The defense will probably (assuming it goes to trial) rest on the point that not only were the passwords public knowledge but were being used with the teacher's knowledge in other instances.
Where did you get this from? The student said that other students used the teachers' accounts, but nobody said they were doing it with the knowledge of the teachers or with their permission. Even with their permission may be unauthorized access, since I'm going to guess that the AUP for the systems involved prohibit account sharing. If they don't, they should.
Here's what the fine article says about the intent of the student who was arrested:
That's when he tried the other computer, which he realized was used by a teacher he didn't like, and realized that he could use his wide-reaching access to wreak some havoc.
To expand the analogy, it would be like keeping your key under a rock so any number of people can come in to feed your cat, but then one of those people scrawls something on the wall.
No, the analogy would be that you leave a key under a rock and then someone you haven't given permission to use the key or enter your house uses that key to enter your house with the intent to "wreak some havoc", but doesn't do much before he decides to leave.
'hacking' needs to have some lower bounds,
Were he charged with "hacking" you might have a point. "Unauthorized access to computer systems" does have a lower bound. Don't access a computer system without authorization and you're well below the lower bound.
Except when it's used just to catch people who split the deposits.
Except it wasn't. Since amounts less than $10,000 are not reported, the reports cannot be used to catch people who are just splitting deposits. The article you linked to said it was her other financial activities that raised the red flag, at which point the investigation disclosed the deposits. They didn't come knocking just because of the deposit pattern.
Not saying the government is acting appropriately in this case, but she did break the law.
What would prevent a bank from making a transaction report for me when I deposited the 4000 dollars?
Then you've just lowered the threshold for reporting to $4000. That means they've reported your $9000 deposit and the $4000 one. And anyone else who has deposited more than $4000. Like me, when my paycheck is deposited.
I have to keep track of my deposits and request a report myself?
No, the bank does it.
Shouldn't the teller inform me that I am over the reporting limit and the IRS might seize my money?
No. What makes you think the IRS is going to seize your money just because you deposited more than $10,000? It happens alot. It isn't a crime. BUT it can be combined with income information and might cause an investigation if you're busy making routine $20,000 deposits and withdrawals but you report only $5000 in income.
There's no magic to the $10,000 threshold. It's just a nice round number that will result in the vast majority of transactions to not be reported. Since the $9000/$4000 transactions aren't reported, it isn't like the feds can detect the attempts at gaming the system and come after you. The law against gaming the system is there not to catch people who just split the deposits because they don't want them reported, but to allow increased penalties for those they determine are money laundering (a federal crime) through other means.
The incremental cost to include my side of of the neighborhood would have been small at the time as all the needed crew, equipment and supplies were in the neighborhood. But the "other city" utilities board [1] caved to the original cable company's demand to not let the new company in - not even the quarter square mile section of my neighborhood that is in the "other city".
So they kept from granting a franchise to a company that had no other plan than cherry-picking your neighborhood. You wanted them to cherry-pick you, but I can bet that the rest of the people in that city did not care. You weren't "a few dozen vs. a large corporation", you were a few dozen vs. everyone else in the city. Why should they be happy about it? If they want another company to come in and this franchise was granted, then there would already be two companies serving the same area and a third would have even less economic justification for trying to get a franchise.
The existing company has a contractual agreement to provide service to the entire city. Since most cable franchise ordinances were based on models from other places, it is unquestionably the case that your city was prohibited from granting a franchise to another company unless the terms were essentially the same as any existing franchise. The new company had no reason to agree to serve an already served area, did they? Why would they agree to serve an entire city and face legal consequences from not doing that in exchange for a few dozen more subs?
So you say that Netflix as a company shouldn't try to get the best deal they can they can when signing with an ISP? Interesting theory...
I don't see him saying that. Not at all.
Any ISP signing a contract with Netflix should realize what a bandwidth hog Netflix is. If that incurs extra costs for the ISP it's THEIR problem.
No argument there. If Netflix buys services from Level 3, then Level 3 is on the hook to provide that service.
But Netflix did not buy service from Comcast. It's the peering that is congested, not the internal Level 3 network.
... the users ISP has oversold their available bandwidth.
Do you not realize what it would cost to provide 100% service to everyone at the same time? It would require a huge investment in capacity that would be underutilized most of the time. The cost of service would skyrocket for no apparent benefit.
This isn't a new concept. There was never one dialtone generator for each subscriber telephone line, there was a set number based on statistical usage patterns. There was never one step-by-step switch for every phone line, there were a fixed number based on statistical use patterns. (And when BBSs/dialup ISPs became so popular it skewed that pattern to more and longer calls consuming switch capacity. That's why telcos tried to get "data line" service as an extra cost feature, so they could pay for the added switching capacity necessary to support the new pattern.)
And sometimes, if you tried to make a long distance call during heavy use (like on Mother's Day) you got a busy signal. Not because Mom was talking to one of your siblings, but because there were no long distance circuits available.
And you think that 100% capacity should be the goal? I'd rather pay less and get some congestion at peak periods, thanks. You see, we're seeing the exact same pattern in ISP service that we saw when BBSs/dialup hit the wireline. Systems designed for expected use patterns are being overloaded because more people are getting more data for longer times. I didn't want to pay a "data line" charge then, I don't want to pay a "my neighbor wants Netflix" fee, either.
It's a fact that the internet provider market in the US lacks competition and is more or less monopolistic or duopolist with hints of cartel agreements.
