And, pray tell, what *is* the subnet identified... it is the ethernet port of the router at the customer site. So you can identify that. Which home the request was made from. Is that personally identifying information ? Of course it is.
The other "changing" part, you can determine the machine's MAC address from it, so it identifies the machine uniquely.
Which is *still* a lot better than what Libyans ("mohamedans" as they were called then) were doing under the caliphate. Which is my point.
And what you accuse the US of doing (making a number of people work for 10 times the wage one gets in Libya) TODAY is also a lot better than what Libyans are doing to eachother TODAY.
Let's not pretend, for a second, that there is some weird sort of moral equivalence between Obama and qadaffi, because there isn't. Obama is a blithering lying idiot (if you believe...). He is not ordering the military to kill half of America, and qadaffi *is* doing exactly that. That makes him a better man.
Have you ever noticed how Libya is... not filled with black people. Yet on every painting more than, say 150 years old, you will barely find any arabs, and masses of black people.
Ottoman muslims had vast amounts of black slaves, including in Libya. They not only had to work for nothing, in nazi-camp like conditions, but the muslim state regularly comitted genocide against black slaves. Today...
none are left.
Shall I repeat that once more that you can absorb the full extent of just how bad Libyans treated them ?
We live in the 21st century now. Unless you wish to compare these union incidents to the (regular) slave genocides that the ottoman empire carried out in northern africa (and elsewhere)... Incidentally, muslims killed a LOT more than 100 blacks during those incidents.
I mean, you need some seriously twisted reality to even compare these things. Yes, the US behaved better in 1921 than Libyans behave TODAY.
Really ? What has the US done, to it's own people, that compares to what Libya's doing now (and, frankly, has been doing for some 50 years now, just on a lower level)
You wish. The UN has comitted dozens of genocides. Certainly they've knowingly done things like having their armies commit genocide on citizens of UN member states. Doesn't that count as bombing your own people ?
These are just a few pointers. Let's also not forget that Qadhafi is the chairman of the UN human rights council (yes, he's "suspended pending investigation").
Which of them deserves to 'own' such an important international technology?
Nobody deserves that, obviously. So why tamper with the situation : 1) UN is a LOT less free than the US. The DMCA is tame compared to the European equivalent, and is a bastion of anarchism compared to Middle eastern or African versions of these laws. The situation WILL NOT improve 2) the US has built the internet. Of course they have some measure of control (though I seriously doubt the US has the power to shutdown the internet world-wide. No, not even the DNS system. Explain, for example, how the US could get the k root server to go down. You know, without bombing half of Europe and Asia's capitals)
Let's not forget too easily that the UN's idea of social justice has, on multiple occasions, involved comitting ethnic and religious genocide.
Of course you can. It's just slightly impractical. In other words, no-one ever does it.
But nothing forces you to run websites on port 80. Nothing forces you from disregarding global address assignments on networks (in fact, I frequently do this for technical reasons) Nothing forces you from using the "normal" DNS, and there are alternatives (this is the easiest part to avoid imho)....
So yes, you can perfectly well go around ICANN. Of course, it means not being connected to the "normal" internet. A bit like being on native IPv6 a year ago.
Still, I would sooner put North Korea or Kadaffi in charge of the internet than a UN body. At least North Korea is responsible for less than 10 million deaths per decade, and Kadaffi is the chairman of the UN body on human rights, surely he will do what's best for humanity, right ?
Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. (Static) data uploaded by a previous version of an AI is of no use whatsoever until the AI's are relatively mature. Even then, it's nowhere near as useful as an actual teacher. Copies of (parts of) their minds... maybe.
The whole point of ANN logic is to learn feedback loops. Now these feedback loops will be massively different for even small modifications of the robot's body (e.g. despite being a massively overused cliche in movies, one human cannot control the body of another, or even a android body similar to his own, until months or years of training pass)
You could probably duplicate AI individuals, and one might be able to extract parts of their brain to solve small tasks. But they'd have to be pretty small tasks for this procedure to have a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding. Still, reading, that might work. Simple, confined tasks that don't require any grasp whatsoever of "the big picture" (whatever that may be in that specific field).
