Ya know, as easy as it is to take potshots at Dubya, I think you've largely missed a legitimate concern.
So ICANN wants to be released from oversight by the United States. Great. I bet that makes a lot of people around here happy. What's it going to be replaced with exactly? Do you really want an ICANN without any oversight?
Say what you will about the United States and the current arrangement, but at least at the end of the day ICANN is responsible to SOMEONE. That 'someone' is in turn responsible to 300,000,000 Americans. While 300,000,000 != the whole population of Earth, it's a hellva lot better then ICANN being responsible to no one in my book.
The simple fact is that no small company can afford to build out this spectrum
On a national level? Maybe not. But why has nobody considered the option of encouraging smaller (i.e: regional) carriers to come about? That's originally how the whole wireless market got going before we allowed the massive consolidation that happened later. There's no reason why somebody couldn't get the funds to win a regional license and deploy a network. Partnerships with similar networks in other markets could provide for nationwide coverage, more or less transparent to the end users.
I don't think Google is all that super good but I know that I am in the minority on Slashdot.
I'm in the same minority. Google is already scary enough. I don't want to see them controlling the pipe as well. I'm glad they used their clout to force open access but I'd be leery of them as a service provider. I think the cable companies have shown us why having the service provider and content creation businesses under one roof is a bad idea. And, hell, that's half of what open access was about -- the carriers fought it because they'd rather lock you into their own sandbox then allow you to choose where you get content from. What makes you think that Google wouldn't have a vested interest in locking you into their sandbox? Just because their sandbox is better then Verizon's or Time Warner's doesn't mean that's a good business practice.
Yea I would love for Sprint to do better BTW. I feel they are the least evil of the Cell companies.
Sprint, which is to say Sprint Nextel, can burn in hell as far as I'm concerned. Back in the day when it was just Nextel I had an account. Constant billing problems. They'd cash my check but not credit the account, or (even better) credit the account without cashing my check. This went on for months. Each month contacted them -- each month was told that they were "upgrading" the billing system and not to worry about it.
Cut to a trip out of town. On a weekend. My cell phone gets shut off. Call them up. They claim I owe them ~$200. I say that's impossible because they cashed the check I sent them. They say they never got it. I ask if they can see all of the account notes from previous issues that were all their fault -- they say yes, but it doesn't matter, I owe $200. I ask them to turn me back on until I can get home and contact my bank to get the check images -- they refuse. I tell them to go fuck themselves and switch.
Three weeks later they contact me and admit it was their fault. I tell them it's too late and I've left. They then tell me that they will be charging me an early termination fee. Yeah, you shut off my service by mistake and then try to collect a termination fee when I leave? Go fuck yourselves!
Granted, that was a long time ago, and "Nextel" as opposed to "Sprint Nextel", but "Sprint Nextel" continues to send me collection notices, years after the fact. Each time I get one I call up the collection agency and tell them that story. They close the account and I don't hear anything for a few months -- at which time I'm contacted by a new collection agency and the process repeats. Sprint Nextel refuses to directly talk to me about it, because the amount is in "collections".
Anyway, I rambled on for a bit there. That was six years ago but it still gets my blood boiling to think about it. So, no, I don't think Sprint is the best carrier. I like some of their offerings and wish them luck with Wi-Max (we need a third pipe...) but I'll be sticking with T-Mobile for my cell service. They use some of the same business practices as the others, but at least they are the little guy. Plus you can get a better bang for the buck with them. I've got 1,000 minutes w/unlimited N&W for $39.99. Can't touch that anywhere else.
but I really don't see any reason why Google couldn't get serious and really try to bid for some air space.
Because Google isn't interested in being the delivery-person, they are interested in creating the product that he is bringing to your house.
In fact, I would be terrified of Google getting into the content-delivery business. Forgot about "do no evil". Take a look at your friendly local cable provider to see what happens when you allow a media company to control the pipe that comes into your house.
Content delivery needs to be separate from content creation. Otherwise the delivery provider has a vested interest in locking you into his product and removing your freedom of choice. Can you imagine if UPS opened up their own online bookstore and tried to use their position as a shipping provider to price Amazon and Barnes & Noble out of the market?
Let big business pay for the privilege of using our spectrum
That's all well and good and you won't find too many people on my side of the fence that disagree with that concept.
What bothers me is that outfits like AT&T and Verizon that already own large swaths of the cellular (850mhz) band are going to be allowed to gobble up large swaths of the 700mhz band. Nobody has asked them to justify why they need this much spectrum. One would think that with the pending shutdown of AMPS that they'd have lots of free spectrum in 850mhz to do whatever they'd like with.
