Your network security team can already see everything you do on your computer.
Well, practically everything. Except on machines where they control the BIOS, they can't tell what happens if I power off, disconnect the network cable, and boot up with another device.
They also can't tell if I use the monitor as a place to hold the sticky note with my password on it. Now, the security team that comes around and night checking for sticky notes with passwords on the other hand....
Companies with job openings have a choice in the free market:
* They can raise salaries or otherwise improve the work environment, which has the effect of "poaching" from those who would choose to do other kinds of work instead (plus a few who might choose to not do paid work at all such as would-be stay-at-home parents) * They can lower their requirements, which increases the qualified applicant pool * They can decide they would rather leave the position unfilled or eliminate the position entirely, and use the money they saved for some different purpose, such as creating non-technical-jobs or technical buying goods and services from overseas * They can try to import or create talent that is willing to work for below-market wages or work in below-what-is-acceptable-by-society working conditions
I bolded the first one because it cuts to the heart of any real "shortage" that might exist - if companies do that, then they will either steal from other employers and/or related industries, possibly creating a similar shortage there, or entice young adults to get the training they need to enter this career field. The first is the free job market at work but it does nothing to eliminate the "overall" shortage of talent across all affected employers/industries. The latter is desirable but only if it doesn't create shortages in the industries that these students would otherwise go into upon graduation.
The second option isn't always an option - lowering your standards for employment may do far more harm than paying more or eliminating the position.
Barring legal or other barriers to trade, the third option - exporting the work to another country - is frequently viable. However, quality control and other issues may be harder to control than doing the work in-house. Caveat employer.
Now, the open question is how much of the "shortage" is real - that is, how much would "appear" to be solved by just raising wages but which would really amount to playing musical chairs with existing American talent - and how much is "artificial" - that is, how much could be filled by existing American talent that is currently unemployed or under-employed and which can't get a job because employers rig job descriptions so they "aren't qualified" or because employers offer salaries that they know no American will accept but which they know a non-American would be happy to accept?
In other news, stores call the police when they see a patron beating her kid to a pulp but they do not call the police when someone buys a single pre-paid cell phone or gift-prepaid-debit-card when they know or should know that terrorists use burner cell phones and prepaid debit cards.
Governments pull people over if they see a kid tied to the roof of a car going down the highway but they don't pull over someone whose trunk lid is shut even though they know good and well that terrorists carry weapons in their car trunks.
To the few of you who think I seriously advocate a police state, yes, I'm being sarcastic.
After 9/11 America became much less of a free country. True, this started earlier. The ramping up of the "police state" after the terrorism of the 1st Twin Towers bombing and the domestic threat demonstrated by a couple (or three?) kooks in Oklahoma City in 1995 didn't help. Treating strong encryption like munitions in the 1990s almost certainly scared off some scholars and computer professionals from wanting to make their careers in America.
I'm not saying things were better before then - the Red Scare era of the 50s and 60s had a domestic aura of "what is good for the government is good for the country" about it. Vietnam and the rest of the '60s saw that crumble at least in part. From a "you can come to America, research what you want, and not have to worry that the government will try to shut you down by any method other than cutting your government funding" perspective the 70s and 80s and maybe the 90s were probably better than the 21st century and better than the 50s and 60s for anyone working outside areas where the primary application would be military or national-defense.
1) Authenticate that you are talking to the machine you think you are talking to 2) Encrypt the traffic so that it would take a large amount of effort (ideally, an infeasible amount) for someone listening in to see the traffic.
SSL and TLS do make it difficult if not impossible for someone with just a wire-sniffer to decrypt the traffic. Typically they would either need the legal resources to get a court order to get the server's private keys, the technical resources to either acquire the keys another way or to fool you into connecting to their MITM machine, and/or the technical or other resources needed to compromise either your machine or the server. If they have that many resources, they may also have the resources to break into your house or office while you aren't there and install a hidden camera, at which time them snooping on your internet traffic suddenly becomes a lower-priority problem.
Essentially all customers at ISPs must subsidize the desires of the customers who like to access streaming providers.