To grow many capable AI consciousnesses, you'd need a full digital society, if you want a lot of capable specialized individuals. Digital versions of things like, oh, nurseries, parents, schools, police,... the works. And it would take a while to grow a new one (at least, in the perception of the AI's involved it would take a long while, maybe it could be only a little time in the real world, but it would take years of interaction with the previous generation AI's to get them to say basic words, just like with human infants). Creating a new individual would take a huge amount of processing power.
Of course, given what a huge intelligence difference even 2% more neurons means, it seems unlikely we'd even be able to control AI's once they grow significantly beyond our minds. One buffer overflow mistake... whoops.
Given that a human brain has about 100 billion neurons. Each of these neurons can be simplified as storing about 10000 floating-point values between 0 and 1 (granted, to an utter ridiculous level of precision, but moving everything about 1% has about the same effect of getting yourself drunk, so let's say each can have 4096 different values).
So that means that total amount of information in the human mind is close to 4*10^18 bits. This is about the amount of information encoded in 4 grams of metal, in the magnetic orientation of the individual atoms.
Given that there are about 6 billion people. Including all the dead ones, let's say 12 billion. So that means 48000 tons of steel contain more ideas than all of humanity has ever had, combined. The earth's core contains that ~ 10^12th time.
So we have prior art for pretty much everything any human will ever think up inside this little ball we're walking on.
Point being : discoveries are patentable too, in general.
I find your arguments a bit hypocritical. First you claim that you cannot get what you want for "market rate" (which clearly is about $30/month), then you say that you won't pay more for better service, certainly you will not pay the cost difference for ISPs.
Then there is nothing to talk about, is there ?
Probably your tactic of demanding the government force everyone to pay for what you, and at best 0.1% of ISP customers want... perhaps that's the correct one. Certainly it's the only one that can succeed, even in theory.
You didn't pay full price. That's the whole point. Your grandparents were given the choice : pay full price, or pay 1/4th or less, and pay a monthly fee.
Most municipalities obviously chose the cheap option, but there were quite a few that didn't, and the government created the phone network for them. Then a number of companies started to offer them money for the network (and these municipalities were... "somewhat lax"... in maintaining the networks, and upgrades were all but unheard off).
So after a while, sometimes a long while, but mostly a very short while people demanded these municipalities sell their networks, to the Bell. Because you know, as horrible as AT&T service is (granted it was better then, but not much), it was a lot better than government service. Additionally it gave these munis some money. Never seen a politician refuse that.
Nothing was "stolen" from you, all was bought and paid for, the price agreed with properly elected officials.
the last mile issue is the only thing that will make internet access fair and unbiased, and at a decent price
Might I attract your attention to this document ? Fair and unbiased indeed. Either you're beyond naive, or you're malicious.
And, frankly, compared to European telcos (or, curse these moronic assholes, Asian ones), this is quite tame. Also, the peering policy of AT&T is not a lie : you fulfill the conditions, and they will actually peer with you. You can jump through Telefonica's (many) hoops as much as you want, and you'll get nothing at all in return ever, and if they don't like you for whatever reason, they'll openly sabotage you.
Most people want internet to surf around a little bit, and that's what the lowest, cheapest contracts provide. That you want to use it fully maxed out for the same price... is lunacy.
It must be beyond obvious that this is not in the cards. Just calculate what kinds of bandwidth this would require. Just for once. Look at the numbers. Making municipalities provide what you're asking would make this cost half as much as all social services combined.
You can have unlimited bandwidth. No problem at all. Just not for $30, for $500. And no, this is *NOT* due to evil capitalism, it's due to reality.
Now if consumers were prepared to pick up the cost for what they used (ie. metered bandwidth), then ISPs would fall over their own feet trying to get you to use as much bandwidth as possible (and some ISPs do this). How about going that route ?
Oh wait, you want free stuff, paid for by other people. Or else you'll get really, really cross... BTW, I want a Ferrari for the price of a smart, and I want you to pay for it too. Perhaps we can exchange ? You deliver me a shiny new Ferrari F40 for the cost of a smart, and I'll provide you a 10 Mbit pipe to your home, unlimited unthrottled bandwidth for $30 a month. Deal ?
I'm actually in favor of this. Killing net neutrality. Of course, I work in the ISP business. It's just another useless measure that does nothing but making life difficult for us, and has been sold to democrats as "more free stuff". Outlawing QoS. Moronic is indeed the correct term, but I find it fits very well on the other shoe.
