Gmail messages are encrypted from the time they leave a user's machine to the time they leave Google's infrastructure.
Horseshit. The message is not encrypted. It is cleartext travelling over encrypted channels. It is on their machines in the clear, which enables them to do things for you, like search and filter, and against you, like profiling you and anyone who sends you email.
The Koch brothers and friends are always bitching about the bottom 90% having a sense of entitlement for wanting to be able to afford health insurance when they work full time. I'm a lot more sick of the rich and their sense of entitlement to be a little richer, often with a little government intervention needed to get them there.
A control mechanism need not involve only limiting something (showing restraint). It may be active, and add to the process as well.
While I think you are absolutely correct for the majority in the short run, for the entire population in the long run, and for the economy in the short and long run, I think that solving the problems this study explores necessarily will have costs for at least some of the most affluent and powerful in the short run. If economic stratification really does contribute to collapse, and limiting stratification it is a necessary part of the solution, it's going to limit someone's short-run upside.
'You can't kid a kidder. Having been a lobbyist, he knows all their tricks,' says Blair Levin.
So this is what we've been reduced to? The disconsolate wish, having turned the regulatory body over to one of the kleptarchs, that he will discover not only his duty to society but also unbiased objectivity, and turn on his own? A ray of hope so thin strains my credulity.
Any decent engineer could probably put together a PID loop or two (possibly cascaded) to keep stability in the system, but what would you use as a control mechanism?
And what would you do if the most powerful and affluent had a great deal to lose if we attemped to put such controls in place? Suppose they had powerful PR machines, sharpened through years of product marketing and fierce political campaigns, at their disposal to sew disdain for those who advocate such restraint.
Our tax policies have made our most rapidly expanding market sector resemble the 1500s. I, for one, welcome our new economic lordship. Give most of the money to a very small number of people, and let them decide if and when to parcel it out through patronage, buying electric sports cars, and financing asteroid mining projects. Surely the broader income ranks wouldn't do any better with it. I mean, think about it; other than the 1950s to 1960s in America, when has a far more progressive tax policy ever been correlated with broad-based entrepreneurship, small business expansion, and a nation rising to superpower?
Young says the MP3 files we're all listening to actually are pretty poor from an audio-quality standpoint and only contains about five percent of the audio from an original recording.
Obviously Young doesn't understand The Coastline Paradox. At a sufficiently high resolution of measurement, a wave contains infinite information. Any finitely sized digital recording actually contains 0.00000% of the information in the original signal.
Of course, that's only if you include all the information that our brains are incapable of distinguishing. The interpretation of waves by our brains is an inherently fuzzy process, and beyond a certain resolution there is no perceptible difference between a flawed and a perfect recording (even if you had the equipment and sound room to produce a sufficiently high quality set of vibrations in the air to reliably communicate that tiny difference to your tympanic membrane (you don't)).
It's funny when the financial press mistakes MtGOX (Magic the Gathering Online Exchange, lest we forget) for "Mt. Gox", like it was a mountain or something.
It's funny when pretentious Slashdot posters trot out some half-understood fact to sound important. Mt. Gox has gone by "Mt. Gox" for quite some time on mtgox.com, on Wikipedia, and on Bitcoin Charts -- as well as in common use in Bitcoin forums.
taking $2.6 trillion from some and handing it back out to others.
Ummm, what else is the government supposed to do with the money? If it gave the money back to the same people who paid the taxes in the first place, it wouldn't make much sense, would it?
This year, 70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals, an all-time high.
Including medicare, medicaid, and Obamacare? So the payments for drugs and health care are counted as going directly to individuals. OK, and other than the military, what's left? Highways, schools, NASA, and the post office -- and we've been cutting all of those.
So in short, article is saying that taxes are money transfers (which they had better be, or they'd be really stupid), and that health care and social security are going up, and everything else but the military is getting cut. That's news?
Can someone explain to me how this sentence even makes sense?
I'll try, and I think if you genuinely try to understand, you will. It is similar to saying that you are exporting energy when you receive bauxite and ship refined aluminum. Refining aluminum uses a lot of energy in the same sense that growing grain "uses" water; by moving it from a useful concentrated form to a disperse and less usable form, some of which winds up being recovered at a later stage, often with an additional recapture cost. So the refined aluminum, in an economic system sense, "contains" a lot of energy, even though only a small part of the consumed energy remains stored in the refined product itself.
'Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease,' said Dr. Venter.
I'm not sure I believe that. It may be true on an individual level for a person with good health insurance in a first world country, but I bet for most people in the world it is the ability to afford and access the kind of advanced medical care that Dr. Venter will be researching. That observation, of course, leads to things like the quote from the article on Facebook meme evolution, "No one should die because they cannot afford health care and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree please post this as your status for the rest of the day." A noble sentiment, to be sure, but is it realistic?
Can we afford to pay for every life extending medical practice for every person? At current prices, I suspect we cannot. Even if we dedicated 100% of GDP to health care, I think we still could not afford every medical treatment that could extend the life of every person on Earth. And that assumes that paying 100% of GDP is sustainable. In practice, of course, doing so would lead to an economic collapse and we would be able to afford even less health care next year, causing more people to die unnecessarily, not fewer.
I suspect that we now have sufficiently advanced medical technology that the most powerful force limiting the ability of medical technology to prevent disease is that the majority of the world populace cannot afford the medical care we have already discovered -- in an absolute "there is not enough GDP, and would be less if we tried" sense.
After all, they ARE the customers for these features. Funding it out of government/law enforcement budgets accurately reflects the costs of the enforcement.
The government is not the final customer for anything. It only exists to do our bidding. While I agree with your distaste for this activity, it does not mean the government is some third party with its own money to throw around. It is our money and our laws. The cost of policing a product or service should be born by its consumers. Whether the regulation is sensible is a separate question. As a similar example, the highway patrol receives funding from various transportation taxes and licensing fees; unfunded mandates are simply a market-based approach to the same allocation of enforcement expenses to those who benefit from the market sector in question.
In this case the government is mandating they provide a new service, to them; a service which doesn't benefit, and in fact, actually directly harms the privacy which the public/customer (an overlapping set) pay for.
The government is not the final customer for anything. It only exists to do our bidding. While I agree with your distaste for this activity, it does not mean the government is some third party with its own money to throw around. It is our money and our laws. The cost of policing a product or service should be born by its consumers. Whether the regulation is sensible is a separate question. As a similar example, the highway patrol receives funding from various transportation taxes and licensing fees; unfunded mandates are simply a market-based approach to the same allocation of enforcement expenses to those who benefit from the market sector in question.
There are a lot of unfunded mandates. They're an efficient way to run a market economy. Here are a few examples: Automobile manufacturers are subject to an unfunded mandate to include seat belts, odometers, and speedometers in the cars they sell in the US. Electronics manufacturers are subject to unfunded mandates regarding EMF emmissions. Food manufacturers are subject to unfunded mandates for food safety and product labeling. In most cases it is far more market efficient for the cost of those things to be built into the price of the product, putting the price on the direct consumer of the regulated good, rather than on non-users of the product. It would be incredibly unjust to require taxpayers who do not use a given product to bear the cost of making that product in compliance with the law.
"...what will it take for general acceptance to finally take hold?"
For me? A reasonable belief that the recording will not become part of a centralized surveillance database of sightings of me and my fellow citizens that can be datamined decades from now. The same thing I want for ATM cameras, license plate scanners, and all the other increaslingly pervasive permanent, personally identifiable record systems. Reasonable expectation of privacy isn't just about whether I am concealed from perception, it is also about the reasonable belief that where I have been and what I've been doing will generally be forgotten if I'm not famous and it isn't criminal behavior or otherwise significantly offensive.
In short, I will become accepting when I believe the device shows the same degree of civil discretion and temporal fade that I would expect from a random stranger who sees me walk out of a strip club or hydroponics store (neither of which are my personal pecadillo, but the best I could come up with). I do not have that belief currently about Google Glass. It's the same motive that causes me to limit my use of Facebook (six logins of less than fifteen minutes each last year -- I counted). Problem with Google Glass is I can't choose when you are going to sacrifice my privacy to your corporate overlord's time- and GPS- stamped photo surveillance database.
If you had to change your pricing every 10 minutes how would you ever advertise anything?
Hmm, how could that possibly work? Let's ask a Slashdot user...
Would restaurants have dynamic menus with pricing that changes throughout the meal?
