I used to [use a tool to de-bloat images] This was important since much of the world was still on dial-up back then.
It is still important.
- Some of the world is STILL on dial-up. Even in the US. (especially the rural part: At my vacation/retirement ranch I had only 28kbps until AT&T upgraded the cell tower to LTE last year).
- Some of the "high-speed internet" isn't very - like DSL at 1.5 or 6 Mbps, or WISPs serving an entire town with what amounts to a WiFi hotspot.
- Some services charge by the bandwidth used.
- Some services throttle back "heavy users"
- Some services sell tiered usage, with higher prices for larger monthly data caps, and killing the link (e.g. prepaid), drastically throttling down (e.g. 4G dropping to 3G speed), and/or charging punitive "overage" rates for bandwidth beyond the pre-purchased tier.
- As the users get farther away, latency and setup-turnaround for the components of a web page display also slow the process.
Web developers tend to work with disks and servers built into their machine or attached by a fast LAN. So it's easy to miss that the actual users' experience may be slower - even drastically so. (Thus was the web, at the dawn of image-laden web pages, nicknamed the "World Wide Wait".) And they're not charged for that bandwidth, so they also don't get their noses rubbed in the price of it when they receive their monthly bills or hit their monthly caps.
So keeping a web page's bandwidth use small is still useful:
- Even on broadband it makes it quicker - "snappier" - which improves the user experience.
- It can reach a wider audience, as those on slower or more latent links don't give up in disgust.
- It saves some users substantial money.
Solar panels have a very large capital expense, they are cheap in the long run, but they are not feasible for running industry in poor countries.
Raw, ready-to-mount, single-crystal panels are down to $0.50/watt now, in pallets of ten at about 350 watts each, and have good lifetimes. Even adding the control electronics and batteries for nighttime and bad weather power, and replacing the batteries periodically, that's cheaper than building and running coal plants and their distribution infrastructure (even at third-world labor prices).
The control electronics is mostly semiconductor devices and still benefiting from Moore's Law. Solar panels are still improving, as are batteries (following their own Moore's Law like curves.) Solar has a factor of several in efficiency yet to go, and lot of room for cheaper manufacture. Batteries are pretty efficient, but still have lots of room for improvement in charge/discharge rates, lifetime, and manufacturing cost. Coal plants, meanwhile, are already close to as efficient and cheap to run as they can get. So solar will continue to improve its lead.
The main remaining advantage to coal plants is grid power gives suppliers an ongoing revenue stream and a captive market, while solar provides only an occasional capital purchase.
(But why do you never hear about the greenhouse effect of solar panels?)
Rich corporations and people are allowed to do what they want.
There are exceptions: Volkswagen to pay $2.8 billion in US diesel emission scandal
That's because they cheated the GOVERNMENT.
But it's nice to see the individuals who got hurt (lower mileage once the patches are applied, lower resale value) getting some of the bux for a change.
(Why do you still get robo-calls? Because the Fed preempted state laws that had let people sue the robo-callers for damages.)
I thought one of the previous releases mentioned Weeping Angel (or at least weeping something) and that it turned Samsung TVs into room bugs. So I assumed this one was more details on it.
But the media seems to be talking about it as if it's new with this release and a big surprise.
Did they just notice it now, or am I misremembering the earlier stuff? (Either way, it's good that it's finally getting public attention.)
(Sorry to bother others with the question. But I've been too busy to plow through it all personally and would appreciate info from people who have done some deep-diving.)
... the sheer number of "why would you want that at all" or "nobody needs that" or "the software is fine as it is" type responses from software users. What is particularly puzzling is that its not the developers of the software rejecting the suggestions -- its users of the software...
You've answered your own question. To mix a few metaphors:
One of the things about software is that a LOT of people stand on the shoulders of each giant - by being users of his code. A change that isn't a straight augmentation (and even some that are intended to be) can shift the sand under their castles and bring them crashing down.
