They've been on the chopping block for several weeks now and nothing has happened. For example, the latest version of the Kindle app was published on the App Store on the 14th and has been downloadable to this day. Apple's made no statements about how they're going to apply these rules to Netfilx and Kindle, and all we can do is extrapolate.
All we have is one data point from a frustrated vanity publisher who's upset, really, because it's not him getting that 30% instead of Apple. He wants to pretend he's the "content provider" when the independent writer's he's fleecing are doing all the writing and Apple is doing all legwork with the distribution, making the mobile devices and making electronic reading an actual going proposition. All he is is a middleman trying to get his cut for doing nothing more than running a website and doing "classy" branding.
According to the page you linked to, the development environment is closed source and requires a license. It does say the hardware platform is open and documented, but the toolchain, which is what people end up doing their work, is not -- they don't even seem to target Linux, let alone Mac OS X, which Arduino does. Weirdly, their "Code Composer Studio" is built on Eclipse but requires an license and activation file, and a "30-day trial" is mentioned. Here be dragons...
But free markets rely on proper design -- if people were allowed to sell stocks on the stock market without proper accounting or disclosures, then anyone who did disclose would be at a competitive disadvantage and there would be no disclosure, and eventually nobody would buy stocks except for a few insiders and dumb money.
If the laissez-faire outcome of only relying on "star" ranking is that only suckers and power users use the app market, then that's a market failure and bad for Android. The idea of rating a should be to evaluate the quality of an app at doing what it says it will, provided that it does nothing malicious. Fraud simply cannot be tolerated in any excessive amount, because if someone is bitten by this once and the cause is not rectified, they might just not ever use the App market again and tell their friends same.
If I were running an app market, what I might do is create a "referee" type system where some users are allowed to use a submitted app before it's released at-large, and in exchange they must show their system logs and external verification of their network usage. That wouldn't catch everything but it would catch a lot of things.
Although apple's laptops have few unique features, you are not getting as much as you put, according to profit margins of Apple Corp.
This contention, that a consumer is getting a bad deal if the producer makes a profit, is very strange. Remember, profit come from the fact that manufacturing costs become marginal with volume, producers lock-in low commodity prices through contracts (Apple buys its SSDs and RAM 5 years in advance of you in astounding volumes), and from the various economic rents it gets from proprietary processes and licensing.
Yeah you're right, but then again when you're comparing people to a crowd the likes of Sun, SGI, Sperry, Symbolic, and Wang...:)
I'm reminded of the old Keynes line: "In the long run everybody dies." If I were a C-level exec at NeXT in 1996 and a C-level exec at Sun in 2009 (or an SGI exec in 2006) came back in a time machine and asked to switch, I definitely wouldn't take that offer. Sun and SGI made more money and ran a lot longer but for some reason had a lot less to show for it in the final analysis. In the Valhalla of computer companies they both preside over an empire of antiques and misfit toys. NeXT not so much.
Windows recycle bin does not extend to WebDAV, FTP, or SMB...
Oh, well. My OS does.
Perhaps that would give the user more time to decide they really wanted to purge this... Maybe this will cause them to be more careful with the delete command?
There's a difference between protecting the user from a careless action, and presuming every action of the user is careless and requiring them to prove to the OS their carefulness -- there was a reason everyone made fun of Vista's security validation screens, it was because they were redundant and obsequious, and treated the user as if they were an idiot that needed training wheels.
I mean while we're adding 20 minute waits into putting things in the trash (not even emptying the trash mind, just moving things to it) why don't we add one of those little word jumbles or a sliding tile puzzle to the trash dialogue, so the user can be extra extra sure that they really wanted to delete the file? Atomicity of operations, conceptual simplicity, appropriate balance between safety and efficiency? Bah! Who needs it! Even better, I like the silent presumption in your argument that a 100k file wouldn't need as much time for pause or consideration as a 80 gig file.
It's just deleting a file, it's not opening the vents of the primary coolant loop or putting the transmission into reverse on the freeway. It's best to let people do this if they want, and to keep the safety conventions as simple as is practical. Besides, if the day comes that you do want to vent the primary coolant, when you turn the key it'd better damn vent, and not indicate that coolant can only vent on alternate Tuesday's with the supervisor's permission, independent of the permissions of the valve, and that the containment can only open one valve per every 30 seconds as a "safety" feature to prevent the operator from opening "too many valves" without "thinking about it."
