It's not that a day (in any sense) varies between 58.7 and 176 (Earth days), it's that those numbers are measurements for different definitions of day.
Mercury's sidereal day, the time it takes Mercury to make a complete rotation (with respect to the background stars), is 58.7 days. The length of Mars' solar day, the time it takes to for the sun to cross the same meridian on Mercury (or the time it takes to reach the same place in the sky from the perspective of someone standing at a fixed point on Mercury) is 176 days. This notion is a little strange when you first hear about it, because the distinction is much narrower here on Earth: Our solar day is (very close to) the usual 24 hours, but our sidereal day is about four minutes shorter. (The difference on Mercury is so much larger than it is here because Earth's orbital period -- how long it takes to complete one trip around the sun -- is more than two orders of magnitude larger than its sidereal day. By contrast, on Mercury those quantities are comparable.)
Do you really mean the lobbying itself, and not, say, the contributions of corporate sponsors and interest groups that form the other half of this potential conflict of interest?
Were it not for lobbying, congressmen might have a harder time discovering and learning about some issues. How would they, besides the Congressional Research Service, letters from the home district, and -- once they know enough about an issue that they know whom to ask -- calling in expert testimony?
...the names of every project lead/author of every Linux project, from the Wikipedia article:
"Hans Thomas Reiser (born December 1963) is an American computer programmer famous for his contributions to the free software community in the field of file systems. In particular he is deeply involved in the Linux kernel development with his widespread ReiserFS journaling file system and its successor Reiser4. In 1997 Reiser founded and has since headed Namesys Inc., a software company specialized in operating systems and in developing and providing support for his file systems. He is currently residing in Oakland, California. Since October 10, 2006, he is charged with the murder of his missing estranged wife, Nina Reiser, and is currently being held on remand."
Seriously, it should be no real burden for submitters or even editors to add a one-phrase or -sentence bio for players not all of us may be familiar with, so that Linux laypeople here (myself included) know why this would even be construed as "news for nerds" at all.
(1) Point taken, but that's different. Intel may be an advertiser here, but there's no evidence that there's any soft-sell payola here. (Are Intel products ever reviewed here, even, besides by voluntary member posts, i.e. is this even a potential conflict of interest?)
(2) The tagline aside, Slashdot is not a news site: Its stories are not reported as (even ostensibly objective) news -- they're reported more like opinionated analysis (which includes both thought-provoking and shameless flamebait).
From recent (posted) summaries:
"Perhaps by then, people will have forgotten how eBay enabled buyer 'Blazers5505' to hook up with sellers like 'oneclickshooting' just weeks before the worst mass shooting in modern US history, prompting eBay to issue a gun-parts-don't-kill-students-guns-and-ammo-do statement that showed little evidence of its celebrated commitment to social consciousness."
"Google's motto is 'Don't Be Evil' -- but they sure have an evil non-disclosure agreement!... Luckily, someone has posted excerpts from the NDA before he signed it and had to say silent forever."
"I wonder if this time it will be more obvious to the courts that Verizon's patents aren't so original?"
"How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?"
Also, cf. most stories about China, Diebold, Microsoft, the Microsoft topic icon, etc.
These opinions may be variously well-supported by data, but they're opinions nonetheless, and are often (and unfortunately) disguised as news. How about "Analysis for Nerds, (Mostly) Stuff That Matters?"
Dantooine, the planet Leia named to Grand Moff Tarkin as the location of the hidden rebel base, was home only to an abandoned complex. Tarkin asserted that Dantooine was too remote to make an "effective demonstration" and instead destroyed Leia's (adopted) homeworld of Alderaan.
According to this link cited in the article, it's not that "violent" games would only be "accessible" to customers over 30, it's that retailers would be required "to check I.D. for buyers" who wanted to browse that section and "who appear to be 30 or under." It's more like the policy of checking IDs when serving alcohol than the nonsense the article and summary suggest.
Incidentally, if they were accurate, it would (comically) mean that someone could run for and win a seat in the House of Representatives and sponsor laws re video game violence before they could browse the proposed section at game stores.
It's apparently too much to expect that when a story is submitted by an editor, he check the primary sources linked in the cited article to support what's obviously an improbable assertion (and in this case, a flatly incorrect one).
