Sounds to me like the US could do with some of that.
Clearly you didn't bother to read what I wrote about working with CLECs. Let me summarize it for you in easier to follow language: Been there, done that, wasn't impressed.
. Government regulation is what helps keeps bad pharmaceuticals off the "free market".
Yeah, if it wasn't for Government we might have drugs on the marketplace that caused heart attacks or something.
Government regulation is necessary because of monopolies although lately it seems to have fallen off the job.
I don't think you read what I wrote. I was complaining about monopolies that are issued and backed up by the Government, i.e: cable & telephone franchise agreements. I was not complaining about regulation. That's a separate issue. If you hate monopolies so much then why aren't you down at your local city hall demanding that they end the practice of granting them?
More regulation is necessary or else we wind up again in the situation where companies are too big to be allowed to fail.
Interestingly enough the companies that got "too big to fail" are in some of the most regulated (insurance, banking) industries that are out there.
Here again, the free market is not valuing competition the way we need it to.
I'm sorry that you are so confused that you actually believe we have a free market for telecommunications services in this country.
Yeah, that is the problem, isn't it? I've toyed with the idea of moving to New Hampshire (live free or die baby) but I'm told that so many Boston ex-pats are moving to the state that it's soon going to become Massachusetts-lite. Mores the pity.
Where are you in the South? I spent four years living outside of Hickory NC before moving back to NYS.
I miss the days when disputes were settled on the playground after school. *sigh*
I miss the days when society was sensible. I'm not that old but when I went to school we had a rifle shooting club on campus, complete with indoor and outdoor shooting ranges. It wasn't regarded as unusual if students carried pocket knives. Nowadays they suspend kids for having toy guns in their backpacks or pocket knives in their car. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.....
The south of the U.S. has a higher proportion of ignorant people than other areas.
Yet people keep moving there because they can actually afford to live in the South without being taxed and regulated to death. As someone who was born, raised and still lives in the Northeast, let me assure you that it's no paradise.
Who gets to decent what's "reasonable"? And why should I believe that the experience will be any different than my previous experiences with CLECs? I've worked with CLECs in many different communities for connections ranging from personal to small business to enterprise. The only thing they seem to be good at is pointing the finger at the ILEC when they have service issues.
Me: "My connection is still down, I'd like to check on the status of my trouble ticket."
Them: "Yeah, we are working on fixing that, but we are waiting for Verizon and don't have an ETA yet."
Me: "How is it Verizon's fault when I can run a traceroute that makes it to your core network before dying?"
Them: "I'm sorry sir, I can't give you any more information until Verizon gets back to us."
Me: "The Verizon tech left here four hours ago and said the circuit was fine."
Them: "Sir, I can't give you any information until Verizon gets back to us."
YMMV but I've never had a positive experience with a CLEC.
So why don't you do something about it instead of waiting for the Government to come and save you? Have a bunch of people in your neighborhood go in together on a business connection at a location that can get cable and pipe it over to your neighborhood with wireless. Or do the same thing right in your own neighborhood with a couple of bonded T-1s. If there are enough people in your neighborhood that want good internet you ought to be able to pull this off. If there aren't then why are you surprised that nobody wants to invest the money to service your location?
The government has say in certain things like trash collection for efficiency.
You think government picking up the trash makes it more efficient? What planet do you live on?
My home town has a mixture of communities with public and private trash pick-up. Follow the two garbage trucks around and you'll soon learn the difference between the two. The public trucks require three men and plod along at a leisurely pace. The driver sits in the cab the whole time and does nothing but drive. The private trucks work with two men, the driver gets out and helps and they manage to move at a much quicker pace.
Then there's the difference in pay. The public guys start out at $18/hr with benefits that would make most private sector employees envious. Now I don't want to knock the value of my friendly local sanitation engineers, but unless you are the garbage man from Dilbert you probably aren't worth $18/hr for driving a truck around and picking up garbage.
but in cases where the entry costs are so high as to make new entry impractical free market capitalism breaks down, and the government needs to intervene.