Why not make the recycle bin a separate filesystem? Allocate a block of disk of pre-defined size for the recycle bin.
Because that would cause deletions that now run in O(1) to run in O(n) (at least); a deleted file (maybe an 80 gig video file) would have to be copied to the deletion FS before the deletion operation was complete. The idea of the Trash Can (eff this Recycle Bin noise) is that it's an abstraction that lives on top of the filesystem and allows interaction with files without regard for their filesystem, or if they're even filesystem entities at all; they might be resources on a WebDAV server, or references to files on an FTP or SMB. Trash Cans are entities of the Desktop Manager and are used for managing the user's session with the Desktop, and only presents of facade of underlying operations. And your rules for dealing with all the exceptional cases basically would make it impossible for a casual user to know if his file was even going to stay in the trash, or if they'd even be able to go in the trash at all (instead of going straight to being unlink) with a sudo, or constantly putting up "Are you sure you want to... This can only be deleted if..." messages).
Most Apple true believers are simply people who hate MS and Intel and are making a politcal point as opposed to a logical shopping decision.
Well, at least her on the 'dot we have communities of WebOS, Windows, Android, Emacs, Java, and Linux consumers to offset this with their stern rationality and scrupulous abstention from any appearance of advocacy...
Imagine portable digital music players coming out this year?
He didn't say "portable music player," he said "the iPod." iPods are, granted, a kind of portable music player, but they are also different from all other portable music players in that it's an actual mass consumer product instead of some hobbyist thing. Without iPod's we'd still have portable music players, but they'd all play ATRACS off of Memory Sticks...
NeXT wasn't a "popular" computing company, it built high-end workstations and an object-oriented OS for the scientific and government markets, actually a lot like Sun. NeXT actually did pretty well at this, which is why NeXT was able to buy Apple -- they'd have you believe it was the other way around, but don't be fooled. NeXT, unlike Sun, actually had an exit strategy for the dot-com bust, and exercised it before the music stopped playing.
Every other story in TFA basically goes like this: "Our platform started on X, and then we changed it to Y, using Z UI library but the developers from Y used some of their own." As far as MeeGo and Moblin go, there didn't seem to be any attention to creating the minimum specification and just choosing what they were going to support and refine.
Nokia seemed to have completely outsourced their technology strategy to their open-source community process, and things stagnated over the sort of squabbles people in OSS know and love. Unlike Apple or Google, which took off-the-shelf OSS software that the community had written, made it their own and now act as BDFLs for their own brands and make their money off supporting and extending the OSS core; Nokia did the exact opposite, putting a ton of effort into reduplicating OS work, and then leaving support and extension to the community. It seems like their community process was completely dysfunctional and nobody working on MeeGo ever knew where the platform was going next. Nokia and Intel were very tight-lipped, so the people in the community would do their own thing and the platform would drift and work would be done on all kinds of stuff that didn't benefit Nokia. And then Nokia would come in one day and drop Gtk. You don't see the sort of high-level coordination that Google nominally does through the OHA, and you don't see the sort of commitment Apple makes to promoting their platform to end-users and keeping the platform as consistent as possible.
Open Source is good for a lot of things. People can write your software for you! But Nokia seemed to have the idea that if they just kickstarted an OSS phone OS, they could just sell handsets and the software platform would take care of itself with magic bazaar pixie dust, while assuming that at any time they could completely drop or add whatever technology they chose and the community would go along for the ride.
Each additional bit gets you 6 dB of signal -- 3 dB doubling is only true for power relations, 6 dB is a doubling of amplitude, and PCM encodes amplitude; he's deleting one bit to account for dither and THD, thus assuming 15 ENOB, which is a sufficient approximation but depends on the kind of dither noise, and the quality of the recording equipment, etc.
I could provide 140dB of dynamic range using 8-bits, but it would sound crappy because 90% of the sound would only use the lower few bits.
Well, yeah, if you were using decibels SPL to measure the output at the speakers and decibels fullscale to measure the signal on the medium. Don't mismatch your decibel units.
If Apple *actually* wanted to improve the quality of music they would demand remastered tracks with actual audio engineers doing the work instead of rap "producers" using the compression widget in Protools to make it sound "better".
It's not enough that Apple tells people what apps they can run on their phone or how magazines are allowed to run their subscriptions, now they can tell rap producers how to mix their tracks, too?:)
And we'll have you know that out "compression widget" was like $3000 in the Waves Platinum Mastering box set.
