Let's assume you could get $10 per resident in payments from your "customers" -- that's $350,000k per year.
Is that even enough to pay for the networking gear and integration necessary to implement your filtering? Management/monitoring/configuration?
It seems like making it worthwhile would require $100 per resident, and I don't see how large vendors (Netflix) would ever pay that much for a relatively small population, and it's too much for niche sites for whom your residents are a larger portion of their customer base.
It would be one thing if it was a single site, but you're talking multiple sites all over the country. That's a lot of BS for the return on your investment.
I'd no more want to pay $2k for a run of fiber than I'd want to pay $10k to pave the roads from my driveway to the corner.
This is why a municipal model makes more sense. The municipality should build and own a dark network. A contractor should be hired to operate and maintain the infrastructure at a fixed profit margin and excluded from offering any services on the network.
Access to the network could be leased out to providers like ISPs and cable providers.
The best part is that it could be paid for with low-interest municipal bonding instead of trying to do it as some kind of absurdly expensive one-time cash payment.
I'm not convinced the Republican Party "of old" was ever all that much better although I could be swayed by the idea that they're a lot more brazen in their willingness to embrace just about any corporate proposal. I'm especially unconvinced the Democrats are any better,
Lame duck like Obama, you'd hope he'd use the FCC/FTC/Justice department to lean on the cable companies, block their merger attempts, get the DoJ to issue opinions in favor of municipal broadband and raise anti-trust investigations over market interference and monopoly behavior regarding things like Netflix paying twice for transit. He's not running again, let Hillary sell her own soul to big telecom to claim she'l undo his executive actions or make the Republicans waste their political capital defending the cable company.
I think the only hope in this situation is municipal infrastructure. Get the cities or counties to build a dark fiber network and lease it out to any and all that want to sell services on it. The information superhighway is a tired cliche, but the road/network analogy is true and there's no reason we can't think of roads/fiber as the same concept. City owns the roads, service providers buy the vehicles and sell their services.
In theory cable companies should be behind this -- cut them out of all that infrastructure to maintain, let the taxpayers do it and just provide the programming. It won't be rent-seeking money but their overhead goes down a lot.
Would the NSA be bold enough to physically interdict trucks? Guys with badges and guns tell you they need something in your truck, tell you you never saw them and by the way, driver Fred, you did a nice job on that new downstairs bathroom, tile job looks real professional, I'll bet your wife and daughter really like how nice it is there.
Or is it even remotely practical to identify specific package/truck combinations?
I can only guess that the NBA has talked to their attorneys and found out their ability to strip Sterling of his ownership was more complicated and expensive than they thought, compounded by the fact that I think its tied up with his wife and their divorce proceedings. At a minimum Sterling is very rich, very old and probably willing to make it very expensive for the NBA to force his hand. If it's uncertain you will prevail against an adversary capable and likely willing to throw $250 million at lawyers to defeat you, you give in. Even if they would have ultimately won, Sterling could have cost the league many millions and years to achieve their goal.
The upshot being Sterling could demand whatever he wanted to sell the team. The NBA, wanting to be rid of Sterling, was probably more than willing to greenlight a sale to the right buyer -- someone of standing who also had no problem financing the buyout.
There was talk of A-list black celebrities buying the team, but that kind of financing gets complicated -- I don't think any of them individually have the kind of cash to finance a buyout easily, requiring a complex partnership/investment ownership which I think most sports leagues don't favor. I'd also guess that even if a single buyer in this category could have financed this solo (Oprah's net is sub-$3 billion, but probably highly illiquid) they would then be facing a lot of negative PR for agreeing to any terms of Sterling's.
I'd also guess that the NBA may have also agreed to some kind of long-term bump in TV money to offset Ballmer's price tag. This way Ballmer actually pays less for the team while not making it look like the NBA was being forced to buy Sterling out at his price, which would have been negative PR, making them look like they were capitulating to him.
The best idea seems to be not a false flag operation but a false motive operation; the motive not being to compromise TrueCrypt but to sow distrust/disuse of TrueCrypt because it's too good and makes essentially unbreakable encryption of computers possible. Intelligence agencies must run into all the time, it's trivial, portable and very flexible to use.
