I mean can no one but me understand that the more instant the delivery of broadcast communication is of road issues the better?
No, we understand that in theory, what you are saying is true. We also understand that:
In practice, it is physically impossible to make it faster to send data to a tower, on to a server in another state, back to the tower, and down to an adjacent car than to send it directly from one car to another. That's why all inter-car communication will always necessarily be either direct broadcast or mesh-based, not server-based. And as soon as you get far enough away for that to be impractical, you're also too far away for it to matter if the data is delayed, so there cannot possibly ever be a plausible reason why prioritization would be needed, paid or otherwise.
It isn't practical for a server to keep track of where every car is in real-time to determine whether two cars are near enough to one another to be worth using the bandwidth to relay the data from one car to another, making any server-based approach utterly infeasible.
Both of these are fairly fundamental limitations posed by the laws of physics, and no amount of prioritization—paid or otherwise—can ever hope to change them.
And again, as I've pointed out, even if somehow there could be some miraculous way for such a design to work reliably and fast enough to be usable, and even if we ignored the fact that it would be inherently inferior to a local mesh network, there would still be absolutely no sane reason for the FCC to allow a cellular company to charge money to the car company in exchange for getting the bits there faster. The cellular company should simply make the bits from all cars get there faster, non-preferentially, and slow down non-car traffic. There's no reason to allow what is at that point a basic consumer need to turn into a money grab between one company and another.
Several orders of magnitude better. For a server-based approach to work, you'd have, in the best case (read "not periodic HTTP polling"), tens of milliseconds to deliver the data to the server, tens of milliseconds to deliver the data back, plus hundreds of milliseconds (or more) for the server to look through all the cars in a list of geographically nearby vehicles to see if they're close enough to warrant sending the data to them. It would likely take only single-digit milliseconds for direct car-to-car communication. Even if it had to be relayed through multiple cars, it would still be an order of magnitude faster.
If you don't understand the internet then just please say so. If a vehicle is making an internet connection to something AT THE OTHER END (and there is always "the other end") and the other end is not getting the packets from the vehicle in a timely manner, then it cannot RESPOND in a timely manner. A "paid fastlane" isn't just for the "vehicle end" of the data, it applies to the full path from vehicle to ANYWHERE.
No, a paid fast lane is a fast path from the vehicle to the Internet backbone. From there, it would get the same priority as any other traffic.
Also, a paid fast lane is a fast path from vehicles of a specific company to the Internet backbone. Nothing in net neutrality laws would prevent companies from building a fast path from all vehicles to the backbone, if it were necessary for some specific critical purpose. The laws just say that A. the ISPs can't charge the car companies for giving priority to cars, and B. the ISPs can't give priority to traffic from Ford over traffic from Chevy in exchange for money. All traffic of a given type (e.g. vehicle navigation data, if you want to use that rather silly, highly latency-tolerant example) must get the same priority.
I made a five and a half hour car trip a couple of weeks ago. It would have been four hours long except I didn't have the real-time data that told me that the road I was taking was completely blocked by a crash a half hour earlier. I had to find an alternate route that took much longer. Had I gotten the real-time data about the crash I could have gone a different alternate that wouldn't have cost an hour and a half.
You keep using the word "real-time". I do not think it means what you think it does.
Real-time refers to something in which microseconds matter, not milliseconds, not seconds, not minutes, not hours. Your traffic data getting there ten seconds later won't affect you at all unless you just happen to be right before the last exit before the wreck when it first gets detected, in which case the additional data would pose at least as high a risk of you causing an accident trying to cut over at the last minute as it would of getting you to avoid the accident.
Besides, the first cars that come upon an accident usually don't have to slow down much anyway. It's the cars that are minutes away that need to start taking actions to avoid the accident. Delays of milliseconds don't matter in traffic data. Delays of minutes usually don't matter, at least in the aggregate. So traffic data is not an example of something that requires real-time communication by any stretch of the imagination. It requires, at most, a background-notification-caliber polling model, if that. Most navigation systems just use a radio receiver and get broadcasts from the transit agencies based on fixed RADAR stations. And that's good enough granularity to get the job done.
When you say it can operate without external data, that is exactly what you mean. You said, quote, "Autonomous cars don't need data channels of any sort. They're autonomous." That's a data vacuum, and it is a patently absurd claim to make. That's also a clear admission that you really don't know what "autonomous" means, since "don't need data" is not part of that definition. Every AV needs data to make decisions, and the better the data it can get the better decisions it will make. Like the example I already gave, where an AV that can get real-time data about a road closure could have chosen a different main route to conduct that four hour trip instead of getting to the crash site, deciding it can't get through, and then reverting to the back roads and taking an extra hour and a half.
It is not patently absurd. It is accurate. The vehicle must be able to drive safely without external data, or it is not autonomous. The fact that it can do a better job of getting you there in a timely manner doesn't mean that it needs a high-priority channel.
