Geez, did you catch the special shoes and tailoring to hide the cloven hoofs and barbed tail? What could be more evil than weak crypto plus a bunch of B.S. thoughtcrime laws that make it illegal to think about breaking it? Ick! make everybody who downloads a crack into a criminal, and provide "probable cause" to search anyone who could have downloaded a crack. That's why this is different than mail tampering, which requires physical contact.
And did he understand at all that the horse has left the barn already on strong crypto? This kind of thinking at the highest levels of government (Didn't Web Hubbel have a hand in Clinton administration crypto policy? Ugh!) is scary.
The "ILEC" would be the I-for-incumbent - the one alreay there. A CLEC (C-for-competitive) would be up and coming.
And it won't be the long distance bundle that will make these guys money - that's just a start. If they can figure out how to use voice over DSL (VoDSL) to provide local service to small business and high end residential customers, then they will be in good shape. Long distance prices have gone way down since AT&T was broken up, but local costs have gone up in nominal terms and have just about kept pace with inflation. That's where the money is.
If people actually saw leases of national resources as a source of income, which do you think would be more likely:
a) People would suddenly accept tax rates higher than they have grown used to.
b) We would have less government.
For extra credit: Do you think most people actually trust the government not to waste money from non-tax sources?
The problem is that voting citizens do not get to see this money. It is hidden from them. That makes it susceptible to abuse. Spectrum is just one example. Water, mineral, grazing land, etc. are all chock full of wasteful sweetheart deals and hidden subsidies.
Nobody has yet pointed out the most serious flaw in "licensing" or "leasing" resources that, for lack any alternative, are considered the property of nations: You and I don't get dividend checks for this stuff. If we did, we would have an interest in charging the right price for these resources. But we never see the money, so these deals are subject to all kinds of B.S. like licensing broadcast spectrum "for the public good." Broadcast licensees are, essentially, squatters that have taken over property you and I should be compensated for. I want the back rent.
Corporations and the governments are both, in theory, organizations consisting of individuals. Why should some corporation's shareholders benefit through my share in a national resource without me getting paid for the priviledge? If you permit these deals to go on between unaccountable bureaucrats and managements at large companies that are themselves well-insulated against shreholder scrutiny, you will get deals that cut you out. Put some money on the table, and see how quick people get up to speed on maximizing the return on spectrum.
The problem is not "public" versus "private." The problem is that there is no sense of ownership by the people who should feel like they own the airwaves. Consequently, you get all kinds of sweetheart deals and good-for-the-nation drivel that masks that this stuff is being given away or traded for favors. You own it. Ask your congressman for your dividend check.
This is a great example of why the Internet is A Good Thing. Not to slather on the praise too thick, but where in the mainstream press will you read a statement that says "Establishment Entity X routinely abuses our beloved Constitution?"
Yes, it's time to have every law that abuses the term "limited" in the copyright clause thrown out. Yes, it's time to have every law that abuses the commerce clause thrown out. The same kind of abuse of the Constitution that leads to routine abuse of probable cause leads to abuse like this, and abuse of the fifth and tenth amendments.
What we need is a law that attaches serious consequnces to anyone enforcing unconstitutional laws. You bet lawmakers would hear about it pretty quick the first time a bureaucrat got thrown in jail for being overenthusiatic about the power an unconstitutional law conferred on him. Laws are too often made as private deals between lawmakers and law enforcers or, as in this case, people who derive their living by being private enforcers. If there are no consequences, this will go out of control.
If a wireline infrastructure is so expensive to operate, you could build a competitive one, especially if you did not have a unionized workforce. This is exactly what the fiber CLECs that are cream-skimming the big business customers are doing. This won't help you or me get broadband cheaper, but it does apply to businesses, universities, and governments. Business is 60% of ILEC local service revenue, and the CLECs are, in abolute terms, growing this business faster than the ILECs (check out www.fcc.gov for the numbers).