If your goal is to to prevent this kind of "one customer subsidizes another," it sounds like you are arguing for a pay-by-the-byte pricing model, with possible adjustments for quality-of-service or time-of-day (e.g. discount pricing for off-peak hours or traffic that can tolerate jitter/delay/dropped packets/etc.).
In such a model, Comcast would be happy to let everyone peer for free, knowing it would be paid for every byte sent and received by its customers.
I'm not Anonymous Coward, but I will answer your question:
How do you propose they manage those bottlenecks? Throttling?
I a case of unexpected surges in demand, yes, throttle and prioritize based on common sense (e.g. give VoIP priority over ftp, etc.).
However, if you as a network manager find yourself in this situation more than occasionally or in response to events that no reasonable person would plan for, then you are doing it wrong.
Network management is also about capacity planning. It's using what you know and what you can reasonably predict about the future to make sure your equipment can handle the predicted load with a margin for unexpected traffic, unexpected equipment failure, etc.
Um, tell me if I'm wrong, but I assume that Netflix only sends traffic to Comcast if someone on Comcast's network asks for it.
If Comcast wants to deter its customers from asking for non-Comcast traffic to be sent to them, perhaps it should raise its incremental per-GB prices and/or encourage those customers to use DSL instead.
What about all of the customers not downloading that data, should they also pay for these upgrades?
Those customers who will use more data as a result of NetFlix being a more usable service should pay more, those who do not use NetFlix or whose usage doesn't change as a result of the improvements should not.
However, whether they will or not depends on Comcast's pricing model: If Comcast were to sell marginal-metered service ($X flat fee for low-use users + $Y GB in $0.01 increments for everything above the low-user allowance, where $Y is no more than than $X/allowance), they would. If Comcast were to sell tiered service in a way that approximated metered service ($X for A GB, $Y for B GB, etc. with reasonable increments and reasonable incremental pricing), they would but only with respect to customers who upgraded to the next tier.
As far as I know, Comcast does have a tiered pricing model but it's not as reasonable as it needs to be to entice most customers to upgrade "to the next level" just so they can use more NetFlix. Yes, the NetFlix upgrade may encourage a few customers who were already considering upgrading to do so, but it won't have the broad effect on Comcast's bottom line that a more reasonable incremental pricing structure or a marginal-per-GB fee would have.
For the phone and electric bill, some of the fees are literal regulatory fees and taxes. Others are "split out fees" that the company claims are there to cover the cost of regulation so, presumably, they can lower the "advertised" rate. Others are built into the advertised rates.
The water bill is municipal, which is outside the scope of your question.
I don't have a FedEx account but when I to ship, I pay the "advertised rate" which has no breakdowns of fees. The only "extra" line-item is sales tax (and in some cases a so-called "fuel charge" which is just another way of lowering the advertised rate without lowering the actual rate). I have no illusions that this rate includes all regulatory fees. The same goes for almost everything else I buy - groceries, movie tickets, gas (the taxes/fees are posted at the pump but they are included in the advertised price).
The bottom line: Regulated or not, all businesses pass on all costs to customers plus the "cost" of providing a return to their stockholders if they are a for-profit business in some way, shape, or form. This includes the explicit regulatory costs as well as the not-so-explicit costs of complying with government regulations (e.g. employee-safety laws, environmental laws, financial-auditing/bookkeeping legal requirements, government-mandated health care costs, etc.) If they don't, they soon run out of money and will likely go belly up.
I for one don't mind paying this price - it's better than living in a society with no such regulations (think air quality in Beijing). Or, if I do mind due to either the higher cost or simply objecting to paying that fee in principle, I will either not buy the product, buy less of it, or if it's a product or service that I can't do without or which I have to buy (such as legally-required immunizations for children), I will spend less money on other discretionary items. After all, I have to keep my checkbook balanced too.
The BitTorrent debacle wasn't so much a network neutrality issue as it was a possible* violation-of-contract/false-advertising issue with its affected customers and potentially* a "tortuous interference" issue with respect to any contract between its customers and the company attempting to deliver data to them using BitTorrent.
