For a convinction, it wouldn't be sufficient to establish a pattern of buying pumped stocks. But it might be enough to get the warrant necessary to find the rest of the proof you'd need. Either you'd need to raid their computers, or possibly a wiretap watching them sending the spam.
It would also help narrow the field if you saw somebody buy the stock just before the first spam went out.
You'll end up investigating (and possibly raiding) at least a few innocent people who just bought the stocks being pumped and turning a profit on it. It would sure suck to be them, but if the behavior is sufficiently suspicious it seems that an investigation is merited. Police work is always messy. It's really up to the judges to make sure that the police/FBI present a very compelling case before issuing that warrant.
I assume the AC is baiting me for proposing draconian tactics. But you shouldn't be able to get a warrant to do that without probable cause. A suspicious pattern of stock purchases isn't sufficient evidence for a courtroom conviction, but it is sufficient for a warrant. I'd hope that the judge would hold a pretty high standard for granting such a warrant, but I'd consider a pattern of a dozen or so stocks all bought and sold right about the same time as a spam (in particular, bought just before the spam) to be sufficient.
Identifying pump-and-dump stocks is easy: you just look at the spam. It shouldn't be too hard from there to narrow down the list of suspects: people who bought just before a surge and sold during it. But if the stock is heavily trafficked, the spammers may hope to hide among the crowd.
And connecting those people to the spam, however, may be tricky. Raid their houses, look on their computers, and hope you find something incriminating.
There are ways to launder that money. If they're using accounts opened with fake records, and eventually withdrawing it in cash or cashier's checks, it could be hard to track them physically down.
It may be too much work to track them all down, but I'd hope that tracking down even one of them and hitting them with a harsh sentence will scare off some of them, at least for a while.
And most importantly, he was sending it to just one person. To be spam in my book it's got to be sent to a lot of different people without trying to target your audience.
So I concur with you: he's still an asshole, just not a spamming-asshole. Being sent to his room (without even depriving him of supper) may be a tad weak for an attack which had at least the potential to do economic harm, as well as containing an tone of violent threat, but it doesn't merit the sort if massive ire that true spammers have earned.
For me, the depressing part is "If broadband providers engage in anticompetitive conduct, we will not hesitate to act using our existing authority." I'm a free-market libertarian type much of the time, and my first thought on Net Neutrality is to exactly that: let them try breaking it and seeing if it the market wants it.
But the FTC's version of "not hesitating" is to establish a blue-ribbon panel to look into setting up a commission to investigate the idea of setting up a web site to solicit people's opinions. Even if I trust the FTC to be acting in good faith, I worry that the cable/telco providers would have somewhere between one and five years to stomp certain web sites to death before the FTC is able to act on their "existing authority".
I mean, how long has Microsoft been in antitrust litigation?
I was interested in your question, so I did some research. The grandparent poster is overstating the case, but there were polls back in December/January that kind of back him up.
The NY Times says, "The poll found that 53 percent of Americans approved of Mr. Bush's authorizing eavesdropping without prior court approval 'in order to reduce the threat of terrorism.'"
The CS Monitor (reporting on a Zogby poll) says, "Nearly half of likely voters, 49 percent, say Bush has the constitutional powers to approve such a plan".
I don't have more recent figures. The President's popularity is roughly the same now that it was then, though it had risen a bit for a while in the meantime.
Which is why I'm finding the Ken Lay case interestingly ironic. "Innocent until proven guilty" is itself kind of an oversimplification. A jury has heard his case, but he had avenues of appeal left open, which he cannot pursue on account of being dead.
Intuitively, I want to say he's been found guilty by a jury, and the anecdotal evidence is more than enough to convince me that he's guilty in truth. What little justice can be done by fining his estate seems entirely justified.
But with appeals left unpursued, it seems that he's in a nebulous legal state, neither proven guilty in finality, nor innocent. It's not just a question of his reputation, which will be entirely for the court of public opinion anyway. Those fines can go to legal reparations.