The DLECs lost becuase they focused on wholesale in an unprofitable business: Internet access. Not enough margin dollars to go around. Voice is half the revenue and all of the profit in telecom.
Second, what do you think backhauls from wireless transcievers and base stations? A wireline infrastructure. It isn't cheap putting up all those antennas. Each individual location might cost less than the floor space for a DSLAM in a CO, but taken together they might, or might not, be cheaper. And for high-end business customers, nothing beats glass for cost per bit.
It is far from obvious what will win. The situation is complex, with lots of replacement technologies: Like current-generation digital wireless competing against wireline POTS - if your mobile phone is your most important phone, the easiest way to save money on phones is to shut off your land line. Of course current-generation wireless can't do broadband Internet access. For that, wireless infrastructure will have to acquire a lot more backhaul bandwidth. Will that force a copper-to-fiber transition there?
The only way to implement the intent of the Telecom Act of 1996 in opening competition for small consumers is to do structural separation of the ILECs into wholesale and retail. Then you could deregulate the market becuase everyone would be a CLEC. Don't worry: there certainly would not be an upstream supply shortage ala electricity in California. Telephone switches are not in short supply.
AT&T pimps out its brand name for phones. You can even find "IBM" brand phones at Staples. Southwest Bell? Who the hell are they? You think General Electric makes their phones right next to the jet engines and locomotives? Most cordless phones are made by VTech or Uniden, no matter the brand.
And for the original poster: do you really think it is economcially efficient for the U.S. to have Western Electric factories turning out phones that last 40 years or more so we can lease them from a telco monopoly? That is a freaking wierd case of nostalgia.
What? That trade liberalization means economic growth, which means less grinding poverty in the developing world? There are some pretty screwed-up things about transnational organizations like trade authorities, including especially attempts to make thought-crime laws like the DMCA international, but the alternative of uncoordinated, inefficient, and parochial (to local corporate interests) trade barriers is worse. Much better to support organizations that fight government/corporate corruption, like Transparency International than hide in ones own nationalistic hole.
There are much less intrusive ways to prevent vote fraud than universal databases, or even, as in some replies to this message, requiring the adult population to show up at polling places.
Simply requiring adequate and difficult-to-forge identification at polling places (some might be shocked to find this is not required in the U.S.) would raise the cost of vote fraud to the point where it would fall to statistically insignificant levels. This, combined with cleansing the voter roles of felons and the dead, the latter of which would object less to having data about their status cross-referenced against registration lists, would restore a system that, in the U.S., is teetering on the edge of losing credibility.
Among the many problems mentioned by other posters there is, in addition, the problem of a lack of sensory input. It is attractive to think of the Web as a substitute for machine vision and audition, but the example in the article has embedded in itself one reason why this is not enough: How quiet is quiet enough for a phone call? It's fine to say "Turn down the volume." But without an integration of knowledge of how quiet is quiet enough for a phone call for this person, and an actual measurement that things are getting quiet enough (and possibly the blender and/or exhaust fan ought to be slowed or stopped as well), you really do not have a system that is practical, even for turning down the volume.
The theory behind DSL wholesale providers goes something like this:
There will be more ISPs than DSL wholesalers, and the geogrpahical distribution of their customer base will be different, too, so wholesale makes sense.
DSL wholesalers will be able to rent more lines from the local telco, and do it cheaper.
Being a DSL CLEC is a specialty, so is being an ISP.
Some ISPs, like AOL, MSN, or Earthlink, will not become CLECs themselves. Wholesale is the only way for these ISPs to use DSL.
So much for theory: Unless you are AT&T, Sprint, or Qwest (which is in part a baby Bell), you do not have the scale to build-out and compete. If you are smaller, you better be the ISP and keep all the margin to yourself, you better offer voice because there actually is a margin for voice, and you better concentrate on business customers, like XO, Network Telephone, MPOWER, etc., but even these will have some failures among them.
