If you want to rage about farmers getting too much unwarranted subsidies, make sure you focus the anger on the big corporate farms because they're the one's that have Congress's ear. About the only benefit small farmer's have seen is the relatively recent sustained rise in corn prices due to the OP's point. The small farmer subsidy era largely went away during the Reagan Administration and has never returned. If you want to check your "fax", look at how many family farms went under in the 80's and the farm bill provisions before, during, and after that time.
It looks to me like the only benefit small farmers have seen is a surplus of apostrophes.
My demand of the incoming Congress: End wasteful punctuation subsidies now!
How is this "unlimited consumer lawsuits from unlimited plaintiffs!"? What I see in this article is a substantial but limited number of lawsuits from one plaintiff.
San Francisco-based Balsam has been wielding a one-man crusade against e-mail marketers he alleges run afoul of federal and state anti-spamming laws...
if it fails in a way that you never thought possible, how would you write an error message that describes the failure?
By putting error messages in a ton of places you don't expect an error to arise, just in case (i.e. places where you expect the input to have been sanitized, add error messages for unsanitized input; places where you expect parameters to be in a certain range, check for them to be out of range and indicate which was out of range).
Yeah, I looked long and hard at the Viewsonic G, but my conclusion so far is that if I'm getting a Tegra 2 I want something that's programmed to actually utilize all the different processors in it fully, so my conclusion was to wait for a Notion Ink Adam (I know they're available for pre-order now but I wanted to wait until the first customers got theirs because of how shifty NI has been acting lately). Do you know if the homebrew stuff gets the G to utilize all its processing capacity, or only gets you around the stupid interface? The other one I was looking at was Archos 101 but I heard the Archos tablets were built flimsily. How is the build on your Archos 7?
It's not just your eyes, the article is no longer on the blog at the time I'm writing this. Don't know why. Hopefully they put it back up so we can read it, though.
I know it's a crazy thing to say around here, but owners of the telecommunication companies are just as deserving of having their needs served by government as the consumers of telecommunications services.
Not necessarily. It makes sense for government to protect those needs which are underrepresented by other forces, and ignore those needs which are adequately represented outside of government. See below.
Government doesn't exist to protect the rights of citizens who are consuming over those who are producing. I don't know much about this ruling, but in general a compromise between those interests is a good thing.
Government doesn't exist to protect the rights of consumers over producers, but it does exist to protect the rights of the weak over those of the strong. The strong have no need of government to protect their rights because they are adequately protected by their own strength. The weak would have no rights in practice if it were not for government, because they lack the strength to defend their own rights. So the question becomes, who are the weak and who are the strong here? I think consumers and small content producers are the weaker parties when it comes to Net Neutrality, and large content producers and ISPs are the stronger parties. In the absence of regulations, ISPs and large content providers get to make whatever rules they deem fit, and consumers have very little real choice in most internet-service markets.
I know the corporations are the 'bad' guys, but you don't want government playing favorites. Maybe it will make you feel better to know that pension funds, which keep a great many of our elderly working class and middle class housed and fed, are among the largest owners of those corporations.
Sure, but I do want government making sensible policy to balance the interests of all those affected, which sometimes means weighing against powerful corporations. I would hope they wouldn't hurt corporations just because "corporations are bad, grrrr," but I would hope they wouldn't be in the pocket of those corporations either. Not that the latter is at all realistic, but one can always hope, no?
Again, maybe this ruling is different, but it wouldn't be a compromise if everyone was happy.
Yeah, I have a hard time figuring out WTF happened when TFA doesn't even tell us something that was done, only something that's expected to happen, and no details except that "The FCC will cave."
If you want to say "The government gives the network providers all sorts of tax-breaks and subsidies, so we get to have a say in how it's run", you fail, because your lawmakers didn't tie those sorts of conditions into those subsidies and tax-breaks, and you don't get to play Darth Vader and "alter the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" down the road.
