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New 'Net Neutrality' Bill Introduced
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Reps Ed Markey (D-MA) and Chip Pickering (R-MS) introduced the 'Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008' (HR 5353) this week. The proposed legislation [PDF] would not legislate what is and is not 'neutral'. Instead, it would add a section to the 'Broadband Policy' section of the Communications Act which spells out principles the FCC is expected to uphold, in addition to having them hold summits which would 'assess competition, consumer protection, and consumer choice issues related to broadband Internet access services' and make it easy for citizens to submit comments or complaints online."
Which is precisely why I wrote my congresscritter asking him to support it.
Why don't you do the same?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
"... make it easy for citizens to submit comments or complaints online."
Those comments are always ignored, apparently.
As long as Comcast et al keep up with their regular "contributions" to the FCC, they'll just look the other way.
I think breaking up a few telecom monopolies would be a bit more of a realistic solution than scrapping the Internet...
What good are new laws or guidelines if they go unenforced? Man in the middle attacks are already illegal, but Comcast continues unabated. It's like having a Constitution that law makers ignore. Until someone goes to prison for ignoring it, its value becomes symbolic at best.
Since there isn't yet a problem for Net Neutrality laws to fix, it seems a little early to define what is and isn't net neutrality. Such a law is quite likely to permit bad behaviour, and have undesirable side effects. Both problems that would take several years to fix legislatively.
By extending the scope of the FCC, changes can be made much more quickly. Bad rules can be repealled quickly. New guidelines issued. Explicit behaviour prevented as soon as it starts.
If you don't vote, then really, what cause do you have to complain? Go bugger off and stop talking about it if you're not even going to make a token effort to fix it.
Going beyond voting, every message that the congresscritter receives from his or her constituents supporting this bill will indicate to them that it is an important issue, and that if they want to be re-elected they may want to pay attention.
Yes, my opinion individually may not matter much, but it still contributes.
I do not need to stick out in a crowd. I have no desire to stick out of the crowd--it's more trouble than it's worth, frankly. But forming a part of the 'mountain'? That's worthwhile.
It doesn't take much time to send an email to your congresscritter (make sure to include your snail addy, o'course, and your name and phone number). If net neutrality isn't important enough for you to take a couple of minutes to support it, then don't complain when all you can get is throttled-to-hell packet-shaped crapwidth instead of decent broadband.
I vote. I write my congresscritter when I hear about something that I find important. My opinion has been heard on more than one occasion, and as a result, I am content to participate in this democracy.
Does it always go my way? Of course not. But that's the way these things work, and sometimes what is best for me is not best for everybody else.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Make you a deal. If you write your congresscritter to talk about that and post your letter here, then I'll write something similar to mine.
Or are you all talk and no action?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
congressmen aren't going to waste their time worrying about my one vote
1. If you put pen to paper and write a concise and reasonable paragraph or two about why it matters to you and send it to your representatives, you bet they will listen. Why? Because they know it's coming from a warm body as opposed to all of the anonymous electronic spam that Political Action Committees stir up. The letter becomes a bellwether of sorts if it is similar to other handwritten letters on the same topic.
2. The U.S. is a Republic, not a Democracy. Your one vote isn't really designed to matter as much as common knowledge would suggest.
3. Maintaining the Republic requires participation. Participation means putting pen to paper, talking to people in and out of the political system. Once you know a few people and have a couple of interests it can be very satisfying.
4. No, majority does not rule. More pablum that passes for common sense.
Making up excuses like yours is simply lazy and unpatriotic.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I can't deny your assertion that your vote makes no difference. You're entirely correct, because you said you don't vote.
No vote, no difference.
You may as well stop talking altogether, really, though--because if you choose not to vote, then you're letting all those people who do vote choose what to do with you. As such, you're going to have to live with what we say.
What do I say?
Put up or shut up. Unless you're prepared to get off your lazy duff and -do- something about it, don't bother complaining about it.
Vote. Write your congresscritter. Write letters to the editor. Participate in the system--yes, even if you disagree, because, frankly, unless you know how to work the current one, you've got no chance of making it better or changing it for something else.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
to maintain the freedom to use for lawful purposes broadband telecommunications networks, including the Internet, without unreasonable interference from or discrimination by network operators, as has been the policy and history of the Internet and the basis of user expectations since its inception;
Interesting that they stuck the word "lawful" in there, as well as "unreasonable interference". This bill won't change anything.
Last I checked, Libertarianism still required voting.
