Only some of the things posted on Facebook are news articles. Only some of your search results on Google are from news sites. But Slashdot? Every single story here comes from horrible people stealing content from news agencies! For shame! Down with all news aggregation sites!
If you're going to be pedantic at least try to be pedantic about something that matters.
If you are pedantic about something that matters, doesn't that mean you're no longer pedantic? Pedant, by its (not it's) very definition focuses on minor, unimportant details. That's like saying "If you're going to be a jerk, can't you at least be nice?"
I've been a strong proponent of FCC-enforced NN. However, this article does raise some really good counter points. Pai and crew keep saying that the market should decide, and ignore the fact that there's absolutely no competition for the vast majority of the nation (only one broadband provider in my entire state, for example). The EFF article talks about how fostering competition is really the solution, if it could somehow be done. Here's something that was done in a small town where I used to live that really could make a huge difference.
If you don't feel like clicking on the link, the short story is that there's a municipal fiber network, but they actually don't act as an ISP. They are just a last-leg service and you select from a range of ISPs that have run a service to the town's central hub (which greatly lowers the barrier to entry for an ISP). Some are calling it new and novel, but it sounds to me like the Internet of the 90s, where you pay your phone company for the line and you pay AOL or some such to act as your ISP. Then the phone companies bought out the ISPs and that's how we ended up with today's mess. I vote for switching back to the 90's model like my old town did.
I might have to do just that. Since they only advertise a maximum speed and not a minimum, I'm not sure how far I'll get, but it might be worth investing some time doing some research.
Still, it doesn't change the scenario I suggested. Let's say your ISP offered a new service, which was only 5 Mbps. However, they promised 200 down/ 200 up from certain sites like Netflix, Hulu, Facebook, etc. And let's say it was half as expensive as your current 150 down/50 up service (which they would be able to do because it's subsidized by the companies paying for access to those fast lanes). Would you buy it? Probably depends on whether or not the sites you frequent are in the list of blessed services. I'm thinking many people would. It makes sense for them. But it still leads to the same result: all customers are pushed to those providers who had enough capital to buy the fast-lane, or who are getting it free because they are owned by the ISP's parent company. It puts a huge barrier to entry on a new startup. Small businesses cannot compete because people navigate elsewhere after a couple of seconds of waiting for loading time. Same end result: the Internet is owned by Amazon and Google. Your ISP hasn't violated their contract to you. They may even have been completely transparent about it. You welcomed the lower monthly bill, but failed to think about the long-term consequences of destroying the Internet.
Actually that's quite common in my area. No competition. If you complain about speed, they respond it's "up to" 100mb, and 5mb is indeed a part of "up to 100mb". My choices are to continue giving them money, or live without internet, as they are the only broadband provider
#3 should have read "When a new streaming startup tries to deliver content to you, it is throttled because they don't have the capital for a 'fast lane'. "
Didn't like the formatting of the first post. Sorry for the repeat, but wanted a little more readability.
My prediction:
1) ISPs will artificially slow down all traffic, using current era technology for "fast lanes" that are actually just normal-speed lanes.
2) ISPs will then offer "fast lanes", which are really just normal-speed lanes where the artificial throttle has been lifted. Only companies with HUGE amounts of money to spend will get to use them, while all other traffic is throttled. Note that these fast lanes will not be made by buying cutting-edge hardware, just by lifting artificial limitations on existing hardware.
3) When a new streaming startup tries to deliver content to you, it goes through the legacy hardware.
4) Netflix and Hulu say "LOL! Look how slow they are! You need to stick with us!"
5) The new streaming startup goes out of business.
6) Netflix and Hulu raise their rates, because the ISPs are helping them keep their monopoly and they don't have to worry about competition.
7) Cable executives who are still butt-hurt that Hulu is leading to the demise of Cable TV force their ISP branch to charge more for the "fast lanes". Hulu and Netflix will comply and simply raise their rates again.