As a Star Wars fan and a citizen of the land of the free, I get to play Darth Vader whenever the fuck I want.
I hate to break it to the entitlement-crowd, but those corporations built those networks with their own money, and own it outright, and as such, they get to be the supreme authority on what data traverses those networks, who pays how much to connect to any part of that network (as an end-user, a peer, or as a content-provider).
This would be a great argument, if the bolded part were actually true.
If you want to say "The government gives the network providers all sorts of tax-breaks and subsidies, so we get to have a say in how it's run", you fail, because your lawmakers didn't tie those sorts of conditions into those subsidies and tax-breaks, and you don't get to play Darth Vader and "alter the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" down the road.
We don't even have to get that far. Forget even playing Darth Vader, once you admit the corporations built those networks with subsidies you've already destroyed your original premise that they'd built them "with their own money".
The problem isn't that "ISPs are filtering/packet-shaping/blocking traffic", it's that your local governments have been propping up a monopoly.
If that's really the problem, then how come my area, which has robust competition among many ISPs, also has traffic-blocking by the ISPs?
Don't bother, he's probably already drunk the libertarian Kool-Aid and convinced himself that any ill apparently caused by lack of regulation is really caused by too much regulation, evidence be damned!
Not true. There's nothing saying that the company that runs the lines has to offer services. In fact, it shouldn't. The company that runs the lines should be completely split from any kind of content.
And how would you stop them? Ban them from both owning lines and delivering content? Good luck with that. I mean, I agree, in a perfect world that's what we would do. But in this world? Like I said, good luck with that.
I said disallow the cable monopolies, not the companies. Please re-read again.
You re-read again: "Disallowing Comcast and its ilk from doing something is regulation." He wasn't saying disallow the companies (from existing) either, he said disallow them "from doing something", namely from operating a monopoly.
In many municipalities the Cable companies have a government-sanctioned monopoly. That means that if you would like to unsubscribe from the Comcast and get a different cable line -- you can not because the said municipalities do not allow them into the market.
That part is true. However, it's not universal. In many areas cable companies simply own the private lines and it's too expensive for a competitor to lay down cable lines, so "allowing competition" would mean forcing the company that owns the cable TV lines to allow other companies to offer service over its property. If every local cable monopoly were as you described then your solution of deregulation would work, but as it is to create real competition in a majority of local markets you would have to also mandate private lines be leased to competitors, which is additional regulation.
Wasn't he appointed by the Democrat president? Or was he a Bush appointee? I assume the latter if he's bending-over to appease the megacorps.
Party affiliation only determines which megacorps he wants to bend over for. One way or the other, the corporations will bend you over anyway.
Actually, I think it's all the same megacorps, and party affiliation just determines how far the bend. I think these days it's statutorily regulated to be an angle of 120 degrees of bending over for Republicans, 117.3 degrees of bending over for Democrats.
I think that makes a lot of sense, and I have yet to hear a good argument from the "all packets must be equal" crowd against your position, but I figure there must be one, because people still cling to the "all packets must be equal" definition of True Net Neutrality[TM]. So my question to all the purists is, what's wrong with MozeeToby's version of Net Neutrality? Please explain your position in detail so I can understand it thoroughly and adapt my position accordingly.
Indeed it does, and since the FCC insists on crafting Law (a job I THINK was left to Congress in our Constitution)....
Congress has crafted law, under its Constitutional authority, which delegates regulatory authority to certain administrative agencies. This includes the FCC.
Well intentioned laws are not allowed to have bad consequences. If an Internet 911 call was dropped because the network provider was not allowed to give it priority, the network provider would be sued.
For following the rules? The fact that "the network provider was not allowed" to do other than they did would instantly defeat that suit. On the other hand, you are right that we should probably craft the rules with the right type of exception so that that 911 call goes through in the first place.