The old rules prevent anybody (with enough money) from buying an outlet in each of the bulk of the markets and setting up a new network. (That would be doable even by parties of relatively modest means, because there are a lot of little stations that are hanging on by their fingernails which might be available cheap.) They're limited to directly reaching about a third of the potential viewers (and partnering with other owners if they want to reach more).
Meanwhile, they don't keep someone from buying up essentially all the outlets in a particular area (since taking over more of the stations doesn't add any more potential viewers).
Both of those reduce diversity - the first nationally, the second within regions.
Seems to me that eliminating the rule would fix the first one and increase the diversity of opinion available to viewers.
(Meanwhile, if the FCC wants to prohibit something to try to increase diversity, they could limit the number of outlets within each region a single party could own. That would also free up some outlets for new wholly-owned network builders, too.)
Those [tiny job ads] are needed for job-based green card applications, not for H1-Bs.
They used to be needed for H1-Bs also. Then the requirement was dropped.
The classified ad section of the Saturday issue of the San Jose Mercury News shrank from a small telephone books to a few pages. (And the paper and postage expenses of Silicon Valley technical people on unemployment dropped in proportion.)
A degree from India is absolutely meaningless. They have a "university" practically on every street corner...
Worse than that: The body shops often claim the worker in question has degrees that they don't actually have - but which the employer requires.
= = = =
Back before things got egregious, more than a decade ago, my wife was involved in making a hiring decision, and one of the candidates was an H1-B. My wife asked her about the masters degree on her resume and she was appalled: She had no such degree, (nor a CS bachelors - just some classes in the field.) She risked her immigration status rather than be party to the fraud.
(My wife hired her: She had adequate skills for the position and had demonstrated her honesty.)
And, frankly, he's no more of an embarrassment than Obama was...
At least we know that he's not a (knowledgeable about the religion) Muslim.
He bowed to a Muslim head of state. There was some flap in the US media about that, but they missed a big point: That was literal blasphemy. Muslims don't bow to heads of state - or anyone else but God.
It was a very good thing he had diplomatic immunity. An ordinary person doing that in a country with a sharia-based legal system could have been in serious trouble.
(By the way: Citizens of a republic also don't bow to heads of state, according to diplomatic protocol. In a republic we're ALL (at least all that are elegible to vote) sovereigns, and thus formally peers with kings and queens. The President is just the guy holding a particular job - which is why he's addressed as "Mr. President".)
You are making the assumption that people buying things have complete information about the products they buy. That assumption does make the math easy in econ 101, but it is not true in the real world.
That's because econ 101 courses are taught by Keynsian, rather than Hayekian / "Austrian School", or Friedmanite / "Chicago School" principles.
(That's largely thanks to financial meddling in the economics journal and university department "marketplace of ideas" by the Federal Reserve Banks, in the form of selective grants of large amounts of (freshly "printed") money.)
Both the Austrian and Chicago schools analyze market decisions with respect to the marginal cost of collecting information for making better decisions vs. the marginal benefit of the improvement of the decisions.
Using Firefox in Linux is truly painful anymore, I quickly use it to install Chrome these days.
I don't use chrome, and am curious why you do.
1) When an employer's IT guy deployed it as the default browser, a few years back, I stopped using it (and installed Firefox) when a typo brought up a NSFW site - and then I couldn't get Chrome to dump it from the autocomplete (even by following their excuse for online documentation), where it insisted it be the top entry whenever I typed the first keystroke of a site name that started with the same first letter.
2) Like several appliances, its voice-typing feature forwards the sound samples over the Internet to servers - acting as a room bug. (Even if it doesn't do this all the time - and how do you know it doesn't? - it provides the infrastructure for trivial malware hacks to do so.)
3) The version on my new Android smartphone has a click-through license that includes an adobe license, which in turn constrains the user - for the rest of his life - to not compete with Adobe's products or work on security matters related to them. Accepting that (on an appliance that is identifiable as mine and no doubt "phones home" with the acceptance) would be a career limiting move.
So I don't use Chrome, and don't understand why any computer professional would.