The local telcos (ILECs) are not blameless, but there are many other factors, like EZ credit and then no credit for CLECs that can really screw things up. Some CLECs were badly run. And if you know which business model really works there is a Nobel Prize in economics in it for you. Even the ILECs and big IXCs are up to their ears in debt, and the CLECs providing voice lines are successfully cream-skimming the high-margin business customers from the ILECs even as the ILECs are inflicting pain on the DSL wholesalers and ISPs in residential DSL.
The reason the PUC can plausibly, if not practically, tell Northpoint what to do is that Northpoint is a CLEC, and so has particular rights and responsibilties. Northpoint, unlike as ISP, must register with the PUC to get the benefit of being able to demand that ILECs supply it with UNEs (elements of the telephone network it can rent).
Some ISPs are CLECs because they need to rent local loops, like Northpoint (which is not an ISP, but a wholesaler). Some ISPs are CLECs because they want reciprocal compensation for terminating calls. But there is nothing compelling ISPs to register as CLECs, nor is there any regulatory body that can claim any dominion over ISPs to any greater extent than any other business. What that means is that no precedent is being set here w.r.t. ISPs.
This is a fairly common right wing-nut tin-foil hat assertion, but it is an unban (rural?) myth. The U.S. Constitution says:
Article VI, Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
In other words, if you ratify a treaty that has something unconstitutional in it, it is no more (or less) permanent than an unconstitutional federal law. Treaties are on the same footing as federal law, which is to say hierarchically under the U.S. Constitution but over state constitutions or laws.
The real problem here is the same as bad patents, only worse: Once you have a bad treaty, you have to make, literally, a federal case out of it to get it thrown out. So if you want to pull some sleazy stunt with the law, it is even easier to do it in a foriegn forum, with no elected or particularly answerable participants, than it is in a Congress - convenience, not conspiracy. Who is going to read a treaty the size of a New York telephone directory? This is bad, but it isn't the black helicopter people coming to get you.
The level of soil salinity will not go up over time. It will reach a constant level probably very similar to the water salinity, since it appears they keep pumping water through this farm.
Interesting case, isn't it: hide a "troll" (An annoying word in the first place, being a bastardization of "trawl.") under a gun control argument that's so PC even Slashdotters won't mark it a "Troll," then put in that usage error, as if to taunt us. Maybe the post was really a fiendish trap to re-ignite the troll/trawl debate. So I ask, half clever, or clever and a half?
Does anyone else see the rich irony potential in this?
"...not only because it destroys the child's self esteem..."
Clearly the family should have a lawyer letter sent to the school demanding a written apology and retraction otherwise there might be irreparable damage to their dear daughter's self esteem, implying that might be worth a princely sum. Then let's see the bureaucrats slither out of that one.
Thinking: "Thielen" sounds German, maybe Scandinavian. What are the odds she's Black? Whether or not she is Black, questioning a double standard in this case is still a valid point. The subtext being that race relations are not only not a topic for a seemingly well-designed (at least at that level) sociology study that did not produce a tendentious or otherwise questionable result, but that they are not a topic for Whites. Seems like a good thing to bring up that question.
I beg to differ: Newspapers, especially tabloids, use a restricted vocabulary. As I was getting up to speed on German, it was very easy to read tabs like the Kronen Zeitung (local to Austria) while a business paper like the Frankfurter Allgemeine (international) was a tough slog. But both were much easier than holding up my end of a cafe conversation.
And, if you know enough word-roots in a few languages, you could probably score better than a poorly educated native speaker, thereby proving what? That the test is invalid? Not. The test would still be a reliable predictor of performance.
In theory, the Telecom Act of 1996 sets up a competitive multi-vendor environment. In theory, I should have my pick of DSL ISPs and wholesalers. In fact, the DLECs have been dropping like flies, soon to leave only the ILECs (Baby Bells) standing. Which would not be a problem if the big ILECs had better service. But service complaints against incumbents are still very high.