Google needs to start charging for Android OS development, and they need to take the money and take over the dev role from the handset makers. Then they need to start pushing hard on the carriers to standardize on the bloat they will push to their customers. Then, and only then, will we see a mature Android market (and the whole android experience for that matter) appear.
But then people will accuse Google of being Nazis!
(Disclaimer: I actually think you may be right, I just had to throw this out there 'cuz I can foresee it happening)
Dude, please. You're getting your anti-Apple memes all mixed up.
Facts: In 1979 the Apple II+ cost $1195 with 48K of RAM. In 1981, the IBM PC cost $1565 with 16K of RAM. Apple had cheaper hardware and software for years.
Hate it when they do that. Don't cross the memes!!
And furthermore Microsoft was a key supplier to both companies, so why on earth would anyone have wanted to crush them?
Yeah, back then Apple thought of IBM as the enemy. IBM, not Microsoft, was Big Brother in the famous 1984 ad. How ironic that Apple would end up fighting Microsoft and working together with IBM a mere 7 years later.
The cheap PC clones vs. expensive Apple meme had real legs for about 10 years (early 1990s to early 2000's). It has been false for quite a bit longer than it was true.
Well, last I owned an Apple was in '07 and but it was still VERY true then. I've since switched to Dell which cost me 1/3 the price of a comparably-powered and featured machine, and came pre-installed with Ubuntu which is a plus for me though I know many prefer OS X. You're probably right that the meme didn't start to have legs until the '90s, but I'm not convinced it's lost its legs yet, or that it ever will as long as Apple continues to appeal to the same customer base.
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...and they both got modded up! Suck it, Trollocracy!
If you want to rage about farmers getting too much unwarranted subsidies, make sure you focus the anger on the big corporate farms because they're the one's that have Congress's ear. About the only benefit small farmer's have seen is the relatively recent sustained rise in corn prices due to the OP's point. The small farmer subsidy era largely went away during the Reagan Administration and has never returned. If you want to check your "fax", look at how many family farms went under in the 80's and the farm bill provisions before, during, and after that time.
It looks to me like the only benefit small farmers have seen is a surplus of apostrophes.
My demand of the incoming Congress: End wasteful punctuation subsidies now!
Then the "Ethanol has taken over prime farm corn land." statement to which I replied is BS.
You're right. Ethanol has taken over prime vegetable-farming and livestock-grazing land by turning more of it into corn-farming land.
How is this "unlimited consumer lawsuits from unlimited plaintiffs!"? What I see in this article is a substantial but limited number of lawsuits from one plaintiff.
San Francisco-based Balsam has been wielding a one-man crusade against e-mail marketers he alleges run afoul of federal and state anti-spamming laws...
Wielding a crusade? Really?
if it fails in a way that you never thought possible, how would you write an error message that describes the failure?
By putting error messages in a ton of places you don't expect an error to arise, just in case (i.e. places where you expect the input to have been sanitized, add error messages for unsanitized input; places where you expect parameters to be in a certain range, check for them to be out of range and indicate which was out of range).
However, the question should be asked, is granting control over the Internet to political appointees the way to go?
Yes.
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?
No.
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't you just adopt my political point of view?
A more honest way of saying the same thing.
Yeah, I looked long and hard at the Viewsonic G, but my conclusion so far is that if I'm getting a Tegra 2 I want something that's programmed to actually utilize all the different processors in it fully, so my conclusion was to wait for a Notion Ink Adam (I know they're available for pre-order now but I wanted to wait until the first customers got theirs because of how shifty NI has been acting lately). Do you know if the homebrew stuff gets the G to utilize all its processing capacity, or only gets you around the stupid interface? The other one I was looking at was Archos 101 but I heard the Archos tablets were built flimsily. How is the build on your Archos 7?
It's not just your eyes, the article is no longer on the blog at the time I'm writing this. Don't know why. Hopefully they put it back up so we can read it, though.
The difference between corporations and citizens is that a for-profit corporation exists for the sole purpose of making money.
