"It's no different from the morons who go on about population density in Canada being the reason for ancient speeds and horrible prices."
They're not morons. They are at least partly correct.
The majority of the cost of the infrastructure isn't the backbone (which runs from city to city), but the hubs and the infamous "last mile". And your bandwidth depends on the quality of the infrastructure.
That last mile is far more expensive in sparsely populated, rural areas. THAT is why population density matters. It doesn't matter so much anymore how remote the city is, as long as it's a city.
Throughout the U.S., there are strong correlations between bandwidth, price, and population density. That correlation would be even stronger if the ISPs' pricing structure did not tend to spread the cost between regions.
"They deliberately throttle down traffic they feel is associated to pirating."
I think you mean filesharing, not pirating. They are not the same things. Pirating is a crime, filesharing is not. Look it up. Copyright "pirating" has been a specific legal term for close to 100 years. It's amazing how many people have come to misuse it in just the last few. Of course, we have the "content industry" to thank for that propaganda.
In any case, here's the problem: first off, throttling filesharing requires deep packet inspection, which is very undesirable and may be illegal in some circumstances. Second, throttling regardless of what is being sent or received is illegal in the United States. Comcast has already been chastised by the FCC for that. I don't recall exactly, but I think they made a settlement and agreed not to throttle, in order to stay out of litigation (which Comcast would almost certainly have lost).
"you see the same argument applies when you're on 64kbit connection and so is everyone else."
But that's not so much the case anymore. Larger ISPs, and many of the smaller ones, have moved to tiered pricing plans, depending on the bandwidth they dole out to you.
If they're going to charge for the extra speed, they had better deliver that extra speed, or else it's fraud.
"Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe."
Nonsense, at least here in the U.S. While it might be catching up (hard to say for sure), compared to most "first tier" countries the U.S. has averaged significantly lower bandwidth at much higher cost. Mainly due to insufficient competition.
Bandwidth for ISPs gets cheaper by they year, as they have continued to steadily raise their monthly rates.
That's because they've never actually read Rand. So they think when she wrote about "selfishness" she really meant "greed".
Rand may have been a bit over the top at times, and her books were stuffy and difficult, but she did a pretty good job of illustrating how real greed and powermongering can be disguised as "helping your fellow man".
"My point is only that it's less bad than control being held by a single country that most of us don't trust and don't like."
No, you MISSED the point. ICANN is not run by "the U.S."
The government has very little, if any, say in what ICANN does. Not very long ago, ICANN defied the U.S. government in regard to some of ICANN'S policies.
You are trying to raise issues that simply don't exist.
But that doesn't work both ways. Is the Salvation Army a government shill? Or the ACLU?
Yes, they have to play by the "non-profit" rules of the US, but there is nothing else saying they have to listen to D.C.
In fact (I don't remember the details off-hand), a year or so ago the US government threatened to cut off some of its donation money if ICANN didn't change its position on an issue. It refused.
"Silent and forced updating like Chrome does really is the best way to keep the web moving forward without being obnoxious about it towards your users."
No, you didn't. That isn't what I was referring to, at all. You made a pretty big assumption there.
"If you have information that is to precious to lose, don't depend on a free service. Do it yourself or at least have the common sense to make the other party contractually obligated."
You make a very good point, but it is separate from the points I was making:
(A) Google+ has been proven to be unreliable, regardless of whether its status is "free" or contracted. I didn't even consider that.
(B) Google+ DOES scan your documents, and emails, and note your relationships and other information. Which I would not want ANYBODY doing to my business, because it's none of THEIR business. (And don't try to tell me they don't... it's in their TOS and Google has publicly admitted to doing so.)
But for TapeCutter, I do have an answer to one of your questions:
The reason consensus is not science, is because it doesn't matter how many scientists agree that something is plausible; it only takes one counterexample to prove them wrong.
And it has often been INDIVIDUALS, outside the field, who have provided that counter-evidence. Such is the history of science. Recorded history is riddled throughout with individuals proving the "consensus" to be wrong.
Almost EVERY major scientific advance has come about as a result of a discovery that proved the status quo (consensus) wrong, to a greater or lesser degree. If that were not so, individuals would not make discoveries and science could not advance.