8) The ISP will continue to charge customers more for the limited services they offer, in the name of "investing in infrastructure", while everyone knows they do no such thing (to be fair, they are going to do this one with or without NN rules. This is just standard business procedure for ISPs.)
9) Repeat 1-8 until all independent content providers are crushed or acquired and only Amazon and Google remain, with a few outliers like/. served up a 128 kbps.
My prediction:
1) ISPs will artificially slow down all traffic, using current era technology for "fast lanes" that are actually just normal-speed lanes.
2) ISPs will then offer "fast lanes", which are really just normal-speed lanes where the artificial throttle has been lifted. Only companies with HUGE amounts of money to spend will get to use them, while all other traffic is throttled. Note that these fast lanes will not be made by buying cutting-edge hardware, just by lifting artificial limitations on existing hardware.
3) When a new streaming startup tries to deliver content to you, it goes through the legacy hardware.
4) Netflix and Hulu say "LOL! Look how slow they are! You need to stick with us!"
5) The new streaming startup goes out of business.
6) Netflix and Hulu raise their rates, because the ISPs are helping them keep their monopoly and they don't have to worry about competition.
7) Cable executives who are still butt-hurt that Hulu is leading to the demise of Cable TV force their ISP branch to charge more for the "fast lanes". Hulu and Netflix will comply and simply raise their rates again.
8) The ISP will continue to charge customers more for the limited services they offer, in the name of "investing in infrastructure", while everyone knows they do no such thing (to be fair, they are going to do this one with or without NN rules. This is just standard business procedure for ISPs.)
9) Repeat 1-8 until all independent content providers are crushed or acquired and only Amazon and Google remain, with a few outliers like/. served up a 128 kbps.
Wait, why can't a robot "purchase" things for itself? I am sure software can be written to mimic a person buying things.
I mean if you think an employee's value comes about from what they purchase in addition to what they make.. why can't a robot do that part too?
Because in order for the purchase to be of any value, money would have to be transferred, which means the robot would need a salary in order to make purchases, which means it's no longer cheaper than an employee. This argument makes no sense.
I wasn't referring to automated steel making "everyone unemployed". I was referring to Freischutz's scenario: "how will the economy work when 90% of the jobs are automated".
So, while factory owners love the idea of not having to pay salaries, they need people to have enough money to buy their crap. It's in their financial interest to make sure that people are being paid some sort of wage. So the rich would then hire people to further enrich their lives (back to artist patronage, perhaps?), and a new economic sector would be born. Make no mistake, it's still done in the spirit of greed and exploitation, but the rich don't really get rich without the rest of us working.
The problem with this argument is it assumes that owning an automated factory = profit. When everyone is unemployed, they stop buying cars. When they stop buying cars, automated factories have to stop making cars. When they stop making cars, they stop buying steel. When they stop buying steel, the steel mill from this story stops making steel. Etc. at some point, they either have to pass some of their savings on to the consumers or close shop, as the consumers will be making next to nothing in the scenario you describe.
That's kind of what I'm getting at. This is a perfect case study for modern Luddite thinking. Do we a) see people finding new work or b) see massive unemployment and as the plant owners get rich while everyone else becomes homeless? Both arguments get made regularly on Slashdot.
Gone are the days where you have to wonder is there's a camera watching you dress or watching you be intimate in your bedroom. You never have to wonder again, because the answer is simply "Yes"! We will absolutely record your most private moments. Not only that, but we can automatically share them with the people who have no need to know. Have your parents been worried about how well you've been eating since you moved out? We'll send them a video of your latest BM!
I live in Idaho and I'll second that. Verizon abuses its customers, but it's the only carrier where you can consistently expect to be able to place a call while on the Interstate.
I live in a rural mountain-west state. Around here, all four major carriers are fine in the center of the "city" (by city, I mean a town of about 50k people). However, in the surrounding area, Verizon is really the only show in town. T-Mobile is growing, but Sprint and AT&T don't really even have 3G reaching my house, much less 4G.