Government intervention is the reason that free market capitalism has broken down. Nobody even gets to try to come up with the entry costs because there's no point -- not when Government has already granted an exclusive monopoly to another company.
You saying you can open a bar in New York and stick a 'No Blacks' sign in the window?
And why exactly shouldn't you be allowed to do this? Your business won't last long -- the community will see to that -- so why do we need the Government to force you to let blacks into your business when the marketplace will see to it that you don't have a business for very long?
Discriminating based on mental abilities would be just as illegal as discrimination based on ethnicity, religion or sex in many European countries.
Thankfully we don't live in Europe and a private business is still free to choose who they want to do business with. If you think it's "discrimination" then you are equally free not to do business with them or even to try and get people to boycott them.
You the customer and user shapes your traffic not your outside ISP
It would actually be more efficient to have my ISP do it but they wanted too much damn money for it. If they were shaping it I could take advantage of more of the pipe. Because they aren't I have to limit how much of our bandwidth we can utilize, else the packets start getting queued on their router and my shaping rules don't mean anything.
Too bad, the only choice you have is that provider or no provider.
Why is that I wonder? It wouldn't have anything to do with the practice of local governments granting monopolies, would it?
There will always be a market for that, even under a completely neutral internet. My company is out in the boonies and can't get any other internet access besides satellite (high latency, transfer limits, shitty upload pipe) or a T-1 (expensive but reliable). We can't afford to get a bonded connection so we are stuck with a 1.5 mbit/s pipe to share among 60 employees (upwards of 40 of whom are working at any time).
That pipe has to accommodate web browsing, our e-mail and web servers, VPN access for employees who work from home, VOIP for our two people who work out in the field, etc, etc. There is no way that I could accommodate all of those uses without a decent traffic shaping setup.
I'm not talking about sending people to jail. I'm talking about what the bandwidth and iron that I paid for will be used to support. I choose not to have it used by perverts who exploit children. I live in a free country and have other means of communicating anonymously if the need arises. I don't need to support tor.
Was it actual child pornography, or just children without clothes? There's a difference. The former is sick, but the latter is legal.
A lot of the traffic that I observed was encrypted and could have been anything. The part that caught my attention was a bunch of FTP transfers to IP addresses in Eastern Europe. The file names that were being transferred were rather "suggestive" if you get my drift. That was when I shut the exit node down.
I loved the idea of having my computer assist people in China from bypassing the Great Firewall, dissents get their story out, etc. But I wasn't willing to have it be used to assist perverts in the exploitation of other human beings.
I did run it again for awhile during the mess in Iran with a carefully picked white list. I had Twitter, Google, the BBC, CNN and VOA allowed as exit points. I saw a fair amount of traffic for awhile so I'd like to think I helped somebody out. I did manage to piss someone off, because that computer got DDoS'ed a few weeks after I set it up. They wasted their time on me though, the traffic had largely died down by the time the DDoS happened.
The true test of free speech is if you tolerate things that you find objectionable.
It's not free speech when it comes with the abuse (child exploitation) of other human beings. That's a crime and we throw those responsible for it in prison.
The conventions never applied to signatories who were fighting adversaries that refused to follow them. Given the Japanese treatment of prisoners and the fact that their soldiers would often use white flags as cover to get close enough to kill our troops, I'd say that they forfeited whatever protections the civilized world had previously agreed to.
I don't have a problem with tor existing. I've used it myself many times. I'm just not willing to support it with my network resources when child pornography makes up such a large portion of the traffic on the tor network.
Personally I would like to see someone design something like tor that would be limited to text based protocols like IRC, Usenet, etc. That would provide a channel of anonymous communication that could be deployed without sucking up as many resources as tor does and without supporting child pornography and copyright infringement. This would bring at least two benefits:
More people would be willing to run tor nodes because they wouldn't have to donate as much bandwidth
The network would be used for communication rather than bulk transfers of copyrighted works and/or child pornography.
Russians we're already owning Japanese with their land attacks
Given Russian actions in Eastern Europe one could argue that it was better to absorb two nuclear bombs and wind up occupied by the United States than it would have been to be sliced in half with a large portion of your population at the mercy of Stalin and his army of rapists.