Perhaps it would be wiser to implement an 8+16 bit floating point format which could have a chance of surviving the loudness war, but I wouldn't bet on it.
It would just turn the loudness war into the normalization war.
A lot of people suffer from non-debilitating hearing damage, too. There's also a lot of bias in hearing, so if you didn't A/B the two signals on a proper system, and have someone else do the switching a-la Pepsi Challenge, I wouldn't take your impression to the bank.
About half way through it gets very quiet, sounds shit on many audio systems, you may not even be able to hear it. It gets crucified on MP3.
Most mastering engineers will "cheat" and pump the dynamics on quieter parts of a long symphonic composition on account of the medium, and then they'll accentuate dynamic changes by tucking the faders leading into sforzandos (and that's not even getting into mic placement for room versus ensemble emphasis, cheating spot mics into the mix, varying polar patterns and EQ during the performance...). You really don't get a realistic dynamic of what was originally recorded from a finished off-the-rack CD -- the recording engineers know they're being graded for how dynamic it sounds and how the performance is translated to the medium and not necessarily how accurate it sounds. They really want to have it set up in such a way that the person at home never has to touch the volume knob.
Thus, I'm tempted to say that if something sounds like shit on an MP3, it probably wasn't mastered very well, because if the sound is suffering it means that the mastering engineer is letting the recording drift outside the listener model and are letting the pianissimos get too pianissimo because they can, even if it means dragging the program through the dithers, which is probably why the MP3 is suffering, it's wasting a lot of signal space encoding the mastered dither. There are some engineers that are really pedantic and are really touchy about ever using mixing, and they want to force people at home to have to strain to hear the quiet bits, but these guys are all nutty audiophiles who go home to soundproofed living rooms equipped with Klipsches.
The main factor I'm aware of in the migration away from Final Cut systems is lack of support (they've pretty much stopped updating it) and cost of maintenance/storage.
Compared to the update schedule and cost structures of, say, Avid Media Composer, Final Cut is still pretty formidable, but that's the market they seem to think about now, large production houses, feature films and HD television shops that want RED workflows. I notice that the winner of the Eddie on Saturday, The Social Network was an FCP show, as was True Grit; Fincher and the Coen's have been using the platform for years and it generally takes about a decade of a vendor screwing up before people like this starting looking for a new platform. (I think Avid was on Media Composer 4 for like, what, 8 years?
There really is no problem with FCP workflows at this point, you just have to pay. And as long as Premiere doesn't have Avid's negative matchback or Final Cut's color tools and particular RED workflow features, that's probably where it's going to stay.
Do not crap on the daisy-chain desktop bus that was invented by Woz 10 years before USB. If you wanna complain, complain about the LC-PDS:)
and thier goofy round serial
You realize it was just an RS-232 in a DIN sleeve, right? The cables to go from MiniDIN to D-Sub were just wire and you didn't have to do any active adaptation (I mean a real geek would just order some parts off DigiKey and solder his own D-sub, but I digress). What made the port a pain was the lack of printing drivers -- any old modem would generally work as long as you knew Hayes and had a proper terminal app.
GeoPort, and other complete CRAP.
Geoport's actually an interesting case, because Apple actually got a bunch of vendors together and tried to standardize it through the Versit Consortium. The GeoPort was just an RS-232 with an extra pin to pass audio back to the host so it could do softmodem or signaling to different kinds of PBX switches using its DSP chip to make the tones. Alas switch vendors sorta resented other people's hardware talking to their switches...
I didn't say it was impossible, I just said that you can't pay for it the way we have been paying for it. And it would require a hell of a lot more laws on the books than Net Neutrality. The Transcontinental Railroad required enormous government land grants and the federal government basically had to force the railroads to carry passenger service. The Alaskan Pipeline and nuclear plants are all heavily government regulated -- the proceeds of Alaska oil licenses are heavily taxed and the rents socialized. Putting a man on the moon was a stupendous government expenditure, where the state actively picked winners in order to achieve a scientific goal with almost zero direct profit.
I'm in favor of all of these things, I think they were all qualified goods. I'm also a strong supporter of a strong, centralized state, which maintains strong economic and cultural authority in society. Almost nobody in the US agrees with me on this, so they invent things like "Net Neutrality" which attempt to phrase common sense about liberal rights into a doctrine which completely ignores the costs and economy of the situation. Transporting video, or any future medium of communication, over D distance, using W bandwidth with a latency of T has upfront costs and continuing costs, and how you charge for it is not as simple as "everybody pays the same," whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. This sort of policy is just a giveaway to content providers, who would stop at nothing to have the rents in the network be shifted completely onto their suppliers and all the upside profits accrue to them.