Have you ever been on a large ISP's network with QoS disabled (ie. a "net neutral" one) ? You can't actually surf on a network like that, but I'm sure all of you "net neutrality" experts can tell me why, and have considered all technical issues. And there's of course the tiny little tidbit that any reasonable piece of network hardware won't actually let you disable QoS (as that is moronic and *will* kill the network due to the resulting routing instability. But I'm sure all of these net neutrality advocates know why, right ?)
You know, maybe, just maybe, it's the case that things like QoS have technical reasons, the result of hardworking people attempting to bring a usable network to their subscribers, and not just a conspiracy born late at night in Obama's bed with satan, hitler, stalin and few ugly female camp guards mixed up in a big messy pool.
The whole point of a hierarchical addressing scheme is that you DON'T randomize the addresses. That's, incidentally, the problem IPv6 was supposed to solve (before, of course, politics got in the way).
Why ? A hierarchical routing table only needs to contain your own clients, and a single upstream route. That's maybe 10-20 routes for any "normal" point in the network. 50 at the most.
Randomizing addresses, for political reasons, got us to... checking...
345750 network entries using 41835750 bytes of memory
(and of course, rising fast). The difference ? A 10000 route switch is $2000, one that can take one million routes (the minimum you'll risk if you're smart) costs around $50000 (that's per device).
I don't need you to "fix" my "shit". I am perfectly capable of fixing it myself. So long as you give me what you advertised without any funny business. In that case I don't even need to call you. But you damn well better be prepared to have weekly calls about if you filter my traffic and won't let me out of the contract for 24 months (that is if the shaping actually affects me -- say my ssh sessions). I'm prepared to pay above market average, but not 25 times market price for this. And if you are not prepared to provide what you advertise, then yes, I do hope you go bankrupt and serve as a lesson of why defrauding your customers is bad. I'd be most grateful for that.
To even support configurations as you suggest, with extreme per-customer configuration we'll need to double (at least) our network engineering team AND add a team of developers for good measure, to enable you to actually modify these settings.
We'll also need hardware upgrades, and things that support these sort of configurations don't come cheap. Additionally, right now your traffic is about cut in half by the proxies, and in general it is shaped so it cannot overload our upstream lines. If a customer attempts to overload any specific line, *his* packets will be dropped. This allows an overprovision ratio of (on average) between 30 and 50 (ie. we sell 1 megabit about 40 times).
If we are to support your speeds as you "demand" it (and you seem to think are advertised, even though they're obviously not), it will become a more-or-less symmetric line, where traffic cannot be cached very effectively anymore (or it at the very least looses a lot of effectiveness, because it can't cache upstream traffic if you're running servers - p2p or otherwise). Additionally, if you plan to actually use this bandwidth, it becomes 40 times more expensive for us (although on symmetric lines we're seeing about 50% usage, so let's assume it becomes 20 times more expensive, but combined with the caching issues we'll be having, we're back at about 40).
So let's add all of it together : -> MUCH more difficult job for network engineering, obviously resulting in increased manpower -> MUCH more difficult job, including serious software development for network operations, and I'm absolutely sure we'll need to at least double the department size for that -> Due to the necessity of hiring an actually competent first line helpdesk, that cost will skyrocket as well -> 40 times as much bandwidth required in our network, both on the (cheap) upstreams and the (VERY expensive) lex interlinks
I hope this can give you a bit of perspective. A factor 25 "above market rate" is not a bad deal - at all. Sorry to say it.
We *can* provide massive connection speeds for very cheap, in quite a few datacenters. So if you run your applications on a server you put at our site, we'll gladly sell you 10 Mbit symmetric for less than $100 monthly (because we don't have support issues, you just get a flat internet pipe, all problems are yours to solve (unless you pay consultancy rate : ~ $75 per started hour)) And of course, for this kind of connection we don't have to pay to AT&T for lex interlinks.
These are the deals that are available, and I hope this can clarify a bit the business position of these "evil" isps, and your options, and why they are that way.
Unfortunately I can't change these options. Nobody but AT&T can. And until the day comes that 10-20% of internet users are prepared to pay seriously more for these kinds of services, I don't see them happening.
The problem with that argument is that once you get past your modem, it's all shared pipes. So -sorry- it's simply not true what you're saying.
There is something inherently wrong with the provider choosing what is good and what is not for you.
And if 99,99% of ISP users weren't morons whose approach to tagging packets results in this situation, it might be possible to change something about that.
