Not to actually cite authority or anything, but American ISPs are not common carriers and really haven't been since Brand X when the Supreme Court said the FCC was free to consider broadband providers as "information service providers" rather than "telecommunications service providers." The FCC did so and deemed cable and DSL both as information service providers. As a telecom service provider, they would be subject to common carrier rules. As information service providers, they're not common carriers, but the FCC can still regulate them a little if they want to through their ancillary authority. Mostly, Brand X stands for a general move to deregulate broadband. Or open it up to regulation outside the FCC, not that other agencies have done a lot to take them up on that.
I appreciate the positive feedback. The reason I was focused on the female side was because that was the focus of the thread, but it wasn't intended to indicate that I didn't see problems with how society treats the other side too.
and yet few housewives are happy to do all the chores. - I really can't speak for the rest of my sex on that topic. I was just pointing out that *in theory* a setup where the original paradigm was maintained wouldn't cause the same level of conflict as the current paradigm shift with which we're currently contending.
It seems like we're pretty much in agreement on the social issues here actually. It's just a pretty contentious issue in general. The lack of support in the workplace for men who want to focus on family is an excellent illustration of the continuing inequality.
and yet when women are teamed up with men they complain that they can't relate or that the workplace is male dominated. - I worked in a big corporate office before going to law school, and my mentor was a male who had advanced far in his profession by working hard and being dedicated to a superior work product. I'd like to think that my choice wasn't because the workplace was male-dominated, but that because this particular male was one that I connected with on a professional level and who understood my goals and priorities. There were plenty of middle-to-upper management women around (and yes, they often had a lot of young women who went to them for mentorship), but a mentorship to me is a lot more than sharing reproductive capacity. So, while I can't speak for all other women, I for one would be fine with being paired with more men during interviews. I'm interested in a career, not a job to make money until baby season.
My general take away from this exchange is that men and women are both still struggling with the holdovers from an outdated paradigm, with working women being expected to earn a salary AND be a wife and mother and keep the house in order, and working men being expected to earn a salary as a replacement for actually being involved in their children's lives, with few if any options for taking time off of work to focus on family obligations. So everyone is getting shafted and will continue to be shafted until the employers shift their own views of the roles of men and women OUTSIDE of the work environment. Does that sound about like our middle ground?
Honestly, I agree that men need to be given credit for doing more work on the family level. If either do it, they're taking on twice the work. If both do it, they're splitting these duties between themselves. I've just had too many classes of reading feminist lit lately, so criticism of society's prevailing winds was on the forefront, and it was not intended as a slight against men who contribute more at home.
It seems that the dominant paradigm from about 50 years ago was that the man would contribute to the home by bringing in salary and the woman would contribute to the home by doing domestic work. My point was simply that a shift where both parties are now expected to contribute to the home by bringing in salary should also be accompanied by a shift in how the parties share the domestic work. By the same token, if the couple is NOT doing the two-income-household thing, there's theoretically no problem with a choice of the salaried party to focus on career and a choice of the non-salaried party to focus on domestic matters. As a female law student, I found it insulting for interviewing law firms to always make it a point to pair female candidates with female attorneys so they can talk about maternity leave and work/life balance and options for going part time in the future when the female candidate decides to have children. I may or may not go that route, but I don't like having that assumption in front of me right off the bat. I don't have any way of knowing how male candidates are interacted with during interviews though. So my serious question for you (as, I assume, a male in a demanding profession): Are companies discussing family emphasis with young male candidates to the same extent that they discuss it with young female candidates? If not, do you think they should?
Sorry, I don't mean to bring the discussion back on topic or anything, but a lack of females at the top of the law profession was one of the other things mentioned briefly in the linked article, and my experience as an interviewee brought that to mind again.
This is pretty astute. The only thing I would add is that this whole "equality" thing in today's society really just means that women are expected to do *twice* the work, because they ARE generally expected to contribute to the household income nowadays. Work-life balance is a pretty atrocious phrase that you almost never hear said to (or by) MALE applicants for a demanding job. Balance schmalance. That's just a fancy way of saying she gets to juggle a full time job in an office with a full time job as a homemaker and mother and whatever else (because Dear Hubby is so tired after a hard day's work that he couldn't possibly help with chores).