So, consensus is not science, because: it cannot be. That's not the way it works. It is not a democracy, it is a set of rules based on evidence. One "vote" can invalidate all the rest.
I did read the article, and I don't see a connection between the statements made there, and the statements I Kan Reed made about pseudoscience and conspiracy.
The one thing it DOES say that might relate, however loosely, is that pseudoscientists are fond of conspiracies. But even if that is true, you can't validly turn it around, and say a claim of conspiracy makes one a pseudoscientist. Logic doesn't work that way.
"The US likes the oversight it has, and doesn't want to hand that over to anyone else. "
And what kind of "oversight" do you fantasize that it has?
ICANN is a non-profit corporation in California. While government may have some little degree of input, ICANN has repeatedly refused to take the U.S. governments advice (or demands, if you really want to put it that way) seriously. It has repeatedly refused to comply with government interference.
While at the same time, ICANN has a large international panel of advisors.
No matter how dumb you think ICANN's actions have been in recent years, they haven't been the result of US government policy.
IT ISN'T UNDER "GOVERNMENT CONTROL", any more than any other non-profit in the United States is under "government control".
Well, perhaps there is a BIT more government influence than your typical non-profit, but it's questionable just how much that influence it is, since ICANN has a committee representing most of the governments of the world advising it. ICANN has repeatedly declined to take U.S. government's advice on quite a few matters, in fact.
THAT'S why moving it under UN would be bad. Not only WOULD it be under government control, that control would be exerted by diverse countries with individual and special interests. It would be a disaster.
Take two stuffed bunnies. Lay one on its side, and stand the other on its head. These are two "polarizations".
But with QUANTUM stuffed bunnies, it is possible to create a pair of stuffed bunnies that are actually in both positions at the same time... "superposition"... and "entangled", meaning the the positions of both are linked. (This has also led to the creation of a new illustrated book, the Quanta Sutra... but that's another story.)
So, you send these superposed stuffed bunnies down different pipes, and when they get to the end, one of them is knocked over the head with a laser, which causes them BOTH to resolve into one or the other position. Then by determining the position of that one you can determine the position of the other, even at a distance.
I am thinking about naming this the "stuff your bunny sideways" principle.
"The UN charter states explicitly that "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers" From 1948, in it's non legally binding charter, and essentially the same thing in its legally binding agreements that only about 150 countries have signed on to."
Right. And what this means in practice is that the UN supports the "right" of governments to censor... because they are individually free to develop their own standards of expression.
And let's not forget that not all countries "represented" by the UN are represented equally. It was designed, from the very beginning, to give certain countries more say than others.
So don't look to the UN for equity or equality. You will never find it.
Well said. As I have stated before many times, we need a decentralized addressing system. It would be a disaster if this were handed to the UN before then.
"Everyone knows the US will be a puppet to US corporate shenanigans as the seek to capitalise and profit off of control of the internet."
So... a NON-PROFIT corporation, which is advised by A PANEL CONSISTING OF GOVERNMENTS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD, is a US-corporate shill? You're dreaming.
Now, it is true, ICANN has made a number of recent blunders. Not only its TLD auction, which some saw as blatant money-grubbing (although, again, it is a non-profit), to its method of deciding name disputes, which it assigned to a "target-shoot", requiring the disputants to send an http request at precisely a specific time... the closer to the target time wins. (This was a particularly stupid move, as it is amendable to automation, and favors those with low latency. A lottery would have been far preferable.)
Nevertheless, one cannot say these things have anything at all to do with the U.S. government.
And your proposed DNS fragmentation will never work, in the long run.
What the Internet needs, is a new DNS-free protocol. That would solve ALL of these problems.
"IP addressing will remain pretty clean but Domain Names are going to be exploited for profit a trend started by the US."
It was NOT. ICANN made that move but it was NOT "the US". Repeat: ICANN is advised by governments all over the world (I think it would be fair to say "most governments", today). NONE of its decisions in recent years -- as dumb as some of them have been -- have been unilateral on the part of the United States. To claim that they were is an admission of ignorance.