At any rate, any particular pair of twin primes is unlikely* to be especially "significant." However, an important open problem in math is, "Do there exist infinitely many twin primes?" Experts think it's likely enough that the answer is yes that they've named that supposition "Twin Prime Conjecture," which indicates that those experts consider it definitely less than a theorem but much more than a wild guess.
That the problem is so simply stated but remains unsolved is a testament to its difficulty (cf. Fermat's Last Theorem a.k.a. Wiles' Theorem). Hardy and Wright wrote to this effect: "The evidence, when examined in detail, appears to justify this conjecture, but the proof or disproof of conjectures of this type is at present beyond the resources of mathematics."
*If the conjecture is false, that is, if there are only finitely many twin primes, certainly the largest pair is important.
Incidentally, the "Pentium bug" was discovered when someone computed the reciprocals of two large (twin) primes and noticed an error after about 10 decimal paces.
I'd never heard of Parakey before reading this, and clicking on the link didn't leave me much better off. From the Wikipedia article about Parakey:
"Parakey is a Web-based computer user interface proposed by Firefox creator Blake Ross. Ross describes it as a 'a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.' The idea behind it is to make image, video, and text transfer to the web easier."
Even the Wikipedia article is awfully short for a computer tech topic. Is this just a proposal? Vaporvare? If not, does anyone have a link to something more substantial about it?
You might guess it from the summary, but the implication is that Ross has a potential motive other than promoting blind ranking for its own ostensibly good sake.
Maybe this should have been:
"...Island of Stability..." If you're visually inclined, check out the aptly illustrated "chart of nuclides," showing stability as a function of nucleon counts (i.e. proton and neutron counts).
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Compassion and decency certainly have a place in the law. To the extent that laws protect rights, they codify the notion that we're fundamentally obligated to be decent to one another in (usually obvious) ways. But it's not clear to me that Schwartz' medical condition means that this case should be treated any differently.
Based on the provided links (thanks for the link in your reply, BTW), Schwartz didn't commit any real offense, this case should be dropped for that reason. But the same applies to most of the RIAA lawsuits I've read about here (consider this thankfully dropped case that you linked earlier). Schwartz' medical condition doesn't distinguish her from many of the other RIAA lawsuit defendants (i.e. she isn't "helpless") unless it significantly affects her capacity to do the illegal things the RIAA claims she did. If it does, the summary (or at least one of the links) ought to have explained that; if it doesn't, her medical condition isn't relevant and so doesn't belong in the story.
I appreciate NewYorkCountryLawyer's insight into many of the legal issues discussed here, but the summary seems misdirected.
The summary describes a "case against a woman with Multiple Sclerosis," and the lede of the P2PNet article is, "RaeJ Schwartz is a mother in Queen's [sic], New York, who's been seriously disabled by multiple sclerosis, a chronic, crippling disease of the central nervous system." Neither makes any further mention of her disease or disability, or any mention of how either affects the case, so we're left to guess: Is the implication that the RIAA is particularly unscrupulous for bringing a suit against someone with a severe medical condition, and that it should hence be additionally vilified accordingly? This leaves unanswered the basic question of why her disease should affect our analysis of the situation. My best guess: MS can severely limit mobility, so the implication is that her disease prevented her from downloading. (How likely is this? I'm ignorant of the practical specifics of the disease.) If this is the implication, it should have been included in the summary.
Instead of name-dropping her disability and saying no more, the summary ought to have included something more relevant, like "a case against a woman who has a severe medical condition preventing her from conventional computer use" or "a case against a woman who likely never downloaded any music" (as was suggested in the P2PNet article, though this would deserve more explanation, too).
Some of us here (me included) are interested in legal issues but don't play WoW. A better summary would have included a description of the program, so that those of us who don't keep up with this niche have to fish around through links.
From the (admittedly linked) WoW Glider Homepage.
"WoW Glider is a tool that plays your World of Warcraft character for you, the way you want it. It grinds, it loots, it skins, it heals, it even farms soul shards... without you."
As it stands, Wikipedia will never "make the grade" in academic circles for a simple reason: Academic citation is meaningless without authority -- almost by defintion -- and allowing anyone to modify entries removes any guarantee that the entries themselves are authoritative. (This situation is actually somewhat worse than that: On account of the free editing policy, any article can contain contradictory statements are different times, or even at once.)