As the weirdo who's actually obsessively following the actual progress of the bill text, February 11th was after it didn't get into the Senate version. Feinstein was still trying to get it into the final version when the Senate and House met to work out a compromise to get the REAL final version of the bill done so they could vote on it and send it to Obama. The meeting finished late last night on 2/13. I haven't been able to find the updated bill text *anywhere*, so I was happy as hell when I saw this posting. Until I scrolled down to the next to last page and saw that the PDF was the version from when the House passed the initial pre-Senate version on 1/28.
So yeah, the lack of Feinstein language in that PDF means nothing. The reason there wouldn't be any Feinstein language in that version of the bill was because that's the version from BEFORE the Senate got their hands on it.
Don't breathe yet, this ISN'T the final version.
on
Net Neutrality Still Lives
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Sorry guys, no fly. Try gpoaccess.gov instead - the new version isn't listed there yet either. They just agreed on a final version late last night (2/13), and that version ain't it. The linked PDF file is signed at the bottom. That's the version that the House passed on January 28th (open access language + semi-codification of the FCC internet policy statement) which is different from the version that the Senate passed on February 10th.
As an amendment now that I'm not rushing to get my yammering done before class starts, one quick correction. When I looked a little closer at the language, I realized that Feinstein is trying to say "deterring illegal activity" is a reasonable network management practice within the use of the term as used in the Internet Policy Statement (which doesn't include a definition, but the fact that they treated 'reasonable network management' and legality separately suggests that the two aren't meant to overlap like that). That in itself is a logical fallacy, because "network management" shouldn't apply to more than bandwidth and physical resources, and so yes, broadening the definition of "network management" to implicitly include "content management" is completely ridiculous.
But the whole thing? Still ain't net neutrality.
I have devoted the last five months to researching the FCC decision on Comcast's network management practics, net neutrality, and the FCC in general. That Register article is the most obnoxiously WRONG thing I have read in quite a while on this.
First off, "reasonable network management practices" was not Comcast's language. It was the FCC's in their 2005 Internet Policy Statement. The Internet Policy Statement, by the way, is NOT a bad thing, and is very pro-"net neutrality" - it's just not really enforceable at this point because it's just a "policy statement" and not a rule. Second, net neutrality language was put into section 6002 of the version of the house bill (which, from what I understand from the context of the article, is what Feinstein was looking to amend). Section 6002 would codify (that's legalese for "make into law") the FCC's Internet Policy Statement, and the relevant section of 6002 basically says "If you're using government funds to expand broadband internet access to underserved areas, you can't engage in discriminatory network management practices, and you have to abide by the principles in the FCC's Internet Policy Statement." Go to gpoaccess.gov, search for 111 hr 1. Politics ain't pretty, but it ain't impossible to understand either, if people would stop misreporting things.
It's 3 pages, so it's not like I'm saying "Go read the FCC's order distributing Adelphia's assets between Comcast and Time Warner." Or really, anything the FCC puts out that isn't a consent decree or a policy statement. Who has time to read 180 pages anyway (other than a lawyer...)? But as a shortcut, here's the big stuff in those 3 pages for the purposes of this post:
The four principles in paragraph 4 include "To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice." Two of the remaining three principles reference law enforcement and legality. The fourth includes the phrase "consumers are entitled to competition among network providers,
application and service providers, and content providers," which I would say goes to the heart of the *real* net neutrality debate, since it would also preclude access tiering that would give content providers faster service based on how much $$ they put down, and that in turn would harm competition between content providers.
Second sentence in footnote 15 of the Internet Policy Statement: "The principles we adopt are subject to reasonable network management."
Sorry guys, Feinstein's not the enemy here. The reason that amendment wouldn't fly isn't because it's OMG STRICT. It's because it's completely redundant of what is already IN the language of the bill. Those things are illegal, therefore if you brought a claim to the FCC because Comcast cut off your service, even if the FCC followed its Internet Policy Statement to the letter (REMINDER: That policy statement what the telecom section of the stimulus bill would implement as federal law), it already wouldn't protect you from "discrimination" by your broadband provider when you download/upload 25 gigs of copyrighted content over the course of a week. If anything, Feinstein's language would be lighter, because it's only applying "reasonable network management" language to illegal activity. The Internet policy statement applies "reasonable network management" discretion to ALL activity.
Sorry, I've written the better part of 50 pages on this exact topic as it is, so you guys are getting off light if I'm just saying THIS much about it.
