For the record, the GP was in no way meant to be a defence of the Obama Administration, who are even more to blame for this and several other problems. I didn't feel the need to state this in the post because I presume by now everyone is more of less aware of the homogeneous nature of those in power in the US.
House Leadership was pressured by the Obama Administration to weaken many of the bill's provisions.
Pressured how? They sent lots of Emails with "RE:" in the subject title? Many phone calls were made? The people who took you to lunch chuckled at public "hysteria"? Somebody insinuated they might have the ability to strike a committee to consider, in the fullness of time, whether pork due to your constituency -- if any -- might be placed under a possible pending review?
Would the house leadership describe the "pressure" placed by the Administration as "Overwhelming", "Compelling", or merely "Gentle but Firm"? Which one of these do Legislators consider as an excuse to justify gutting the Act?
The story is BS, and pure optics. The house leadership had no intention of passing the bill ungutted.
As much as I'd like to see engineers speaking freely about problems, the consequences of doing so can be catastrophic when they don't know what they are doing.
This should not be so. The law as it currently stands promotes thes kinds of irrational, destructive practices and behaviours. We need laws that punish engineers who obfuscate, and which protect engineers who speak openly and honestly.
The law is a tool which can shape the morals and behaviour of human beings. At some point in the last 30 years, the West has completely forgotten that the law is a tool for shaping public ethics and morality, and has instead regarded it as a pen an paper RPG which can be gamed, min-maxed, and generally ruined in spirit by twisting the meaning of its letters. The degeneracy of our insitutions, private and public, has its roots in the degeneracy of the courts and legal professions and their practices.
What about the right of the general public to take pleasure and satisfaction in the petty humiliation and dehumanization of incarcerated persons? The cruelty dollar is a huge dollar, not to mention the cruelty vote.
The internet, that you when you click on the blue "e", that's your cloud. You can store as much as you like on your cloud. Your cloud can float on the information superhighway, up as much as you want. Everytime someone visits your cloud, it rains apps on them, and they smile.
Your server isn't a cloud. It's just a water tap. People have to drive to your house to use the tap. There are no apps coming from the tap. It makes people sad. You should pay money to put your apps on the cloud, where everyone can read them. When you hug your server, you just get wet, and the NSA get cross with you.
The cloud is a magic place of infinite storage and bandwidth, and unicorns. Its the dreamland where all of the apps come from. You should hug the cloud.
The internet, that you when you click on the blue "e", that's your cloud. You can only store so much on your cloud. Every time you browse, you store more and more in the your cloud. If you store to much water in the cloud, the tubes of the internet will leak.
That's why we need to cap the amount of water you store in there. Especially Netflix. They steal water from your cloud, and pump too much storage in. So we had to build a dam, to store water and generate Net Neutrality. That's how the Market moves.
You can develop all the security technologies you like. They'll be worth precisely nothing when the NSA sends a pup of an agent with a national security letter to seize your files, equipment, and force your co-operation under penalty of imprisonment. The courts remain the ultimate root-kit.
One ploy they can use that doesn't require super genius insight is to try to promote complexity in new standards. Complexity makes implementation harder and increases the probability of exploitable mistakes, in both design and implementation.
And yet despite this, SELinux remains installed by default on many distros. How long more is the NSA going to be allowed to live in our Kernels?
This may sound crass, but this is a problem that'll solve itself in a couple of decades, after which you'll have a much lower population on the island, which given the lack of space (especially in large cities) is probably a good thing.
Ireland has one of the lowest population densities in the world. This did not stop one of the world's worst per capita property bubbles forming and bursting, and now re-inflate itself in the capital.
The principal determiner of housing afford-ability is bank policy, and after that the level of influence landlords have over government policy. I imagine both are high in Japan, and the result has in part contributed to the literal decay of the entire country.
If young people in developed countries cannot afford a place to live and raise children, they will not marry, they will not have children, and the country will slowly die. Property prices and rents will remain propped up on an artificial floor, but in consequence the country will simply die.
Perhaps a lot of server administrators are simply tired of dealing with the unending farce that constitutes modern internet security, and have simply decided to give in. What's the use in spending time and effort on security measures which frequently fail, sometimes spectacularly so in the case of heart-bleed. In particular, what's the point of protecting customer data if organizations like the NSA can simply walk in and take it, or if you're already selling it en-masse to marketers.