Pushing users to another encryption scheme leaves data vulnerable, either through known weaknesses in other systems or compromises built into other products.
I can only assume that the only reason the developer(s) haven't spoken out is that they were pressured by the government somehow.
It's an interesting idea, but if you raise the evidentiary bar you raise the cost of litigating civil cases. The higher cost would probably also increase damage awards, necessary for individual plaintiffs to pursue cases with more rigorous evidence requirements. You could actually end up making it more lucrative for trial lawyers by increasing the total amount they receive or cause them to increase the percentage of settlement monies they claim, which also impacts plaintiffs who would obtain less relief through smaller net judgements after legal fees.
There's also the chilling effect it could have on individual civil plaintiffs -- if the evidentiary standard is higher, many people may be discouraged from seeking relief in the courts because they would be even more unable to compete against deep-pocketed adversaries.
I was at the vet and watched/held my poor old dog as she was euthanized. I was glad to see it happen as she was sick and suffering. Sad to lose my dog, happy she didn't suffer any further.
I also have done a bit of bird hunting and have broken the necks of more than few pheasants who didn't die immediately. I may enjoy shooting and eating them, but I don't want to see them suffer, either.
Not sure about the USA, but veterinary graduates in the UK have the highest suicide rate of any discipline. It turns out that most people who go into the subject do so because they like animals, and much of the job of a qualified vey (especially a newly qualified vet) involves killing animals. With that in mind, a career in IT doesn't sound so bad.
And as it turns out, much of the job of new CompSci grads involves killing application systems and designing database entry screens. The question isn't why is the suicide rate so high for veterinarians, but why isn't it higher for CompSci grads?
But it seems extremely unfair to punish him for private comments, especially those recorded surreptitiously.
I also think if you went to any country club where guys of his wealth and general age congregate you would find that nearly all of them would probably have the same kinds of opinions as Sterling.
I can't help but think if I was as rich and as old as he is I might just decide to see how much money the NBA wanted to spend fighting with me.
I'm pretty sure for Twitter this all boils down to money and investors and the usual capitalist bullshit, which seems kind of sad.
But it also seems predictable, because has public speech other than the soapbox in a park or printing your own newspaper ever been truly uncensored? Or has some kind of censorship always prevailed, whether it was relatively benign (and occasionally insidious) decorum, popularity/lack of popularity, commercial, or even the more onerous state/institutional imposed?
It'd be nice to see Twitter stand up against censorship, especially the particularly noxious kind imposed with a mixture of religious ignorance and state authority.
Merely supplying some kind of forum site centered on the product where users can gather has value. It's a bonus when they don't sanitize the content to bury problems and hide discontent; I've found that quite often if the product isn't complete crap, they're sort of self-regulating and total whiners get ignored by normal participants even.
Maybe it is a way to cut corners on support, but what kind of support were you really expecting -- a product development engineer dropping everything to figure out your issue? That doesn't exist except at the highest priced support levels for the largest enterprises and products, and even then you are just as likely to get steered into a hall of mirrors of consultants and local partners who just want to bill more. In almost all cases the alternative to Forum-centric support is bad telephone support and a weak knowledge base, at least from the vendor. If you're lucky there may be a third party site that helps, but often this just fragments knowledge across zillions of similar sites.
And it's not like supplying a reasonable forum is free, either. It takes software, hardware, hosting, administration and those cost money. I'll take the hive mind of other users over what the alternative is for the same money, which is like one one additional FTE -- an overworked, underpaid, clueless phone support drone.
It seems like it should be easy with either one drug or two at most.
There seems to be dozens of drugs used for anesthesia that should work for a single drug. When I've had surgery it seems like "count backwards from 10" gets me to about 8.5 before I'm out. And at that point they could just inject enough after that to kill you.
Even if they had to use two drugs, again there's plenty that would make you unconscious and they could inject nasty stuff to finish you off.