* I am not a lawyer. A lawyer could tell you if there was an actual violation of contract or an actual "tortuous interference" issue.
One is the Netflix issue of "pay to talk to me [Comcast] directly, bypassing peering points" and the other is "do we have prioritized traffic?"
Prioritized traffic (also known as prioritized- or guarenteed-quality-of-service) actually makes some sense. 911 and other emergency traffic and certain network-maintenance traffic absolutely must get through with a certain amount of quality or bad things happen. For everything else, the more latency-sensitive and less tolerant-of-dropped-packets a particular type of traffic, the more priority it should have. For example, streaming video and sound can tolerate only a small amount of packet loss before customers notice, but the consequences aren't terrible. Real-time gaming and similar things also require high latency but they are more sensitive to bit loss. Web browsing is less latency-sensitive but it is more latency-sensitive than downloading a file over your web browser (if there is a 5-second hiccup loading slashdot.com you'll feel it, if there is a 5-second hiccup downloading the lastest Linux DVD iso, you probably won't care as long as your browser doesn't abort the download).
Thank you for having the guts to come here and say that. On behalf of the Slashdot community, I apologize for the rude tone of some of the replies.
Having said that, the replies above are essentially correct: It is part of Comcast's job to make sure its peering points don't get saturated under routine use. They owe that much to their customers (and of course they can pass that cost on to their customers).
Now, if the problem is at an upstream peering point that Comcast does not participate in, then I can understand that Comcast is not to blame. However, a company as big as Comcast should participate in peering points around the country, Comcast owes its customers that much. Every major network provider - including Netflix's provider - should be peering directly with Comcast* in the regions in which they and Comcast have a significant amount of traffic to exchange and in which both companies have a significant physical presence.
The same goes for ATT, Time-Warner, and the other major ISPs and network providers.
*If the peering at the peering point isn't, technically-speaking, direct, it should have the characteristics of a direct link from a customer-satisfaction point of view. That is, the connection is good enough that if you turned it into a direct-peering connection there wouldn't be much improvement.
Looks like you got off easy. When some ISPs fsck their customers, they don't throttle, they go full-bore with the giant corn-cob, all the way, to make sure the customer feels the pain.
Comcast, Time-Warner, ATT, etc. should embrace the regulated utility model.
By splitting their businesses into two companies, a regulated "bit pipe" company and an unregulated "content provider" company, they all but guarantee that the regulated company will have modest profits and more importantly they guarantee that the "content provider" part of their company will have access to every DSL and cable customer nationwide on the same terms as all other "content provider" companies. This means that Time-Warner's and Comcast's content arms can both compete for my eyeballs.
The only "gotcha" here is "always on for everyone" (i.e. non-switched) TV channels over cable. Because of the nature of those channels, only one company, presumably the local "bit pipe company", will have a say in what those channels are. But as the industry moves to switched-channels that are only "on" when a customer is watching them (sort of like UVerse TV), this will become unimportant. I envision a day when less than 10% of the available bandwidth on a typical customer's "bit pipe" is used for "always on for everyone" TV channels.
Well, I guess that's a matter of opinion, so calling it an "upside" or "downside" shouldn't be part of the title.
In any case, the fairest way to pay for roads is some form of general-revenue, as those who don't use them still benefit from well-maintained roads, and a use tax.
Ideally, a use tax would charge all drivers for their "fair share" of the wear-and-tear on the roads and the building of new ones. Heavier vehicles would pay more, those who drive more would pay more. Until recent decades, fuel taxes were pretty fair in this sense. Electric cars and even very-high-efficiency (40+ MPG for a full-sized car) fundamentally changed this.
Unfortunately, the only fair way I can think of to tax "by the mile" today is either to have the odometer inspected every year, which will encourage odometer fraud, self-reporting, which is even more vulnerable to fraud, or using a tamper-resistant and tamper-evident "black box" in the car, which is likely to open a pandora's box of privacy implications (sadly, that box is probably already opened).