I keep asking, nobody has given me an answer. What ISP has been granted a monopoly? What two ISPs have been granted a duopoly? If you are unhappy with your cable-wired internet service, what stops you from starting your own ISP and providing better/faster/cheaper service? Hint: it isn't the government.
Yeah, the existing cable companies are evil for agreeing not to compete directly. Unfortunately, you cannot legislate that they must enter a market where they don't want to. You CAN use legal remedies if they have contractually agreed to service an area and they haven't. But if there is an area where there is no service, grab the opportunity for huge profits by creating your own cable company and providing it. Someone would have done that -- if they could make a profit. It isn't the government stopping them, it's simple economics.
If communities aren't served by BIG_CABLE_ISP or BIG_TELECOM_ISP, they can't form their own broadband efforts because said big companies will lobby state legislators to ban these efforts as "bad for competition."
Yes, government funded cable service is a direct competition with private companies. How is that not obvious?
What is NOT prevented is the formation of a private company to provide that ISP service. Do you know why this isn't happening? Because it isn't profitable. It can only be "profitable" if the government steps in and uses taxpayer dollars to fund it. Government doesn't need to care about profit, they can do it for "free". I.e., using tax money. Involuntary subscribers. And when government can offer services at below cost, how can any private company compete? You think it is fair for that to happen?
In a perfect world, customers could just vote with their wallets and switch ISPs, but they couldn't due to the monopoly situation above.
And no company is smart enough to take advantage of all the disaffected subscribers to the awful BIG_COMPANY by trying to provide service to them? Seems like an easy chunk of money to pick up. Walk into an area, give better cable service at faster rates and you'll have people beating a path to your door.
In short, we didn't want to go to the FCC. We just wanted things to operate the way they always had been operating.
Given that the FCC net neutrality rules have NOTHING to do with breaking up defacto monopolies and nothing to do with peering congestion and are not limited to the BIG_CABLE_ISP or BIG_TELECOM_ISP, it is a bit hard to accept this claim.
The problem is trying to privatize infrastructure we all share.
The only reason we all share the cable tv infrastructure (not "Internet") is because there is typically only one cable TV provider in an area. If you want to be the second provider, go for it. You won't make any money, but you aren't prevented from trying. We already don't all share the same telco infrastructure for phones, since a large number of people have abandoned wireline for wireless.
Unfortunately for your argument, the "Internet" infrastructure isn't "all shared" by everyone either. It's different infrastructure for cable vs. telco vs. wireless. If my neighbor has DSL he's not using the same infrastructure I am. The guy next to him is wireless, and it isn't the same infrastructure either.
But people don't like government, so they "privatize", which is to say, hand a monopoly to private hands.
Which ISP has been granted a monopoly? If they have, why are there so many of them to choose from?
Unregulated libertarian fantasy of every american with a dream driving backhoes through your yard.
I'm sorry, but there are no easements in my backyard and thus no right to drive your backhoe through it. Your franchise will give you access to the public rights of way, which isn't my backyard.
What should not be happening is the bits being read and handled differently based on the content. The only conceivable reason to do so would be QoS for certain protocols and if you want those bits treated differently, by protocol, then you pay for those type of bits to get priority on a protocol basis.
So if I do only FTP and web browsing my ISP should charge me less, and the day I hook up my Vonage adapter they should start charging me more?
No, QOS should be a default practice for all traffic and it shouldn't cost more to get traffic that cannot manage high or intermittent latency issues through compared to an FTP transfer of the lastest distro (or whatever transport you use for that.)
However, that doesn't mean they need to care if I am looking at YouTube or reading a Slashdot summary or taking a Skype call. They should base their price per bit on what it takes to upgrade their backbone to support all those bits and make their profit.
Oh, so if they allow ANY SIP traffic through they should charge EVERYONE extra for that privilege. Got it. What?
If you want people to pay for the privilege of QOS shaping, then they need to know what kind of traffic you're sending/receiving so they can charge you extra for that privilege.
If the ISPs want to use their existing backbones to jump start other services, like Pay per View, then fine, but charge for that service separately.
In other words, you want no ISP to have content without a separate charge for that content. You might want to reconsider your example, however. "Pay Per View" and "On Demand" (as Comcast calls theirs) is not carried via the ISP side of the house, it uses existing cable television bandwidth.
In any case, why should a company be prohibited from giving you stuff for free?
If you want to encourage use of your service, then build in an honest fee for data that has to traverse peering points, again, on a per bit rate.
I think the point is that internal ISP traffic does not go through peering points and thus does not incur that cost.
Were I am employer, I would never hire Ron White. Unless I ran a comedy club. And then only if he promises to bring his blue collar friends around every so often to do shows. But they can't use the bathrooms, they'll have to go next door to the Chinese restaurant.
A lot of people only look at the old fitness, and ignore the new one.
Another quite visible example is eyesight. In ages past if you couldn't see the sabre tooth tiger stalking you, you died. Or bear. Or any other predator. And boys didn't make passes at girls who wear glasses.
Over the last decades this has all changed. Predation is no longer a major factor in survival. Glasses are easy to get. They're common. And becoming more common as genes for poor eyesight are now more likely to survive and be passed on.