It's kind of a legal race condition, to put it in nerdy terms. I'll be interested to see what they make of it.
A "daughter species" doesn't necessarily kick the parent species out of its niche. That's common when the environment changes but doesn't eliminate the old environment, or when the old environment splits into to different parts. Humans evolved from tree-dwelling apes who ventured out into the encroaching grassland. That selected for apes which walked on their hind legs at the expense of prehensile feet, but the trees were still there and apes live in them to this day.
Go into an ape's niche and you'll find yourself massively out-competed. You'd make a lousy chimpanzee.
Sometimes a daughter species does compete with, and outcompete, the parent species, and drives it into extinction. We appear to be working on that pretty vigorously. In a century or so the answer to the question "Why are there still apes?" may be "There aren't." But it doesn't really change the answer: new species come all the time without destroying the old ones.
Remember that from the evolutionary point of view, humans aren't "better" than apes, any more than apes are "better" than fish or fish are "better" than amoebas. Each one fits into a niche without driving out the older species. It's only our bias that puts us on the top of an evolutionary ladder.
It's not really survival of the fittest. In fact, that which survives, survives. And when the environment changes, it stops surviving.
Indeed. They serve roles a bit like the US Supreme Court (a seat on which is much like a life peerage to the Law Lords) and the US Senate. The Senate's 6-year term is designed to give it some of the same moderating effect, in that they're not continuously campaigning.
The House of Lords does not often overturn bills; they see their job is to oversee the House of Commons, not compete with them. But I think that having them there has a moderating effect on the bills that are put into play.
The Java Virtual Machine is also sort of stack-based. The JVM bytecode set uses stack operations but the safety checks that it runs make it equivalent to a sliding set of registers not unlike, say, the SPARC architecture. A JIT implementation could do away with the stack, at least in the individual method calls, though the call-return stack would still have to be there.
With domains costing only a few dollars, it can be very hard to blacklist them fast enough. But I suspect that large-scale providers like GMail identify spam along those criteria: if a few hundred people tag emails with "legal-generic-v1@gr@.com" as spam, they mark that as spam for the rest of them (potentially millions of emails).
As you allude, trust can be an issue. It would suck for somebody to joe-job GMail by signing up a few thousand free accounts, subscribing to a legitimate newsletter, and marking them as spam when they got sent. And with the spammers starting to send their messages as images rather than text (including speckles to make OCR'ing harder as well as to prevent you from just doing a checksum), it gets harder to automate detection even of URLs you know for sure are spamtastic.
In theory, that's the idea behind the CAN-SPAM law; legal spam is easily filtered because it identifies the sender (as well as flagging itself as unsolicited). But the "legitimate" spam is a negligible portion of the spam in the world, and hardly even feels like spam because it's trying to sell you a legitimate product.
And by "web designers," I'm sure you mean "control-freak relics from print publishing who don't know how the fuck to use the new medium properly," right?
800x600 may die one of these days. "Fixed with" layouts are very popular with web designers, who like the amount of control it gives them. Combine that with weaknesses in CSS, whose ability to set column widths based on their content is sketchy.
Slashdot, for example, displays some very unpleasant behavior when fonts are scaled large. Every site that I know that handles font-scaling well does so with a layout whose total width is fixed.
If you're going to do fixed width, it should probably be no more than 1024x768, and 800x600 isn't a bad measure.
It isn't even a question of how good a programmer you are. It's a question of how good a programmer everybody on the team is. And "team" includes every library you use.
When memory is passed across the boundary from one developer to another, you need some kind of mechanism to track who is going to free that memory, and under what circumstances.
Garbage-collected languages make that contract fairly clear. (But not infinitely clear; there are still ways to accidentally pin objects in memory even in a GC language).