If what you're really concerned about is telco consolidation and monopolies, fight that. Net Neutrality is a very dull instrument to prevent that, though.
Slashdot Mirror
They've been on the chopping block for several weeks now and nothing has happened. For example, the latest version of the Kindle app was published on the App Store on the 14th and has been downloadable to this day. Apple's made no statements about how they're going to apply these rules to Netfilx and Kindle, and all we can do is extrapolate.
All we have is one data point from a frustrated vanity publisher who's upset, really, because it's not him getting that 30% instead of Apple. He wants to pretend he's the "content provider" when the independent writer's he's fleecing are doing all the writing and Apple is doing all legwork with the distribution, making the mobile devices and making electronic reading an actual going proposition. All he is is a middleman trying to get his cut for doing nothing more than running a website and doing "classy" branding.
Why outrun the bear when you just need to outrun the other lawyers?
According to the page you linked to, the development environment is closed source and requires a license. It does say the hardware platform is open and documented, but the toolchain, which is what people end up doing their work, is not -- they don't even seem to target Linux, let alone Mac OS X, which Arduino does. Weirdly, their "Code Composer Studio" is built on Eclipse but requires an license and activation file, and a "30-day trial" is mentioned. Here be dragons...
But free markets rely on proper design -- if people were allowed to sell stocks on the stock market without proper accounting or disclosures, then anyone who did disclose would be at a competitive disadvantage and there would be no disclosure, and eventually nobody would buy stocks except for a few insiders and dumb money.
If the laissez-faire outcome of only relying on "star" ranking is that only suckers and power users use the app market, then that's a market failure and bad for Android. The idea of rating a should be to evaluate the quality of an app at doing what it says it will, provided that it does nothing malicious. Fraud simply cannot be tolerated in any excessive amount, because if someone is bitten by this once and the cause is not rectified, they might just not ever use the App market again and tell their friends same.
If I were running an app market, what I might do is create a "referee" type system where some users are allowed to use a submitted app before it's released at-large, and in exchange they must show their system logs and external verification of their network usage. That wouldn't catch everything but it would catch a lot of things.
Are you sure? The contention of the post is that a company's profits somehow affect the consumer's value, and I'm saying it doesn't work that way.
This contention, that a consumer is getting a bad deal if the producer makes a profit, is very strange. Remember, profit come from the fact that manufacturing costs become marginal with volume, producers lock-in low commodity prices through contracts (Apple buys its SSDs and RAM 5 years in advance of you in astounding volumes), and from the various economic rents it gets from proprietary processes and licensing.
Yeah you're right, but then again when you're comparing people to a crowd the likes of Sun, SGI, Sperry, Symbolic, and Wang... :)
I'm reminded of the old Keynes line: "In the long run everybody dies." If I were a C-level exec at NeXT in 1996 and a C-level exec at Sun in 2009 (or an SGI exec in 2006) came back in a time machine and asked to switch, I definitely wouldn't take that offer. Sun and SGI made more money and ran a lot longer but for some reason had a lot less to show for it in the final analysis. In the Valhalla of computer companies they both preside over an empire of antiques and misfit toys. NeXT not so much.
Oh, well. My OS does.
There's a difference between protecting the user from a careless action, and presuming every action of the user is careless and requiring them to prove to the OS their carefulness -- there was a reason everyone made fun of Vista's security validation screens, it was because they were redundant and obsequious, and treated the user as if they were an idiot that needed training wheels.
I mean while we're adding 20 minute waits into putting things in the trash (not even emptying the trash mind, just moving things to it) why don't we add one of those little word jumbles or a sliding tile puzzle to the trash dialogue, so the user can be extra extra sure that they really wanted to delete the file? Atomicity of operations, conceptual simplicity, appropriate balance between safety and efficiency? Bah! Who needs it! Even better, I like the silent presumption in your argument that a 100k file wouldn't need as much time for pause or consideration as a 80 gig file.