Quit rambling about your unfounded theories here....we all know damn well that no amount of tequila or diamonds could cause any girl to sleep with a Slashdot reader.
Are female slashdot readers similarly doomed to a life of non-sleep-withing-ness? Serious empirical question here. Just, you know, with artificial words thrown in.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to actually cite authority or anything, but American ISPs are not common carriers and really haven't been since Brand X when the Supreme Court said the FCC was free to consider broadband providers as "information service providers" rather than "telecommunications service providers." The FCC did so and deemed cable and DSL both as information service providers. As a telecom service provider, they would be subject to common carrier rules. As information service providers, they're not common carriers, but the FCC can still regulate them a little if they want to through their ancillary authority. Mostly, Brand X stands for a general move to deregulate broadband. Or open it up to regulation outside the FCC, not that other agencies have done a lot to take them up on that.
I appreciate the positive feedback. The reason I was focused on the female side was because that was the focus of the thread, but it wasn't intended to indicate that I didn't see problems with how society treats the other side too.
It seems like we're pretty much in agreement on the social issues here actually. It's just a pretty contentious issue in general. The lack of support in the workplace for men who want to focus on family is an excellent illustration of the continuing inequality.
and yet when women are teamed up with men they complain that they can't relate or that the workplace is male dominated. - I worked in a big corporate office before going to law school, and my mentor was a male who had advanced far in his profession by working hard and being dedicated to a superior work product. I'd like to think that my choice wasn't because the workplace was male-dominated, but that because this particular male was one that I connected with on a professional level and who understood my goals and priorities. There were plenty of middle-to-upper management women around (and yes, they often had a lot of young women who went to them for mentorship), but a mentorship to me is a lot more than sharing reproductive capacity. So, while I can't speak for all other women, I for one would be fine with being paired with more men during interviews. I'm interested in a career, not a job to make money until baby season.
My general take away from this exchange is that men and women are both still struggling with the holdovers from an outdated paradigm, with working women being expected to earn a salary AND be a wife and mother and keep the house in order, and working men being expected to earn a salary as a replacement for actually being involved in their children's lives, with few if any options for taking time off of work to focus on family obligations. So everyone is getting shafted and will continue to be shafted until the employers shift their own views of the roles of men and women OUTSIDE of the work environment. Does that sound about like our middle ground?
It seems that the dominant paradigm from about 50 years ago was that the man would contribute to the home by bringing in salary and the woman would contribute to the home by doing domestic work. My point was simply that a shift where both parties are now expected to contribute to the home by bringing in salary should also be accompanied by a shift in how the parties share the domestic work. By the same token, if the couple is NOT doing the two-income-household thing, there's theoretically no problem with a choice of the salaried party to focus on career and a choice of the non-salaried party to focus on domestic matters. As a female law student, I found it insulting for interviewing law firms to always make it a point to pair female candidates with female attorneys so they can talk about maternity leave and work/life balance and options for going part time in the future when the female candidate decides to have children. I may or may not go that route, but I don't like having that assumption in front of me right off the bat. I don't have any way of knowing how male candidates are interacted with during interviews though. So my serious question for you (as, I assume, a male in a demanding profession): Are companies discussing family emphasis with young male candidates to the same extent that they discuss it with young female candidates? If not, do you think they should?
Sorry, I don't mean to bring the discussion back on topic or anything, but a lack of females at the top of the law profession was one of the other things mentioned briefly in the linked article, and my experience as an interviewee brought that to mind again.
This reminds me of this entry from a short while back. The whiny marketing major makes you feel a bit better about the narcissistic entitlement you encounter with developers, huh?
This is pretty astute. The only thing I would add is that this whole "equality" thing in today's society really just means that women are expected to do *twice* the work, because they ARE generally expected to contribute to the household income nowadays. Work-life balance is a pretty atrocious phrase that you almost never hear said to (or by) MALE applicants for a demanding job. Balance schmalance. That's just a fancy way of saying she gets to juggle a full time job in an office with a full time job as a homemaker and mother and whatever else (because Dear Hubby is so tired after a hard day's work that he couldn't possibly help with chores).