... if I need a virtual server for something, I spin up a virtual server and I run software on it. But virtualization is enough of a pain in the ass when it doesn't work right. Why would I want containers to add yet another level of abstraction getting in my way.
Because containers are lighter weight than virtual servers but still get what you want done. You still have only one "extra level of abstraction" but it's less of a pain.
A virtual server is a whole virtual machine, with its own copy of the OS, its own file system with all the libraries and utilities, etc.
A container is a package containing your application and designating how much of which version of the OS, libraries, file system, utilities, etc. it gets to see. It looks to the app like it's running on its own little machine, just like in a VM. But it's actually running (along with everything else) under the native Linux kernel, which is using several compartmentalization mechanisms to give the app its own, limited and tuned, view of task numbers, file system, tables, etc.
It's a sandbox, something like a chroot jail, except instead of just compartmentalizing the file system (to show a version that limits the app's view and shows it its own versions of libraries and such) it does the same thing to stuff like the processor, task environment, available devices, etc.
Go to the government and find the stupid, cheap, incompetent anal aperture(s) who decided to save a few dollars by connecting a CIVIL DEFENCE system INSECURELY to the INTERNET,..
What makes you think it was done over then Internet?
I'm sure that it is possible to set up a Raspberry Pi to authenticate the received touch tones in a way similar to the two-factor authentication fobs, at a much reduced cost, no? Or am I missing something?
What you're missing is that it's a life-critical system that has to run unattended for years and work every time when needed, or people depending on it may be injured or killed.
So the equipment has to be engineered, built, and tested to high standards.
How high? High enough to convince the insurance company city-raters to believe it will do the job. Otherwise the city's rating will drop and everybody's insurance premiums there will go up, to the tune of many millions per year.
(Insurance companies are capitalism's way of mapping risky behavior's costs from damage, suffering and death into money out-of-pocket BEFORE people get hurt and damage gets done.)
Seek shelter immediatelyâ. If shelter is not available and severe weather is in the area lie in a ditch, ravine, culvert or low-lying area. Make sure the low-lying area you choose is not prone to flooding. Use your arms or a piece of clothing to protect your head and neck.
If this is an approaching electrical storm (and tornadoes are often VERY lightning-generating), lying in a ditch or other cut in the ground can be suicidal.
When lightning strikes the ground the current spreads out, just as the other end does in the cloud. (And it doesn't have to even hit: When a charged cloud is over the ground the opposite charge collects beneath it, and when the cloud discharges it the collected charge runs away, creating a "surge" with much the same effect).
The current tends to spread out near the surface. A ditch or other cut into the ground makes a gap in this easy path - and a bolt will tend to cross it at the narrowest point. If you're crouching in the ditch the easiest path across the ditch is through you.
The problem is allergies are problems with the fine-tuning of the immune system. Anything which massively inhibits this is going to cause massive problems...perhaps up to the "bubble-boy syndrome" level.
It depends on which subset you're talking about when you say "allergies".
The common sniffiling-and-hives branch is apparently a rapid massive-response to attack tropical worms,. You get "allergies" when this bored system decides that molecule on a plant pollen grain or some other irritant is actually a tropical worm and needs a SWAT team style response. Unless you're living in an area where there are such tropical worms AND have already been infected by them once, the system is probably doing you no good at all (but considerable harm if it has gone into "looking for work" mode).
Now I don't know if this treatment is specific to that system or more general. But if it is specific to it, it should be really useful for allergy sufferers. And if it's more general it could still be useful for some things (better anti-rejection treatments?) as well as being the initial breakthrough leading to a burst of designer molecules for more controlled interventions.
FTC is specifically forbidden by law to regulate ISPs.
FTC is specifically forbidden by current/b. law to regulate ISPs.
This is something that is subject to change. (It's a one-liner either way.) It's also something that people in the Trump administration are already on the record of having mentioned.
If enough congressmen can be convinced that the problem for them will go away if they do it that way, they could easily do it in a few weeks.