Got it in one. Most of it anyway. With unstable currencies, prices are updated rapidly and include a margin for risk. So there's a transaction cost that adds friction to the transaction when performed using that currency. If you've ever visited a small second or third world economy, you'd see it in action. I went to Indonesia during Suharto's last year, prices were volatile, exchange rates were written in chalk and updated all day long. US Dollars and Rupiah were both accepted most places, despite the rapidly changing exchange rate.
Phrases like "absolutely needed" rarely hold in economics. Everything is about relative value. Most supply and demand curves have an intersection, even if it's moving around rapidly. With a wide enough spread, every trade has a market.
My response would be that Netflix and Cogent aren't just sending unsolicited traffic to Verizon. It's Verizon's customers who're requesting the traffic by asking to stream video from Netflix.
That is a really strong counterpoint. Still, though, handling Netflix's bulk traffic really is cheaper than parcelling out to all the individual customers. But then I guess Verizon should just be charging their customers more if providing the service they want is expensive. Verizon isn't going after Netflix because it is impossible to bill the customer fairly. Verizon is going after Netflix because Netflix has deep pockets and Verizon wants an additional revenue stream on the back of their limited competition market, regardless of whether it is how a theoretical perfectly efficient free market would solve it. [feigned shock]Why, they're not capitalist idealists at all, this is just a money making thing![/feigned shock]
Cogent has an agreement with Verizon to exchange traffic â" which works fine until the massive amount of traffic from Netflix makes it a lopsided arrangement. Verizon wants more money from Cogent, and one of their negotiating tactics is simply to stop upgrading their infrastructure so that service degrades.
I'm a pretty rabid net neutrality guy, and as a disclaimer I've never worked for ISPs or long haul providers so I may have my head up my ass. But in this case, I'm tending to fall on the Verizon side of the argument. Peering is supposed to be a two-way street, and if it isn't, the peering is subject to negotiation. It may not be fair for Cogent to take the relatively easy money from giant, centralized Netflix outbound data handling and leave Verizon doing the more costly work of parcelling that data out to millions of endpoints without giving Verizon a piece of the action.
The problem of Verizon having a non-competitive (or reduced competition) supply of consumers to negotiate with is still there, and the outcome ultimately will be Netflix paying more for their connectivity, but at least the payment is being coupled to the right transaction.
The Pew Research Center and the Social Media Research Foundation analyzed thousands of twitter conversations going back to 2010.... 'These maps provide insights into people's behavior in a way that complements and expands on traditional research methods... '
It's a cookbook. Society is a fuzzy programmable machine, and we are rapidly advancing the science of computer aided psychological operations (CAPO). Widespread use of centralized insecure comm systems makes the research work really easy. Lambs to the slaughter.
DavidHumus notes "Maybe the bigger question is why is CEO pay so entirely disconnected from company performance?"
My question, if we're considering how we as a society should respond, is how changes in CEO pay and tax rates correlate to changes in the long-run GDP growth rate. If we're paying more and getting more, I'm all for it. If we're paying more and getting less, I'm opposed. If we decrease the high income tax rate, and lower the highest income tax bracket, and GDP growth rate increases, it is the right decision for society. If we do that and the GDP growth rate stays the same or falls, we are wasting money.
The nice thing is that we have good records going back to 1917, and from about 1950 to present we have both a steady change in tax policy (reducing the top income tax rate and lowering the top income tax bracket) and no major external shocks to the economy other than the OPEC crisis and attendant massive increase in the price of energy in the early 1970s. We can actually come up with a pretty solid estimate of this simple question: Are we getting our money's worth?
It's really the same question a restaurant owner asks himself when deciding how much to pay a dishwasher -- if I pay less, will I still get sufficiently clean dishes? If I pay more, will the dishes be enough cleaner to justify the expense? As a society we need to apply the same standard at the top brackets: to pay as little as we can while still getting the GDP performance we desire. Paying more than that is wasting money. Paying less than that is leaving GDP growth on the table. That is what we as a society care about, when it comes to allocating GDP -- maximizing the ROI.
The statement reads to me a lot like saber rattling. He basically says, "Remain neutral voluntarily, and don't challenge this next round of rules, or I will make you common carriers." That seems like an interesting approach. Mostly it kicks the can down the road, which is unfortunate since the cable and telco lobbies won't stop trying, but it does seem like it'll get the job done for now at least.
