I notice you start throttling traffic to Google. A have a very simple solution. No more peering for you.
WHAT?! And give up billing Amazon?! I think your CEO wants to have a word for you. Something about corporate socialism and how he deserves to get Amazon's money for free and he was counting on that for the new yacht he's already ordered.
and the fact that I am white and middle class. That was all they cared about.
Sadly, this is true on either side of the puddle. And one of these days some white Texan or some white Oklahoman will get away with it, and everyone will stand around in shock and awe that some white person would do such a thing. For about 30 minutes. Then everyone will go back to hurling epithets at people that don't look like they do.
Meanwhile we get pretend security against some enemies.
2)companies already pay for ISP's and webhosting; tiered service is not anything new. Anyway, webhosting costs have been decreasing in price. I find it highly unlikely that this downward trend won't continue across the board.
This "net neutrality" stuff isn't about tiering. I pay more than you to get a connection to the internet that should be faster than yours (reasonable expectation, since you said you downgraded yours). Google pays lots more than I pay in order to get a really high-bandwidth connection, with uptime guarantees and all. This is The Way It Should Be. The ISPs are threatening to break this.
To dig up an analogy I made in a previous post to explain what the ISPs want, lets talk about roads. Let's say that today, you could drive to disneyland in 2 days going 60 mph. If you wanted to, you could pay to get on a toll road, and cut some time off of that, lets call it 1.5 days at 70mph with fewer stops in cities. Now lets look at the future: You get on the road and discover that for some reason you can only get your car up to 30mph. You're not told why, but the truth is that Disney didn't pay your road's bill for "customer access". You're starting to wonder whether an 8 day round trip just so little timmy can see Mickey for a few hours is worth it. You decide to pay extra to get up on the toll road, but you're still stuck at 30MPH.
At this rate, are you still going to drive to Disney? The ISPs hope the answer will be "no", so that they can convince google, etc to pay for the priviledge of having their site usable by the ISP's clients. This will destroy the current tiered model, after all, if all I'm using is Google and my ISP is throttling Google, why should I pay more to get a "faster" connection when I'll still get service at the same speed as before?
The thing I find strange is that if anything, tiered pricing, by passing on costs to distributors, could ultimately benefit consumers by lowering subscription costs.
Thats a laugh, I don't expect the money that Google will have to pay my ISP so that I can use their website doing anything but padding the CxO's wallet. I doubt that this will be the magic funding for all the network development that most of the major players have stopped doing over the past decade. (fttp? I am strongly considering relocating myself and my web-based business outside of any area serviced by SBC/ATT, and letting my mayor, governor, and local reps know exactly why they're losing my tax revenue.)
So what if SBC decides to implement a tiered system of bandwidth! Consumers just stop renewing their contracts if they hate it enough.
You think SBC is going to tell you what they're doing? That's a laugh right there.
8)There is a certain arrogance to the notion that consumers can't be trusted to act in their self-interest but require government's "help" to be protected.
See above. If the consumers know nothing, how are they going to protect themselves?
Right, so they arrest a bunch of random people, and when nothing happens they say "see! We did that!" When someone asks them to prove it, they whine about national security.
I've got a terrorist repellant rock that's worked just as well, it's even driven all the terrorists to Canada.
By providing a service thats worth it, obviously. If the "free" service is crap, sell service that isn't. If the residents are happy playing with crap, then curse the corporations before you as you attempt to use marketing to educate the public instead of turning them into the mindless sheep who are happy with the crap that corporations and governments sell them.
Of course, it also means that if the city is charging Google to allow its residents to access google, and google is refusing to pay, you won't be able to charge google, otherwise your service would be just as crappy, AND you'll be charging for it.
tells me that either you're wrong. Or they're considering purposefully delaying "non-prioritized" traffic
The "net congestion" excuse is a lie. If the telco drops a TCP packet (or delays it until the window closes and the packet is considered dropped), that packet gets sent again and again until it gets through or until the TCP connection times out. Anything they do that would cause more packets to be dropped would make congestion worse.
If you want a taxi analogy, try this on: you hail a taxi cab and ask him if he can take you from the airport to the hotel. Cabbie says "sure". You ride around, then stop. You pay the cabbie fare and get a receipt, but you discover that you've been dropped off in the middle of the bad part of town. You check your receipt and discover that the cabbie charged you the full fare to get to the hotel, and you're left wondering why you're not there. Secretly, the cab collects $50 from another hotel that was competing with your hotel for dropping you off immediately in order to pick up their patron, at a "higher priority".