The Common Carrier Bureau's industry analysis reports show excellent growth in CLEC line count, but the recent bankruptcies among DLECs indicates a serious rupture in competitive markets. What should the new administration do to keep telecom markets open to choice among carriers that compete on the basis of excellent products and support?
Specifically, should telecom competition be separated from the ownership and maintenance of last-mile facilities? Should every carrier be a CLEC?
Ummm, the DSL situation sucks, about which I will post questions, but isn't your lack of truth-in-banwidth problem an issue with your DLEC (Covad, as you indicated) or you ISP? Even if it is a Verizon DSLAM, the upstream suppliers contract with Verizon or another MAN carrier for upstream bandwidth, which sounds like the source of your problem.
Nope. ADSL is last-mile (or 3) only. The ADSL frequency band cannot be carried over inter-exchange trunks or even through an exchange's switch fabric. Everything outside voice band would not make it past the line card. DSL is groomed out at a DSLAM in front of the exchange. Depending on China's telephone network, you could do an ISDN call into or out of China, but it would cost the GDP of Somalia to do that.
Fact is, if China really wants to block content, and does not care too much about small leakage and lots of innocuous stuff getting blocked, then they can block content within that definition of success.
Trans-border data flows are, still, pretty small compared with the capacity of monitoring networks to monitor and backhaul stuff they think is interesting. Neither monitoring nor blocking can be perfect, but perfect is not the goal. "Good enough for government work" is fine for most purposes.
It is also all a matter of degree. Goverment influence and propoganda is difficult to implement in a relatively open press market like the U.S. and Europe. But governements still try it, like when the DEA was found to have been secretly paying U.S. broadcasters to propogandize for the drug war. And when they succeed completely we usually don't hear about it.
Slashdot Mirror
And did he understand at all that the horse has left the barn already on strong crypto? This kind of thinking at the highest levels of government (Didn't Web Hubbel have a hand in Clinton administration crypto policy? Ugh!) is scary.
And it won't be the long distance bundle that will make these guys money - that's just a start. If they can figure out how to use voice over DSL (VoDSL) to provide local service to small business and high end residential customers, then they will be in good shape. Long distance prices have gone way down since AT&T was broken up, but local costs have gone up in nominal terms and have just about kept pace with inflation. That's where the money is.
a) People would suddenly accept tax rates higher than they have grown used to.
b) We would have less government.
For extra credit: Do you think most people actually trust the government not to waste money from non-tax sources?
The problem is that voting citizens do not get to see this money. It is hidden from them. That makes it susceptible to abuse. Spectrum is just one example. Water, mineral, grazing land, etc. are all chock full of wasteful sweetheart deals and hidden subsidies.
Corporations and the governments are both, in theory, organizations consisting of individuals. Why should some corporation's shareholders benefit through my share in a national resource without me getting paid for the priviledge? If you permit these deals to go on between unaccountable bureaucrats and managements at large companies that are themselves well-insulated against shreholder scrutiny, you will get deals that cut you out. Put some money on the table, and see how quick people get up to speed on maximizing the return on spectrum.
The problem is not "public" versus "private." The problem is that there is no sense of ownership by the people who should feel like they own the airwaves. Consequently, you get all kinds of sweetheart deals and good-for-the-nation drivel that masks that this stuff is being given away or traded for favors. You own it. Ask your congressman for your dividend check.
Yes, it's time to have every law that abuses the term "limited" in the copyright clause thrown out. Yes, it's time to have every law that abuses the commerce clause thrown out. The same kind of abuse of the Constitution that leads to routine abuse of probable cause leads to abuse like this, and abuse of the fifth and tenth amendments.
What we need is a law that attaches serious consequnces to anyone enforcing unconstitutional laws. You bet lawmakers would hear about it pretty quick the first time a bureaucrat got thrown in jail for being overenthusiatic about the power an unconstitutional law conferred on him. Laws are too often made as private deals between lawmakers and law enforcers or, as in this case, people who derive their living by being private enforcers. If there are no consequences, this will go out of control.