"Actually, a sort of One World Government is precisely what makes it possible to reach the same resource when you type http://google.com/ from anywhere in the world"
NO, it isn't. Organization, but with a LACK of government, is what allows that. Your argument is exactly backward.
The UN doesn't loan money... it is subsidized by the member nations. (I make that statement with full realization that you were probably being sarcastic.)
The US has "membership fees" which it has recently been reluctant to pay... and with good reason. But many people seem to forget that the UN is *IN* the United States; its building is supported with US government money; UN representatives are give care and perks courtesy of the US government (i.e., American taxpayers).
If it ISN'T going to support the U.S. Constitution (and in many ways today the UN is actively inimical to it), then I say let it move elsewhere. I don't want my tax money supporting it.
"The fear of a one-world government is unfounded. The UN is not set up to function as such a body..."
Not only is that cart-before-the-horse, it is also false. The fact that the UN is incapable of doing it has not bearing on the fear of a one-world government. The fear is very real, and the UN has very little to do with it. Most people recognize that the UN is just a big pile of BS.
"And, while this may sound a little patronizing to other nations, the UN is at it's most effective when it is aligned with the U.S."
And maybe it WAS, but that has happened pretty rarely lately.
"It promotes what used to be first and foremost "American values" (real values, like democracy, human rights, an autonomy)"
It's SUPPOSED to do that. Doesn't mean that it actually does. The UN has lost its purpose (weak as it was to begin with) and now has its OWN agenda, which is not in line with the U.S. Constitution.
Take off your blinders, forget what it was originally DESIGNED to do, and look at what it is actually doing.
Personally, I think anybody who uses Google+ as part of their way of doing business has a screw loose.
You are putting your business at the mercy of an organization that has proven itself to be capricious, if not malicious. Not to mention their downtime. This is just more proof.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's no different from the morons who go on about population density in Canada being the reason for ancient speeds and horrible prices."
They're not morons. They are at least partly correct.
The majority of the cost of the infrastructure isn't the backbone (which runs from city to city), but the hubs and the infamous "last mile". And your bandwidth depends on the quality of the infrastructure.
That last mile is far more expensive in sparsely populated, rural areas. THAT is why population density matters. It doesn't matter so much anymore how remote the city is, as long as it's a city.
Throughout the U.S., there are strong correlations between bandwidth, price, and population density. That correlation would be even stronger if the ISPs' pricing structure did not tend to spread the cost between regions.
"They deliberately throttle down traffic they feel is associated to pirating."
I think you mean filesharing, not pirating. They are not the same things. Pirating is a crime, filesharing is not. Look it up. Copyright "pirating" has been a specific legal term for close to 100 years. It's amazing how many people have come to misuse it in just the last few. Of course, we have the "content industry" to thank for that propaganda.
In any case, here's the problem: first off, throttling filesharing requires deep packet inspection, which is very undesirable and may be illegal in some circumstances. Second, throttling regardless of what is being sent or received is illegal in the United States. Comcast has already been chastised by the FCC for that. I don't recall exactly, but I think they made a settlement and agreed not to throttle, in order to stay out of litigation (which Comcast would almost certainly have lost).
"you see the same argument applies when you're on 64kbit connection and so is everyone else."
But that's not so much the case anymore. Larger ISPs, and many of the smaller ones, have moved to tiered pricing plans, depending on the bandwidth they dole out to you.
If they're going to charge for the extra speed, they had better deliver that extra speed, or else it's fraud.
"Just a hint, your measily 60 bucks a month doesn't come close to covering a dedicated 50 mbps pipe, it doesn't even come close to a dedicated 1.5 mbps pipe."
Nonsense, at least here in the U.S. While it might be catching up (hard to say for sure), compared to most "first tier" countries the U.S. has averaged significantly lower bandwidth at much higher cost. Mainly due to insufficient competition.
Bandwidth for ISPs gets cheaper by they year, as they have continued to steadily raise their monthly rates.
They can afford it.
That's all great, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the point I was making.
That's because they've never actually read Rand. So they think when she wrote about "selfishness" she really meant "greed".
