The government is stepping in to keep the consumer from harm and/or to ensure the market is functioning properly by attempting to regulate some degree of interoperability. The government has done this many times to very positive effect. In many cases such interoperability leads to much greater choice and much lower cost. If the government failed to do that choice would exist but it would be expensive and difficult to obtain because alternatives would have a significant market disadvantage. So, in summary, the whole point here is to give you choice, not to butt into your business.
Great in theory.
The trouble is with supply side of the equation. Apple doesn't have to make an IPod. They don't have to have an online store. Copyright holders don't have to agree to allow the sale of their music online. But they do all those things because DRM is being used.
Suppliers have options. You can't just change the rules and expect suppliers not to change their business behavior in response. They're not legally required to make music players.
If consumers voluntarily buy a system that emplys DRM restrictions and Apple is voluntarily supplying it, where is the harm? Why should the government step in to prevent commerce between consenting adults?
Of course there are people out there that think government should be a "big brother" to keep its little brother, "the public" out of trouble.
I say I'm an adult. If I want to buy a system that employs DRM, it's my god damn business.
Sometimes the world changes in such a way that you just have to give up and move on. We have technology in place and available that allows nearly anyone anywhere anytime to freely copy music and videos and people not going to let DRM or any moral objections or law stop them from doing it.
And maybe that's justice in a way. The industry doesn't seem to have any objection to making money from music and movies that praise some of the very behaviors responsible for their own decline. They produce songs like "Smack My Bitch Up" and "Been Caught Stealing" and "Murder Rap" then wonder why they can't get people to "do the right thing" and pay them for their product. They're fucking hypocrites. They're getting what they deserve.
One ought to recall that not only was the American economy "built" on slavery but
The biggest boost to the US economy came with industrialization and the railroads and most of that was built with the help of poor Irish immigrants. 40,000 Irish died in a single year just trying to get here. Slaves were considered too valuable for many of the things the Irish did. The US slave experience was very different from what went on elsewhere. The point you make in the rest of your post is a good one.
Consider this passage from the American Historica Review:
Among North American slaves, births greatly exceeded deaths, so that the slave population expanded rapidly. In sharp contrast, across the slave societies of the Caribbean and Latin America, the persistent experience was one not of natural increase but of dramatic natural decrease. Indeed, the North American pattern was probably, with a few local and sometimes short-term exceptions, unique in the history of slavery. As C. Vann Woodward wrote: "So far as history reveals, no other slave society, whether of antiquity or modern times, has so much as sustained, much less greatly multiplied, its slave population by relying on natural increase."1 Why, then, did North American slaves experience such rapid natural increase (excess of births over deaths), and why did slaves in the rest of the Americas fail to increase naturally? 1
The contrast between North America and the rest of the Americas is a fundamental one. For example, over the many years of the African slave trade, Jamaica imported some 750,000 slaves, but at the time of emancipation in 1838 its black population numbered only just over 300,000: North America, in contrast, imported only about 427,000 Africans, but at the time of emancipation in 1865 the U.S. black population had grown to more than ten times that number.2 In the antebellum period, U.S. slaves showed a natural population growth of some 25 percent per decade (and indeed, North American slaves had established a pattern of natural growth by about 1710). In sharp contrast, Caribbean and Brazilian slaves commonly suffered rates of natural decrease of 20 percent per decade.
In the US, local commerce is rigidly controlled through zoning laws. It would be nice to have a neighborhood store, or set of shops, etc, but most local governments don't allow mixing commercial areas with residential.
In fact, if they were to run a supercooled chip at the nominal clock frequency, they would have hold time violations and the chip would not work. In other words, the data would propagate so quickly that it would corrupt the previous piece of data.
I don't see much of a problem with hold-time issues since the hold-time requirements for gates receiving the data also get better with cooling.
I would worry instead about long, pipelined wires, where several bits are in flight simultaneously. While gates get much faster with cooling, signal propagation down a wire doesn't improve very much, so a gate at the other end of a wire would expect a particular bit much sooner than it was available.