You talk about monopolies and collusion, but the REAL problem here is that the telcos and other ISPs involved will almost certainly not disclose their "priorities", which would give people the chance to select a product that performs how they want.
Not sure what television stations have to do with this, last I checked FCC requires cable companies to carry all local stations. Perhaps you mean new cable channels, yet new channels do get created, even by independents. You have to compete with the big boys if you're just now starting out, but a couple of anime companies managed to get their own channels listed in several markets. The video on demand services are great for this, put up some material for the cable companies to let their customers watch if they want, if demand is high enough and you've got enough material for a full feed (G4 only got away with repeating every 4 hours because they ARE Comcast), maybe they'll let you have a channel.
a tiered internet is all about. Charging more for changing speed limits.
Disabuse yourself of the notion that what the telcos want is a "tiered internet". Charging more for changing the speedlimit is what we've got now. I pay a lot of money for a nice fast connection, with the understanding that it's nice and fast to any destination that can also do nice and fast.
What the telcos want to do, instead of charging you to go fast, they charge the friend you're driving over to see. Maybe you're going to Disneyworld, then Disney foots the bill if you drive there faster than 25 mph. Now, of course 25 doesn't make sense, after all you used to be able to drive there at 60 most of the way, but thats how it's going to work now.
The telcos repeatedly frame the issue as one of battling "network congestion" however they fail to explain how all of the packets getting resent after being dropped the first time(s) makes the congestion any better. (To further the analogy, now you're trying to go 60 on a road where everyone's going 25 because their friend didn't want to pay to see them.)
C, on the other other hand, automagically infuses them with impeccable programming style.
Clearly. Unless, of course, you started with one of those other languages like BASIC or PHP which was a magical land of milk and honey, where strings were always long enough and return values weren't really all that important.
The reason the fringe exists is because people refuse to be swayed by proof. Try proving to some people that NASA really did send astronauts to the moon. To them, everything is staged, manipulated, or edited to show what The Man wants them to think.
Absolutely not. Unlike normal wireless internet access, VoIP over wireless networking would cause fiscal interference with the in-flight phones, which would result in the airline to crash straight into the ground.
When your enemy knows how often your satellites pass overhead, he stops revealing his troop movements during your satellite passes.
Then your satellites don't pass by often enough.
When your enemy knows you are tapping his phone lines, he stops revealing his plans by discussing them over the phone.
Because it's a well known fact that phones are the only way terrorists make plans, unless they know they're tapped in which case they switch to untappable psychic powers.
All of this aside, secret or not, intel is only useful if you use it. I'm reminded of all the whining about the news leaking the US's ability to track bin Laden's satellite phone, as if the government was ever actually going to kill the guy.
Intelligence is kind of like encryption. Excluding things like infiltration, if it only works because it's super-sekrit, it's probably not working anyway.
Basic image comparison techniques are pretty easy to fool. Change one pixel and the entire image hashes to something else. Some "dupe detectors" reduce the image to a grid of n*m, take the average color of each square, and hash that. This can be defeated by changing the color of a significant block of pixels to a random color, though this would need to be arranged based on the picture itself so you don't hide the kitten.
That still leaves things like manually capturing every possible unique base kitten image, then doing a pixel-by-pixel comparison and marking everything mostly matching as a kitten. It can be slowed down by changing the brightness or tint of the overall image slightly, but too much would make the image unrecognizable.
It would be more interesting to combine several ideas. Rather than "click on the kitten" have each picture marked with a random letter, and "enter the letters of the pictures with kittens". Or maybe change it up, pick brown kittens or black kittens or white kittens, kittens playing with a ball, etc.
But any attempt to narrow the focus to PROBABLE terrorists is derided by some (including on/.) as "racial profiling."
Because after Richard Reid, Ted, those Christian nutjobs arrested with cyanide bombs in Texas, the guy in Oklahoma who tried to carry a pipe bomb on the plane, and the Unibomber, the more intelligent people are simply not going to accept that the only people who want to kill them are dark-skinned turban-wearing bearded people. Find a profile that would not have ignored the majority of these attacks/attempts, or face derision.
Likewise, I have the right to petition my representatives, or pay someone to do that on my behalf
I've no problem with you (or even employees representing the company they work for) petitioning their representatives or paying someone else to do it. My problem is when you start giving representatives the limos full of prostitutes and $90k in ice cubes. It's one thing to ask them to do something, another entirely to pay them to do it.
Was the public interest really served by releasing this story?