Jobs will temporarily be lost to automation. We've been automating people out of work for a very, very long time. Farm equipment automated farm hands out of work. They found jobs in manufacturing. Software automated a lot of secretarial positions and other white collar positions out of work, but that same software led to a new industry that employs a massive number of people in higher paying jobs.
When you automate people out of a job, you temporarily displace them. However, that frees up a lot of capital. And, before you say that the rich greedy people at the top will just pocket all that money, remember that they are rich and greedy and want even more money, so they'll take that money and start new businesses that employ lots of people.
I know that sounds an awful lot like trickle-down economics (probably because it is), but I for one don't begrudge the technological advances of the past that, while temporarily painful, have in the end made everyone's lives better (bringing down food prices, employing most of the readership of slashdot, etc).
Note that they qualify that as "global warming pollution" rather than just "pollution". If we're only talking carbon, yes. Studies have shown that over the life of the vehicle, an electric vehicle's carbon footprint is roughly half that of a combustion engine. But there's a lot of pollution that harms the environment and DOESN'T contribute to global warming. On that front, lithium mines kind of take the cake.
I would love to own an electric car. However, I'm not going to kid myself and say it's helping the environment. With current processes for extracting Lithium from the ground resulting in 0.02% lithium and 99.8% dirt that is now contaminated by the toxic chemicals used to extract the lithium and the resource depletion on local water sources as water is shipped to lithium mines in salt flats, plus the fact that electricity to charge the cars likely comes from burning fossil fuels anyway, I'm going to guess the net environmental impact of an electric vehicle over the course of its life is only nominally better than a combustion engine. People have this idea that if the pollution isn't directly coming out of their tailpipe, they aren't causing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Only some of the things posted on Facebook are news articles. Only some of your search results on Google are from news sites. But Slashdot? Every single story here comes from horrible people stealing content from news agencies! For shame! Down with all news aggregation sites!
If you're going to be pedantic at least try to be pedantic about something that matters.
If you are pedantic about something that matters, doesn't that mean you're no longer pedantic? Pedant, by its (not it's) very definition focuses on minor, unimportant details. That's like saying "If you're going to be a jerk, can't you at least be nice?"
I've been a strong proponent of FCC-enforced NN. However, this article does raise some really good counter points. Pai and crew keep saying that the market should decide, and ignore the fact that there's absolutely no competition for the vast majority of the nation (only one broadband provider in my entire state, for example). The EFF article talks about how fostering competition is really the solution, if it could somehow be done. Here's something that was done in a small town where I used to live that really could make a huge difference.
If you don't feel like clicking on the link, the short story is that there's a municipal fiber network, but they actually don't act as an ISP. They are just a last-leg service and you select from a range of ISPs that have run a service to the town's central hub (which greatly lowers the barrier to entry for an ISP). Some are calling it new and novel, but it sounds to me like the Internet of the 90s, where you pay your phone company for the line and you pay AOL or some such to act as your ISP. Then the phone companies bought out the ISPs and that's how we ended up with today's mess. I vote for switching back to the 90's model like my old town did.
I might have to do just that. Since they only advertise a maximum speed and not a minimum, I'm not sure how far I'll get, but it might be worth investing some time doing some research. Still, it doesn't change the scenario I suggested. Let's say your ISP offered a new service, which was only 5 Mbps. However, they promised 200 down/ 200 up from certain sites like Netflix, Hulu, Facebook, etc. And let's say it was half as expensive as your current 150 down/50 up service (which they would be able to do because it's subsidized by the companies paying for access to those fast lanes). Would you buy it? Probably depends on whether or not the sites you frequent are in the list of blessed services. I'm thinking many people would. It makes sense for them. But it still leads to the same result: all customers are pushed to those providers who had enough capital to buy the fast-lane, or who are getting it free because they are owned by the ISP's parent company. It puts a huge barrier to entry on a new startup. Small businesses cannot compete because people navigate elsewhere after a couple of seconds of waiting for loading time. Same end result: the Internet is owned by Amazon and Google. Your ISP hasn't violated their contract to you. They may even have been completely transparent about it. You welcomed the lower monthly bill, but failed to think about the long-term consequences of destroying the Internet.