More significantly, in most major cities, traffic data is broadcast on sidebands of various radio stations, and can be received by any device for which the user has paid the fairly cheap lifetime subscription fee. Because traffic data is available from permanent RADAR stations along the highway, the receipt of that information can be strictly one-directional, and is thus well suited to a broadcast system. This is not to say that you can't do it over the Internet, just that it isn't strictly necessary to do so. Thus, making a high-priority bidirectional channel available for getting information that can be just as easily obtained by adding a $25 traffic data receiver would be patently absurd.
And even if you want to go full-on-Waze-style, with real-time data gathering to pinpoint slow spots and try to route people around on side streets (which may or may not actually reduce your drive time, depending on lots of other factors that are hard to predict, such as traffic light timing), there's no reason to believe that self-driving cars would benefit from that data arriving faster, with lower latency, because overall traffic patterns don't change enough from one second to the next for latency to matter anyway—even if it the latency is on the order of tens of seconds, much less when it is on the order of single-digit seconds.
Traffic mapping is simply not a real-time task and never will be. Nothing associated with self-driving cars benefits from real-time performance except what is happening entirely inside the car—processing data from sensors—and perhaps communication with nearby cars in some situations (which must necessarily be direct, not just because of latency, but also because of the high complexity of figuring out what cars are near you on the server side and routing data appropriately, and also because of the high probability that your cars will get their data from different companies whose data centers are on opposite sides of the country from each other).
No, the sorts of tasks that benefit from prioritization are things like live audio and video streaming. And these things are readily identifiable by port numbers, QoS flags, etc. without any need to use paid prioritization to give higher priority for traffic to/from a single company. Remember, this is not about prioritization, but rather paid prioritization, whose sole purpose, by its very definition, is to give an advantage to traffic from specific companies that pay over others that don't.
That last bit is what Comcast is trying to make people forget. Paid prioritization is, by definition, anti-competitive.
I now have much less than 1/3 sec to get that information back. Whatever it is (object, pothole, water, etc) I need to know in under 1/10 or a second or better so the car can start slowing down or maneuvering to avoid.
Too bad the real-world latency for LTE, even if your traffic got maximum priority, would still be almost a third of a second just for the two cellular round-trips, which means you're still going to hit the pothole even if the server takes zero time to propagate the data from the server that car A is using to the server that car B is using (in a different data center) and even if your car just happens to poll its server at exactly the right millisecond, which it won't because it will poll only once every few minutes.
Realistically, self-driving cars can't assume data will be more current than O(minutes), and must be able to tolerate data that is O(hours) old. For handling sudden changes in road conditions, they have to rely on their own in-car sensors (and, where available, communication from nearby cars) to do the best they can. Anything else is just asking to be disappointed (or worse, dead). No fast lane to some server somewhere on the Internet can realistically solve any problems associated with self-driving car tech. Those other pieces of information might help it make smarter decisions farther ahead, resulting in better traffic flow, but if they're required for safety, then the self-driving tech is nowhere near ready to ship, because it means that safety depends on another, more capable vehicle having recently driven the road within a few minutes prior.
I would not be at all surprised if sharing photos amounts to sharing the URL for the photo, in effect, in which case it can be blocked merely by blocking the URL (assuming no HTTPS).
of course they sued, if you allow one company access like this then you need to allow everyone access. but then you need to figure out who's going to pay the costs in stringing the wire back up in case of a big storm.
Everybody. Each company is responsible for repairing its own lines in the event of a big storm, just as has always been true. Your question doesn't make sense.
If they're not going to be a neutral pipe, they can't logically continue to have common carrier status and will be responsible for any child pornography transmitted through their servers.
ISPs are not common carriers until the Title II reclassification goes into effect (which the FCC is now trying to preempt). The laws preventing them from being liable have nothing to do with their becoming common carriers a few months from now.
You're certainly right about it being useful to prioritize traffic based on whether increased latency will affect usability. The part that is inherently anticompetitive is where you insert the word "paid" in there and prioritize one content provider's traffic over another instead of prioritizing one type of traffic over another.
I have yet to see anything even approaching a legitimate argument in favor of paid prioritization.
That's only half right. The Obama FCC declared fast lanes to be violations of their policy, along with (IIRC) zero-rating unless it was equally available to any company. This is part of what will get rolled back by losing Title II classification, so we'll likely be back to ISPs being allowed to do zero-rating preferentially for their own content.
Actually, it was Obama's FCC that reclassified them as common carriers (Title II) about two years ago. The current FCC commissioners want to roll that back, thus removing the anti-throttling regulations that could otherwise be used to force carriers to actually provide enough bandwidth for their competitors to compete.
Background: The existing rule was notable in that 1) It was a gross overreach for the FCC, in that it was implemented under Title II classification 2) It actually does not completely or correctly implement net neutrality (in the way people expect when they use the term).
IMO, it solves all of the most egregious problems. And I don't think it is an overreach. The purpose of Title II classification was historically to cover voice telephony. A large percentage of Internet users now do their voice telephony over broadband. Therefore, it is completely reasonable to treat the underlying broadband under Title II, as it would be impossible to enforce Title II on telephony companies without the underlying communication infrastructure being covered by similar laws.