Of course it depends exactly on how the circuit is constructed. If the clock driving the gates on the receive end suffers the same propagation delay as the pipelined wire, then everything might work out.
What's really neat in all this how at some point you need to think like Einstein and ask what does it mean for two events in a circuit be simultaneous.
I don't have a problem with networks prioritizing data based on the port number or type of data. I do have problems with networks prioritizing data based on its target or originating computers.
Then you've ruled out things like weighted-fair-queuing -- a queuing and prioritization scheme used by nearly every large network provider to allow fair sharing of links.
You MUST look at the destination address of a packet and prioritize (dynamically), otherwise the destination that is the target of the most source packets will steal most of the bandwidth.
Let's suppose two people share a link, but one person is the destination for 2/3rds of the packets hitting the router. Without fair-queuing, that person will get 2/3rds of the bandwidth. Maybe he's downloading two things at a time while you're downloading just one. Is it fair that he gets 2/3rds of the bandwidth? Of course not. But to make things fair the router has to look at the destination address of each packet and prioritize based on how much bandwidth each destination system is consuming. With fair queuing, the user getting 2/3rds of the packets will have half of his packets held back while the other user's packets are allowed to pass. This will allow them to receive packets at the same rate -- the fair share.
Since internet bandwidth has limits (it can be clogged with enourmous amounts of material) those paying the most money can get the biggest chunk of that bandwidth. If the demand for bandwidth is high enough, that means the people on the low end of the scale get 'choked' for bandwidth.
That happens right now and is how the price for broadband is set.
If broadband were to cost as much as dial-up, you'd get dial-up speeds with a broadband connection because so many more people would be using it.
The price of broadband right now is the toll that keeps the connections relatively open and high-speed.
No, it's like someone buying up all the lanes on the freeway and then dictating who can drive and how fast. And they wouldn't even have to buy all the roads, just a few "choke points". Actually, a bit more accurate would be that a company would pay the "road-company" to dictate who can drive what, to where and how fast. Of course, as each company owns different stretches of roads, I see different companies paying for different roads so that all traffic moves at a stand still.
I think what you're saying is that broadband supply isn't as elastic as automobile supply. You may be right, but then the solution would be to find ways to make supply more elastic. Deregulating public rights-of-way to some extent would help.
And now companies are offering wireless broadband. So in many cases people have three options: cable, DSL, and wireless. If one provider provides crappy service, you still have a choice.
Even so, I think it very unlikely that even the biggest company would be able to afford to buy all the available bandwidth out there. But let's say such a company existed. Where would they get the money? They must be able to provide damn good content and services to be able to both convince people to give them loads of money and to convince them that they're the only company the consumer needs.
On net neutrality, in a competitive market, premium services will result in lower prices for bulk services. What do I care about 2000 ms latency when I'm downloading ISOs? I just increase RWIN.
This would be great for consumers that can't afford full price for full broadband. Let the well-off pay for 24/7 full speed while others get a discount on the bulk bandwidth that's left-over on off-hours -- kind of like the way long distance or cell phone hours are sold, with discounts nights and weekends.
If fact, with QoS, you could offer a discount plan that had the broadband link at dial-up speeds during peak hours with a modem price, but allow higher speeds at other times giving people part-time broadband essentially for free.
A side thought on net neutrality: If an ISP decides to limit access to such sites as Microsoft.com, thereby hampering the Windows Update service, and the computers that can't get updated turn into botboxes (for spam or virii- or both), would the ISP then be liable for any damage caused by the spam/virii?
The question is: would they have any customers left?
So we should allow the highest bidder to choke off the bandwidth from their less wealthy competitors?
That's like saying someone can go to Ford or Honda and buy up all the cars, and thus deprive all others of automobiles.
It won't work for the simple reason that Ford and Honda can make more.
No one will pay big money to monopolize all the bandwidth, because the more money they spend trying to do it, the more incentive there is for providers to make more.
And keep in mind that it's easy right now to choke off bandwidth. Simply open a huge number of simultaneous TCP connections to overwhelm all others. All other things being equal, if someone has 1 TCP connection moving data and another person has 16 TCP connections, the latter person will grab 16/17ths of the bandwidth.
