"Oohh, I guess that rules out this per-- oh wait, they were convicted in Arizona, where "child molester" doesn't actually mean anything. Ok, you're hired."
Until TV news anchors show up at your door demanding to know why you're hiring a convicted sex offender, and both of you get fired because protesters are making your company lose money over your decision. Watch TV some day, fucking up everyone's lives is quality prime time material!
Arizona just undermined itself. Be ridiculous with labels, and you end up only labeling yourself.
Pfft. The label has been ridiculous from the start. Public indecency in many states is a sex offense, and you're added to the registry on the second time, whether a minor sees you or not. Alabama will register you for "obscene bumper stickers" (what about those popular truck mudflaps sporting a woman's silhouette, are they "obscene"? Miller test time! Who wants to ruin their life to see whether shitty beer is shitty or not?) Googlized version of pdfd version of an excel spreadsheet (yay!) listing registrable offenses by state.
Add to that the fact that as far as "being a sex offender" goes, raping 3 year olds is apparently just as heinous as having sex with your 17 year old girlfriend, or taking home a 24 year old who didn't seem drunk until she woke up and had no clue where she was or who you were, and the whole thing turns out to be a horrid mess, but somebody has to think of the children! No matter how ridiculous it gets, no politician will touch it, because anyone who does would be opening the floodgates for monsters to rape your little girls.
I'll give up on regulation banning network neutrality when the telcos and cablecos would give up on their regulations and contracts that ban other people from competing against their monopoly.
Then you say "oops, I goofed up", pay royalties if necessary, credit the orignal version, and life moves on. You probably take a credibility hit for a few weeks, then people decide your version was better anyway.
Who needs law to mess things up when a CEO can write a press release stating "no, we do not grind babies up to make flour" with one hand while pushing the grind button with the other? The "no fraud" clause required by just about every economic system that claims to have a "free market" was violated long before Thag realized that if he had the biggest club, everyone would have to obey him and became the first ruler. People like to do the song and dance about how government fucked it all up, but government is simply a symptom of the fact that the ultimate fuckup -- humans -- are involved.
We do specialized web-based applications, not IPTV, so we've been following this in terms of "what does that mean to us". Maybe the IPTV companies are demanding free internet links, if so, then they're way out of line, they can buy whatever connections to whichever networks they want, just like everyone else.
This is how we see the issue as a service provider: ISP sees Company X making money (google, iTunes, etc), and wants a piece of it or their thug-routers might see to it that something terrible happens to their packets, where "a piece of it" comes from what is essentially protection money. When they tell us "buy our link for faster service" when our service is already fast enough for their customers, what we're hearing is "buy our link or be penalized". Even a little intentional throttling could become disastrous for us, if our clients' ISPs dropped every other packet, our bandwidth costs would essentially double (consider 1MB file+0.5MB retransmitted packets+0.25MB retransmitted retransmits+...=2MB) while our site would basically become unusable.
These aren't observations we've pulled out of our ass, these are things that the CEOs of the major telecoms are saying by themselves. A competitor could convince Bellsouth to put us out of business (especially if the merger with SBC/ATT completes, making just about everyone in the US who uses DSL affected). Of course, convincing our customers to switch to cable wouldn't help, Comcast is on the bandwagon, and they've already shown that they're more than happy to cut anything they don't like out of their service.
From what I understood all that a man in the middle could see was the host ip address as everything else is authenticated/encrypted. Or else you would get a security warning upon visiting the page.
There are SSL proxies that will present to you a certificate for www.whateveryouwentto.com, and talk to you in SSL while talking to the website in SSL. Yes, you'll get a "who the hell signed this thing?" popup... unless of course you've installed the signing certificate from the proxy as a trusted certificate. Remember that when you're using a computer not in your control, or if someone gives you a CD of "things you have to install" in order to get on the internet.
I'll give you vocal nuts blocking nuclear plants, but every excuse that I've heard about new plants of other kinds is simply that the new modern plants are simply too expensive, and vocal nuts are keeping people from building stinky old plants via the EPA.
Then the other wavelength is that what you're describing (dedicated links) has little to do with network [non-]neutrality. If the issue was simply "buy a link into our network for better service to our customers" then nobody would be up in arms. Hell, my own company's servers have links out the wazoo. The problem is that there's a strongly implied "or else we'll make your normal routing even worse than it is now" in the wording of the ISPs' positions on the subject. Ignore HBO for a second, take Google (a popular target of ISPs who think they deserve money just because someone else used them to make billions. Who do they think they are, Shuji Nakamura?).