In short, instead of calling everyone stupid...
Whoa there. I didn't call everyone stupid. I respect some people who disagree with the Title II reclassification. I just don't respect people who make patently absurd claims, like saying that self-driving cars won't be possible without paid prioritization (when, in fact, self-driving cars barely use the Internet at all; they don't need it).
Just to get things started, how about the law is implemented not solely for the internet, but as an anti-trust problem? We could have the law enforced by the FTC instead of the FCC, and therefore apply not only to the internet, but other forms of communication and trade as well. (For example: Visa and Mastercard must treat all clients equally, and not deny certain companies from using their services, or charge different per-transaction amounts for different companies.)
In theory, you bet. The problem is that the FTC has been completely toothless for as long as I can remember. At least the FCC occasionally acts.:-)
I'm not going to dig into the problem of peering agreements and the way they've been set up, as that's not my area of expertise. Instead, I'll focus on the consumer problems.
The fundamental problem is that Internet service is a commodity. One provider that passes packets is as good as another, assuming they all provide the same quantity per unit time and with similar levels of quality. There are very narrow areas in which they can compete, mostly involving the amount of speed that they provide. So to provide any useful value-add, companies are forced to package unrelated services, such as cable TV, telephone, video-on-demand, etc. Because those services compete with other Internet services, but are almost always provided by servers within the company's network, those services are almost inherently less affected by network speeds than third-party services unless the providers take reasonable steps to ensure that services are not getting de facto throttled by insufficient external bandwidth.
The ideal solution would be to pass a federal broadband access act that creates an unfunded mandate for states to provide fiber to every home and business by a particular date, owned by the state, and leased to any ISP that wants to lease lines. This would create a huge flurry of competition that would largely negate the need for any sort of additional net neutrality regulation. But the cable and phone companies would never let such a law pass.
A slightly less ideal solution would be to take the leased line rules that currently apply only to telephone lines (IIRC) and extending them to all companies that own any communications infrastructure (whether fiber, coax, twisted pair, or cellular). Specifically, require that they make that infrastructure available to any ISP that wants to provide service, at a cost just above the cost of maintaining the wires. This would make it trivial to have proper competition in broadband. This would, of course, cause all of the existing ISPs to wet themselves, and they would find ways to guarantee that any such bill never saw the light of day
It is highly likely that you're wrong. And by highly likely, I mean absolutely certain. I can guarantee you with absolute certainty that no self-driving car system will ever be a centralized control system, because that would be fundamentally unsafe, for several reasons:
Many driving decisions are made by humans in on the order of tens of milliseconds. Even under the most ideal circumstances, cellular networking is almost never that fast. So even if cars were the only devices on the Internet, they would still be less safe than a human driver if the decisions were being made by a remote server on the other side of a cellular hop.
A centralized server is a single point of failure that could bring the traffic grid to its knees. If a single computer fails and the car decides to limp off to the side of the road, it's a minor nuisance for the other cars. If a million cars all fail and limp to the side of the road, the company goes out of business, because nobody is ever going to trust that company's self-driving cars again. That's what we call a company-limiting decision.
Any self-driving system that can only work when in a major metropolitan area would completely eliminate the biggest, most important use of self-driving tech, which is to eliminate the need for drivers on long-haul trucking routes.
It is simply not realistic to believe that anyone would design a self-driving car system that is controlled from outside of the vehicle itself. That's why nobody is doing that. Nobody.
Note that self-driving cars do periodically use the Internet for things like asking for road condition updates, both to avoid closed roads and to alert it ahead of time about lane closures that might require special attention. None of that functionality, however, is life-critical, and any self-driving car must be able to cope without that information (both because it might not be kept up-to-date by local authorities and because the network might not always work). And in any case, that data communication is not continuous. A single data burst every couple of hours would likely be perfectly fine, and when you're talking about something that infrequent, you have a lot of opportunities to retry before it becomes important. That makes autonomous vehicle communications quite possibly the single least important data flowing over the Internet, priority-wise.
In other words, it's hard to imagine how you could possibly be more wrong.
No engineer in his/her right mind would ever even consider designing a self-driving car in such a way that it required instantaneous communication. There's too much potential for network failures even under ideal circumstances with a perfect signal, just from routing problems alone. And that's before you consider vehicles driving through tunnels, rain fade, spectrum congestion, deliberate interference, etc.
Basically, the FCC asked, as part of people's filings, to come up with ideas for innovation that would be made impossible without paid prioritization. As expected, Comcast tried, and as expected, failed.
Fundamentally, Internet service either works or it doesn't. If slowness causes something to fail, then the service doesn't work, and therefore the best that paid prioritization can do is give the customers the service that they paid for. If slowness does not cause something to fail, then paid prioritization serves no beneficial purpose.
Therefore, there is no plausible situation in which paid prioritization can possibly be beneficial to consumers. Period. At best, it can only increase the potential for consumer harm, and at worst, it is the direct cause of consumer harm.