And if the pro-network-neutrality people can be convinced that moving this from the FCC to the FTC would solve their problems, or the bulk of them, without breaking the Internet in the process, they have enough lobbying power to override even the multi-billion-dollar entertainment conglomerates' lobbying against such a move.
The net non-neutrality problem is not technical, so the solution to isn't FCC rulemaking.
The problem stems from two aspects of monopoly/cartel control of the market, so the solution is FTC, DOJ, and antitrust.
The two aspects are:
- Vertical integration of ISPs into conglomerates that make most of their money from selling "content" that can be transported over the internet. This gives them massive financial incentives to have their ISP divisions penalize services competing either with their entertainment divisions' online services on the same ISP, or their offline / on other ISPs marketing. Services competing with their own products are penalized unless they pay enough extra to more than make up for their impact on the profit from the conglomerate's own product. "No-neutrality" is one of the manifestations of this anti-competitive tie-in.
- A limited number of competitors results in monopolistic / cartel levels of pricing and service. (The FCC historically considers two providers to be "competition" - though a minimum of three, and usually four or more, competitors are necessary before market forces have good effects on either prices or service levels.) On the service-level side, the incentive is to engage in "rent-seeking" by providing as little service as necessary and charge as much extra as possible, from whichever player can be soaked, for more than a token minimum. (If they don't like it, who will they go to?)
All these years tossed in the bin just like that. What a colossal...
So do you think they should throw MORE man-lifetimes down the rathole after those already wasted?
Rule 1 of business: Don't throw good money after bad. It applies to other endeavors and resource types as well.
Experiments are necessary to progress. You usually can't tell for sure if something will be a great improvement, or be crippled by "gotchas", until you try it. But once you find out, first that they're failing, second that they're not readily fixable, it's time to pull the plug, stop the waste, and move on.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to [use a tool to de-bloat images] This was important since much of the world was still on dial-up back then.
It is still important.
- Some of the world is STILL on dial-up. Even in the US. (especially the rural part: At my vacation/retirement ranch I had only 28kbps until AT&T upgraded the cell tower to LTE last year).
- Some of the "high-speed internet" isn't very - like DSL at 1.5 or 6 Mbps, or WISPs serving an entire town with what amounts to a WiFi hotspot.
- Some services charge by the bandwidth used.
- Some services throttle back "heavy users"
- Some services sell tiered usage, with higher prices for larger monthly data caps, and killing the link (e.g. prepaid), drastically throttling down (e.g. 4G dropping to 3G speed), and/or charging punitive "overage" rates for bandwidth beyond the pre-purchased tier.
- As the users get farther away, latency and setup-turnaround for the components of a web page display also slow the process.
Web developers tend to work with disks and servers built into their machine or attached by a fast LAN. So it's easy to miss that the actual users' experience may be slower - even drastically so. (Thus was the web, at the dawn of image-laden web pages, nicknamed the "World Wide Wait".) And they're not charged for that bandwidth, so they also don't get their noses rubbed in the price of it when they receive their monthly bills or hit their monthly caps.
So keeping a web page's bandwidth use small is still useful:
- Even on broadband it makes it quicker - "snappier" - which improves the user experience.
- It can reach a wider audience, as those on slower or more latent links don't give up in disgust.
- It saves some users substantial money.
... Blue Strat is lying and blustering again ...
Blue Strat is dead-on correct on this one.
Solar panels have a very large capital expense, they are cheap in the long run, but they are not feasible for running industry in poor countries.
Raw, ready-to-mount, single-crystal panels are down to $0.50/watt now, in pallets of ten at about 350 watts each, and have good lifetimes. Even adding the control electronics and batteries for nighttime and bad weather power, and replacing the batteries periodically, that's cheaper than building and running coal plants and their distribution infrastructure (even at third-world labor prices).
The control electronics is mostly semiconductor devices and still benefiting from Moore's Law. Solar panels are still improving, as are batteries (following their own Moore's Law like curves.) Solar has a factor of several in efficiency yet to go, and lot of room for cheaper manufacture. Batteries are pretty efficient, but still have lots of room for improvement in charge/discharge rates, lifetime, and manufacturing cost. Coal plants, meanwhile, are already close to as efficient and cheap to run as they can get. So solar will continue to improve its lead.
