I support a constitutional amendment if the power is not already there... it is a much better use of the various legislature time than say gay marriage....
Seriously the government has warped the interstate commerce clause to pretty much let them do anything. And some states have done a lot for health care, like Massachusetts, but others haven't done anything at all....
Also I'd point to the financial industry. The government was very quick to jump in with low and zero interest loans for its buddies in wall street. The health industry needs some regulation. And many of the companies involved span multiple states.... Not that the government is great at regulation, because ATT is basically back to what it was in the 80's. But without regulation you end up like in Argentina where 1 or 2 companies control the industry, throw in barriers to entry so new companies can't enter the industry, and pretty much charge huge rip off prices that people can barely afford, but have no choice. E.g. Every hospital my family has dealt with has totally screwed up billing...It seems to be quite common. Almost all of them charge ridiculous prices for basic things. You would think since gauze is paid for in bulk, it would be cheaper than going to the supermarket...There are all sorts of reports of how hospitals/doctors rip off medicare/medicaid all over the country. That ripping off and over inflated pricing costs a lot of money....
In reality the states should be cracking down/prosecuting these tax thieves, but they don't....
Re:News for nerds. Stuff that matters
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Health Care Reform
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· Score: 1
I think this matters for when you your internet enabled sex toy gets stuck and you need the emergency room to get it off you...after making a hasty retreat from your parents' basement of course without being seen....
But seriously geeks get sick. Some have chronic illnesses which is what gives them so much time to lay in bed and read/play with the computer. It's not uncommon to see geeks with glasses (although I'm not sure the bill covers eye care...but anyway). Or geeks with asthma. Also look at Stephen Hawking. He needs a lot of medical care and he is an uber geek... Look at Steve Jobs, he needed an organ. What happens if you don't run apple. Although his geek status is a question. But a reality distortion field is very geeky:)
The bill appears to suck but....
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Health Care Reform
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The reality is that the government doesn't seem to get anything done. I recall Arlen Spector saying that the patriot act was flaws, but he would vote for it as is and fix it later... Well as you can see, no one has really changed it to fix it. In 1992/1993 when Bill Clinton tried to make health care, no one agreed with him and he couldn't pass the bill. The republicans that later got in control of congress failed to make another health care bill. I think it will be similar with this bill. The republicans are calling to scrap the bill and start over, or why the hurry. But pretty much they (and the democrats who vote no) will forget about it.
Still a lot of provisions I don't like. For example if you get cancer you are screwed with a 5 million per year benefits cap. But then again my insurance at work has a 5 million dollar lifetime cap, so I am even more screwed. People like my brother who didn't go to college and work at hourly jobs without benefits need this bill. He doesn't make enough money to afford health insurance, and the company does not provide it. So there's really nothing he can do. If he gets poison ivy, even real bad, he has to sit at home and suffer rather than visiting a doctor to get a prescription for a cortico steroid that could cure it. That's not right.....
Also an awful lot of personal bankruptcies are due to medical bills. There was a time when I graduated college and I was unemployed for almost a year before finding a job. If I got into a traffic accident or I broke my foot jogging, I would have been in deep trouble. Sometimes surgeries go into the hundred thousands or even millions.... I don't have that kind of money. Even now, if I got cancer and went over that 5 million lifetime cap on my company's insurance, I'd have to somehow borrow massive amounts of money that I would never pay back, or just die... Any system that doesn't value human life over all else is broken....
This bill pretty much sucks. The more provisions I see of it, the more I hate it. Also the parties are busy taking pot shots about things like abortion funding instead of fixing the bill. I don't really care about abortion funding. Most Americans don't give a damn either except for a few religious right nuts. I just want a bill that gives me some security that if I lose my job and get sick, I'm not going to have to declare bankruptcy or suffer with my illness until it gets better or I die......
Considering the Trillions we spend on wars, I think one trillion for health insurance is worth it. It is an investment in the american people... And unfortunately if this shitty bill doesn't pass, the same thing that happened in 1992-1993 will happen again, people will scream it is the other party's fault, and then it will go away..... But it's a shitty Bill for sure. It is overly complicated, probably on purpose so that no one can read/understand the whole thing before voting on it. I'm sure there are lots of special interest payments in here......
It also does nothing to address the over charging on medical supplies. Ie the $500 paperclip. Not only that but when you don't have insurance all the rates are way higher than the rates negotiated with insurance companies. So not only is it harder to pay, it is even more expensive without insurance. Because those companies have people to say $500 for a paperclip, you're full of shit, we'll give you $1 and the hospital will be like okay, we still make $.95. And the people doing the billing try to double/triple charge me all the time. The insurance company and hospital billing often fight for 6 or 7 months before they get the entire bill properly worked out........ The hospital will bill twice, the insurance company will see two bills and reject all the bills, etc... Then you have to act as mediator to teach the hospital how to code the bill....And the insurance company to be ready for a payment....it wastes a long time.... By yourself you don't have a chance.... The rates are crazy too. I was well over $1,0
DB2 contains a shared nothing architecture for partitioning horizontally. Back in 1999 I worked for a company that had like 20 nodes for about 10 TB of data. Now computers are significantly more powerful, so those 20 nodes could handle much more data. Also you can always throw more nodes at it. Each table had a partitioning key which would determine how the data is split. The partitioning key does not seem that different from something like Dryad LINQ's scheme for partitioning tables.
OF course I think the big difference is that there aren't really good open source solutions. You have to pay a lot for IBM DB2. I have also heard people swear that Oracle can handle massive amounts of data. Even a normal RDBMS implementation of Oracle costs a fortune. I'm sure whatever their clustering solution is cannot be obtained by the average company..... Microsoft SQL Server doesn't seem to have a good clustering solution just yet.
MySQL is practically free, assuming you don't subscribe to Monty's bastardized reading of the GPL. PostgreSQL is also free....... IBM DB2 not so much.... I have seen some clustering for both MySQL and PostgreSQL but the consensus seems to be that it is not adequate.
I would say you would look at it different when dying. Maybe you let it go and then a year after you die they find a cure for your disease. Or even worse, you let it go and then a few months before you die they find a cure....but it is too late to apply it. I would rather live than have the $1 million go towards bonuses to pharmaceutical executives or medical device maker executives or insurance executives.... e2fsck them.....
Well I see an awful lot of doctors driving Bentleys/porsches. They work hard it's true. But still what's the cost in human life that could be saved from those good things? I also see awful high premiums on mal practice insurance.