Ah. Yeah, that makes a big difference. So ostensibly, this means that if all of the world production were diverted to that purpose, we'd hit full coverage about the same time we started having to replace panels. Well, that's slightly more plausible.:-)
I think you're low by at least an entire zero, and probably closer to two. If we could repurpose all the manufacturing on Earth to produce only high-efficiency solar panels and completely dry up the market for everything else, then your numbers would probably be in the ballpark. I prefer to look at production in terms of megawatt-hours-per-year-per-year.
According to Wikipedia, the projected total PV output for the entire world was projected to be around 400,000 Megawatt-Hours this year, growing by on the order of 80,000 MWh per year from the previous year, give or take (source: Wikipedia graph). Powering the United States would require on the order of 4 Billion (thousand million) Mwh. So by my math, this is about 10,000x as many PV cells as exist on the planet right now, given the current mix of energy density. And at that rate of manufacture/installation, it will take 50,000 years to get there, so even if we assume 50-year refresh (unrealistically long), that still means cranking up the industry's output by 1,000x. Continuously. Forever and ever. Just for the United States alone.
For watering down Obamacare at the insistence of Republicans.
The reason Obamacare is a train wreck is because the Republicans made it that way. For all their talk of the Democrats ramming it through, the reality is that the Democrats let the Republicans be involved in shaping that bill. The original plan was to have a single-payer system with a base-level public option that would have effectively cut the insurance companies off at the knees.
All of the failings of Obamacare—the insurance companies leaving the exchanges over cost, the insurance companies cranking up prices to extortionate levels, etc.—would not have happened under the original, Democrat plan. Had the Democrats rammed that through, the Republicans would still be pissing themselves, unable to find anything wrong with the plan. Instead, the Democrats chose to work across the aisle and created a bill that had fundamental structural problems, introduced by the Republicans so that that they would have cause to tear it down later.
So no, I wasn't mad at the Obama administration or the Democrats when they were in power (for two years), because they have never acted the way Republicans have. Democrats have never refused to let Republicans have a seat at the table, even when the result was something demonstrably worse as a result. And the only times that the Democrats have "rammed a bill through" have occurred as a direct result of Republicans locking arms and voting the way their party leadership told them to vote rather than voting based on what was best for their states, even after the Democrats made huge concessions to try to get Republican votes.
This is not to say that the Democrats don't engage in those sorts of politics to a limited degree, but arguing that they are equally bad in that regard is like saying that slapping somebody across the face is the same as shooting someone. The Republicans are much, much, much worse at outright rejecting the opinions of Democrats, they are much, much, much worse at compromise, and they are much, much, much worse when it comes to voting as a block of mindless drones instead of as individuals. So I'm mildly annoyed with the Democrats for their bad behavior, because it is mildly bad, and I'm furious at the Republicans for their bad behavior, because it is atrocious.
And lest you think this comes from a rabid Democrat, I've voted for both parties over the years, and I think both of our Democrat senators are terrible, and have voted against both of them consistently for the past decade.
Not even close. It can be summarized as "A content provider can pay for a fast lane as far as the backbone. From there, apart from short-term packet-type-based QoS prioritization, all traffic should be treated the same. And an end user who is paying X dollars to their ISP for Y amount of bandwidth should not get less bandwidth to some arbitrary content provider merely because that content provider refused to pay an extra 'protection fee' to the end user's ISP." This is critically important, because the alternative allows for nearly unlimited amounts of extortion. "You have a nice website, there. It would be a shame if something happened to half of your traffic."
Backbone providers must, out of necessity, negotiate peering agreements with edge network providers to allow more traffic through. When they need to provide more bandwidth, this may result in the end users of those edge networks (in this case, content providers) paying more money for their Internet service. However, those improvements in peering also improve speed for other companies that are connected to the same edge network, or at least enable the edge network to continue providing service at the rate that all of those companies are paying for. Either way, the backbone is a shared resource paid for by each ISP according to its use, and each edge ISP, in turn, charges its customers according to their use. Thus, each customer pays for his or her or its own connection, and nothing more. Netflix shouldn't have to pay for the cost of my connection to the backbone merely because I use their service, nor vice versa (except insofar as my subscription fee to Netflix indirectly helps pay for the cost of their connection to the backbone).
Yeah, see I think fruit fails as "medicine" not because it's preventative, but rather because I wouldn't call it a "drug or preparation".
Okay, how about orange juice, then.:-)
The point is that medicine is a bit like pornography. I don't know how to define it, but I'll know it when I see it.:-D
And lots of perfectly reasonable medicine is preventative in just the way you seem to be against. I have no qualms with, say, getting vaccinated - even for a disease that I'm very unlikely to encounter.
I guess you could call vaccines a medication—in my mind, that's kind of a different animal altogether—but either way, I wasn't attacking vaccines with that comment, but rather dubious uses of medicine, such as giving people antibiotics without reason to believe that they have a bacterial infection, giving people aspirin just in case they might otherwise have a heart attack, putting everybody with even slightly elevated blood pressure on statins, and other similarly egregious treatments that are typically about as likely to cause problems as to prevent them.