But Americans had to show off too (as Cold War was already kind of starting), so they launched those nukes.
It seems to me that you should produce some evidence to substantiate such an outlandish claim.
So if you point a gun at me, I can hunt down and disintegrate your entire family tree?
That's what total war is. Every resource of the nation-state is poured into the war effort. Every resource of the nation-state becomes a valid target.
Take that to it's logical extreme: if a citizen of a foreign country kills someone in America, we have the right to nuke that person's homeland, because they started the killing.
That's not the "logical conclusion". That's a straw man that you set up.
It's a matter of intent, participation, and scale. It's ludicrous to assume that everyone in Japan supported the alliance with the Germans or even the war in general
Why is that relevant?
And don't forget we are talking about an action undertaken with full knowledge of the fact that it would kill hundreds of thousands of helpless civilians
You mean after we gave them months of warnings that they should evacuate their cities?
at a time when Japan's war machine was already decimated, and the allied forces were merely trying to force an official surrender so they could occupy a country which posed no further military threat.
No further military threat? Ask the 12,500 dead Allied soldiers on Okinawa if the Japanese still posed a military threat. Ask the hundreds of thousands that were expected to die during Operation Downfall if they still posed a military threat. Then consider the alternative to invasion (continuing the economic blockade) and ask yourself how many millions of Japanese civilians would have starved to death.
There was just recently a slashdot article about Congress passing a law to allow them to monitor what passes through anonymous networks.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's about 50% child pornography, 25% copyright infringement, 15% trolling on sites that banned someone and 10% legitimate speech that has a valid need for anonymity. I ran a tor exit node for three days before I got curious enough to fire up wireshark and see what kind of traffic was passing through it. I shut it down after I discovered that the vast majority of it was child pornography being downloaded from servers in Eastern Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
The weather can't be that much worse than Upstate New York :) How hard is it to find IT and teaching jobs up there?
Sounds to me like the US could do with some of that.
Clearly you didn't bother to read what I wrote about working with CLECs. Let me summarize it for you in easier to follow language: Been there, done that, wasn't impressed.
. Government regulation is what helps keeps bad pharmaceuticals off the "free market".
Yeah, if it wasn't for Government we might have drugs on the marketplace that caused heart attacks or something.
Government regulation is necessary because of monopolies although lately it seems to have fallen off the job.
I don't think you read what I wrote. I was complaining about monopolies that are issued and backed up by the Government, i.e: cable & telephone franchise agreements. I was not complaining about regulation. That's a separate issue. If you hate monopolies so much then why aren't you down at your local city hall demanding that they end the practice of granting them?
More regulation is necessary or else we wind up again in the situation where companies are too big to be allowed to fail.
Interestingly enough the companies that got "too big to fail" are in some of the most regulated (insurance, banking) industries that are out there.
Here again, the free market is not valuing competition the way we need it to.
I'm sorry that you are so confused that you actually believe we have a free market for telecommunications services in this country.
Yeah, that is the problem, isn't it? I've toyed with the idea of moving to New Hampshire (live free or die baby) but I'm told that so many Boston ex-pats are moving to the state that it's soon going to become Massachusetts-lite. Mores the pity.
Where are you in the South? I spent four years living outside of Hickory NC before moving back to NYS.
I miss the days when disputes were settled on the playground after school. *sigh*
I miss the days when society was sensible. I'm not that old but when I went to school we had a rifle shooting club on campus, complete with indoor and outdoor shooting ranges. It wasn't regarded as unusual if students carried pocket knives. Nowadays they suspend kids for having toy guns in their backpacks or pocket knives in their car. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.....
The south of the U.S. has a higher proportion of ignorant people than other areas.
Yet people keep moving there because they can actually afford to live in the South without being taxed and regulated to death. As someone who was born, raised and still lives in the Northeast, let me assure you that it's no paradise.