I also can't see not suing a doctor either. I mean if a doctor causes brain damage and you can no longer work for the rest of your life, then you need to sue for the money to live. If a doctor causes an expensive mistake that requires millions in medical treatment to repair or so you can live somewhat pain free, then you need compensation. Now if a doctor adjusts a bone and it hurts, but it heals and you sue for "pain and suffering" then you shouldn't get a dime. If it can be proven that the doctor did it wrong and should have done it another well known way to save you pain, then his license should be revoked.
IF a doctor is leaving his surgical instruments in many of his patients, he should be fired. Once or twice is an honest mistake, over and over again is carelessness. And if he leaves his surgical instruments in then you should be able to sue for medical bills. If his instrument ruins your life and makes you unable to work or causes chronic illness/pain then you should sue and not have to pay the treatment. If it just requires a quick surgery/recovery then you should sue only for the lost days of work, and the medical costs. No need for 100 million because a pair of scissors was left in your stomach.
You sure are naive. It is not unusual for agencies to put a dollar value on human life to figure stuff out. The book "Flying Blind, Fly Safe" http://www.amazon.com/Flying-Blind-Fly-Safe-Schiavo/dp/038079330X mentions that there is a dollar value on human life in the FAA. The loss of life and dollar value determines when the FAA steps in and when the economic cost to the industry versus the economic loss of human life is not worth the effort of say forcing some type of safety change/inspection. I guarantee they are not the only agency that does it.
If you really think people don't put a cost on human life (particularly companies selling products that may hurt people) then you certainly aren't familiar with the greed of men. I would bet that tobacco companies computed some type of financial model from lawsuits resulting from the deaths/illnesses of consumers and decided that economically rather than trying to find ways to make their products not kill you, it is better to keep selling and fight the lawsuits....
A lot of the complaints from NoSQL seem to be regarding DBMSses being too slow and SQL being too hard. And yet a lot of them invent query languages/query languages similar to SQL. Supposedly Oracle scales up really well. There is a paper that compares mapreduce to parallel databases and Hadoop takes a huge beating via the RDBMSes in performance. Now the funny thing is that Oracle was not included, yet most content that if you pay enough Oracle scales really well. DB2 also scales, because in 1999 I worked at a place with terabytes of database space and they had a few nodes running DB2 on AIX boxes and seemed to be getting adequate performance.
But most open sources databases seem to not be able to compete with the likes of the commercial parallel databases. But it seems like an open source parallel database would do a lot to silence many nosql critics. There is still the complaint about needing to define a schema, however if you are not exploring the data and are processing the same data over and over again, it seems like a good idea to define a schema anyway, that way you can better detect files that don't conform.
I had a professor mention how he catches people cheating:
1. Their english stinks and they cheat from someone with perfect english. Or they cheat from someone with bad english. If two people have the same writing style/spelling errors in an essay question it is usually a clue that someone cheated.
2. Two people have exactly the same wrong answer. This depends on the exam, but for an essay exam to have the same wrong answer is usually a dead giveaway.
So to cheat:
1. Pay attention to writing style/spelling, if something is a radically different style from your normal one, it is a giveaway.
2. Make sure your answer is right, otherwise that is a giveaway as well. Of course if you know the answer is right, then you could just answer it on your own......
The problem with these plagiarism detectors is that often for simple programs there are common ways of doing it that everyone knows. Ie for selection sort, how many ways can you write it? If it keeps growing based on other people's submissions, I'm sure someone wrote it similar to me. Also java.sun.com/tutorial is full of examples. Quite often you just cut/paste and modify an example that does what you want. Even if you were to write per scratch from the tutorial you'd end up with something similar to their example.
Quite often in programming you see many small example programs/problems through books/tutorials and string them all together in one program to do what you want. If you all used the same textbook, it is highly likely that some portions of the code will be identical. Ie eliminate duplicates from a list...Well you have to sort it first, the textbook has several sorts, but in class Quicksort was discussed as the quickest and the textbook has an implementation. Now any halfway intelligent student will just copy the book's quick sort implementation. Is that cheating? I don't think so. Even if I was to write a bubblesort from scratch, it would probably be something that I am remembering from some CS textbook or another. Is that cheating? Again I don't think so.
I tell my friend Jim to do the program for me. Is that cheating? Yes. Can you always tell by using a cheating program? I don't think so. Take the sorting algorithms, they often have the same loops, just slightly different indexing/variable names between them. It seems like a cheating program would flag up false positives.
I think a better approach is to assign a program. And then to ask questions about it on the exam. If someone has no clue how their code works, it is a sign that something is wrong. That combined with a positive on a cheating program may be enough to merit a conviction. And on the bright side, people who did the assignment would see extra rewards for doing the homework.
Evidently a rather large amount of professors would. Some even use slightly modified powerpoint slides from the textbook publisher to present the class. Guys with PhDs are just like the rest of us, there are some good ones, many average ones, and a bunch who totally suck. Some cannot even be bothered to read their own class textbook..... Some steal tests from other places and then invent their own "interpretations" of a problem. And when their own "interpretation" is totally wrong or based on false assumptions from 10 or 20 years ago, it's a major headache to correct them....
If you are going to sell your books more expensive than everyone else, what do I as a consumer get out of the deal?
Honestly I would be willing to pay the same as a paperback as long as it was DRM free. Even though an EBook costs way less than a Paperback (because in theory a paperback should include binding/printing charges as should a hard cover), there is a convenience to not filling up a library.
But I'll be damned if I'm going to pay 14.99 every time I switch e-readers for the same book.
Some publishers are holding e-books back long after release. First they release the hard cover, then a few months later they release the e-book with the paperback. For me that's stupid and it would be better to charge more for the e-book. But still I would expect some savings over a full hardcover, after all there are no binding/printing/additional costs. I would expect those savings to be passed onto me. Also if you are going to charge me $20 for a book where the paperback is $10 and the hardcover is $30 then it damn well better be DRM free.
The reality is many of the DRM formats have been cracked and people often buy e-readers expecting to use the DRM cracks to export the title to however they want. But this is stupid because it just keeps funding the companies so they can constantly create new DRM and new nuisances for the customer. It's time to stop rewarding DRM makers. I don't want to have to be a "criminal" (see DMCA) in order to shift books to whatever format I want. I want that as part of the deal. Why people are such idiots and open to being ripped off I have no idea.
And on the e-book prices, if the price is too high then people won't buy. I'm surprised apple is letting publishers set prices. I guess they aren't going to fight the fight to eliminate DRM from books for us like they did on music.