The last bullet point caught my attention:
6. Enhance competition. The Commission will look for opportunities to enhance Internet access competition. One obvious candidate for close examination was raised in Judge Silberman's separate opinion, namely legal restrictions on the ability of cities and towns to offer broadband services to consumers in their communities.
So is he saying, "Cut the crap with local ordinances prohibiting competition"? If so, big props to him. There are natural barriers to having sufficient competition for an efficient free market even under ideal conditions, but at least removing the fiat barriers would be nice.
Also: Beta is not an efficient interface for the primary authors of Slashdot's traffic generating content. Lean, static, and dense must remain a comment UI option or a big chunk of your content will disappear.
Just to be clear. You can pay UPS for priority shipping. They have several tiers of guarantees regarding transit time (standard, 2nd day, overnight, etc.) with different prices.
That's prioritization on a per-package basis, which ties the price difference to the individual shipment, not the sender or recipient.
What exactly would be wrong with ISPs having a "cheap but we'll throttle you first when load is high", and "expensive and unthrottled " tiers of service?
Nothing, if it is on the individual transaction. That's not what they've been talking about, though. They are talking about competing entities paying to be generally prioritized over their competitors.
It's more like an anti-theft service that when it thinks the laptop may have been stolen, it then turns on the camera to see who is using the laptop.
That would be me choosing to enlist my private sensors in a service that is specific to the use of those sensors. Two significant differences in this case: In the narrow sense, the user has not given informed consent to the use of his private sensors. In the broader sense, our society has not had a frank discussion about requiring access to a person's private sensors as a condition of the sale of an urelated product.
Slashdot Mirror
Gmail messages are encrypted from the time they leave a user's machine to the time they leave Google's infrastructure.
Horseshit. The message is not encrypted. It is cleartext travelling over encrypted channels. It is on their machines in the clear, which enables them to do things for you, like search and filter, and against you, like profiling you and anyone who sends you email.
Good to know England is once again fighting to keep the world safe from those who advocate the violent overthrow of the lawful government.
SoA bitching about Google
Google bitching about copyright
Apple bitching about Samsung
Microsoft and Google bitching about each other
Sprint ripping off the warrantless surveillance program
University of Phoenix poisoning the student loan program
The Koch brothers and friends are always bitching about the bottom 90% having a sense of entitlement for wanting to be able to afford health insurance when they work full time. I'm a lot more sick of the rich and their sense of entitlement to be a little richer, often with a little government intervention needed to get them there.
A control mechanism need not involve only limiting something (showing restraint). It may be active, and add to the process as well.
While I think you are absolutely correct for the majority in the short run, for the entire population in the long run, and for the economy in the short and long run, I think that solving the problems this study explores necessarily will have costs for at least some of the most affluent and powerful in the short run. If economic stratification really does contribute to collapse, and limiting stratification it is a necessary part of the solution, it's going to limit someone's short-run upside.
'You can't kid a kidder. Having been a lobbyist, he knows all their tricks,' says Blair Levin.
So this is what we've been reduced to? The disconsolate wish, having turned the regulatory body over to one of the kleptarchs, that he will discover not only his duty to society but also unbiased objectivity, and turn on his own? A ray of hope so thin strains my credulity.
Any decent engineer could probably put together a PID loop or two (possibly cascaded) to keep stability in the system, but what would you use as a control mechanism?
And what would you do if the most powerful and affluent had a great deal to lose if we attemped to put such controls in place? Suppose they had powerful PR machines, sharpened through years of product marketing and fierce political campaigns, at their disposal to sew disdain for those who advocate such restraint.
"May you live in interesting times."
Our tax policies have made our most rapidly expanding market sector resemble the 1500s. I, for one, welcome our new economic lordship. Give most of the money to a very small number of people, and let them decide if and when to parcel it out through patronage, buying electric sports cars, and financing asteroid mining projects. Surely the broader income ranks wouldn't do any better with it. I mean, think about it; other than the 1950s to 1960s in America, when has a far more progressive tax policy ever been correlated with broad-based entrepreneurship, small business expansion, and a nation rising to superpower?