Here's reality "ooh this bittorrent client sends it's packets faster" <2 minutes pause> "stupid isp you promised me a fast line, webpages don't even load decently anymore" <4 minutes pause> "stupid isp, why are you sending all my friends viagra mails in my name ?" <15 minutes pause> 200 phones are ringing, all with users receiving said mails and having clicked on an exe.
Unfortunately giving unfiltered bandwidth to home users is beyond moronic, and it *will* kill your network. Of course, as the ISP *YOU* will get blamed for this, and everyone will move, complaining to high heavens about how their contracts don't let them switch isps every 2 days.
I hope understanding dawns.
But of course, if you're willing to pay $500 a month instead of 20, we *will* fix all the shit you cause and give you your unfiltered bandwidth. But not for 20. Sorry. And, frankly, I hope users like you avoid us like the plague and bankrupt our competition instead. We'd be most grateful for that.
Before you say "moron" calculate just what kind of speeds we're talking about here. Other than the obvious fact that those speeds you'd need for that simply don't exist (1 ADSL line = 4 mbit, so per 250 customers you'd require a gigabit of backbone capacity).
These people have, say, a million customers, so you'd like them to install 4 terabit uplinks (and to actually get 4 terabit of traffic you'd roughly need 8 terabit capacity). It doesn't exist.
Moron.
You want a 1-1 connection ? No problem. Every ISP sells them. Of course, not for 20$/month. But you can get 10 Mbit for about $500 in most places. Why don't you pay for what you "demand" ?
There is also the other argument... http traffic (the first 10 kb of a connection, say), dns, gaming traffic,... is highly interactive, and generally it will result in massive slowdowns when even a minute amount of this traffic gets dropped. Result : just about every customer complains.
Long http downloads, p2p traffic,... is not interactive -at all- and nobody will be very upset if you drop all of it for 5 minutes.
So giving the interactive traffic absolute priority over the non-interactive traffic (ie. "throttling p2p (and all other large downloads)") is exactly what you'd want to do yourself on your own connection anyway to optimize the subjective speed of your internet connection. Treating p2p, with max downloading speed, the same as other traffic will make all other traffic (esp. http) horrendously slow.
Exactly : currently moving away from oil is prevented, not by of evil corporations conspiring against meddling kids, not (much) by middle eastern theocratic lunatic dictators, not even by the American version of same.
It's prevented by actual, honest-to-God, technical issues.
One thing you never hear greens suggest is... fixing the problems. It's just so much easier to declare a problem solved and accuse everyone of conspiracies. To depict yourself the victim of whatever is the unpopular enemy "du jour" (is it still BP these days ?). As to whether it gets anyone anywhere... But where's the fun for "green" parties saying the obvious : we're waiting for decent (= cheap + efficient) energy storage technology. Let's please not waste money or resources on actually becoming green until we... know HOW. No, not even on co2 reduction (because we won't get it down until we have an actual alternative. Moving co2 production to china does exactly zilch for the environment, except paying for Al Gore's army of cronies and fleet of 30 gallons-a-mile cars)
But wasting taxpayer's money on fool's errands, which then proceed to fail, and then blame the, oh, local bank that demands it's dividends. Or a president. Or congress. Or an oil company that fucked up an installation. Or... that's like fighting the man, man ! That's so cool.
The problem is (some) users are idiots, easily tricked into revealing their encryption keys, and OpenPGP is no protection on a virus-infested pc (of course palladium, or "trusted execution" could solve that).
Don't you think it's probably more meant as a kinder, faster alternative to confirmed (ie. legally valid) snailmail delivery, in addition a way for that long-awaited legally valid electronic signature ?
Because that's what Europe's various governments have been trying to create for a long while now. Belgium, Holland, France. The good news (for you at least) ? They all failed miserably. Somehow I doubt this will work better.
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And, pray tell, what *is* the subnet identified ... it is the ethernet port of the router at the customer site. So you can identify that. Which home the request was made from. Is that personally identifying information ? Of course it is.
The other "changing" part, you can determine the machine's MAC address from it, so it identifies the machine uniquely.
150 years ago americans were killing each other.
Which is *still* a lot better than what Libyans ("mohamedans" as they were called then) were doing under the caliphate. Which is my point.