Except, why would a machine intelligence want to enslave us? For me that was the biggest gaping plot hole in The Matrix. If it/they lacked creativity we might have something to offer, otherwise we're just playthings or potentially dangerous vermin.
The Wachowski's original idea was that the machines were enslaving humans to use their brains for raw computational power. As the humans dreamed in the matrix, the machines would be able to run themselves and their society on the zillions of effective clock cycles that the massed human brains provided, all at a fairly minimal biological cost, and with the small "overhead" of the Matrix itself.
This concept was later abandoned after being deemed "too complex" for audience, and later changed to the Duracel version.
Which was a huge pity because the idea of human brains as computing devices explains immediately how operative can "will" themselves to be stronger, faster, etc in the matrix, and how Neo can manipulate the code. Not only that, it createed a concrete in-universe consequence for the ordinarily abstract cyper-punk goal of "waking-up" the population. In the Matrix, a revolution of thought alone was enough to, and indeed the only thing which could overthrow the oppressive machines.
"Everyone just had to like, wake up man. Turn off the government TV in your head dude. Like, fight the system... with your miiind." The genius of the original concept was that it actually turned abstract cyber-punk rebellion into a concrete sci-fi consequence. The Duracell version lacks any such subtlety.
However, the Wachowski's seemed to later forget this script change and proceeded to write the next two films under "humans as CPUs" viewpoint. As the on-screen sequels devolve deeper into what seems like mysticism, the greater tradgedy is that not underestimating the original audience, these elements of the sequels could have added to the philosophical bent of the original film.
But the short answer to your question is that AI intelligences could concievably be digital zombies who want to "eat" our brains.
Doom was "Indie". Command and Conquer was "Indie". Hell, compared to the modern AAA teams large enough to fill a city church, Super Mario World was "Indie".
The difference between 1 guy in a bedroom making an ephemeral App, and 10-20 people in an office a timeless classic does not give the right to the former to be lauded as either innovative, avant-garde, or somehow good for the industry. Contemporary "Indie" developers are just as much of a cancer on modern gaming as AAA kilo-teams.
If you're using LaTeX, it's not, provided that you're a reasonably quick typist and have memorized the standard mathematical commands.
No.
I use LaTeX Professionally. Moreover I use AucTex with in editor previews, split panes with docview and a heavily customised yasnippets installation made to work on Lyx-type input shortcuts. Everything is designed to speed up LaTeX document creation(Believe me I've tried it using vanilla LaTeX).
On average, it still takes me five times longer to type up a page of mathematics than to simply write it down with a pen. If there is so much as a single image, this extends to fifteen to twenty times longer -- literally.
LaTeX can very easily fool you into believing you are actually getting work done, but in reality you are simply wasting time typesetting mathematics instead of actually writing it. The only positive side to LaTeX'ed mathematics is that the equations look nice. Everything else is a huge waste of time.
It did not happen because the software and distributed infrastruture needed to support it was never written or developed. The blame for this can be placed solidly at the feet of the global hacking community, which hasn't created a truely disruptive technology since Bittorrent back in 2001 (IMHO, the jury is still out on Bitcoin (2009) ).
The reasons for this are largely socio-economic. The rise of Google and Co. has meant that "disruptive" software is now principally developed in corporate campuses, with most "hacking" talent now draw to the stable and lucrative paycheck offered by compaanies interested in neat toys, but not unfortunately in the kind of software the world needs to keep the NSA out of people's lives. Another big trend has been the mass migration of programmers towards writing "Apps" for walled garden devices. It would also be unwise to omit the drain of programmers to HFT firms and computer aided finance in general over the last decade or so.
There is no modern Bram Cohen (or Satoshi Nakamoto) working on a mass privacy program. They're all writing iPhone games or working for Google, Facebook, the NSA, and the Banks. And without that individual, or small team, actively dedicated to creating a distributed, anonymous, and secure communication system, users will increasingly turn away from the panopticon that the internet has now become.
Those complaints resulted in roughly 21 million vehicles being recalled. The push-button ignition isn't perfect, but we know electrical trumps mechanical more often than not.
Those recalls were predominantly due to issues which arose as a direct result of companies cutting cost by deliberately making parts weaker, cheaper, less durable, etc. It is simply naive to suggest that these same companies will apply more care or consideration when designing all electrical systems.