Why the hell are we allowing AT&T and Verizon to further cement their stranglehold on the wireless industry in the United States? If you believe that the airwaves should be used for the public benefit then you should want to see a more competitive market for wireless services emerge. This isn't going to happen as long as we allow two largecompanies (combined with two smallerones) to completely dominate an industry. We should be taking steps to bring more companies into this market, not further cementing the position of the existing ones.
What would I do differently? At the very least I would require a justification of the existing use of the spectrum that they have and detailed roll-out plans. I'd also exclude AT&T and Verizon from the 700mhz band in any market where they already have cellular (850mhz) licenses. Let the carriers stuck with the poorer-performing PCS (1900mhz) band have the first shot at this valuable space. I'd also mandate stricter rules on what they can do with these bands, including a full adoption of carterfone rules and the elimination of their practice of locking people up into long term contracts with hefty termination fees.
Did you know that in some markets AT&T owns more then 50% of the available wireless (cellular, PCS and AWS) licenses? If you combine them with Verizon in those markets the two manage to own 75-80% of the available spectrum. What's wrong with that picture? AT&T previously justified by it by saying they needed to run three (AMPS/TDMA/GSM) networks. What's the excuse now?
Aside from P2P, how many *TYPICAL HOME USER* apps can you think of that eat bandwidth bandwidth 24x7?
It's not about 24x7. I'm single and live by myself. I can easily reach 1.33GB/day just by streaming Pandora and general web browsing. Toss a few Netflix instant views into the mix and I completely blow that limit out of the water.
150GB is at least a bit more reasonable then TW's purposed highest tier of 40GB. 40GB is a joke. You could come close to attaining that with an ISDN. Are they really telling us that the network is so oversubscribed that they can only match the capability of 20 year old technology?
150GB/mo works out to an average transfer rate of 463Kbit/s. 40GB/mo is 123Kbit/s.
It's not a "constant" stream. I came up with the 209Kbit figure by averaging out the usage over the whole month. In any case, I do the following downstream-heavy activities:
Netflix Instant View (45 minute TV episode == roughly 870Mbytes in my experience)
Pandora. Pandora by itself will consume 100-200kbits on average while playing, in my experience. If I'm awake then Pandora is probably streaming, as I find it to be a lot better then my local radio stations and easier then trying to manage my own playlists and having the music stored locally.
Microsoft (Windows and Office) updates. I fix PCs as a side business. It's easily a couple hundred megs to get a fresh XP install up to date. Add on another hundred megs or so if you also update Office.
Other video usage, e.g: The Daily Show & Colbert Report (I watch them on the webpages because I have no cable service), Google Video, Youtube, etc, etc. Not as big of a consumer as Netflix, but it still adds up. This will only grow as more networks put their TV shows online.
There's other stuff I do that probably consumes a fair bit of bandwidth, but it's not stuff I do on a regular basis. A Linux distribution is easily 4 gigs or more, but how often do you download one?
As for the US, welcome to what the rest of the world has been putting up with for a while, really don't see what all the fuss is about.
By "rest of the world" do you mean "Canada and Australia"? Because the last time I checked, there are quite a few countries (South Korea, Japan and Sweden come to mind) where you can get connections into the dozens of megabits for what we are paying for our lousy 1.5Mbit DSL or 5.0Mbit cable over here in the states. Hell, you can oftentimes even get symmetric 10/10 or 100/100 connections in those countries.
Might it have something to do with the fact that they have no content industry to protect in those countries?
I don't disagree with any of what you said, but I don't see a response to my point that multicast isn't a real solution either.
Multicast is a great solution for people that want to watch live TV. It's not going to be very helpful with video-on-demand type stuff though. The majority of the bandwidth that I used for video went into Netflix instant view. Unless there are a bunch of other people on my ISP watching the same video as I am (and pausing/rewinding/fast-forwarding the same as me), how is multicast going to help here? It's a unique data stream for each user, dependent upon what they are watching, when they started watching it, etc, etc. You can bring it closer to the end-user through mirroring/peering arrangements but you can't change it's unicast nature.
Furthermore, while I don't disagree with your assessment of the current "chokepoints" in the typical DSL or DOCSIS network, that's with existing technology. One would like to assume that as demand for bandwidth goes up (be it through VOD, torrents, porn, etc, etc) the market will respond with better infrastructure and more options.