And what you accuse the US of doing (making a number of people work for 10 times the wage one gets in Libya) TODAY is also a lot better than what Libyans are doing to eachother TODAY.
Let's not pretend, for a second, that there is some weird sort of moral equivalence between Obama and qadaffi, because there isn't. Obama is a blithering lying idiot (if you believe ...). He is not ordering the military to kill half of America, and qadaffi *is* doing exactly that. That makes him a better man.
Have you ever noticed how Libya is ... not filled with black people. Yet on every painting more than, say 150 years old, you will barely find any arabs, and masses of black people.
Ottoman muslims had vast amounts of black slaves, including in Libya. They not only had to work for nothing, in nazi-camp like conditions, but the muslim state regularly comitted genocide against black slaves. Today ...
none are left.
Shall I repeat that once more that you can absorb the full extent of just how bad Libyans treated them ?
none are left
We live in the 21st century now. Unless you wish to compare these union incidents to the (regular) slave genocides that the ottoman empire carried out in northern africa (and elsewhere) ... Incidentally, muslims killed a LOT more than 100 blacks during those incidents.
I mean, you need some seriously twisted reality to even compare these things. Yes, the US behaved better in 1921 than Libyans behave TODAY.
Really ? What has the US done, to it's own people, that compares to what Libya's doing now (and, frankly, has been doing for some 50 years now, just on a lower level)
The UN hasn't bombed their own people either.
You wish. The UN has comitted dozens of genocides. Certainly they've knowingly done things like having their armies commit genocide on citizens of UN member states. Doesn't that count as bombing your own people ?
http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb-034.html
http://www.realityzone.com/katanga1.html
(but do not - for a moment - think the UN malice, incompetence and greed is limited to these 2 incidents. I just thought to give an example from the beginning of the UN and a recent example)
These are just a few pointers. Let's also not forget that Qadhafi is the chairman of the UN human rights council (yes, he's "suspended pending investigation").
Which of them deserves to 'own' such an important international technology?
Nobody deserves that, obviously. So why tamper with the situation :
1) UN is a LOT less free than the US. The DMCA is tame compared to the European equivalent, and is a bastion of anarchism compared to Middle eastern or African versions of these laws. The situation WILL NOT improve
2) the US has built the internet. Of course they have some measure of control (though I seriously doubt the US has the power to shutdown the internet world-wide. No, not even the DNS system. Explain, for example, how the US could get the k root server to go down. You know, without bombing half of Europe and Asia's capitals)
Let's not forget too easily that the UN's idea of social justice has, on multiple occasions, involved comitting ethnic and religious genocide.
Of course you can. It's just slightly impractical. In other words, no-one ever does it.
But nothing forces you to run websites on port 80. ...
Nothing forces you from disregarding global address assignments on networks (in fact, I frequently do this for technical reasons)
Nothing forces you from using the "normal" DNS, and there are alternatives (this is the easiest part to avoid imho).
So yes, you can perfectly well go around ICANN. Of course, it means not being connected to the "normal" internet. A bit like being on native IPv6 a year ago.
Still, I would sooner put North Korea or Kadaffi in charge of the internet than a UN body. At least North Korea is responsible for less than 10 million deaths per decade, and Kadaffi is the chairman of the UN body on human rights, surely he will do what's best for humanity, right ?
Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. (Static) data uploaded by a previous version of an AI is of no use whatsoever until the AI's are relatively mature. Even then, it's nowhere near as useful as an actual teacher. Copies of (parts of) their minds ... maybe.
The whole point of ANN logic is to learn feedback loops. Now these feedback loops will be massively different for even small modifications of the robot's body (e.g. despite being a massively overused cliche in movies, one human cannot control the body of another, or even a android body similar to his own, until months or years of training pass)
You could probably duplicate AI individuals, and one might be able to extract parts of their brain to solve small tasks. But they'd have to be pretty small tasks for this procedure to have a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding. Still, reading, that might work. Simple, confined tasks that don't require any grasp whatsoever of "the big picture" (whatever that may be in that specific field).
To grow many capable AI consciousnesses, you'd need a full digital society, if you want a lot of capable specialized individuals. Digital versions of things like, oh, nurseries, parents, schools, police, ... the works. And it would take a while to grow a new one (at least, in the perception of the AI's involved it would take a long while, maybe it could be only a little time in the real world, but it would take years of interaction with the previous generation AI's to get them to say basic words, just like with human infants). Creating a new individual would take a huge amount of processing power.