With regards to the Dutch, I think it's their massive genetic modification program that is causing them to be taller, enroute to global domination as they are the only ones who survive the rising sea levels. I mean, remember where they live. A government that is based primarily below sea level has a vested interest in modifying the population statistics towards taller people.
the Big Lie is that cutting taxes and eliminating regulations and reducing wages
Don't know where you got the "reducing wages" bit in a discussion about tax rates, but who am I to get in the way of a good rant?
and that requires people having money in their pockets to buy stuff with
And higher taxes reduce the amount of money in people's pockets. That includes both the employees who can buy less, and the employer who can afford to hire fewer people and can invest less in infrastructure -- that HE buys from other companies who thus have less money...
I think the example of the luxury taxes on boats is a good example. Increase the luxury tax on boats for rich people, not a bad way to redistribute wealth, right? Except fewer boats were bought, which meant fewer boat builders were needed, which meant that less money was spent by the out of work boat builders, more money was handed to them in unemployment so other people had to pay taxes for that, so they had less money to spend... I think the phrase is "cut off your nose to spite your face".
But the actual question that started this is whether a company would move to get away from higher taxes, and the clear answer to that is "if they can, of course they will". You can't move the local MickyD, but the company that makes the cups and stuff the MickyD uses can certainly move to a lower tax area. And it is hardly uncommon to hear about a company making a location decision based on tax considerations.
"Free at point of use" is quite a dull phrase to litter a post with.
It's also meaningless. Using that definition of "free", I have a free health club membership. I pay nothing "at point of use". I have free internet, because I pay nothing "at point of use". I have free cellphone service. I eat at restaurants for free, too. I get lots of free stuff from Amazon.com. My cable TV service is free. The list of free stuff is endless, using that meaning of "free", despite none of it actually being free.
I consider it dishonest to use the word "free" as if it meant "free" just because you aren't paying "at point of use".
When income taxes are HIGHER, it makes more sense to hire more people. Increase expenses and lower taxes.
You pay 7.65% of your employee's salaries in Medicare and SSI taxes. You pay some percentage in unemployment taxes and other state taxes. You pay more for employees because they want more to offset the higher income tax rate.
If you're hiring people you need then your productivity goes up and you make more income, which you pay taxes on. If you are hiring just to avoid taxes, then you are spending more money than you are saving, and part of that "more" is taxes.
In any case, your equation is wrong. Income - expenses is profit. Profit times tax rate is what you pay in taxes ON YOUR PROFIT. But you are also paying taxes on your expenses when they are wages.
And when you pay more in taxes, you have less to use for such things as hiring.
If you think the government gives you nothing back, you're right to be annoyed. I get free health care, free education, free social care,
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
It's only free if you are a completely non-productive leech on society and pay nothing in taxes. In that case, everyone else is paying for your education, your health care, your "social care"...
In fact, if taxes are going to be high, I might hire *more* pay *less* in tax.
The more people you hire, the more you pay in taxes, not less.
So, when taxes are high, where are you going to get more money to hire more people? How will you compete for the better employees who will want higher wages to offset the higher taxes they'll be paying? Not only will you have to come up with more to pay them, you'll pay more in employment taxes for them. And you'll be making less money because you'll be paying more in taxes, too.
Other than being highly regressive and requiring a massive federal agency to manage it, it's just a peachy idea. Unless you create a whole series of exemptions and credits just like the exemptions and loopholes we have today, which then means even more federal employees to manage and enforce.
States and business a like are already setup to cope with sales tax,
Not all of them, and none of them have anything in place to cope with a federal sales tax.
EVERYTHING not on that list gets taxed, no matter who or what type of entity is transacting.
Uhhh, no, there are a large number of sales tax exempt organizations. You're talking about the existing ways of keeping a sales tax from being highly regressive by exempting food, etc, but then you fail when you don't recognize the existing tax-exempt entities.
Pay an employee, you are a purchaser of time, employer pays the tax.
OMG, you're actually going to tax intangibles and not consumption.
Want to 'buy' Euros to spend on your vacation to Spain or to purchase raw materials for your manufacturing company, or for that matter to pay your overseas employees - you pay the tax.
And a sales tax on money conversions? Do you have any idea what that would do to the value of the dollar and the world economy?
Essentially if a dollar changes hands the tax is collected.
Cool. Loophole number 1: all transactions are done in euros. No dollars change hands, no tax.
There is no tax evasion possible, because there are only a handful of excluded transactions and the same rules apply to everyone and every entity, nobody ever has to 'file' anything.
So you leave the poor people who will find this tax extremely regressive and repressive with lower buying power while the rich folks don't see much impact at all.
So what percentage is YOUR tax going to be? 10%? 5%?
The biggest problem I have seen with these connected devices is that many of them need to "call the mothership". While that does make it easier for the device vendors to support their products,
I've given up trying to find a router that doesn't have hardwired network connections to mama. The last router I bought makes repeated connections to an NTP server run by the company that makes it, to the point that there is no manual way to set the date and time and no way to change the configuration for NTP.
I wanted to use this device behind a slow network connection where I already have a stratum 2 server of my own. The only way to do this was to hard-configure the first DNS nameserver to the nameserver on my network and put in entries for each of the 10 hardwired NTP servers. I asked customer support what all the names were, and they told me they were not permitted to tell me. That's ok, tcpdump and dig eventually got the information.
Netgear WNR2000v5.
And after a bit I found that it was also pinging an update server.
That's not the worst offender. I have some internet-controllable power switches that send data packets off to some Chinese server for some reason that is completely undocumented. Customer service for that company claims it is to implement a dynamic DNS service.
For many aircraft and many airports, it doesn't. I would go so far as to say "most".