As the weirdo who's actually obsessively following the actual progress of the bill text, February 11th was after it didn't get into the Senate version. Feinstein was still trying to get it into the final version when the Senate and House met to work out a compromise to get the REAL final version of the bill done so they could vote on it and send it to Obama. The meeting finished late last night on 2/13. I haven't been able to find the updated bill text *anywhere*, so I was happy as hell when I saw this posting. Until I scrolled down to the next to last page and saw that the PDF was the version from when the House passed the initial pre-Senate version on 1/28. So yeah, the lack of Feinstein language in that PDF means nothing. The reason there wouldn't be any Feinstein language in that version of the bill was because that's the version from BEFORE the Senate got their hands on it.
Sorry guys, no fly. Try gpoaccess.gov instead - the new version isn't listed there yet either. They just agreed on a final version late last night (2/13), and that version ain't it. The linked PDF file is signed at the bottom. That's the version that the House passed on January 28th (open access language + semi-codification of the FCC internet policy statement) which is different from the version that the Senate passed on February 10th.
As an amendment now that I'm not rushing to get my yammering done before class starts, one quick correction. When I looked a little closer at the language, I realized that Feinstein is trying to say "deterring illegal activity" is a reasonable network management practice within the use of the term as used in the Internet Policy Statement (which doesn't include a definition, but the fact that they treated 'reasonable network management' and legality separately suggests that the two aren't meant to overlap like that). That in itself is a logical fallacy, because "network management" shouldn't apply to more than bandwidth and physical resources, and so yes, broadening the definition of "network management" to implicitly include "content management" is completely ridiculous. But the whole thing? Still ain't net neutrality.
First off, "reasonable network management practices" was not Comcast's language. It was the FCC's in their 2005 Internet Policy Statement. The Internet Policy Statement, by the way, is NOT a bad thing, and is very pro-"net neutrality" - it's just not really enforceable at this point because it's just a "policy statement" and not a rule. Second, net neutrality language was put into section 6002 of the version of the house bill (which, from what I understand from the context of the article, is what Feinstein was looking to amend). Section 6002 would codify (that's legalese for "make into law") the FCC's Internet Policy Statement, and the relevant section of 6002 basically says "If you're using government funds to expand broadband internet access to underserved areas, you can't engage in discriminatory network management practices, and you have to abide by the principles in the FCC's Internet Policy Statement." Go to gpoaccess.gov, search for 111 hr 1. Politics ain't pretty, but it ain't impossible to understand either, if people would stop misreporting things.
This is the FCC's Internet Policy Statement from 2005.
It's 3 pages, so it's not like I'm saying "Go read the FCC's order distributing Adelphia's assets between Comcast and Time Warner." Or really, anything the FCC puts out that isn't a consent decree or a policy statement. Who has time to read 180 pages anyway (other than a lawyer...)? But as a shortcut, here's the big stuff in those 3 pages for the purposes of this post:
The four principles in paragraph 4 include "To encourage broadband deployment and preserve and promote the open and interconnected nature of the public Internet, consumers are entitled to access the lawful Internet content of their choice." Two of the remaining three principles reference law enforcement and legality. The fourth includes the phrase "consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers," which I would say goes to the heart of the *real* net neutrality debate, since it would also preclude access tiering that would give content providers faster service based on how much $$ they put down, and that in turn would harm competition between content providers.
Second sentence in footnote 15 of the Internet Policy Statement: "The principles we adopt are subject to reasonable network management."
Sorry guys, Feinstein's not the enemy here. The reason that amendment wouldn't fly isn't because it's OMG STRICT. It's because it's completely redundant of what is already IN the language of the bill. Those things are illegal, therefore if you brought a claim to the FCC because Comcast cut off your service, even if the FCC followed its Internet Policy Statement to the letter (REMINDER: That policy statement what the telecom section of the stimulus bill would implement as federal law), it already wouldn't protect you from "discrimination" by your broadband provider when you download/upload 25 gigs of copyrighted content over the course of a week. If anything, Feinstein's language would be lighter, because it's only applying "reasonable network management" language to illegal activity. The Internet policy statement applies "reasonable network management" discretion to ALL activity.
Sorry, I've written the better part of 50 pages on this exact topic as it is, so you guys are getting off light if I'm just saying THIS much about it.
Quit rambling about your unfounded theories here....we all know damn well that no amount of tequila or diamonds could cause any girl to sleep with a Slashdot reader.
Are female slashdot readers similarly doomed to a life of non-sleep-withing-ness? Serious empirical question here. Just, you know, with artificial words thrown in.