It's just deleting a file, it's not opening the vents of the primary coolant loop or putting the transmission into reverse on the freeway. It's best to let people do this if they want, and to keep the safety conventions as simple as is practical. Besides, if the day comes that you do want to vent the primary coolant, when you turn the key it'd better damn vent, and not indicate that coolant can only vent on alternate Tuesday's with the supervisor's permission, independent of the permissions of the valve, and that the containment can only open one valve per every 30 seconds as a "safety" feature to prevent the operator from opening "too many valves" without "thinking about it."
Because that would cause deletions that now run in O(1) to run in O(n) (at least); a deleted file (maybe an 80 gig video file) would have to be copied to the deletion FS before the deletion operation was complete. The idea of the Trash Can (eff this Recycle Bin noise) is that it's an abstraction that lives on top of the filesystem and allows interaction with files without regard for their filesystem, or if they're even filesystem entities at all; they might be resources on a WebDAV server, or references to files on an FTP or SMB. Trash Cans are entities of the Desktop Manager and are used for managing the user's session with the Desktop, and only presents of facade of underlying operations. And your rules for dealing with all the exceptional cases basically would make it impossible for a casual user to know if his file was even going to stay in the trash, or if they'd even be able to go in the trash at all (instead of going straight to being unlink) with a sudo, or constantly putting up "Are you sure you want to... This can only be deleted if..." messages).
Well, at least her on the 'dot we have communities of WebOS, Windows, Android, Emacs, Java, and Linux consumers to offset this with their stern rationality and scrupulous abstention from any appearance of advocacy...
Apple does a lot better respecting the intelligence and freedoms of their customers than the average Apple-trolling slashdotter.
He didn't say "portable music player," he said "the iPod." iPods are, granted, a kind of portable music player, but they are also different from all other portable music players in that it's an actual mass consumer product instead of some hobbyist thing. Without iPod's we'd still have portable music players, but they'd all play ATRACS off of Memory Sticks...
NeXT wasn't a "popular" computing company, it built high-end workstations and an object-oriented OS for the scientific and government markets, actually a lot like Sun. NeXT actually did pretty well at this, which is why NeXT was able to buy Apple -- they'd have you believe it was the other way around, but don't be fooled. NeXT, unlike Sun, actually had an exit strategy for the dot-com bust, and exercised it before the music stopped playing.
Every other story in TFA basically goes like this: "Our platform started on X, and then we changed it to Y, using Z UI library but the developers from Y used some of their own." As far as MeeGo and Moblin go, there didn't seem to be any attention to creating the minimum specification and just choosing what they were going to support and refine.
Nokia seemed to have completely outsourced their technology strategy to their open-source community process, and things stagnated over the sort of squabbles people in OSS know and love. Unlike Apple or Google, which took off-the-shelf OSS software that the community had written, made it their own and now act as BDFLs for their own brands and make their money off supporting and extending the OSS core; Nokia did the exact opposite, putting a ton of effort into reduplicating OS work, and then leaving support and extension to the community. It seems like their community process was completely dysfunctional and nobody working on MeeGo ever knew where the platform was going next. Nokia and Intel were very tight-lipped, so the people in the community would do their own thing and the platform would drift and work would be done on all kinds of stuff that didn't benefit Nokia. And then Nokia would come in one day and drop Gtk. You don't see the sort of high-level coordination that Google nominally does through the OHA, and you don't see the sort of commitment Apple makes to promoting their platform to end-users and keeping the platform as consistent as possible.
Open Source is good for a lot of things. People can write your software for you! But Nokia seemed to have the idea that if they just kickstarted an OSS phone OS, they could just sell handsets and the software platform would take care of itself with magic bazaar pixie dust, while assuming that at any time they could completely drop or add whatever technology they chose and the community would go along for the ride.
Each additional bit gets you 6 dB of signal -- 3 dB doubling is only true for power relations, 6 dB is a doubling of amplitude, and PCM encodes amplitude; he's deleting one bit to account for dither and THD, thus assuming 15 ENOB, which is a sufficient approximation but depends on the kind of dither noise, and the quality of the recording equipment, etc.
Well, yeah, if you were using decibels SPL to measure the output at the speakers and decibels fullscale to measure the signal on the medium. Don't mismatch your decibel units.
The gold reflective material doesn't make it sound better today, it's supposed to make it sound better than other CDs 20 years from now.
It's not enough that Apple tells people what apps they can run on their phone or how magazines are allowed to run their subscriptions, now they can tell rap producers how to mix their tracks, too? :)
And we'll have you know that out "compression widget" was like $3000 in the Waves Platinum Mastering box set.
It would just turn the loudness war into the normalization war.