Or maybe recruit thousands of zombie computers to ping flood a destination IP in a DoS attack. In effect network neutrality means those with the most bandwidth and most servers will win.
One solution to these problems would be to set up queues for all destination IPs and use prioritization to implement fair-queuing. The only trouble is that, under certain net neutrality proposals like that of Markey, fair-queuing would actually be illegal since it uses a prioritization scheme not among those allowed.
Think about that. It would actually be illegal in to fairly allocate bandwidth.
The argument that competition can somehow spring forth out of the last mile is based upon the fallacy that someone will string a whole new set of lines to homes.
In the early years of telephone, there were literally hundreds of telephone companies competing against each other. You might have 10 different companies sharing space on a telephone pole.
The federal government then came along and decided to "bring order" to the telephone system in 1918 by nationalizing the entire telecommunications industry, with national security as the stated intent. AT&T become a government protect monopoly.
Of course later on they changed their minds and decided to break up AT&T, which created a huge amount of competition for national telephone services and drove doen prices.
The trouble was that the local monopolies were never deregulated and broken up, so have near zero competition now.
So to power an electric car, you will convert the chemical energy in fossil fuel into electric energy in a power plant, send it over thousands of miles of power lines, doing several voltage conversions along the way, convert it back into chemical energy in your cars battery, back into electric energy as it goes to the engine, and then finally into mechanical energy moving the car. This is MUCH less efficient than just converting the chemical energy directly of fossil fuel into mechanical energy in your car's internal combustion engine.
Your mistake is in assuming that the specific method of converting chemical energy to mechanical energy doesn't matter, but it does.
Powerplants don't use inefficient internal combustion engines to power generators. They often use more efficient gas turbines with much greater efficiencies. So even after all the energy loss in transmission, you still get more usable energy left over.
The specifics vary, but a gasoline IC engine might be 25% efficient while a coal-fired power plant is generally over 33% efficient with the newest designs up to 48% efficient.
Give 10 bucks to a poor man and that money will go back in local economy in no time, with several other people also benefiting from that money.
This is a good example of a common misunderstanding about how money works.
Money represents a demand on the productive capacity of the economy. Give a poor man 10 bucks and you've promised him a portion of economic production.
But does he add to total economic production? If not, then you have productive persons not only being forced to provide for themselves, but also must work harder to provide additional production to satisfy the demand of the poor man.
The most visible problem is the ever-increasing cost of health care, and the number of people like yourselves who are falling through the cracks because good health insurance is only available through employers who can command group rates.
About 50% of the money spent on health care in the USA is government money. The other 50% comes from people competing for health care services with those the get government money. This race for services is the number one reason prices keep going up. Rising prices are continually reallocating services from one group to another.
Our hero, the small business owner that's looking for help, had his share of health care reallocated away from him long ago.
I think some retired senior living in Miami got it.
As Gore points out in the movie, most of the "scientists" who don't believe in Global Warming are either those who have no right to speak(Non-Ecologists)
I hope he meant physicists, since very few ecologists even understand the basic physics behind global warming.
Also we all laughed while the film had a diagram of most of the oil evaporating and doing little harm in Valdez.
Why would you laugh? An oil slick really will evaporate over time. It happens every day in the Gulf of Mexico where oil literally rises to the surface from the sea floor.
Immediately after the laughter, your science teacher could have made the important point that the results of experiments often conflict with what our intuition suggests.
Slashdot Mirror
Great in theory.
The trouble is with supply side of the equation. Apple doesn't have to make an IPod. They don't have to have an online store. Copyright holders don't have to agree to allow the sale of their music online. But they do all those things because DRM is being used.
Suppliers have options. You can't just change the rules and expect suppliers not to change their business behavior in response. They're not legally required to make music players.
If consumers voluntarily buy a system that emplys DRM restrictions and Apple is voluntarily supplying it, where is the harm? Why should the government step in to prevent commerce between consenting adults?
Of course there are people out there that think government should be a "big brother" to keep its little brother, "the public" out of trouble.