And if the ILS being used fails, for example someone transmits a strong lower beam signal (creating a full scale "too low" indication), the landing has to be aborted.
Yeah, too bad there's not something called "autopilot" that could take over if communications are lost.
In the "remote controller" system, the only reason you would need to rely on communications is if there were a major systems failure on board and the on-board pilot could not control the aircraft.
In other words, at the time when communications becomes most critical, you are already experiencing systems failures that may make communications ineffective. Combine that with the potential for active jamming (DOS) at least and maybe a security issue that allows unauthorized remote control, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
To those who say that a remote control operator can do as well as pilots on scene, keep in mind the DC9 (or DC10, I forget) that almost landed at Sioux City after a complete loss of hydraulics. Three pilots saved a lot of lives that day, and it would be impossible for that to have been done by a guy sitting in a dark room. Even if for no other reason than he wasn't invested in the process of saving that airplane. Now, if you make it a rule that anyone who takes such a remote controller job is executed if any aircraft he controls has a fatality, that might make him concentrate a bit harder.
An "under-served market," huh? Alright then: the market I'm talking about is in almost the middle of the ninth largest metropolitan area in the United States,
And an under-served market is an under-served market no matter where it is.
Yes, and a de-facto monopoly is still a monopoly.
Yep. However, the solutions are different for the two. For a dejure monopoly, the solution could be as simple as removing the grant. For a defacto monopoly you have to figure out IF there is a problem and then what a fair solution is. (If there's one company in a city selling a specific service, is that because the market is saturated, because the customers love that one company but won't buy anywhere else, or something else.) Is it fair to the existing company to give preferential treatment to competitors if the company isn't doing anything wrong? If the company is abusing the customers, then why would they remain loyal to that company and why wouldn't another company come in and rake in the cash by giving good service? It wouldn't need preferential treatment, it would thrive by being better.
But, as you point out, there are at least two other services in the area, they just don't want to provide service to your specific location. Please cite the section of the new net neutrality regulations that will solve this problem.
And you ignored the question I asked, which is specifically where in the country there is a government-granted monopoly to any ISP. Not cable company, not telephone company, an ISP. Net neutrality deals with ISPs, not cable television or telephone, and it has nothing to do with breaking monopolistic powers.
and the other player (Comcast) actually is a de jure monopoly for services delivered over coaxial cable
That is a false statement. Refer to the City of Atlanta Cable Ordinances found here and you will note that the law grants a non-exclusive franchise. That there is only one company who has chosen to go through the franchise process does not mean the government has created a monopoly. The laco of competition is not created by the city council, it's created by the economic disincentive to split a market where the costs of infrastructure are so high.
(it has a franchise agreement with the City of Atlanta, which prohibits other cable providers such as Charter from coming in)
No, actually, it doesn't. All Charter would have to do is follow the process to get a franchise just like Media One of Colorado did (which was then transferred to Comcast). While a franchise agreement is a bit more than just a business license, it is very similar. When a city grants a business license to one company to do something, they are not granting that company a monopoly even if nobody else applies.
Q: What is it called when you can only get high-speed Internet within a particular geographic area from one company?
A: a monopoly.
A: an under-served market. Most likely because the costs of providing service are too high to support more than one player.
It's not a government-enforced monopoly, and laws to enforce net neutrality will do absolutely NOTHING to solve your problem.
However, Comcast cable is literally the only choice, and is therefore a monopoly.
It is not a government-enforced monopoly, it is a defacto monopoly, and the existence of the other two services show that. If the costs didn't outweigh the benefits some company would have come in and be providing the service you want. But it might not be at the price you demand, so you would probably still argue that there was only one ISP in your area. "Not fast enough for what I want" and "costs too much" don't prove a monopoly, they only prove that the service you want costs more than you are willing to pay.
Since natural (and historically government-enforced) last-mile monopolies give ISPs undue power over end users,
If such a thing existed, yes, it would.
ISPs can't use their monopoly or duopoly
We've moved from "one" to "two". Where in the US has anyone said that only two ISPs can provide service to an area? And government-enforced. Where?
Net neutrality, along with other regulation (like punishing AT&T for throttling "unlimited" plans) does exactly that.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with breaking up monopolies (or duopolies). It regulates ISPs. When you find an ISP that has a monopoly someplace, let me know. The closest you can get is the telephone company when they act as an ISP in addition to wireline telephone service, but since there are scads of other ISPs (and even some who use those same wires the telco has a monopoly on), they aren't truly a monopoly as an ISP.
Do you mean that last-mile monopoly which has been given to them by... local governments ?
Which ISP has been given a last-mile monopoly on anything?
The answer is "none". The telephone companies have last-mile monopolies on their wires. The cable companies typically have only defacto and not dejure monopolies. But those monopolies are not because they are ISPs, it is because they started as other services. In fact, as services, they don't have government-granted monopolies either. Only the telephone companies have a historical monopoly on wired telephony, but there is competition in "telephone" services today. There is competition in delivery of video services.
There are LOTS of ISPs that have nothing close to a monopoly anywhere that these net-neutrality laws impact. Claiming that net neutrality has anything to do with breaking monopolies is just nonsense. It's trying to garner support for government intervention in ISP services because 'we hates Comcast'.
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The defense will probably (assuming it goes to trial) rest on the point that not only were the passwords public knowledge but were being used with the teacher's knowledge in other instances.
Where did you get this from? The student said that other students used the teachers' accounts, but nobody said they were doing it with the knowledge of the teachers or with their permission. Even with their permission may be unauthorized access, since I'm going to guess that the AUP for the systems involved prohibit account sharing. If they don't, they should.
Here's what the fine article says about the intent of the student who was arrested:
To expand the analogy, it would be like keeping your key under a rock so any number of people can come in to feed your cat, but then one of those people scrawls something on the wall.
No, the analogy would be that you leave a key under a rock and then someone you haven't given permission to use the key or enter your house uses that key to enter your house with the intent to "wreak some havoc", but doesn't do much before he decides to leave.
'hacking' needs to have some lower bounds,
Were he charged with "hacking" you might have a point. "Unauthorized access to computer systems" does have a lower bound. Don't access a computer system without authorization and you're well below the lower bound.
Except when it's used just to catch people who split the deposits.
Except it wasn't. Since amounts less than $10,000 are not reported, the reports cannot be used to catch people who are just splitting deposits. The article you linked to said it was her other financial activities that raised the red flag, at which point the investigation disclosed the deposits. They didn't come knocking just because of the deposit pattern.
Not saying the government is acting appropriately in this case, but she did break the law.
What would prevent a bank from making a transaction report for me when I deposited the 4000 dollars?
Then you've just lowered the threshold for reporting to $4000. That means they've reported your $9000 deposit and the $4000 one. And anyone else who has deposited more than $4000. Like me, when my paycheck is deposited.
I have to keep track of my deposits and request a report myself?
No, the bank does it.
Shouldn't the teller inform me that I am over the reporting limit and the IRS might seize my money?
No. What makes you think the IRS is going to seize your money just because you deposited more than $10,000? It happens alot. It isn't a crime. BUT it can be combined with income information and might cause an investigation if you're busy making routine $20,000 deposits and withdrawals but you report only $5000 in income.
There's no magic to the $10,000 threshold. It's just a nice round number that will result in the vast majority of transactions to not be reported. Since the $9000/$4000 transactions aren't reported, it isn't like the feds can detect the attempts at gaming the system and come after you. The law against gaming the system is there not to catch people who just split the deposits because they don't want them reported, but to allow increased penalties for those they determine are money laundering (a federal crime) through other means.
The incremental cost to include my side of of the neighborhood would have been small at the time as all the needed crew, equipment and supplies were in the neighborhood. But the "other city" utilities board [1] caved to the original cable company's demand to not let the new company in - not even the quarter square mile section of my neighborhood that is in the "other city".
So they kept from granting a franchise to a company that had no other plan than cherry-picking your neighborhood. You wanted them to cherry-pick you, but I can bet that the rest of the people in that city did not care. You weren't "a few dozen vs. a large corporation", you were a few dozen vs. everyone else in the city. Why should they be happy about it? If they want another company to come in and this franchise was granted, then there would already be two companies serving the same area and a third would have even less economic justification for trying to get a franchise.
The existing company has a contractual agreement to provide service to the entire city. Since most cable franchise ordinances were based on models from other places, it is unquestionably the case that your city was prohibited from granting a franchise to another company unless the terms were essentially the same as any existing franchise. The new company had no reason to agree to serve an already served area, did they? Why would they agree to serve an entire city and face legal consequences from not doing that in exchange for a few dozen more subs?
So you say that Netflix as a company shouldn't try to get the best deal they can they can when signing with an ISP? Interesting theory...
I don't see him saying that. Not at all.
Any ISP signing a contract with Netflix should realize what a bandwidth hog Netflix is. If that incurs extra costs for the ISP it's THEIR problem.
No argument there. If Netflix buys services from Level 3, then Level 3 is on the hook to provide that service.
But Netflix did not buy service from Comcast. It's the peering that is congested, not the internal Level 3 network.
... the users ISP has oversold their available bandwidth.
Do you not realize what it would cost to provide 100% service to everyone at the same time? It would require a huge investment in capacity that would be underutilized most of the time. The cost of service would skyrocket for no apparent benefit.
This isn't a new concept. There was never one dialtone generator for each subscriber telephone line, there was a set number based on statistical usage patterns. There was never one step-by-step switch for every phone line, there were a fixed number based on statistical use patterns. (And when BBSs/dialup ISPs became so popular it skewed that pattern to more and longer calls consuming switch capacity. That's why telcos tried to get "data line" service as an extra cost feature, so they could pay for the added switching capacity necessary to support the new pattern.)
And sometimes, if you tried to make a long distance call during heavy use (like on Mother's Day) you got a busy signal. Not because Mom was talking to one of your siblings, but because there were no long distance circuits available.
And you think that 100% capacity should be the goal? I'd rather pay less and get some congestion at peak periods, thanks. You see, we're seeing the exact same pattern in ISP service that we saw when BBSs/dialup hit the wireline. Systems designed for expected use patterns are being overloaded because more people are getting more data for longer times. I didn't want to pay a "data line" charge then, I don't want to pay a "my neighbor wants Netflix" fee, either.
It's a fact that the internet provider market in the US lacks competition and is more or less monopolistic or duopolist with hints of cartel agreements.
I keep asking, nobody has given me an answer. What ISP has been granted a monopoly? What two ISPs have been granted a duopoly? If you are unhappy with your cable-wired internet service, what stops you from starting your own ISP and providing better/faster/cheaper service? Hint: it isn't the government.
Yeah, the existing cable companies are evil for agreeing not to compete directly. Unfortunately, you cannot legislate that they must enter a market where they don't want to. You CAN use legal remedies if they have contractually agreed to service an area and they haven't. But if there is an area where there is no service, grab the opportunity for huge profits by creating your own cable company and providing it. Someone would have done that -- if they could make a profit. It isn't the government stopping them, it's simple economics.
If communities aren't served by BIG_CABLE_ISP or BIG_TELECOM_ISP, they can't form their own broadband efforts because said big companies will lobby state legislators to ban these efforts as "bad for competition."
Yes, government funded cable service is a direct competition with private companies. How is that not obvious?
What is NOT prevented is the formation of a private company to provide that ISP service. Do you know why this isn't happening? Because it isn't profitable. It can only be "profitable" if the government steps in and uses taxpayer dollars to fund it. Government doesn't need to care about profit, they can do it for "free". I.e., using tax money. Involuntary subscribers. And when government can offer services at below cost, how can any private company compete? You think it is fair for that to happen?
In a perfect world, customers could just vote with their wallets and switch ISPs, but they couldn't due to the monopoly situation above.
And no company is smart enough to take advantage of all the disaffected subscribers to the awful BIG_COMPANY by trying to provide service to them? Seems like an easy chunk of money to pick up. Walk into an area, give better cable service at faster rates and you'll have people beating a path to your door.
In short, we didn't want to go to the FCC. We just wanted things to operate the way they always had been operating.
Given that the FCC net neutrality rules have NOTHING to do with breaking up defacto monopolies and nothing to do with peering congestion and are not limited to the BIG_CABLE_ISP or BIG_TELECOM_ISP, it is a bit hard to accept this claim.
The problem is trying to privatize infrastructure we all share.
The only reason we all share the cable tv infrastructure (not "Internet") is because there is typically only one cable TV provider in an area. If you want to be the second provider, go for it. You won't make any money, but you aren't prevented from trying. We already don't all share the same telco infrastructure for phones, since a large number of people have abandoned wireline for wireless.
Unfortunately for your argument, the "Internet" infrastructure isn't "all shared" by everyone either. It's different infrastructure for cable vs. telco vs. wireless. If my neighbor has DSL he's not using the same infrastructure I am. The guy next to him is wireless, and it isn't the same infrastructure either.
But people don't like government, so they "privatize", which is to say, hand a monopoly to private hands.
Which ISP has been granted a monopoly? If they have, why are there so many of them to choose from?
Unregulated libertarian fantasy of every american with a dream driving backhoes through your yard.
I'm sorry, but there are no easements in my backyard and thus no right to drive your backhoe through it. Your franchise will give you access to the public rights of way, which isn't my backyard.
What should not be happening is the bits being read and handled differently based on the content. The only conceivable reason to do so would be QoS for certain protocols and if you want those bits treated differently, by protocol, then you pay for those type of bits to get priority on a protocol basis.
So if I do only FTP and web browsing my ISP should charge me less, and the day I hook up my Vonage adapter they should start charging me more?
No, QOS should be a default practice for all traffic and it shouldn't cost more to get traffic that cannot manage high or intermittent latency issues through compared to an FTP transfer of the lastest distro (or whatever transport you use for that.)
However, that doesn't mean they need to care if I am looking at YouTube or reading a Slashdot summary or taking a Skype call. They should base their price per bit on what it takes to upgrade their backbone to support all those bits and make their profit.
Oh, so if they allow ANY SIP traffic through they should charge EVERYONE extra for that privilege. Got it. What?
If you want people to pay for the privilege of QOS shaping, then they need to know what kind of traffic you're sending/receiving so they can charge you extra for that privilege.
If the ISPs want to use their existing backbones to jump start other services, like Pay per View, then fine, but charge for that service separately.
In other words, you want no ISP to have content without a separate charge for that content. You might want to reconsider your example, however. "Pay Per View" and "On Demand" (as Comcast calls theirs) is not carried via the ISP side of the house, it uses existing cable television bandwidth.
In any case, why should a company be prohibited from giving you stuff for free?
If you want to encourage use of your service, then build in an honest fee for data that has to traverse peering points, again, on a per bit rate.
I think the point is that internal ISP traffic does not go through peering points and thus does not incur that cost.
I'm the Ron White of employees.
Were I am employer, I would never hire Ron White. Unless I ran a comedy club. And then only if he promises to bring his blue collar friends around every so often to do shows. But they can't use the bathrooms, they'll have to go next door to the Chinese restaurant.
A lot of people only look at the old fitness, and ignore the new one.
Another quite visible example is eyesight. In ages past if you couldn't see the sabre tooth tiger stalking you, you died. Or bear. Or any other predator. And boys didn't make passes at girls who wear glasses.
Over the last decades this has all changed. Predation is no longer a major factor in survival. Glasses are easy to get. They're common. And becoming more common as genes for poor eyesight are now more likely to survive and be passed on.
With regards to the Dutch, I think it's their massive genetic modification program that is causing them to be taller, enroute to global domination as they are the only ones who survive the rising sea levels. I mean, remember where they live. A government that is based primarily below sea level has a vested interest in modifying the population statistics towards taller people.
the Big Lie is that cutting taxes and eliminating regulations and reducing wages
Don't know where you got the "reducing wages" bit in a discussion about tax rates, but who am I to get in the way of a good rant?
and that requires people having money in their pockets to buy stuff with
And higher taxes reduce the amount of money in people's pockets. That includes both the employees who can buy less, and the employer who can afford to hire fewer people and can invest less in infrastructure -- that HE buys from other companies who thus have less money ...
I think the example of the luxury taxes on boats is a good example. Increase the luxury tax on boats for rich people, not a bad way to redistribute wealth, right? Except fewer boats were bought, which meant fewer boat builders were needed, which meant that less money was spent by the out of work boat builders, more money was handed to them in unemployment so other people had to pay taxes for that, so they had less money to spend ... I think the phrase is "cut off your nose to spite your face".
But the actual question that started this is whether a company would move to get away from higher taxes, and the clear answer to that is "if they can, of course they will". You can't move the local MickyD, but the company that makes the cups and stuff the MickyD uses can certainly move to a lower tax area. And it is hardly uncommon to hear about a company making a location decision based on tax considerations.
What do you think happened before there were fire departments?
Dalmations had to live in the streets, and suspender sales were lackluster at best?
"Free at point of use" is quite a dull phrase to litter a post with.
It's also meaningless. Using that definition of "free", I have a free health club membership. I pay nothing "at point of use". I have free internet, because I pay nothing "at point of use". I have free cellphone service. I eat at restaurants for free, too. I get lots of free stuff from Amazon.com. My cable TV service is free. The list of free stuff is endless, using that meaning of "free", despite none of it actually being free.
I consider it dishonest to use the word "free" as if it meant "free" just because you aren't paying "at point of use".
When income taxes are HIGHER, it makes more sense to hire more people. Increase expenses and lower taxes.
You pay 7.65% of your employee's salaries in Medicare and SSI taxes. You pay some percentage in unemployment taxes and other state taxes. You pay more for employees because they want more to offset the higher income tax rate.
If you're hiring people you need then your productivity goes up and you make more income, which you pay taxes on. If you are hiring just to avoid taxes, then you are spending more money than you are saving, and part of that "more" is taxes.
In any case, your equation is wrong. Income - expenses is profit. Profit times tax rate is what you pay in taxes ON YOUR PROFIT. But you are also paying taxes on your expenses when they are wages.
And when you pay more in taxes, you have less to use for such things as hiring.
If you think the government gives you nothing back, you're right to be annoyed. I get free health care, free education, free social care,
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
It's only free if you are a completely non-productive leech on society and pay nothing in taxes. In that case, everyone else is paying for your education, your health care, your "social care" ...
In fact, if taxes are going to be high, I might hire *more* pay *less* in tax.
The more people you hire, the more you pay in taxes, not less.
So, when taxes are high, where are you going to get more money to hire more people? How will you compete for the better employees who will want higher wages to offset the higher taxes they'll be paying? Not only will you have to come up with more to pay them, you'll pay more in employment taxes for them. And you'll be making less money because you'll be paying more in taxes, too.
Where's the "big lie", again?
There are zero good reasons not to do so.
Other than being highly regressive and requiring a massive federal agency to manage it, it's just a peachy idea. Unless you create a whole series of exemptions and credits just like the exemptions and loopholes we have today, which then means even more federal employees to manage and enforce.
States and business a like are already setup to cope with sales tax,
Not all of them, and none of them have anything in place to cope with a federal sales tax.
EVERYTHING not on that list gets taxed, no matter who or what type of entity is transacting.
Uhhh, no, there are a large number of sales tax exempt organizations. You're talking about the existing ways of keeping a sales tax from being highly regressive by exempting food, etc, but then you fail when you don't recognize the existing tax-exempt entities.
Pay an employee, you are a purchaser of time, employer pays the tax.
OMG, you're actually going to tax intangibles and not consumption.
Want to 'buy' Euros to spend on your vacation to Spain or to purchase raw materials for your manufacturing company, or for that matter to pay your overseas employees - you pay the tax.
And a sales tax on money conversions? Do you have any idea what that would do to the value of the dollar and the world economy?
Essentially if a dollar changes hands the tax is collected.
Cool. Loophole number 1: all transactions are done in euros. No dollars change hands, no tax.
There is no tax evasion possible, because there are only a handful of excluded transactions and the same rules apply to everyone and every entity, nobody ever has to 'file' anything.
So you leave the poor people who will find this tax extremely regressive and repressive with lower buying power while the rich folks don't see much impact at all.
So what percentage is YOUR tax going to be? 10%? 5%?
The biggest problem I have seen with these connected devices is that many of them need to "call the mothership". While that does make it easier for the device vendors to support their products,
I've given up trying to find a router that doesn't have hardwired network connections to mama. The last router I bought makes repeated connections to an NTP server run by the company that makes it, to the point that there is no manual way to set the date and time and no way to change the configuration for NTP.
I wanted to use this device behind a slow network connection where I already have a stratum 2 server of my own. The only way to do this was to hard-configure the first DNS nameserver to the nameserver on my network and put in entries for each of the 10 hardwired NTP servers. I asked customer support what all the names were, and they told me they were not permitted to tell me. That's ok, tcpdump and dig eventually got the information.
Netgear WNR2000v5.
And after a bit I found that it was also pinging an update server.
That's not the worst offender. I have some internet-controllable power switches that send data packets off to some Chinese server for some reason that is completely undocumented. Customer service for that company claims it is to implement a dynamic DNS service.
By making intrusive surveillance devices available inexpensively (perhaps by showing hobbyists how to build their own),
How dare those scum at MIT teach people how to surveil their neighbors and stuff.