All a switch to electronic system will do is replace infrequent mechanical recalls with increasingly more frequent updates of shoddy on-board software. Eventually, drivers will be expected to download and install car software patches themselves. Once again, company costs will be externalized at the expense of quality.
Back when I was still programming, i once got a spec sheet written on a post-it.
The programmers task is to create the concrete system which the executives are only daydreaming about. When executives give you such a document, they are giving you the freedom you to design, code, and implement the thing. Once you have created it, Code is Law, and the program gains its own authority.
Is it the NSA and FBI engaged in evildoing? Or are they stopping evildoing?
Even if the NSA was actually stopping terrorist plots, the end would not justify the means. Given the size and scope of their operations, any plots which they might have foiled are literally negligible considerations. The NSA is now a domestic surveillance apparatus and nothing more.
There is no solution to this situation that I could think of.
Bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy will -- in a vary painful but mercifully short way -- clear the debts, crystallize the losses of those who have invested poorly, reward the prudent with decreased asset prices, and ultimately free those trapped in debt to start their lives again. It's harsh, but the slow debt/deflationary purgatory we are now living in is death by a thousand cuts by comparison.
No so. Throughout most of history, mathematicians did not have the luxury of pandering to nationalism, militarism, pacifism or other temporal concerns. The numbers of mathematicians were so low that from the very earliest days mathematics was an international scholarly activity.
While it is true that mathematics was employed by engineers and others in many applied fields, mathematics itself has never been subject to restriction or exclusion on the basis of its applications. The applications themselves perhaps, but never the mathematics. Even in the Soviet Union, mathematicians were free to research and publish as they pleased.
This, like so many things in science, has changed in the post war, "Big Science" era. We are now in a situation where ~1% of all mathematicians worldwide are employed by one organisation -- the NSA -- and the issues surrounding this organisation may yet lead to a wholly unprecedented crisis within mathematics, concerning what we should/shouldn't not work on -- or for. If we end up in a situation where certain branches of mathematics become restricted or prohibited in any way, then mathematics will have crossed a particularly dangerous Rubicon, and with it so will Western society.
As much as I don't like what the NSA is doing, the problem is with that organization, and not the tools, disciplines, or mathematics being done there. I for one am not willing to uproot millennia of mathematical traditions and precedent because one foreign power has allowed its spy organization to run out of control.
I note that the great French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, effectively retired from mathematics in protest at, basically, the Vietnam war. Some view this as a powerful statement of principal, but I don't accept that mathematicians direct themselves according to events in the United States or any other country. Mathematics is an international, long-term and now global activity and that should not be compromised because of the likes of the NSA.
P.S. If you are a mathematicians and you do want to do something about the NSA, please consider designing distributed secure browsing/email/DNS/messaging/hosting systems or contributing to their design. That will do far more for the world than fragmenting mathematics ever will.
Now, I do find myself personally skeptical of a lot of the theoretical physics/cosmology/multiverse terminology, theories and lingo you are likely to encounter nowadays, but including Inflation on the list is a bit of a stretch to say the the least. But then I also spotted this
They've basically been DOSing the ISPs local loops for nearly a decade, blaming the ISPs and now they have the brilliant idea that maybe they should address the insane amount of bandwidth they're eating up?
They did pay. Netflix payed Cogent for the amount of data they uploaded. You paid Comcast (or whoever) for the amount of data you downloaded. Your movie data has been paid for -- twice-- and never forget it.
Now, Comcast might have promised you an "all you can eat" unlimited Internet connection, but by God you paid for it, and Comcast can either deliver or just give you your money back. Note I'm not saying that connections should be unlimited -- in fact, I think end users paying per GB is fair -- but the nature of these contracts is determined by the ISPs making the offer. If Comcast are writing cheques their network can't cash, that's between their shareholders and their competition.
The real issue here is the Peering agreements between the very largest ISPs. They agreed back in the 1980s to not charge one another and simply switch to a user pays cash model. This would encourage ISPs to try and host as much content as they had users, promoting both the creation of servers and content as well as connections and end users. It's a system which has functioned astoundingly well for 30 years now.
Comcast now wants to go back on those peering agreements essentially because it is too lazy to compete. Comcast will not a) Try to make Netflix offers so that they are hosted on Comcast's Network in the first place, b) charge end users the real costs of the GB they download or c) cut the pensioned executive fat out of their operation so that they can actually deliver what the customers paid while still making money.