If TFA is accurate then TW's tiers are a pathetic joke. 40GB as the highest one? In a 30 day month that works out to 1.33GB a day or 123.45Kbit/s. Would they seriously have us believe that they aren't capable of delivering more then ISDN speeds (on average) to all of their customers? I think you hit the nail on the head when you said "revenue protection", which is why I'm of the opinion that content providers should not be allowed to be in the content delivery business.
Let those users who insist on sucking down 8Mbps 24/7 pay for it, but don't cut them off.
I think the number of those users is seriously overstated by the ISPs of the World. On the surface, I use a fairly hefty amount of bandwidth (70.06GB in the last 30 days), but upon further review it doesn't seem that excessive. That works out to an average of 209.28Kbit/s. For comparison, a duel channel ISDN (technology that is decades old) is capable of 128Kbit/s.
40GB as the highest tier they offer? What a load of crap. That works out to 1.33GB a day or 129.45Kbit/s, little more then the aforementioned ISDN would be capable of. Is their network so seriously oversubscribed that it can't even compete with the bandwidth capacity of ISDN?
No, this has everything to do with protecting their video revenue stream from internet competition and nothing to do with capacity issues. This is yet another example of why content providers should not be allowed to be in the content-delivery business. It's just too much of a conflict of interest.
Back in the days of Ma Bell, AT&T had a hard time connecting everyone on Mother's Day because the demand overwhelmed usage
And they don't have that problem anymore. Ergo it's not impossible to upgrade your infrastructure to support demand.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
No, but I'm just cynical enough to think that this has less to do with capacity issues and more to do with protecting their existing video business from online offerings. How else can you explain those low caps? 40GB a month as the highest tier? That comes close to not being good enough to stream regular video, to say nothing of HD.
So short Exxon if you want, but I don't think it would be a good bet. At least not until alternate power sources are commercially competitive, and that won't be for years. And even then, there will still be a huge demand for oil because it's used as the precursor to so many different chemicals, and used in so many different products (hence petroleum products). You are totally off the mark on that one.
If Exxon sees such a future for their product, then why the hell aren't they investing any of those record profits into new refineries? We've heard over and over again how high gas prices aren't being caused (exclusively) by high oil prices, but rather by a lack of refining capacity.
Assuming that's true and not a load of BS, then how come none of them are bothering to address it? Could it be that they like the current situation and see no reason to change it?
That's why I'm against net neutrality.
Instead of artificial bandwidth limits to "cure" the problem, how about selling priority? Let me purchase a business class connection and give my packets higher priority through the ISP network. Obviously, this quits once it leaves the ISP - but usually that is where my problems are.
Well, two answers to this. A) Network neutrality need not prevent this type of a setup. Network neutrality is more concerned with preventing the carriers from double-dipping, i.e: It's ok to charge YOU more money to prioritize your traffic, but it's not ok for them to charge Google money just to prioritize Google's traffic to ALL of their customers (as opposed to say Amazon's). Most of us advocating network neutrality aren't worried about $200/mo business class customers getting priority over $40/mo residential ones. We are worried about AT&T charging content providers money for "preferential" access to their customers, thus locking out start-ups.
B) Even better then giving your business class packets QoS would be having a separate network in place for business customers. It need not even be a separate physical network -- it could just be a different channel on the coax plant for business users as opposed to residential ones. Then they could use different oversubscription ratios on the two networks.
Fact is, most users want a fairly modest average bandwidth, with rare bouts of high-bandwidth usage
Read some of what's been written about this. The tiers that TW wants to offer are 5GB/10GB/20GB and 40GB. In the last month I've used 70GB of downstream bandwidth, for an average of 209.21Kbit/s.
209.21Kbit/s seems to be "fairly modest average bandwidth" (it's 4.1% of my downstream speed), yet I'm using almost twice what they intend to offer for their highest tier. Hell, 40GB is only 1.3GB a day. You don't even need video to reach that -- Pandora will consume a couple hundred megabytes if you play it a few hours a day. Toss some surfing into that and a couple of Windows Updates and you are probably already close to (if not in excess of) 1.3GB.
Sorry, but if this becomes the norm (here's hoping Verizon actually competes with this and doesn't decide to do the same thing) then it's the end of the internet as we know it.
I work for Time Warner, I'm a network engineer for Road Runner even
If you actually are then I consider this:
My bandwidth usage for the last 30 days according to Cacti is 70.04GB down/66.25GB up. The upload is pretty extreme (I'm seeding Fedora) and entirely the fault of bittorrent, but the download has little to do with bittorrent and everything to do with Netflix instant view, Pandora, etc, etc.