Force 'em to share the lines at a reasonable cost
Who gets to decent what's "reasonable"? And why should I believe that the experience will be any different than my previous experiences with CLECs? I've worked with CLECs in many different communities for connections ranging from personal to small business to enterprise. The only thing they seem to be good at is pointing the finger at the ILEC when they have service issues.
Me: "My connection is still down, I'd like to check on the status of my trouble ticket."
Them: "Yeah, we are working on fixing that, but we are waiting for Verizon and don't have an ETA yet."
Me: "How is it Verizon's fault when I can run a traceroute that makes it to your core network before dying?"
Them: "I'm sorry sir, I can't give you any more information until Verizon gets back to us."
Me: "The Verizon tech left here four hours ago and said the circuit was fine."
Them: "Sir, I can't give you any information until Verizon gets back to us."
YMMV but I've never had a positive experience with a CLEC.
So why don't you do something about it instead of waiting for the Government to come and save you? Have a bunch of people in your neighborhood go in together on a business connection at a location that can get cable and pipe it over to your neighborhood with wireless. Or do the same thing right in your own neighborhood with a couple of bonded T-1s. If there are enough people in your neighborhood that want good internet you ought to be able to pull this off. If there aren't then why are you surprised that nobody wants to invest the money to service your location?
The government has say in certain things like trash collection for efficiency.
You think government picking up the trash makes it more efficient? What planet do you live on?
My home town has a mixture of communities with public and private trash pick-up. Follow the two garbage trucks around and you'll soon learn the difference between the two. The public trucks require three men and plod along at a leisurely pace. The driver sits in the cab the whole time and does nothing but drive. The private trucks work with two men, the driver gets out and helps and they manage to move at a much quicker pace.
Then there's the difference in pay. The public guys start out at $18/hr with benefits that would make most private sector employees envious. Now I don't want to knock the value of my friendly local sanitation engineers, but unless you are the garbage man from Dilbert you probably aren't worth $18/hr for driving a truck around and picking up garbage.
More efficient? Really?
but in cases where the entry costs are so high as to make new entry impractical free market capitalism breaks down, and the government needs to intervene.
Government intervention is the reason that free market capitalism has broken down. Nobody even gets to try to come up with the entry costs because there's no point -- not when Government has already granted an exclusive monopoly to another company.
Are you claiming that the Red Army didn't rape millions of German women? Would you feel better if I cited NPR, spiegel or Wikipedia?
You saying you can open a bar in New York and stick a 'No Blacks' sign in the window?
And why exactly shouldn't you be allowed to do this? Your business won't last long -- the community will see to that -- so why do we need the Government to force you to let blacks into your business when the marketplace will see to it that you don't have a business for very long?
Discriminating based on mental abilities would be just as illegal as discrimination based on ethnicity, religion or sex in many European countries.
Thankfully we don't live in Europe and a private business is still free to choose who they want to do business with. If you think it's "discrimination" then you are equally free not to do business with them or even to try and get people to boycott them.
You the customer and user shapes your traffic not your outside ISP
It would actually be more efficient to have my ISP do it but they wanted too much damn money for it. If they were shaping it I could take advantage of more of the pipe. Because they aren't I have to limit how much of our bandwidth we can utilize, else the packets start getting queued on their router and my shaping rules don't mean anything.
Too bad, the only choice you have is that provider or no provider.
Why is that I wonder? It wouldn't have anything to do with the practice of local governments granting monopolies, would it?
Selling traffic shaping solutions, presumably.
There will always be a market for that, even under a completely neutral internet. My company is out in the boonies and can't get any other internet access besides satellite (high latency, transfer limits, shitty upload pipe) or a T-1 (expensive but reliable). We can't afford to get a bonded connection so we are stuck with a 1.5 mbit/s pipe to share among 60 employees (upwards of 40 of whom are working at any time).
That pipe has to accommodate web browsing, our e-mail and web servers, VPN access for employees who work from home, VOIP for our two people who work out in the field, etc, etc. There is no way that I could accommodate all of those uses without a decent traffic shaping setup.
I'm not talking about sending people to jail. I'm talking about what the bandwidth and iron that I paid for will be used to support. I choose not to have it used by perverts who exploit children. I live in a free country and have other means of communicating anonymously if the need arises. I don't need to support tor.