If Comcast succeeds in the US with this, they will have effectively broken the Internet. We will go from the Network we have to a closed off, content delivery system like cable, possibly seeing the internet fragment into a collection of internal corporate networks -- a situation more likely each days as IPv4 addresses run out. The Internet is now in danger of regressing to the original conceptions of a world wide computer network, first imagined in the 1960s,and bearing no resemblance to the open, imaginative, uncontrolled and informative network we have today. This danger is the result of the greed of companies like comcast, and the simplistic emotional arguments that constitute the current level of discourse around this, probably the most pivotal social and economic issue of our times.
Slashdot Mirror
Spelling is the least significant digit of communication.
For the record, the GP was in no way meant to be a defence of the Obama Administration, who are even more to blame for this and several other problems. I didn't feel the need to state this in the post because I presume by now everyone is more of less aware of the homogeneous nature of those in power in the US.
Pressured how? They sent lots of Emails with "RE:" in the subject title? Many phone calls were made? The people who took you to lunch chuckled at public "hysteria"? Somebody insinuated they might have the ability to strike a committee to consider, in the fullness of time, whether pork due to your constituency -- if any -- might be placed under a possible pending review?
Would the house leadership describe the "pressure" placed by the Administration as "Overwhelming", "Compelling", or merely "Gentle but Firm"? Which one of these do Legislators consider as an excuse to justify gutting the Act?
The story is BS, and pure optics. The house leadership had no intention of passing the bill ungutted.
If the media want to have a field day with you, they can have it regardless of what you wrote.
This should not be so. The law as it currently stands promotes thes kinds of irrational, destructive practices and behaviours. We need laws that punish engineers who obfuscate, and which protect engineers who speak openly and honestly.
The law is a tool which can shape the morals and behaviour of human beings. At some point in the last 30 years, the West has completely forgotten that the law is a tool for shaping public ethics and morality, and has instead regarded it as a pen an paper RPG which can be gamed, min-maxed, and generally ruined in spirit by twisting the meaning of its letters. The degeneracy of our insitutions, private and public, has its roots in the degeneracy of the courts and legal professions and their practices.
What about the right of the general public to take pleasure and satisfaction in the petty humiliation and dehumanization of incarcerated persons? The cruelty dollar is a huge dollar, not to mention the cruelty vote.
The internet, that you when you click on the blue "e", that's your cloud. You can store as much as you like on your cloud. Your cloud can float on the information superhighway, up as much as you want. Everytime someone visits your cloud, it rains apps on them, and they smile.
Your server isn't a cloud. It's just a water tap. People have to drive to your house to use the tap. There are no apps coming from the tap. It makes people sad. You should pay money to put your apps on the cloud, where everyone can read them. When you hug your server, you just get wet, and the NSA get cross with you.
The cloud is a magic place of infinite storage and bandwidth, and unicorns. Its the dreamland where all of the apps come from. You should hug the cloud.
The internet, that you when you click on the blue "e", that's your cloud. You can only store so much on your cloud. Every time you browse, you store more and more in the your cloud. If you store to much water in the cloud, the tubes of the internet will leak.
That's why we need to cap the amount of water you store in there. Especially Netflix. They steal water from your cloud, and pump too much storage in. So we had to build a dam, to store water and generate Net Neutrality. That's how the Market moves.
You can develop all the security technologies you like. They'll be worth precisely nothing when the NSA sends a pup of an agent with a national security letter to seize your files, equipment, and force your co-operation under penalty of imprisonment. The courts remain the ultimate root-kit.
And yet despite this, SELinux remains installed by default on many distros. How long more is the NSA going to be allowed to live in our Kernels?
Paris may forget you cheri, but marketers never will.
Ireland has one of the lowest population densities in the world. This did not stop one of the world's worst per capita property bubbles forming and bursting, and now re-inflate itself in the capital.
The principal determiner of housing afford-ability is bank policy, and after that the level of influence landlords have over government policy. I imagine both are high in Japan, and the result has in part contributed to the literal decay of the entire country.
If young people in developed countries cannot afford a place to live and raise children, they will not marry, they will not have children, and the country will slowly die. Property prices and rents will remain propped up on an artificial floor, but in consequence the country will simply die.
Perhaps a lot of server administrators are simply tired of dealing with the unending farce that constitutes modern internet security, and have simply decided to give in. What's the use in spending time and effort on security measures which frequently fail, sometimes spectacularly so in the case of heart-bleed. In particular, what's the point of protecting customer data if organizations like the NSA can simply walk in and take it, or if you're already selling it en-masse to marketers.