40GB as the highest tier they will offer? 40 / 30 = 1.3GB a day. 45 minutes of Netflix instant view (i.e: a single TV episode) translates into ~870megs. Do the math -- a 40GB limit effectively limits you to about an hour of video a day. WTF is the point? How is to fair to restrict what we can do with our internet connections whilst devoting as much bandwidth as required to your own video on demand offerings? Things like this make me wonder if its really fair to allow companies to be in the content business and the service provider business at the same time.
A question for you if you are a RR network engineer: What is the bigger problem for you guys? The shared last-mile nature of DOCSIS networks (i.e: this neighborhood maxes out cuz of the script kiddies running torrents 24/7) or capacity at the edge (i.e: the collective number of torrent users on the whole network overwhelms the connections to Level3/other backbone providers)?
I fail to see how multicasting will be very useful with the current video offerings. It might be useful for a continuous broadcast (i.e: CNN mirrors their TV broadcast onto the net) without pause/ff/rewind but it's not going to be very helpful for video on demand type stuff where each person is watching different videos.
there's a limit to how far your typical half-watt cellphone can usefully transmit, especially in real world conditions with no unblocked line of sight between you and the tower
Which cellphone are you using that's limited to half a watt? Most handsets are capable of transmitting at the maximum allowed power for the PCS 1900mhz band (1 watt) and can either max out or come close to maxing out the power allowed on the 850mhz cellular band (2 watts).
Go to phonescoop and look up the FCC filings for your phone. Mine maxes out at 32.5dBm (1.7 watts) on cellular and 30dBm (1 watt) on PCS.
Note: This doesn't mean that everything else you said doesn't hold true. Even with full power there's still a limit to how far your cell phone will reach -- particularly on the PCS band which tends not to work as well inside structures (lower frequencies penetrate obstructions easier). If you can manage to get a clear line of sight (hilltop to hilltop) though it's actually kind of amazing how far that lousy watt will reach. I've made GSM phone calls at 25km from the tower before whilst hiking up in the hills.
While I realize you're joking, witholding first aid to someone who needs it is usually illegal. This is true whether you are a professional health care provider or merely a bystander who knows first aid.
Sorry, but your wrong, at least in my state. When I went through all of the Red Cross training we were told that you have a legal obligation to assist in a professional setting (i.e: I work at a hospital and would have to assist until more qualified personal showed up), but you have no such obligation "on the street".
If you do choose to start providing assistance then you have a legal obligation to remain until relived by someone with equal or superior training to your own (i.e: I have to stay until the EMTs show up.... the EMTs have to stay until a nurse or doctor shows up/takes over), but you have no legal obligation to offer said assistance in the first place, unless it occurs in a professional setting and is an expectation of your job duties.
His theory is that if Jenna and Barbara were under arms that the President would be a lot less likely to take us into wars that we don't need to be in (*cough* Iraq *cough*). I'd tend to agree with you -- we don't need our Commander-in-Chief distracted -- but I'd also agree with him that we should have a draft and it should include most everybody.
If people were drafted across racial/gender/money lines then our Government actually would have had to make a decent case for the war. Right now you can't say that the United States is fighting a war -- we don't have a draft and we aren't even paying for the war (raise taxes? pffft! we'll just do some more deficit spending). Our volunteer troops are fighting a war -- the rest of us are sitting on our asses going shopping.
Let's see Bush justify the war if the children of his rich donors were being drafted into the army and sent to Iraq. Let's see him justify the war if Congress had the balls to tell him that they aren't going to fund it unless we raise taxes to actually pay for it. Of course neither of those things will happen and we'll just continue to stretch the volunteer force until it hits the breaking point.
And if anything goes wrong, the guy AND the game makers will get sued for millions.
Actually, the guy probably would be fine. You are generally protected by good samaritan laws for any efforts you undertake in good faith to help the victims of an accident.
I get screwed however, because I've had just enough training (Red Cross CPR and First Aid training) that I'm considered to be a "professional responder" and thus ineligible for the protections of the good samaritan laws in my state. Nice huh? Two days of training makes me a "professional" and thus liable to be held to the same malpractice standard as an EMT, RN or MD if I screw up while trying to save your life. And they wonder why people just keep driving when they see an accident on the side of the road.....
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but my understanding of general relativity is that all objects with mass tend to curve spacetime and curved spacetime is directly responsible for what we perceive as "gravity". The Wikipedia gravity well article has a decent picture that might do a better job of explaining this concept then words do.
How can it act apparently instantly across great distances that even photons can't reach as quickly?
Actually, I recall reading somewhere that they did a test awhile back and figured out that gravity is limited to C, i.e: if you could make the sun wink out of existence, Earth would continue in it's orbit for 8 minutes or so as if nothing had happened. Then again, I just did a Google search and can't really find anything conclusive on this. One site seems to think that gravity propagates out at more then 300 times C. Another claims it's limited to C. Any actual physicists care to comment?
If an all-powerful god can create all of life and everything, how do you explain cancer and the other flavors of suffering god's creatures are facing?
Forgot about all of those mundane things. What's cancer in the grand scheme of things? The question I've always posed is: If God is all-powerful and loves us so much, then why the hell did he create a universe that's going to end in a big freeze or big rip, the end result of which is the extinction of every single life form in the universe.
Keep your fucking Bible out of my science classroom please. We can talk about creationism in theology class, where it belongs.
Y'know, it occurs to me that anti-evolutionists don't just have a problem with evolution, but also geology, cosmology, carbon dating, physics. Any I missed?
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Ya know, as easy as it is to take potshots at Dubya, I think you've largely missed a legitimate concern.
So ICANN wants to be released from oversight by the United States. Great. I bet that makes a lot of people around here happy. What's it going to be replaced with exactly? Do you really want an ICANN without any oversight?
Say what you will about the United States and the current arrangement, but at least at the end of the day ICANN is responsible to SOMEONE. That 'someone' is in turn responsible to 300,000,000 Americans. While 300,000,000 != the whole population of Earth, it's a hellva lot better then ICANN being responsible to no one in my book.
On a national level? Maybe not. But why has nobody considered the option of encouraging smaller (i.e: regional) carriers to come about? That's originally how the whole wireless market got going before we allowed the massive consolidation that happened later. There's no reason why somebody couldn't get the funds to win a regional license and deploy a network. Partnerships with similar networks in other markets could provide for nationwide coverage, more or less transparent to the end users.
I don't think Google is all that super good but I know that I am in the minority on Slashdot.I'm in the same minority. Google is already scary enough. I don't want to see them controlling the pipe as well. I'm glad they used their clout to force open access but I'd be leery of them as a service provider. I think the cable companies have shown us why having the service provider and content creation businesses under one roof is a bad idea. And, hell, that's half of what open access was about -- the carriers fought it because they'd rather lock you into their own sandbox then allow you to choose where you get content from. What makes you think that Google wouldn't have a vested interest in locking you into their sandbox? Just because their sandbox is better then Verizon's or Time Warner's doesn't mean that's a good business practice.
Yea I would love for Sprint to do better BTW. I feel they are the least evil of the Cell companies.Sprint, which is to say Sprint Nextel, can burn in hell as far as I'm concerned. Back in the day when it was just Nextel I had an account. Constant billing problems. They'd cash my check but not credit the account, or (even better) credit the account without cashing my check. This went on for months. Each month contacted them -- each month was told that they were "upgrading" the billing system and not to worry about it.
Cut to a trip out of town. On a weekend. My cell phone gets shut off. Call them up. They claim I owe them ~$200. I say that's impossible because they cashed the check I sent them. They say they never got it. I ask if they can see all of the account notes from previous issues that were all their fault -- they say yes, but it doesn't matter, I owe $200. I ask them to turn me back on until I can get home and contact my bank to get the check images -- they refuse. I tell them to go fuck themselves and switch.
Three weeks later they contact me and admit it was their fault. I tell them it's too late and I've left. They then tell me that they will be charging me an early termination fee. Yeah, you shut off my service by mistake and then try to collect a termination fee when I leave? Go fuck yourselves!
Granted, that was a long time ago, and "Nextel" as opposed to "Sprint Nextel", but "Sprint Nextel" continues to send me collection notices, years after the fact. Each time I get one I call up the collection agency and tell them that story. They close the account and I don't hear anything for a few months -- at which time I'm contacted by a new collection agency and the process repeats. Sprint Nextel refuses to directly talk to me about it, because the amount is in "collections".
Anyway, I rambled on for a bit there. That was six years ago but it still gets my blood boiling to think about it. So, no, I don't think Sprint is the best carrier. I like some of their offerings and wish them luck with Wi-Max (we need a third pipe...) but I'll be sticking with T-Mobile for my cell service. They use some of the same business practices as the others, but at least they are the little guy. Plus you can get a better bang for the buck with them. I've got 1,000 minutes w/unlimited N&W for $39.99. Can't touch that anywhere else.