Young says the MP3 files we're all listening to actually are pretty poor from an audio-quality standpoint and only contains about five percent of the audio from an original recording.
Obviously Young doesn't understand The Coastline Paradox. At a sufficiently high resolution of measurement, a wave contains infinite information. Any finitely sized digital recording actually contains 0.00000% of the information in the original signal.
Of course, that's only if you include all the information that our brains are incapable of distinguishing. The interpretation of waves by our brains is an inherently fuzzy process, and beyond a certain resolution there is no perceptible difference between a flawed and a perfect recording (even if you had the equipment and sound room to produce a sufficiently high quality set of vibrations in the air to reliably communicate that tiny difference to your tympanic membrane (you don't)).
Or, more succinctly: Extreme audiophilia is bunk.
It's funny when the financial press mistakes MtGOX (Magic the Gathering Online Exchange, lest we forget) for "Mt. Gox", like it was a mountain or something.
It's funny when pretentious Slashdot posters trot out some half-understood fact to sound important. Mt. Gox has gone by "Mt. Gox" for quite some time on mtgox.com, on Wikipedia, and on Bitcoin Charts -- as well as in common use in Bitcoin forums.
taking $2.6 trillion from some and handing it back out to others.
Ummm, what else is the government supposed to do with the money? If it gave the money back to the same people who paid the taxes in the first place, it wouldn't make much sense, would it?
This year, 70% of all the money the federal government spends will be in the form of direct payments to individuals, an all-time high.
Including medicare, medicaid, and Obamacare? So the payments for drugs and health care are counted as going directly to individuals. OK, and other than the military, what's left? Highways, schools, NASA, and the post office -- and we've been cutting all of those.
So in short, article is saying that taxes are money transfers (which they had better be, or they'd be really stupid), and that health care and social security are going up, and everything else but the military is getting cut. That's news?
an eye-opening fact
Maybe if you're retarded.
Can someone explain to me how this sentence even makes sense?
I'll try, and I think if you genuinely try to understand, you will. It is similar to saying that you are exporting energy when you receive bauxite and ship refined aluminum. Refining aluminum uses a lot of energy in the same sense that growing grain "uses" water; by moving it from a useful concentrated form to a disperse and less usable form, some of which winds up being recovered at a later stage, often with an additional recapture cost. So the refined aluminum, in an economic system sense, "contains" a lot of energy, even though only a small part of the consumed energy remains stored in the refined product itself.
'Your age is your No. 1 risk factor for almost every disease,' said Dr. Venter.
I'm not sure I believe that. It may be true on an individual level for a person with good health insurance in a first world country, but I bet for most people in the world it is the ability to afford and access the kind of advanced medical care that Dr. Venter will be researching. That observation, of course, leads to things like the quote from the article on Facebook meme evolution, "No one should die because they cannot afford health care and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree please post this as your status for the rest of the day." A noble sentiment, to be sure, but is it realistic?
Can we afford to pay for every life extending medical practice for every person? At current prices, I suspect we cannot. Even if we dedicated 100% of GDP to health care, I think we still could not afford every medical treatment that could extend the life of every person on Earth. And that assumes that paying 100% of GDP is sustainable. In practice, of course, doing so would lead to an economic collapse and we would be able to afford even less health care next year, causing more people to die unnecessarily, not fewer.
I suspect that we now have sufficiently advanced medical technology that the most powerful force limiting the ability of medical technology to prevent disease is that the majority of the world populace cannot afford the medical care we have already discovered -- in an absolute "there is not enough GDP, and would be less if we tried" sense.
1st amendment has been limited for hundreds of years ... no releasing classified info
You are mistaken. See The Pentagon Papers and Daniel Ellsberg as the iconic example case.
After all, they ARE the customers for these features. Funding it out of government/law enforcement budgets accurately reflects the costs of the enforcement.
The government is not the final customer for anything. It only exists to do our bidding. While I agree with your distaste for this activity, it does not mean the government is some third party with its own money to throw around. It is our money and our laws. The cost of policing a product or service should be born by its consumers. Whether the regulation is sensible is a separate question. As a similar example, the highway patrol receives funding from various transportation taxes and licensing fees; unfunded mandates are simply a market-based approach to the same allocation of enforcement expenses to those who benefit from the market sector in question.