Whether Wikipedia has the qualifications for academic citation (i.e. is a source to trust your academic reputation to) is separate from whether it is useful or a valuable resource in any other context. Indeed, Wikipedia is a superb, even unparalleled resource, in many other ("softer") ways:
(1) It's an excellent casual reference, as a starting point for academic research, or as a source for rounded, pithy introductions to just about anything.
(2) It _is_ a source for just about anything. No other general-purpose reference source has a treatise on the decimal expansion 0.999... with 63 references or nine-page articles on foreign cartoon characters (w.r.t. America).
Issues of the requirement of nonobviousness aside...
If the PodBuddy is very similar to the original product, then the original is not "inferior" (design considerations aside), and the patent system is doing its job.
It the PodBuddy is self-evidently superior, then the difference in functionality should prevent it from being covered by the patent. Again, the patent system is doing its job.
Of course, the word "unfair" invokes some kind of ethical system. If the company has optimized its price for profit, the invisible hand is working, and everyone who is willing to pay the price does, that's "fair" in the sense that no one is being coerced.
Now, whether it's ethical ("fair") in some other (broader?) sense to charge higher prices than some people can afford to pay for medications that significantly improve quality of life is a different issue.
That difference is more academic than that, I think. Genetic codes produced by natural processes (variation and selection) is, as you put it, "representational of a natural reality." But what about new arrangements and combinations of genetic material, previously unseen in nature.
To imagine new applications, and then create new sequences of genetic code (previously unseen) is nature certainly demands imagination, and so is the same sort of "creative" process that you ascribe to software programmers.
One could argue that "Progamming code is a mapping of logical relationships used, and is a representational of a natural system of logic" (certainly, the logical calculus is at least as fundamental to "natural reality" as a fairly narrow class of chemical processes).
The real difference here, it seems, is that the quanta of construction are of different logical scales; that is, even the simplest piece of genetic code is much more complicated than an XOR-gate. The assertion of a "fundamental difference" between these cases relies, then, on picking an arbitrary line dividing "fundamental" properties (like logical relationships)from "extant and fundamental, but complicated enough that new combinations of them shouldn't be patentable" (like genetic blueprints).
Worse, invoking a particularly absurd application of the argument, one could assert that atoms themselves are "representational of a natural reality," and that any rearrangement of them (including all tangible inventions) oughtn't be patentable.
What kinds of genetic "inventions" we should be able to patent is still up in the air, but it's a poor start to base public policy on dubious logical assumptions (in this case, the existence of a "fundamental difference" as described in the above post).
That the mentioned conduct being felonious (or even just criminal) is philosophically dubious doesn't have much to do with the legitimacy of DNA fingerprinting.
I'd imagine it would be little consolation to a rape victim that her assailant couldn't be identified (or that she was attacked by someone who wasn't caught) because someone decided that it wouldn't be unfair to sample graffiti artists.
Hear, hear! Just earlier today, the following was posted on the front page:
Ballmer On Microsoft's Search Goofs
Posted by timothy on 2004.03.25 14:12
from the at-least-that's-honest dept.
An anonymous reader writes "AP reports on CEO Steve Ballmer's regret over Microsoft's failure to get into the search market early on. Best quote? 'I want to make sure (a user) can't get through... an online experience without hitting a Microsoft ad.' Nice to see they're still user-oriented."
Now, what Microsoft execs tell AP reporters may well often be important to the industry, but Ballmer announcing that he'd like his company's advertising to be more permeating is a boring example of marketing principles, not a/. subject worthy of discussion. (What? You're saying you'd like your advertisements to reach and possibly affect more potential customers?)
Microsoft has definitely done some dirty things in its day, and many of them are/.-able (and deserve more media attention), but the above is a thin excuse to rail against them. No matter how you feel about Microsoft, you could probably agree that the energy devoted to that discussion would have been more informatively spent on, say, a science topic, than on an anti-Microsoft Two Minutes' Hate.
I am reasonably certain that the only reason (today) that everyone uses Windows is because everyone uses Windows.
Certainly. Just like any product where inter-user compatibility is important, who already uses the product has a dramatic effect on adoption. But adoption doesn't occur in a vacuum -- at some point, the reason that many people used Windows is because it was the OS that best suited their needs. Otherwise, they would have picked a different product.