Think about it. When did you start having trouble searching on google? What does google stand to lose if they don't pay for these links?
How do you intend on applying QoS rules to packets that have already been dropped? It's your broadband connection that's likely to be congested, not your home LAN.
OK, then, a web interface on the next hop up that allows me to adjust the settings for my particular IP address. Wouldn't be too hard to do, most of the work would have to go into a making a simple but effective web UI that grandma can set up with minimal coaching from the staff if she has unusual tastes in consumption and wants to change the priorities.
This also ignores the longest part of the packet's journey, as it travels over the public Internet.
My ISP doesn't have any control over that either, but that's not going to stop them from taking money from HBO, now is it?
Good thing Clarence Thomas doesn't run any banks, it'd suck if you were charged late fees and interest on your credit card because you didn't pay the charge for $5000 in some other state that you submitted the paperwork to contest, but paying the contested charges would have waived your right to contest them.
He'd probably have even written the contract to read that payments are applied to contested charges first to prevent people from paying everything but the contested charges.
Even if it was only on one side of the coin, you have just cut your chances of detecting it by 50%
That's why it was suggested that it was the $2 coin. The middle could be popped out and replaced without many people (especially Americans who don't encounter such coins on a daily basis) noticing it at all, and with the whole middle replaced, it could go through both sides of the coin.
or a "non-neutral" Internet, where the network understands that your IPTV is more important and gives it preference when the connection gets congested?
What about a "non-neutral" internet, where I tell it what I think is more important. Apparently this whole giving the consumer what they want thing is what's on a different wavelength here. I'm sure that having companies bid on whether or not customers get to use their content is a great measure of how important they think they are, but maybe I want my bittorent of the latest shakycam video to finish, and I'm just watching junk on HBO to pass the time?
To me, this is an choice which has vast potential. Implemented properly, the play style and story line and world of Hellgate could indeed prove to work well in a heavily instanced world..."safe houses" could be in the same vain as guild wars towns, while "action zones" could be instanced.
I agree. It gets people to pick it up who might otherwise think "wait a minute, I'm paying to get a game that I'll have to pay MORE to play?"
It's doubtful that it'll get it a lot more money monthly, but I'm sure it would be able to move more boxes than just another MMO.
If the ISP moves to explicitly throttle HBO, then there is definitely an act of aggression, and the ISP will have expended resources (purchase of routers with the capability of throttling packets based on rules setup by a billing system that would be purchased to control who paid for which packets to go where) for the purpose of collecting money to not throttle the packets (just because it's a service, not a good, doesn't mean the principle behind the broken window fallacy can't apply). On the other hand, if the ISP does not explicitly throttle HBO, then there is currently no reason for HBO to pay up. They'll simply remind their subscribers that they'll need to throttle or kill their p2p apps, music streams, or other downloads if they want to watch uninterrupted.
Cause if it is the exact same, and they have now created a $200 value for the laptops, they can now easily be sold to collect the money, instead of the intended educational value...
Yep. Exactly like how PBS telethons have encouraged the mugging of ladies carrying bags or men sipping coffee by setting the value of cloth bags and mugs at $120.
And HBO decides how much to pay for that service based on how much their customers (the advertisers) are willing to pay to make sure HBO stays "on-air".
The advertisers, in turn, will decide how much they want HBO to stay on-air on the basis of how much they are willing to spend to ensure that HBO's viewers (to whom their advertisements are directed) keep watching HBO, and thus their advertisements. This roughtly correlates with how much the viewers desire a clear, non-throttled transmission (though there are obviously other factors involved, such as the quality of the shows).
End result: Viewer preferences dictate the priority the ISP assigns to HBO.
And all this because the ISP couldn't just provide their customers the service they wanted. The only difference between this and the broken window fallacy is that in this case, somebody's window HAS to break, and the ISP seems to be trying to find the least efficient way to decide whose window has to go. Of course, even the idea that something HAS to break is false, the ISP could reinvest profits into a better network that could support your download and your HBO at the same time.
Even if there were no regulations at all on the electricity market, Enron could still have easily manipulated it by turning off generators as it did. Even if they turned off all the generators, by the time any competitor managed to build a facility to replace them, Enron would have turned them back on, rendering the facility redundant.
Why should anyone be entitled to all you can consume bandwidth for a miniscule amount each month?