That said, in truth, that concern exists to some degree even for vaccines. Odds are good that if we vaccinated people against every possible virus, we would end up with way more allergies and autoimmune disorders, simply because the immune system would be looking for a lot more things and would attack them more rapidly. This is not to say that vaccines are bad—far from it. But the risks should still be carefully weighed when deciding whether the risk of death or serious consequences from an illness are high enough to warrant that incremental risk (in the aggregate), however slight it might be.
That's not really true, because the entity or entities that run that monopoly or duopoly own the wires, and any attempt to confiscate them with eminent domain would face a significant uphill battle, as I said in one of the other posts in this thread.
The word "prevention" in that definition is somewhat problematic, in that it you could stretch that to cover all sorts of things that most people wouldn't think of as medicine, e.g. citrus fruits. (If you don't eat at least a bit of citrus, you'll likely get gout.)
In general, medicine treats disease. When medicine is used prophylactically (e.g. giving Cipro to someone who you think might have been exposed to airborne anthrax), its actual purpose is still treating disease, just treating it before it becomes symptomatic. Prescribing medicine to prevent disease (e.g. giving antibiotics to perfectly healthy animals so they won't get sick) is almost invariably a very bad idea.:-)
Don't confuse "Free Market" with "Unregulated Market"! Even Adam Smith (the originator of the term "Free Market") understood that government regulation is nearly _always_ required to keep markets and trade free.
I don't disagree with that, but IMO, a regulated monopoly or duopoly, no matter how regulated, can never be a free market in any meaningful sense of the word, and we basically have a natural monopoly or duopoly for wire providers in pretty much all of the United States except for certain business-heavy areas.
Especially non-point infrastructure. It's less important for infrastructure that can be in one spot (like an airport or cell tower) than for infrastructure that is sprawling across the country (like roads, last-mile fiber, possibly backbone fiber).
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No, we understand that in theory, what you are saying is true. We also understand that:
Both of these are fairly fundamental limitations posed by the laws of physics, and no amount of prioritization—paid or otherwise—can ever hope to change them.
And again, as I've pointed out, even if somehow there could be some miraculous way for such a design to work reliably and fast enough to be usable, and even if we ignored the fact that it would be inherently inferior to a local mesh network, there would still be absolutely no sane reason for the FCC to allow a cellular company to charge money to the car company in exchange for getting the bits there faster. The cellular company should simply make the bits from all cars get there faster, non-preferentially, and slow down non-car traffic. There's no reason to allow what is at that point a basic consumer need to turn into a money grab between one company and another.
Several orders of magnitude better. For a server-based approach to work, you'd have, in the best case (read "not periodic HTTP polling"), tens of milliseconds to deliver the data to the server, tens of milliseconds to deliver the data back, plus hundreds of milliseconds (or more) for the server to look through all the cars in a list of geographically nearby vehicles to see if they're close enough to warrant sending the data to them. It would likely take only single-digit milliseconds for direct car-to-car communication. Even if it had to be relayed through multiple cars, it would still be an order of magnitude faster.
No, a paid fast lane is a fast path from the vehicle to the Internet backbone. From there, it would get the same priority as any other traffic.
Also, a paid fast lane is a fast path from vehicles of a specific company to the Internet backbone. Nothing in net neutrality laws would prevent companies from building a fast path from all vehicles to the backbone, if it were necessary for some specific critical purpose. The laws just say that A. the ISPs can't charge the car companies for giving priority to cars, and B. the ISPs can't give priority to traffic from Ford over traffic from Chevy in exchange for money. All traffic of a given type (e.g. vehicle navigation data, if you want to use that rather silly, highly latency-tolerant example) must get the same priority.
You keep using the word "real-time". I do not think it means what you think it does.
Real-time refers to something in which microseconds matter, not milliseconds, not seconds, not minutes, not hours. Your traffic data getting there ten seconds later won't affect you at all unless you just happen to be right before the last exit before the wreck when it first gets detected, in which case the additional data would pose at least as high a risk of you causing an accident trying to cut over at the last minute as it would of getting you to avoid the accident.
Besides, the first cars that come upon an accident usually don't have to slow down much anyway. It's the cars that are minutes away that need to start taking actions to avoid the accident. Delays of milliseconds don't matter in traffic data. Delays of minutes usually don't matter, at least in the aggregate. So traffic data is not an example of something that requires real-time communication by any stretch of the imagination. It requires, at most, a background-notification-caliber polling model, if that. Most navigation systems just use a radio receiver and get broadcasts from the transit agencies based on fixed RADAR stations. And that's good enough granularity to get the job done.
It is not patently absurd. It is accurate. The vehicle must be able to drive safely without external data, or it is not autonomous. The fact that it can do a better job of getting you there in a timely manner doesn't mean that it needs a high-priority channel.