Actually that's quite common in my area. No competition. If you complain about speed, they respond it's "up to" 100mb, and 5mb is indeed a part of "up to 100mb". My choices are to continue giving them money, or live without internet, as they are the only broadband provider
#3 should have read "When a new streaming startup tries to deliver content to you, it is throttled because they don't have the capital for a 'fast lane'. "
Didn't like the formatting of the first post. Sorry for the repeat, but wanted a little more readability.
/. served up a 128 kbps.
My prediction:
1) ISPs will artificially slow down all traffic, using current era technology for "fast lanes" that are actually just normal-speed lanes.
2) ISPs will then offer "fast lanes", which are really just normal-speed lanes where the artificial throttle has been lifted. Only companies with HUGE amounts of money to spend will get to use them, while all other traffic is throttled. Note that these fast lanes will not be made by buying cutting-edge hardware, just by lifting artificial limitations on existing hardware.
3) When a new streaming startup tries to deliver content to you, it goes through the legacy hardware.
4) Netflix and Hulu say "LOL! Look how slow they are! You need to stick with us!"
5) The new streaming startup goes out of business.
6) Netflix and Hulu raise their rates, because the ISPs are helping them keep their monopoly and they don't have to worry about competition.
7) Cable executives who are still butt-hurt that Hulu is leading to the demise of Cable TV force their ISP branch to charge more for the "fast lanes". Hulu and Netflix will comply and simply raise their rates again.
8) The ISP will continue to charge customers more for the limited services they offer, in the name of "investing in infrastructure", while everyone knows they do no such thing (to be fair, they are going to do this one with or without NN rules. This is just standard business procedure for ISPs.)
9) Repeat 1-8 until all independent content providers are crushed or acquired and only Amazon and Google remain, with a few outliers like
My prediction: 1) ISPs will artificially slow down all traffic, using current era technology for "fast lanes" that are actually just normal-speed lanes. 2) ISPs will then offer "fast lanes", which are really just normal-speed lanes where the artificial throttle has been lifted. Only companies with HUGE amounts of money to spend will get to use them, while all other traffic is throttled. Note that these fast lanes will not be made by buying cutting-edge hardware, just by lifting artificial limitations on existing hardware. 3) When a new streaming startup tries to deliver content to you, it goes through the legacy hardware. 4) Netflix and Hulu say "LOL! Look how slow they are! You need to stick with us!" 5) The new streaming startup goes out of business. 6) Netflix and Hulu raise their rates, because the ISPs are helping them keep their monopoly and they don't have to worry about competition. 7) Cable executives who are still butt-hurt that Hulu is leading to the demise of Cable TV force their ISP branch to charge more for the "fast lanes". Hulu and Netflix will comply and simply raise their rates again. 8) The ISP will continue to charge customers more for the limited services they offer, in the name of "investing in infrastructure", while everyone knows they do no such thing (to be fair, they are going to do this one with or without NN rules. This is just standard business procedure for ISPs.) 9) Repeat 1-8 until all independent content providers are crushed or acquired and only Amazon and Google remain, with a few outliers like /. served up a 128 kbps.
Well, they've been banned by the FCC for now, but here's what they used to be: http://www.fiercecable.com/onl...
In a totally unrelated story, the suicide rate in Wisconsin is at an all time high...
Wait, why can't a robot "purchase" things for itself? I am sure software can be written to mimic a person buying things.
I mean if you think an employee's value comes about from what they purchase in addition to what they make .. why can't a robot do that part too?
Because in order for the purchase to be of any value, money would have to be transferred, which means the robot would need a salary in order to make purchases, which means it's no longer cheaper than an employee. This argument makes no sense.