Or perhaps that's why the Libertarians can't ever get a candidate in office--because none of their alleged supporters bother voting?
Sorry. If you don't vote, you don't matter. What people see are the numbers--and if there's no opposition because of broken people like you who don't bother voting, then any opposition to the status quo that might exist will never show up.
So by all means, have your lofty pie-in-the-sky Libertarian ideals. Don't expect anyone else to give a flying bacon sandwich for 'em, though, if you don't put action to it and actually do something with it.
You don't vote? You don't matter.
You don't work with the system? Then you'll have to shut up and accept what the system--and all those people who support it--will do to you.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
There's no way to win the bandwidth race at this point. The moment you start talking about "video", you move to a requirement that really is unrealistic.
To have the "Internet" (open access, bidirectional services and bandwidth, all-you-can eat buffet style bandwidth, unicast (or multicast)) with "Video" (continuous, "large" bandwidth streams), you have a problem.
OC-192's are the defacto standard in the Telecom industry. Even if you run multiple bonded OC-192, or have a faster standard, or any of the currently available technologies, you simply can't architect a network that could do what you suggest is so easy to do. Well, telepathy might work, but a workable implementation of mind-to-mind communications hasn't been demonstrated yet.
Now, saying that, the Telecom's are coping out with there current "traffic management", it's a pathetic implementation, and any real network engineer with more than a handful of years experience could create something better than manipulating TCP headers/windows/sessions (the minimum standard for MSS is 536 AT&T, or did you miss NewReno-IETF Standards 101 class?) or doing a DOS man in the middle attack on their customers. It's called Network Calculus, or Queueing theory, do a Google search and look it up, if you haven't blocked yourself from doing Google searches.
A simple queueing system that has a deficit round robin scheduler based on only src or dst IP address would do exactly what they are looking for (think WFQ, but only src or dst address based). With FQ, Cisco has been doing this for at least as long as I've been into networking, all that really needs to be done is for Cisco do change fair queueing to only include one parameter, the src or dst IP address. Problem solved. Customers happy. Multiflow file transfer applications running fine and not hogging the network. People browsing the web getting great performance. No lawsuits. Everybody wins.
It's so freakin' simple. Sometimes, the ISP's should just be slapped. All the Executives, managers, and engineers who go along with their BS. All in one big Three Stooges style line slap.
Oh... But you'll never truly get "Video" and the "Internet" to mix. If you think you can, I'd be glad for you to provide a potential architecture in this forum and prove me wrong.
multiplatformgeekbutmainlyjustnetworks
Can politicians lay off the whitewashing of bill names? I'd like to request the "Freedom from freedom naming Act" which would mandate that all bills are simply numerically titled, so that for example, politicians and people will actually have to learn about bill #654934792 before voting on it.
I'm really sick of these 'patriotic names' which usually have little or nothing to do with what the bill encompasses,
Less than 1% of the voting population ever writes to their representatives. That means, to an elected representative, each letter is assumed to represent at least 100 votes, often a few orders of magnitude more. Once my former local MP explained this to me, I started writing whenever an issue of importance to me came up.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Mods can do as they like. My karma's resilient enough for me to make the occasional 'controversial' statement.
So let me get this straight. Your philosophy depends on other people taking pity on you and reading your mind to figure out what you want?
You want everyone else to vote for someone whom you don't even really support, just so that you can have your opinions--which you'll never actually -tell- to anyone in charge--respected?
And somehow you don't see how broken that is?
This is why nobody will ever take your alleged 'political philosophy' seriously: you're unwilling to participate in a government, but want the government to magically do what you want it to do.
If you want to fix a system you see as broken, you'll have to get into the system to fix it. Ain't nobody yet who ever fixed a broken ethernet card by sulking in a corner--ain't nobody ever fixed a broken government by whining on slashdot.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
be sure to expect the Comcasts of the world to mark that traffic as the lowest priority possible, thus taking forever to actually get to those sites to log a complaint.
"The remote server timed out. Try again later."
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
the economist in me is wondering something... what would happen to broadband competition if instead of leaving the infrastructure in the hands of the telcos, it was put under the charge of a third party, who in turn sold bandwidth to ISPs, similar to how DSL providers were able to operate before Verizon and AT&T switched to fiber optics?
the way i'm seeing things right now, more choice would lower costs to consumers (which naturally the telcos would oppose), but if an ISP was caught doing something shaky (traffic shaping, etc), consumers would have other choices than their cable or phone company. having competing infrastructures strikes me as having to choice which company's sewers i flush my toilet into. it would make things simpler to have the one infrastructure.