In C we got used to putting in comments saying, "I'm passing you back a static structure, so I'm not re-entrant" or "This thing is malloc'ed so free it when you're done" or "You have to pass in a reference to that object and I'll fill it in". As long as discipline is followed the program works brilliantly (no GC overhead) but if any developer anywhere on the project misreads any single one of those comments, you're completely and totally doomed.
There is still software to be cranked out by one guy who can keep the entire thing in his head, but software requirements for most things are too big for just one guy. Even the uberest of uber-hackers is limited by the dumbest guy on his team, especialyl when that dumbest guy (even if he's pretty damn smart) nulls out a memory location that wasn't finished yet.
It's not just you. I've been thinking the same thing in different terms. I want the equivalent of a Mac Mini, but I'd rather not pay to have a laptop hard disk in a machine doesn't really move.
Apple isn't Dell. They don't try to cover the spectrum. They'd rather put out a few machines in a very limited set of configurations. I think it makes it cheaper for them: fewer options means easier support, and ordering is mostly putting a stamp on a box rather than constructing (and testing) a system.
That's a good and funny observation. The Long Tail theory doesn't deny that bestsellers will remain a major piece of the market. It's just pointing out that there are ways to make money elsewhere. He's talking about flattening out the hump, but not removing it entirely.
So ultimately it's evidence for his theory, not against it.
Their own interfaces to the game, but not to starting the game. Once you've started the game you're in the game's own world and they can do anything they want to the interface, but to start the game is a matter for the operating system. People would like to see that behave as much as possible like all of the other programs on their system.
It sounds like the intended delivery mechanism is that the game developers produce a Mac version of the game separate from the Windows version. You need to produce a Mac executable to act like a Mac program that a Mac user is familiar with, even if that Mac program is just the cider executable wrapped around the Windows executable.
A Linux user might be comfortable with the idea of starting cider and then pointing it to the Windows executable to run, but Mac users want things to be more seamless than that. This is supposed to make it trivial to produce that Mac port, but not to replace it.
Broadband service requires rather expensive physical infrastructure in the form of wires or fibers, and access to that will always be somewhat contentious. So there will always be a limited number of ISPs. In rural places, that number may be 1. Even in cities, there will be only a limited number.
Especially since, as you point out, each is compelled to break neutrality or be forced out by a cheaper company.
It is an interesting topic. My own personal take is to let the phone and cable companies try breaking neutrality and see if they really do use it just to provide QoS and improved access, or if they do what many Slashdotters fear: extorting content providers like YouTube and cutting off access to sites they don't like. I'm reluctant to let Congress legislate it for exactly the reasons listed in the article.
But if the ISPs really do screw it up... I'll be mighty ticked.
For Question 1, the problem isn't so much discriminating based on the content as discriminating based on the sender. That is, if amazon.com has paid the fee and bn.com hasn't, you get faster access to amazon's web site than bn. (Especially if "slower" means "nothing at all".)
Which could lead to discrimination against content you don't like (e.g. fast access to nra.org, shutting aclu.org to a trickle), but it's site-based, not something you can fix with encryption unless you start talking about fancy stuff like onion routing. Even that doesn't really help, because they could throttle everything except packets directly to their paid providers.
What guarantees network neutrality is your ability to switch to a neutral ISP if you don't get the access you want. That only works if you have competition among ISPs, which too many people don't.
For your second question, there's also a notion of using special protocols (quality of service, QoS) to guarantee certain bandwidth between two sites on a site-by-site basis. So if you want to watch a movie in real time, and you want to guarantee that there's at least 1 Mbps available between the sites, the ISPs want to be able to charge you for that guarantee.
Most ISPs make very little in the way of guarantees to individual users. (High-level providers like the one amazon uses are a different story). Guaranteeing 1 Mbps constantly requires a lot more hardware than they have now, and most of the time that's just fine, because most Internet traffic comes in short burts. It becomes not-fine only when you have a specific requirement, like watching a movie or a VOIP conversation, or a web site that you absolutely must keep running 99.999% of the time or you'll scare away the customers.