The Wachowski's original idea was that the machines were enslaving humans to use their brains for raw computational power. As the humans dreamed in the matrix, the machines would be able to run themselves and their society on the zillions of effective clock cycles that the massed human brains provided, all at a fairly minimal biological cost, and with the small "overhead" of the Matrix itself.
This concept was later abandoned after being deemed "too complex" for audience, and later changed to the Duracel version.
Which was a huge pity because the idea of human brains as computing devices explains immediately how operative can "will" themselves to be stronger, faster, etc in the matrix, and how Neo can manipulate the code. Not only that, it createed a concrete in-universe consequence for the ordinarily abstract cyper-punk goal of "waking-up" the population. In the Matrix, a revolution of thought alone was enough to, and indeed the only thing which could overthrow the oppressive machines.
"Everyone just had to like, wake up man. Turn off the government TV in your head dude. Like, fight the system... with your miiind." The genius of the original concept was that it actually turned abstract cyber-punk rebellion into a concrete sci-fi consequence. The Duracell version lacks any such subtlety.
However, the Wachowski's seemed to later forget this script change and proceeded to write the next two films under "humans as CPUs" viewpoint. As the on-screen sequels devolve deeper into what seems like mysticism, the greater tradgedy is that not underestimating the original audience, these elements of the sequels could have added to the philosophical bent of the original film.
But the short answer to your question is that AI intelligences could concievably be digital zombies who want to "eat" our brains.
Doom was "Indie". Command and Conquer was "Indie". Hell, compared to the modern AAA teams large enough to fill a city church, Super Mario World was "Indie".
The difference between 1 guy in a bedroom making an ephemeral App, and 10-20 people in an office a timeless classic does not give the right to the former to be lauded as either innovative, avant-garde, or somehow good for the industry. Contemporary "Indie" developers are just as much of a cancer on modern gaming as AAA kilo-teams.
No.
I use LaTeX Professionally. Moreover I use AucTex with in editor previews, split panes with docview and a heavily customised yasnippets installation made to work on Lyx-type input shortcuts. Everything is designed to speed up LaTeX document creation(Believe me I've tried it using vanilla LaTeX).
On average, it still takes me five times longer to type up a page of mathematics than to simply write it down with a pen. If there is so much as a single image, this extends to fifteen to twenty times longer -- literally.
LaTeX can very easily fool you into believing you are actually getting work done, but in reality you are simply wasting time typesetting mathematics instead of actually writing it. The only positive side to LaTeX'ed mathematics is that the equations look nice. Everything else is a huge waste of time.
It did not happen because the software and distributed infrastruture needed to support it was never written or developed. The blame for this can be placed solidly at the feet of the global hacking community, which hasn't created a truely disruptive technology since Bittorrent back in 2001 (IMHO, the jury is still out on Bitcoin (2009) ).
The reasons for this are largely socio-economic. The rise of Google and Co. has meant that "disruptive" software is now principally developed in corporate campuses, with most "hacking" talent now draw to the stable and lucrative paycheck offered by compaanies interested in neat toys, but not unfortunately in the kind of software the world needs to keep the NSA out of people's lives. Another big trend has been the mass migration of programmers towards writing "Apps" for walled garden devices. It would also be unwise to omit the drain of programmers to HFT firms and computer aided finance in general over the last decade or so.
There is no modern Bram Cohen (or Satoshi Nakamoto) working on a mass privacy program. They're all writing iPhone games or working for Google, Facebook, the NSA, and the Banks. And without that individual, or small team, actively dedicated to creating a distributed, anonymous, and secure communication system, users will increasingly turn away from the panopticon that the internet has now become.
Those recalls were predominantly due to issues which arose as a direct result of companies cutting cost by deliberately making parts weaker, cheaper, less durable, etc. It is simply naive to suggest that these same companies will apply more care or consideration when designing all electrical systems.
All a switch to electronic system will do is replace infrequent mechanical recalls with increasingly more frequent updates of shoddy on-board software. Eventually, drivers will be expected to download and install car software patches themselves. Once again, company costs will be externalized at the expense of quality.
The programmers task is to create the concrete system which the executives are only daydreaming about. When executives give you such a document, they are giving you the freedom you to design, code, and implement the thing. Once you have created it, Code is Law, and the program gains its own authority.