It's not like TWC/Comcast has to rip out and replace any cabling, the existing infrastructure (yes, copper) works well for speeds up to what Google Fiber is offering and more (100Mbps - 1Gbps). Even at current speeds (1-10Mbps), there is PLENTY of headroom for most people, Netflix doesn't take more than a few hundred kbps per stream.
My guess is that Comcast IS worried about ripping out cable or extensively expanding infrastructure. Coax only has so much bandwidth and I would bet that Comcast is starting to look at a zero-sum situation where keeping IP service at reasonable performance levels for their fairly high bandwidth levels will mean limits on what video services they can supply -- removing channels, fewer PPV/on-demand services, etc.
In my experience Netflix HD streams are in excess of 1 Mbit/sec -- maybe 2-3, depending on the title, time of day, etc.
It's not like Comcast couldn't fix it (fewer homes per single coax, more bandwidth in the distribution network, etc), but those cost money without delivering any incremental revenue or reducing revenue from their services or carrying fewer channels.
Assuming you've got a track record as a top-notch white hat hacker and security guy and you had some unique experience/skill mix that the FBI really felt they needed, would they just kind of put up with it, maybe/especially if you lived in a state like Colorado or had a medical card in California?
How do companies like Apple/Oracle/Google/MS/Amazon handle it in California now? My first hand experience and everything I've read in the media makes pot seem pretty well accepted in California and there's certainly a counter-culture kind of attitude among a lot of technology people. If you get recruited to Google because you're something special, do they give you a piss test and then tell you they won't hire you?
That worked once in Cuba. After the Dominican Republic, Panama and Grenada the track record of that kind of strategy looks like poking the wrong end of the 82nd Airborne.
I would assume that whatever the NSA is doing to this equipment must make hardware changes. If reflashing with new IOS loads "fixed" NSA compromises, I would expect it wouldn't be a very successful program as firmware upgrades would close the back doors.
They must be making changes to hardware in some way that are transparent to IOS and possibly not even visible to someone doing field replacement of internal modules.
It's kind of crummy they do it at all, but it would be pretty fascinating to see how they are able to backdoor this equipment in a way that survives firmware flashing and doesn't add mystery daughterboards to the equipment. Given that it's also network equipment typically implemented by people who are smarter than the average bear, it's also interesting how they manage to configure remote access into the equipment without being detected and accommodating the actual premise configurations.
That we all continue to pay for the latest-and-greatest no matter what for ever and ever? Smartphones are plateauing, like any other technology.
I think some people will, there seems to be a lot of opportunity for improvements in technology and platform-specific development even if cheap phones seem good enough for some specific set of circumstances.
By keeping payloads lighter you could get more range. You could have it fly via GPS and land a fair distance from the border.
A kilo of heroin is worth $50-80,000. If they could get 3 miles inside the border on GPS guidance, I would imagine the cartels might even consider a fleet of $10k drones to be a single-use disposable item if they could get each one to move a kilo of heroin totally undetected.
Why would I ever buy into any idea someone is selling who is in the business of selling services based on that same idea? Isn't this just a sales pitch with a smart-ass insult thrown in to gain some kind of attention?
As far as I can tell this is just a rear guard action to defend their current capacities and preserve as much capacity for high-margin value-add services.
Anything that doesn't involve caps and forced slowdowns of Internet services will result in complaints from consumers who say they aren't getting their advertised speeds. My guess is that the pace of consumption is trending towards not just 20 Mbit service dropping to 15 Mbit at peak times but 20 Mbit dropping to sub-5 Mbit which would force them to give up bandwidth they would like to reserve for their own services, or even more costly infrastructure upgrades.
The principal problem with last-mile companies like Comcast is that the real money for them is in value-add services, not in providing high speed IP connectivity. They don't want to supply network connectivity that will allow people to choose a competitive product.
The only solution to this that actually solves anything is some kind of anti-trust action that forces ISPs out of the content-service business completely. There is just too much conflict of interest for ISPs who supply content.
...and upgrades they are currently planning that would be put on the chopping block with common carrier status. Be specific. Tell us EXACTLY what new innovations and upgrades you will be forced to cancel because of this.
