By that logic, there's never been a damaging monopoly at all - after all, by definition, all the customers are comfortable paying the price charged or they wouldn't be customers, right?
Exactly, the concept of a "damaging monopoly" is BS, and the truth is that if you examine most successful anti-trust operations (Standard Oil, ALCOA, etc.) , they have been against companies that have dramatically reduced costs for consumers or provided them incredible value, but made their competition angry because they were beating them.
The "real damaging monopolies" have been folks like AT&T where governments empowered them to be monopolies.
The internet is apparently SO different that we have to replace 100 years of precedent
Yep. ISPsused dial-up and trunk telephony lines (highly regulated) to provide a completely unregulated service over them (Internetworking). The commercial Internet and later Web came from this world of highly unregulated internetworking. Individual companies made market business decisions about who was to exchange network traffic (and whether that would be for free or for pay) and everyone worked under completely voluntary Internet RFCs regarding protocols.
If Time Warner ensures that all news sites not owned by Time Warner download at 10 b/s, Time Warner is not in any way liable for restricting users' rights to look at different news sources.
Actually the local government agency that granted Time Warner the cable franchise can do pretty much whatever kind of regulation they want to do, as per the franchise agreement. (Here is an example agreement).
Interesting, though, that your theoretical has never actually happened, since if it did plenty of subscribers would get upset and go to DSL or FiOS or uVerse.
This is one of the reasons why I don't mind the Apple App Store process. I'm sure its not perfect, but at least I know Apple has taken a look at apps I run on my phone (although I think they should ask for the source code and have Apple compile it themselves if they want to be really sure).
Regarding App Store approval, I wrote an iPhone app and it took just 1 week for approval.
Why not let each HOA buy back the infrastructure for their communities and lease it to whomever wants to use it? Unlike the "local government" idea you proposed, we wouldn't have any rent seeking behavior
Actually HOAs are just another form of government (otherwise, you could just "leave them"). They will lock you into the providers THEY want, not who you want. For example, I was forced to accept a particular trash company when I wanted another one that was more expensive but who picked up more regularly. Also you often see apartment buildings locked into a single telecom provider who often sucks.
So, I must have imagined all that stuff with Comcast screwing up BitTorrent?
Yes, Comcast was trying to keep the war3z leeches from clogging up everyone else's lines with patently illegal operations (go change copyright law, not telecom law, or get DSL so you aren't in bandwidth contention with your neighbors).
And my ISP certainly hasn't been playing around with my DNS either, right?
Of course they have not blocked external DNS servers...
we create the word "species" to mean a group of individuals with similar enough DNA that they can interbreed.
"Species" is actually a much more complicated concept, because there certainly do seem to be "species" of bacteria, yet they exchange DNA with other "species", while generally maintaining morphological similarity within their own "species" as the reproduce asexually. So species also directly appears to refer to morphologies required for evolutionary niches. Without evolutionary pressure into niches, bacteria would rapidly change morphology as they exchange DNA with other bacteria.
Instead, the rating companies were completely irresponsibly rating 80% of the bonds at AAA or "investment grade".
The theory of tranches of asset-based securities is that you expect a portion of them will have more risk due to prepayment or default. You separate out the ones that are less risky (which get a higher rating) from those that are more risky (which get a lower rating).
This works pretty well when the probability of prepayment or default was well understood - it worked fine for about 20 years. During that time, AAA-rated mortgage backed securities did not default.
The problem was that the US moved from a predictable, random occurrence of mortgage default to an unpredictable, massive burst of defaults across the entire country. This was combined with a deflation of all housing prices and reduction of house sale liquidity, which make the valuation of the mortgages that did not default questionable (you only have a price if you have a market. If no one shows up to the market because they are scared and confused, there is no price).
lots of pensions and other stuff is required to invest in AAA bonds
Indeed, government regulations required many people, including banks, to hold AAA-rated asset backed securities as capital. These regulations actually encouraged the holding of mortgage backed securities over holding individual mortgages - the regulations encouraged them to sell off mortgages to Fannie/Freddie and private companies, and buy back mortgage backed securities.
The SEC "officially recognized" only a small number of ratings agencies for these ratings, including Moody's, Fitch, S&P.
So we had all kinds of regulation. The SEC regulated the ratings agencies. Banks were required under Basel rules to hold certain rated securities.
Everybody missed the risk of the real estate market bubble implosion - the private banks, the private insurance companies, the government-sponsored enterprises, the government regulators, Congress, and new homeowners.
I think it is silly to try to draw ideological results from this situation. There simply was no real understanding of the situation ahead of time. Regulations are very good at stopping known bad behavior, but regulators don't have magic crystal balls into the future.
The one thing we do know is that debt multiplies risk - we have learned this from history over and over. We might not know ahead of time what kind of new risk is being multiplied by the debt, but we know the debt does multiply the risk. Yet we have not gotten rid of the mortgage interest personal income tax deduction, or bond interest deductions for corporate income tax, two laws that encourage more debt than is required. Plus we seem to be willing to have plenty of sovereign debt.
Another way of looking at it: "5 megawatts with a field of 30,000 square meters of mirrors"
Typical nuclear power reactors generate 1 GW, = 200*5 MW, thus you'd need 6 million square meters of mirrors (a square of 2.5 km on a side) to match the nuclear reactor.
And, oh yeah, many nuclear power plants have 2 or more reactors next to each other....
Mini2440 is $100 in quantity 50+, comes with Linux / Qtopia, 405 MHz ARM9 with a 3.5" LCD 240x320, 128MB NAND FLASH, Ethernet, USB (could put a thumb drive on here for more space), serial, microphone, headphone out audio, $15 webcam (quantity 50+).
perfect storm of greed, arrogance and ineptitude, by all parties mind you, and that includes the Federal government
I think if everyone involved truly understood the downside risk of a major blowout, they would have cut less corners, but like the mortgage meltdown, it was a black swan event. A horrible costly outlier that is perfectly obvious...after it happens...but before it happens, even the smartest people in the room would not think it could happen.
Now there will probably never be as bad an event in deepwater drilling because everyone will be on the look out for it, and even if it does happen, they will be able to get in and fix it faster.
No one is ever going to rate mortgage-backed CDOs as "AAA" again either...
How about the FCC's action on Comcasts' interference with BitTorrent traffic?
How about it? It was a stupid move by the FCC. BitTorrent users should have felt the invisible hand and gone to DSL or another non-shared access medium (like buy their own DS3) rather than chewing up all the bandwidth on block's coax.
Never mind that it was Comcast that was caught deliberately interfering with BitTorrent traffic, and when this particular government agency told them to stop (an unequivocally pro-consumer move),
How is it pro-consumer if allowing unrestricted BitTorrent traffic drives up their networking costs, which of course get passed on to the consumer (including those who don't traffic in massive war3z)?
Net neutrality means this, and only this: all packets are created equal. Comcast has to treat packets originating from Google the same as those originating from Bing, and treat packets sent in response to http requests the same as packets sent in response to ftp requests. That's all it is. The whole thing, right there.
And has Comcast ever treated packets from Google differently than those for Bing? Or is this all just hypothetical BS?
Then there was the private sector. Compuserve, AOL, GEnie, Prodigy, TheSource, home-grown BBSes. People on Compuserve talked to people on Compuserve and accessed information Compuserve made available or partnered for. Ditto for AOL, GEnie, Prodigy, TheSource, etc. NONE OF THEM WERE ANYTHING LIKE THE INTERNET!! ALL OF THEM WERE VYING FOR THE WHOLE PIE!! Now I'll quit shouting. In the private sector, many of those home-grown BBSes networked with each other. Modems dialed modems late at night when rates were low, and moved information from island to island.
And they all went out of business. The same thing will happen to Comcast et al. if they actually try any of this "network non-neutrality" that impairs performance. Of course they HAVEN'T ACTUALLY DONE ANYTHING which makes the whole network neutrality argument ANGELS ON THE HEAD OF A PIN.
Note that the private sector companies that supported Internetworking (UUNet, DIGEX, PSI, etc.) all thrived. Of course they DID NOT hook into just anybody (i.e. not "neutral"), they determined which networks made sense to peer with in order to balance their real costs with the Inetworking benefits for their users. Some smaller ISPs had to buy connectivity from the larger ones, as they did not provide enough traffic to make it worth the cost of peering. But the network and the businesses survived because real costs were balanced with real benefits or real connectivity payments.
I was there at the birth of the commercial Internet. We were under constant threat of government regulation that would have screwed us up (such as the Communications Decency Act). It is best to avoid any regulation of the Internet unless there is a REAL and PRESENT danger that will not be fixed by market forces.
There is no reasonable expectation of privacy when you broadcast information from your home in an unsecured form.
It is a grey area, because the ECPA makes any "intercepts, endeavors to intercept, or procures any other person to intercept or endeavor to intercept, any wire, oral, or electronic communication" illegal, however a recent court case found:
In United States v. Ahrndt, No. 3:08-cr-00468-KI (D. Or. Jan. 28, 2010), Ahrndt argued that his neighbor violated the ECPA when she connected to his unsecured wireless network and accessed his iTunes library while a police officer observed. The court noted that under the ECPA, it is not unlawful for any person "to intercept or access an electronic communication made through an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public." Because Ahrndt's wireless network was broadcast in a 400 foot radius around his house, and because his iTunes program was configured to automatically share files with any computer that joined that network, the court held that the wireless network was "readily accessible to the general public," and rejected Ahrndt's ECPA claim. For similar reasons, the court also denied the defendant's Fourth Amendment claim, finding that he had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his wirelessly broadcast iTunes files.
I'd go crazy if I had to drive around LA without Tom Tom with traffic. The traffic out here changes very rapidly, and there are plenty of alternative side roads that can be used.
Slashdot Mirror
The rules are that you can't use a monopoly in one area to undercut your competition in another area. That's damaging simply on face.
How is it "damaging to the consumer" if it is lowering the cost to consumers (which is what "undercutting" is)? If so, hurt me more, please!
It may be damaging to other businesses, but that's competition.
TFA says "The third parties are not proactively going onto anyone's network."
So you don't mind if the Cops listen to your IP traffic then, and prosecute you for data they find in it?
By that logic, there's never been a damaging monopoly at all - after all, by definition, all the customers are comfortable paying the price charged or they wouldn't be customers, right?
Exactly, the concept of a "damaging monopoly" is BS, and the truth is that if you examine most successful anti-trust operations (Standard Oil, ALCOA, etc.) , they have been against companies that have dramatically reduced costs for consumers or provided them incredible value, but made their competition angry because they were beating them.
The "real damaging monopolies" have been folks like AT&T where governments empowered them to be monopolies.
The internet is apparently SO different that we have to replace 100 years of precedent
Yep. ISPsused dial-up and trunk telephony lines (highly regulated) to provide a completely unregulated service over them (Internetworking). The commercial Internet and later Web came from this world of highly unregulated internetworking. Individual companies made market business decisions about who was to exchange network traffic (and whether that would be for free or for pay) and everyone worked under completely voluntary Internet RFCs regarding protocols.
If Time Warner ensures that all news sites not owned by Time Warner download at 10 b/s, Time Warner is not in any way liable for restricting users' rights to look at different news sources.
Actually the local government agency that granted Time Warner the cable franchise can do pretty much whatever kind of regulation they want to do, as per the franchise agreement. (Here is an example agreement).
Interesting, though, that your theoretical has never actually happened, since if it did plenty of subscribers would get upset and go to DSL or FiOS or uVerse.
This is one of the reasons why I don't mind the Apple App Store process. I'm sure its not perfect, but at least I know Apple has taken a look at apps I run on my phone (although I think they should ask for the source code and have Apple compile it themselves if they want to be really sure).
Regarding App Store approval, I wrote an iPhone app and it took just 1 week for approval.
Why not let each HOA buy back the infrastructure for their communities and lease it to whomever wants to use it? Unlike the "local government" idea you proposed, we wouldn't have any rent seeking behavior
Actually HOAs are just another form of government (otherwise, you could just "leave them"). They will lock you into the providers THEY want, not who you want. For example, I was forced to accept a particular trash company when I wanted another one that was more expensive but who picked up more regularly. Also you often see apartment buildings locked into a single telecom provider who often sucks.
Local governments had to promise cablecos a monopoly in order to get them to invest in the infrastructure
I suggest we test your statement. Perhaps local governments do not have to promise cablecos a monopoly to get them to invest in the infrastructure.
