First of all, notice that this was not the decision of a court. It was a settlement; there was no involvement of governmental agencies. The problem is that the case even went that far; it's astonishing to me that someone has the nerve to claim that her credit card company should regulate what she can buy. I'll bet that she would have been the first one to complain if Visa had refused her the loan in the first place ("It's none of your business what it's for! Loan me the money, and I'll commit to paying it back!")
Like many of the people on/., I consider myself something of a libertarian. However I disagree (preemptively) with the replies I expect approving the decision as being hands-off. The problem is that, as far as I'm concerned, most of those lines aren't legitimate company property. Most of those lines were created under protected monopolies; improving bandwidth in many cases required threats and arm twisting from local towns In my opinion, lines created under monopolies benefited from public regulation, should be considered effectively public property, and therefore should be open to other providers. Note that this does not apply to networks built during competition; those are legitimiate private property.
That's actually what intrigued me about biology (my field of interest switched from computing to biochemistry for just this reason). The intriguing thing about biomolecules is that they must encode their purpose based on the physical properties of the molecules. Biosignals, unlike their computing equivalents, are not arbitrary. Instead they tend to be particular sequences of water-attracting and water-repelling amino acids which make certain things easier. The interactions are not optical, or even analog. They are physical in nature, making them extremely versitile, but also very complicated.
40% is far more impressive than it sounds. That's on the same order as the efficiency of the human body, and vastly more efficient than anything else made by humans.
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First of all, notice that this was not the decision of a court. It was a settlement; there was no involvement of governmental agencies. The problem is that the case even went that far; it's astonishing to me that someone has the nerve to claim that her credit card company should regulate what she can buy. I'll bet that she would have been the first one to complain if Visa had refused her the loan in the first place ("It's none of your business what it's for! Loan me the money, and I'll commit to paying it back!")
Like many of the people on /., I consider myself something of a libertarian. However I disagree (preemptively) with the replies I expect approving the decision as being hands-off. The problem is that, as far as I'm concerned, most of those lines aren't legitimate company property. Most of those lines were created under protected monopolies; improving bandwidth in many cases required threats and arm twisting from local towns In my opinion, lines created under monopolies benefited from public regulation, should be considered effectively public property, and therefore should be open to other providers. Note that this does not apply to networks built during competition; those are legitimiate private property.
The story about Nobel's dispute with a mathematician is exactly that-a story. Nobel didn't feel that math was practical enough.
That's actually what intrigued me about biology (my field of interest switched from computing to biochemistry for just this reason). The intriguing thing about biomolecules is that they must encode their purpose based on the physical properties of the molecules.
Biosignals, unlike their computing equivalents, are not arbitrary. Instead they tend to be particular sequences of water-attracting and water-repelling amino acids which make certain things easier. The interactions are not optical, or even analog. They are physical in nature, making them extremely versitile, but also very complicated.
40% is far more impressive than it sounds. That's on the same order as the efficiency of the human body, and vastly more efficient than anything else made by humans.