The analogies of the water fountain and the bicycle are good. If I put a water fountain in front of my house, people will drink from it, because they assume it is acceptable to do so. Taking a bike from my front porch prevents me from using the bike for my own purposes. Taking a drink from my water fountain does not prevent me from taking a drink, especially since the incremental cost of a single drink is very small. In this context a WiFi access point is much more like a water fountain than a bicycle.
Another important aspect of the discussion is that the wireless signals from my property do not stay on my property--they propagate into neighboring property and public space. As long as the intention is not malicious, I think the inherently promiscuous nature of wireless implies that the owner of an access point has more responsibility to prevent unwanted access than just leaving it open. Indeed, the user of an access point might not know whether the AP is in a public space or a private space. As a previous poster said, even WEP-40 with the password "welcome" or the 2-digit code on a 900-Mhz cordless phone should be sufficient to signal that the owner wants exclusive use of a base station.
There is already a convention that many public places (cafes, libraries, hotels) offer free open wireless access. Open wifi in a public area is very similar to public water fountains and public toilets. You don't need to ask permission to use a personal quantity of toilet paper in a free public toilet.
Hezbollah is a guerilla organization. They are not generally involved in suicide bombings. Perhaps you are confusing Hezbollah with Hamas. Recall that this most recent war in Lebanon started with a cross-border kidnapping raid for a prisoner swap (which has happened many times in the past on both sides). Note that the Israeli army caused the first civilan casualties in this particular conflict and deliberately targetted civilian infrastructure.
Let me be clear that I condemn targetting civilians, whether by the Israeli army (Lebanon, Palestinian Territories), Hezbollah (Israel), Hammas (Israel), the US military (Iraq), or anyone else. Labeling a group as terrorists or jihadist does nothing to help clarify the problem and even less to actually solve it. It is this mentality by both sides that allows people to justify killing civilians.
"An eye for an eye, and soon the whole world is blind" - Mahatma Gandhi
The "we can only make 3-4 days equivalent auto fuel if we use biodiesel" argument is artificially low for a number of reasons:
1. Biodiesel can be made from nearly any fatty acid. Soybeans are actually a very poor source of oil, so basing future biodiesel production capacity on current soy oil production is silly. Even canola/rapeseed oil is a better source of oil than soy. A very promising source of oil for biodiesel production is algae, which is nearly 50% oil by volume and grows happily even in waste water.
2. Diesel vehicles tend toward better fuel economy for the equivalent engine size and torque. My 1.9L diesel VW wagon gets 40mpg compared to 25-30mpg from my neghbor's comparable gasoline powered model.
3. If consumers payed at the pump the true cost of gasoline (pay the lost revenue from tax credits paid to the oil industry and add the costs of removing carbon from the atmosphere and the cost of "securing" oil), the cost would be higher and we would start using less fuel.
Finally, I've looked for a study that can show an existing US civilian fission power plant as "cost competitive" when it includes construction and waste disposal costs. I have not seen such a beast.
The Environmental Protection Agency doesn't regulate industry in the same sense that the FCC regulates communications. EPA regulations deal with notion of protecting (the legal concept of) property. If you dump toxic sludge into a river that I have water rights to, then you are reducing the value of my property. Most FCC regulations discussed in this forum (and the rural electrification program you mentioned) deal with the notion of a public good. How effective are any of these agencies? Well that's another rant...
Did you know that US taxpayers are still paying for new rural electrification projects which include such "necessities" as new ski resorts? I think its safe to say that this agency has outlived its usefulness providing a public good. (A former director of this agency agrees).
I think folks are getting confused about the difference between sending calls over some IP network vs. sending calls over the public Internet.
In the US, the FCC has a bunch of regulations for a vertical-integrated service called "telephone service". The behavior, roles, requirements, taxation, etc. are described in great detail. Today, local and/or long-distance companies can and do carry phone calls over private IP networks, some of which are also used for Internet traffic as well. This is perfectly legal and does not change existing taxation rules in any way. In addition, PacketCable and others have extensive architectures which describe how to build a managed telephone service that runs natively on an IP network. In both cases, the whole network is managed in a manner consistent with the FCC definitions of a telephone service and taxed equivalently.