I can only imagine the math is something like:
"We have Z mbits of bandwidth per customer with current infrastructure. We want to use 80% of that for our value-add services like our own streaming and on-demand services. The remaining 20% is for end-user internet access and we've already oversold that by 50%".
I can only imagine the "innovation" and "upgrades" they will lose out on are their own, internal revenue-generating uses designed to supplant third party services like Netflix/Amazon/iTunes.
I don't think for a minute that they are designing and planning any kind of bandwidth/capacity upgrades designed for general-purpose end-user internet access. Any increases in network capacity or bandwidth (if there are any at all) are strictly reserved for in-house high-margin media consumption services they want to sell, cap-free and un-shaped to their subscribers while they cap and shape Netflix et al into a stuttering, low-res wasteland.
It'd be nice if the EV-only range was better than 37 miles (75 would cover about 80% of my use cases, and I drive more than just a round-trip commute), but the idea that you can have a car that is pluggable electric but is limited only in range by the fuel in the tank is appealing.
I just don't know why they haven't put a diesel in the Volt.
For many use cases, USB3 seems fast enough but it seems inadequate in some ways.
Will we ever have "universal" connectivity system? Ie, will USB 4 have ports on the motherboard for drives and the drives themselves having USB 4 ports? Enough bandwidth to drive 4k displays (with maybe the display itself having some of the GPU logic)? Supported by "enterprise" software for things like OS-defined RAID or usable as a storage bus for VMware (or even just as a normal bootable drive for Windows)?
It seems like no matter how fast USB gets, it still ends up short on support for a range of useful tasks which end up falling to other interfaces -- SATA, SAS, DisplayPort/HDMI, etc.
Potential do-it-all replacement interfaces like Thunderbolt seem superior, but then lack ubiquity or seem to suffer from overreach, offering too much that complicates their adoption or makes them too expensive for ordinary tasks.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's assume you could get $10 per resident in payments from your "customers" -- that's $350,000k per year.
Is that even enough to pay for the networking gear and integration necessary to implement your filtering? Management/monitoring/configuration?
It seems like making it worthwhile would require $100 per resident, and I don't see how large vendors (Netflix) would ever pay that much for a relatively small population, and it's too much for niche sites for whom your residents are a larger portion of their customer base.
It would be one thing if it was a single site, but you're talking multiple sites all over the country. That's a lot of BS for the return on your investment.
I'd no more want to pay $2k for a run of fiber than I'd want to pay $10k to pave the roads from my driveway to the corner.
This is why a municipal model makes more sense. The municipality should build and own a dark network. A contractor should be hired to operate and maintain the infrastructure at a fixed profit margin and excluded from offering any services on the network.
Access to the network could be leased out to providers like ISPs and cable providers.
The best part is that it could be paid for with low-interest municipal bonding instead of trying to do it as some kind of absurdly expensive one-time cash payment.
I'm not convinced the Republican Party "of old" was ever all that much better although I could be swayed by the idea that they're a lot more brazen in their willingness to embrace just about any corporate proposal. I'm especially unconvinced the Democrats are any better,
Lame duck like Obama, you'd hope he'd use the FCC/FTC/Justice department to lean on the cable companies, block their merger attempts, get the DoJ to issue opinions in favor of municipal broadband and raise anti-trust investigations over market interference and monopoly behavior regarding things like Netflix paying twice for transit. He's not running again, let Hillary sell her own soul to big telecom to claim she'l undo his executive actions or make the Republicans waste their political capital defending the cable company.
I think the only hope in this situation is municipal infrastructure. Get the cities or counties to build a dark fiber network and lease it out to any and all that want to sell services on it. The information superhighway is a tired cliche, but the road/network analogy is true and there's no reason we can't think of roads/fiber as the same concept. City owns the roads, service providers buy the vehicles and sell their services.
In theory cable companies should be behind this -- cut them out of all that infrastructure to maintain, let the taxpayers do it and just provide the programming. It won't be rent-seeking money but their overhead goes down a lot.