So you can thank Apple for your DRM-free music. Let's hope that they do the same to the book, movie, and television industry!
Agreed. Even if the iPad device sucks, I don't care. This is my single hope that Apple takes care of. If the iPad sucked but had DRM free books I would buy it for the books. Eventually something better would come along and I could take my books and read it on that (or the next version of the iPad). Even now it seems that some other guys making tablets have way better hardware and way less locked down than an iPad.
But anyway if apple manages to crack book DRM for everyone the way it cracked music DRM that would be great. Even buyers of Kindles, Nooks, Sony Readers, or anything else would be grateful to apple:)
Well this is the thing. If you jack up the price to that of a paperback, what incentive do I have to buy a DRMed proprietary format? However if you charge the same price as a paperback and the book is not DRMed, then I am likely to buy it just for the convenience of not filling up my book shelf....
Publishers need to learn the same lesson as the music industry about DRM. I did not see a giant drop in itunes sales when they started selling DRM free tracks. Also there is an article on slashdot about people pirating DRMed content more than DRM free content. That is what happened to me. In 2000 or so, I got my mp3s from AudioGalaxy/Napster/Kazaa/etc... When itunes came out with DRM, I still got my mp3s that way. Once iTunes and Amazon went DRM free, now I am more likely to just buy the mp3 from there rather than to avoid the hassle. Also with sharing I would typically share music that I downloaded, but I would never share music from my audio CD's.
Anyway for books, many people I know (me included) do not plan on sharing them on a filesharing network. We just want a fair deal. You give me a digital book in a portable format that I can read on any ebook reader that I want. We have no plans to share our books on a filesharing network. We just want it on our device. In reality I expect that some people would copy books for their friends like the old days though. Some type of lending feature might help prevent that. You lend the book and it is lent for 20 days. You can lend each book to one person at a time. You can still read your own book while it is lent (after all why ignore the benefits of technology to bring "lending" into the 21st century). But you cannot lend it to anyone else until the 20 days elapse. If your friend needs an extension, you can lend it to your friend again for another 20 days. Libraries can have a certain number of copies of books. Or the lending scheme can have a way of "returning" the book where the book is erased and the lending device is free to lend it to someone else.
I would almost say rather than DRM it is probably better for publishers to figure out how to embed a signature of a customer in a book. AT least that way if they are so inclined pirated books can be traced. Of course a hard disk could have been stolen/etc.. or a computer hacked, a program to translate between formats have a trojan horse to send the book to some other server, etc... But probably if most books were DRM free and in an open format there would not be a ton of motivation to crack the identification scheme unless you are Richard Stallman:)
Why not, PhDs need to eat too... Also the illusion of someone staying at your company for 10 to 20 years is just that, an illusion. You're lucky to hold a 20 or 30 something for even a year or two in this day and age. So what's the difference if he/she has a PhD, Bachelors, and Masters as long as he/she can do the job and doesn't break the bank.
I would say this applies to the PhD, not the Masters. It is possible to get a Masters with only classes (sometimes with an exam required) or mostly classes and a project.
In CS there are typically 3 paths to a masters degree (class only, sometimes with exam at end depending upon school), project (very open, can be a pretty standard software system that would come out of a company), Thesis (less novel than a PhD but still a lot of research work, the adviser pretty much agreed with me that it would be crazy to do a Thesis for a Masters because if you are doing to do a thesis you might as well do the PhD and there really isn't that much time to do it, most do not get it done in the two 3 credit Thesis classes that they take)...
Anyway it seems MS in CS = Undergrad with more group projects so far (finished 15 credits so far and am working on another 6 now). Also the algorithms classes have much more emphasis on the mathematical/proof side then the undergrad equivalent. But aside from that more of the same...
now PhD seems to be more contributing, doing research, showing initiative, etc... It also seems to involve a fair amount of ego stroking of mediocre professors. Not all PhDs are geniuses. As an undergrad the most frustrating thing in the world would be when these "geniuses" give an exam and then can't recognize a correct answer. Then when you show it to them they imply "they are GOD and are always correct". Then after a while you shove the book page saying that they are wrong in their face, and maybe even some references found via Wikipedia to some publication they respect. Then they scoff and have to give everyone credit for that question that got it wrong. Or in class they say some generalization that is totally wrong. Or they mention stuff as impossible that was solved 10 years ago... Quite often a book will say "a = b" and then a paragraph or two it will say "the above only holds in cases 1, 2, 3" or "except in the case when a=z". Some professors must skim their books or something and just not read it all. There are a lot of idiots, lazy losers, and tools in academia.
But there are a few gems. There are some professors who I completely cannot keep up with. They hurl so many ideas so fast and think about them in 10 ways before I can blink.....I am 100% certain that if a question is wrong on their exam it is wrong. Now should they go at that pace in class, maybe not but that's where the curve is your friend:) The best is a professor who is always accurate and simple in class, but if you talk with him about something you quickly find he is more informed than you are, but he says it in a way that you can understand and even points you to places you can look for more info....Such a guy or girl does not need stroking, the best thing you could do for them is to give them something new to work with.
Hey I made Slackware work back in the day but I needed menus at least.... X configuration was a bitch...but since you are doing embedded systems probably not an issue.
The configuration used to have a set of NCURSES screens though which is technically a GUI, made life much easier...
Exactly. The thought is that you learn how to write software on your own. The degree is just supposed to teach underlying concepts. Also in theory someone who never turned on a computer is supposed to come out knowledgeable about computer science. Personally I think it would be very hard to pick up programming from the college classes (the explanations/instruction is often very poor with many details glossed over). The classes don't really have enough programming assignments to get good at it either. Someone would have to practice a lot more than just in class assignments....
I did a B.A. in C.S. (basically it meant I had more freedom to pick electives). Mostly the value of college was a lot of math classes and physics (my High School had lousy science classes so physics was great for learning to solve the word problems, before that class they were kind of hard, but after that class all word problems were much easier...).
College doesn't teach you how to program a large maintainable system, or even good engineering practices. It is good for teaching the underlying concepts of operating systems, networking, data structures, etc. if you don't already know them. The reality is that we could all benefit from refreshing our mind of the concepts. And even if you already know the stuff, you still pick up more tricks/information. It's like a book, the first time you read it you get the plot. Then each additional time you pick up other details.