Nearly everything in the law is a bandage. The wheels of justice grind slowly; if a CEO's secretary gets fired and slapped with a restraining order for whisteblowing, the laws that protect him or her won't take effect anywhere near quickly enough to keep that person from being reduced to poverty.
Even at its best the law is a patchwork of new laws covering up failings left by old ones. You're right that it's better to examine the agency involved in violating the rights of whistleblowers, but if we could fix these agencies for that problem, we could fix it so that there wouldn't be any need to blow the whistle in the first place.
The idea of the long tail is the area under the curve. If he height of the curve represents the amount of money going to any one item, the area under the curve is the total amount of money available. That area is supposed to be more or less constant: people will spend a fixed amount of money on books, music, etc. They may spend a bit less on music if the music itself is cheaper, but in general the assumption is that things will even out so that prices would rise and/or people would buy more music.
The long curve is about shifting the curve so that it's flatter. Same total revenue but distributed to more people.
The profit doesn't really enter into it. It may be cheaper to produce indie music/books/movies/etc, but it may not. A studio may spend $200 million to make one movie and sell $400 million worth of tickets. Or 2,000 little indie studios could make 2,000 movies for $100k each. One will be a blockbuster hit and make $100 million. Three will be minor hits and make $5 million. The rest will sit there on the tail, and most of them will make squat or turn a bare profit.
But aggregated, they'll all make up about the same $400 million on $200 million in revenue. The winners change, and the profitability computations get complicated (somebody won a zillion times more than the studio ever could have; many suffered losses.)
The consistent winner, as you point out, will be the companies that "own" the tail. Those companies are like the current studios: big central points of reference where people when they want stuff: Amazon, iTunes music store, eBay. Like the studios, they depend heavily on marketing, and that keeps out other players.
To sum up, it's less about the amount of profit as redistributing where the revenue. The cost of that profit is actually not all that different from what it used to be, once you factor in the losers; there are a great many losers on the long tail.
But it sucks revenue away from the big hump in the center. They're losing out to a new competitor: they might actually split that $400 million that people are willing to spend on a movie with the long tail, but if they get only half of it they're profitability has gone from 100% ROI to 0. And that's all the difference in the world.
Hypnosis is not completely useless as a scientific tool, but I gotta agree with you here. FTA:
The researchers showed volunteers 24 common words, then hypnotised them and told them that when they were next presented with a word in a red frame, they would feel that the word was familiar, although they would not know when they last saw it...Of the 18 people studied so far, 10 reported a peculiar sensation when they saw new words in red frames and five said it definitely felt like deja vu.
This sounds badly blinded: the same people self-reporting deja vu are also being told what to feel. In theory they aren't consciously recalling what they were told under hypnosis, but I didn't see a control to demonstrate that.
In the end, this result isn't important in itself ("Look, we can recreate deja vu in a lab") but rather the tool it provides for further research, being able to generate deja vu on demand without electro-zapping the brain. If that makes other experiments possible, to understand how memories are stored and recalled using this as a kind of mental stick to poke at the brain, that's an interesting result.
But that result has a caveat that this isn't necessarily identical to real deja vu, might be a completely different phenonmenon, and may simply be research subjects telling experimenters what they want to hear.
The submitter is "buzz@nww.com"; the article is at networkworld.com. Of course nww.com is just an alias for networkworld.com. I couldn't immediately tell if buzz == Paul McNamara, but it's at least astroturfing for the site.
I think they're much more interested in what you do watch, as measured by your skipping, rather than what you say you want to watch. Advertising is a subtle business; everybody claims to be unaffected by TV ads but ineffective ad campaigns produce losses and effective ad campaigns can be huge drivers.
It's easy to observe in the big stuff (national ads for massive brands, Coke or Ford or McDonalds) but much harder (and no less important, to the advertisers) for smaller things: grape juice and plumbers and tires. That means selling you stuff you're not going to jump up and down and say, "Yeah, I want that!"