This is more Washington Double speak. This bill would not ensure internet freedom anymore than the PATRIOT act is patriotic.
I used to believe that my single vote couldn't possibly make a difference. Yet every couple months, I still hauled my ass over to the voting booths to vote on local issues, local representation, and a national leader, purely out of an interest in current events, rather than out of a desire to change how things worked or to right a wrong.
Every year, I would vote for the local school district levy, and every year it would fail. Ever since I first entered high school, I recognized how poorly the local public schools were doing: the books were falling apart, teachers were being laid off, extracurricular activities were being canceled, less teachers for classes meant more useless study hall periods, etc. For over ten years, the levies consistently failed, so the school failed to receive funding to support many of its most basic services.
During my senior year, I remember my homeroom adviser telling the class how the levy failed by a margin of only ~20-30 votes (I think it was). Since we were all of voting age, she said that if a single classroom of students would have just got off their asses and voted for the levy, it would have succeeded. That's a real, quantifiable number of people who could have made a change in a sea of tens of thousands of other voters.
Then the unthinkable happened. Last year, the levy passed by a margin of three votes. It was incredible, but then they issued a recount. After the recount, it still managed to pass by a margin of only TWO votes.
Of course, there were only tens of thousands voting, rather than tens of millions. And yes, one vote didn't really matter--two did. I wasn't necessarily one of those two votes, nor possibly anyone in my family.
But that didn't stop my younger brother from marching into class the next day, staring at his history teacher from across the room, and boldly proclaiming, "You have MY family to thank for your pay-raise. We accept cash only."
The basic idea is, in a sufficiently large election, there's a fantastically low probability that the vote will be tied (or within 1 vote of a tie) but for your vote. Since this is the only case in which your vote actually makes a difference, the probability of your vote making a difference is fantastically low, and thus there's a correspondingly high probability that your vote will make no difference. There are a few ways of getting around this: one is by making multiple thresholds of your vote mattering, one is by forcing a low sample size. In practice, the ability to influence the votes of others is also important. But straight up-and-down secret-ballot first-past-the-post voting systems, like we have in America, pretty much minimize the probability of your vote making any difference.
Compare this to, for instance, a jury. A jury is a small sample size in which every juror has the ability to influence the votes of others. Also, due to the unanimity requirement, every juror has the power to make a difference, and a truly intransigent juror can single-handedly force a mistrial via hung jury. Even in a caucus, a caucusgoer can influence the votes of others and there can be multiple thresholds of "making a difference" (i.e. a minimum level of support for a candidate to be considered "viable") rather than just the single threshold of putting your candidate over the top, or into a tied position.
The actual proposition to be proven would probably be some relation between voting population and probability of any given individual's vote mattering under any given voting system. There could be different relations and different proofs for different systems, or perhaps a single theorem could cover all cases. Discovering and proving that relation is left as an exercise to the reader--but I hope my argument was illustrative if not convincing.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
The fallacy of your argument is that your definition of a vote "counting" is wrong. Not wrong in any intellectual or mathematical way, merely wrong in a philosophical or sociological way. It embodies the outlook that "what I do affects me and my surroundings only". Very "me generation". The proper outlook for this problem is the outlook that "what I do is an example to society, which if followed by the majority, would benefit all".
It's obviously clear, assuming that democracy is worthwhile, that everyone should vote even though every individual's vote has an extremely small probability of swaying the result of the election.
A growing (and dangerous) analogous phenomenon to not voting is not having your children vaccinated. The probability that any one child not being vaccinated will enable an epidemic is small.
The video over the internet problem has already been solved by companies like Akamai (edge cache servers close to the end users) and swarm technology (BitTorrent).
All that it would take to have HDTV streaming to every house in the US would be a cable or DSL connection, utilizing swarm technology like BitTorrent and local seeding at each major ISP's NOC in each major city. Akamai already has servers geographically dispersed all over the US (and many foreign countries). Put a BitTorrent client on every AppleTV and let them swarm with other users on the same ISP. Problem solved.
The whole net neutrality debate exists because the big ISPs don't want us to actually use the unlimited bandwidth we paid for. Sure they might have to upgrade a few of their systems to handle video over the internet, but I can assure you, those that don't upgrade their systems and start throttling video (ala Comcast) will go the way of the dinosaur, while those ISPs that provide decent bandwidth and don't interfere will flourish.
The free market will eventually win, even if it's local wifi coops bypassing the incumbent monopoly carriers (in areas where there is no competition).
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon