No, none of that. He tweeted. That's it, just a tweet.
So you don't believe that threats made using Twitter should be investigated or dealt with in any way? Are there any social media systems where threats should be taken seriously?
If the feds ACTUALLY believed he was hacking the plane, why did they wait until it landed to do anything? Shouldn't they have ordered the plane to make an immediate emergency landing before something happened?
They didn't need to know he was actively hacking the systems to know they needed to take the threat seriously. It was still a credible threat. They waited because, you know, dropping the o2 masks doesn't really mean the airplane is going to crash, and the pilots can actually still fly the plane and everything.
Had they ordered the plane down immediately while nothing was happening, you'd be complaining how they lept to conclusions and inconvenienced all the passengers and maybe the FBI was the cause of the scare and not the guy who was talking about hacking into the onboard systems.
When you make jokes about hacking into mission critical systems that could endanger a couple hundred people, you're a fool and need to have a reality check. That's what he's getting.
He knew he was going to get it, too. According to TFA, they didn't even have to tell him they were on board to visit him. It says the feds walked past his seat and turned around, and he asked "should I get my bags?" In other words, he was getting the response he knew he would get, and that means the response he wanted. An innocent person wouldn't know the feds were there for him. An immediate assumption like he made shows a guilty mind.
I hereby claim that I have hands, therefore I am able to stab someone. Should I be detained and my property seized because I am ABLE to commit a crime?
If you threaten to stab someone, that's called "assault" and it is, indeed, a crime for which you can be detained and a large knife in your possession at the time will be confiscated.
It has no scientific answer, but in red states a definition of when cells become a person is going to be shoved down our throats.
A government-based decision either way is shoving some answer down someone's throat. The best course of action is to get government out of the answer altogether and let people decide. That means, however, getting government all the way out of the answer, including not forcing people who make one decision pay for the actions of people who decide the other way.
Flight plans have to be public, because they're offering travel to the public. If you don't know when the plane lands, you can't schedule a ride from family.
While the two kinds of data are similar, they are not identical.
The flight schedule has to be online for the reasons you gave. But the flight schedule is not the flight plan, and the times can differ by a significant amount. Every time you've arrived or left early or late, you're comparing your watch to the scheduled time. The flight plan will be much more accurate and be based on existing conditions.
For example, the "book" time for a United flight from PDX (Portland OR) to ORD (Orchard, I mean O'Hare Chicago) is 3 hours 55 minutes. Depending on the position of the jetstream and other winds aloft, the flight can take as little as 3 hours 20 minutes. The flight plan will take into account the jetstream; the schedule does not.
Yes, for that camera, an area of approximately five square inches. Subtract one for the side that is mounted to something, so four left over.
The lens occupies most of one face.
Yes, the lens covers one face of the cube. That remove 1 square inch from the surface area of the camera.
Now, class, what percentage of the camera's surface area is occupied by the lens?
Uhhh, 1/6. So? The statement was that the surface area of the camera will be larger than that of the lens. The lens is not just one face, it is a cylinder of some length and diameter. The ends of the cylinder will be used as entrance and exit for the lens so cannot be covered by pv cells. The surface of the cylindrical part, however, is available.
I have a 9mm lens on my desk which has a diameter of about 1.75" and a length of 2". The area of the cylinder is therefore 1.75*3.14*2, or 11 square inches. I think 11 square inches is greater than 4 square inches. Isn't it?
Also, it is entirely possible, (if unlikely) that you can shuffle a randomized deck of cards into sequential order.
Random does not mean completely out of order, it means unpredictable. I can roll five dice and come up with a large straight (12345). The random comes from not being able to predict from the previous state (22222 Yahtzee!) what the next state (12356 chance) will be.
A perfect riffle shuffle is not a random process since you can observe the initial state (123456 e.g) and predict the result (142536). That's true for whatever the starting state is.
Why would they do that? They aren't a retailer for AMD products. They don't care what graphics chip you have, they just want to sell games. If the game doesn't support the graphics you have, that's just too damn bad. You've opened the product and you can't get your money back, and Steam won't let you transfer the registration so you can't resell the game to someone else to get your money back.
Been there, done that. Duke Nuke'm Forever looked like it would run on my system but did not. The dealer would exchange the physical medium (DVD) but not give me an unused registration code, and Steam said it was my problem, not theirs. No skin off their noses, the chance of me buying another Steam-based game were zero before they screwed me, so they've lost nothing by not helping.
3. I assert that any camera will have a housing with more surface area than its lens.
This and several other models. The lenses used for these usually have much more surface area than the camera itself, and weigh significantly more to boot.
It can be proved empirically that this is a correct theory - the longer you shuffle cards, the more random sequence you have.
Not for a riffle-shuffle, which is what most people do. For a riffle, the more you do IMPERFECT shuffles, the more random, but for every perfect riffle shuffle the output will be completely predictable.
A wash is a much more random shuffle, which is why casinos that don't have machines to shuffle and use a single deck will do a wash.
I have no idea how the shuffle machines operate, they're literally a black box.
Exactly. That's long been my view. You can either get your tax exemption, or you can run a publishing company, but you can't do both.
I'm sorry, but the price of free speech is being subject to taxation, even for non-profit organizations?
Do you also have issues with the Seventh Day Adventists who run their own publishing companies to produce their printed material? I'd say as a religion they are about as non-rabble rousing and least-troublesome as they come. Yet you'd happily strip their tax exemption from them because they use the right to free speech to publish their documents.
Don't rely on a firewall - I really can't believe that an airgapped network is not standard practice.
Where have you seen anything that says it isn't? The GAO is warning about something that might happen if... The "demonstrated hack" of the 'satellite communications' wasn't the avionics, it was the satellite system used for WiFi and inflight video.
It's not like Die Hard and Scorpion show you. Really.
You'd lose, but you're doing very well at trying to marginalize opinions you don't agree with. Kind of like the algorithm that would allegedly identify trolls based on an unfriendly reception in social media. The FCC ruling being a bad idea is an unpopular opinion here, so of course anyone who expresses that opinion must be a troll or a shill.
As if you don't know who Comcast is charging here.
I know exactly who Comcast is charging here, and it isn't their customers. They aren't double-charging anyone.
You also know perfectly well that Netflix has offered to place storage services within ISP networks.
So you think that Netflix can demand that ISPs host their servers instead of paying for the upgrades so Netflix can run their own servers and let the ISPs run their own business? Why does Netflix get to dictate terms like that?
But even if they weren't, it's none of Comcast's concern as Netflix is already paying for their access and Comcast's customer's are paying for theirs.
It is patently unfair to expect all of Comcast's customers to pay for upgrades so that Netflix can make a better profit from their high-bandwidth services. Either charge the Netflix customers more for their expanded bandwidth requirements, or get Netflix to pay and then Netflix can pass the costs along.
Uh, no. Netflix, in case you didn't know, is a company,
Yes, I think we know that.
Peering arrangements are not between companies like Netflix and Comcast. Peering arrangements are between ISPs. That's the first point.
Yes, we know that. What's the point you are trying to make? That Comcast as an ISP cannot ask a heavy outside user of their backbone to help pay for upgrades? Of course they can.
The second point is that Comcast is not a transit provider. It is a last-mile provider.
Comcast has its own backbone in addition to the last mile plant. It's two things in one. It has peering agreements with another backbone where Netflix the company gets its internet access. That border is congested because Netflix is sending data through it in large volumes. Netflix is profiting from this traffic, and is paying their ISP -- but not Comcast, who is now expected to upgrade their border connections to make Netflix happy and more profitable. Who pays for that?
In a traditional peering arrangement the traffic is bidirectional and costs would balance out. With Netflix traffic, that's no longer true. It's not one Comcast customer, and it isn't fair to all the Comcast customers to ask them to pay for someone else's huge use of bandwidth, so they're asking the source of the data. Comcast has a death by a thousand cuts. They can either go after the individual cuts, or find the guy wielding the knife.
This is not about peering arrangements.
Yes, when you talk about Netflix and Comcast in the same sentence, it most certainly is about peering. That's where the problem is.
This is about cable companies.
Uhh, no. Neither "net neutrality" as a concept nor "net neutrality" as enacted by the FCC ruling is about cable companies. Both are about ISPs. Cable television is a different service. ONE method of internet delivery uses the cable television backbone. There are two other pre-existing wires that go to almost every home: power and telephone. Both are methods of internet delivery, too. And the FCC ruling applies to ISPs no matter what means of delivery is used. If your ISP uses carrier pidgeons, it is covered by the FCC ruling.
It wasn't going to take long for all of the last-mile networks to try to turn themselves into cable companies.
What an interesting statement.
But Suddenlink the ISP knows that its customers can stream Comedy Central from the web, so it is intentionally blocking access to streaming from www.cc.com.
So go to a different ISP. No, Suddenlink is wrong for doing that, but it has nothing to do with, and is in no way similar to, the Comcast/Netflix issue. Comcast isn't blocking anything.
Net neutrality may not be perfect in every way.
Net neutrality as a concept is fine. When you refer to the FCC ruling as "net neutrality" that's where there's a problem. One can be a staunch advocate for net neutrality but still be opposed to the federal regulations now imposed on all ISPs in an attempt to solve the problems of a few.
But to say that there are no problems out there that need to be addressed
And I said that when? Never. Maybe smaller words would help.
1) Comcast the cable company has not been granted a monopoly. It is a defacto monopoly through economic causes. 2) Comcast the ISP is not a monopoly of any kind. 3) The FCC ruling will not solve the issues created by large data sources clogging gateway routers. 4) The FCC ruling does allow ISPs to censor content. 5) The FCC ruling does nothing to break up or fix monopoly status for any defacto (or dejure) monopoly currently in existence.
It doesn't stop local bureaucrats, politicians, and the companies themselves from stop or delaying and new franchises to the point where it's not cost effective though.
The part that makes it not cost effective is not the incumbent or the politicians, it is the market itself.
Comcast has a city wired according to the franchise requirements. Charter decides they want to compete in that market. First, they have to wire it to the same franchise requirements. Then they have to find subscribers. Now, they COULD offer services much better than Comcast and hope they get a sufficient number of subs to cover the fixed costs. Maybe. Or they don't get enough subs and lose money until they shut down. The latter is much more likely when you're splitting a fixed market with another company.
The FACT remains that cable companies are not granted monopolies, and NO ISP has been granted one. Not a single one.
I have never seen a "Netflix charge" on my Comcast bill. They have not been charging their users extra for Netflix.
They HAVE asked Netflix to pay for the capacity upgrade at the border gateways -- capacity that is being used in large part by Netflix and is making Netflix money. Netflix is profiting from a peering agreement that Comcast has to pay for. Seems fair to me that Netflix pays part of the costs of upgrade.
In fact, I'd say that if Comcast has to increase everyone's bill to pay for capacity upgrades required to handle Netflix traffic, THAT would be charging their customers for Netflix traffic -- even if the customers aren't Netflix customers.
In any case, Netflix is not being throttled. All traffic through that gateway is seeing congestion, not just them.
You really don't know much about how cable companies are granted monopoly control over individual markets, do you?
I understand very well how cable companies are granted franchises to operate in different municpalities, yes. I have yet to find one that has been granted a monopoly.
Cable companies can't just show up in town and lay down a network whenever they feel like it. Most markets have very strict rules about who is allowed to put their cables up in utility easements.
Yes, they have rules, and must get a franchise. But having a franchise is not the same as being granted a monopoly. In fact, all of the cable franchising ordinances I've seen hve mandated that the franchise be non-exclusive (i.e., not a monopoly) and are specific in saying that there can be other franchisees.
You probably think that a liquor store that gets a business license to operate in a certain city has been granted a monopoly, too. No, sorry, having to follow a law to be able to operate (a law that is specific in saying that any franchise cannot be a monopoly) is not creating a monopoly.
And don't even bother with the "illegal" content nonsense. The FCC does not decide what is legal and illegal.
The comment I replied to spoke about ISPs not being able to censor content "at all". That's patent nonsense. The FCC ruling is specific in using the term "legal" when referring to what content may not be controlled. For a reason. No, the FCC doesn't determine what is legal, but the congress does. That's still censorship if they decide that the content you want to view is illegal, and the ISPs can cut you off with the full approval of the FCC and despite any yammering about "net neutrality" and "no censorship".
It prevents Comcast, who effectively has monopoly power in most of the markets it serves,
Except for all those other ISPs, that is. If this problem is of so much concern to the customers, why has no other company stepped in to provide better service? Defacto monopolies cannot survive when competition is justified to solve service issues.
from charging Netflix extra simply to route packets from their servers to their subscribers.
So you're buying Netflix' spin on the issue? Your link is to a Netflix statement. It isn't about routing, it's about solving border congestion. The route is the same.
In fact, the ruling states quite clearly that ISPs are to act as common carriers and no censorship of content is to take place at all.
Applying only to all "legal" content. Illegal content, such as gambling sites or whatever else the government decides is illegal, can be censored at will. By the way, distribution of classified material is illegal, so goodbye Wikileaks.
Further, the ruling does nothing to solve the congestion issues.
You would know this if you actually read the ruling...
No, like "writing compilers for programmers". System administration is a different job than network administration, even though the person doing the jobs may be the same and the responsibilities overlap.
If there really is a "network problem" then it won't be just your machine that cannot connect to some other machine.
It certainly can be. There's a lot of "if you can trip over it" stuff between some of the systems I administer and the network they connect to.
I've had a wonderful fiber to cat5 converter that decided it would not pass any packets larger than about 128 bytes. Ping worked great. You could initiate all kinds of TCP connections, like the initial SSH handshaking. It was fascinating to see how the network reacted to different ping packet sizes while tracking this down. Make them small enough, the destination was alive. Make them one byte too large, the destination was offline.
That was a network problem. It was isolated by pinging various controlled devices on that network and seeing what things stopped answering when the packet got too big.
have fun with your difficulties accepting aspects of reality you have no control over
Thanks for telling me that I don't control the language. Your response fits the new definition of "troll" perfectly.
You either didn't read or didn't parse what I said. I have no difficulty accepting the new definitions. I'm quite happy with meaningless terms being bandied about as if they contained universal truths. Show me what I said that confused you about that. I just pointed out that they were meaningless, which I think is what you were saying, too. The "rail" wasn't.
yes, and now we get into the same sort of pointless useless territory as arguing about what "hacking" means
Because both "troll" and "hacking" have been made into pointless useless words through the magic of "common use" by common people who have no clue what they were supposed to mean.
"An algorithm that can detect trolls" is a meaningless statement. If it is an algorithm, it needs a definition to work from. That definition is not going to be based on historical or accurate usage of the term. In fact, the summary gives you a good idea what it will be based on:
It also observes that higher rates of community intolerance are likely to foster the anti-social behavior and speed the ban.
So, the "definition" of "troll" is going to be "people who display unpopular or angry behavior when confronted by an intolerant social media environment." Gee, anyone slashdotted recently? "Community intolerance" is not the problem, I guess, it's the reaction of people in a supposedly open forum to that intolerance.
There will be no direct definition as such. It will be an empirical model based on correlation between use of angry or unpopular
phrases and the subsequent ban of the poster. That's the new "troll". Say enough stuff that people don't like, you're a troll.
Behold the contrarian school of science, where assertions require no studies, and are just known to be correct because they have a pleasant ring to the political faithful.
You mean like this, from the first sentence of the actual study abstract, written by the scientists doing the study:
Ocean acidification triggered by Siberian Trap volcanism was a possible kill mechanism for the Permo-Triassic Boundary mass extinction, but direct evidence for an acidification event is lacking.
Emphasis mine. Evidence is lacking. The only "evidence" they have is a computer model. Sadly, outside the modelling community, and sometimes within, models are taken as physical reality instead of a mathematical construct that is supposed to represent reality but can differ from reality significantly. Empirical models have no basis in physics, they simply extend correlation to causality. Physical models always make simplifying assumptions because the systems are too complicated to have an analytical (exact) solution, or can't be calculated fast enough to be useful.
This study was converted from "possible" but "evidence lacking" result into "was caused by" by a journalist with a political agenda, because that has a more "pleasant ring" to the political faithful that are his audience.
Slashdot Mirror
No, none of that. He tweeted. That's it, just a tweet.
So you don't believe that threats made using Twitter should be investigated or dealt with in any way? Are there any social media systems where threats should be taken seriously?
If the feds ACTUALLY believed he was hacking the plane, why did they wait until it landed to do anything? Shouldn't they have ordered the plane to make an immediate emergency landing before something happened?
They didn't need to know he was actively hacking the systems to know they needed to take the threat seriously. It was still a credible threat. They waited because, you know, dropping the o2 masks doesn't really mean the airplane is going to crash, and the pilots can actually still fly the plane and everything.
Had they ordered the plane down immediately while nothing was happening, you'd be complaining how they lept to conclusions and inconvenienced all the passengers and maybe the FBI was the cause of the scare and not the guy who was talking about hacking into the onboard systems.
When you make jokes about hacking into mission critical systems that could endanger a couple hundred people, you're a fool and need to have a reality check. That's what he's getting.
He knew he was going to get it, too. According to TFA, they didn't even have to tell him they were on board to visit him. It says the feds walked past his seat and turned around, and he asked "should I get my bags?" In other words, he was getting the response he knew he would get, and that means the response he wanted. An innocent person wouldn't know the feds were there for him. An immediate assumption like he made shows a guilty mind.
I hereby claim that I have hands, therefore I am able to stab someone. Should I be detained and my property seized because I am ABLE to commit a crime?
If you threaten to stab someone, that's called "assault" and it is, indeed, a crime for which you can be detained and a large knife in your possession at the time will be confiscated.
It has no scientific answer, but in red states a definition of when cells become a person is going to be shoved down our throats.
A government-based decision either way is shoving some answer down someone's throat. The best course of action is to get government out of the answer altogether and let people decide. That means, however, getting government all the way out of the answer, including not forcing people who make one decision pay for the actions of people who decide the other way.
Oh for fuck's sake.. it's very simple: Avionics need to be on a physically separate network from everything else, preferably encrypted.
Why should a private network waste time encrypting and decrypting stuff?
If you've got a hacker accessing your avionics network, you have more serious issues than just whether the data is encrypted or not.
Flight plans have to be public, because they're offering travel to the public. If you don't know when the plane lands, you can't schedule a ride from family.
While the two kinds of data are similar, they are not identical.
The flight schedule has to be online for the reasons you gave. But the flight schedule is not the flight plan, and the times can differ by a significant amount. Every time you've arrived or left early or late, you're comparing your watch to the scheduled time. The flight plan will be much more accurate and be based on existing conditions.
For example, the "book" time for a United flight from PDX (Portland OR) to ORD (Orchard, I mean O'Hare Chicago) is 3 hours 55 minutes. Depending on the position of the jetstream and other winds aloft, the flight can take as little as 3 hours 20 minutes. The flight plan will take into account the jetstream; the schedule does not.
That camera's body is approximately a cube.
Yes, for that camera, an area of approximately five square inches. Subtract one for the side that is mounted to something, so four left over.
The lens occupies most of one face.
Yes, the lens covers one face of the cube. That remove 1 square inch from the surface area of the camera.
Now, class, what percentage of the camera's surface area is occupied by the lens?
Uhhh, 1/6. So? The statement was that the surface area of the camera will be larger than that of the lens. The lens is not just one face, it is a cylinder of some length and diameter. The ends of the cylinder will be used as entrance and exit for the lens so cannot be covered by pv cells. The surface of the cylindrical part, however, is available.
I have a 9mm lens on my desk which has a diameter of about 1.75" and a length of 2". The area of the cylinder is therefore 1.75*3.14*2, or 11 square inches. I think 11 square inches is greater than 4 square inches. Isn't it?
Also, it is entirely possible, (if unlikely) that you can shuffle a randomized deck of cards into sequential order.
Random does not mean completely out of order, it means unpredictable. I can roll five dice and come up with a large straight (12345). The random comes from not being able to predict from the previous state (22222 Yahtzee!) what the next state (12356 chance) will be.
A perfect riffle shuffle is not a random process since you can observe the initial state (123456 e.g) and predict the result (142536). That's true for whatever the starting state is.
Steam starts running ads promoting AMD.
Why would they do that? They aren't a retailer for AMD products. They don't care what graphics chip you have, they just want to sell games. If the game doesn't support the graphics you have, that's just too damn bad. You've opened the product and you can't get your money back, and Steam won't let you transfer the registration so you can't resell the game to someone else to get your money back.
Been there, done that. Duke Nuke'm Forever looked like it would run on my system but did not. The dealer would exchange the physical medium (DVD) but not give me an unused registration code, and Steam said it was my problem, not theirs. No skin off their noses, the chance of me buying another Steam-based game were zero before they screwed me, so they've lost nothing by not helping.
3. I assert that any camera will have a housing with more surface area than its lens.
This and several other models. The lenses used for these usually have much more surface area than the camera itself, and weigh significantly more to boot.
All of man's greatest accomplishments were derived from man's biological need for ever easier access to porn & sex.
Al Gore's claims to the contrary, it was porn that drove the innovation of the internet.
It can be proved empirically that this is a correct theory - the longer you shuffle cards, the more random sequence you have.
Not for a riffle-shuffle, which is what most people do. For a riffle, the more you do IMPERFECT shuffles, the more random, but for every perfect riffle shuffle the output will be completely predictable.
A wash is a much more random shuffle, which is why casinos that don't have machines to shuffle and use a single deck will do a wash. I have no idea how the shuffle machines operate, they're literally a black box.
Exactly. That's long been my view. You can either get your tax exemption, or you can run a publishing company, but you can't do both.
I'm sorry, but the price of free speech is being subject to taxation, even for non-profit organizations?
Do you also have issues with the Seventh Day Adventists who run their own publishing companies to produce their printed material? I'd say as a religion they are about as non-rabble rousing and least-troublesome as they come. Yet you'd happily strip their tax exemption from them because they use the right to free speech to publish their documents.
Don't rely on a firewall - I really can't believe that an airgapped network is not standard practice.
Where have you seen anything that says it isn't? The GAO is warning about something that might happen if ... The "demonstrated hack" of the 'satellite communications' wasn't the avionics, it was the satellite system used for WiFi and inflight video.
It's not like Die Hard and Scorpion show you. Really.
Where is net neutrality when you need it?
As if you don't know who Comcast is charging here.
I know exactly who Comcast is charging here, and it isn't their customers. They aren't double-charging anyone.
You also know perfectly well that Netflix has offered to place storage services within ISP networks.
So you think that Netflix can demand that ISPs host their servers instead of paying for the upgrades so Netflix can run their own servers and let the ISPs run their own business? Why does Netflix get to dictate terms like that?
But even if they weren't, it's none of Comcast's concern as Netflix is already paying for their access and Comcast's customer's are paying for theirs.
It is patently unfair to expect all of Comcast's customers to pay for upgrades so that Netflix can make a better profit from their high-bandwidth services. Either charge the Netflix customers more for their expanded bandwidth requirements, or get Netflix to pay and then Netflix can pass the costs along.
Uh, no. Netflix, in case you didn't know, is a company,
Yes, I think we know that.
Peering arrangements are not between companies like Netflix and Comcast. Peering arrangements are between ISPs. That's the first point.
Yes, we know that. What's the point you are trying to make? That Comcast as an ISP cannot ask a heavy outside user of their backbone to help pay for upgrades? Of course they can.
The second point is that Comcast is not a transit provider. It is a last-mile provider.
Comcast has its own backbone in addition to the last mile plant. It's two things in one. It has peering agreements with another backbone where Netflix the company gets its internet access. That border is congested because Netflix is sending data through it in large volumes. Netflix is profiting from this traffic, and is paying their ISP -- but not Comcast, who is now expected to upgrade their border connections to make Netflix happy and more profitable. Who pays for that?
In a traditional peering arrangement the traffic is bidirectional and costs would balance out. With Netflix traffic, that's no longer true. It's not one Comcast customer, and it isn't fair to all the Comcast customers to ask them to pay for someone else's huge use of bandwidth, so they're asking the source of the data. Comcast has a death by a thousand cuts. They can either go after the individual cuts, or find the guy wielding the knife.