Of course, given what a huge intelligence difference even 2% more neurons means, it seems unlikely we'd even be able to control AI's once they grow significantly beyond our minds. One buffer overflow mistake ... whoops.
Given that a human brain has about 100 billion neurons. Each of these neurons can be simplified as storing about 10000 floating-point values between 0 and 1 (granted, to an utter ridiculous level of precision, but moving everything about 1% has about the same effect of getting yourself drunk, so let's say each can have 4096 different values).
So that means that total amount of information in the human mind is close to 4*10^18 bits. This is about the amount of information encoded in 4 grams of metal, in the magnetic orientation of the individual atoms.
Given that there are about 6 billion people. Including all the dead ones, let's say 12 billion. So that means 48000 tons of steel contain more ideas than all of humanity has ever had, combined. The earth's core contains that ~ 10^12th time.
So we have prior art for pretty much everything any human will ever think up inside this little ball we're walking on.
Point being : discoveries are patentable too, in general.
I find your arguments a bit hypocritical. First you claim that you cannot get what you want for "market rate" (which clearly is about $30/month), then you say that you won't pay more for better service, certainly you will not pay the cost difference for ISPs.
Then there is nothing to talk about, is there ?
Probably your tactic of demanding the government force everyone to pay for what you, and at best 0.1% of ISP customers want ... perhaps that's the correct one. Certainly it's the only one that can succeed, even in theory.
You didn't pay full price. That's the whole point. Your grandparents were given the choice : pay full price, or pay 1/4th or less, and pay a monthly fee.
Most municipalities obviously chose the cheap option, but there were quite a few that didn't, and the government created the phone network for them. Then a number of companies started to offer them money for the network (and these municipalities were ... "somewhat lax" ... in maintaining the networks, and upgrades were all but unheard off).
So after a while, sometimes a long while, but mostly a very short while people demanded these municipalities sell their networks, to the Bell. Because you know, as horrible as AT&T service is (granted it was better then, but not much), it was a lot better than government service. Additionally it gave these munis some money. Never seen a politician refuse that.
Nothing was "stolen" from you, all was bought and paid for, the price agreed with properly elected officials.
the last mile issue is the only thing that will make internet access fair and unbiased, and at a decent price
Might I attract your attention to this document ? Fair and unbiased indeed. Either you're beyond naive, or you're malicious.
And, frankly, compared to European telcos (or, curse these moronic assholes, Asian ones), this is quite tame. Also, the peering policy of AT&T is not a lie : you fulfill the conditions, and they will actually peer with you. You can jump through Telefonica's (many) hoops as much as you want, and you'll get nothing at all in return ever, and if they don't like you for whatever reason, they'll openly sabotage you.
*sigh* the point I was trying to make is that the unchanging part identifies the client.
Mind if I interject another theory ?
Most people want internet to surf around a little bit, and that's what the lowest, cheapest contracts provide. That you want to use it fully maxed out for the same price ... is lunacy.
It must be beyond obvious that this is not in the cards. Just calculate what kinds of bandwidth this would require. Just for once. Look at the numbers. Making municipalities provide what you're asking would make this cost half as much as all social services combined.
You can have unlimited bandwidth. No problem at all. Just not for $30, for $500. And no, this is *NOT* due to evil capitalism, it's due to reality.
Now if consumers were prepared to pick up the cost for what they used (ie. metered bandwidth), then ISPs would fall over their own feet trying to get you to use as much bandwidth as possible (and some ISPs do this). How about going that route ?
Oh wait, you want free stuff, paid for by other people. Or else you'll get really, really cross ... BTW, I want a Ferrari for the price of a smart, and I want you to pay for it too. Perhaps we can exchange ? You deliver me a shiny new Ferrari F40 for the cost of a smart, and I'll provide you a 10 Mbit pipe to your home, unlimited unthrottled bandwidth for $30 a month. Deal ?
Correct. The lower 64 bits change, the upper 64 bits stay constant.
Now ... which of these 2 identify the client ? The changing part, or the non-changing part ?
Exactly ... telling a republican your version of facts is like telling a blind man he can see.
In other words, it's lying.
As to why net neutrality is getting killed : http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/12/06/comcast-execs-gave-large-donations-obama-democrats.