I say I'm an adult. If I want to buy a system that employs DRM, it's my god damn business.
"Why exactly do you define avoiding taxes as 'evil'?"
Because the taxes that cash-rich google doesn't pay are paid for by the rest of us.
That's like being mad at your neighbors for installing a security system that causes your house to be burgled instead of theirs.
Sometimes the world changes in such a way that you just have to give up and move on. We have technology in place
and available that allows nearly anyone anywhere anytime to freely copy music and videos and people not going to let
DRM or any moral objections or law stop them from doing it.
And maybe that's justice in a way. The industry doesn't seem to have any objection to making money from music and movies that praise some of the very behaviors responsible for their own decline. They produce songs like "Smack My Bitch Up" and "Been Caught Stealing" and "Murder Rap" then wonder why they can't get people to "do the right thing" and pay them for their product. They're fucking hypocrites. They're getting what they deserve.
A government entity, though, CAN show up to your front door with guns and force you do do whatever they'd like.
You don't seem to realize that a lot of slashdotters don't mind -- as long they're the ones holding the guns.
The relationship between low temperature and failure suggests that the higher viscosity of colder lube is causing increased wear.
You see the same thing happen with autos that are started frequently in cold weather. Thick, cold oil just doesn't work well.
The major routers on the Internet are setup to provide many alternative paths based on congestion or other sorts of delays.
Are you sure about that? I've been led to believe that most routes are static to avoid oscillations and route flapping.
The biggest boost to the US economy came with industrialization and the railroads and most of that was built with the help of poor Irish immigrants. 40,000 Irish died in a single year just trying to get here. Slaves were considered too valuable for many of the things the Irish did. The US slave experience was very different from what went on elsewhere. The point you make in the rest of your post is a good one.
Consider this passage from the American Historica Review:
Now, when are they going to outlaw all the other DRM-infested music stores? If "Fairplay" is unfair, then so is "PlaysForSure!"
Yet another person attempting outlaw capitalistic acts between consenting adults.
Oh yes, the American way. Information that's vital for you: either pay for it, or die.
Money is a promise from society to do something for the person that holds it.
If someone learns or discovers something that saves lives, I say they deserve more than just "hey, thanks" back from society.
In the US, local commerce is rigidly controlled through zoning laws. It would be nice to have a neighborhood store, or set of shops, etc, but most local governments don't allow mixing commercial areas with residential.
It's simply against the law.
Land of the free, my ass.
I don't see much of a problem with hold-time issues since the hold-time requirements for gates receiving the data also get better with cooling.
I would worry instead about long, pipelined wires, where several bits are in flight simultaneously. While gates get much faster with cooling, signal propagation down a wire doesn't improve very much, so a gate at the other end of a wire would expect a particular bit much sooner than it was available.
Of course it depends exactly on how the circuit is constructed. If the clock driving the gates on the receive end suffers the same propagation delay as the pipelined wire, then everything might work out.
What's really neat in all this how at some point you need to think like Einstein and ask what does it mean for two events in a circuit be simultaneous.
Then you've ruled out things like weighted-fair-queuing -- a queuing and prioritization scheme used by nearly every large network provider to allow fair sharing of links.
You MUST look at the destination address of a packet and prioritize (dynamically), otherwise the destination that is the target of the most source packets will steal most of the bandwidth.
Let's suppose two people share a link, but one person is the destination for 2/3rds of the packets hitting the router. Without fair-queuing, that person will get 2/3rds of the bandwidth. Maybe he's downloading two things at a time while you're downloading just one. Is it fair that he gets 2/3rds of the bandwidth? Of course not. But to make things fair the router has to look at the destination address of each packet and prioritize based on how much bandwidth each destination system is consuming. With fair queuing, the user getting 2/3rds of the packets will have half of his packets held back while the other user's packets are allowed to pass. This will allow them to receive packets at the same rate -- the fair share.
That happens right now and is how the price for broadband is set.
If broadband were to cost as much as dial-up, you'd get dial-up speeds with a broadband connection because so many more people would be using it.