Yes, because now we've learned that the system is utter bullshit. How many false positives are we wasting my tax money on? Let's go beyond just the expense of sending an agent out to "Aunt Becky's" house like dozens of other posters pointed out. What about all of these people being stuck on watch lists? How many millions to maintain this increasingly bogus list, how many millions in manpower and time searching them every flight they take? Furthermore, according to Qwest's statement the government apparently attempted to bribe them with millions of dollars worth of contracts to get access to their closet without a warrant. If this is true, how much did the NSA spend on bribing the others?
Hear that? The sound you heard when you read the article was not the sound of terrorists "getting away", that was the sound of the NSA taking my tax money and flushing it down the toilet. If they knew who the terrorists were and for some reason didn't want them to have a sudden heart attack (leading cause of death, don'tcha know) then they'd be able to look and see who's calling who and work out who they're in league with. But this? There's already so much noise in the system that they'd probably drop a trail that led to a local pizza delivery. All the terrorists would need to "win" is a dispatcher and a driver, sending out "today's sausage special" of bombparts and cash to the co-conspirators.
Is that so? Then why are comcast, ATT, etc demanding that google, amazon, etc share their profits with them? Why are cities stealing peoples' houses so that companies can build there? Wake up to the new communism, where corporations want to have everything for no work at all.
the people currently running the US have opposite beliefs.
Just remember, unless a political miracle occurrs today, thanks to the SCOTUS's Kelo decision, people will have their homes taken away by the government.
No-one knows the true pronunciation of this elder god's name, for those unfortunate enough to stumble upon it, invariably utter it aloud, resulting in the summoning of this dread being to the mortal realm, whereupon it devours the souls of anyone nearby.
Great. So google shells out 10% of their profits to help comcast. Then they shell out 10% of their profits to help ATT. Then they shell out 10% of their profits to help AOL... When does it stop?
When did capitalism become so communist? If comcast needs more money then it should charge its customers more, not demand companies who have no connection to comcast's network at all to pay them more money.
Slashdot Mirror
I notice you start throttling traffic to Google. A have a very simple solution. No more peering for you.
WHAT?! And give up billing Amazon?! I think your CEO wants to have a word for you. Something about corporate socialism and how he deserves to get Amazon's money for free and he was counting on that for the new yacht he's already ordered.
and the fact that I am white and middle class. That was all they cared about.
Sadly, this is true on either side of the puddle. And one of these days some white Texan or some white Oklahoman will get away with it, and everyone will stand around in shock and awe that some white person would do such a thing. For about 30 minutes. Then everyone will go back to hurling epithets at people that don't look like they do.
Meanwhile we get pretend security against some enemies.
2)companies already pay for ISP's and webhosting; tiered service is not anything new. Anyway, webhosting costs have been decreasing in price. I find it highly unlikely that this downward trend won't continue across the board.
This "net neutrality" stuff isn't about tiering. I pay more than you to get a connection to the internet that should be faster than yours (reasonable expectation, since you said you downgraded yours). Google pays lots more than I pay in order to get a really high-bandwidth connection, with uptime guarantees and all. This is The Way It Should Be. The ISPs are threatening to break this.
To dig up an analogy I made in a previous post to explain what the ISPs want, lets talk about roads. Let's say that today, you could drive to disneyland in 2 days going 60 mph. If you wanted to, you could pay to get on a toll road, and cut some time off of that, lets call it 1.5 days at 70mph with fewer stops in cities. Now lets look at the future: You get on the road and discover that for some reason you can only get your car up to 30mph. You're not told why, but the truth is that Disney didn't pay your road's bill for "customer access". You're starting to wonder whether an 8 day round trip just so little timmy can see Mickey for a few hours is worth it. You decide to pay extra to get up on the toll road, but you're still stuck at 30MPH.
At this rate, are you still going to drive to Disney? The ISPs hope the answer will be "no", so that they can convince google, etc to pay for the priviledge of having their site usable by the ISP's clients. This will destroy the current tiered model, after all, if all I'm using is Google and my ISP is throttling Google, why should I pay more to get a "faster" connection when I'll still get service at the same speed as before?
The thing I find strange is that if anything, tiered pricing, by passing on costs to distributors, could ultimately benefit consumers by lowering subscription costs.
Thats a laugh, I don't expect the money that Google will have to pay my ISP so that I can use their website doing anything but padding the CxO's wallet. I doubt that this will be the magic funding for all the network development that most of the major players have stopped doing over the past decade. (fttp? I am strongly considering relocating myself and my web-based business outside of any area serviced by SBC/ATT, and letting my mayor, governor, and local reps know exactly why they're losing my tax revenue.)
So what if SBC decides to implement a tiered system of bandwidth! Consumers just stop renewing their contracts if they hate it enough.