So, I must have imagined all that stuff with Comcast screwing up BitTorrent?
Yes, Comcast was trying to keep the war3z leeches from clogging up everyone else's lines with patently illegal operations (go change copyright law, not telecom law, or get DSL so you aren't in bandwidth contention with your neighbors).
And my ISP certainly hasn't been playing around with my DNS either, right?
Of course they have not blocked external DNS servers...
we create the word "species" to mean a group of individuals with similar enough DNA that they can interbreed.
"Species" is actually a much more complicated concept, because there certainly do seem to be "species" of bacteria, yet they exchange DNA with other "species", while generally maintaining morphological similarity within their own "species" as the reproduce asexually. So species also directly appears to refer to morphologies required for evolutionary niches. Without evolutionary pressure into niches, bacteria would rapidly change morphology as they exchange DNA with other bacteria.
Most of the "species" on earth are bacteria...
Instead, the rating companies were completely irresponsibly rating 80% of the bonds at AAA or "investment grade".
The theory of tranches of asset-based securities is that you expect a portion of them will have more risk due to prepayment or default. You separate out the ones that are less risky (which get a higher rating) from those that are more risky (which get a lower rating).
This works pretty well when the probability of prepayment or default was well understood - it worked fine for about 20 years. During that time, AAA-rated mortgage backed securities did not default.
The problem was that the US moved from a predictable, random occurrence of mortgage default to an unpredictable, massive burst of defaults across the entire country. This was combined with a deflation of all housing prices and reduction of house sale liquidity, which make the valuation of the mortgages that did not default questionable (you only have a price if you have a market. If no one shows up to the market because they are scared and confused, there is no price).
lots of pensions and other stuff is required to invest in AAA bonds
Indeed, government regulations required many people, including banks, to hold AAA-rated asset backed securities as capital. These regulations actually encouraged the holding of mortgage backed securities over holding individual mortgages - the regulations encouraged them to sell off mortgages to Fannie/Freddie and private companies, and buy back mortgage backed securities.
The SEC "officially recognized" only a small number of ratings agencies for these ratings, including Moody's, Fitch, S&P.
So we had all kinds of regulation. The SEC regulated the ratings agencies. Banks were required under Basel rules to hold certain rated securities.
Everybody missed the risk of the real estate market bubble implosion - the private banks, the private insurance companies, the government-sponsored enterprises, the government regulators, Congress, and new homeowners.
I think it is silly to try to draw ideological results from this situation. There simply was no real understanding of the situation ahead of time. Regulations are very good at stopping known bad behavior, but regulators don't have magic crystal balls into the future.
The one thing we do know is that debt multiplies risk - we have learned this from history over and over. We might not know ahead of time what kind of new risk is being multiplied by the debt, but we know the debt does multiply the risk. Yet we have not gotten rid of the mortgage interest personal income tax deduction, or bond interest deductions for corporate income tax, two laws that encourage more debt than is required. Plus we seem to be willing to have plenty of sovereign debt.
The First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press"
It does not say "Congress shall make laws abridging the freedom of Internet service providers..."
Another way of looking at it: "5 megawatts with a field of 30,000 square meters of mirrors"
Typical nuclear power reactors generate 1 GW, = 200*5 MW, thus you'd need 6 million square meters of mirrors (a square of 2.5 km on a side) to match the nuclear reactor.
And, oh yeah, many nuclear power plants have 2 or more reactors next to each other....
Mini2440 is $100 in quantity 50+, comes with Linux / Qtopia, 405 MHz ARM9 with a 3.5" LCD 240x320, 128MB NAND FLASH, Ethernet, USB (could put a thumb drive on here for more space), serial, microphone, headphone out audio, $15 webcam (quantity 50+).
perfect storm of greed, arrogance and ineptitude, by all parties mind you, and that includes the Federal government
I think if everyone involved truly understood the downside risk of a major blowout, they would have cut less corners, but like the mortgage meltdown, it was a black swan event. A horrible costly outlier that is perfectly obvious...after it happens...but before it happens, even the smartest people in the room would not think it could happen.
Now there will probably never be as bad an event in deepwater drilling because everyone will be on the look out for it, and even if it does happen, they will be able to get in and fix it faster.