Because that was what they sold me? Because they stated in their contract that they would make a "best effort" attempt to carry traffic between the internet and my computer? I wonder at what point people decided that contracts were worthless and free to break at any time. I doubt that I'd receive any redress should I attempt to take AT&T to court over breach of that contract, they'd just claim it was retroactively terminated with no recourse. If I'm lucky I might get a refund for the remainder of that month's service.
I'm all for not having the government fuck shit up, but let's not pretend that the companies involved have lily-white hands.
And didn't some call for the federalization of airport security?
And it turned out that that idea sucked. Let's have the airlines responsible for their own security, and then tell them that if they have a plane fall out of the sky, the taxpayers aren't going to bail them out. The security theater will give its last performance that very same day.
they're not "laws". That's why they're called security "directives"
Personally, I think this is just word games, whether it's US Code, Building Code, or "If the person does not have ID, then 1) obtain one (1) pair of latex gloves and wear them on your hands...", the government telling people what to do is a "law". The fact that it's a law that tells someone else what to do doesn't make it any less so.
Further, in his quest to "expose" this situation, he found at one of the largest airports in the country, San Francisco International Airport, that he WAS indeed allowed to fly without ID (if he submitted to a search).
The problem was without being able to see the "directives" that the airport operated by, he had no way of knowing whether it was actually possible for him to trade identification for a search. How would he know the search was even offered in good faith (nothing like spending 30 minutes on a body cavity search followed by "sorry, still can't let you fly without an ID")?
Possible? Probable? Perhaps, but what you presented is pretty damn far from "proof".
Yeah, well, it worked well enough to ban open gas flares from pretty much the rest of the first world. If you want more proof, you can personally go out there with a gas chromatograph and see if there really is mercury and benzene coming out of those 300 foot high flames.
Of course, then you'd have to believe the quacks that tell us mercury and benzene are hazardous to your health.
Slashdot Mirror
"Oohh, I guess that rules out this per-- oh wait, they were convicted in Arizona, where "child molester" doesn't actually mean anything. Ok, you're hired."
Until TV news anchors show up at your door demanding to know why you're hiring a convicted sex offender, and both of you get fired because protesters are making your company lose money over your decision. Watch TV some day, fucking up everyone's lives is quality prime time material!
Arizona just undermined itself. Be ridiculous with labels, and you end up only labeling yourself.
Pfft. The label has been ridiculous from the start. Public indecency in many states is a sex offense, and you're added to the registry on the second time, whether a minor sees you or not. Alabama will register you for "obscene bumper stickers" (what about those popular truck mudflaps sporting a woman's silhouette, are they "obscene"? Miller test time! Who wants to ruin their life to see whether shitty beer is shitty or not?) Googlized version of pdfd version of an excel spreadsheet (yay!) listing registrable offenses by state.
Add to that the fact that as far as "being a sex offender" goes, raping 3 year olds is apparently just as heinous as having sex with your 17 year old girlfriend, or taking home a 24 year old who didn't seem drunk until she woke up and had no clue where she was or who you were, and the whole thing turns out to be a horrid mess, but somebody has to think of the children! No matter how ridiculous it gets, no politician will touch it, because anyone who does would be opening the floodgates for monsters to rape your little girls.
I'll give up on regulation banning network neutrality when the telcos and cablecos would give up on their regulations and contracts that ban other people from competing against their monopoly.
I was with you until you misused the word 'directly' for emphasis.
If it's misused, how does one properly "directly" kill someone?
Obviously we have to find the lowest common denominator between all the different tagging systems.
I propose that we standardize the following tags:
thissux
omgthisrox
That should cover 100% of the content in a manner that everyone can relate to.
See Cryptomnesia
Then you say "oops, I goofed up", pay royalties if necessary, credit the orignal version, and life moves on. You probably take a credibility hit for a few weeks, then people decide your version was better anyway.
web of law
Who needs law to mess things up when a CEO can write a press release stating "no, we do not grind babies up to make flour" with one hand while pushing the grind button with the other? The "no fraud" clause required by just about every economic system that claims to have a "free market" was violated long before Thag realized that if he had the biggest club, everyone would have to obey him and became the first ruler. People like to do the song and dance about how government fucked it all up, but government is simply a symptom of the fact that the ultimate fuckup -- humans -- are involved.
We do specialized web-based applications, not IPTV, so we've been following this in terms of "what does that mean to us". Maybe the IPTV companies are demanding free internet links, if so, then they're way out of line, they can buy whatever connections to whichever networks they want, just like everyone else.