More significantly, in most major cities, traffic data is broadcast on sidebands of various radio stations, and can be received by any device for which the user has paid the fairly cheap lifetime subscription fee. Because traffic data is available from permanent RADAR stations along the highway, the receipt of that information can be strictly one-directional, and is thus well suited to a broadcast system. This is not to say that you can't do it over the Internet, just that it isn't strictly necessary to do so. Thus, making a high-priority bidirectional channel available for getting information that can be just as easily obtained by adding a $25 traffic data receiver would be patently absurd.
And even if you want to go full-on-Waze-style, with real-time data gathering to pinpoint slow spots and try to route people around on side streets (which may or may not actually reduce your drive time, depending on lots of other factors that are hard to predict, such as traffic light timing), there's no reason to believe that self-driving cars would benefit from that data arriving faster, with lower latency, because overall traffic patterns don't change enough from one second to the next for latency to matter anyway—even if it the latency is on the order of tens of seconds, much less when it is on the order of single-digit seconds.
Traffic mapping is simply not a real-time task and never will be. Nothing associated with self-driving cars benefits from real-time performance except what is happening entirely inside the car—processing data from sensors—and perhaps communication with nearby cars in some situations (which must necessarily be direct, not just because of latency, but also because of the high complexity of figuring out what cars are near you on the server side and routing data appropriately, and also because of the high probability that your cars will get their data from different companies whose data centers are on opposite sides of the country from each other).
No, the sorts of tasks that benefit from prioritization are things like live audio and video streaming. And these things are readily identifiable by port numbers, QoS flags, etc. without any need to use paid prioritization to give higher priority for traffic to/from a single company. Remember, this is not about prioritization, but rather paid prioritization, whose sole purpose, by its very definition, is to give an advantage to traffic from specific companies that pay over others that don't.
That last bit is what Comcast is trying to make people forget. Paid prioritization is, by definition, anti-competitive.
Too bad the real-world latency for LTE, even if your traffic got maximum priority, would still be almost a third of a second just for the two cellular round-trips, which means you're still going to hit the pothole even if the server takes zero time to propagate the data from the server that car A is using to the server that car B is using (in a different data center) and even if your car just happens to poll its server at exactly the right millisecond, which it won't because it will poll only once every few minutes.
Realistically, self-driving cars can't assume data will be more current than O(minutes), and must be able to tolerate data that is O(hours) old. For handling sudden changes in road conditions, they have to rely on their own in-car sensors (and, where available, communication from nearby cars) to do the best they can. Anything else is just asking to be disappointed (or worse, dead). No fast lane to some server somewhere on the Internet can realistically solve any problems associated with self-driving car tech. Those other pieces of information might help it make smarter decisions farther ahead, resulting in better traffic flow, but if they're required for safety, then the self-driving tech is nowhere near ready to ship, because it means that safety depends on another, more capable vehicle having recently driven the road within a few minutes prior.
I would not be at all surprised if sharing photos amounts to sharing the URL for the photo, in effect, in which case it can be blocked merely by blocking the URL (assuming no HTTPS).
Everybody. Each company is responsible for repairing its own lines in the event of a big storm, just as has always been true. Your question doesn't make sense.
If they're not going to be a neutral pipe, they can't logically continue to have common carrier status and will be responsible for any child pornography transmitted through their servers.
ISPs are not common carriers until the Title II reclassification goes into effect (which the FCC is now trying to preempt). The laws preventing them from being liable have nothing to do with their becoming common carriers a few months from now.
You're certainly right about it being useful to prioritize traffic based on whether increased latency will affect usability. The part that is inherently anticompetitive is where you insert the word "paid" in there and prioritize one content provider's traffic over another instead of prioritizing one type of traffic over another.
I have yet to see anything even approaching a legitimate argument in favor of paid prioritization.
That's only half right. The Obama FCC declared fast lanes to be violations of their policy, along with (IIRC) zero-rating unless it was equally available to any company. This is part of what will get rolled back by losing Title II classification, so we'll likely be back to ISPs being allowed to do zero-rating preferentially for their own content.
Actually, it was Obama's FCC that reclassified them as common carriers (Title II) about two years ago. The current FCC commissioners want to roll that back, thus removing the anti-throttling regulations that could otherwise be used to force carriers to actually provide enough bandwidth for their competitors to compete.
IMO, it solves all of the most egregious problems. And I don't think it is an overreach. The purpose of Title II classification was historically to cover voice telephony. A large percentage of Internet users now do their voice telephony over broadband. Therefore, it is completely reasonable to treat the underlying broadband under Title II, as it would be impossible to enforce Title II on telephony companies without the underlying communication infrastructure being covered by similar laws.
Whoa there. I didn't call everyone stupid. I respect some people who disagree with the Title II reclassification. I just don't respect people who make patently absurd claims, like saying that self-driving cars won't be possible without paid prioritization (when, in fact, self-driving cars barely use the Internet at all; they don't need it).