I am now doing my MS in CS in the hopes of learning something. In one of my classes we had to do a Huffman code assignment in Java or C (storing the compressed file at the bit level). Well writing bits in these languages (which like to write in bytes) is tricky. Anyway when it was all said and done my code was a mess with bit writing, writing the compression tree, lots of additional data for lengths of codes, the huffman tree, etc. all strewn about haphazardly but it worked and got 100% credit. My classmate commented that he didn't finish the assignment because he was too busy designing a library to let him write bits, and after he completed it there was no time to do the Huffman code. In a serious software organization, my program would be severely criticized as unmaintainable and my classmate's would have been celebrated and held as an example (assuming he got it done in a reasonable time). But in college you are not programming "elegantly" or even "well", your job is to solve the problem/assignment. In a larger software team your job is to engineer software for reliability and maintainability in addition to doing it as cost effectively as possible. In a start up environment your job is to get code out as soon as possible (basically the college approach again works here.....).
I have been working for 7 years and my code still sucks. I keep getting startup like teams where the pressure is to get it done, not to engineer it for maintainability. Also mostly I work with SQL and coding is more for "side projects". I'd love a real software team someday but I can't seem to find them. The closest I came was a one year job as a DBA where the software team was great, but I was on the wrong team.... They seemed to have a comprehensive computer architecture, a process for coding, code reviews to help developers get their code up to par. I have yet to have a code review of anything.... Now I am technically on a software team, but it is start-up like development (although this is a big company with a giant properly engineered software dev team...but since i am in a side business they have a tiny start-up like dev team supporting it as opposed to the main business which is supported by the "Software Engineering Group") of some web apps and a lot of reporting which is SQL + a report designer. No code reviews, get it done yesterday....
Anyway I would also add that most companies do not take their IT staff seriously. In a typical non software company the IT staff is seen as "overhead" and "not generating revenue". Often it is the first to be cut... I doubt congress is different....
Where was this skilled IT staff when the DMCA came out? Asleep at the wheel? Where was this skilled IT staff with the Child Online Protection Act? Asleep again? I'm sorry but either the staff in the offices is totally incompetent (which I doubt), or congress guys just don't take their advice at all when deciding how to vote.
How about that Ted Stevens guy saying the internet is a bunch of tubes? Are you saying he consulted his IT staff for that? John McCain spouted a lot of anti-net neutrality crap on his campaign....I don't think he get that from his IT staff, more like the nice lobbyist from ATT or Comcast.....
But it is. If the phone sex is a live chat and your porn movie is not live, then whether you get the porn movie now or an hour later it makes no difference. However if you are having phone sex and you get throttled it will ruin the conversation. The same is true of a streaming video. If you are streaming your porn movie then throttling may make it full of skips/jumps. But if you are downloading the whole thing on bittorrent then whether you get it now or an hour later, it makes no difference. You'll get your entire movie to watch it.
Mostly I'm okay with P2P data being put lower priority than everything else. Some of those apps suck bandwidth like crazy.....I would even prefer my web page browsing is faster than P2P. It all comes down to response time. P2P or even FTP don't require response time so much, they aren't critical. They mostly need a good throughput. Meanwhile VOIP, Streaming Video, and even web browsing require relatively quick responses because someone is there interactively.
That's exactly why we probably need net neutrality. I can't think of how to word it so there is no way around it. And I have a tech background. Our congresscritters don't have a chance at wording it right. If they make a certain class of application, then the phone companies would probably figure a way to work around it making it so all their traffic is that class of application. Or making it so that everything is low priority and that people who pay can have their packets slightly modified to meet the new definition of real-time and hence be served at normal speed.
But still if it was possible to make a perfect law, I'd be okay with throttling. Since it probably isn't, I think we have to go with net neutrality.
Most cell networks have really shitty service, and completely rip you off. SMS prices seem to have gone up over the years, however they are tiny text messages. As network capacity increases they should be even easier to deliver. The fact that people are surfing websites for cheap which use way more data than SMS just shows how the phone companies rip you off. They also have control on their phones, so often any IM apps will charge you for an SMS with every message.
Also once you buy a phone, you are locked into a network. If they screw you over for two years, to leave you will have to pay termination fees, and get a new phone on your new network. You are basically locked in. Some people sell unlocked phones, but they are often locked into one network. Even T-Mobile/ATT use different 3G frequencies. Verizon/Sprint do not use the same hardware either. So cell companies aren't in competition with each other.
With net neutrality 3rd parties can make devices that use all the cell networks (just the 3g parts, not the voice) and use VOIP. Now, Apple smacks down most VOIP apps in the apple store (no doubt at the request of ATT). But even if they didn't, the phone company could probably use deep packet inspection to find other people's VOIP packets an dmake them lower priority. OR just block all VOIP packets except for the phone company's own. IF there is net neutrality then they can't. So you could make 3rd party devices that link to everyone's 3g network and use VOIP. Then carriers would be forced to compete on price, and network quality. Customer service would improve because dissatisfied customers would just leave....
But in defeating net neutrality things can mostly stay the same....
Anyway the other thing is that if I can't figure out how to word the regulation so there are no exceptions and I am familiar with the issue, what chance does a normal congresscritter have of wording the regulation right to stop people from getting around it? Many of them are totally clueless on technology issues. Basically the safest thing for a congresscritter is to regulate net neutrality. Anything else will endanger the internet.
Also if there is throttling another thing that I didn't think about is that you can exercise control. The government can start to make laws, like any anti-government or "terrorist" websites get a lower priority. Not that I'm a terrorist, or that I am interested in the Klu Klux Klan or anything, but they have a right to their opinion as long as they aren't hurting anyone.
The government also often goes on anti-porn crusades to try to attract the religious right. They could legislate that all ISPs need to throttle down any traffic to known porn sites (from their list) to be super slow. Basically throttling can be used to control content on the internet. We have already seen governments trying to use a blacklist.
Also look at some of the anti net neutrality opponents (ie the RIAA, etc...). By using throttling they can control who is permitted to distribute their content. Anyone not "authorized" or maybe even someone "authorized" trying to negotiate a better deal will have their traffic throttled so slow, they won't be able to deliver content. Or even more, the RIAA can pay so that it's music sites get higher priority. An independent music site may not be able to pay, so the content is so slow that no one bothers. Then the independent artists are forced to sign on with the RIAA to get online distribution.
Anti Net Neutrality is all about control, no matter what anyone says. It is the last chance to control the internet. With net neutrality it remains as it is, largely without control. There will be red light districts, fringe opinions, government opinions, etc... all with equal access. There will be "legal" places to get content and "illegal" places to get content. And if the "legal" places try to rip consumers off they will be to the "illegal" places.