The problem with pain scales is that sometimes they don't include all the numbers.
Even if the NSA was actually stopping terrorist plots, the end would not justify the means. Given the size and scope of their operations, any plots which they might have foiled are literally negligible considerations. The NSA is now a domestic surveillance apparatus and nothing more.
Bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy will -- in a vary painful but mercifully short way -- clear the debts, crystallize the losses of those who have invested poorly, reward the prudent with decreased asset prices, and ultimately free those trapped in debt to start their lives again. It's harsh, but the slow debt/deflationary purgatory we are now living in is death by a thousand cuts by comparison.
No so. Throughout most of history, mathematicians did not have the luxury of pandering to nationalism, militarism, pacifism or other temporal concerns. The numbers of mathematicians were so low that from the very earliest days mathematics was an international scholarly activity.
While it is true that mathematics was employed by engineers and others in many applied fields, mathematics itself has never been subject to restriction or exclusion on the basis of its applications. The applications themselves perhaps, but never the mathematics. Even in the Soviet Union, mathematicians were free to research and publish as they pleased.
This, like so many things in science, has changed in the post war, "Big Science" era. We are now in a situation where ~1% of all mathematicians worldwide are employed by one organisation -- the NSA -- and the issues surrounding this organisation may yet lead to a wholly unprecedented crisis within mathematics, concerning what we should/shouldn't not work on -- or for. If we end up in a situation where certain branches of mathematics become restricted or prohibited in any way, then mathematics will have crossed a particularly dangerous Rubicon, and with it so will Western society.
As much as I don't like what the NSA is doing, the problem is with that organization, and not the tools, disciplines, or mathematics being done there. I for one am not willing to uproot millennia of mathematical traditions and precedent because one foreign power has allowed its spy organization to run out of control.
I note that the great French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, effectively retired from mathematics in protest at, basically, the Vietnam war. Some view this as a powerful statement of principal, but I don't accept that mathematicians direct themselves according to events in the United States or any other country. Mathematics is an international, long-term and now global activity and that should not be compromised because of the likes of the NSA.
P.S.
If you are a mathematicians and you do want to do something about the NSA, please consider designing distributed secure browsing/email/DNS/messaging/hosting systems or contributing to their design. That will do far more for the world than fragmenting mathematics ever will.
The last item on the list reads
20. Inflation
Now, I do find myself personally skeptical of a lot of the theoretical physics/cosmology/multiverse terminology, theories and lingo you are likely to encounter nowadays, but including Inflation on the list is a bit of a stretch to say the the least. But then I also spotted this
13. CuGeO3
What is this I Don't Even?
They did pay. Netflix payed Cogent for the amount of data they uploaded. You paid Comcast (or whoever) for the amount of data you downloaded. Your movie data has been paid for -- twice-- and never forget it.
Now, Comcast might have promised you an "all you can eat" unlimited Internet connection, but by God you paid for it, and Comcast can either deliver or just give you your money back. Note I'm not saying that connections should be unlimited -- in fact, I think end users paying per GB is fair -- but the nature of these contracts is determined by the ISPs making the offer. If Comcast are writing cheques their network can't cash, that's between their shareholders and their competition.
The real issue here is the Peering agreements between the very largest ISPs. They agreed back in the 1980s to not charge one another and simply switch to a user pays cash model. This would encourage ISPs to try and host as much content as they had users, promoting both the creation of servers and content as well as connections and end users. It's a system which has functioned astoundingly well for 30 years now.
Comcast now wants to go back on those peering agreements essentially because it is too lazy to compete. Comcast will not a) Try to make Netflix offers so that they are hosted on Comcast's Network in the first place, b) charge end users the real costs of the GB they download or c) cut the pensioned executive fat out of their operation so that they can actually deliver what the customers paid while still making money.
If Comcast succeeds in the US with this, they will have effectively broken the Internet. We will go from the Network we have to a closed off, content delivery system like cable, possibly seeing the internet fragment into a collection of internal corporate networks -- a situation more likely each days as IPv4 addresses run out. The Internet is now in danger of regressing to the original conceptions of a world wide computer network, first imagined in the 1960s,and bearing no resemblance to the open, imaginative, uncontrolled and informative network we have today. This danger is the result of the greed of companies like comcast, and the simplistic emotional arguments that constitute the current level of discourse around this, probably the most pivotal social and economic issue of our times.