Rand may have been a bit over the top at times, and her books were stuffy and difficult, but she did a pretty good job of illustrating how real greed and powermongering can be disguised as "helping your fellow man".
"My point is only that it's less bad than control being held by a single country that most of us don't trust and don't like."
No, you MISSED the point. ICANN is not run by "the U.S."
The government has very little, if any, say in what ICANN does. Not very long ago, ICANN defied the U.S. government in regard to some of ICANN'S policies.
You are trying to raise issues that simply don't exist.
But that doesn't work both ways. Is the Salvation Army a government shill? Or the ACLU?
Yes, they have to play by the "non-profit" rules of the US, but there is nothing else saying they have to listen to D.C.
In fact (I don't remember the details off-hand), a year or so ago the US government threatened to cut off some of its donation money if ICANN didn't change its position on an issue. It refused.
"Silent and forced updating like Chrome does really is the best way to keep the web moving forward without being obnoxious about it towards your users."
How easily we forget the gruesome past.
"At what point does ignorance become willful?"
At precisely that point at which it becomes a bureaucracy.
"FTFY."
No, you didn't. That isn't what I was referring to, at all. You made a pretty big assumption there.
"If you have information that is to precious to lose, don't depend on a free service. Do it yourself or at least have the common sense to make the other party contractually obligated."
You make a very good point, but it is separate from the points I was making:
(A) Google+ has been proven to be unreliable, regardless of whether its status is "free" or contracted. I didn't even consider that.
(B) Google+ DOES scan your documents, and emails, and note your relationships and other information. Which I would not want ANYBODY doing to my business, because it's none of THEIR business. (And don't try to tell me they don't... it's in their TOS and Google has publicly admitted to doing so.)
I was also amazed.
But for TapeCutter, I do have an answer to one of your questions:
The reason consensus is not science, is because it doesn't matter how many scientists agree that something is plausible; it only takes one counterexample to prove them wrong.
And it has often been INDIVIDUALS, outside the field, who have provided that counter-evidence. Such is the history of science. Recorded history is riddled throughout with individuals proving the "consensus" to be wrong.
Almost EVERY major scientific advance has come about as a result of a discovery that proved the status quo (consensus) wrong, to a greater or lesser degree. If that were not so, individuals would not make discoveries and science could not advance.
So, consensus is not science, because: it cannot be. That's not the way it works. It is not a democracy, it is a set of rules based on evidence. One "vote" can invalidate all the rest.
I did read the article, and I don't see a connection between the statements made there, and the statements I Kan Reed made about pseudoscience and conspiracy.
The one thing it DOES say that might relate, however loosely, is that pseudoscientists are fond of conspiracies. But even if that is true, you can't validly turn it around, and say a claim of conspiracy makes one a pseudoscientist. Logic doesn't work that way.
I'll stand by my comments, thanks.
"The US likes the oversight it has, and doesn't want to hand that over to anyone else. "
And what kind of "oversight" do you fantasize that it has?
ICANN is a non-profit corporation in California. While government may have some little degree of input, ICANN has repeatedly refused to take the U.S. governments advice (or demands, if you really want to put it that way) seriously. It has repeatedly refused to comply with government interference.
While at the same time, ICANN has a large international panel of advisors.
No matter how dumb you think ICANN's actions have been in recent years, they haven't been the result of US government policy.
IT ISN'T UNDER "GOVERNMENT CONTROL", any more than any other non-profit in the United States is under "government control".
Well, perhaps there is a BIT more government influence than your typical non-profit, but it's questionable just how much that influence it is, since ICANN has a committee representing most of the governments of the world advising it. ICANN has repeatedly declined to take U.S. government's advice on quite a few matters, in fact.
THAT'S why moving it under UN would be bad. Not only WOULD it be under government control, that control would be exerted by diverse countries with individual and special interests. It would be a disaster.
Certainly.
Take two stuffed bunnies. Lay one on its side, and stand the other on its head. These are two "polarizations".
But with QUANTUM stuffed bunnies, it is possible to create a pair of stuffed bunnies that are actually in both positions at the same time... "superposition"... and "entangled", meaning the the positions of both are linked. (This has also led to the creation of a new illustrated book, the Quanta Sutra... but that's another story.)