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I support a constitutional amendment if the power is not already there... it is a much better use of the various legislature time than say gay marriage....
Seriously the government has warped the interstate commerce clause to pretty much let them do anything. And some states have done a lot for health care, like Massachusetts, but others haven't done anything at all....
Also I'd point to the financial industry. The government was very quick to jump in with low and zero interest loans for its buddies in wall street. The health industry needs some regulation. And many of the companies involved span multiple states.... Not that the government is great at regulation, because ATT is basically back to what it was in the 80's. But without regulation you end up like in Argentina where 1 or 2 companies control the industry, throw in barriers to entry so new companies can't enter the industry, and pretty much charge huge rip off prices that people can barely afford, but have no choice. E.g. Every hospital my family has dealt with has totally screwed up billing...It seems to be quite common. Almost all of them charge ridiculous prices for basic things. You would think since gauze is paid for in bulk, it would be cheaper than going to the supermarket...There are all sorts of reports of how hospitals/doctors rip off medicare/medicaid all over the country. That ripping off and over inflated pricing costs a lot of money....
In reality the states should be cracking down/prosecuting these tax thieves, but they don't....
I think this matters for when you your internet enabled sex toy gets stuck and you need the emergency room to get it off you...after making a hasty retreat from your parents' basement of course without being seen....
:)
But seriously geeks get sick. Some have chronic illnesses which is what gives them so much time to lay in bed and read/play with the computer. It's not uncommon to see geeks with glasses (although I'm not sure the bill covers eye care...but anyway). Or geeks with asthma. Also look at Stephen Hawking. He needs a lot of medical care and he is an uber geek... Look at Steve Jobs, he needed an organ. What happens if you don't run apple. Although his geek status is a question. But a reality distortion field is very geeky
The reality is that the government doesn't seem to get anything done. I recall Arlen Spector saying that the patriot act was flaws, but he would vote for it as is and fix it later... Well as you can see, no one has really changed it to fix it. In 1992/1993 when Bill Clinton tried to make health care, no one agreed with him and he couldn't pass the bill. The republicans that later got in control of congress failed to make another health care bill. I think it will be similar with this bill. The republicans are calling to scrap the bill and start over, or why the hurry. But pretty much they (and the democrats who vote no) will forget about it.
Still a lot of provisions I don't like. For example if you get cancer you are screwed with a 5 million per year benefits cap. But then again my insurance at work has a 5 million dollar lifetime cap, so I am even more screwed. People like my brother who didn't go to college and work at hourly jobs without benefits need this bill. He doesn't make enough money to afford health insurance, and the company does not provide it. So there's really nothing he can do. If he gets poison ivy, even real bad, he has to sit at home and suffer rather than visiting a doctor to get a prescription for a cortico steroid that could cure it. That's not right.....
Also an awful lot of personal bankruptcies are due to medical bills. There was a time when I graduated college and I was unemployed for almost a year before finding a job. If I got into a traffic accident or I broke my foot jogging, I would have been in deep trouble. Sometimes surgeries go into the hundred thousands or even millions.... I don't have that kind of money. Even now, if I got cancer and went over that 5 million lifetime cap on my company's insurance, I'd have to somehow borrow massive amounts of money that I would never pay back, or just die... Any system that doesn't value human life over all else is broken....
This bill pretty much sucks. The more provisions I see of it, the more I hate it. Also the parties are busy taking pot shots about things like abortion funding instead of fixing the bill. I don't really care about abortion funding. Most Americans don't give a damn either except for a few religious right nuts. I just want a bill that gives me some security that if I lose my job and get sick, I'm not going to have to declare bankruptcy or suffer with my illness until it gets better or I die......
Considering the Trillions we spend on wars, I think one trillion for health insurance is worth it. It is an investment in the american people... And unfortunately if this shitty bill doesn't pass, the same thing that happened in 1992-1993 will happen again, people will scream it is the other party's fault, and then it will go away..... But it's a shitty Bill for sure. It is overly complicated, probably on purpose so that no one can read/understand the whole thing before voting on it. I'm sure there are lots of special interest payments in here......
It also does nothing to address the over charging on medical supplies. Ie the $500 paperclip. Not only that but when you don't have insurance all the rates are way higher than the rates negotiated with insurance companies. So not only is it harder to pay, it is even more expensive without insurance. Because those companies have people to say $500 for a paperclip, you're full of shit, we'll give you $1 and the hospital will be like okay, we still make $.95. And the people doing the billing try to double/triple charge me all the time. The insurance company and hospital billing often fight for 6 or 7 months before they get the entire bill properly worked out........ The hospital will bill twice, the insurance company will see two bills and reject all the bills, etc... Then you have to act as mediator to teach the hospital how to code the bill....And the insurance company to be ready for a payment....it wastes a long time.... By yourself you don't have a chance.... The rates are crazy too. I was well over $1,0
DB2 contains a shared nothing architecture for partitioning horizontally. Back in 1999 I worked for a company that had like 20 nodes for about 10 TB of data. Now computers are significantly more powerful, so those 20 nodes could handle much more data. Also you can always throw more nodes at it. Each table had a partitioning key which would determine how the data is split. The partitioning key does not seem that different from something like Dryad LINQ's scheme for partitioning tables.
OF course I think the big difference is that there aren't really good open source solutions. You have to pay a lot for IBM DB2. I have also heard people swear that Oracle can handle massive amounts of data. Even a normal RDBMS implementation of Oracle costs a fortune. I'm sure whatever their clustering solution is cannot be obtained by the average company..... Microsoft SQL Server doesn't seem to have a good clustering solution just yet.
MySQL is practically free, assuming you don't subscribe to Monty's bastardized reading of the GPL. PostgreSQL is also free....... IBM DB2 not so much.... I have seen some clustering for both MySQL and PostgreSQL but the consensus seems to be that it is not adequate.
I would say you would look at it different when dying. Maybe you let it go and then a year after you die they find a cure for your disease. Or even worse, you let it go and then a few months before you die they find a cure....but it is too late to apply it. I would rather live than have the $1 million go towards bonuses to pharmaceutical executives or medical device maker executives or insurance executives.... e2fsck them.....
Well I see an awful lot of doctors driving Bentleys/porsches. They work hard it's true. But still what's the cost in human life that could be saved from those good things? I also see awful high premiums on mal practice insurance.
I also can't see not suing a doctor either. I mean if a doctor causes brain damage and you can no longer work for the rest of your life, then you need to sue for the money to live. If a doctor causes an expensive mistake that requires millions in medical treatment to repair or so you can live somewhat pain free, then you need compensation. Now if a doctor adjusts a bone and it hurts, but it heals and you sue for "pain and suffering" then you shouldn't get a dime. If it can be proven that the doctor did it wrong and should have done it another well known way to save you pain, then his license should be revoked.
IF a doctor is leaving his surgical instruments in many of his patients, he should be fired. Once or twice is an honest mistake, over and over again is carelessness. And if he leaves his surgical instruments in then you should be able to sue for medical bills. If his instrument ruins your life and makes you unable to work or causes chronic illness/pain then you should sue and not have to pay the treatment. If it just requires a quick surgery/recovery then you should sue only for the lost days of work, and the medical costs. No need for 100 million because a pair of scissors was left in your stomach.
You sure are naive. It is not unusual for agencies to put a dollar value on human life to figure stuff out. The book "Flying Blind, Fly Safe" http://www.amazon.com/Flying-Blind-Fly-Safe-Schiavo/dp/038079330X mentions that there is a dollar value on human life in the FAA. The loss of life and dollar value determines when the FAA steps in and when the economic cost to the industry versus the economic loss of human life is not worth the effort of say forcing some type of safety change/inspection. I guarantee they are not the only agency that does it.
:)
If you really think people don't put a cost on human life (particularly companies selling products that may hurt people) then you certainly aren't familiar with the greed of men. I would bet that tobacco companies computed some type of financial model from lawsuits resulting from the deaths/illnesses of consumers and decided that economically rather than trying to find ways to make their products not kill you, it is better to keep selling and fight the lawsuits....
Oh welcome to earth
A lot of the complaints from NoSQL seem to be regarding DBMSses being too slow and SQL being too hard. And yet a lot of them invent query languages/query languages similar to SQL. Supposedly Oracle scales up really well. There is a paper that compares mapreduce to parallel databases and Hadoop takes a huge beating via the RDBMSes in performance. Now the funny thing is that Oracle was not included, yet most content that if you pay enough Oracle scales really well. DB2 also scales, because in 1999 I worked at a place with terabytes of database space and they had a few nodes running DB2 on AIX boxes and seemed to be getting adequate performance.
But most open sources databases seem to not be able to compete with the likes of the commercial parallel databases. But it seems like an open source parallel database would do a lot to silence many nosql critics. There is still the complaint about needing to define a schema, however if you are not exploring the data and are processing the same data over and over again, it seems like a good idea to define a schema anyway, that way you can better detect files that don't conform.
They just need the devil to boil water while he plays his fiddle.....
I had a professor mention how he catches people cheating:
1. Their english stinks and they cheat from someone with perfect english. Or they cheat from someone with bad english. If two people have the same writing style/spelling errors in an essay question it is usually a clue that someone cheated.
2. Two people have exactly the same wrong answer. This depends on the exam, but for an essay exam to have the same wrong answer is usually a dead giveaway.
So to cheat:
1. Pay attention to writing style/spelling, if something is a radically different style from your normal one, it is a giveaway.
2. Make sure your answer is right, otherwise that is a giveaway as well. Of course if you know the answer is right, then you could just answer it on your own......
It's easier just to study if you ask me....
The problem with these plagiarism detectors is that often for simple programs there are common ways of doing it that everyone knows. Ie for selection sort, how many ways can you write it? If it keeps growing based on other people's submissions, I'm sure someone wrote it similar to me. Also java.sun.com/tutorial is full of examples. Quite often you just cut/paste and modify an example that does what you want. Even if you were to write per scratch from the tutorial you'd end up with something similar to their example.
Quite often in programming you see many small example programs/problems through books/tutorials and string them all together in one program to do what you want. If you all used the same textbook, it is highly likely that some portions of the code will be identical. Ie eliminate duplicates from a list...Well you have to sort it first, the textbook has several sorts, but in class Quicksort was discussed as the quickest and the textbook has an implementation. Now any halfway intelligent student will just copy the book's quick sort implementation. Is that cheating? I don't think so. Even if I was to write a bubblesort from scratch, it would probably be something that I am remembering from some CS textbook or another. Is that cheating? Again I don't think so.
I tell my friend Jim to do the program for me. Is that cheating? Yes. Can you always tell by using a cheating program? I don't think so. Take the sorting algorithms, they often have the same loops, just slightly different indexing/variable names between them. It seems like a cheating program would flag up false positives.
I think a better approach is to assign a program. And then to ask questions about it on the exam. If someone has no clue how their code works, it is a sign that something is wrong. That combined with a positive on a cheating program may be enough to merit a conviction. And on the bright side, people who did the assignment would see extra rewards for doing the homework.
Evidently a rather large amount of professors would. Some even use slightly modified powerpoint slides from the textbook publisher to present the class. Guys with PhDs are just like the rest of us, there are some good ones, many average ones, and a bunch who totally suck. Some cannot even be bothered to read their own class textbook..... Some steal tests from other places and then invent their own "interpretations" of a problem. And when their own "interpretation" is totally wrong or based on false assumptions from 10 or 20 years ago, it's a major headache to correct them....
If you are going to sell your books more expensive than everyone else, what do I as a consumer get out of the deal?
Honestly I would be willing to pay the same as a paperback as long as it was DRM free. Even though an EBook costs way less than a Paperback (because in theory a paperback should include binding/printing charges as should a hard cover), there is a convenience to not filling up a library.
But I'll be damned if I'm going to pay 14.99 every time I switch e-readers for the same book.
Some publishers are holding e-books back long after release. First they release the hard cover, then a few months later they release the e-book with the paperback. For me that's stupid and it would be better to charge more for the e-book. But still I would expect some savings over a full hardcover, after all there are no binding/printing/additional costs. I would expect those savings to be passed onto me. Also if you are going to charge me $20 for a book where the paperback is $10 and the hardcover is $30 then it damn well better be DRM free.
The reality is many of the DRM formats have been cracked and people often buy e-readers expecting to use the DRM cracks to export the title to however they want. But this is stupid because it just keeps funding the companies so they can constantly create new DRM and new nuisances for the customer. It's time to stop rewarding DRM makers. I don't want to have to be a "criminal" (see DMCA) in order to shift books to whatever format I want. I want that as part of the deal. Why people are such idiots and open to being ripped off I have no idea.
And on the e-book prices, if the price is too high then people won't buy. I'm surprised apple is letting publishers set prices. I guess they aren't going to fight the fight to eliminate DRM from books for us like they did on music.