Perhaps we need a better proxy for fuel taxes. Replacing the fuel tax with a tax on tires based on their rated life might work, but it might also have the side-effect of encouraging people to delay replacing tires, which is not safe. It would also create sticker-shock when it came time to replace tires.
About the only reason to tax fuels other than for funding roads would be to encourage the use of fuel-efficient vehicles or to just tax fuels like most other products with a sales tax and put the money into the general revenue fund.
If the company is marketing itself as an Internet service provider and actively keeping its customers from the entire Internet then that's false advertising.
The ISP owes all of its customers who aren't getting the part of the Internet that they want to use a refund, and the company must either change its ways or change its marketing.
I'm sure "she" is really the one launching an attack... Why assume he is a female? It makes more sense to assume he is a male, especially considering the proportion of men to women in the industry.
Women are under-represented in computer science. By over-using the female gender when referring to people of an unknown gender or at least using it about half the time, we hope that girls will say "hey, I can do that too someday, if I study hard and go to college".
Freenet is for pedophiles. Why do you support Freenet?
Dear A/C:
So are basic civil liberties, a planet with air clean enough to breath, and courtrooms in which juries and/or judges convict and sentence criminals for violating the law. I support all 3.
I assume you support all three as well.
In short, the ability to communicate privately is for everyone, from Mother Teresa to the worst scumbag you can think of and everyone in between.
It's therefore not enough for a processor to be Turing complete in order to be classified as general purpose; it must be able to run all programs efficiently. [emphasis added]
Um, nope.
A general-purpose anything is rarely as efficient at a given task as a special-purpose version of the same thing. Sometimes you really do want your computer chip to be a "Jack of all trades, master of none."
Slashdot Mirror
Your network security team can already see everything you do on your computer.
Well, practically everything. Except on machines where they control the BIOS, they can't tell what happens if I power off, disconnect the network cable, and boot up with another device.
They also can't tell if I use the monitor as a place to hold the sticky note with my password on it. Now, the security team that comes around and night checking for sticky notes with passwords on the other hand....
Companies with job openings have a choice in the free market:
* They can raise salaries or otherwise improve the work environment, which has the effect of "poaching" from those who would choose to do other kinds of work instead (plus a few who might choose to not do paid work at all such as would-be stay-at-home parents)
* They can lower their requirements, which increases the qualified applicant pool
* They can decide they would rather leave the position unfilled or eliminate the position entirely, and use the money they saved for some different purpose, such as creating non-technical-jobs or technical buying goods and services from overseas
* They can try to import or create talent that is willing to work for below-market wages or work in below-what-is-acceptable-by-society working conditions
I bolded the first one because it cuts to the heart of any real "shortage" that might exist - if companies do that, then they will either steal from other employers and/or related industries, possibly creating a similar shortage there, or entice young adults to get the training they need to enter this career field. The first is the free job market at work but it does nothing to eliminate the "overall" shortage of talent across all affected employers/industries. The latter is desirable but only if it doesn't create shortages in the industries that these students would otherwise go into upon graduation.
The second option isn't always an option - lowering your standards for employment may do far more harm than paying more or eliminating the position.
Barring legal or other barriers to trade, the third option - exporting the work to another country - is frequently viable. However, quality control and other issues may be harder to control than doing the work in-house. Caveat employer.
Now, the open question is how much of the "shortage" is real - that is, how much would "appear" to be solved by just raising wages but which would really amount to playing musical chairs with existing American talent - and how much is "artificial" - that is, how much could be filled by existing American talent that is currently unemployed or under-employed and which can't get a job because employers rig job descriptions so they "aren't qualified" or because employers offer salaries that they know no American will accept but which they know a non-American would be happy to accept?
In other news, stores call the police when they see a patron beating her kid to a pulp but they do not call the police when someone buys a single pre-paid cell phone or gift-prepaid-debit-card when they know or should know that terrorists use burner cell phones and prepaid debit cards.