In theory, you bet. The problem is that the FTC has been completely toothless for as long as I can remember. At least the FCC occasionally acts. :-)
I'm not going to dig into the problem of peering agreements and the way they've been set up, as that's not my area of expertise. Instead, I'll focus on the consumer problems.
The fundamental problem is that Internet service is a commodity. One provider that passes packets is as good as another, assuming they all provide the same quantity per unit time and with similar levels of quality. There are very narrow areas in which they can compete, mostly involving the amount of speed that they provide. So to provide any useful value-add, companies are forced to package unrelated services, such as cable TV, telephone, video-on-demand, etc. Because those services compete with other Internet services, but are almost always provided by servers within the company's network, those services are almost inherently less affected by network speeds than third-party services unless the providers take reasonable steps to ensure that services are not getting de facto throttled by insufficient external bandwidth.
The ideal solution would be to pass a federal broadband access act that creates an unfunded mandate for states to provide fiber to every home and business by a particular date, owned by the state, and leased to any ISP that wants to lease lines. This would create a huge flurry of competition that would largely negate the need for any sort of additional net neutrality regulation. But the cable and phone companies would never let such a law pass.
A slightly less ideal solution would be to take the leased line rules that currently apply only to telephone lines (IIRC) and extending them to all companies that own any communications infrastructure (whether fiber, coax, twisted pair, or cellular). Specifically, require that they make that infrastructure available to any ISP that wants to provide service, at a cost just above the cost of maintaining the wires. This would make it trivial to have proper competition in broadband. This would, of course, cause all of the existing ISPs to wet themselves, and they would find ways to guarantee that any such bill never saw the light of day
It is highly likely that you're wrong. And by highly likely, I mean absolutely certain. I can guarantee you with absolute certainty that no self-driving car system will ever be a centralized control system, because that would be fundamentally unsafe, for several reasons:
It is simply not realistic to believe that anyone would design a self-driving car system that is controlled from outside of the vehicle itself. That's why nobody is doing that. Nobody.
Note that self-driving cars do periodically use the Internet for things like asking for road condition updates, both to avoid closed roads and to alert it ahead of time about lane closures that might require special attention. None of that functionality, however, is life-critical, and any self-driving car must be able to cope without that information (both because it might not be kept up-to-date by local authorities and because the network might not always work). And in any case, that data communication is not continuous. A single data burst every couple of hours would likely be perfectly fine, and when you're talking about something that infrequent, you have a lot of opportunities to retry before it becomes important. That makes autonomous vehicle communications quite possibly the single least important data flowing over the Internet, priority-wise.
In other words, it's hard to imagine how you could possibly be more wrong.
No engineer in his/her right mind would ever even consider designing a self-driving car in such a way that it required instantaneous communication. There's too much potential for network failures even under ideal circumstances with a perfect signal, just from routing problems alone. And that's before you consider vehicles driving through tunnels, rain fade, spectrum congestion, deliberate interference, etc.
Basically, the FCC asked, as part of people's filings, to come up with ideas for innovation that would be made impossible without paid prioritization. As expected, Comcast tried, and as expected, failed.
Fundamentally, Internet service either works or it doesn't. If slowness causes something to fail, then the service doesn't work, and therefore the best that paid prioritization can do is give the customers the service that they paid for. If slowness does not cause something to fail, then paid prioritization serves no beneficial purpose.
Therefore, there is no plausible situation in which paid prioritization can possibly be beneficial to consumers. Period. At best, it can only increase the potential for consumer harm, and at worst, it is the direct cause of consumer harm.
Ah. Yeah, that makes a big difference. So ostensibly, this means that if all of the world production were diverted to that purpose, we'd hit full coverage about the same time we started having to replace panels. Well, that's slightly more plausible. :-)
I think you're low by at least an entire zero, and probably closer to two. If we could repurpose all the manufacturing on Earth to produce only high-efficiency solar panels and completely dry up the market for everything else, then your numbers would probably be in the ballpark. I prefer to look at production in terms of megawatt-hours-per-year-per-year.
According to Wikipedia, the projected total PV output for the entire world was projected to be around 400,000 Megawatt-Hours this year, growing by on the order of 80,000 MWh per year from the previous year, give or take (source: Wikipedia graph). Powering the United States would require on the order of 4 Billion (thousand million) Mwh. So by my math, this is about 10,000x as many PV cells as exist on the planet right now, given the current mix of energy density. And at that rate of manufacture/installation, it will take 50,000 years to get there, so even if we assume 50-year refresh (unrealistically long), that still means cranking up the industry's output by 1,000x. Continuously. Forever and ever. Just for the United States alone.
For watering down Obamacare at the insistence of Republicans.
The reason Obamacare is a train wreck is because the Republicans made it that way. For all their talk of the Democrats ramming it through, the reality is that the Democrats let the Republicans be involved in shaping that bill. The original plan was to have a single-payer system with a base-level public option that would have effectively cut the insurance companies off at the knees.