You think SBC is going to tell you what they're doing? That's a laugh right there.
8)There is a certain arrogance to the notion that consumers can't be trusted to act in their self-interest but require government's "help" to be protected.
See above. If the consumers know nothing, how are they going to protect themselves?
Data mine all you want, I don't think it will give you that much information. That is, other than how not to style a webpage.
Personally, I think the agents just want to hook up with all the half-naked 15 year old girls out there.
Right, so they arrest a bunch of random people, and when nothing happens they say "see! We did that!" When someone asks them to prove it, they whine about national security.
I've got a terrorist repellant rock that's worked just as well, it's even driven all the terrorists to Canada.
How can you compete with something that's free?
By providing a service thats worth it, obviously. If the "free" service is crap, sell service that isn't. If the residents are happy playing with crap, then curse the corporations before you as you attempt to use marketing to educate the public instead of turning them into the mindless sheep who are happy with the crap that corporations and governments sell them.
Of course, it also means that if the city is charging Google to allow its residents to access google, and google is refusing to pay, you won't be able to charge google, otherwise your service would be just as crappy, AND you'll be charging for it.
tells me that either you're wrong. Or they're considering purposefully delaying "non-prioritized" traffic
The "net congestion" excuse is a lie. If the telco drops a TCP packet (or delays it until the window closes and the packet is considered dropped), that packet gets sent again and again until it gets through or until the TCP connection times out. Anything they do that would cause more packets to be dropped would make congestion worse.
And this is different from whats happening with the corrupt and bloated ISPs now, how?
ISP's ability to lower priority and eventually block anything that might look like it could be P2P.
Many already do this. I don't see a correction anywhere on the horizon.
If you want a taxi analogy, try this on: you hail a taxi cab and ask him if he can take you from the airport to the hotel. Cabbie says "sure". You ride around, then stop. You pay the cabbie fare and get a receipt, but you discover that you've been dropped off in the middle of the bad part of town. You check your receipt and discover that the cabbie charged you the full fare to get to the hotel, and you're left wondering why you're not there. Secretly, the cab collects $50 from another hotel that was competing with your hotel for dropping you off immediately in order to pick up their patron, at a "higher priority".
You talk about monopolies and collusion, but the REAL problem here is that the telcos and other ISPs involved will almost certainly not disclose their "priorities", which would give people the chance to select a product that performs how they want.
Not sure what television stations have to do with this, last I checked FCC requires cable companies to carry all local stations. Perhaps you mean new cable channels, yet new channels do get created, even by independents. You have to compete with the big boys if you're just now starting out, but a couple of anime companies managed to get their own channels listed in several markets. The video on demand services are great for this, put up some material for the cable companies to let their customers watch if they want, if demand is high enough and you've got enough material for a full feed (G4 only got away with repeating every 4 hours because they ARE Comcast), maybe they'll let you have a channel.
a tiered internet is all about. Charging more for changing speed limits.
Disabuse yourself of the notion that what the telcos want is a "tiered internet". Charging more for changing the speedlimit is what we've got now. I pay a lot of money for a nice fast connection, with the understanding that it's nice and fast to any destination that can also do nice and fast.
What the telcos want to do, instead of charging you to go fast, they charge the friend you're driving over to see. Maybe you're going to Disneyworld, then Disney foots the bill if you drive there faster than 25 mph. Now, of course 25 doesn't make sense, after all you used to be able to drive there at 60 most of the way, but thats how it's going to work now.
The telcos repeatedly frame the issue as one of battling "network congestion" however they fail to explain how all of the packets getting resent after being dropped the first time(s) makes the congestion any better. (To further the analogy, now you're trying to go 60 on a road where everyone's going 25 because their friend didn't want to pay to see them.)
help protect the populations from civil war
Truly, war is peace.
C, on the other other hand, automagically infuses them with impeccable programming style.
Clearly. Unless, of course, you started with one of those other languages like BASIC or PHP which was a magical land of milk and honey, where strings were always long enough and return values weren't really all that important.
Then things get ugly.
The reason the fringe exists is because people refuse to be swayed by proof. Try proving to some people that NASA really did send astronauts to the moon. To them, everything is staged, manipulated, or edited to show what The Man wants them to think.
Absolutely not. Unlike normal wireless internet access, VoIP over wireless networking would cause fiscal interference with the in-flight phones, which would result in the airline to crash straight into the ground.
When your enemy knows how often your satellites pass overhead, he stops revealing his troop movements during your satellite passes.
Then your satellites don't pass by often enough.
When your enemy knows you are tapping his phone lines, he stops revealing his plans by discussing them over the phone.