For all its foibles, XP surely has some of the features that made earlier incarnations of Windows appealing enough that users adopted them.
Free market benefits can be very real here.
In my area (Eugene, OR), we pay ~$42 for cable access (including a few one- and two-dollar fees), where there's only one major provider. In Tacoma, where competition has forced prices down, Comcast high-speed Internet starts at $20.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that a day (in any sense) varies between 58.7 and 176 (Earth days), it's that those numbers are measurements for different definitions of day. Mercury's sidereal day, the time it takes Mercury to make a complete rotation (with respect to the background stars), is 58.7 days. The length of Mars' solar day, the time it takes to for the sun to cross the same meridian on Mercury (or the time it takes to reach the same place in the sky from the perspective of someone standing at a fixed point on Mercury) is 176 days. This notion is a little strange when you first hear about it, because the distinction is much narrower here on Earth: Our solar day is (very close to) the usual 24 hours, but our sidereal day is about four minutes shorter. (The difference on Mercury is so much larger than it is here because Earth's orbital period -- how long it takes to complete one trip around the sun -- is more than two orders of magnitude larger than its sidereal day. By contrast, on Mercury those quantities are comparable.)
digital films are as vulnerable to loss as digitized documents
Maybe that's because digital films are digital documents? How much was the consultant paid who sorted that one out?
...on the subversive moral instruction of Sesame Street
Do you really mean the lobbying itself, and not, say, the contributions of corporate sponsors and interest groups that form the other half of this potential conflict of interest?
Were it not for lobbying, congressmen might have a harder time discovering and learning about some issues. How would they, besides the Congressional Research Service, letters from the home district, and -- once they know enough about an issue that they know whom to ask -- calling in expert testimony?
...the names of every project lead/author of every Linux project, from the Wikipedia article:
"Hans Thomas Reiser (born December 1963) is an American computer programmer famous for his contributions to the free software community in the field of file systems. In particular he is deeply involved in the Linux kernel development with his widespread ReiserFS journaling file system and its successor Reiser4. In 1997 Reiser founded and has since headed Namesys Inc., a software company specialized in operating systems and in developing and providing support for his file systems. He is currently residing in Oakland, California. Since October 10, 2006, he is charged with the murder of his missing estranged wife, Nina Reiser, and is currently being held on remand."
Seriously, it should be no real burden for submitters or even editors to add a one-phrase or -sentence bio for players not all of us may be familiar with, so that Linux laypeople here (myself included) know why this would even be construed as "news for nerds" at all.
(1) Point taken, but that's different. Intel may be an advertiser here, but there's no evidence that there's any soft-sell payola here. (Are Intel products ever reviewed here, even, besides by voluntary member posts, i.e. is this even a potential conflict of interest?) (2) The tagline aside, Slashdot is not a news site: Its stories are not reported as (even ostensibly objective) news -- they're reported more like opinionated analysis (which includes both thought-provoking and shameless flamebait). From recent (posted) summaries: "Perhaps by then, people will have forgotten how eBay enabled buyer 'Blazers5505' to hook up with sellers like 'oneclickshooting' just weeks before the worst mass shooting in modern US history, prompting eBay to issue a gun-parts-don't-kill-students-guns-and-ammo-do statement that showed little evidence of its celebrated commitment to social consciousness." "Google's motto is 'Don't Be Evil' -- but they sure have an evil non-disclosure agreement!... Luckily, someone has posted excerpts from the NDA before he signed it and had to say silent forever." "I wonder if this time it will be more obvious to the courts that Verizon's patents aren't so original?" "How long will we let rampant censorship go on, in the name of economic interest?" Also, cf. most stories about China, Diebold, Microsoft, the Microsoft topic icon, etc. These opinions may be variously well-supported by data, but they're opinions nonetheless, and are often (and unfortunately) disguised as news. How about "Analysis for Nerds, (Mostly) Stuff That Matters?"
Dantooine, the planet Leia named to Grand Moff Tarkin as the location of the hidden rebel base, was home only to an abandoned complex. Tarkin asserted that Dantooine was too remote to make an "effective demonstration" and instead destroyed Leia's (adopted) homeworld of Alderaan.