Governments pull people over if they see a kid tied to the roof of a car going down the highway but they don't pull over someone whose trunk lid is shut even though they know good and well that terrorists carry weapons in their car trunks.
To the few of you who think I seriously advocate a police state, yes, I'm being sarcastic.
After 9/11 America became much less of a free country. True, this started earlier. The ramping up of the "police state" after the terrorism of the 1st Twin Towers bombing and the domestic threat demonstrated by a couple (or three?) kooks in Oklahoma City in 1995 didn't help. Treating strong encryption like munitions in the 1990s almost certainly scared off some scholars and computer professionals from wanting to make their careers in America.
I'm not saying things were better before then - the Red Scare era of the 50s and 60s had a domestic aura of "what is good for the government is good for the country" about it. Vietnam and the rest of the '60s saw that crumble at least in part. From a "you can come to America, research what you want, and not have to worry that the government will try to shut you down by any method other than cutting your government funding" perspective the 70s and 80s and maybe the 90s were probably better than the 21st century and better than the 50s and 60s for anyone working outside areas where the primary application would be military or national-defense.
SSL/TSL/etc. are supposed to do two things:
1) Authenticate that you are talking to the machine you think you are talking to
2) Encrypt the traffic so that it would take a large amount of effort (ideally, an infeasible amount) for someone listening in to see the traffic.
SSL and TLS do make it difficult if not impossible for someone with just a wire-sniffer to decrypt the traffic. Typically they would either need the legal resources to get a court order to get the server's private keys, the technical resources to either acquire the keys another way or to fool you into connecting to their MITM machine, and/or the technical or other resources needed to compromise either your machine or the server. If they have that many resources, they may also have the resources to break into your house or office while you aren't there and install a hidden camera, at which time them snooping on your internet traffic suddenly becomes a lower-priority problem.
For when you need that extra level of noise.
Essentially all customers at ISPs must subsidize the desires of the customers who like to access streaming providers.
If your goal is to to prevent this kind of "one customer subsidizes another," it sounds like you are arguing for a pay-by-the-byte pricing model, with possible adjustments for quality-of-service or time-of-day (e.g. discount pricing for off-peak hours or traffic that can tolerate jitter/delay/dropped packets/etc.).
In such a model, Comcast would be happy to let everyone peer for free, knowing it would be paid for every byte sent and received by its customers.
I'm not Anonymous Coward, but I will answer your question:
How do you propose they manage those bottlenecks? Throttling?
I a case of unexpected surges in demand, yes, throttle and prioritize based on common sense (e.g. give VoIP priority over ftp, etc.).
However, if you as a network manager find yourself in this situation more than occasionally or in response to events that no reasonable person would plan for, then you are doing it wrong.
Network management is also about capacity planning. It's using what you know and what you can reasonably predict about the future to make sure your equipment can handle the predicted load with a margin for unexpected traffic, unexpected equipment failure, etc.
as their peer irresponsibly saturates the link.
Um, tell me if I'm wrong, but I assume that Netflix only sends traffic to Comcast if someone on Comcast's network asks for it.
If Comcast wants to deter its customers from asking for non-Comcast traffic to be sent to them, perhaps it should raise its incremental per-GB prices and/or encourage those customers to use DSL instead.
What about all of the customers not downloading that data, should they also pay for these upgrades?
Those customers who will use more data as a result of NetFlix being a more usable service should pay more, those who do not use NetFlix or whose usage doesn't change as a result of the improvements should not.
However, whether they will or not depends on Comcast's pricing model: If Comcast were to sell marginal-metered service ($X flat fee for low-use users + $Y GB in $0.01 increments for everything above the low-user allowance, where $Y is no more than than $X/allowance), they would. If Comcast were to sell tiered service in a way that approximated metered service ($X for A GB, $Y for B GB, etc. with reasonable increments and reasonable incremental pricing), they would but only with respect to customers who upgraded to the next tier.