Contrast this with a program on a PC that allows me to rendezvous with and send arbitrary data (which could be packetized audio) between users on the public Internet (like Skype). The FCC also has a tax on broadband access, but does not treat Skype as a telephony service. As folks have pointed out, it would be almost impossible to detect the difference between one such use of the Internet and any other.
Finally there are services like Vonage which offer a rendezvous and telephone-network-gateway service on the public Internet. These services use a broadband Internet connection paid for separately by their users and not managed by the gateway provider, but they provide a dedicated PSTN telephone number and usually use small home gateways you can plug a telephone into. These are harder to classify since they can be configured to look/sound like a traditional telephone service to unsuspecting users. Here is where the regulatory battle is being fought.
In addition to the taxation issue, there are public safety agencies who still want emergency services to work well in this environment, after the fiasco of cellular 911. (One proposal to satisfy these folks is to add an additional tax to broadband services to fund "Internet emergency services". Imagine paging 911 from your Blackberry)
Hopefully this will provide some interesting grist for the mill...
One last thing. I bristle a bit when folks talk about US telecom "deregulation". In the US, we went from having a two Incumbent Local Exchange Providers of any relevance (AT&T and GTE) to 8 (US West, Ameritech, SBC, PacBell, Bell South, Bell Atlantic, NYNEX, GTE) in 1986, to now 4 (Qwest, SBC, Bell South, and Verizon). AFAIK, telecom "deregulation" is really just "reregulation". Competition for traditional phone service is still effectively limited to very large companies. Real deregulation would allow for a proliferation of small companies and cooperatives to participate, and we are not there yet.
I think folks are getting confused about the difference between sending calls over some IP network vs. sending calls over the public Internet.
In the US, the FCC has a bunch of regulations for a vertical-integrated service called "telephone service". The behavior, roles, requirements, taxation, etc. are described in great detail. Today, local and/or long-distance companies can and do carry phone calls over private IP networks, some of which are also used for Internet traffic as well. This is perfectly legal and does not change existing taxation rules in any way. In addition, PacketCable and others have extensive architectures which describe how to build a managed telephone service that runs natively on an IP network. In both cases, the whole network is managed in a manner consistent with the FCC definitions of a telephone service and taxed equivalently.
Contrast this with a program on a PC that allows me to rendezvous with and send arbitrary data (which could be packetized audio) between users on the public Internet (like Skype). The FCC also has a tax on broadband access, but does not treat Skype as a telephony service. As folks have pointed out, it would be almost impossible to detect the difference between one such use of the Internet and any other.
Finally there are services like Vonage which offer a rendezvous and telephone-network-gateway service on the public Internet. These services use a broadband Internet connection paid for separately by their users and not managed by the gateway provider, but they provide a dedicated PSTN telephone number and usually use small home gateways you can plug a telephone into. These are harder to classify since they can be configured to look/sound like a traditional telephone service to unsuspecting users. Here is where the regulatory battle is being fought.
In addition to the taxation issue, there are public safety agencies who still want emergency services to work well in this environment, after the fiasco of cellular 911. (One proposal to satisfy these folks is to add an additional tax to broadband services to fund "Internet emergency services". Imagine paging 911 from your Blackberry)
Hopefully this will provide some interesting grist for the mill...
One last thing. I bristle a bit when folks talk about US telecom "deregulation". In the US, we went from having a two Incumbent Local Exchange Providers of any relevance (AT&T and GTE) to 8 (US West, Ameritech, SBC, PacBell, Bell South, Bell Atlantic, NYNEX, GTE) in 1986, to now 4 (Qwest, SBC, Bell South, and Verizon). AFAIK, telecom "deregulation" is really just "reregulation". Competition for traditional phone service is still effectively limited to very large companies. Real deregulation would allow for a proliferation of small companies and cooperatives to participate, and we are not there yet.