Would the NSA be bold enough to physically interdict trucks? Guys with badges and guns tell you they need something in your truck, tell you you never saw them and by the way, driver Fred, you did a nice job on that new downstairs bathroom, tile job looks real professional, I'll bet your wife and daughter really like how nice it is there.
Or is it even remotely practical to identify specific package/truck combinations?
I can only guess that the NBA has talked to their attorneys and found out their ability to strip Sterling of his ownership was more complicated and expensive than they thought, compounded by the fact that I think its tied up with his wife and their divorce proceedings. At a minimum Sterling is very rich, very old and probably willing to make it very expensive for the NBA to force his hand. If it's uncertain you will prevail against an adversary capable and likely willing to throw $250 million at lawyers to defeat you, you give in. Even if they would have ultimately won, Sterling could have cost the league many millions and years to achieve their goal.
The upshot being Sterling could demand whatever he wanted to sell the team. The NBA, wanting to be rid of Sterling, was probably more than willing to greenlight a sale to the right buyer -- someone of standing who also had no problem financing the buyout.
There was talk of A-list black celebrities buying the team, but that kind of financing gets complicated -- I don't think any of them individually have the kind of cash to finance a buyout easily, requiring a complex partnership/investment ownership which I think most sports leagues don't favor. I'd also guess that even if a single buyer in this category could have financed this solo (Oprah's net is sub-$3 billion, but probably highly illiquid) they would then be facing a lot of negative PR for agreeing to any terms of Sterling's.
I'd also guess that the NBA may have also agreed to some kind of long-term bump in TV money to offset Ballmer's price tag. This way Ballmer actually pays less for the team while not making it look like the NBA was being forced to buy Sterling out at his price, which would have been negative PR, making them look like they were capitulating to him.
The best idea seems to be not a false flag operation but a false motive operation; the motive not being to compromise TrueCrypt but to sow distrust/disuse of TrueCrypt because it's too good and makes essentially unbreakable encryption of computers possible. Intelligence agencies must run into all the time, it's trivial, portable and very flexible to use.
Pushing users to another encryption scheme leaves data vulnerable, either through known weaknesses in other systems or compromises built into other products.
I can only assume that the only reason the developer(s) haven't spoken out is that they were pressured by the government somehow.
It's an interesting idea, but if you raise the evidentiary bar you raise the cost of litigating civil cases. The higher cost would probably also increase damage awards, necessary for individual plaintiffs to pursue cases with more rigorous evidence requirements. You could actually end up making it more lucrative for trial lawyers by increasing the total amount they receive or cause them to increase the percentage of settlement monies they claim, which also impacts plaintiffs who would obtain less relief through smaller net judgements after legal fees.
There's also the chilling effect it could have on individual civil plaintiffs -- if the evidentiary standard is higher, many people may be discouraged from seeking relief in the courts because they would be even more unable to compete against deep-pocketed adversaries.
Oh please.
I was at the vet and watched/held my poor old dog as she was euthanized. I was glad to see it happen as she was sick and suffering. Sad to lose my dog, happy she didn't suffer any further.
I also have done a bit of bird hunting and have broken the necks of more than few pheasants who didn't die immediately. I may enjoy shooting and eating them, but I don't want to see them suffer, either.
Not sure about the USA, but veterinary graduates in the UK have the highest suicide rate of any discipline. It turns out that most people who go into the subject do so because they like animals, and much of the job of a qualified vey (especially a newly qualified vet) involves killing animals. With that in mind, a career in IT doesn't sound so bad.
And as it turns out, much of the job of new CompSci grads involves killing application systems and designing database entry screens. The question isn't why is the suicide rate so high for veterinarians, but why isn't it higher for CompSci grads?
Sure, he's a jerk and something of a racist.
But it seems extremely unfair to punish him for private comments, especially those recorded surreptitiously.
I also think if you went to any country club where guys of his wealth and general age congregate you would find that nearly all of them would probably have the same kinds of opinions as Sterling.
I can't help but think if I was as rich and as old as he is I might just decide to see how much money the NBA wanted to spend fighting with me.