The main remaining advantage to coal plants is grid power gives suppliers an ongoing revenue stream and a captive market, while solar provides only an occasional capital purchase.
(But why do you never hear about the greenhouse effect of solar panels?)
Too bad the colonies across the pond are now run by a muppet.
Yeah, and Carthage must be destroyed, too.
Your side lost. Five and a half months ago. Isn't it time you got over it?
Rich corporations and people are allowed to do what they want.
There are exceptions: Volkswagen to pay $2.8 billion in US diesel emission scandal
That's because they cheated the GOVERNMENT.
But it's nice to see the individuals who got hurt (lower mileage once the patches are applied, lower resale value) getting some of the bux for a change.
(Why do you still get robo-calls? Because the Fed preempted state laws that had let people sue the robo-callers for damages.)
I thought one of the previous releases mentioned Weeping Angel (or at least weeping something) and that it turned Samsung TVs into room bugs. So I assumed this one was more details on it.
But the media seems to be talking about it as if it's new with this release and a big surprise.
Did they just notice it now, or am I misremembering the earlier stuff? (Either way, it's good that it's finally getting public attention.)
(Sorry to bother others with the question. But I've been too busy to plow through it all personally and would appreciate info from people who have done some deep-diving.)
... the sheer number of "why would you want that at all" or "nobody needs that" or "the software is fine as it is" type responses from software users. What is particularly puzzling is that its not the developers of the software rejecting the suggestions -- its users of the software ...
You've answered your own question. To mix a few metaphors:
One of the things about software is that a LOT of people stand on the shoulders of each giant - by being users of his code. A change that isn't a straight augmentation (and even some that are intended to be) can shift the sand under their castles and bring them crashing down.
The old rules prevent anybody (with enough money) from buying an outlet in each of the bulk of the markets and setting up a new network. (That would be doable even by parties of relatively modest means, because there are a lot of little stations that are hanging on by their fingernails which might be available cheap.) They're limited to directly reaching about a third of the potential viewers (and partnering with other owners if they want to reach more).
Meanwhile, they don't keep someone from buying up essentially all the outlets in a particular area (since taking over more of the stations doesn't add any more potential viewers).
Both of those reduce diversity - the first nationally, the second within regions.
Seems to me that eliminating the rule would fix the first one and increase the diversity of opinion available to viewers.
(Meanwhile, if the FCC wants to prohibit something to try to increase diversity, they could limit the number of outlets within each region a single party could own. That would also free up some outlets for new wholly-owned network builders, too.)
You misread my post. We are in agreement.
Those [tiny job ads] are needed for job-based green card applications, not for H1-Bs.
They used to be needed for H1-Bs also. Then the requirement was dropped.
The classified ad section of the Saturday issue of the San Jose Mercury News shrank from a small telephone books to a few pages. (And the paper and postage expenses of Silicon Valley technical people on unemployment dropped in proportion.)
A degree from India is absolutely meaningless. They have a "university" practically on every street corner ...
Worse than that: The body shops often claim the worker in question has degrees that they don't actually have - but which the employer requires.
= = = =
Back before things got egregious, more than a decade ago, my wife was involved in making a hiring decision, and one of the candidates was an H1-B. My wife asked her about the masters degree on her resume and she was appalled: She had no such degree, (nor a CS bachelors - just some classes in the field.) She risked her immigration status rather than be party to the fraud.
(My wife hired her: She had adequate skills for the position and had demonstrated her honesty.)
And, frankly, he's no more of an embarrassment than Obama was ...
At least we know that he's not a (knowledgeable about the religion) Muslim.
He bowed to a Muslim head of state. There was some flap in the US media about that, but they missed a big point: That was literal blasphemy. Muslims don't bow to heads of state - or anyone else but God.