As far as I know, Comcast does have a tiered pricing model but it's not as reasonable as it needs to be to entice most customers to upgrade "to the next level" just so they can use more NetFlix. Yes, the NetFlix upgrade may encourage a few customers who were already considering upgrading to do so, but it won't have the broad effect on Comcast's bottom line that a more reasonable incremental pricing structure or a marginal-per-GB fee would have.
For the phone and electric bill, some of the fees are literal regulatory fees and taxes. Others are "split out fees" that the company claims are there to cover the cost of regulation so, presumably, they can lower the "advertised" rate. Others are built into the advertised rates.
The water bill is municipal, which is outside the scope of your question.
I don't have a FedEx account but when I to ship, I pay the "advertised rate" which has no breakdowns of fees. The only "extra" line-item is sales tax (and in some cases a so-called "fuel charge" which is just another way of lowering the advertised rate without lowering the actual rate). I have no illusions that this rate includes all regulatory fees. The same goes for almost everything else I buy - groceries, movie tickets, gas (the taxes/fees are posted at the pump but they are included in the advertised price).
The bottom line:
Regulated or not, all businesses pass on all costs to customers plus the "cost" of providing a return to their stockholders if they are a for-profit business in some way, shape, or form. This includes the explicit regulatory costs as well as the not-so-explicit costs of complying with government regulations (e.g. employee-safety laws, environmental laws, financial-auditing/bookkeeping legal requirements, government-mandated health care costs, etc.) If they don't, they soon run out of money and will likely go belly up.
I for one don't mind paying this price - it's better than living in a society with no such regulations (think air quality in Beijing). Or, if I do mind due to either the higher cost or simply objecting to paying that fee in principle, I will either not buy the product, buy less of it, or if it's a product or service that I can't do without or which I have to buy (such as legally-required immunizations for children), I will spend less money on other discretionary items. After all, I have to keep my checkbook balanced too.
Who knew?
How do you say Solidarity in Russian?
The BitTorrent debacle wasn't so much a network neutrality issue as it was a possible* violation-of-contract/false-advertising issue with its affected customers and potentially* a "tortuous interference" issue with respect to any contract between its customers and the company attempting to deliver data to them using BitTorrent.
* I am not a lawyer. A lawyer could tell you if there was an actual violation of contract or an actual "tortuous interference" issue.
There are multiple issues here.
One is the Netflix issue of "pay to talk to me [Comcast] directly, bypassing peering points" and the other is "do we have prioritized traffic?"
Prioritized traffic (also known as prioritized- or guarenteed-quality-of-service) actually makes some sense. 911 and other emergency traffic and certain network-maintenance traffic absolutely must get through with a certain amount of quality or bad things happen. For everything else, the more latency-sensitive and less tolerant-of-dropped-packets a particular type of traffic, the more priority it should have. For example, streaming video and sound can tolerate only a small amount of packet loss before customers notice, but the consequences aren't terrible. Real-time gaming and similar things also require high latency but they are more sensitive to bit loss. Web browsing is less latency-sensitive but it is more latency-sensitive than downloading a file over your web browser (if there is a 5-second hiccup loading slashdot.com you'll feel it, if there is a 5-second hiccup downloading the lastest Linux DVD iso, you probably won't care as long as your browser doesn't abort the download).
Thank you for having the guts to come here and say that. On behalf of the Slashdot community, I apologize for the rude tone of some of the replies.
Having said that, the replies above are essentially correct: It is part of Comcast's job to make sure its peering points don't get saturated under routine use. They owe that much to their customers (and of course they can pass that cost on to their customers).
Now, if the problem is at an upstream peering point that Comcast does not participate in, then I can understand that Comcast is not to blame. However, a company as big as Comcast should participate in peering points around the country, Comcast owes its customers that much. Every major network provider - including Netflix's provider - should be peering directly with Comcast* in the regions in which they and Comcast have a significant amount of traffic to exchange and in which both companies have a significant physical presence.
The same goes for ATT, Time-Warner, and the other major ISPs and network providers.
*If the peering at the peering point isn't, technically-speaking, direct, it should have the characteristics of a direct link from a customer-satisfaction point of view. That is, the connection is good enough that if you turned it into a direct-peering connection there wouldn't be much improvement.