They know perfectly well you're going to hit "no" on essentially every ad except the occasional breast-filled beer commercial. If they actually believed that they wouldn't bother advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
For a convinction, it wouldn't be sufficient to establish a pattern of buying pumped stocks. But it might be enough to get the warrant necessary to find the rest of the proof you'd need. Either you'd need to raid their computers, or possibly a wiretap watching them sending the spam.
It would also help narrow the field if you saw somebody buy the stock just before the first spam went out.
You'll end up investigating (and possibly raiding) at least a few innocent people who just bought the stocks being pumped and turning a profit on it. It would sure suck to be them, but if the behavior is sufficiently suspicious it seems that an investigation is merited. Police work is always messy. It's really up to the judges to make sure that the police/FBI present a very compelling case before issuing that warrant.
I assume the AC is baiting me for proposing draconian tactics. But you shouldn't be able to get a warrant to do that without probable cause. A suspicious pattern of stock purchases isn't sufficient evidence for a courtroom conviction, but it is sufficient for a warrant. I'd hope that the judge would hold a pretty high standard for granting such a warrant, but I'd consider a pattern of a dozen or so stocks all bought and sold right about the same time as a spam (in particular, bought just before the spam) to be sufficient.
Identifying pump-and-dump stocks is easy: you just look at the spam. It shouldn't be too hard from there to narrow down the list of suspects: people who bought just before a surge and sold during it. But if the stock is heavily trafficked, the spammers may hope to hide among the crowd.
And connecting those people to the spam, however, may be tricky. Raid their houses, look on their computers, and hope you find something incriminating.
There are ways to launder that money. If they're using accounts opened with fake records, and eventually withdrawing it in cash or cashier's checks, it could be hard to track them physically down.
It may be too much work to track them all down, but I'd hope that tracking down even one of them and hitting them with a harsh sentence will scare off some of them, at least for a while.
And most importantly, he was sending it to just one person. To be spam in my book it's got to be sent to a lot of different people without trying to target your audience.
So I concur with you: he's still an asshole, just not a spamming-asshole. Being sent to his room (without even depriving him of supper) may be a tad weak for an attack which had at least the potential to do economic harm, as well as containing an tone of violent threat, but it doesn't merit the sort if massive ire that true spammers have earned.
For me, the depressing part is "If broadband providers engage in anticompetitive conduct, we will not hesitate to act using our existing authority." I'm a free-market libertarian type much of the time, and my first thought on Net Neutrality is to exactly that: let them try breaking it and seeing if it the market wants it.
But the FTC's version of "not hesitating" is to establish a blue-ribbon panel to look into setting up a commission to investigate the idea of setting up a web site to solicit people's opinions. Even if I trust the FTC to be acting in good faith, I worry that the cable/telco providers would have somewhere between one and five years to stomp certain web sites to death before the FTC is able to act on their "existing authority".
I mean, how long has Microsoft been in antitrust litigation?
I was interested in your question, so I did some research. The grandparent poster is overstating the case, but there were polls back in December/January that kind of back him up.
The NY Times says, "The poll found that 53 percent of Americans approved of Mr. Bush's authorizing eavesdropping without prior court approval 'in order to reduce the threat of terrorism.'"
The CS Monitor (reporting on a Zogby poll) says, "Nearly half of likely voters, 49 percent, say Bush has the constitutional powers to approve such a plan".
I don't have more recent figures. The President's popularity is roughly the same now that it was then, though it had risen a bit for a while in the meantime.
Which is why I'm finding the Ken Lay case interestingly ironic. "Innocent until proven guilty" is itself kind of an oversimplification. A jury has heard his case, but he had avenues of appeal left open, which he cannot pursue on account of being dead.
Intuitively, I want to say he's been found guilty by a jury, and the anecdotal evidence is more than enough to convince me that he's guilty in truth. What little justice can be done by fining his estate seems entirely justified.