In this case the government is mandating they provide a new service, to them; a service which doesn't benefit, and in fact, actually directly harms the privacy which the public/customer (an overlapping set) pay for.
The government is not the final customer for anything. It only exists to do our bidding. While I agree with your distaste for this activity, it does not mean the government is some third party with its own money to throw around. It is our money and our laws. The cost of policing a product or service should be born by its consumers. Whether the regulation is sensible is a separate question. As a similar example, the highway patrol receives funding from various transportation taxes and licensing fees; unfunded mandates are simply a market-based approach to the same allocation of enforcement expenses to those who benefit from the market sector in question.
an unfunded mandate
There are a lot of unfunded mandates. They're an efficient way to run a market economy. Here are a few examples: Automobile manufacturers are subject to an unfunded mandate to include seat belts, odometers, and speedometers in the cars they sell in the US. Electronics manufacturers are subject to unfunded mandates regarding EMF emmissions. Food manufacturers are subject to unfunded mandates for food safety and product labeling. In most cases it is far more market efficient for the cost of those things to be built into the price of the product, putting the price on the direct consumer of the regulated good, rather than on non-users of the product. It would be incredibly unjust to require taxpayers who do not use a given product to bear the cost of making that product in compliance with the law.
"...what will it take for general acceptance to finally take hold?"
For me? A reasonable belief that the recording will not become part of a centralized surveillance database of sightings of me and my fellow citizens that can be datamined decades from now. The same thing I want for ATM cameras, license plate scanners, and all the other increaslingly pervasive permanent, personally identifiable record systems. Reasonable expectation of privacy isn't just about whether I am concealed from perception, it is also about the reasonable belief that where I have been and what I've been doing will generally be forgotten if I'm not famous and it isn't criminal behavior or otherwise significantly offensive.
In short, I will become accepting when I believe the device shows the same degree of civil discretion and temporal fade that I would expect from a random stranger who sees me walk out of a strip club or hydroponics store (neither of which are my personal pecadillo, but the best I could come up with). I do not have that belief currently about Google Glass. It's the same motive that causes me to limit my use of Facebook (six logins of less than fifteen minutes each last year -- I counted). Problem with Google Glass is I can't choose when you are going to sacrifice my privacy to your corporate overlord's time- and GPS- stamped photo surveillance database.
If you had to change your pricing every 10 minutes how would you ever advertise anything?
Hmm, how could that possibly work? Let's ask a Slashdot user...
Would restaurants have dynamic menus with pricing that changes throughout the meal?
Got it in one. Most of it anyway. With unstable currencies, prices are updated rapidly and include a margin for risk. So there's a transaction cost that adds friction to the transaction when performed using that currency. If you've ever visited a small second or third world economy, you'd see it in action. I went to Indonesia during Suharto's last year, prices were volatile, exchange rates were written in chalk and updated all day long. US Dollars and Rupiah were both accepted most places, despite the rapidly changing exchange rate.
Phrases like "absolutely needed" rarely hold in economics. Everything is about relative value. Most supply and demand curves have an intersection, even if it's moving around rapidly. With a wide enough spread, every trade has a market.
My response would be that Netflix and Cogent aren't just sending unsolicited traffic to Verizon. It's Verizon's customers who're requesting the traffic by asking to stream video from Netflix.
That is a really strong counterpoint. Still, though, handling Netflix's bulk traffic really is cheaper than parcelling out to all the individual customers. But then I guess Verizon should just be charging their customers more if providing the service they want is expensive. Verizon isn't going after Netflix because it is impossible to bill the customer fairly. Verizon is going after Netflix because Netflix has deep pockets and Verizon wants an additional revenue stream on the back of their limited competition market, regardless of whether it is how a theoretical perfectly efficient free market would solve it. [feigned shock]Why, they're not capitalist idealists at all, this is just a money making thing![/feigned shock]
Cogent has an agreement with Verizon to exchange traffic â" which works fine until the massive amount of traffic from Netflix makes it a lopsided arrangement. Verizon wants more money from Cogent, and one of their negotiating tactics is simply to stop upgrading their infrastructure so that service degrades.