Was it actual child pornography, or just children without clothes? There's a difference. The former is sick, but the latter is legal.
A lot of the traffic that I observed was encrypted and could have been anything. The part that caught my attention was a bunch of FTP transfers to IP addresses in Eastern Europe. The file names that were being transferred were rather "suggestive" if you get my drift. That was when I shut the exit node down.
I loved the idea of having my computer assist people in China from bypassing the Great Firewall, dissents get their story out, etc. But I wasn't willing to have it be used to assist perverts in the exploitation of other human beings.
I did run it again for awhile during the mess in Iran with a carefully picked white list. I had Twitter, Google, the BBC, CNN and VOA allowed as exit points. I saw a fair amount of traffic for awhile so I'd like to think I helped somebody out. I did manage to piss someone off, because that computer got DDoS'ed a few weeks after I set it up. They wasted their time on me though, the traffic had largely died down by the time the DDoS happened.
The true test of free speech is if you tolerate things that you find objectionable.
It's not free speech when it comes with the abuse (child exploitation) of other human beings. That's a crime and we throw those responsible for it in prison.
That looks like an interesting read. Think I'll pick that up for the weekend. Thanks for the recommendation :)
The conventions never applied to signatories who were fighting adversaries that refused to follow them. Given the Japanese treatment of prisoners and the fact that their soldiers would often use white flags as cover to get close enough to kill our troops, I'd say that they forfeited whatever protections the civilized world had previously agreed to.
I don't have a problem with tor existing. I've used it myself many times. I'm just not willing to support it with my network resources when child pornography makes up such a large portion of the traffic on the tor network.
Personally I would like to see someone design something like tor that would be limited to text based protocols like IRC, Usenet, etc. That would provide a channel of anonymous communication that could be deployed without sucking up as many resources as tor does and without supporting child pornography and copyright infringement. This would bring at least two benefits:
Russians we're already owning Japanese with their land attacks
Given Russian actions in Eastern Europe one could argue that it was better to absorb two nuclear bombs and wind up occupied by the United States than it would have been to be sliced in half with a large portion of your population at the mercy of Stalin and his army of rapists.
But Americans had to show off too (as Cold War was already kind of starting), so they launched those nukes.
It seems to me that you should produce some evidence to substantiate such an outlandish claim.
No, I'm just not willing to use my resources to promote the exploitation of children.
So if you point a gun at me, I can hunt down and disintegrate your entire family tree?
That's what total war is. Every resource of the nation-state is poured into the war effort. Every resource of the nation-state becomes a valid target.
Take that to it's logical extreme: if a citizen of a foreign country kills someone in America, we have the right to nuke that person's homeland, because they started the killing.
That's not the "logical conclusion". That's a straw man that you set up.
It's a matter of intent, participation, and scale. It's ludicrous to assume that everyone in Japan supported the alliance with the Germans or even the war in general
Why is that relevant?
And don't forget we are talking about an action undertaken with full knowledge of the fact that it would kill hundreds of thousands of helpless civilians
You mean after we gave them months of warnings that they should evacuate their cities?
at a time when Japan's war machine was already decimated, and the allied forces were merely trying to force an official surrender so they could occupy a country which posed no further military threat.
No further military threat? Ask the 12,500 dead Allied soldiers on Okinawa if the Japanese still posed a military threat. Ask the hundreds of thousands that were expected to die during Operation Downfall if they still posed a military threat. Then consider the alternative to invasion (continuing the economic blockade) and ask yourself how many millions of Japanese civilians would have starved to death.
There was just recently a slashdot article about Congress passing a law to allow them to monitor what passes through anonymous networks.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's about 50% child pornography, 25% copyright infringement, 15% trolling on sites that banned someone and 10% legitimate speech that has a valid need for anonymity. I ran a tor exit node for three days before I got curious enough to fire up wireshark and see what kind of traffic was passing through it. I shut it down after I discovered that the vast majority of it was child pornography being downloaded from servers in Eastern Europe.