According to this link cited in the article, it's not that "violent" games would only be "accessible" to customers over 30, it's that retailers would be required "to check I.D. for buyers" who wanted to browse that section and "who appear to be 30 or under." It's more like the policy of checking IDs when serving alcohol than the nonsense the article and summary suggest.
Incidentally, if they were accurate, it would (comically) mean that someone could run for and win a seat in the House of Representatives and sponsor laws re video game violence before they could browse the proposed section at game stores.
It's apparently too much to expect that when a story is submitted by an editor, he check the primary sources linked in the cited article to support what's obviously an improbable assertion (and in this case, a flatly incorrect one).
It depends on what you mean by "of value."
At any rate, any particular pair of twin primes is unlikely* to be especially "significant." However, an important open problem in math is, "Do there exist infinitely many twin primes?" Experts think it's likely enough that the answer is yes that they've named that supposition "Twin Prime Conjecture," which indicates that those experts consider it definitely less than a theorem but much more than a wild guess.
That the problem is so simply stated but remains unsolved is a testament to its difficulty (cf. Fermat's Last Theorem a.k.a. Wiles' Theorem). Hardy and Wright wrote to this effect: "The evidence, when examined in detail, appears to justify this conjecture, but the proof or disproof of conjectures of this type is at present beyond the resources of mathematics."
*If the conjecture is false, that is, if there are only finitely many twin primes, certainly the largest pair is important.
Incidentally, the "Pentium bug" was discovered when someone computed the reciprocals of two large (twin) primes and noticed an error after about 10 decimal paces.
Twin Prime (Wikipedia)
"Parakey is a Web-based computer user interface proposed by Firefox creator Blake Ross. Ross describes it as a 'a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.' The idea behind it is to make image, video, and text transfer to the web easier."
Even the Wikipedia article is awfully short for a computer tech topic. Is this just a proposal? Vaporvare? If not, does anyone have a link to something more substantial about it?
You might guess it from the summary, but the implication is that Ross has a potential motive other than promoting blind ranking for its own ostensibly good sake.
Maybe this should have been: "...Island of Stability..." If you're visually inclined, check out the aptly illustrated "chart of nuclides," showing stability as a function of nucleon counts (i.e. proton and neutron counts).
...deer hunt you!
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Compassion and decency certainly have a place in the law. To the extent that laws protect rights, they codify the notion that we're fundamentally obligated to be decent to one another in (usually obvious) ways. But it's not clear to me that Schwartz' medical condition means that this case should be treated any differently.
Based on the provided links (thanks for the link in your reply, BTW), Schwartz didn't commit any real offense, this case should be dropped for that reason. But the same applies to most of the RIAA lawsuits I've read about here (consider this thankfully dropped case that you linked earlier). Schwartz' medical condition doesn't distinguish her from many of the other RIAA lawsuit defendants (i.e. she isn't "helpless") unless it significantly affects her capacity to do the illegal things the RIAA claims she did. If it does, the summary (or at least one of the links) ought to have explained that; if it doesn't, her medical condition isn't relevant and so doesn't belong in the story.
Regards, -T
I appreciate NewYorkCountryLawyer's insight into many of the legal issues discussed here, but the summary seems misdirected.
The summary describes a "case against a woman with Multiple Sclerosis," and the lede of the P2PNet article is, "RaeJ Schwartz is a mother in Queen's [sic], New York, who's been seriously disabled by multiple sclerosis, a chronic, crippling disease of the central nervous system." Neither makes any further mention of her disease or disability, or any mention of how either affects the case, so we're left to guess: Is the implication that the RIAA is particularly unscrupulous for bringing a suit against someone with a severe medical condition, and that it should hence be additionally vilified accordingly? This leaves unanswered the basic question of why her disease should affect our analysis of the situation. My best guess: MS can severely limit mobility, so the implication is that her disease prevented her from downloading. (How likely is this? I'm ignorant of the practical specifics of the disease.) If this is the implication, it should have been included in the summary.
Instead of name-dropping her disability and saying no more, the summary ought to have included something more relevant, like "a case against a woman who has a severe medical condition preventing her from conventional computer use" or "a case against a woman who likely never downloaded any music" (as was suggested in the P2PNet article, though this would deserve more explanation, too).
Some of us here (me included) are interested in legal issues but don't play WoW. A better summary would have included a description of the program, so that those of us who don't keep up with this niche have to fish around through links.
