Microsoft (who actually disbanded the IE team after IE6 --can you believe it?)
Yes - once you have no competition and thus noone to stay ahead of in order to keep customers, why would you continue to invest in development of a project? If the customers think your product sucks then that's too bad - there's nowhere else to go*
(* yes, I know that there have always been other browsers, but they weren't known to the average user so MS stood no chance of losing a significant number of users).
This is why competition is good for the customers - it forces the vendors to continue to improve their products. Remember that the vendor isn't working for the good if it's customers, it's working for the good of itself - when there is competition in the market place then those goals tend to align quite well, but they are at odds with eachother if there is no competition.
This is also a key difference between commercial projects and many (but not all) Free projects - Free projects are often improved because the coder wants the feature for himself. Commercial projects are improved either because a customer will pay for the improvement or because it keeps customers from migrating away to the competition. In a monopoly, many Free projects will continue to improve.
even if people switch back to IE, it won't be to IE 6
Sadly there are still a lot of people using IE <= 6 - at what point can web developers ignore it completely and stop having to use horrible hacks just to make their pages display (I pretty much gave up supporting IE a few years ago, but I'm not running a commercial site. If people want to visit my site then it's their responsibility to use sane software - it doesn't harm me if they go elsewhere instead. For a commercial site, the loss of all the IE users would be disaster).
Microsoft has a long history of coming from behind
Couldn't have phrased it better myself.:)
Although historically MS seem to have overtaken the competition by copying what the competition is doing and then extending it in a non-standard way. That kind of behaviour won't wash with web developers, but sadly it is the non-technical user who dictates what browser is popular - if IE8 has a shiny new feature, the average user won't care that it's non standard and makes the lives of web developers hell.
there was no need for the Mozilla Foundation to vet and officially support extensions
I think that there needs to be work done to segregate extensions and plugins from the browser. At the moment, if an extension leaks memory, for example, then it's not obvious that it's the extension at fault - it's just interpretted as "firefox being crap" by the users. If each extension is segregated then the resource usage of each is easy to examine and a unstable extension/plugin shouldn't take down the whole browser.
I don't want IE to actually end up overtaking Firefox, because I want the dominant browser on the Web to be a cross-platform one.
I would be quite happy for several (relatively standards complient) browsers (including IE) to continually be leap-frogging ahead of eachother from version to version, rather than having one dominant browser. Having any dominant browser encourages the web developers to embrace non-standard parts of it at the expense of users of other browsers. The key to good web development is to try and make your code work in as many browsers as possible, not force everyone to use the dominant browser (even if it is cross-platform).
This is easilly described by the old inflating balloon model. Imagine you're a 2-dimensional being living on the surface of a balloon. One of your dimensions is east/west around the balloon and the other is perpendicular, making it north/south (for want of better terms). There is no boundary to those dimensions - you can keep walking in any direction forever. However, if the balloon expands then those dimensions are undeniably expanding - 2 stationary points anywhere on the surface of the balloon will always be moving away from eachother at a speed that is proportional to the distance between them.
The same thing can be modelled as a flat rubber sheet extending infinitely in all directions - the sheet can be continually stretched so that any 2 stationary points on the sheet are moving away from eachother at a speed proportional to their distance. Points with a great distance between them will be separating at a speed greater than the speed of light and thus they are unable to ever affect eachother in any way (this is allowed since the points are not moving with respect to space since it is the space between them that is expanding).
I don't see any reason why our universe couldn't be a bubble of space expanding into some OTHER bubble of space.
Clearly it depends on how you define "the universe"
If the universe is everything that could ever affect us then there is an (observer location dependent) edge, beyond which there may well just be more of the same universe which is expanding away from us faster than the speed of light so can never affect us (assuming we _can't_ just pop down a worm hole and appear at the edge of the visible universe).
If you define the universe to be the entire length of all of the spacial dimensions (even past the edge of the visible universe) then the concept of something being "outside" the universe gets more difficult. I suppose if the containing space has more dimensions than our universe then we could be expanding within it, just like the (2 spacial dimensional) "universe" represented by the surface of a balloon can expand inside our (3D) universe.
cosmologists believe that time's arrow was set very soon (split second) after the big bang occurred
I've heard this before and it doesn't seem to make much sense. - How can you define the start of the existance of time as happening _after_ a certain amount of time has elapsed? In order for time to elapse you need time to exist. - The big bang is a rapid expansion of space. The word "expansion" requires there to be time since it refers to the distances between points changing over a duration of time. So how can there be any expansion "between" the start of the big bang and the start of time?
Fundamentally I don't understand how there can ever be a "before the existance of time" since the word "before" requires there to be time.
I am too. I have a contract with my ISP that entitles me to the service defined in our agreement. Contention rates don't enter into it.
Ok, I guess that's a fair point - your ISP's service agreement will include a monthly cap (or similar) and so long as you don't exceed that you can consider the bandiwdth paid for by yourself.
This isn't about bittorrent, and it isn't about your ISP. It's about being able surcharge web proividers so as to drive the small sites off the web.