Comcast throttled me. Fuck them.
Looks like you got off easy. When some ISPs fsck their customers, they don't throttle, they go full-bore with the giant corn-cob, all the way, to make sure the customer feels the pain.
Or so I've been told.
Can't use "Comcast" or the BBC will get sued.
How about "Executive orders will come from The Communications Broadcasting Authority" whose logo spells out "Commcast".
It would be Comm-cast-tic!
Comcast, Time-Warner, ATT, etc. should embrace the regulated utility model.
By splitting their businesses into two companies, a regulated "bit pipe" company and an unregulated "content provider" company, they all but guarantee that the regulated company will have modest profits and more importantly they guarantee that the "content provider" part of their company will have access to every DSL and cable customer nationwide on the same terms as all other "content provider" companies. This means that Time-Warner's and Comcast's content arms can both compete for my eyeballs.
The only "gotcha" here is "always on for everyone" (i.e. non-switched) TV channels over cable. Because of the nature of those channels, only one company, presumably the local "bit pipe company", will have a say in what those channels are. But as the industry moves to switched-channels that are only "on" when a customer is watching them (sort of like UVerse TV), this will become unimportant. I envision a day when less than 10% of the available bandwidth on a typical customer's "bit pipe" is used for "always on for everyone" TV channels.
Well, I guess that's a matter of opinion, so calling it an "upside" or "downside" shouldn't be part of the title.
In any case, the fairest way to pay for roads is some form of general-revenue, as those who don't use them still benefit from well-maintained roads, and a use tax.
Ideally, a use tax would charge all drivers for their "fair share" of the wear-and-tear on the roads and the building of new ones. Heavier vehicles would pay more, those who drive more would pay more. Until recent decades, fuel taxes were pretty fair in this sense. Electric cars and even very-high-efficiency (40+ MPG for a full-sized car) fundamentally changed this.
Unfortunately, the only fair way I can think of to tax "by the mile" today is either to have the odometer inspected every year, which will encourage odometer fraud, self-reporting, which is even more vulnerable to fraud, or using a tamper-resistant and tamper-evident "black box" in the car, which is likely to open a pandora's box of privacy implications (sadly, that box is probably already opened).
Perhaps we need a better proxy for fuel taxes. Replacing the fuel tax with a tax on tires based on their rated life might work, but it might also have the side-effect of encouraging people to delay replacing tires, which is not safe. It would also create sticker-shock when it came time to replace tires.
About the only reason to tax fuels other than for funding roads would be to encourage the use of fuel-efficient vehicles or to just tax fuels like most other products with a sales tax and put the money into the general revenue fund.
If the company is marketing itself as an Internet service provider and actively keeping its customers from the entire Internet then that's false advertising.
The ISP owes all of its customers who aren't getting the part of the Internet that they want to use a refund, and the company must either change its ways or change its marketing.
I'm sure "she" is really the one launching an attack... Why assume he is a female? It makes more sense to assume he is a male, especially considering the proportion of men to women in the industry.
Women are under-represented in computer science. By over-using the female gender when referring to people of an unknown gender or at least using it about half the time, we hope that girls will say "hey, I can do that too someday, if I study hard and go to college".
Freenet is for pedophiles. Why do you support Freenet?
Dear A/C:
So are basic civil liberties, a planet with air clean enough to breath, and courtrooms in which juries and/or judges convict and sentence criminals for violating the law. I support all 3.
I assume you support all three as well.
In short, the ability to communicate privately is for everyone, from Mother Teresa to the worst scumbag you can think of and everyone in between.
From TFA:
It's therefore not enough for a processor to be Turing complete in order to be classified as general purpose; it must be able to run all programs efficiently. [emphasis added]
Um, nope.
A general-purpose anything is rarely as efficient at a given task as a special-purpose version of the same thing. Sometimes you really do want your computer chip to be a "Jack of all trades, master of none."
At least, not officially.
So I guess if I want to buy something from him now, I have to send him a check or money order.
How quaint.