At least it would keep all of the steroid dealers in business now that MLB is cracking down ;)
Because Google isn't interested in being the delivery-person, they are interested in creating the product that he is bringing to your house.
In fact, I would be terrified of Google getting into the content-delivery business. Forgot about "do no evil". Take a look at your friendly local cable provider to see what happens when you allow a media company to control the pipe that comes into your house.
Content delivery needs to be separate from content creation. Otherwise the delivery provider has a vested interest in locking you into his product and removing your freedom of choice. Can you imagine if UPS opened up their own online bookstore and tried to use their position as a shipping provider to price Amazon and Barnes & Noble out of the market?
That's all well and good and you won't find too many people on my side of the fence that disagree with that concept.
What bothers me is that outfits like AT&T and Verizon that already own large swaths of the cellular (850mhz) band are going to be allowed to gobble up large swaths of the 700mhz band. Nobody has asked them to justify why they need this much spectrum. One would think that with the pending shutdown of AMPS that they'd have lots of free spectrum in 850mhz to do whatever they'd like with.
Why the hell are we allowing AT&T and Verizon to further cement their stranglehold on the wireless industry in the United States? If you believe that the airwaves should be used for the public benefit then you should want to see a more competitive market for wireless services emerge. This isn't going to happen as long as we allow two large companies (combined with two smaller ones) to completely dominate an industry. We should be taking steps to bring more companies into this market, not further cementing the position of the existing ones.
What would I do differently? At the very least I would require a justification of the existing use of the spectrum that they have and detailed roll-out plans. I'd also exclude AT&T and Verizon from the 700mhz band in any market where they already have cellular (850mhz) licenses. Let the carriers stuck with the poorer-performing PCS (1900mhz) band have the first shot at this valuable space. I'd also mandate stricter rules on what they can do with these bands, including a full adoption of carterfone rules and the elimination of their practice of locking people up into long term contracts with hefty termination fees.
Did you know that in some markets AT&T owns more then 50% of the available wireless (cellular, PCS and AWS) licenses? If you combine them with Verizon in those markets the two manage to own 75-80% of the available spectrum. What's wrong with that picture? AT&T previously justified by it by saying they needed to run three (AMPS/TDMA/GSM) networks. What's the excuse now?
It's not about 24x7. I'm single and live by myself. I can easily reach 1.33GB/day just by streaming Pandora and general web browsing. Toss a few Netflix instant views into the mix and I completely blow that limit out of the water.
40GB is a joke.
150GB is at least a bit more reasonable then TW's purposed highest tier of 40GB. 40GB is a joke. You could come close to attaining that with an ISDN. Are they really telling us that the network is so oversubscribed that they can only match the capability of 20 year old technology?
150GB/mo works out to an average transfer rate of 463Kbit/s. 40GB/mo is 123Kbit/s.
It's not a "constant" stream. I came up with the 209Kbit figure by averaging out the usage over the whole month. In any case, I do the following downstream-heavy activities:
There's other stuff I do that probably consumes a fair bit of bandwidth, but it's not stuff I do on a regular basis. A Linux distribution is easily 4 gigs or more, but how often do you download one?
By "rest of the world" do you mean "Canada and Australia"? Because the last time I checked, there are quite a few countries (South Korea, Japan and Sweden come to mind) where you can get connections into the dozens of megabits for what we are paying for our lousy 1.5Mbit DSL or 5.0Mbit cable over here in the states. Hell, you can oftentimes even get symmetric 10/10 or 100/100 connections in those countries.
Might it have something to do with the fact that they have no content industry to protect in those countries?
I don't disagree with any of what you said, but I don't see a response to my point that multicast isn't a real solution either.
Multicast is a great solution for people that want to watch live TV. It's not going to be very helpful with video-on-demand type stuff though. The majority of the bandwidth that I used for video went into Netflix instant view. Unless there are a bunch of other people on my ISP watching the same video as I am (and pausing/rewinding/fast-forwarding the same as me), how is multicast going to help here? It's a unique data stream for each user, dependent upon what they are watching, when they started watching it, etc, etc. You can bring it closer to the end-user through mirroring/peering arrangements but you can't change it's unicast nature.