I'm actually in favor of this. Killing net neutrality. Of course, I work in the ISP business. It's just another useless measure that does nothing but making life difficult for us, and has been sold to democrats as "more free stuff". Outlawing QoS. Moronic is indeed the correct term, but I find it fits very well on the other shoe.
Have you ever been on a large ISP's network with QoS disabled (ie. a "net neutral" one) ? You can't actually surf on a network like that, but I'm sure all of you "net neutrality" experts can tell me why, and have considered all technical issues. And there's of course the tiny little tidbit that any reasonable piece of network hardware won't actually let you disable QoS (as that is moronic and *will* kill the network due to the resulting routing instability. But I'm sure all of these net neutrality advocates know why, right ?)
You know, maybe, just maybe, it's the case that things like QoS have technical reasons, the result of hardworking people attempting to bring a usable network to their subscribers, and not just a conspiracy born late at night in Obama's bed with satan, hitler, stalin and few ugly female camp guards mixed up in a big messy pool.
The whole point of a hierarchical addressing scheme is that you DON'T randomize the addresses. That's, incidentally, the problem IPv6 was supposed to solve (before, of course, politics got in the way).
Why ? A hierarchical routing table only needs to contain your own clients, and a single upstream route. That's maybe 10-20 routes for any "normal" point in the network. 50 at the most.
Randomizing addresses, for political reasons, got us to ... checking ...
345750 network entries using 41835750 bytes of memory
(and of course, rising fast). The difference ? A 10000 route switch is $2000, one that can take one million routes (the minimum you'll risk if you're smart) costs around $50000 (that's per device).
I don't need you to "fix" my "shit". I am perfectly capable of fixing it myself. So long as you give me what you advertised without any funny business. In that case I don't even need to call you. But you damn well better be prepared to have weekly calls about if you filter my traffic and won't let me out of the contract for 24 months (that is if the shaping actually affects me -- say my ssh sessions). I'm prepared to pay above market average, but not 25 times market price for this. And if you are not prepared to provide what you advertise, then yes, I do hope you go bankrupt and serve as a lesson of why defrauding your customers is bad. I'd be most grateful for that.
To even support configurations as you suggest, with extreme per-customer configuration we'll need to double (at least) our network engineering team AND add a team of developers for good measure, to enable you to actually modify these settings.
We'll also need hardware upgrades, and things that support these sort of configurations don't come cheap. Additionally, right now your traffic is about cut in half by the proxies, and in general it is shaped so it cannot overload our upstream lines. If a customer attempts to overload any specific line, *his* packets will be dropped. This allows an overprovision ratio of (on average) between 30 and 50 (ie. we sell 1 megabit about 40 times).
If we are to support your speeds as you "demand" it (and you seem to think are advertised, even though they're obviously not), it will become a more-or-less symmetric line, where traffic cannot be cached very effectively anymore (or it at the very least looses a lot of effectiveness, because it can't cache upstream traffic if you're running servers - p2p or otherwise). Additionally, if you plan to actually use this bandwidth, it becomes 40 times more expensive for us (although on symmetric lines we're seeing about 50% usage, so let's assume it becomes 20 times more expensive, but combined with the caching issues we'll be having, we're back at about 40).
So let's add all of it together :
-> MUCH more difficult job for network engineering, obviously resulting in increased manpower
-> MUCH more difficult job, including serious software development for network operations, and I'm absolutely sure we'll need to at least double the department size for that
-> Due to the necessity of hiring an actually competent first line helpdesk, that cost will skyrocket as well
-> 40 times as much bandwidth required in our network, both on the (cheap) upstreams and the (VERY expensive) lex interlinks
I hope this can give you a bit of perspective. A factor 25 "above market rate" is not a bad deal - at all. Sorry to say it.
We *can* provide massive connection speeds for very cheap, in quite a few datacenters. So if you run your applications on a server you put at our site, we'll gladly sell you 10 Mbit symmetric for less than $100 monthly (because we don't have support issues, you just get a flat internet pipe, all problems are yours to solve (unless you pay consultancy rate : ~ $75 per started hour)) And of course, for this kind of connection we don't have to pay to AT&T for lex interlinks.
These are the deals that are available, and I hope this can clarify a bit the business position of these "evil" isps, and your options, and why they are that way.
Unfortunately I can't change these options. Nobody but AT&T can. And until the day comes that 10-20% of internet users are prepared to pay seriously more for these kinds of services, I don't see them happening.