But with appeals left unpursued, it seems that he's in a nebulous legal state, neither proven guilty in finality, nor innocent. It's not just a question of his reputation, which will be entirely for the court of public opinion anyway. Those fines can go to legal reparations.
It's kind of a legal race condition, to put it in nerdy terms. I'll be interested to see what they make of it.
Because apes are pretty good at being apes.
A "daughter species" doesn't necessarily kick the parent species out of its niche. That's common when the environment changes but doesn't eliminate the old environment, or when the old environment splits into to different parts. Humans evolved from tree-dwelling apes who ventured out into the encroaching grassland. That selected for apes which walked on their hind legs at the expense of prehensile feet, but the trees were still there and apes live in them to this day.
Go into an ape's niche and you'll find yourself massively out-competed. You'd make a lousy chimpanzee.
Sometimes a daughter species does compete with, and outcompete, the parent species, and drives it into extinction. We appear to be working on that pretty vigorously. In a century or so the answer to the question "Why are there still apes?" may be "There aren't." But it doesn't really change the answer: new species come all the time without destroying the old ones.
Remember that from the evolutionary point of view, humans aren't "better" than apes, any more than apes are "better" than fish or fish are "better" than amoebas. Each one fits into a niche without driving out the older species. It's only our bias that puts us on the top of an evolutionary ladder.
It's not really survival of the fittest. In fact, that which survives, survives. And when the environment changes, it stops surviving.
Indeed. They serve roles a bit like the US Supreme Court (a seat on which is much like a life peerage to the Law Lords) and the US Senate. The Senate's 6-year term is designed to give it some of the same moderating effect, in that they're not continuously campaigning.
The House of Lords does not often overturn bills; they see their job is to oversee the House of Commons, not compete with them. But I think that having them there has a moderating effect on the bills that are put into play.
The Java Virtual Machine is also sort of stack-based. The JVM bytecode set uses stack operations but the safety checks that it runs make it equivalent to a sliding set of registers not unlike, say, the SPARC architecture. A JIT implementation could do away with the stack, at least in the individual method calls, though the call-return stack would still have to be there.
With domains costing only a few dollars, it can be very hard to blacklist them fast enough. But I suspect that large-scale providers like GMail identify spam along those criteria: if a few hundred people tag emails with "legal-generic-v1@gr@.com" as spam, they mark that as spam for the rest of them (potentially millions of emails).
As you allude, trust can be an issue. It would suck for somebody to joe-job GMail by signing up a few thousand free accounts, subscribing to a legitimate newsletter, and marking them as spam when they got sent. And with the spammers starting to send their messages as images rather than text (including speckles to make OCR'ing harder as well as to prevent you from just doing a checksum), it gets harder to automate detection even of URLs you know for sure are spamtastic.
In theory, that's the idea behind the CAN-SPAM law; legal spam is easily filtered because it identifies the sender (as well as flagging itself as unsolicited). But the "legitimate" spam is a negligible portion of the spam in the world, and hardly even feels like spam because it's trying to sell you a legitimate product.
And by "web designers," I'm sure you mean "control-freak relics from print publishing who don't know how the fuck to use the new medium properly," right?
Yes. That's EXACTLY who I mean.
800x600 may die one of these days. "Fixed with" layouts are very popular with web designers, who like the amount of control it gives them. Combine that with weaknesses in CSS, whose ability to set column widths based on their content is sketchy.
Slashdot, for example, displays some very unpleasant behavior when fonts are scaled large. Every site that I know that handles font-scaling well does so with a layout whose total width is fixed.
If you're going to do fixed width, it should probably be no more than 1024x768, and 800x600 isn't a bad measure.
It isn't even a question of how good a programmer you are. It's a question of how good a programmer everybody on the team is. And "team" includes every library you use.
When memory is passed across the boundary from one developer to another, you need some kind of mechanism to track who is going to free that memory, and under what circumstances.