So you can thank Apple for your DRM-free music. Let's hope that they do the same to the book, movie, and television industry!
Agreed. Even if the iPad device sucks, I don't care. This is my single hope that Apple takes care of. If the iPad sucked but had DRM free books I would buy it for the books. Eventually something better would come along and I could take my books and read it on that (or the next version of the iPad). Even now it seems that some other guys making tablets have way better hardware and way less locked down than an iPad.
:)
But anyway if apple manages to crack book DRM for everyone the way it cracked music DRM that would be great. Even buyers of Kindles, Nooks, Sony Readers, or anything else would be grateful to apple
Well this is the thing. If you jack up the price to that of a paperback, what incentive do I have to buy a DRMed proprietary format? However if you charge the same price as a paperback and the book is not DRMed, then I am likely to buy it just for the convenience of not filling up my book shelf....
:)
Publishers need to learn the same lesson as the music industry about DRM. I did not see a giant drop in itunes sales when they started selling DRM free tracks. Also there is an article on slashdot about people pirating DRMed content more than DRM free content. That is what happened to me. In 2000 or so, I got my mp3s from AudioGalaxy/Napster/Kazaa/etc... When itunes came out with DRM, I still got my mp3s that way. Once iTunes and Amazon went DRM free, now I am more likely to just buy the mp3 from there rather than to avoid the hassle. Also with sharing I would typically share music that I downloaded, but I would never share music from my audio CD's.
Anyway for books, many people I know (me included) do not plan on sharing them on a filesharing network. We just want a fair deal. You give me a digital book in a portable format that I can read on any ebook reader that I want. We have no plans to share our books on a filesharing network. We just want it on our device. In reality I expect that some people would copy books for their friends like the old days though. Some type of lending feature might help prevent that. You lend the book and it is lent for 20 days. You can lend each book to one person at a time. You can still read your own book while it is lent (after all why ignore the benefits of technology to bring "lending" into the 21st century). But you cannot lend it to anyone else until the 20 days elapse. If your friend needs an extension, you can lend it to your friend again for another 20 days. Libraries can have a certain number of copies of books. Or the lending scheme can have a way of "returning" the book where the book is erased and the lending device is free to lend it to someone else.
I would almost say rather than DRM it is probably better for publishers to figure out how to embed a signature of a customer in a book. AT least that way if they are so inclined pirated books can be traced. Of course a hard disk could have been stolen/etc.. or a computer hacked, a program to translate between formats have a trojan horse to send the book to some other server, etc... But probably if most books were DRM free and in an open format there would not be a ton of motivation to crack the identification scheme unless you are Richard Stallman
Why not, PhDs need to eat too... Also the illusion of someone staying at your company for 10 to 20 years is just that, an illusion. You're lucky to hold a 20 or 30 something for even a year or two in this day and age. So what's the difference if he/she has a PhD, Bachelors, and Masters as long as he/she can do the job and doesn't break the bank.
I would say this applies to the PhD, not the Masters. It is possible to get a Masters with only classes (sometimes with an exam required) or mostly classes and a project.
:) The best is a professor who is always accurate and simple in class, but if you talk with him about something you quickly find he is more informed than you are, but he says it in a way that you can understand and even points you to places you can look for more info....Such a guy or girl does not need stroking, the best thing you could do for them is to give them something new to work with.
In CS there are typically 3 paths to a masters degree (class only, sometimes with exam at end depending upon school), project (very open, can be a pretty standard software system that would come out of a company), Thesis (less novel than a PhD but still a lot of research work, the adviser pretty much agreed with me that it would be crazy to do a Thesis for a Masters because if you are doing to do a thesis you might as well do the PhD and there really isn't that much time to do it, most do not get it done in the two 3 credit Thesis classes that they take)...
Anyway it seems MS in CS = Undergrad with more group projects so far (finished 15 credits so far and am working on another 6 now). Also the algorithms classes have much more emphasis on the mathematical/proof side then the undergrad equivalent. But aside from that more of the same...
now PhD seems to be more contributing, doing research, showing initiative, etc... It also seems to involve a fair amount of ego stroking of mediocre professors. Not all PhDs are geniuses. As an undergrad the most frustrating thing in the world would be when these "geniuses" give an exam and then can't recognize a correct answer. Then when you show it to them they imply "they are GOD and are always correct". Then after a while you shove the book page saying that they are wrong in their face, and maybe even some references found via Wikipedia to some publication they respect. Then they scoff and have to give everyone credit for that question that got it wrong. Or in class they say some generalization that is totally wrong. Or they mention stuff as impossible that was solved 10 years ago... Quite often a book will say "a = b" and then a paragraph or two it will say "the above only holds in cases 1, 2, 3" or "except in the case when a=z". Some professors must skim their books or something and just not read it all. There are a lot of idiots, lazy losers, and tools in academia.
But there are a few gems. There are some professors who I completely cannot keep up with. They hurl so many ideas so fast and think about them in 10 ways before I can blink.....I am 100% certain that if a question is wrong on their exam it is wrong. Now should they go at that pace in class, maybe not but that's where the curve is your friend
Hey I made Slackware work back in the day but I needed menus at least.... X configuration was a bitch...but since you are doing embedded systems probably not an issue.
The configuration used to have a set of NCURSES screens though which is technically a GUI, made life much easier...
Exactly. The thought is that you learn how to write software on your own. The degree is just supposed to teach underlying concepts. Also in theory someone who never turned on a computer is supposed to come out knowledgeable about computer science. Personally I think it would be very hard to pick up programming from the college classes (the explanations/instruction is often very poor with many details glossed over). The classes don't really have enough programming assignments to get good at it either. Someone would have to practice a lot more than just in class assignments....
I did a B.A. in C.S. (basically it meant I had more freedom to pick electives). Mostly the value of college was a lot of math classes and physics (my High School had lousy science classes so physics was great for learning to solve the word problems, before that class they were kind of hard, but after that class all word problems were much easier...).
College doesn't teach you how to program a large maintainable system, or even good engineering practices. It is good for teaching the underlying concepts of operating systems, networking, data structures, etc. if you don't already know them. The reality is that we could all benefit from refreshing our mind of the concepts. And even if you already know the stuff, you still pick up more tricks/information. It's like a book, the first time you read it you get the plot. Then each additional time you pick up other details.