The problem with that argument is that once you get past your modem, it's all shared pipes. So -sorry- it's simply not true what you're saying.
There is something inherently wrong with the provider choosing what is good and what is not for you.
And if 99,99% of ISP users weren't morons whose approach to tagging packets results in this situation, it might be possible to change something about that.
Here's reality "ooh this bittorrent client sends it's packets faster" <2 minutes pause> "stupid isp you promised me a fast line, webpages don't even load decently anymore" <4 minutes pause> "stupid isp, why are you sending all my friends viagra mails in my name ?" <15 minutes pause> 200 phones are ringing, all with users receiving said mails and having clicked on an exe.
Unfortunately giving unfiltered bandwidth to home users is beyond moronic, and it *will* kill your network. Of course, as the ISP *YOU* will get blamed for this, and everyone will move, complaining to high heavens about how their contracts don't let them switch isps every 2 days.
I hope understanding dawns.
But of course, if you're willing to pay $500 a month instead of 20, we *will* fix all the shit you cause and give you your unfiltered bandwidth. But not for 20. Sorry. And, frankly, I hope users like you avoid us like the plague and bankrupt our competition instead. We'd be most grateful for that.
Before you say "moron" calculate just what kind of speeds we're talking about here. Other than the obvious fact that those speeds you'd need for that simply don't exist (1 ADSL line = 4 mbit, so per 250 customers you'd require a gigabit of backbone capacity).
These people have, say, a million customers, so you'd like them to install 4 terabit uplinks (and to actually get 4 terabit of traffic you'd roughly need 8 terabit capacity). It doesn't exist.
Moron.
You want a 1-1 connection ? No problem. Every ISP sells them. Of course, not for 20$/month. But you can get 10 Mbit for about $500 in most places. Why don't you pay for what you "demand" ?
You don't get it. Upgrading infrastructure doesn't work if you have customers that constantly use all available bandwidth ...
Obviously.
*ahem* transparent http proxy ...
There is also the other argument ... http traffic (the first 10 kb of a connection, say), dns, gaming traffic, ... is highly interactive, and generally it will result in massive slowdowns when even a minute amount of this traffic gets dropped. Result : just about every customer complains.
Long http downloads, p2p traffic, ... is not interactive -at all- and nobody will be very upset if you drop all of it for 5 minutes.
So giving the interactive traffic absolute priority over the non-interactive traffic (ie. "throttling p2p (and all other large downloads)") is exactly what you'd want to do yourself on your own connection anyway to optimize the subjective speed of your internet connection. Treating p2p, with max downloading speed, the same as other traffic will make all other traffic (esp. http) horrendously slow.
Exactly : currently moving away from oil is prevented, not by of evil corporations conspiring against meddling kids, not (much) by middle eastern theocratic lunatic dictators, not even by the American version of same.
It's prevented by actual, honest-to-God, technical issues.
One thing you never hear greens suggest is ... fixing the problems. It's just so much easier to declare a problem solved and accuse everyone of conspiracies. To depict yourself the victim of whatever is the unpopular enemy "du jour" (is it still BP these days ?). As to whether it gets anyone anywhere ... But where's the fun for "green" parties saying the obvious : we're waiting for decent (= cheap + efficient) energy storage technology. Let's please not waste money or resources on actually becoming green until we ... know HOW. No, not even on co2 reduction (because we won't get it down until we have an actual alternative. Moving co2 production to china does exactly zilch for the environment, except paying for Al Gore's army of cronies and fleet of 30 gallons-a-mile cars)
But wasting taxpayer's money on fool's errands, which then proceed to fail, and then blame the, oh, local bank that demands it's dividends. Or a president. Or congress. Or an oil company that fucked up an installation. Or ... that's like fighting the man, man ! That's so cool.
The problem is (some) users are idiots, easily tricked into revealing their encryption keys, and OpenPGP is no protection on a virus-infested pc (of course palladium, or "trusted execution" could solve that).
Don't you think it's probably more meant as a kinder, faster alternative to confirmed (ie. legally valid) snailmail delivery, in addition a way for that long-awaited legally valid electronic signature ?
Because that's what Europe's various governments have been trying to create for a long while now. Belgium, Holland, France. The good news (for you at least) ? They all failed miserably. Somehow I doubt this will work better.