I'm pretty sure for Twitter this all boils down to money and investors and the usual capitalist bullshit, which seems kind of sad.
But it also seems predictable, because has public speech other than the soapbox in a park or printing your own newspaper ever been truly uncensored? Or has some kind of censorship always prevailed, whether it was relatively benign (and occasionally insidious) decorum, popularity/lack of popularity, commercial, or even the more onerous state/institutional imposed?
It'd be nice to see Twitter stand up against censorship, especially the particularly noxious kind imposed with a mixture of religious ignorance and state authority.
But I can't say I'm surprised at all.
Merely supplying some kind of forum site centered on the product where users can gather has value. It's a bonus when they don't sanitize the content to bury problems and hide discontent; I've found that quite often if the product isn't complete crap, they're sort of self-regulating and total whiners get ignored by normal participants even.
Maybe it is a way to cut corners on support, but what kind of support were you really expecting -- a product development engineer dropping everything to figure out your issue? That doesn't exist except at the highest priced support levels for the largest enterprises and products, and even then you are just as likely to get steered into a hall of mirrors of consultants and local partners who just want to bill more. In almost all cases the alternative to Forum-centric support is bad telephone support and a weak knowledge base, at least from the vendor. If you're lucky there may be a third party site that helps, but often this just fragments knowledge across zillions of similar sites.
And it's not like supplying a reasonable forum is free, either. It takes software, hardware, hosting, administration and those cost money. I'll take the hive mind of other users over what the alternative is for the same money, which is like one one additional FTE -- an overworked, underpaid, clueless phone support drone.
It seems like it should be easy with either one drug or two at most.
There seems to be dozens of drugs used for anesthesia that should work for a single drug. When I've had surgery it seems like "count backwards from 10" gets me to about 8.5 before I'm out. And at that point they could just inject enough after that to kill you.
Even if they had to use two drugs, again there's plenty that would make you unconscious and they could inject nasty stuff to finish you off.
It's not like TWC/Comcast has to rip out and replace any cabling, the existing infrastructure (yes, copper) works well for speeds up to what Google Fiber is offering and more (100Mbps - 1Gbps). Even at current speeds (1-10Mbps), there is PLENTY of headroom for most people, Netflix doesn't take more than a few hundred kbps per stream.
My guess is that Comcast IS worried about ripping out cable or extensively expanding infrastructure. Coax only has so much bandwidth and I would bet that Comcast is starting to look at a zero-sum situation where keeping IP service at reasonable performance levels for their fairly high bandwidth levels will mean limits on what video services they can supply -- removing channels, fewer PPV/on-demand services, etc.
In my experience Netflix HD streams are in excess of 1 Mbit/sec -- maybe 2-3, depending on the title, time of day, etc.
It's not like Comcast couldn't fix it (fewer homes per single coax, more bandwidth in the distribution network, etc), but those cost money without delivering any incremental revenue or reducing revenue from their services or carrying fewer channels.
Assuming you've got a track record as a top-notch white hat hacker and security guy and you had some unique experience/skill mix that the FBI really felt they needed, would they just kind of put up with it, maybe/especially if you lived in a state like Colorado or had a medical card in California?
How do companies like Apple/Oracle/Google/MS/Amazon handle it in California now? My first hand experience and everything I've read in the media makes pot seem pretty well accepted in California and there's certainly a counter-culture kind of attitude among a lot of technology people. If you get recruited to Google because you're something special, do they give you a piss test and then tell you they won't hire you?
We've stopped doing all those things and now look at the mess we're in.
Peggy, get your skirt back on, get me some ice and pour me a drink.
That worked once in Cuba. After the Dominican Republic, Panama and Grenada the track record of that kind of strategy looks like poking the wrong end of the 82nd Airborne.
I would assume that whatever the NSA is doing to this equipment must make hardware changes. If reflashing with new IOS loads "fixed" NSA compromises, I would expect it wouldn't be a very successful program as firmware upgrades would close the back doors.
They must be making changes to hardware in some way that are transparent to IOS and possibly not even visible to someone doing field replacement of internal modules.