The DLECs lost becuase they focused on wholesale in an unprofitable business: Internet access. Not enough margin dollars to go around. Voice is half the revenue and all of the profit in telecom.
Second, what do you think backhauls from wireless transcievers and base stations? A wireline infrastructure. It isn't cheap putting up all those antennas. Each individual location might cost less than the floor space for a DSLAM in a CO, but taken together they might, or might not, be cheaper. And for high-end business customers, nothing beats glass for cost per bit.
It is far from obvious what will win. The situation is complex, with lots of replacement technologies: Like current-generation digital wireless competing against wireline POTS - if your mobile phone is your most important phone, the easiest way to save money on phones is to shut off your land line. Of course current-generation wireless can't do broadband Internet access. For that, wireless infrastructure will have to acquire a lot more backhaul bandwidth. Will that force a copper-to-fiber transition there?
The only way to implement the intent of the Telecom Act of 1996 in opening competition for small consumers is to do structural separation of the ILECs into wholesale and retail. Then you could deregulate the market becuase everyone would be a CLEC. Don't worry: there certainly would not be an upstream supply shortage ala electricity in California. Telephone switches are not in short supply.
And for the original poster: do you really think it is economcially efficient for the U.S. to have Western Electric factories turning out phones that last 40 years or more so we can lease them from a telco monopoly? That is a freaking wierd case of nostalgia.
What? That trade liberalization means economic growth, which means less grinding poverty in the developing world? There are some pretty screwed-up things about transnational organizations like trade authorities, including especially attempts to make thought-crime laws like the DMCA international, but the alternative of uncoordinated, inefficient, and parochial (to local corporate interests) trade barriers is worse. Much better to support organizations that fight government/corporate corruption, like Transparency International than hide in ones own nationalistic hole.
Simply requiring adequate and difficult-to-forge identification at polling places (some might be shocked to find this is not required in the U.S.) would raise the cost of vote fraud to the point where it would fall to statistically insignificant levels. This, combined with cleansing the voter roles of felons and the dead, the latter of which would object less to having data about their status cross-referenced against registration lists, would restore a system that, in the U.S., is teetering on the edge of losing credibility.
Among the many problems mentioned by other posters there is, in addition, the problem of a lack of sensory input. It is attractive to think of the Web as a substitute for machine vision and audition, but the example in the article has embedded in itself one reason why this is not enough: How quiet is quiet enough for a phone call? It's fine to say "Turn down the volume." But without an integration of knowledge of how quiet is quiet enough for a phone call for this person, and an actual measurement that things are getting quiet enough (and possibly the blender and/or exhaust fan ought to be slowed or stopped as well), you really do not have a system that is practical, even for turning down the volume.
There will be more ISPs than DSL wholesalers, and the geogrpahical distribution of their customer base will be different, too, so wholesale makes sense.
DSL wholesalers will be able to rent more lines from the local telco, and do it cheaper.
Being a DSL CLEC is a specialty, so is being an ISP.
Some ISPs, like AOL, MSN, or Earthlink, will not become CLECs themselves. Wholesale is the only way for these ISPs to use DSL.
So much for theory: Unless you are AT&T, Sprint, or Qwest (which is in part a baby Bell), you do not have the scale to build-out and compete. If you are smaller, you better be the ISP and keep all the margin to yourself, you better offer voice because there actually is a margin for voice, and you better concentrate on business customers, like XO, Network Telephone, MPOWER, etc., but even these will have some failures among them.
The local telcos (ILECs) are not blameless, but there are many other factors, like EZ credit and then no credit for CLECs that can really screw things up. Some CLECs were badly run. And if you know which business model really works there is a Nobel Prize in economics in it for you. Even the ILECs and big IXCs are up to their ears in debt, and the CLECs providing voice lines are successfully cream-skimming the high-margin business customers from the ILECs even as the ILECs are inflicting pain on the DSL wholesalers and ISPs in residential DSL.