It was a very good thing he had diplomatic immunity. An ordinary person doing that in a country with a sharia-based legal system could have been in serious trouble.
(By the way: Citizens of a republic also don't bow to heads of state, according to diplomatic protocol. In a republic we're ALL (at least all that are elegible to vote) sovereigns, and thus formally peers with kings and queens. The President is just the guy holding a particular job - which is why he's addressed as "Mr. President".)
That's why Snowden was charged with espionage and not treason.
Also why Jane Fonda got to marry Ted Turner, rather than hang by the neck.
You are making the assumption that people buying things have complete information about the products they buy. That assumption does make the math easy in econ 101, but it is not true in the real world.
That's because econ 101 courses are taught by Keynsian, rather than Hayekian / "Austrian School", or Friedmanite / "Chicago School" principles.
(That's largely thanks to financial meddling in the economics journal and university department "marketplace of ideas" by the Federal Reserve Banks, in the form of selective grants of large amounts of (freshly "printed") money.)
Both the Austrian and Chicago schools analyze market decisions with respect to the marginal cost of collecting information for making better decisions vs. the marginal benefit of the improvement of the decisions.
Using Firefox in Linux is truly painful anymore, I quickly use it to install Chrome these days.
I don't use chrome, and am curious why you do.
1) When an employer's IT guy deployed it as the default browser, a few years back, I stopped using it (and installed Firefox) when a typo brought up a NSFW site - and then I couldn't get Chrome to dump it from the autocomplete (even by following their excuse for online documentation), where it insisted it be the top entry whenever I typed the first keystroke of a site name that started with the same first letter.
2) Like several appliances, its voice-typing feature forwards the sound samples over the Internet to servers - acting as a room bug. (Even if it doesn't do this all the time - and how do you know it doesn't? - it provides the infrastructure for trivial malware hacks to do so.)
3) The version on my new Android smartphone has a click-through license that includes an adobe license, which in turn constrains the user - for the rest of his life - to not compete with Adobe's products or work on security matters related to them. Accepting that (on an appliance that is identifiable as mine and no doubt "phones home" with the acceptance) would be a career limiting move.
So I don't use Chrome, and don't understand why any computer professional would.
... if I need a virtual server for something, I spin up a virtual server and I run software on it. But virtualization is enough of a pain in the ass when it doesn't work right. Why would I want containers to add yet another level of abstraction getting in my way.
Because containers are lighter weight than virtual servers but still get what you want done. You still have only one "extra level of abstraction" but it's less of a pain.
A virtual server is a whole virtual machine, with its own copy of the OS, its own file system with all the libraries and utilities, etc.
A container is a package containing your application and designating how much of which version of the OS, libraries, file system, utilities, etc. it gets to see. It looks to the app like it's running on its own little machine, just like in a VM. But it's actually running (along with everything else) under the native Linux kernel, which is using several compartmentalization mechanisms to give the app its own, limited and tuned, view of task numbers, file system, tables, etc.
It's a sandbox, something like a chroot jail, except instead of just compartmentalizing the file system (to show a version that limits the app's view and shows it its own versions of libraries and such) it does the same thing to stuff like the processor, task environment, available devices, etc.
Go to the government and find the stupid, cheap, incompetent anal aperture(s) who decided to save a few dollars by connecting a CIVIL DEFENCE system INSECURELY to the INTERNET,..
What makes you think it was done over then Internet?
I'm sure that it is possible to set up a Raspberry Pi to authenticate the received touch tones in a way similar to the two-factor authentication fobs, at a much reduced cost, no? Or am I missing something?
What you're missing is that it's a life-critical system that has to run unattended for years and work every time when needed, or people depending on it may be injured or killed.
So the equipment has to be engineered, built, and tested to high standards.
How high? High enough to convince the insurance company city-raters to believe it will do the job. Otherwise the city's rating will drop and everybody's insurance premiums there will go up, to the tune of many millions per year.
(Insurance companies are capitalism's way of mapping risky behavior's costs from damage, suffering and death into money out-of-pocket BEFORE people get hurt and damage gets done.)