Right, as if autoland doesn't exist?
For many aircraft and many airports, it doesn't. I would go so far as to say "most".
And if the ILS being used fails, for example someone transmits a strong lower beam signal (creating a full scale "too low" indication), the landing has to be aborted.
Yeah, too bad there's not something called "autopilot" that could take over if communications are lost.
In the "remote controller" system, the only reason you would need to rely on communications is if there were a major systems failure on board and the on-board pilot could not control the aircraft.
In other words, at the time when communications becomes most critical, you are already experiencing systems failures that may make communications ineffective. Combine that with the potential for active jamming (DOS) at least and maybe a security issue that allows unauthorized remote control, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
To those who say that a remote control operator can do as well as pilots on scene, keep in mind the DC9 (or DC10, I forget) that almost landed at Sioux City after a complete loss of hydraulics. Three pilots saved a lot of lives that day, and it would be impossible for that to have been done by a guy sitting in a dark room. Even if for no other reason than he wasn't invested in the process of saving that airplane. Now, if you make it a rule that anyone who takes such a remote controller job is executed if any aircraft he controls has a fatality, that might make him concentrate a bit harder.
An "under-served market," huh? Alright then: the market I'm talking about is in almost the middle of the ninth largest metropolitan area in the United States,
And an under-served market is an under-served market no matter where it is.
Yes, and a de-facto monopoly is still a monopoly.
Yep. However, the solutions are different for the two. For a dejure monopoly, the solution could be as simple as removing the grant. For a defacto monopoly you have to figure out IF there is a problem and then what a fair solution is. (If there's one company in a city selling a specific service, is that because the market is saturated, because the customers love that one company but won't buy anywhere else, or something else.) Is it fair to the existing company to give preferential treatment to competitors if the company isn't doing anything wrong? If the company is abusing the customers, then why would they remain loyal to that company and why wouldn't another company come in and rake in the cash by giving good service? It wouldn't need preferential treatment, it would thrive by being better.
But, as you point out, there are at least two other services in the area, they just don't want to provide service to your specific location. Please cite the section of the new net neutrality regulations that will solve this problem.
And you ignored the question I asked, which is specifically where in the country there is a government-granted monopoly to any ISP. Not cable company, not telephone company, an ISP. Net neutrality deals with ISPs, not cable television or telephone, and it has nothing to do with breaking monopolistic powers.
and the other player (Comcast) actually is a de jure monopoly for services delivered over coaxial cable
That is a false statement. Refer to the City of Atlanta Cable Ordinances found here and you will note that the law grants a non-exclusive franchise. That there is only one company who has chosen to go through the franchise process does not mean the government has created a monopoly. The laco of competition is not created by the city council, it's created by the economic disincentive to split a market where the costs of infrastructure are so high.
(it has a franchise agreement with the City of Atlanta, which prohibits other cable providers such as Charter from coming in)
No, actually, it doesn't. All Charter would have to do is follow the process to get a franchise just like Media One of Colorado did (which was then transferred to Comcast). While a franchise agreement is a bit more than just a business license, it is very similar. When a city grants a business license to one company to do something, they are not granting that company a monopoly even if nobody else applies.
Q: What is it called when you can only get high-speed Internet within a particular geographic area from one company? A: a monopoly.
A: an under-served market. Most likely because the costs of providing service are too high to support more than one player.
It's not a government-enforced monopoly, and laws to enforce net neutrality will do absolutely NOTHING to solve your problem.
However, Comcast cable is literally the only choice, and is therefore a monopoly.
It is not a government-enforced monopoly, it is a defacto monopoly, and the existence of the other two services show that. If the costs didn't outweigh the benefits some company would have come in and be providing the service you want. But it might not be at the price you demand, so you would probably still argue that there was only one ISP in your area. "Not fast enough for what I want" and "costs too much" don't prove a monopoly, they only prove that the service you want costs more than you are willing to pay.
Since natural (and historically government-enforced) last-mile monopolies give ISPs undue power over end users,
If such a thing existed, yes, it would.
ISPs can't use their monopoly or duopoly
We've moved from "one" to "two". Where in the US has anyone said that only two ISPs can provide service to an area? And government-enforced. Where?
Net neutrality, along with other regulation (like punishing AT&T for throttling "unlimited" plans) does exactly that.
Net neutrality has nothing to do with breaking up monopolies (or duopolies). It regulates ISPs. When you find an ISP that has a monopoly someplace, let me know. The closest you can get is the telephone company when they act as an ISP in addition to wireline telephone service, but since there are scads of other ISPs (and even some who use those same wires the telco has a monopoly on), they aren't truly a monopoly as an ISP.
Do you mean that last-mile monopoly which has been given to them by... local governments ?
Which ISP has been given a last-mile monopoly on anything?
The answer is "none". The telephone companies have last-mile monopolies on their wires. The cable companies typically have only defacto and not dejure monopolies. But those monopolies are not because they are ISPs, it is because they started as other services. In fact, as services, they don't have government-granted monopolies either. Only the telephone companies have a historical monopoly on wired telephony, but there is competition in "telephone" services today. There is competition in delivery of video services.
There are LOTS of ISPs that have nothing close to a monopoly anywhere that these net-neutrality laws impact. Claiming that net neutrality has anything to do with breaking monopolies is just nonsense. It's trying to garner support for government intervention in ISP services because 'we hates Comcast'.