It's kind of crummy they do it at all, but it would be pretty fascinating to see how they are able to backdoor this equipment in a way that survives firmware flashing and doesn't add mystery daughterboards to the equipment. Given that it's also network equipment typically implemented by people who are smarter than the average bear, it's also interesting how they manage to configure remote access into the equipment without being detected and accommodating the actual premise configurations.
That we all continue to pay for the latest-and-greatest no matter what for ever and ever? Smartphones are plateauing, like any other technology.
I think some people will, there seems to be a lot of opportunity for improvements in technology and platform-specific development even if cheap phones seem good enough for some specific set of circumstances.
By keeping payloads lighter you could get more range. You could have it fly via GPS and land a fair distance from the border.
A kilo of heroin is worth $50-80,000. If they could get 3 miles inside the border on GPS guidance, I would imagine the cartels might even consider a fleet of $10k drones to be a single-use disposable item if they could get each one to move a kilo of heroin totally undetected.
...film at 11.
Why would I ever buy into any idea someone is selling who is in the business of selling services based on that same idea? Isn't this just a sales pitch with a smart-ass insult thrown in to gain some kind of attention?
As far as I can tell this is just a rear guard action to defend their current capacities and preserve as much capacity for high-margin value-add services.
Anything that doesn't involve caps and forced slowdowns of Internet services will result in complaints from consumers who say they aren't getting their advertised speeds. My guess is that the pace of consumption is trending towards not just 20 Mbit service dropping to 15 Mbit at peak times but 20 Mbit dropping to sub-5 Mbit which would force them to give up bandwidth they would like to reserve for their own services, or even more costly infrastructure upgrades.
The principal problem with last-mile companies like Comcast is that the real money for them is in value-add services, not in providing high speed IP connectivity. They don't want to supply network connectivity that will allow people to choose a competitive product.
The only solution to this that actually solves anything is some kind of anti-trust action that forces ISPs out of the content-service business completely. There is just too much conflict of interest for ISPs who supply content.
...and upgrades they are currently planning that would be put on the chopping block with common carrier status. Be specific. Tell us EXACTLY what new innovations and upgrades you will be forced to cancel because of this.
I can only imagine the math is something like:
"We have Z mbits of bandwidth per customer with current infrastructure. We want to use 80% of that for our value-add services like our own streaming and on-demand services. The remaining 20% is for end-user internet access and we've already oversold that by 50%".
I can only imagine the "innovation" and "upgrades" they will lose out on are their own, internal revenue-generating uses designed to supplant third party services like Netflix/Amazon/iTunes.
I don't think for a minute that they are designing and planning any kind of bandwidth/capacity upgrades designed for general-purpose end-user internet access. Any increases in network capacity or bandwidth (if there are any at all) are strictly reserved for in-house high-margin media consumption services they want to sell, cap-free and un-shaped to their subscribers while they cap and shape Netflix et al into a stuttering, low-res wasteland.
It'd be nice if the EV-only range was better than 37 miles (75 would cover about 80% of my use cases, and I drive more than just a round-trip commute), but the idea that you can have a car that is pluggable electric but is limited only in range by the fuel in the tank is appealing.
I just don't know why they haven't put a diesel in the Volt.
For many use cases, USB3 seems fast enough but it seems inadequate in some ways.
Will we ever have "universal" connectivity system? Ie, will USB 4 have ports on the motherboard for drives and the drives themselves having USB 4 ports? Enough bandwidth to drive 4k displays (with maybe the display itself having some of the GPU logic)? Supported by "enterprise" software for things like OS-defined RAID or usable as a storage bus for VMware (or even just as a normal bootable drive for Windows)?
It seems like no matter how fast USB gets, it still ends up short on support for a range of useful tasks which end up falling to other interfaces -- SATA, SAS, DisplayPort/HDMI, etc.
Potential do-it-all replacement interfaces like Thunderbolt seem superior, but then lack ubiquity or seem to suffer from overreach, offering too much that complicates their adoption or makes them too expensive for ordinary tasks.