The price of broadband right now is the toll that keeps the connections relatively open and high-speed.
I think what you're saying is that broadband supply isn't as elastic as automobile supply. You may be right, but then the solution would be to find ways to make supply more elastic. Deregulating public rights-of-way to some extent would help.
And now companies are offering wireless broadband. So in many cases people have three options: cable, DSL, and wireless. If one provider provides crappy service, you still have a choice.
Even so, I think it very unlikely that even the biggest company would be able to afford to buy all the available bandwidth out there. But let's say such a company existed. Where would they get the money? They must be able to provide damn good content and services to be able to both convince people to give them loads of money and to convince them that they're the only company the consumer needs.
This would be great for consumers that can't afford full price for full broadband. Let the well-off pay for 24/7 full speed while others get a discount on the bulk bandwidth that's left-over on off-hours -- kind of like the way long distance or cell phone hours are sold, with discounts nights and weekends.
If fact, with QoS, you could offer a discount plan that had the broadband link at dial-up speeds during peak hours with a modem price, but allow higher speeds at other times giving people part-time broadband essentially for free.
The question is: would they have any customers left?
That's like saying someone can go to Ford or Honda and buy up all the cars, and thus deprive all others of automobiles.
It won't work for the simple reason that Ford and Honda can make more.
No one will pay big money to monopolize all the bandwidth, because the more money they spend trying to do it, the more incentive there is for providers to make more.
And keep in mind that it's easy right now to choke off bandwidth. Simply open a huge number of simultaneous TCP connections to overwhelm all others. All other things being equal, if someone has 1 TCP connection moving data and another person has 16 TCP connections, the latter person will grab 16/17ths of the bandwidth.
Or maybe recruit thousands of zombie computers to ping flood a destination IP in a DoS attack. In effect network neutrality means those with the most bandwidth and most servers will win.
One solution to these problems would be to set up queues for all destination IPs and use prioritization to implement fair-queuing. The only trouble is that, under certain net neutrality proposals like that of Markey, fair-queuing would actually be illegal since it uses a prioritization scheme not among those allowed.
Think about that. It would actually be illegal in to fairly allocate bandwidth.
In the early years of telephone, there were literally hundreds of telephone companies competing against each other. You might have 10 different companies sharing space on a telephone pole.
The federal government then came along and decided to "bring order" to the telephone system in 1918 by nationalizing the entire telecommunications industry, with national security as the stated intent. AT&T become a government protect monopoly.
Of course later on they changed their minds and decided to break up AT&T, which created a huge amount of competition for national telephone services and drove doen prices.
The trouble was that the local monopolies were never deregulated and broken up, so have near zero competition now.
Your mistake is in assuming that the specific method of converting chemical energy to mechanical energy doesn't matter, but it does.
Powerplants don't use inefficient internal combustion engines to power generators. They often use more efficient gas turbines with much greater efficiencies. So even after all the energy loss in transmission, you still get more usable energy left over.
The specifics vary, but a gasoline IC engine might be 25% efficient while a coal-fired power plant is generally over 33% efficient with the newest designs up to 48% efficient.
with LCDs!
This is a good example of a common misunderstanding about how money works.
Money represents a demand on the productive capacity of the economy. Give a poor man 10 bucks and you've promised him a portion of economic production.
But does he add to total economic production? If not, then you have productive persons not only being forced to provide for themselves, but also must work harder to provide additional production to satisfy the demand of the poor man.
About 50% of the money spent on health care in the USA is government money. The other 50% comes from people competing for health care services with those the get government money. This race for services is the number one reason prices keep going up. Rising prices are continually reallocating services from one group to another.
Our hero, the small business owner that's looking for help, had his share of health care reallocated away from him long ago.
I think some retired senior living in Miami got it.
I hope he meant physicists, since very few ecologists even understand the basic physics behind global warming.
Why would you laugh? An oil slick really will evaporate over time. It happens every day in the Gulf of Mexico where oil literally rises to the surface from the sea floor.
Immediately after the laughter, your science teacher could have made the important point that the results of experiments often conflict with what our intuition suggests.