA PATRIOT (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism - 107th H.R.3162 - law 107-056),

You can go look at the Center for Democracy and Technology legislative reports and the Electronic Frontier Foundation Action Center and the proliferation of groups like the Center for Digital Democracy, Digital Speech Project, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse to understand that these are not isolated examples.

I totally agree with you on the value of multicast. But, I ask myself, "Self, why would AOL/ATT/Comcast make the investment necessary to upgrade their networks to be multicast enabled if that would mean that all of their customers could compete with them?"

Even assuming that they had to make no investment, they could just lock down their routers, to not just prevent multicast (or maybe a similar app level service), but to slow down content coming from their competitors, as suggested by the Center for Digital Democracy.

While there are still a few things going on in the courts and before the FCC they don't want to do anything like this that would attract attention. But being proactive to put forward technologies that would strengthen civil society is not in the cards.

Hmm, no mention of Markey's recent bill, the "Wireless Technology Investment and Digital Dividends Act" aka hr4641. It would use some of the proceeds from spectrum auctions to go to a fund to support digital divide issues and clear our new unlicensed spectrum. There's a companion bill in the Senate that *doesn't* include the spectrum bit, so we'll have to fight for it.

Yall West Coast politico-wannabe's must be out of it if yall missed this, get in the game already. This stuff is going down in Washington and yall don't even know it. Couldn't Larry Lessig have clued you in? Seriously, here's some resources on this.

Quick info on the bill from the Center for Digital Democracy (lead group on the open access fight)

http://democraticmedia.org/news/washingtonwatch/ma rkeyBill.html

The proposal is kinda a scaled down version of the a proposal called the Digital Promise, hatched by a guy who used to head PBS.

This was all discussed at a gab fest at the New America Foundation last week. Check out the agenda (pdf), the spectrum panel is on towards the end. You'll notice Reed Hundt, former FCC commissioner, and Yochai Benkler who's scholarship intersects w/ free software and other kinds of commons.

Hmm, no mention of Markey's recent bill, the "Wireless Technology Investment and Digital Dividends Act" aka hr4641. It would use some of the proceeds from spectrum auctions to go to a fund to support digital divide issues and clear our new unlicensed spectrum. There's a companion bill in the Senate that *doesn't* include the spectrum bit, so we'll have to fight for it.

Yall West Coast politico-wannabe's must be out of it if yall missed this, get in the game already. This stuff is going down in Washington and yall don't even know it. Couldn't Larry Lessig have clued you in? Seriously, here's some resources on this.

Quick info on the bill from the Center for Digital Democracy (lead group on the open access fight)

http://democraticmedia.org/news/washingtonwatch/ma rkeyBill.html

The proposal is kinda a scaled down version of the a proposal called the Digital Promise, hatched by a guy who used to head PBS.

This was all discussed at a gab fest at the New America Foundation last week. Check out the agenda (pdf), the spectrum panel is on towards the end. You'll notice Reed Hundt, former FCC commissioner, and Yochai Benkler who's scholarship intersects w/ free software and other kinds of commons.

http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/openaccess/i ndex.html

This is a terrible thing - and could very well squash what we have all come to love and enjoy.

DO YOU want to have to go to AOL.COM and enter the keyword SLASHDOT in order to read YOUR SLASHDOT?

• Asymetric bandwidth. Guess why bandwidth is asymetric, they don't want content competition from their customers.
  
  
• ATT, the nation's largest cable operator, at one point made noises about asking a percentage of the ecommerce that flowed over their pipes to the Internet.
  
  
• the "Cisco whitepaper". Cisco marketing equipment to cable internet operators to make competitors traffic slower. Analysis.
  
  

• Asymetric bandwidth. Guess why bandwidth is asymetric, they don't want content competition from their customers.
  
  
• ATT, the nation's largest cable operator, at one point made noises about asking a percentage of the ecommerce that flowed over their pipes to the Internet.
  
  
• the "Cisco whitepaper". Cisco marketing equipment to cable internet operators to make competitors traffic slower. Analysis.