This is not about peering arrangements.
Yes, when you talk about Netflix and Comcast in the same sentence, it most certainly is about peering. That's where the problem is.
This is about cable companies.
Uhh, no. Neither "net neutrality" as a concept nor "net neutrality" as enacted by the FCC ruling is about cable companies. Both are about ISPs. Cable television is a different service. ONE method of internet delivery uses the cable television backbone. There are two other pre-existing wires that go to almost every home: power and telephone. Both are methods of internet delivery, too. And the FCC ruling applies to ISPs no matter what means of delivery is used. If your ISP uses carrier pidgeons, it is covered by the FCC ruling.
It wasn't going to take long for all of the last-mile networks to try to turn themselves into cable companies.
What an interesting statement.
But Suddenlink the ISP knows that its customers can stream Comedy Central from the web, so it is intentionally blocking access to streaming from www.cc.com.
So go to a different ISP. No, Suddenlink is wrong for doing that, but it has nothing to do with, and is in no way similar to, the Comcast/Netflix issue. Comcast isn't blocking anything.
Net neutrality may not be perfect in every way.
Net neutrality as a concept is fine. When you refer to the FCC ruling as "net neutrality" that's where there's a problem. One can be a staunch advocate for net neutrality but still be opposed to the federal regulations now imposed on all ISPs in an attempt to solve the problems of a few.
But to say that there are no problems out there that need to be addressed
And I said that when? Never. Maybe smaller words would help. 1) Comcast the cable company has not been granted a monopoly. It is a defacto monopoly through economic causes. 2) Comcast the ISP is not a monopoly of any kind. 3) The FCC ruling will not solve the issues created by large data sources clogging gateway routers. 4) The FCC ruling does allow ISPs to censor content. 5) The FCC ruling does nothing to break up or fix monopoly status for any defacto (or dejure) monopoly currently in existence.
It doesn't stop local bureaucrats, politicians, and the companies themselves from stop or delaying and new franchises to the point where it's not cost effective though.
The part that makes it not cost effective is not the incumbent or the politicians, it is the market itself.
Comcast has a city wired according to the franchise requirements. Charter decides they want to compete in that market. First, they have to wire it to the same franchise requirements. Then they have to find subscribers. Now, they COULD offer services much better than Comcast and hope they get a sufficient number of subs to cover the fixed costs. Maybe. Or they don't get enough subs and lose money until they shut down. The latter is much more likely when you're splitting a fixed market with another company.
The FACT remains that cable companies are not granted monopolies, and NO ISP has been granted one. Not a single one.
Netflix. Comcast. Double-charging. That happened.
I have never seen a "Netflix charge" on my Comcast bill. They have not been charging their users extra for Netflix.
They HAVE asked Netflix to pay for the capacity upgrade at the border gateways -- capacity that is being used in large part by Netflix and is making Netflix money. Netflix is profiting from a peering agreement that Comcast has to pay for. Seems fair to me that Netflix pays part of the costs of upgrade.
In fact, I'd say that if Comcast has to increase everyone's bill to pay for capacity upgrades required to handle Netflix traffic, THAT would be charging their customers for Netflix traffic -- even if the customers aren't Netflix customers.
In any case, Netflix is not being throttled. All traffic through that gateway is seeing congestion, not just them.
You really don't know much about how cable companies are granted monopoly control over individual markets, do you?
I understand very well how cable companies are granted franchises to operate in different municpalities, yes. I have yet to find one that has been granted a monopoly.
Cable companies can't just show up in town and lay down a network whenever they feel like it. Most markets have very strict rules about who is allowed to put their cables up in utility easements.
Yes, they have rules, and must get a franchise. But having a franchise is not the same as being granted a monopoly. In fact, all of the cable franchising ordinances I've seen hve mandated that the franchise be non-exclusive (i.e., not a monopoly) and are specific in saying that there can be other franchisees.
You probably think that a liquor store that gets a business license to operate in a certain city has been granted a monopoly, too. No, sorry, having to follow a law to be able to operate (a law that is specific in saying that any franchise cannot be a monopoly) is not creating a monopoly.
And don't even bother with the "illegal" content nonsense. The FCC does not decide what is legal and illegal.