So, you send these superposed stuffed bunnies down different pipes, and when they get to the end, one of them is knocked over the head with a laser, which causes them BOTH to resolve into one or the other position. Then by determining the position of that one you can determine the position of the other, even at a distance.
I am thinking about naming this the "stuff your bunny sideways" principle.
"The UN charter states explicitly that "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers" From 1948, in it's non legally binding charter, and essentially the same thing in its legally binding agreements that only about 150 countries have signed on to."
Right. And what this means in practice is that the UN supports the "right" of governments to censor... because they are individually free to develop their own standards of expression.
And let's not forget that not all countries "represented" by the UN are represented equally. It was designed, from the very beginning, to give certain countries more say than others.
So don't look to the UN for equity or equality. You will never find it.
Well said. As I have stated before many times, we need a decentralized addressing system. It would be a disaster if this were handed to the UN before then.
That should have read "amenable", not "amendable".
"Everyone knows the US will be a puppet to US corporate shenanigans as the seek to capitalise and profit off of control of the internet."
So... a NON-PROFIT corporation, which is advised by A PANEL CONSISTING OF GOVERNMENTS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD, is a US-corporate shill? You're dreaming.
Now, it is true, ICANN has made a number of recent blunders. Not only its TLD auction, which some saw as blatant money-grubbing (although, again, it is a non-profit), to its method of deciding name disputes, which it assigned to a "target-shoot", requiring the disputants to send an http request at precisely a specific time... the closer to the target time wins. (This was a particularly stupid move, as it is amendable to automation, and favors those with low latency. A lottery would have been far preferable.)
Nevertheless, one cannot say these things have anything at all to do with the U.S. government.
And your proposed DNS fragmentation will never work, in the long run.
What the Internet needs, is a new DNS-free protocol. That would solve ALL of these problems.
"IP addressing will remain pretty clean but Domain Names are going to be exploited for profit a trend started by the US."
It was NOT. ICANN made that move but it was NOT "the US". Repeat: ICANN is advised by governments all over the world (I think it would be fair to say "most governments", today). NONE of its decisions in recent years -- as dumb as some of them have been -- have been unilateral on the part of the United States. To claim that they were is an admission of ignorance.
"Actually, a sort of One World Government is precisely what makes it possible to reach the same resource when you type http://google.com/ from anywhere in the world"
NO, it isn't. Organization, but with a LACK of government, is what allows that. Your argument is exactly backward.
The UN doesn't loan money... it is subsidized by the member nations. (I make that statement with full realization that you were probably being sarcastic.)
The US has "membership fees" which it has recently been reluctant to pay... and with good reason. But many people seem to forget that the UN is *IN* the United States; its building is supported with US government money; UN representatives are give care and perks courtesy of the US government (i.e., American taxpayers).
If it ISN'T going to support the U.S. Constitution (and in many ways today the UN is actively inimical to it), then I say let it move elsewhere. I don't want my tax money supporting it.
"The fear of a one-world government is unfounded. The UN is not set up to function as such a body..."
Not only is that cart-before-the-horse, it is also false. The fact that the UN is incapable of doing it has not bearing on the fear of a one-world government. The fear is very real, and the UN has very little to do with it. Most people recognize that the UN is just a big pile of BS.
"And, while this may sound a little patronizing to other nations, the UN is at it's most effective when it is aligned with the U.S."
And maybe it WAS, but that has happened pretty rarely lately.
"It promotes what used to be first and foremost "American values" (real values, like democracy, human rights, an autonomy)"
It's SUPPOSED to do that. Doesn't mean that it actually does. The UN has lost its purpose (weak as it was to begin with) and now has its OWN agenda, which is not in line with the U.S. Constitution.
Take off your blinders, forget what it was originally DESIGNED to do, and look at what it is actually doing.
Personally, I think anybody who uses Google+ as part of their way of doing business has a screw loose.
You are putting your business at the mercy of an organization that has proven itself to be capricious, if not malicious. Not to mention their downtime. This is just more proof.
Get a clue.