Furthermore, while I don't disagree with your assessment of the current "chokepoints" in the typical DSL or DOCSIS network, that's with existing technology. One would like to assume that as demand for bandwidth goes up (be it through VOD, torrents, porn, etc, etc) the market will respond with better infrastructure and more options.
If TFA is accurate then TW's tiers are a pathetic joke. 40GB as the highest one? In a 30 day month that works out to 1.33GB a day or 123.45Kbit/s. Would they seriously have us believe that they aren't capable of delivering more then ISDN speeds (on average) to all of their customers? I think you hit the nail on the head when you said "revenue protection", which is why I'm of the opinion that content providers should not be allowed to be in the content delivery business.
I think the number of those users is seriously overstated by the ISPs of the World. On the surface, I use a fairly hefty amount of bandwidth (70.06GB in the last 30 days), but upon further review it doesn't seem that excessive. That works out to an average of 209.28Kbit/s. For comparison, a duel channel ISDN (technology that is decades old) is capable of 128Kbit/s.
40GB as the highest tier they offer? What a load of crap. That works out to 1.33GB a day or 129.45Kbit/s, little more then the aforementioned ISDN would be capable of. Is their network so seriously oversubscribed that it can't even compete with the bandwidth capacity of ISDN?
No, this has everything to do with protecting their video revenue stream from internet competition and nothing to do with capacity issues. This is yet another example of why content providers should not be allowed to be in the content-delivery business. It's just too much of a conflict of interest.
And they don't have that problem anymore. Ergo it's not impossible to upgrade your infrastructure to support demand.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.No, but I'm just cynical enough to think that this has less to do with capacity issues and more to do with protecting their existing video business from online offerings. How else can you explain those low caps? 40GB a month as the highest tier? That comes close to not being good enough to stream regular video, to say nothing of HD.
If Exxon sees such a future for their product, then why the hell aren't they investing any of those record profits into new refineries? We've heard over and over again how high gas prices aren't being caused (exclusively) by high oil prices, but rather by a lack of refining capacity.
Assuming that's true and not a load of BS, then how come none of them are bothering to address it? Could it be that they like the current situation and see no reason to change it?
Well, two answers to this. A) Network neutrality need not prevent this type of a setup. Network neutrality is more concerned with preventing the carriers from double-dipping, i.e: It's ok to charge YOU more money to prioritize your traffic, but it's not ok for them to charge Google money just to prioritize Google's traffic to ALL of their customers (as opposed to say Amazon's). Most of us advocating network neutrality aren't worried about $200/mo business class customers getting priority over $40/mo residential ones. We are worried about AT&T charging content providers money for "preferential" access to their customers, thus locking out start-ups.
B) Even better then giving your business class packets QoS would be having a separate network in place for business customers. It need not even be a separate physical network -- it could just be a different channel on the coax plant for business users as opposed to residential ones. Then they could use different oversubscription ratios on the two networks.
Read some of what's been written about this. The tiers that TW wants to offer are 5GB/10GB/20GB and 40GB. In the last month I've used 70GB of downstream bandwidth, for an average of 209.21Kbit/s.
209.21Kbit/s seems to be "fairly modest average bandwidth" (it's 4.1% of my downstream speed), yet I'm using almost twice what they intend to offer for their highest tier. Hell, 40GB is only 1.3GB a day. You don't even need video to reach that -- Pandora will consume a couple hundred megabytes if you play it a few hours a day. Toss some surfing into that and a couple of Windows Updates and you are probably already close to (if not in excess of) 1.3GB.
Sorry, but if this becomes the norm (here's hoping Verizon actually competes with this and doesn't decide to do the same thing) then it's the end of the internet as we know it.
If you actually are then I consider this:
My bandwidth usage for the last 30 days according to Cacti is 70.04GB down/66.25GB up. The upload is pretty extreme (I'm seeding Fedora) and entirely the fault of bittorrent, but the download has little to do with bittorrent and everything to do with Netflix instant view, Pandora, etc, etc.
40GB as the highest tier they will offer? 40 / 30 = 1.3GB a day. 45 minutes of Netflix instant view (i.e: a single TV episode) translates into ~870megs. Do the math -- a 40GB limit effectively limits you to about an hour of video a day. WTF is the point? How is to fair to restrict what we can do with our internet connections whilst devoting as much bandwidth as required to your own video on demand offerings? Things like this make me wonder if its really fair to allow companies to be in the content business and the service provider business at the same time.