To be fair, some citizens exist for the sole purpose of making money as well.
I know it's a crazy thing to say around here, but owners of the telecommunication companies are just as deserving of having their needs served by government as the consumers of telecommunications services.
Not necessarily. It makes sense for government to protect those needs which are underrepresented by other forces, and ignore those needs which are adequately represented outside of government. See below.
Government doesn't exist to protect the rights of citizens who are consuming over those who are producing. I don't know much about this ruling, but in general a compromise between those interests is a good thing.
Government doesn't exist to protect the rights of consumers over producers, but it does exist to protect the rights of the weak over those of the strong. The strong have no need of government to protect their rights because they are adequately protected by their own strength. The weak would have no rights in practice if it were not for government, because they lack the strength to defend their own rights. So the question becomes, who are the weak and who are the strong here? I think consumers and small content producers are the weaker parties when it comes to Net Neutrality, and large content producers and ISPs are the stronger parties. In the absence of regulations, ISPs and large content providers get to make whatever rules they deem fit, and consumers have very little real choice in most internet-service markets.
I know the corporations are the 'bad' guys, but you don't want government playing favorites. Maybe it will make you feel better to know that pension funds, which keep a great many of our elderly working class and middle class housed and fed, are among the largest owners of those corporations.
Sure, but I do want government making sensible policy to balance the interests of all those affected, which sometimes means weighing against powerful corporations. I would hope they wouldn't hurt corporations just because "corporations are bad, grrrr," but I would hope they wouldn't be in the pocket of those corporations either. Not that the latter is at all realistic, but one can always hope, no?
Again, maybe this ruling is different, but it wouldn't be a compromise if everyone was happy.
Yeah, I have a hard time figuring out WTF happened when TFA doesn't even tell us something that was done, only something that's expected to happen, and no details except that "The FCC will cave."
If you want to say "The government gives the network providers all sorts of tax-breaks and subsidies, so we get to have a say in how it's run", you fail, because your lawmakers didn't tie those sorts of conditions into those subsidies and tax-breaks, and you don't get to play Darth Vader and "alter the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" down the road.
As a Star Wars fan and a citizen of the land of the free, I get to play Darth Vader whenever the fuck I want.
I hate to break it to the entitlement-crowd, but those corporations built those networks with their own money, and own it outright, and as such, they get to be the supreme authority on what data traverses those networks, who pays how much to connect to any part of that network (as an end-user, a peer, or as a content-provider).
This would be a great argument, if the bolded part were actually true.
If you want to say "The government gives the network providers all sorts of tax-breaks and subsidies, so we get to have a say in how it's run", you fail, because your lawmakers didn't tie those sorts of conditions into those subsidies and tax-breaks, and you don't get to play Darth Vader and "alter the deal, pray I don't alter it any further" down the road.
We don't even have to get that far. Forget even playing Darth Vader, once you admit the corporations built those networks with subsidies you've already destroyed your original premise that they'd built them "with their own money".
The problem isn't that "ISPs are filtering/packet-shaping/blocking traffic", it's that your local governments have been propping up a monopoly.
If that's really the problem, then how come my area, which has robust competition among many ISPs, also has traffic-blocking by the ISPs?
Don't bother, he's probably already drunk the libertarian Kool-Aid and convinced himself that any ill apparently caused by lack of regulation is really caused by too much regulation, evidence be damned!
Not true. There's nothing saying that the company that runs the lines has to offer services. In fact, it shouldn't. The company that runs the lines should be completely split from any kind of content.
And how would you stop them? Ban them from both owning lines and delivering content? Good luck with that. I mean, I agree, in a perfect world that's what we would do. But in this world? Like I said, good luck with that.
I said disallow the cable monopolies, not the companies. Please re-read again.
You re-read again: "Disallowing Comcast and its ilk from doing something is regulation." He wasn't saying disallow the companies (from existing) either, he said disallow them "from doing something", namely from operating a monopoly.