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The analogies of the water fountain and the bicycle are good. If I put a water fountain in front of my house, people will drink from it, because they assume it is acceptable to do so. Taking a bike from my front porch prevents me from using the bike for my own purposes. Taking a drink from my water fountain does not prevent me from taking a drink, especially since the incremental cost of a single drink is very small. In this context a WiFi access point is much more like a water fountain than a bicycle.
Another important aspect of the discussion is that the wireless signals from my property do not stay on my property--they propagate into neighboring property and public space. As long as the intention is not malicious, I think the inherently promiscuous nature of wireless implies that the owner of an access point has more responsibility to prevent unwanted access than just leaving it open. Indeed, the user of an access point might not know whether the AP is in a public space or a private space. As a previous poster said, even WEP-40 with the password "welcome" or the 2-digit code on a 900-Mhz cordless phone should be sufficient to signal that the owner wants exclusive use of a base station.
There is already a convention that many public places (cafes, libraries, hotels) offer free open wireless access. Open wifi in a public area is very similar to public water fountains and public toilets. You don't need to ask permission to use a personal quantity of toilet paper in a free public toilet.
thanks,
-rohan
Hezbollah is a guerilla organization. They are not generally involved in suicide bombings. Perhaps you are confusing Hezbollah with Hamas. Recall that this most recent war in Lebanon started with a cross-border kidnapping raid for a prisoner swap (which has happened many times in the past on both sides). Note that the Israeli army caused the first civilan casualties in this particular conflict and deliberately targetted civilian infrastructure.
Let me be clear that I condemn targetting civilians, whether by the Israeli army (Lebanon, Palestinian Territories), Hezbollah (Israel), Hammas (Israel), the US military (Iraq), or anyone else. Labeling a group as terrorists or jihadist does nothing to help clarify the problem and even less to actually solve it. It is this mentality by both sides that allows people to justify killing civilians.
"An eye for an eye, and soon the whole world is blind" - Mahatma Gandhi
The "we can only make 3-4 days equivalent auto fuel if we use biodiesel" argument is artificially low for a number of reasons:
1. Biodiesel can be made from nearly any fatty acid. Soybeans are actually a very poor source of oil, so basing future biodiesel production capacity on current soy oil production is silly. Even canola/rapeseed oil is a better source of oil than soy. A very promising source of oil for biodiesel production is algae, which is nearly 50% oil by volume and grows happily even in waste water.
2. Diesel vehicles tend toward better fuel economy for the equivalent engine size and torque. My 1.9L diesel VW wagon gets 40mpg compared to 25-30mpg from my neghbor's comparable gasoline powered model.
3. If consumers payed at the pump the true cost of gasoline (pay the lost revenue from tax credits paid to the oil industry and add the costs of removing carbon from the atmosphere and the cost of "securing" oil), the cost would be higher and we would start using less fuel.
Finally, I've looked for a study that can show an existing US civilian fission power plant as "cost competitive" when it includes construction and waste disposal costs. I have not seen such a beast.
The Environmental Protection Agency doesn't regulate industry in the same sense that the FCC regulates communications. EPA regulations deal with notion of protecting (the legal concept of) property. If you dump toxic sludge into a river that I have water rights to, then you are reducing the value of my property. Most FCC regulations discussed in this forum (and the rural electrification program you mentioned) deal with the notion of a public good. How effective are any of these agencies? Well that's another rant...
Did you know that US taxpayers are still paying for new rural electrification projects which include such "necessities" as new ski resorts? I think its safe to say that this agency has outlived its usefulness providing a public good. (A former director of this agency agrees).
(reposted as "plain text". apologies...)
I think folks are getting confused about the difference between sending calls over some IP network vs. sending calls over the public Internet.
In the US, the FCC has a bunch of regulations for a vertical-integrated service called "telephone service". The behavior, roles, requirements, taxation, etc. are described in great detail. Today, local and/or long-distance companies can and do carry phone calls over private IP networks, some of which are also used for Internet traffic as well. This is perfectly legal and does not change existing taxation rules in any way. In addition, PacketCable and others have extensive architectures which describe how to build a managed telephone service that runs natively on an IP network. In both cases, the whole network is managed in a manner consistent with the FCC definitions of a telephone service and taxed equivalently.