I wasn't referring to automated steel making "everyone unemployed". I was referring to Freischutz's scenario: "how will the economy work when 90% of the jobs are automated".
So, while factory owners love the idea of not having to pay salaries, they need people to have enough money to buy their crap. It's in their financial interest to make sure that people are being paid some sort of wage. So the rich would then hire people to further enrich their lives (back to artist patronage, perhaps?), and a new economic sector would be born. Make no mistake, it's still done in the spirit of greed and exploitation, but the rich don't really get rich without the rest of us working.
The problem with this argument is it assumes that owning an automated factory = profit. When everyone is unemployed, they stop buying cars. When they stop buying cars, automated factories have to stop making cars. When they stop making cars, they stop buying steel. When they stop buying steel, the steel mill from this story stops making steel. Etc. at some point, they either have to pass some of their savings on to the consumers or close shop, as the consumers will be making next to nothing in the scenario you describe.
That's kind of what I'm getting at. This is a perfect case study for modern Luddite thinking. Do we a) see people finding new work or b) see massive unemployment and as the plant owners get rich while everyone else becomes homeless? Both arguments get made regularly on Slashdot.
I also didn't RTFM to find out, but I'm doing so now...
I haven't gone looking, but I'd be interested to see what happened to the economy of a 600+ year old steel town.
Gone are the days where you have to wonder is there's a camera watching you dress or watching you be intimate in your bedroom. You never have to wonder again, because the answer is simply "Yes"! We will absolutely record your most private moments. Not only that, but we can automatically share them with the people who have no need to know. Have your parents been worried about how well you've been eating since you moved out? We'll send them a video of your latest BM!
I live in Idaho and I'll second that. Verizon abuses its customers, but it's the only carrier where you can consistently expect to be able to place a call while on the Interstate.
I live in a rural mountain-west state. Around here, all four major carriers are fine in the center of the "city" (by city, I mean a town of about 50k people). However, in the surrounding area, Verizon is really the only show in town. T-Mobile is growing, but Sprint and AT&T don't really even have 3G reaching my house, much less 4G.
Maybe we just get rid of passwords altogether and use applications that use an alternative authentication method like SQRL.
Jobs will temporarily be lost to automation. We've been automating people out of work for a very, very long time. Farm equipment automated farm hands out of work. They found jobs in manufacturing. Software automated a lot of secretarial positions and other white collar positions out of work, but that same software led to a new industry that employs a massive number of people in higher paying jobs. When you automate people out of a job, you temporarily displace them. However, that frees up a lot of capital. And, before you say that the rich greedy people at the top will just pocket all that money, remember that they are rich and greedy and want even more money, so they'll take that money and start new businesses that employ lots of people. I know that sounds an awful lot like trickle-down economics (probably because it is), but I for one don't begrudge the technological advances of the past that, while temporarily painful, have in the end made everyone's lives better (bringing down food prices, employing most of the readership of slashdot, etc).
Not a scholarly article, but food for thought: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/...
Note that they qualify that as "global warming pollution" rather than just "pollution". If we're only talking carbon, yes. Studies have shown that over the life of the vehicle, an electric vehicle's carbon footprint is roughly half that of a combustion engine. But there's a lot of pollution that harms the environment and DOESN'T contribute to global warming. On that front, lithium mines kind of take the cake.
I would love to own an electric car. However, I'm not going to kid myself and say it's helping the environment. With current processes for extracting Lithium from the ground resulting in 0.02% lithium and 99.8% dirt that is now contaminated by the toxic chemicals used to extract the lithium and the resource depletion on local water sources as water is shipped to lithium mines in salt flats, plus the fact that electricity to charge the cars likely comes from burning fossil fuels anyway, I'm going to guess the net environmental impact of an electric vehicle over the course of its life is only nominally better than a combustion engine. People have this idea that if the pollution isn't directly coming out of their tailpipe, they aren't causing it.