This is how we see the issue as a service provider: ISP sees Company X making money (google, iTunes, etc), and wants a piece of it or their thug-routers might see to it that something terrible happens to their packets, where "a piece of it" comes from what is essentially protection money. When they tell us "buy our link for faster service" when our service is already fast enough for their customers, what we're hearing is "buy our link or be penalized". Even a little intentional throttling could become disastrous for us, if our clients' ISPs dropped every other packet, our bandwidth costs would essentially double (consider 1MB file+0.5MB retransmitted packets+0.25MB retransmitted retransmits+...=2MB) while our site would basically become unusable.
These aren't observations we've pulled out of our ass, these are things that the CEOs of the major telecoms are saying by themselves. A competitor could convince Bellsouth to put us out of business (especially if the merger with SBC/ATT completes, making just about everyone in the US who uses DSL affected). Of course, convincing our customers to switch to cable wouldn't help, Comcast is on the bandwagon, and they've already shown that they're more than happy to cut anything they don't like out of their service.
From what I understood all that a man in the middle could see was the host ip address as everything else is authenticated/encrypted. Or else you would get a security warning upon visiting the page.
There are SSL proxies that will present to you a certificate for www.whateveryouwentto.com, and talk to you in SSL while talking to the website in SSL. Yes, you'll get a "who the hell signed this thing?" popup... unless of course you've installed the signing certificate from the proxy as a trusted certificate. Remember that when you're using a computer not in your control, or if someone gives you a CD of "things you have to install" in order to get on the internet.
won't let us build modern plants of any kind.
I'll give you vocal nuts blocking nuclear plants, but every excuse that I've heard about new plants of other kinds is simply that the new modern plants are simply too expensive, and vocal nuts are keeping people from building stinky old plants via the EPA.
Then the other wavelength is that what you're describing (dedicated links) has little to do with network [non-]neutrality. If the issue was simply "buy a link into our network for better service to our customers" then nobody would be up in arms. Hell, my own company's servers have links out the wazoo. The problem is that there's a strongly implied "or else we'll make your normal routing even worse than it is now" in the wording of the ISPs' positions on the subject. Ignore HBO for a second, take Google (a popular target of ISPs who think they deserve money just because someone else used them to make billions. Who do they think they are, Shuji Nakamura?).
Think about it. When did you start having trouble searching on google? What does google stand to lose if they don't pay for these links?
How do you intend on applying QoS rules to packets that have already been dropped? It's your broadband connection that's likely to be congested, not your home LAN.
OK, then, a web interface on the next hop up that allows me to adjust the settings for my particular IP address. Wouldn't be too hard to do, most of the work would have to go into a making a simple but effective web UI that grandma can set up with minimal coaching from the staff if she has unusual tastes in consumption and wants to change the priorities.
This also ignores the longest part of the packet's journey, as it travels over the public Internet.
My ISP doesn't have any control over that either, but that's not going to stop them from taking money from HBO, now is it?
Good thing Clarence Thomas doesn't run any banks, it'd suck if you were charged late fees and interest on your credit card because you didn't pay the charge for $5000 in some other state that you submitted the paperwork to contest, but paying the contested charges would have waived your right to contest them.
He'd probably have even written the contract to read that payments are applied to contested charges first to prevent people from paying everything but the contested charges.
as they have nothing to do with each other and won't be referenced in the same context.
But how do I switch the keyboard and monitor between virtual machines?!
Even if it was only on one side of the coin, you have just cut your chances of detecting it by 50%
That's why it was suggested that it was the $2 coin. The middle could be popped out and replaced without many people (especially Americans who don't encounter such coins on a daily basis) noticing it at all, and with the whole middle replaced, it could go through both sides of the coin.
or a "non-neutral" Internet, where the network understands that your IPTV is more important and gives it preference when the connection gets congested?
What about a "non-neutral" internet, where I tell it what I think is more important. Apparently this whole giving the consumer what they want thing is what's on a different wavelength here. I'm sure that having companies bid on whether or not customers get to use their content is a great measure of how important they think they are, but maybe I want my bittorent of the latest shakycam video to finish, and I'm just watching junk on HBO to pass the time?
To me, this is an choice which has vast potential. Implemented properly, the play style and story line and world of Hellgate could indeed prove to work well in a heavily instanced world..."safe houses" could be in the same vain as guild wars towns, while "action zones" could be instanced.
I agree. It gets people to pick it up who might otherwise think "wait a minute, I'm paying to get a game that I'll have to pay MORE to play?"