I am now doing my MS in CS in the hopes of learning something. In one of my classes we had to do a Huffman code assignment in Java or C (storing the compressed file at the bit level). Well writing bits in these languages (which like to write in bytes) is tricky. Anyway when it was all said and done my code was a mess with bit writing, writing the compression tree, lots of additional data for lengths of codes, the huffman tree, etc. all strewn about haphazardly but it worked and got 100% credit. My classmate commented that he didn't finish the assignment because he was too busy designing a library to let him write bits, and after he completed it there was no time to do the Huffman code. In a serious software organization, my program would be severely criticized as unmaintainable and my classmate's would have been celebrated and held as an example (assuming he got it done in a reasonable time). But in college you are not programming "elegantly" or even "well", your job is to solve the problem/assignment. In a larger software team your job is to engineer software for reliability and maintainability in addition to doing it as cost effectively as possible. In a start up environment your job is to get code out as soon as possible (basically the college approach again works here.....).
I have been working for 7 years and my code still sucks. I keep getting startup like teams where the pressure is to get it done, not to engineer it for maintainability. Also mostly I work with SQL and coding is more for "side projects". I'd love a real software team someday but I can't seem to find them. The closest I came was a one year job as a DBA where the software team was great, but I was on the wrong team.... They seemed to have a comprehensive computer architecture, a process for coding, code reviews to help developers get their code up to par. I have yet to have a code review of anything.... Now I am technically on a software team, but it is start-up like development (although this is a big company with a giant properly engineered software dev team...but since i am in a side business they have a tiny start-up like dev team supporting it as opposed to the main business which is supported by the "Software Engineering Group") of some web apps and a lot of reporting which is SQL + a report designer. No code reviews, get it done yesterday....
Anyway I would also add that most companies do not take their IT staff seriously. In a typical non software company the IT staff is seen as "overhead" and "not generating revenue". Often it is the first to be cut... I doubt congress is different....
Where was this skilled IT staff when the DMCA came out? Asleep at the wheel? Where was this skilled IT staff with the Child Online Protection Act? Asleep again? I'm sorry but either the staff in the offices is totally incompetent (which I doubt), or congress guys just don't take their advice at all when deciding how to vote.
How about that Ted Stevens guy saying the internet is a bunch of tubes? Are you saying he consulted his IT staff for that? John McCain spouted a lot of anti-net neutrality crap on his campaign....I don't think he get that from his IT staff, more like the nice lobbyist from ATT or Comcast.....
But it is. If the phone sex is a live chat and your porn movie is not live, then whether you get the porn movie now or an hour later it makes no difference. However if you are having phone sex and you get throttled it will ruin the conversation. The same is true of a streaming video. If you are streaming your porn movie then throttling may make it full of skips/jumps. But if you are downloading the whole thing on bittorrent then whether you get it now or an hour later, it makes no difference. You'll get your entire movie to watch it.
Mostly I'm okay with P2P data being put lower priority than everything else. Some of those apps suck bandwidth like crazy.....I would even prefer my web page browsing is faster than P2P. It all comes down to response time. P2P or even FTP don't require response time so much, they aren't critical. They mostly need a good throughput. Meanwhile VOIP, Streaming Video, and even web browsing require relatively quick responses because someone is there interactively.
That's exactly why we probably need net neutrality. I can't think of how to word it so there is no way around it. And I have a tech background. Our congresscritters don't have a chance at wording it right. If they make a certain class of application, then the phone companies would probably figure a way to work around it making it so all their traffic is that class of application. Or making it so that everything is low priority and that people who pay can have their packets slightly modified to meet the new definition of real-time and hence be served at normal speed.
But still if it was possible to make a perfect law, I'd be okay with throttling. Since it probably isn't, I think we have to go with net neutrality.
Most cell networks have really shitty service, and completely rip you off. SMS prices seem to have gone up over the years, however they are tiny text messages. As network capacity increases they should be even easier to deliver. The fact that people are surfing websites for cheap which use way more data than SMS just shows how the phone companies rip you off. They also have control on their phones, so often any IM apps will charge you for an SMS with every message.
Also once you buy a phone, you are locked into a network. If they screw you over for two years, to leave you will have to pay termination fees, and get a new phone on your new network. You are basically locked in. Some people sell unlocked phones, but they are often locked into one network. Even T-Mobile/ATT use different 3G frequencies. Verizon/Sprint do not use the same hardware either. So cell companies aren't in competition with each other.
With net neutrality 3rd parties can make devices that use all the cell networks (just the 3g parts, not the voice) and use VOIP. Now, Apple smacks down most VOIP apps in the apple store (no doubt at the request of ATT). But even if they didn't, the phone company could probably use deep packet inspection to find other people's VOIP packets an dmake them lower priority. OR just block all VOIP packets except for the phone company's own. IF there is net neutrality then they can't. So you could make 3rd party devices that link to everyone's 3g network and use VOIP. Then carriers would be forced to compete on price, and network quality. Customer service would improve because dissatisfied customers would just leave....
But in defeating net neutrality things can mostly stay the same....
Anyway the other thing is that if I can't figure out how to word the regulation so there are no exceptions and I am familiar with the issue, what chance does a normal congresscritter have of wording the regulation right to stop people from getting around it? Many of them are totally clueless on technology issues. Basically the safest thing for a congresscritter is to regulate net neutrality. Anything else will endanger the internet.
Also if there is throttling another thing that I didn't think about is that you can exercise control. The government can start to make laws, like any anti-government or "terrorist" websites get a lower priority. Not that I'm a terrorist, or that I am interested in the Klu Klux Klan or anything, but they have a right to their opinion as long as they aren't hurting anyone.
The government also often goes on anti-porn crusades to try to attract the religious right. They could legislate that all ISPs need to throttle down any traffic to known porn sites (from their list) to be super slow. Basically throttling can be used to control content on the internet. We have already seen governments trying to use a blacklist.
Also look at some of the anti net neutrality opponents (ie the RIAA, etc...). By using throttling they can control who is permitted to distribute their content. Anyone not "authorized" or maybe even someone "authorized" trying to negotiate a better deal will have their traffic throttled so slow, they won't be able to deliver content. Or even more, the RIAA can pay so that it's music sites get higher priority. An independent music site may not be able to pay, so the content is so slow that no one bothers. Then the independent artists are forced to sign on with the RIAA to get online distribution.
Anti Net Neutrality is all about control, no matter what anyone says. It is the last chance to control the internet. With net neutrality it remains as it is, largely without control. There will be red light districts, fringe opinions, government opinions, etc... all with equal access. There will be "legal" places to get content and "illegal" places to get content. And if the "legal" places try to rip consumers off they will be to the "illegal" places.