Garbage-collected languages make that contract fairly clear. (But not infinitely clear; there are still ways to accidentally pin objects in memory even in a GC language).
In C we got used to putting in comments saying, "I'm passing you back a static structure, so I'm not re-entrant" or "This thing is malloc'ed so free it when you're done" or "You have to pass in a reference to that object and I'll fill it in". As long as discipline is followed the program works brilliantly (no GC overhead) but if any developer anywhere on the project misreads any single one of those comments, you're completely and totally doomed.
There is still software to be cranked out by one guy who can keep the entire thing in his head, but software requirements for most things are too big for just one guy. Even the uberest of uber-hackers is limited by the dumbest guy on his team, especialyl when that dumbest guy (even if he's pretty damn smart) nulls out a memory location that wasn't finished yet.
It's not just you. I've been thinking the same thing in different terms. I want the equivalent of a Mac Mini, but I'd rather not pay to have a laptop hard disk in a machine doesn't really move.
Apple isn't Dell. They don't try to cover the spectrum. They'd rather put out a few machines in a very limited set of configurations. I think it makes it cheaper for them: fewer options means easier support, and ordering is mostly putting a stamp on a box rather than constructing (and testing) a system.
That's a good and funny observation. The Long Tail theory doesn't deny that bestsellers will remain a major piece of the market. It's just pointing out that there are ways to make money elsewhere. He's talking about flattening out the hump, but not removing it entirely.
So ultimately it's evidence for his theory, not against it.
Their own interfaces to the game, but not to starting the game. Once you've started the game you're in the game's own world and they can do anything they want to the interface, but to start the game is a matter for the operating system. People would like to see that behave as much as possible like all of the other programs on their system.
It sounds like the intended delivery mechanism is that the game developers produce a Mac version of the game separate from the Windows version. You need to produce a Mac executable to act like a Mac program that a Mac user is familiar with, even if that Mac program is just the cider executable wrapped around the Windows executable.
A Linux user might be comfortable with the idea of starting cider and then pointing it to the Windows executable to run, but Mac users want things to be more seamless than that. This is supposed to make it trivial to produce that Mac port, but not to replace it.
Broadband service requires rather expensive physical infrastructure in the form of wires or fibers, and access to that will always be somewhat contentious. So there will always be a limited number of ISPs. In rural places, that number may be 1. Even in cities, there will be only a limited number.
Especially since, as you point out, each is compelled to break neutrality or be forced out by a cheaper company.
It is an interesting topic. My own personal take is to let the phone and cable companies try breaking neutrality and see if they really do use it just to provide QoS and improved access, or if they do what many Slashdotters fear: extorting content providers like YouTube and cutting off access to sites they don't like. I'm reluctant to let Congress legislate it for exactly the reasons listed in the article.
But if the ISPs really do screw it up... I'll be mighty ticked.
For Question 1, the problem isn't so much discriminating based on the content as discriminating based on the sender. That is, if amazon.com has paid the fee and bn.com hasn't, you get faster access to amazon's web site than bn. (Especially if "slower" means "nothing at all".)
Which could lead to discrimination against content you don't like (e.g. fast access to nra.org, shutting aclu.org to a trickle), but it's site-based, not something you can fix with encryption unless you start talking about fancy stuff like onion routing. Even that doesn't really help, because they could throttle everything except packets directly to their paid providers.
What guarantees network neutrality is your ability to switch to a neutral ISP if you don't get the access you want. That only works if you have competition among ISPs, which too many people don't.
For your second question, there's also a notion of using special protocols (quality of service, QoS) to guarantee certain bandwidth between two sites on a site-by-site basis. So if you want to watch a movie in real time, and you want to guarantee that there's at least 1 Mbps available between the sites, the ISPs want to be able to charge you for that guarantee.