No one is ever going to rate mortgage-backed CDOs as "AAA" again either...
I don't see how "Go" is simpler than Java or C++.
How about Python? Now there is a language that doesn't need a "package main" statement at top.
Hello world in Python?
print "hello world"
No "package main" or "class helloWorld implements my.butt.squeegee"
The Java Class library is huge, overly complicated, and incredibly difficult to learn how to use.
It could use a goodly amount of flattening.
How about the FCC's action on Comcasts' interference with BitTorrent traffic?
How about it? It was a stupid move by the FCC. BitTorrent users should have felt the invisible hand and gone to DSL or another non-shared access medium (like buy their own DS3) rather than chewing up all the bandwidth on block's coax.
Never mind that it was Comcast that was caught deliberately interfering with BitTorrent traffic, and when this particular government agency told them to stop (an unequivocally pro-consumer move),
How is it pro-consumer if allowing unrestricted BitTorrent traffic drives up their networking costs, which of course get passed on to the consumer (including those who don't traffic in massive war3z)?
Net neutrality means this, and only this: all packets are created equal. Comcast has to treat packets originating from Google the same as those originating from Bing, and treat packets sent in response to http requests the same as packets sent in response to ftp requests. That's all it is. The whole thing, right there.
And has Comcast ever treated packets from Google differently than those for Bing? Or is this all just hypothetical BS?
The FCC has been doing a good job so far to protect consumers.
You mean in their support for local government grants of cable monopolies?
Then there was the private sector. Compuserve, AOL, GEnie, Prodigy, TheSource, home-grown BBSes. People on Compuserve talked to people on Compuserve and accessed information Compuserve made available or partnered for. Ditto for AOL, GEnie, Prodigy, TheSource, etc. NONE OF THEM WERE ANYTHING LIKE THE INTERNET!! ALL OF THEM WERE VYING FOR THE WHOLE PIE!! Now I'll quit shouting. In the private sector, many of those home-grown BBSes networked with each other. Modems dialed modems late at night when rates were low, and moved information from island to island.
And they all went out of business. The same thing will happen to Comcast et al. if they actually try any of this "network non-neutrality" that impairs performance. Of course they HAVEN'T ACTUALLY DONE ANYTHING which makes the whole network neutrality argument ANGELS ON THE HEAD OF A PIN.
Note that the private sector companies that supported Internetworking (UUNet, DIGEX, PSI, etc.) all thrived. Of course they DID NOT hook into just anybody (i.e. not "neutral"), they determined which networks made sense to peer with in order to balance their real costs with the Inetworking benefits for their users. Some smaller ISPs had to buy connectivity from the larger ones, as they did not provide enough traffic to make it worth the cost of peering. But the network and the businesses survived because real costs were balanced with real benefits or real connectivity payments.
I was there at the birth of the commercial Internet. We were under constant threat of government regulation that would have screwed us up (such as the Communications Decency Act). It is best to avoid any regulation of the Internet unless there is a REAL and PRESENT danger that will not be fixed by market forces.
I found tesseract to work very well to do OCR tasks. Doesn't generate PDF though.
There is no reasonable expectation of privacy when you broadcast information from your home in an unsecured form.
It is a grey area, because the ECPA makes any "intercepts, endeavors to intercept, or procures any other person to intercept or endeavor to intercept, any wire, oral, or electronic communication" illegal, however a recent court case found:
In United States v. Ahrndt, No. 3:08-cr-00468-KI (D. Or. Jan. 28, 2010), Ahrndt argued that his neighbor violated the ECPA when she connected to his unsecured wireless network and accessed his iTunes library while a police officer observed. The court noted that under the ECPA, it is not unlawful for any person "to intercept or access an electronic communication made through an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public." Because Ahrndt's wireless network was broadcast in a 400 foot radius around his house, and because his iTunes program was configured to automatically share files with any computer that joined that network, the court held that the wireless network was "readily accessible to the general public," and rejected Ahrndt's ECPA claim. For similar reasons, the court also denied the defendant's Fourth Amendment claim, finding that he had no reasonable expectation of privacy in his wirelessly broadcast iTunes files.
I'd go crazy if I had to drive around LA without Tom Tom with traffic. The traffic out here changes very rapidly, and there are plenty of alternative side roads that can be used.