The kid should be stung up for something like this.
You could jail him under a siren and test it a lot.
The page advises:
If this is an approaching electrical storm (and tornadoes are often VERY lightning-generating), lying in a ditch or other cut in the ground can be suicidal.
When lightning strikes the ground the current spreads out, just as the other end does in the cloud. (And it doesn't have to even hit: When a charged cloud is over the ground the opposite charge collects beneath it, and when the cloud discharges it the collected charge runs away, creating a "surge" with much the same effect).
The current tends to spread out near the surface. A ditch or other cut into the ground makes a gap in this easy path - and a bolt will tend to cross it at the narrowest point. If you're crouching in the ditch the easiest path across the ditch is through you.
The problem is allergies are problems with the fine-tuning of the immune system. Anything which massively inhibits this is going to cause massive problems...perhaps up to the "bubble-boy syndrome" level.
It depends on which subset you're talking about when you say "allergies".
The common sniffiling-and-hives branch is apparently a rapid massive-response to attack tropical worms,. You get "allergies" when this bored system decides that molecule on a plant pollen grain or some other irritant is actually a tropical worm and needs a SWAT team style response. Unless you're living in an area where there are such tropical worms AND have already been infected by them once, the system is probably doing you no good at all (but considerable harm if it has gone into "looking for work" mode).
Now I don't know if this treatment is specific to that system or more general. But if it is specific to it, it should be really useful for allergy sufferers. And if it's more general it could still be useful for some things (better anti-rejection treatments?) as well as being the initial breakthrough leading to a burst of designer molecules for more controlled interventions.
FTC is specifically forbidden by law to regulate ISPs.
FTC is specifically forbidden by current/b. law to regulate ISPs.
This is something that is subject to change. (It's a one-liner either way.) It's also something that people in the Trump administration are already on the record of having mentioned.
If enough congressmen can be convinced that the problem for them will go away if they do it that way, they could easily do it in a few weeks.
And if the pro-network-neutrality people can be convinced that moving this from the FCC to the FTC would solve their problems, or the bulk of them, without breaking the Internet in the process, they have enough lobbying power to override even the multi-billion-dollar entertainment conglomerates' lobbying against such a move.
The net non-neutrality problem is not technical, so the solution to isn't FCC rulemaking.
The problem stems from two aspects of monopoly/cartel control of the market, so the solution is FTC, DOJ, and antitrust.
The two aspects are:
- Vertical integration of ISPs into conglomerates that make most of their money from selling "content" that can be transported over the internet. This gives them massive financial incentives to have their ISP divisions penalize services competing either with their entertainment divisions' online services on the same ISP, or their offline / on other ISPs marketing. Services competing with their own products are penalized unless they pay enough extra to more than make up for their impact on the profit from the conglomerate's own product. "No-neutrality" is one of the manifestations of this anti-competitive tie-in.
- A limited number of competitors results in monopolistic / cartel levels of pricing and service. (The FCC historically considers two providers to be "competition" - though a minimum of three, and usually four or more, competitors are necessary before market forces have good effects on either prices or service levels.) On the service-level side, the incentive is to engage in "rent-seeking" by providing as little service as necessary and charge as much extra as possible, from whichever player can be soaked, for more than a token minimum. (If they don't like it, who will they go to?)
Can I Get a Lobbyist?
It's more effective to BE one. Also cheaper.
Instead of keyboarding your complaints to public fora like Slashdot, type them onto a postcard and mail it to your representative and senator.
All these years tossed in the bin just like that. What a colossal ...
So do you think they should throw MORE man-lifetimes down the rathole after those already wasted?
Rule 1 of business: Don't throw good money after bad. It applies to other endeavors and resource types as well.
Experiments are necessary to progress. You usually can't tell for sure if something will be a great improvement, or be crippled by "gotchas", until you try it. But once you find out, first that they're failing, second that they're not readily fixable, it's time to pull the plug, stop the waste, and move on.