In many municipalities the Cable companies have a government-sanctioned monopoly. That means that if you would like to unsubscribe from the Comcast and get a different cable line -- you can not because the said municipalities do not allow them into the market.
That part is true. However, it's not universal. In many areas cable companies simply own the private lines and it's too expensive for a competitor to lay down cable lines, so "allowing competition" would mean forcing the company that owns the cable TV lines to allow other companies to offer service over its property. If every local cable monopoly were as you described then your solution of deregulation would work, but as it is to create real competition in a majority of local markets you would have to also mandate private lines be leased to competitors, which is additional regulation.
Wasn't he appointed by the Democrat president? Or was he a Bush appointee? I assume the latter if he's bending-over to appease the megacorps.
Party affiliation only determines which megacorps he wants to bend over for. One way or the other, the corporations will bend you over anyway.
Actually, I think it's all the same megacorps, and party affiliation just determines how far the bend. I think these days it's statutorily regulated to be an angle of 120 degrees of bending over for Republicans, 117.3 degrees of bending over for Democrats.
I think that makes a lot of sense, and I have yet to hear a good argument from the "all packets must be equal" crowd against your position, but I figure there must be one, because people still cling to the "all packets must be equal" definition of True Net Neutrality[TM]. So my question to all the purists is, what's wrong with MozeeToby's version of Net Neutrality? Please explain your position in detail so I can understand it thoroughly and adapt my position accordingly.
Indeed it does, and since the FCC insists on crafting Law (a job I THINK was left to Congress in our Constitution)....
Congress has crafted law, under its Constitutional authority, which delegates regulatory authority to certain administrative agencies. This includes the FCC.
Well intentioned laws are not allowed to have bad consequences. If an Internet 911 call was dropped because the network provider was not allowed to give it priority, the network provider would be sued.
For following the rules? The fact that "the network provider was not allowed" to do other than they did would instantly defeat that suit. On the other hand, you are right that we should probably craft the rules with the right type of exception so that that 911 call goes through in the first place.
Is this meant as a criticism of Obama or the fact that Obama had to cave in to people who are against net neutrality?
Clearly it's a criticism of "this world."
Google needs to start charging for Android OS development, and they need to take the money and take over the dev role from the handset makers. Then they need to start pushing hard on the carriers to standardize on the bloat they will push to their customers. Then, and only then, will we see a mature Android market (and the whole android experience for that matter) appear.
But then people will accuse Google of being Nazis!
(Disclaimer: I actually think you may be right, I just had to throw this out there 'cuz I can foresee it happening)
I've since switched to Dell which cost me 1/3 the price of a comparably-powered and featured Apple machine...
Dude, please. You're getting your anti-Apple memes all mixed up.
Facts: In 1979 the Apple II+ cost $1195 with 48K of RAM. In 1981, the IBM PC cost $1565 with 16K of RAM. Apple had cheaper hardware and software for years.
Hate it when they do that. Don't cross the memes!!
And furthermore Microsoft was a key supplier to both companies, so why on earth would anyone have wanted to crush them?
Yeah, back then Apple thought of IBM as the enemy. IBM, not Microsoft, was Big Brother in the famous 1984 ad. How ironic that Apple would end up fighting Microsoft and working together with IBM a mere 7 years later.
The cheap PC clones vs. expensive Apple meme had real legs for about 10 years (early 1990s to early 2000's). It has been false for quite a bit longer than it was true.
Well, last I owned an Apple was in '07 and but it was still VERY true then. I've since switched to Dell which cost me 1/3 the price of a comparably-powered and featured machine, and came pre-installed with Ubuntu which is a plus for me though I know many prefer OS X. You're probably right that the meme didn't start to have legs until the '90s, but I'm not convinced it's lost its legs yet, or that it ever will as long as Apple continues to appeal to the same customer base.