Because it's a well known fact that phones are the only way terrorists make plans, unless they know they're tapped in which case they switch to untappable psychic powers.
All of this aside, secret or not, intel is only useful if you use it. I'm reminded of all the whining about the news leaking the US's ability to track bin Laden's satellite phone, as if the government was ever actually going to kill the guy.
Intelligence is kind of like encryption. Excluding things like infiltration, if it only works because it's super-sekrit, it's probably not working anyway.
Basic image comparison techniques are pretty easy to fool. Change one pixel and the entire image hashes to something else. Some "dupe detectors" reduce the image to a grid of n*m, take the average color of each square, and hash that. This can be defeated by changing the color of a significant block of pixels to a random color, though this would need to be arranged based on the picture itself so you don't hide the kitten.
That still leaves things like manually capturing every possible unique base kitten image, then doing a pixel-by-pixel comparison and marking everything mostly matching as a kitten. It can be slowed down by changing the brightness or tint of the overall image slightly, but too much would make the image unrecognizable.
It would be more interesting to combine several ideas. Rather than "click on the kitten" have each picture marked with a random letter, and "enter the letters of the pictures with kittens". Or maybe change it up, pick brown kittens or black kittens or white kittens, kittens playing with a ball, etc.
"Able Danger" identified Atta and three of the other hijackers pre-9/11.
And after spending untold thousands of tax dollars to figure it out, what did the government do with it?
Now, tell me it's any different now.
But any attempt to narrow the focus to PROBABLE terrorists is derided by some (including on /.) as "racial profiling."
Because after Richard Reid, Ted, those Christian nutjobs arrested with cyanide bombs in Texas, the guy in Oklahoma who tried to carry a pipe bomb on the plane, and the Unibomber, the more intelligent people are simply not going to accept that the only people who want to kill them are dark-skinned turban-wearing bearded people. Find a profile that would not have ignored the majority of these attacks/attempts, or face derision.
Likewise, I have the right to petition my representatives, or pay someone to do that on my behalf
I've no problem with you (or even employees representing the company they work for) petitioning their representatives or paying someone else to do it. My problem is when you start giving representatives the limos full of prostitutes and $90k in ice cubes. It's one thing to ask them to do something, another entirely to pay them to do it.
Was the public interest really served by releasing this story?
Yes, because now we've learned that the system is utter bullshit. How many false positives are we wasting my tax money on? Let's go beyond just the expense of sending an agent out to "Aunt Becky's" house like dozens of other posters pointed out. What about all of these people being stuck on watch lists? How many millions to maintain this increasingly bogus list, how many millions in manpower and time searching them every flight they take? Furthermore, according to Qwest's statement the government apparently attempted to bribe them with millions of dollars worth of contracts to get access to their closet without a warrant. If this is true, how much did the NSA spend on bribing the others?
Hear that? The sound you heard when you read the article was not the sound of terrorists "getting away", that was the sound of the NSA taking my tax money and flushing it down the toilet. If they knew who the terrorists were and for some reason didn't want them to have a sudden heart attack (leading cause of death, don'tcha know) then they'd be able to look and see who's calling who and work out who they're in league with. But this? There's already so much noise in the system that they'd probably drop a trail that led to a local pizza delivery. All the terrorists would need to "win" is a dispatcher and a driver, sending out "today's sausage special" of bombparts and cash to the co-conspirators.
(capitalism is the opposite of communism).
Is that so? Then why are comcast, ATT, etc demanding that google, amazon, etc share their profits with them? Why are cities stealing peoples' houses so that companies can build there? Wake up to the new communism, where corporations want to have everything for no work at all.
the people currently running the US have opposite beliefs.
c les/2006/05/30/deadline_approaches_but_no_deal_exp ected_in_fort_trumbull_dispute/
Just remember, unless a political miracle occurrs today, thanks to the SCOTUS's Kelo decision, people will have their homes taken away by the government.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/connecticut/arti
How do you pronounce Cthulhu?
No-one knows the true pronunciation of this elder god's name, for those unfortunate enough to stumble upon it, invariably utter it aloud, resulting in the summoning of this dread being to the mortal realm, whereupon it devours the souls of anyone nearby.
That said, I prefer 1) Cuh-thoo-loo
they can afford a 10% drop in their profits
Great. So google shells out 10% of their profits to help comcast. Then they shell out 10% of their profits to help ATT. Then they shell out 10% of their profits to help AOL... When does it stop?
When did capitalism become so communist? If comcast needs more money then it should charge its customers more, not demand companies who have no connection to comcast's network at all to pay them more money.