Most ISPs make very little in the way of guarantees to individual users. (High-level providers like the one amazon uses are a different story). Guaranteeing 1 Mbps constantly requires a lot more hardware than they have now, and most of the time that's just fine, because most Internet traffic comes in short burts. It becomes not-fine only when you have a specific requirement, like watching a movie or a VOIP conversation, or a web site that you absolutely must keep running 99.999% of the time or you'll scare away the customers.
Nearly everything in the law is a bandage. The wheels of justice grind slowly; if a CEO's secretary gets fired and slapped with a restraining order for whisteblowing, the laws that protect him or her won't take effect anywhere near quickly enough to keep that person from being reduced to poverty.
Even at its best the law is a patchwork of new laws covering up failings left by old ones. You're right that it's better to examine the agency involved in violating the rights of whistleblowers, but if we could fix these agencies for that problem, we could fix it so that there wouldn't be any need to blow the whistle in the first place.
The idea of the long tail is the area under the curve. If he height of the curve represents the amount of money going to any one item, the area under the curve is the total amount of money available. That area is supposed to be more or less constant: people will spend a fixed amount of money on books, music, etc. They may spend a bit less on music if the music itself is cheaper, but in general the assumption is that things will even out so that prices would rise and/or people would buy more music.
The long curve is about shifting the curve so that it's flatter. Same total revenue but distributed to more people.
The profit doesn't really enter into it. It may be cheaper to produce indie music/books/movies/etc, but it may not. A studio may spend $200 million to make one movie and sell $400 million worth of tickets. Or 2,000 little indie studios could make 2,000 movies for $100k each. One will be a blockbuster hit and make $100 million. Three will be minor hits and make $5 million. The rest will sit there on the tail, and most of them will make squat or turn a bare profit.
But aggregated, they'll all make up about the same $400 million on $200 million in revenue. The winners change, and the profitability computations get complicated (somebody won a zillion times more than the studio ever could have; many suffered losses.)
The consistent winner, as you point out, will be the companies that "own" the tail. Those companies are like the current studios: big central points of reference where people when they want stuff: Amazon, iTunes music store, eBay. Like the studios, they depend heavily on marketing, and that keeps out other players.
To sum up, it's less about the amount of profit as redistributing where the revenue. The cost of that profit is actually not all that different from what it used to be, once you factor in the losers; there are a great many losers on the long tail.
But it sucks revenue away from the big hump in the center. They're losing out to a new competitor: they might actually split that $400 million that people are willing to spend on a movie with the long tail, but if they get only half of it they're profitability has gone from 100% ROI to 0. And that's all the difference in the world.
This sounds badly blinded: the same people self-reporting deja vu are also being told what to feel. In theory they aren't consciously recalling what they were told under hypnosis, but I didn't see a control to demonstrate that.
In the end, this result isn't important in itself ("Look, we can recreate deja vu in a lab") but rather the tool it provides for further research, being able to generate deja vu on demand without electro-zapping the brain. If that makes other experiments possible, to understand how memories are stored and recalled using this as a kind of mental stick to poke at the brain, that's an interesting result.
But that result has a caveat that this isn't necessarily identical to real deja vu, might be a completely different phenonmenon, and may simply be research subjects telling experimenters what they want to hear.
The submitter is "buzz@nww.com"; the article is at networkworld.com. Of course nww.com is just an alias for networkworld.com. I couldn't immediately tell if buzz == Paul McNamara, but it's at least astroturfing for the site.
I think they're much more interested in what you do watch, as measured by your skipping, rather than what you say you want to watch. Advertising is a subtle business; everybody claims to be unaffected by TV ads but ineffective ad campaigns produce losses and effective ad campaigns can be huge drivers.
It's easy to observe in the big stuff (national ads for massive brands, Coke or Ford or McDonalds) but much harder (and no less important, to the advertisers) for smaller things: grape juice and plumbers and tires. That means selling you stuff you're not going to jump up and down and say, "Yeah, I want that!"
They know perfectly well you're going to hit "no" on essentially every ad except the occasional breast-filled beer commercial. If they actually believed that they wouldn't bother advertising.