A lot of people suffer from non-debilitating hearing damage, too. There's also a lot of bias in hearing, so if you didn't A/B the two signals on a proper system, and have someone else do the switching a-la Pepsi Challenge, I wouldn't take your impression to the bank.
Most mastering engineers will "cheat" and pump the dynamics on quieter parts of a long symphonic composition on account of the medium, and then they'll accentuate dynamic changes by tucking the faders leading into sforzandos (and that's not even getting into mic placement for room versus ensemble emphasis, cheating spot mics into the mix, varying polar patterns and EQ during the performance...). You really don't get a realistic dynamic of what was originally recorded from a finished off-the-rack CD -- the recording engineers know they're being graded for how dynamic it sounds and how the performance is translated to the medium and not necessarily how accurate it sounds. They really want to have it set up in such a way that the person at home never has to touch the volume knob.
Thus, I'm tempted to say that if something sounds like shit on an MP3, it probably wasn't mastered very well, because if the sound is suffering it means that the mastering engineer is letting the recording drift outside the listener model and are letting the pianissimos get too pianissimo because they can, even if it means dragging the program through the dithers, which is probably why the MP3 is suffering, it's wasting a lot of signal space encoding the mastered dither. There are some engineers that are really pedantic and are really touchy about ever using mixing, and they want to force people at home to have to strain to hear the quiet bits, but these guys are all nutty audiophiles who go home to soundproofed living rooms equipped with Klipsches.
Compared to the update schedule and cost structures of, say, Avid Media Composer, Final Cut is still pretty formidable, but that's the market they seem to think about now, large production houses, feature films and HD television shops that want RED workflows. I notice that the winner of the Eddie on Saturday, The Social Network was an FCP show, as was True Grit; Fincher and the Coen's have been using the platform for years and it generally takes about a decade of a vendor screwing up before people like this starting looking for a new platform. (I think Avid was on Media Composer 4 for like, what, 8 years?
There really is no problem with FCP workflows at this point, you just have to pay. And as long as Premiere doesn't have Avid's negative matchback or Final Cut's color tools and particular RED workflow features, that's probably where it's going to stay.
ADB for keyboard/mouse
Do not crap on the daisy-chain desktop bus that was invented by Woz 10 years before USB. If you wanna complain, complain about the LC-PDS :)
and thier goofy round serial
You realize it was just an RS-232 in a DIN sleeve, right? The cables to go from MiniDIN to D-Sub were just wire and you didn't have to do any active adaptation (I mean a real geek would just order some parts off DigiKey and solder his own D-sub, but I digress). What made the port a pain was the lack of printing drivers -- any old modem would generally work as long as you knew Hayes and had a proper terminal app.
GeoPort, and other complete CRAP.
Geoport's actually an interesting case, because Apple actually got a bunch of vendors together and tried to standardize it through the Versit Consortium. The GeoPort was just an RS-232 with an extra pin to pass audio back to the host so it could do softmodem or signaling to different kinds of PBX switches using its DSP chip to make the tones. Alas switch vendors sorta resented other people's hardware talking to their switches...
Are you done?
I didn't say it was impossible, I just said that you can't pay for it the way we have been paying for it. And it would require a hell of a lot more laws on the books than Net Neutrality. The Transcontinental Railroad required enormous government land grants and the federal government basically had to force the railroads to carry passenger service. The Alaskan Pipeline and nuclear plants are all heavily government regulated -- the proceeds of Alaska oil licenses are heavily taxed and the rents socialized. Putting a man on the moon was a stupendous government expenditure, where the state actively picked winners in order to achieve a scientific goal with almost zero direct profit.
I'm in favor of all of these things, I think they were all qualified goods. I'm also a strong supporter of a strong, centralized state, which maintains strong economic and cultural authority in society. Almost nobody in the US agrees with me on this, so they invent things like "Net Neutrality" which attempt to phrase common sense about liberal rights into a doctrine which completely ignores the costs and economy of the situation. Transporting video, or any future medium of communication, over D distance, using W bandwidth with a latency of T has upfront costs and continuing costs, and how you charge for it is not as simple as "everybody pays the same," whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. This sort of policy is just a giveaway to content providers, who would stop at nothing to have the rents in the network be shifted completely onto their suppliers and all the upside profits accrue to them.
If what you're really concerned about is telco consolidation and monopolies, fight that. Net Neutrality is a very dull instrument to prevent that, though.
Spaz.