Some ISPs are CLECs because they need to rent local loops, like Northpoint (which is not an ISP, but a wholesaler). Some ISPs are CLECs because they want reciprocal compensation for terminating calls. But there is nothing compelling ISPs to register as CLECs, nor is there any regulatory body that can claim any dominion over ISPs to any greater extent than any other business. What that means is that no precedent is being set here w.r.t. ISPs.
Cheap shot, as in $0.63 on the dollar(CAD).
Article VI, Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
In other words, if you ratify a treaty that has something unconstitutional in it, it is no more (or less) permanent than an unconstitutional federal law. Treaties are on the same footing as federal law, which is to say hierarchically under the U.S. Constitution but over state constitutions or laws.
The real problem here is the same as bad patents, only worse: Once you have a bad treaty, you have to make, literally, a federal case out of it to get it thrown out. So if you want to pull some sleazy stunt with the law, it is even easier to do it in a foriegn forum, with no elected or particularly answerable participants, than it is in a Congress - convenience, not conspiracy. Who is going to read a treaty the size of a New York telephone directory? This is bad, but it isn't the black helicopter people coming to get you.
The level of soil salinity will not go up over time. It will reach a constant level probably very similar to the water salinity, since it appears they keep pumping water through this farm.
Interesting case, isn't it: hide a "troll" (An annoying word in the first place, being a bastardization of "trawl.") under a gun control argument that's so PC even Slashdotters won't mark it a "Troll," then put in that usage error, as if to taunt us. Maybe the post was really a fiendish trap to re-ignite the troll/trawl debate. So I ask, half clever, or clever and a half?
I think you mean the gunwale.
"...not only because it destroys the child's self esteem..."
Clearly the family should have a lawyer letter sent to the school demanding a written apology and retraction otherwise there might be irreparable damage to their dear daughter's self esteem, implying that might be worth a princely sum. Then let's see the bureaucrats slither out of that one.
Thinking: "Thielen" sounds German, maybe Scandinavian. What are the odds she's Black? Whether or not she is Black, questioning a double standard in this case is still a valid point. The subtext being that race relations are not only not a topic for a seemingly well-designed (at least at that level) sociology study that did not produce a tendentious or otherwise questionable result, but that they are not a topic for Whites. Seems like a good thing to bring up that question.
And, if you know enough word-roots in a few languages, you could probably score better than a poorly educated native speaker, thereby proving what? That the test is invalid? Not. The test would still be a reliable predictor of performance.
The Common Carrier Bureau's industry analysis reports show excellent growth in CLEC line count, but the recent bankruptcies among DLECs indicates a serious rupture in competitive markets. What should the new administration do to keep telecom markets open to choice among carriers that compete on the basis of excellent products and support?
Specifically, should telecom competition be separated from the ownership and maintenance of last-mile facilities? Should every carrier be a CLEC?
Ummm, the DSL situation sucks, about which I will post questions, but isn't your lack of truth-in-banwidth problem an issue with your DLEC (Covad, as you indicated) or you ISP? Even if it is a Verizon DSLAM, the upstream suppliers contract with Verizon or another MAN carrier for upstream bandwidth, which sounds like the source of your problem.
Fact is, if China really wants to block content, and does not care too much about small leakage and lots of innocuous stuff getting blocked, then they can block content within that definition of success.
Trans-border data flows are, still, pretty small compared with the capacity of monitoring networks to monitor and backhaul stuff they think is interesting. Neither monitoring nor blocking can be perfect, but perfect is not the goal. "Good enough for government work" is fine for most purposes.
It is also all a matter of degree. Goverment influence and propoganda is difficult to implement in a relatively open press market like the U.S. and Europe. But governements still try it, like when the DEA was found to have been secretly paying U.S. broadcasters to propogandize for the drug war. And when they succeed completely we usually don't hear about it.
Oh geeez somebody mod this up. This is the best thing I have read on Slashdot in weeks.
Don't know much about how cellular networks are put together, do ya?