A question for you if you are a RR network engineer: What is the bigger problem for you guys? The shared last-mile nature of DOCSIS networks (i.e: this neighborhood maxes out cuz of the script kiddies running torrents 24/7) or capacity at the edge (i.e: the collective number of torrent users on the whole network overwhelms the connections to Level3/other backbone providers)?
I fail to see how multicasting will be very useful with the current video offerings. It might be useful for a continuous broadcast (i.e: CNN mirrors their TV broadcast onto the net) without pause/ff/rewind but it's not going to be very helpful for video on demand type stuff where each person is watching different videos.
Which cellphone are you using that's limited to half a watt? Most handsets are capable of transmitting at the maximum allowed power for the PCS 1900mhz band (1 watt) and can either max out or come close to maxing out the power allowed on the 850mhz cellular band (2 watts).
Go to phonescoop and look up the FCC filings for your phone. Mine maxes out at 32.5dBm (1.7 watts) on cellular and 30dBm (1 watt) on PCS.
Note: This doesn't mean that everything else you said doesn't hold true. Even with full power there's still a limit to how far your cell phone will reach -- particularly on the PCS band which tends not to work as well inside structures (lower frequencies penetrate obstructions easier). If you can manage to get a clear line of sight (hilltop to hilltop) though it's actually kind of amazing how far that lousy watt will reach. I've made GSM phone calls at 25km from the tower before whilst hiking up in the hills.
Sorry, but your wrong, at least in my state. When I went through all of the Red Cross training we were told that you have a legal obligation to assist in a professional setting (i.e: I work at a hospital and would have to assist until more qualified personal showed up), but you have no such obligation "on the street".
If you do choose to start providing assistance then you have a legal obligation to remain until relived by someone with equal or superior training to your own (i.e: I have to stay until the EMTs show up.... the EMTs have to stay until a nurse or doctor shows up/takes over), but you have no legal obligation to offer said assistance in the first place, unless it occurs in a professional setting and is an expectation of your job duties.
His theory is that if Jenna and Barbara were under arms that the President would be a lot less likely to take us into wars that we don't need to be in (*cough* Iraq *cough*). I'd tend to agree with you -- we don't need our Commander-in-Chief distracted -- but I'd also agree with him that we should have a draft and it should include most everybody.
If people were drafted across racial/gender/money lines then our Government actually would have had to make a decent case for the war. Right now you can't say that the United States is fighting a war -- we don't have a draft and we aren't even paying for the war (raise taxes? pffft! we'll just do some more deficit spending). Our volunteer troops are fighting a war -- the rest of us are sitting on our asses going shopping.
Let's see Bush justify the war if the children of his rich donors were being drafted into the army and sent to Iraq. Let's see him justify the war if Congress had the balls to tell him that they aren't going to fund it unless we raise taxes to actually pay for it. Of course neither of those things will happen and we'll just continue to stretch the volunteer force until it hits the breaking point.
Well, the first thing I usually do is ask them for their medical insurance card... Hey, my first aid skills aren't free ;)
Actually, the guy probably would be fine. You are generally protected by good samaritan laws for any efforts you undertake in good faith to help the victims of an accident.
I get screwed however, because I've had just enough training (Red Cross CPR and First Aid training) that I'm considered to be a "professional responder" and thus ineligible for the protections of the good samaritan laws in my state. Nice huh? Two days of training makes me a "professional" and thus liable to be held to the same malpractice standard as an EMT, RN or MD if I screw up while trying to save your life. And they wonder why people just keep driving when they see an accident on the side of the road.....
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but my understanding of general relativity is that all objects with mass tend to curve spacetime and curved spacetime is directly responsible for what we perceive as "gravity". The Wikipedia gravity well article has a decent picture that might do a better job of explaining this concept then words do.
How can it act apparently instantly across great distances that even photons can't reach as quickly?Actually, I recall reading somewhere that they did a test awhile back and figured out that gravity is limited to C, i.e: if you could make the sun wink out of existence, Earth would continue in it's orbit for 8 minutes or so as if nothing had happened. Then again, I just did a Google search and can't really find anything conclusive on this. One site seems to think that gravity propagates out at more then 300 times C. Another claims it's limited to C. Any actual physicists care to comment?
Forgot about all of those mundane things. What's cancer in the grand scheme of things? The question I've always posed is: If God is all-powerful and loves us so much, then why the hell did he create a universe that's going to end in a big freeze or big rip, the end result of which is the extinction of every single life form in the universe.
Keep your fucking Bible out of my science classroom please. We can talk about creationism in theology class, where it belongs.
Sexuality. Other religions.