Contrast this with a program on a PC that allows me to rendezvous with and send arbitrary data (which could be packetized audio) between users on the public Internet (like Skype). The FCC also has a tax on broadband access, but does not treat Skype as a telephony service. As folks have pointed out, it would be almost impossible to detect the difference between one such use of the Internet and any other.
Finally there are services like Vonage which offer a rendezvous and telephone-network-gateway service on the public Internet. These services use a broadband Internet connection paid for separately by their users and not managed by the gateway provider, but they provide a dedicated PSTN telephone number and usually use small home gateways you can plug a telephone into. These are harder to classify since they can be configured to look/sound like a traditional telephone service to unsuspecting users. Here is where the regulatory battle is being fought.
In addition to the taxation issue, there are public safety agencies who still want emergency services to work well in this environment, after the fiasco of cellular 911. (One proposal to satisfy these folks is to add an additional tax to broadband services to fund "Internet emergency services". Imagine paging 911 from your Blackberry)
Hopefully this will provide some interesting grist for the mill...
One last thing. I bristle a bit when folks talk about US telecom "deregulation". In the US, we went from having a two Incumbent Local Exchange Providers of any relevance (AT&T and GTE) to 8 (US West, Ameritech, SBC, PacBell, Bell South, Bell Atlantic, NYNEX, GTE) in 1986, to now 4 (Qwest, SBC, Bell South, and Verizon). AFAIK, telecom "deregulation" is really just "reregulation". Competition for traditional phone service is still effectively limited to very large companies. Real deregulation would allow for a proliferation of small companies and cooperatives to participate, and we are not there yet.
I think folks are getting confused about the difference between sending calls over some IP network vs. sending calls over the public Internet. In the US, the FCC has a bunch of regulations for a vertical-integrated service called "telephone service". The behavior, roles, requirements, taxation, etc. are described in great detail. Today, local and/or long-distance companies can and do carry phone calls over private IP networks, some of which are also used for Internet traffic as well. This is perfectly legal and does not change existing taxation rules in any way. In addition, PacketCable and others have extensive architectures which describe how to build a managed telephone service that runs natively on an IP network. In both cases, the whole network is managed in a manner consistent with the FCC definitions of a telephone service and taxed equivalently. Contrast this with a program on a PC that allows me to rendezvous with and send arbitrary data (which could be packetized audio) between users on the public Internet (like Skype). The FCC also has a tax on broadband access, but does not treat Skype as a telephony service. As folks have pointed out, it would be almost impossible to detect the difference between one such use of the Internet and any other. Finally there are services like Vonage which offer a rendezvous and telephone-network-gateway service on the public Internet. These services use a broadband Internet connection paid for separately by their users and not managed by the gateway provider, but they provide a dedicated PSTN telephone number and usually use small home gateways you can plug a telephone into. These are harder to classify since they can be configured to look/sound like a traditional telephone service to unsuspecting users. Here is where the regulatory battle is being fought. In addition to the taxation issue, there are public safety agencies who still want emergency services to work well in this environment, after the fiasco of cellular 911. (One proposal to satisfy these folks is to add an additional tax to broadband services to fund "Internet emergency services". Imagine paging 911 from your Blackberry) Hopefully this will provide some interesting grist for the mill... One last thing. I bristle a bit when folks talk about US telecom "deregulation". In the US, we went from having a two Incumbent Local Exchange Providers of any relevance (AT&T and GTE) to 8 (US West, Ameritech, SBC, PacBell, Bell South, Bell Atlantic, NYNEX, GTE) in 1986, to now 4 (Qwest, SBC, Bell South, and Verizon). AFAIK, telecom "deregulation" is really just "reregulation". Competition for traditional phone service is still effectively limited to very large companies. Real deregulation would allow for a proliferation of small companies and cooperatives to participate, and we are not there yet.