The comment I replied to spoke about ISPs not being able to censor content "at all". That's patent nonsense. The FCC ruling is specific in using the term "legal" when referring to what content may not be controlled. For a reason. No, the FCC doesn't determine what is legal, but the congress does. That's still censorship if they decide that the content you want to view is illegal, and the ISPs can cut you off with the full approval of the FCC and despite any yammering about "net neutrality" and "no censorship".
It prevents Comcast, who effectively has monopoly power in most of the markets it serves,
Except for all those other ISPs, that is. If this problem is of so much concern to the customers, why has no other company stepped in to provide better service? Defacto monopolies cannot survive when competition is justified to solve service issues.
from charging Netflix extra simply to route packets from their servers to their subscribers.
So you're buying Netflix' spin on the issue? Your link is to a Netflix statement. It isn't about routing, it's about solving border congestion. The route is the same.
In fact, the ruling states quite clearly that ISPs are to act as common carriers and no censorship of content is to take place at all.
Applying only to all "legal" content. Illegal content, such as gambling sites or whatever else the government decides is illegal, can be censored at will. By the way, distribution of classified material is illegal, so goodbye Wikileaks.
Further, the ruling does nothing to solve the congestion issues.
You would know this if you actually read the ruling...
No, like "writing compilers for programmers". System administration is a different job than network administration, even though the person doing the jobs may be the same and the responsibilities overlap.
If there really is a "network problem" then it won't be just your machine that cannot connect to some other machine.
It certainly can be. There's a lot of "if you can trip over it" stuff between some of the systems I administer and the network they connect to.
I've had a wonderful fiber to cat5 converter that decided it would not pass any packets larger than about 128 bytes. Ping worked great. You could initiate all kinds of TCP connections, like the initial SSH handshaking. It was fascinating to see how the network reacted to different ping packet sizes while tracking this down. Make them small enough, the destination was alive. Make them one byte too large, the destination was offline.
That was a network problem. It was isolated by pinging various controlled devices on that network and seeing what things stopped answering when the packet got too big.
have fun with your difficulties accepting aspects of reality you have no control over
Thanks for telling me that I don't control the language. Your response fits the new definition of "troll" perfectly.
You either didn't read or didn't parse what I said. I have no difficulty accepting the new definitions. I'm quite happy with meaningless terms being bandied about as if they contained universal truths. Show me what I said that confused you about that. I just pointed out that they were meaningless, which I think is what you were saying, too. The "rail" wasn't.
yes, and now we get into the same sort of pointless useless territory as arguing about what "hacking" means
Because both "troll" and "hacking" have been made into pointless useless words through the magic of "common use" by common people who have no clue what they were supposed to mean.
"An algorithm that can detect trolls" is a meaningless statement. If it is an algorithm, it needs a definition to work from. That definition is not going to be based on historical or accurate usage of the term. In fact, the summary gives you a good idea what it will be based on:
So, the "definition" of "troll" is going to be "people who display unpopular or angry behavior when confronted by an intolerant social media environment." Gee, anyone slashdotted recently? "Community intolerance" is not the problem, I guess, it's the reaction of people in a supposedly open forum to that intolerance.
There will be no direct definition as such. It will be an empirical model based on correlation between use of angry or unpopular phrases and the subsequent ban of the poster. That's the new "troll". Say enough stuff that people don't like, you're a troll.
Behold the contrarian school of science, where assertions require no studies, and are just known to be correct because they have a pleasant ring to the political faithful.
You mean like this, from the first sentence of the actual study abstract, written by the scientists doing the study:
Emphasis mine. Evidence is lacking. The only "evidence" they have is a computer model. Sadly, outside the modelling community, and sometimes within, models are taken as physical reality instead of a mathematical construct that is supposed to represent reality but can differ from reality significantly. Empirical models have no basis in physics, they simply extend correlation to causality. Physical models always make simplifying assumptions because the systems are too complicated to have an analytical (exact) solution, or can't be calculated fast enough to be useful.
This study was converted from "possible" but "evidence lacking" result into "was caused by" by a journalist with a political agenda, because that has a more "pleasant ring" to the political faithful that are his audience.