I'm a pretty rabid net neutrality guy, and as a disclaimer I've never worked for ISPs or long haul providers so I may have my head up my ass. But in this case, I'm tending to fall on the Verizon side of the argument. Peering is supposed to be a two-way street, and if it isn't, the peering is subject to negotiation. It may not be fair for Cogent to take the relatively easy money from giant, centralized Netflix outbound data handling and leave Verizon doing the more costly work of parcelling that data out to millions of endpoints without giving Verizon a piece of the action.
The problem of Verizon having a non-competitive (or reduced competition) supply of consumers to negotiate with is still there, and the outcome ultimately will be Netflix paying more for their connectivity, but at least the payment is being coupled to the right transaction.
The Pew Research Center and the Social Media Research Foundation analyzed thousands of twitter conversations going back to 2010. ... 'These maps provide insights into people's behavior in a way that complements and expands on traditional research methods ... '
It's a cookbook. Society is a fuzzy programmable machine, and we are rapidly advancing the science of computer aided psychological operations (CAPO). Widespread use of centralized insecure comm systems makes the research work really easy. Lambs to the slaughter.
DavidHumus notes "Maybe the bigger question is why is CEO pay so entirely disconnected from company performance?"
My question, if we're considering how we as a society should respond, is how changes in CEO pay and tax rates correlate to changes in the long-run GDP growth rate. If we're paying more and getting more, I'm all for it. If we're paying more and getting less, I'm opposed. If we decrease the high income tax rate, and lower the highest income tax bracket, and GDP growth rate increases, it is the right decision for society. If we do that and the GDP growth rate stays the same or falls, we are wasting money.
The nice thing is that we have good records going back to 1917, and from about 1950 to present we have both a steady change in tax policy (reducing the top income tax rate and lowering the top income tax bracket) and no major external shocks to the economy other than the OPEC crisis and attendant massive increase in the price of energy in the early 1970s. We can actually come up with a pretty solid estimate of this simple question: Are we getting our money's worth?
It's really the same question a restaurant owner asks himself when deciding how much to pay a dishwasher -- if I pay less, will I still get sufficiently clean dishes? If I pay more, will the dishes be enough cleaner to justify the expense? As a society we need to apply the same standard at the top brackets: to pay as little as we can while still getting the GDP performance we desire. Paying more than that is wasting money. Paying less than that is leaving GDP growth on the table. That is what we as a society care about, when it comes to allocating GDP -- maximizing the ROI.
The statement reads to me a lot like saber rattling. He basically says, "Remain neutral voluntarily, and don't challenge this next round of rules, or I will make you common carriers." That seems like an interesting approach. Mostly it kicks the can down the road, which is unfortunate since the cable and telco lobbies won't stop trying, but it does seem like it'll get the job done for now at least.
The last bullet point caught my attention:
6. Enhance competition. The Commission will look for opportunities to enhance Internet access competition. One obvious candidate for close examination was raised in Judge Silberman's separate opinion, namely legal restrictions on the ability of cities and towns to offer broadband services to consumers in their communities.
So is he saying, "Cut the crap with local ordinances prohibiting competition"? If so, big props to him. There are natural barriers to having sufficient competition for an efficient free market even under ideal conditions, but at least removing the fiat barriers would be nice.
Also: Beta is not an efficient interface for the primary authors of Slashdot's traffic generating content. Lean, static, and dense must remain a comment UI option or a big chunk of your content will disappear.
Just to be clear. You can pay UPS for priority shipping. They have several tiers of guarantees regarding transit time (standard, 2nd day, overnight, etc.) with different prices.
That's prioritization on a per-package basis, which ties the price difference to the individual shipment, not the sender or recipient.
What exactly would be wrong with ISPs having a "cheap but we'll throttle you first when load is high", and "expensive and unthrottled " tiers of service?
Nothing, if it is on the individual transaction. That's not what they've been talking about, though. They are talking about competing entities paying to be generally prioritized over their competitors.
It's more like an anti-theft service that when it thinks the laptop may have been stolen, it then turns on the camera to see who is using the laptop.
That would be me choosing to enlist my private sensors in a service that is specific to the use of those sensors. Two significant differences in this case: In the narrow sense, the user has not given informed consent to the use of his private sensors. In the broader sense, our society has not had a frank discussion about requiring access to a person's private sensors as a condition of the sale of an urelated product.