No - the term "net neutrality" has no formal definition. A neutral network would be one that handles all traffic in the same way. By doing *any* traffic prioritisation you are becoming a non-neutral network. I believe that traffic prioritisation based on the type of traffic is a good thing, but prioritisation based on charging content providers is evil. Banning *all* non-neutrality would be very bad since it would prevent both of these things - remember that the law makers aren't going to understand the difference between these two types of non-neutrality.
The middle ISPs have no accountability to the end users. They will have no incentive to be fair or competitive, and every incentive to soak every last cent they can out of anyone using their fibre.
Yes they do have accountability to the end users. Not _direct_ accountability of course, but if they provide a sucky service then the end user will change to an ISP who uses a different transit provider. If an ISP (the transit provider's customer) loses customers because of the transit provider's sucky service then they will drop that provider - thus the transit is indirectly accountable to the end user.
I think you are confusing net neutrality with traffic shaping.
Since there is no strict definition about what "net neutrality" is you cannot state that traffic shaping cannot be considered to be part of it.
Most discussions about net neutrality focus (probably correctly) on the "bad" type of non-neutrality (changing traffic behaviour based on charges imposed on the content providers) and ignore the potentially "good" traffic shaping. A completely neutral network would be one that handles every packet in the same way, no matter what type of content they contain - as soon as you start handling packets differently based on their content, no matter what the reason, you become a non-neutral network.
However, once the law makers get involved, who certainly won't understand the difference, we run the risk of them outlawing all non-neutral behaviour, which would include traffic shaping. I believe that traffic shaping is _required_ for an Internet that works well for everyone, so outlawing it would be very bad.
I believe that the argument for traffic shaping is accepted by most people
The most vocal people seem to be those who don't accept it - there is a lot of very public badmouthing of ISPs by the 24/7 bittorrent crowd and very little noise made about how good and important traffic shaping is.
But at the same time, traffic shaping needs to be treated as a technology that keeps things like Bittorrent playing nice with applications such as VoIP *in exceptional network conditions* - if the traffic shaping is necessary all the time then the network is underprovisioned. A lot of ISPs seem to be underprovisioning their networks and using traffic shaping to force BitTorrent users to take the hit for that lack of bandwidth.
The real debate now (and the important one that must be won for net neutrality) is over prioritising traffic according to its source (rather than its type).
Indeed, but I still fear that once the law makers get involved there may be bad collateral damage unless people are made aware of the legitimate uses for traffic prioritisation.
I don't know about you, but if I had to choose, I don't think I would pick an islamo-fascist government or a violent gang of thugs over my own government. It may not be perfect, but the standard of living here sure beats the hell out of the middle east.
I suspect the religious extremists think their religion sure beats the hell out of yours... I can't really see the difference between the 2 view points - in both cases both sides are attacking people for their own political reasons, and I would prefer to side with someone who _isn't_ killing a bunch of people rather than choosing between the various parties who are.
I'm also a bit confused by your argument, are you saying that blowing people up to improve your own standard of living is a good thing, or are you saying that blowing people up improves _their_ standard of living?
If you can't tell the difference between people who target civilians and those who use deadly force to stop them, then I have little hope for an ignorant sort like you.
So you're claiming that going to war in Iraq under false pretenses has helped stop terrorism?
But if you want to actually use some of that broadband bandwidth that you're already paying for, then I want to charge you extra
Ah, but the thing is that you probably aren't already paying for it. A lot of people seem to think that if they have a residential 8Mbps DSL then they are entitled to use that whole 8Mbps 24/7 (e.g. leave Bittorrent going all the time). However, the only reason residential connections can be so cheap is by having users contend with eachother for bandwidth - i.e. you can use up to 256Kbps (for example) on average and can burst up to 8Mbps. This is a good service really - most people want web pages, etc. to come down quickly (i.e. bursts up to a high speed) but much of the time their connection is idle (causing a low average usage).
I think the idea of forcing content providers to pay for the bandwidth on the consumer's end of the network is a terrible idea though (the consumer is already paying for their connection, why should the content provider pay more? If the consumer is choosing to use high bandwidth content then charge that consumer more, not the content provider). However, I am worried that outlawing non-neutrality would also squash the ISPs' ability to do legitimate traffic shaping.
For example, I think it's a very good thing for the ISP to prioritise protocols that _require_ a low latency (e.g. VoIP) over things like bittorrent (this sort of prioritisation isn't about making money, it's about providing a good service). But the key thing is that ISPs shouldn't be using prioritisation in order to allow massively underprovisioned services - it should be used purely to deal with unusual peaks in demand. On the odd occasion I fire up BitTorrent I should expect to get a reasonable amount of bandwidth out of it - if low priority traffic can never get the full bandwidth, the ISP is underprovisioned and that needs to be fixed.
Now all we need is a way to distinguish these packets. How about a new bit?
The IP header already has a bunch of ToS flags which indicate what sort of service the traffic requires (high bandwidth, low latency, low cost, etc). The problem is that you can't trust these flags because end users are antisocial bastards - if they discover their bittorrent goes a bit faster when pretending to be a low-latency application then they will set that flag, nomatter who else they screw in the process.
My favourite idea is to use the ToS flags to apply QoS rules but try and detect abuses and heavilly penalise people who are doing so. For example, if someone is using an inordinate amount of bandwidth with packets flagged as low latency then drop the priority of *all* that user's traffic as a penalty. The real issue is how to decide what constitutes an inordinate amount of bandwidth - VoIP and video conferencing both want a low latency network, but the video is going to use a lot more bandwidth than just plain VoIP.
There are also problems with encrypted traffic - if your traffic is all carried over ESP then there's no way for the ISP to see what sort of traffic it is anyway, so how can they prioritise it? Personally I'm a big fan of the idea of doing ad-hoc IPSEC between endpoints rather than having each protocol implement it's own encryption but it does rather screw anyone in the middle who is doing traffic prioritisation (whether they are doing it for good reasons or not).
not all of them are readily applicable to warfare with "terrorists."
Please explain the difference between US/UK troops and terrorists. In both cases they are a bunch of people who are following their leaders instructions to blow up and shoot people. I'd be willing to bet that the Iraq and Afganistan wars have cost way more civilian lives than any one "terror" campaign.
Remember, people can still be terrorists even if they don't blow themselves up...
Wasn't it reported somewhere that citizens of EU nations, when offered the "N" versions of Windows either purchased Windows from sources where the full versions were available or pirated the full-versions instead of purchasing the "N" version?
The problem here is the lack of forsight of most consumers.
Most consumers want things easy and good *now*, even if that makes things bad in the future (it's worth noting that many businesses work this way too, sacrificing long-term results for a quick fix).
In the short term, bundling of software is good for the consumer since it makes everything easy. The problem is that it kills off the competition and a market with no competition will inevitably stagnate since there is no reason for the monopoly to improve their product (they nolonger have to stay ahead of the competition). Internet Explorer is a good example of this - there was a period of rapid development which ended with the competing browsers being almost completely killed off and then MS ceased development on IE altogether until some competition reappeared.
Fundamentally, in order to protect the consumers' future, some amount of short-term pain must be endured. Whether it's down to the government to enforce this period of pain is open for debate, but clearly just giving the consumers the _option_ of short term hardship doesn't work - most people take the path of least immediate resistance, nomatter what the long term consequences.
My personal opinion is that the governments should outlaw monoculture bundling, thereby removing the option for the consumers to screw their own future. If Microsoft want to bundle then fine, so long as they allow anyone else to bundle packages of a suitable quality using exactly the same system, much like Linux distros do. For example, when you get a brand new computer, instead of coming with IE preinstalled (and no way to remove it) it could simply ask you whether you want to use IE, FireFox, Opera, etc and install that over the network (and do it in such a way that you can uninstall it later). The choice of what software to use should be up to the consumer, not Microsoft or Dell - and it should be just as easy to use any of the options. The current idea that users get IE, Outluck, etc and if they want something else they are free to search and download it is broken because it requires that consumers have enough knowledge to do that.
Don't even try the "Click throughs not legally binding!".
The fact that it's a click-through doesn't really matter - if you purchase for something then you have a statutory right for the manufacturer to warrant that it is fit for purpose, which AFAIK, can't be disclaimed in any contract. (This almost certainly doesn't apply to free (as in beer) software since you aren't purchasing it).
And if I'm not mistaken, open-source software does the same thing. BugZilla anyone? If it weren't for user feedback, a great majority of bugs wouldn't get fixed.
I find the major difference between reporting bugs to propriatory software and reporting them for Free software is the visibility of the process.
When you report a bug for propriatory software you tell them there's a problem and then your report vanishes into the darkness and eventually it might get fixed in a few years time if you're lucky (and probably won't be documented in the release notes - the only way you'll find out it's been fixed is by trying it), and you'll probably then have to pay a lot of money for a new version of the app that fixes your bug.
When you report a bug in Free software then it usually goes into a publically accessible bug tracker (and you can see if other people are having the same problems). By keeping an eye on the bug tracker you can see when your bug gets resolved or rejected (and the reasons why it was rejected), people can propose workarounds, you can get insight into why the behaviour is like it is. Then when the problem is fixed you can get the resolution for free.
Honestly, the number of times I've seen "there are no known problems with this release" in release notes for propriatory stuff when there is infact still a bug that has been reported to the vendor by numerous people over the past few years, it makes you stop bothering to spend the time filing bugs since the vendor clearly can't be bothered to deal with them (or even admit that they are there).
Visibility is a big deal - if you can quickly search to see if the problem you're seeing is a known problem (maybe even with a known resolution) then you can save yourself a lot of time, and being able to track the progress of your bug report encourages people to report more stuff in the future.
Mod parent down. It's comparable to the BBC in the sense that its run by the state and has a large budget. It's nothing like PBS.
The BBC is expressly *NOT* run by the state. They have a (published) charter _agreed_ with the state but that is most definately not the same thing as being run by the state.
If the positional thrusters are capable of producing enough delta-v for it to come down exactly at the right moment to ram the ascending space shuttle, then I guess yes, the technical possibility to attack the US does exist.
If it's in GEO then there's pretty much no chance it'll have enough fuel to descend to LEO...
the general consumer looks at the easier way to get their movie, be it rental/torrent/buy DVD/p2p: whatever seems better value.
Ah, but the thing is that the DRM _reduces_ the value of the legitimate product.
If I buy a DVD and put it in a legitimate player I get to sit through long unskippable videos telling me that copying is bad. If I download a copy of the movie I can just sit down and watch it.
If I buy an HD DVD I can't play it on my computer because I use Free software (DRM is fundamentally incompatable with Free software). If I download a copy of the movie then it works just fine.
If I buy some music on a corrupt optical disc (which seem to be still sold as "CDs"), I can't play it on my computer, can't rip it to Vorbis files to play on my in-car Vorbis player and it may not even work on some legitimate CD players. If I download a copy of the music then it works just fine.
If I buy "protected" content then I can't back it up, meaning I have to carry the original discs with me which could be lost or damaged. If I download it then I can back it up just fine.
In all of the above cases, the content producers are actually pushing me _away_ from the legitimate product because the illegal version is much, much better.
The only way you can get away with screwing your customers like that is if there is no way for *anyone* to copy the product. As soon as one person has copied it, anyone else can download the copy.
Most people _want_ to buy content legitimately, but DRM or extortionate prices prevent them from doing so.
You are casually conflating IDEOLOGICAL requirements with TECHNICAL requirements and leaving it up to the casual user to ferret them out. That's as good as just plain lying.
Shall I make things simple for you then?
Running non free drivers can cause stability problems
Whilest I have ideological problems with this, it is also a technical problem - propriatory drivers _do_ often have a history of poor code quality and you are at the manufacturer's mercy as to whether the problems will ever be fixed.
Running non free drivers can cause security problems
Again, this is both an ideological thing and a technical thing - propriatory drivers often have a history of long-standing security holes which would've been fixed quickly under a free model.
licencing
This isn't a technical thing, but it _is_ a legal thing. Just because one distro will work with the hardware doesn't make it *legal* for another distro to do it since there may be special licencing terms in place for that specific distro. The drivers may also require me to sign an EULA which prevents me from using the system in the way I want to. This is a very real problem and must be considered unless you are happy to break the law.
ongoing support for new distributions
If I am forced to use a closed, propriatory driver then I may be restricted as to what kernels, distributions, etc I am able to use with it. Again, this is a technical problem - if I am buying some hardware I need to know that I will be able to upgrade the software in the future, otherwise the hardware is worth significantly less to me since it will become obsolete more rapidly.
ease of use
I guess being able to actually *use* the hardware you bought might be considered ideological. However, I consider this a technical requirement - if I am required to jump through all sorts of hoops in order to make a driver work then it's almost as bad as not having a driver at all.
These are real issues, most of them are technical, a few of them are legal. I can't really see any of them which are purely ideological - however, why shouldn't ideology come into this? To me, ideological reasons are almost as important as technical reasons for doing stuff.
It's not really a "compulsory" tax. You're obliged to pay the license fee if you own a television tuner set to recieve broadcast television stations.
The TVLA keeps insisting that you need a licence to watch streaming video on your computer and on your cellphone too.
They seem to want to have their cake and eat it - either the TV licence covers the internet and thus the BBC can't derive advertising revenue from it, or the TV licence doesn't cover the internet and therefore you don't need one to receive content over the net. At the moment they are claiming the licence covers the internet but the BBC can still derive advertising revenue from it.
Also, denying UK access to the news content because of the advertising restrictions seems wrong - they should just present the content to the british public without advertising (or <shock> have YouTube redirect the british viewers to the same content hosted from the BBC website, sans adverts).
Note, in general I'm in favour of funding the BBC publicly rather than through commercial means. However, I think it's wrong for them to use my licence fee to produce content and then subject me to adverts if I want to watch it.
I'm rather of the opinion that there should be a clear line between licence-funded stuff and commercially funded stuff - if they want to use the licence fee to fund content then put it on a designated "non-commercial" channel and if they want to do something commercial then put it on a designated commercial channel and don't use the licence fee to fund it at all.
You make it sound like non-free drivers won't work on a zealously free distro like Debian when this is clearly not the case.
Are you intentionally spreading misinformation or are you just clueless?
There is no misinformation here. If you use non-free drivers then the software you are running ceases to be completely Free. If I don't want to run non-Free drivers (and there are many reasons why I don't - stability, security, ethics, etc.) then it won't do me any good to know that some non-Free drivers will work.
It is possible (but unlikely) that the distro in question has some special licencing arrangement with the hardware manufacturer to allow them to use the non-Free driver and that would mean that another distro may not be able to use the driver.
And finally, it is possible that the distro being used is running an ancient kernel and it _won't_ work with a newer one.
The main point is that this does nothing to show that it will _easilly_ work with any distro - even if it's possible to make it work with my distro of choice, I may have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get it to work.
As soon as you get to the luxury end of the market, the cars come with auto box by default, and you have to order a manual specially.
I call BS - whilest it's easy to get a luxury car with an automatic box, automatics are still by far the exception rather than the rule. No special ordering required - just ask for whichever you want. Infact, the only cars I can immediately think of that don't have a fully manual option are ones with silly flappy-paddle SMT/Steptronic boxes.
(And no, I've never owned an automatic, nor would I want to own one - my current car has a 6 speed manual and is way more fun than you could ever have with a full auto).
Slashdot Mirror
Now if they figure out a way to reduce my ass by half, the person sharing my monitor can also share my chair!
You can use a chainsaw to cut your donkey in two. Although why a smaller donkey allows chair sharing is anyone's guess...
Microsoft (who actually disbanded the IE team after IE6 --can you believe it?)
:)
Yes - once you have no competition and thus noone to stay ahead of in order to keep customers, why would you continue to invest in development of a project? If the customers think your product sucks then that's too bad - there's nowhere else to go*
(* yes, I know that there have always been other browsers, but they weren't known to the average user so MS stood no chance of losing a significant number of users).
This is why competition is good for the customers - it forces the vendors to continue to improve their products. Remember that the vendor isn't working for the good if it's customers, it's working for the good of itself - when there is competition in the market place then those goals tend to align quite well, but they are at odds with eachother if there is no competition.
This is also a key difference between commercial projects and many (but not all) Free projects - Free projects are often improved because the coder wants the feature for himself. Commercial projects are improved either because a customer will pay for the improvement or because it keeps customers from migrating away to the competition. In a monopoly, many Free projects will continue to improve.
even if people switch back to IE, it won't be to IE 6
Sadly there are still a lot of people using IE <= 6 - at what point can web developers ignore it completely and stop having to use horrible hacks just to make their pages display (I pretty much gave up supporting IE a few years ago, but I'm not running a commercial site. If people want to visit my site then it's their responsibility to use sane software - it doesn't harm me if they go elsewhere instead. For a commercial site, the loss of all the IE users would be disaster).
Microsoft has a long history of coming from behind
Couldn't have phrased it better myself.
Although historically MS seem to have overtaken the competition by copying what the competition is doing and then extending it in a non-standard way. That kind of behaviour won't wash with web developers, but sadly it is the non-technical user who dictates what browser is popular - if IE8 has a shiny new feature, the average user won't care that it's non standard and makes the lives of web developers hell.
there was no need for the Mozilla Foundation to vet and officially support extensions
I think that there needs to be work done to segregate extensions and plugins from the browser. At the moment, if an extension leaks memory, for example, then it's not obvious that it's the extension at fault - it's just interpretted as "firefox being crap" by the users. If each extension is segregated then the resource usage of each is easy to examine and a unstable extension/plugin shouldn't take down the whole browser.
I don't want IE to actually end up overtaking Firefox, because I want the dominant browser on the Web to be a cross-platform one.
I would be quite happy for several (relatively standards complient) browsers (including IE) to continually be leap-frogging ahead of eachother from version to version, rather than having one dominant browser. Having any dominant browser encourages the web developers to embrace non-standard parts of it at the expense of users of other browsers. The key to good web development is to try and make your code work in as many browsers as possible, not force everyone to use the dominant browser (even if it is cross-platform).
How can something with no boundary expand?
This is easilly described by the old inflating balloon model. Imagine you're a 2-dimensional being living on the surface of a balloon. One of your dimensions is east/west around the balloon and the other is perpendicular, making it north/south (for want of better terms). There is no boundary to those dimensions - you can keep walking in any direction forever. However, if the balloon expands then those dimensions are undeniably expanding - 2 stationary points anywhere on the surface of the balloon will always be moving away from eachother at a speed that is proportional to the distance between them.
The same thing can be modelled as a flat rubber sheet extending infinitely in all directions - the sheet can be continually stretched so that any 2 stationary points on the sheet are moving away from eachother at a speed proportional to their distance. Points with a great distance between them will be separating at a speed greater than the speed of light and thus they are unable to ever affect eachother in any way (this is allowed since the points are not moving with respect to space since it is the space between them that is expanding).
I don't see any reason why our universe couldn't be a bubble of space expanding into some OTHER bubble of space.
Clearly it depends on how you define "the universe"
If the universe is everything that could ever affect us then there is an (observer location dependent) edge, beyond which there may well just be more of the same universe which is expanding away from us faster than the speed of light so can never affect us (assuming we _can't_ just pop down a worm hole and appear at the edge of the visible universe).
If you define the universe to be the entire length of all of the spacial dimensions (even past the edge of the visible universe) then the concept of something being "outside" the universe gets more difficult. I suppose if the containing space has more dimensions than our universe then we could be expanding within it, just like the (2 spacial dimensional) "universe" represented by the surface of a balloon can expand inside our (3D) universe.
cosmologists believe that time's arrow was set very soon (split second) after the big bang occurred
I've heard this before and it doesn't seem to make much sense.
- How can you define the start of the existance of time as happening _after_ a certain amount of time has elapsed? In order for time to elapse you need time to exist.
- The big bang is a rapid expansion of space. The word "expansion" requires there to be time since it refers to the distances between points changing over a duration of time. So how can there be any expansion "between" the start of the big bang and the start of time?
Fundamentally I don't understand how there can ever be a "before the existance of time" since the word "before" requires there to be time.
I am too. I have a contract with my ISP that entitles me to the service defined in our agreement. Contention rates don't enter into it.
Ok, I guess that's a fair point - your ISP's service agreement will include a monthly cap (or similar) and so long as you don't exceed that you can consider the bandiwdth paid for by yourself.
This isn't about bittorrent, and it isn't about your ISP. It's about being able surcharge web proividers so as to drive the small sites off the web.
No - the term "net neutrality" has no formal definition. A neutral network would be one that handles all traffic in the same way. By doing *any* traffic prioritisation you are becoming a non-neutral network. I believe that traffic prioritisation based on the type of traffic is a good thing, but prioritisation based on charging content providers is evil. Banning *all* non-neutrality would be very bad since it would prevent both of these things - remember that the law makers aren't going to understand the difference between these two types of non-neutrality.
The middle ISPs have no accountability to the end users. They will have no incentive to be fair or competitive, and every incentive to soak every last cent they can out of anyone using their fibre.
Yes they do have accountability to the end users. Not _direct_ accountability of course, but if they provide a sucky service then the end user will change to an ISP who uses a different transit provider. If an ISP (the transit provider's customer) loses customers because of the transit provider's sucky service then they will drop that provider - thus the transit is indirectly accountable to the end user.
I think you are confusing net neutrality with traffic shaping.
Since there is no strict definition about what "net neutrality" is you cannot state that traffic shaping cannot be considered to be part of it.
Most discussions about net neutrality focus (probably correctly) on the "bad" type of non-neutrality (changing traffic behaviour based on charges imposed on the content providers) and ignore the potentially "good" traffic shaping. A completely neutral network would be one that handles every packet in the same way, no matter what type of content they contain - as soon as you start handling packets differently based on their content, no matter what the reason, you become a non-neutral network.
However, once the law makers get involved, who certainly won't understand the difference, we run the risk of them outlawing all non-neutral behaviour, which would include traffic shaping. I believe that traffic shaping is _required_ for an Internet that works well for everyone, so outlawing it would be very bad.
I believe that the argument for traffic shaping is accepted by most people
The most vocal people seem to be those who don't accept it - there is a lot of very public badmouthing of ISPs by the 24/7 bittorrent crowd and very little noise made about how good and important traffic shaping is.
But at the same time, traffic shaping needs to be treated as a technology that keeps things like Bittorrent playing nice with applications such as VoIP *in exceptional network conditions* - if the traffic shaping is necessary all the time then the network is underprovisioned. A lot of ISPs seem to be underprovisioning their networks and using traffic shaping to force BitTorrent users to take the hit for that lack of bandwidth.
The real debate now (and the important one that must be won for net neutrality) is over prioritising traffic according to its source (rather than its type).
Indeed, but I still fear that once the law makers get involved there may be bad collateral damage unless people are made aware of the legitimate uses for traffic prioritisation.
I don't know about you, but if I had to choose, I don't think I would pick an islamo-fascist government or a violent gang of thugs over my own government. It may not be perfect, but the standard of living here sure beats the hell out of the middle east.
I suspect the religious extremists think their religion sure beats the hell out of yours... I can't really see the difference between the 2 view points - in both cases both sides are attacking people for their own political reasons, and I would prefer to side with someone who _isn't_ killing a bunch of people rather than choosing between the various parties who are.
I'm also a bit confused by your argument, are you saying that blowing people up to improve your own standard of living is a good thing, or are you saying that blowing people up improves _their_ standard of living?
If you can't tell the difference between people who target civilians and those who use deadly force to stop them, then I have little hope for an ignorant sort like you.
So you're claiming that going to war in Iraq under false pretenses has helped stop terrorism?
But if you want to actually use some of that broadband bandwidth that you're already paying for, then I want to charge you extra
Ah, but the thing is that you probably aren't already paying for it. A lot of people seem to think that if they have a residential 8Mbps DSL then they are entitled to use that whole 8Mbps 24/7 (e.g. leave Bittorrent going all the time). However, the only reason residential connections can be so cheap is by having users contend with eachother for bandwidth - i.e. you can use up to 256Kbps (for example) on average and can burst up to 8Mbps. This is a good service really - most people want web pages, etc. to come down quickly (i.e. bursts up to a high speed) but much of the time their connection is idle (causing a low average usage).
I think the idea of forcing content providers to pay for the bandwidth on the consumer's end of the network is a terrible idea though (the consumer is already paying for their connection, why should the content provider pay more? If the consumer is choosing to use high bandwidth content then charge that consumer more, not the content provider). However, I am worried that outlawing non-neutrality would also squash the ISPs' ability to do legitimate traffic shaping.
For example, I think it's a very good thing for the ISP to prioritise protocols that _require_ a low latency (e.g. VoIP) over things like bittorrent (this sort of prioritisation isn't about making money, it's about providing a good service). But the key thing is that ISPs shouldn't be using prioritisation in order to allow massively underprovisioned services - it should be used purely to deal with unusual peaks in demand. On the odd occasion I fire up BitTorrent I should expect to get a reasonable amount of bandwidth out of it - if low priority traffic can never get the full bandwidth, the ISP is underprovisioned and that needs to be fixed.
Now all we need is a way to distinguish these packets. How about a new bit?
The IP header already has a bunch of ToS flags which indicate what sort of service the traffic requires (high bandwidth, low latency, low cost, etc). The problem is that you can't trust these flags because end users are antisocial bastards - if they discover their bittorrent goes a bit faster when pretending to be a low-latency application then they will set that flag, nomatter who else they screw in the process.
My favourite idea is to use the ToS flags to apply QoS rules but try and detect abuses and heavilly penalise people who are doing so. For example, if someone is using an inordinate amount of bandwidth with packets flagged as low latency then drop the priority of *all* that user's traffic as a penalty. The real issue is how to decide what constitutes an inordinate amount of bandwidth - VoIP and video conferencing both want a low latency network, but the video is going to use a lot more bandwidth than just plain VoIP.
There are also problems with encrypted traffic - if your traffic is all carried over ESP then there's no way for the ISP to see what sort of traffic it is anyway, so how can they prioritise it? Personally I'm a big fan of the idea of doing ad-hoc IPSEC between endpoints rather than having each protocol implement it's own encryption but it does rather screw anyone in the middle who is doing traffic prioritisation (whether they are doing it for good reasons or not).
not all of them are readily applicable to warfare with "terrorists."
Please explain the difference between US/UK troops and terrorists. In both cases they are a bunch of people who are following their leaders instructions to blow up and shoot people. I'd be willing to bet that the Iraq and Afganistan wars have cost way more civilian lives than any one "terror" campaign.
Remember, people can still be terrorists even if they don't blow themselves up...
Wasn't it reported somewhere that citizens of EU nations, when offered the "N" versions of Windows either purchased Windows from sources where the full versions were available or pirated the full-versions instead of purchasing the "N" version?
The problem here is the lack of forsight of most consumers.
Most consumers want things easy and good *now*, even if that makes things bad in the future (it's worth noting that many businesses work this way too, sacrificing long-term results for a quick fix).
In the short term, bundling of software is good for the consumer since it makes everything easy. The problem is that it kills off the competition and a market with no competition will inevitably stagnate since there is no reason for the monopoly to improve their product (they nolonger have to stay ahead of the competition). Internet Explorer is a good example of this - there was a period of rapid development which ended with the competing browsers being almost completely killed off and then MS ceased development on IE altogether until some competition reappeared.
Fundamentally, in order to protect the consumers' future, some amount of short-term pain must be endured. Whether it's down to the government to enforce this period of pain is open for debate, but clearly just giving the consumers the _option_ of short term hardship doesn't work - most people take the path of least immediate resistance, nomatter what the long term consequences.
My personal opinion is that the governments should outlaw monoculture bundling, thereby removing the option for the consumers to screw their own future. If Microsoft want to bundle then fine, so long as they allow anyone else to bundle packages of a suitable quality using exactly the same system, much like Linux distros do. For example, when you get a brand new computer, instead of coming with IE preinstalled (and no way to remove it) it could simply ask you whether you want to use IE, FireFox, Opera, etc and install that over the network (and do it in such a way that you can uninstall it later). The choice of what software to use should be up to the consumer, not Microsoft or Dell - and it should be just as easy to use any of the options. The current idea that users get IE, Outluck, etc and if they want something else they are free to search and download it is broken because it requires that consumers have enough knowledge to do that.
Troll implies, y'know, trolling for replies. I could care less.
Surely if you could care less then that means you care?
Don't even try the "Click throughs not legally binding!".
The fact that it's a click-through doesn't really matter - if you purchase for something then you have a statutory right for the manufacturer to warrant that it is fit for purpose, which AFAIK, can't be disclaimed in any contract. (This almost certainly doesn't apply to free (as in beer) software since you aren't purchasing it).
And if I'm not mistaken, open-source software does the same thing. BugZilla anyone? If it weren't for user feedback, a great majority of bugs wouldn't get fixed.
I find the major difference between reporting bugs to propriatory software and reporting them for Free software is the visibility of the process.
When you report a bug for propriatory software you tell them there's a problem and then your report vanishes into the darkness and eventually it might get fixed in a few years time if you're lucky (and probably won't be documented in the release notes - the only way you'll find out it's been fixed is by trying it), and you'll probably then have to pay a lot of money for a new version of the app that fixes your bug.
When you report a bug in Free software then it usually goes into a publically accessible bug tracker (and you can see if other people are having the same problems). By keeping an eye on the bug tracker you can see when your bug gets resolved or rejected (and the reasons why it was rejected), people can propose workarounds, you can get insight into why the behaviour is like it is. Then when the problem is fixed you can get the resolution for free.
Honestly, the number of times I've seen "there are no known problems with this release" in release notes for propriatory stuff when there is infact still a bug that has been reported to the vendor by numerous people over the past few years, it makes you stop bothering to spend the time filing bugs since the vendor clearly can't be bothered to deal with them (or even admit that they are there).
Visibility is a big deal - if you can quickly search to see if the problem you're seeing is a known problem (maybe even with a known resolution) then you can save yourself a lot of time, and being able to track the progress of your bug report encourages people to report more stuff in the future.
or if he ends up on a list that guarantees that he can never get a visa.
I'm confused... why would he care if he can't get a visa to visit a country he probably has no interest in visiting?
Mod parent down. It's comparable to the BBC in the sense that its run by the state and has a large budget. It's nothing like PBS.
The BBC is expressly *NOT* run by the state. They have a (published) charter _agreed_ with the state but that is most definately not the same thing as being run by the state.
If the positional thrusters are capable of producing enough delta-v for it to come down exactly at the right moment to ram the ascending space shuttle, then I guess yes, the technical possibility to attack the US does exist.
If it's in GEO then there's pretty much no chance it'll have enough fuel to descend to LEO...
Ah, but the thing is that the DRM _reduces_ the value of the legitimate product.
In all of the above cases, the content producers are actually pushing me _away_ from the legitimate product because the illegal version is much, much better.
The only way you can get away with screwing your customers like that is if there is no way for *anyone* to copy the product. As soon as one person has copied it, anyone else can download the copy.
Most people _want_ to buy content legitimately, but DRM or extortionate prices prevent them from doing so.
Dude, /everything/ phones home. Is this even news anymore? I just take it for granted and use a good firewall.
How about just avoiding using any software that phones home without your permission?
You are casually conflating IDEOLOGICAL requirements with TECHNICAL requirements and leaving it up to the casual user to ferret them out. That's as good as just plain lying.
Shall I make things simple for you then?
Running non free drivers can cause stability problems
Whilest I have ideological problems with this, it is also a technical problem - propriatory drivers _do_ often have a history of poor code quality and you are at the manufacturer's mercy as to whether the problems will ever be fixed.
Running non free drivers can cause security problems
Again, this is both an ideological thing and a technical thing - propriatory drivers often have a history of long-standing security holes which would've been fixed quickly under a free model.
licencing
This isn't a technical thing, but it _is_ a legal thing. Just because one distro will work with the hardware doesn't make it *legal* for another distro to do it since there may be special licencing terms in place for that specific distro. The drivers may also require me to sign an EULA which prevents me from using the system in the way I want to. This is a very real problem and must be considered unless you are happy to break the law.
ongoing support for new distributions
If I am forced to use a closed, propriatory driver then I may be restricted as to what kernels, distributions, etc I am able to use with it. Again, this is a technical problem - if I am buying some hardware I need to know that I will be able to upgrade the software in the future, otherwise the hardware is worth significantly less to me since it will become obsolete more rapidly.
ease of use
I guess being able to actually *use* the hardware you bought might be considered ideological. However, I consider this a technical requirement - if I am required to jump through all sorts of hoops in order to make a driver work then it's almost as bad as not having a driver at all.
These are real issues, most of them are technical, a few of them are legal. I can't really see any of them which are purely ideological - however, why shouldn't ideology come into this? To me, ideological reasons are almost as important as technical reasons for doing stuff.
It's not really a "compulsory" tax. You're obliged to pay the license fee if you own a television tuner set to recieve broadcast television stations.
The TVLA keeps insisting that you need a licence to watch streaming video on your computer and on your cellphone too.
They seem to want to have their cake and eat it - either the TV licence covers the internet and thus the BBC can't derive advertising revenue from it, or the TV licence doesn't cover the internet and therefore you don't need one to receive content over the net. At the moment they are claiming the licence covers the internet but the BBC can still derive advertising revenue from it.
Also, denying UK access to the news content because of the advertising restrictions seems wrong - they should just present the content to the british public without advertising (or <shock> have YouTube redirect the british viewers to the same content hosted from the BBC website, sans adverts).
Note, in general I'm in favour of funding the BBC publicly rather than through commercial means. However, I think it's wrong for them to use my licence fee to produce content and then subject me to adverts if I want to watch it.
I'm rather of the opinion that there should be a clear line between licence-funded stuff and commercially funded stuff - if they want to use the licence fee to fund content then put it on a designated "non-commercial" channel and if they want to do something commercial then put it on a designated commercial channel and don't use the licence fee to fund it at all.
You make it sound like non-free drivers won't work on a zealously free distro like Debian when this is clearly not the case.
Are you intentionally spreading misinformation or are you just clueless?
There is no misinformation here. If you use non-free drivers then the software you are running ceases to be completely Free. If I don't want to run non-Free drivers (and there are many reasons why I don't - stability, security, ethics, etc.) then it won't do me any good to know that some non-Free drivers will work.
It is possible (but unlikely) that the distro in question has some special licencing arrangement with the hardware manufacturer to allow them to use the non-Free driver and that would mean that another distro may not be able to use the driver.
And finally, it is possible that the distro being used is running an ancient kernel and it _won't_ work with a newer one.
The main point is that this does nothing to show that it will _easilly_ work with any distro - even if it's possible to make it work with my distro of choice, I may have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get it to work.
As soon as you get to the luxury end of the market, the cars come with auto box by default, and you have to order a manual specially.
I call BS - whilest it's easy to get a luxury car with an automatic box, automatics are still by far the exception rather than the rule. No special ordering required - just ask for whichever you want. Infact, the only cars I can immediately think of that don't have a fully manual option are ones with silly flappy-paddle SMT/Steptronic boxes.
(And no, I've never owned an automatic, nor would I want to own one - my current car has a 6 speed manual and is way more fun than you could ever have with a full auto).