All of the failings of Obamacare—the insurance companies leaving the exchanges over cost, the insurance companies cranking up prices to extortionate levels, etc.—would not have happened under the original, Democrat plan. Had the Democrats rammed that through, the Republicans would still be pissing themselves, unable to find anything wrong with the plan. Instead, the Democrats chose to work across the aisle and created a bill that had fundamental structural problems, introduced by the Republicans so that that they would have cause to tear it down later.
So no, I wasn't mad at the Obama administration or the Democrats when they were in power (for two years), because they have never acted the way Republicans have. Democrats have never refused to let Republicans have a seat at the table, even when the result was something demonstrably worse as a result. And the only times that the Democrats have "rammed a bill through" have occurred as a direct result of Republicans locking arms and voting the way their party leadership told them to vote rather than voting based on what was best for their states, even after the Democrats made huge concessions to try to get Republican votes.
This is not to say that the Democrats don't engage in those sorts of politics to a limited degree, but arguing that they are equally bad in that regard is like saying that slapping somebody across the face is the same as shooting someone. The Republicans are much, much, much worse at outright rejecting the opinions of Democrats, they are much, much, much worse at compromise, and they are much, much, much worse when it comes to voting as a block of mindless drones instead of as individuals. So I'm mildly annoyed with the Democrats for their bad behavior, because it is mildly bad, and I'm furious at the Republicans for their bad behavior, because it is atrocious.
And lest you think this comes from a rabid Democrat, I've voted for both parties over the years, and I think both of our Democrat senators are terrible, and have voted against both of them consistently for the past decade.
Not even close. It can be summarized as "A content provider can pay for a fast lane as far as the backbone. From there, apart from short-term packet-type-based QoS prioritization, all traffic should be treated the same. And an end user who is paying X dollars to their ISP for Y amount of bandwidth should not get less bandwidth to some arbitrary content provider merely because that content provider refused to pay an extra 'protection fee' to the end user's ISP." This is critically important, because the alternative allows for nearly unlimited amounts of extortion. "You have a nice website, there. It would be a shame if something happened to half of your traffic."
Backbone providers must, out of necessity, negotiate peering agreements with edge network providers to allow more traffic through. When they need to provide more bandwidth, this may result in the end users of those edge networks (in this case, content providers) paying more money for their Internet service. However, those improvements in peering also improve speed for other companies that are connected to the same edge network, or at least enable the edge network to continue providing service at the rate that all of those companies are paying for. Either way, the backbone is a shared resource paid for by each ISP according to its use, and each edge ISP, in turn, charges its customers according to their use. Thus, each customer pays for his or her or its own connection, and nothing more. Netflix shouldn't have to pay for the cost of my connection to the backbone merely because I use their service, nor vice versa (except insofar as my subscription fee to Netflix indirectly helps pay for the cost of their connection to the backbone).
Okay, how about orange juice, then. :-)
The point is that medicine is a bit like pornography. I don't know how to define it, but I'll know it when I see it. :-D
I guess you could call vaccines a medication—in my mind, that's kind of a different animal altogether—but either way, I wasn't attacking vaccines with that comment, but rather dubious uses of medicine, such as giving people antibiotics without reason to believe that they have a bacterial infection, giving people aspirin just in case they might otherwise have a heart attack, putting everybody with even slightly elevated blood pressure on statins, and other similarly egregious treatments that are typically about as likely to cause problems as to prevent them.
That said, in truth, that concern exists to some degree even for vaccines. Odds are good that if we vaccinated people against every possible virus, we would end up with way more allergies and autoimmune disorders, simply because the immune system would be looking for a lot more things and would attack them more rapidly. This is not to say that vaccines are bad—far from it. But the risks should still be carefully weighed when deciding whether the risk of death or serious consequences from an illness are high enough to warrant that incremental risk (in the aggregate), however slight it might be.
That's not really true, because the entity or entities that run that monopoly or duopoly own the wires, and any attempt to confiscate them with eminent domain would face a significant uphill battle, as I said in one of the other posts in this thread.
What's your point? You aren't disagreeing with anything I said.
The word "prevention" in that definition is somewhat problematic, in that it you could stretch that to cover all sorts of things that most people wouldn't think of as medicine, e.g. citrus fruits. (If you don't eat at least a bit of citrus, you'll likely get gout.)
In general, medicine treats disease. When medicine is used prophylactically (e.g. giving Cipro to someone who you think might have been exposed to airborne anthrax), its actual purpose is still treating disease, just treating it before it becomes symptomatic. Prescribing medicine to prevent disease (e.g. giving antibiotics to perfectly healthy animals so they won't get sick) is almost invariably a very bad idea. :-)
I don't disagree with that, but IMO, a regulated monopoly or duopoly, no matter how regulated, can never be a free market in any meaningful sense of the word, and we basically have a natural monopoly or duopoly for wire providers in pretty much all of the United States except for certain business-heavy areas.
Especially non-point infrastructure. It's less important for infrastructure that can be in one spot (like an airport or cell tower) than for infrastructure that is sprawling across the country (like roads, last-mile fiber, possibly backbone fiber).