From the (admittedly linked) WoW Glider Homepage. "WoW Glider is a tool that plays your World of Warcraft character for you, the way you want it. It grinds, it loots, it skins, it heals, it even farms soul shards... without you."
I don't need the karma, but Glider FAQ
-T
As it stands, Wikipedia will never "make the grade" in academic circles for a simple reason: Academic citation is meaningless without authority -- almost by defintion -- and allowing anyone to modify entries removes any guarantee that the entries themselves are authoritative. (This situation is actually somewhat worse than that: On account of the free editing policy, any article can contain contradictory statements are different times, or even at once.) Whether Wikipedia has the qualifications for academic citation (i.e. is a source to trust your academic reputation to) is separate from whether it is useful or a valuable resource in any other context. Indeed, Wikipedia is a superb, even unparalleled resource, in many other ("softer") ways: (1) It's an excellent casual reference, as a starting point for academic research, or as a source for rounded, pithy introductions to just about anything. (2) It _is_ a source for just about anything. No other general-purpose reference source has a treatise on the decimal expansion 0.999... with 63 references or nine-page articles on foreign cartoon characters (w.r.t. America).
Some rural areas, like middle-of-nowhere, Oregon, haven't relied on corporate munificence: http://www.wirednews.com/news/wireless/0,1382,6923 4,00.html
Issues of the requirement of nonobviousness aside... If the PodBuddy is very similar to the original product, then the original is not "inferior" (design considerations aside), and the patent system is doing its job. It the PodBuddy is self-evidently superior, then the difference in functionality should prevent it from being covered by the patent. Again, the patent system is doing its job.
Of course, the word "unfair" invokes some kind of ethical system. If the company has optimized its price for profit, the invisible hand is working, and everyone who is willing to pay the price does, that's "fair" in the sense that no one is being coerced. Now, whether it's ethical ("fair") in some other (broader?) sense to charge higher prices than some people can afford to pay for medications that significantly improve quality of life is a different issue.
That difference is more academic than that, I think. Genetic codes produced by natural processes (variation and selection) is, as you put it, "representational of a natural reality." But what about new arrangements and combinations of genetic material, previously unseen in nature. To imagine new applications, and then create new sequences of genetic code (previously unseen) is nature certainly demands imagination, and so is the same sort of "creative" process that you ascribe to software programmers. One could argue that "Progamming code is a mapping of logical relationships used, and is a representational of a natural system of logic" (certainly, the logical calculus is at least as fundamental to "natural reality" as a fairly narrow class of chemical processes). The real difference here, it seems, is that the quanta of construction are of different logical scales; that is, even the simplest piece of genetic code is much more complicated than an XOR-gate. The assertion of a "fundamental difference" between these cases relies, then, on picking an arbitrary line dividing "fundamental" properties (like logical relationships)from "extant and fundamental, but complicated enough that new combinations of them shouldn't be patentable" (like genetic blueprints). Worse, invoking a particularly absurd application of the argument, one could assert that atoms themselves are "representational of a natural reality," and that any rearrangement of them (including all tangible inventions) oughtn't be patentable. What kinds of genetic "inventions" we should be able to patent is still up in the air, but it's a poor start to base public policy on dubious logical assumptions (in this case, the existence of a "fundamental difference" as described in the above post).
That the mentioned conduct being felonious (or even just criminal) is philosophically dubious doesn't have much to do with the legitimacy of DNA fingerprinting. I'd imagine it would be little consolation to a rape victim that her assailant couldn't be identified (or that she was attacked by someone who wasn't caught) because someone decided that it wouldn't be unfair to sample graffiti artists.
I am reasonably certain that the only reason (today) that everyone uses Windows is because everyone uses Windows. Certainly. Just like any product where inter-user compatibility is important, who already uses the product has a dramatic effect on adoption. But adoption doesn't occur in a vacuum -- at some point, the reason that many people used Windows is because it was the OS that best suited their needs. Otherwise, they would have picked a different product. For all its foibles, XP surely has some of the features that made earlier incarnations of Windows appealing enough that users adopted them.
Free market benefits can be very real here. In my area (Eugene, OR), we pay ~$42 for cable access (including a few one- and two-dollar fees), where there's only one major provider. In Tacoma, where competition has forced prices down, Comcast high-speed Internet starts at $20.