It's doubtful that it'll get it a lot more money monthly, but I'm sure it would be able to move more boxes than just another MMO.
There is no aggression here
If the ISP moves to explicitly throttle HBO, then there is definitely an act of aggression, and the ISP will have expended resources (purchase of routers with the capability of throttling packets based on rules setup by a billing system that would be purchased to control who paid for which packets to go where) for the purpose of collecting money to not throttle the packets (just because it's a service, not a good, doesn't mean the principle behind the broken window fallacy can't apply). On the other hand, if the ISP does not explicitly throttle HBO, then there is currently no reason for HBO to pay up. They'll simply remind their subscribers that they'll need to throttle or kill their p2p apps, music streams, or other downloads if they want to watch uninterrupted.
you'll wish you had some way of telling the network that HBO traffic
Yeah. That would be great, if only my ISP had some way of letting me do QoS, like a broadband router installed in my house that I could control.
Cause if it is the exact same, and they have now created a $200 value for the laptops, they can now easily be sold to collect the money, instead of the intended educational value...
Yep. Exactly like how PBS telethons have encouraged the mugging of ladies carrying bags or men sipping coffee by setting the value of cloth bags and mugs at $120.
And HBO decides how much to pay for that service based on how much their customers (the advertisers) are willing to pay to make sure HBO stays "on-air".
The advertisers, in turn, will decide how much they want HBO to stay on-air on the basis of how much they are willing to spend to ensure that HBO's viewers (to whom their advertisements are directed) keep watching HBO, and thus their advertisements. This roughtly correlates with how much the viewers desire a clear, non-throttled transmission (though there are obviously other factors involved, such as the quality of the shows).
End result: Viewer preferences dictate the priority the ISP assigns to HBO.
And all this because the ISP couldn't just provide their customers the service they wanted. The only difference between this and the broken window fallacy is that in this case, somebody's window HAS to break, and the ISP seems to be trying to find the least efficient way to decide whose window has to go. Of course, even the idea that something HAS to break is false, the ISP could reinvest profits into a better network that could support your download and your HBO at the same time.
Even if there were no regulations at all on the electricity market, Enron could still have easily manipulated it by turning off generators as it did. Even if they turned off all the generators, by the time any competitor managed to build a facility to replace them, Enron would have turned them back on, rendering the facility redundant.
Customers won't just know what's being throttled, they will actively want it to be that way.
Except that the ISPs aren't throttling based on what the customers want, they want to throttle based on how much HBO pays them to not be throttled.
Why should anyone be entitled to all you can consume bandwidth for a miniscule amount each month?
Because that was what they sold me? Because they stated in their contract that they would make a "best effort" attempt to carry traffic between the internet and my computer? I wonder at what point people decided that contracts were worthless and free to break at any time. I doubt that I'd receive any redress should I attempt to take AT&T to court over breach of that contract, they'd just claim it was retroactively terminated with no recourse. If I'm lucky I might get a refund for the remainder of that month's service.
I'm all for not having the government fuck shit up, but let's not pretend that the companies involved have lily-white hands.
And didn't some call for the federalization of airport security?
And it turned out that that idea sucked. Let's have the airlines responsible for their own security, and then tell them that if they have a plane fall out of the sky, the taxpayers aren't going to bail them out. The security theater will give its last performance that very same day.
they're not "laws". That's why they're called security "directives"
Personally, I think this is just word games, whether it's US Code, Building Code, or "If the person does not have ID, then 1) obtain one (1) pair of latex gloves and wear them on your hands...", the government telling people what to do is a "law". The fact that it's a law that tells someone else what to do doesn't make it any less so.
Further, in his quest to "expose" this situation, he found at one of the largest airports in the country, San Francisco International Airport, that he WAS indeed allowed to fly without ID (if he submitted to a search).
The problem was without being able to see the "directives" that the airport operated by, he had no way of knowing whether it was actually possible for him to trade identification for a search. How would he know the search was even offered in good faith (nothing like spending 30 minutes on a body cavity search followed by "sorry, still can't let you fly without an ID")?
Possible? Probable? Perhaps, but what you presented is pretty damn far from "proof".
Yeah, well, it worked well enough to ban open gas flares from pretty much the rest of the first world. If you want more proof, you can personally go out there with a gas chromatograph and see if there really is mercury and benzene coming out of those 300 foot high flames.
Of course, then you'd have to believe the quacks that tell us mercury and benzene are hazardous to your health.