Since when does a profit motive exempt anyone, corporation or human, from morality? Would you say that there is no moral problem with what hit men do for a living?
Depends on who gets hit, and why.
How about a little less sophistry, and more reality. There is no way, on balance, that more information - seen by more people - can be anything but good for an eventually more open society in China. Stories about their government using data from businesses operating units in their country to deal unreasonably with dissidents are good things. What if Yahoo, Google, and MSN were not there? The oppression would be just as real (probably that much worse), but we wouldn't hear as much about it or talk out loud as much about it.
Every time we see a story like that, it ratchets up the pressure on China to grow up. I had really mixed feelings about the Olympics being awarded to that country, but on reflection, I think the white-hot media glare will probably be a good thing. Hordes of reporters in town, exactly when China doesn't want to be caught looking like what it is? That can only help, in the long run. And when the western search engine companies carry the results of some poorly/shrewdly chosen search terms to an increasingly savvy Chinese web audience, it's going to be that much harder for that government to keep up their nonsense.
Re:9/11 was NOT catastrophic
on
Back to the Bunker
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
9/11 (while being pretty symbolic) was not an attack on America
Right! They like America, and didn't want anyone to draw any conclusions about their feelings for the country as a whole. No. They just hated the people on the planes, in the World Trade Center, and in the Pentagon. The rhetoric from the people who planned the attack, describing it specifically as a blow against the country and against the west in general, was obviously just confused. They should really check with you before they talk again, just in case they once again inadvertantly let slip another "death to America," since they obviously don't mean that.
9/11 wasn't a catastrophe of national or even regional concern
How many flights do you suppose were coming and going from Texas, Oregon, Florida, California, etc., 12 hours later? None? Exactly. How many jobs were lost within months of the event because of the dramatic shift in economic activity? Hundreds of thousands? Exactly. Where thousands of people actually died that morning is hardly the only issue that impacted people across the entire country.
it didn't interrupt or negate the federal and regional bureaucracy's ability to operate
Spent a lot of time that day in DC, did you? If you don't live in the area (I do), don't comment on how or whether workers in DC were disrupted. They were. Enormously.
To this day its greatest long-term effect has been the destruction of an entire country as simple retaliation
You mean, of course, the removal of the Taliban thug-ocracy that had the Afghani people in a stranglehold, and was deliberately providing a sanctuary for the people that actually planned, financed, and ordered the attacks? The country wasn't destroyed, the medieval-minded, mysoginistic twits that were trying to turn back the local clock a few centuries were deposed. And the women that used to get dragged off to what used to be the soccer field in the middle of town and shot for daring to teach their daughters to read or for taking on work to feed their family are now running schools, holding jobs, and voting. If you think that's "destroyed," and would prefer that it all gets handed back to the Taliban because they're such swell guys, just say so, and justify it.
You're confusing the cause of the problem with what would have been the results if it had not been taken care of.
I worked on Y2K remediations that impacted everything from payroll to fire alarm systems. Another was responsible for scheduling medical supply deliveries to EMT rigs. I know people who worked on phone systems (911 dialing, anyone?), hospital HVAC, food storage systems, and water treatment facilities.
Why no big problem? Because we all worked our asses off, that's why. Calendar roll-forward trials on paralllel copies of the systems produced everything from total failures of HVAC to people not getting paid and medical shipments dying in the freight schedules. Those things were only avoided because they were fixed. Should the people who originally paid for those systems have not cut the corner, or pressed their original engineers on the issue? Sure. But they didn't. Just like the people that designed much of what's still vulnerable today - only instead of the calendar, it's accidents and malice to fret about.
It is disingenuous to imply that anyone could go out tomorrow and just recreate much of this infrastructure with private funds.
In many areas, true. That's what makes this a regional issue, and not a federal one. I've got plenty of providers to choose from, and I don't want another layer of government oversight/rules impacting something that's changing way, way faster than they can digest it.
It seems to me equally fair that the ISP should have to pay Google for helping it's customers find what they want on the network.
Where have you been? Portals and ISPs have been striking mutually useful deals for years now. Mixed results, since many of the deals were half-baked. But look at what Google's doing with WiFi... there isn't, and won't be, some solid wall between the content and infrastructure worlds.
Exactly like UPS. UPS does not get to double charge everyone
Nope, just consumers. Of course they're not getting two payments, per se. But when you drop off a package at a UPS retail affiliate for a shipment, that box, which travels a different shipping "network" route than a large shipper's single bulk pickup, is priced completely differently. Two identical businesses shipping exactly the same items in the same quantities can wind up paying wildly different rates because of the relative mix of the destination demographics (say, the ratio of apartments to single family homes over the course of a month's deliveries).
There is considerable variation in how a carrier treats a customer, including (speaking of freight) things like the way that customer's customers make use of the carrier's services.
You suffer from the delusion that Google is the local ISP's customer.
No, read my comment. I'm more interested in the third party pipes that have to have relationships with all of the parties involved. But some ISPs are also, more or less, backbone providers (in as much as they put out the cash/sweat to do the heavy-duty peering).
If this were not the case I would agree that market forces would work this out.
But in some cases, it is more market-driven. It depends on the local history and other factors. That's what makes a federal act along these lines such an over-reaching, slippery, and unwise thing.
Ahh, but the local and state governments enforce the monopoly and the federal government then provides special privileges
Are you not actually reading what I'm typing? That must be it. There is no monopoly unless your local people cause it to be so. You can complain all you want about it, hopefully in the interests of getting different policy-setters into your local decision-making positions. Which "special privileges" are you referring to? The several competing providers who have chosen to set up in my area are trying very hard to win me over, always offering better deals and counter-deals on bandwidth. They are the exact opposite of a monopoly, and you have only your locally elected people to blame for a less competitive environment. And that means it's the voters you have to blame, and that means you and your persuasive skills. Which brings us to:
You think ad hominem attacks are going to make me consider your arguments more seriously?
No, I think your previous implication that anyone, like me, that thinks it's OK to adjust prices based on what you're actually having to do to carry traffic to/from thousands of networks is also comfortable being a racist is... exactly an ad hominem attack, and worthy of that response. Did you> really think that playing the race card was helping to make your argument seem more rational?
but handling it differently depending upon whether they get a kickback from someone who is not even their customer, well that is just extortion
I don't think you're really understanding what "extortion" means. Recognizing that a third party is routing an enormous portion of their traffic over your finite network, and making a lot of money doing so, does make talking to that user about traffic optimization a very legitimate objective. It's already being done every day. My ISP has a peering relationship with Google. It's direct... from my home cable modem to Google's network is four hops. Do you think it's free for my ISP to set that up? Knowing them, it's probably a bartering arrangement, or Google is actually subsidizing the infrastructure already, because it's in their interests to do so. Google is not a customer of my ISP, but they have overlapping financial interests (in the form of me, who brings business to each of them).
No. I pay them to impartially transmit and receive whatever data I decide, without regard for who it is to or from or what is in the packet. That is what a common carrier is obligated to do.
A common carrier like UPS, you mean? You know, the ones that take into account the presence of a FedEx depot in the area when deciding what rate to charge a local business for large volume pickups? Or, a common carrier like the US Postal Service? You know, the ones that look at the type of shipments you're making and - while not directly adjusting the price - dedicate hugely more resources in the way of people and infrastructure to woo people away from other carriers in competitive markets? Common carriers don't discriminate on packages (or packets), but they'll still make large concessions and adapt their operations around the demands of the market (including individual large-volume businesses).
have a heart, alright? these poor guys need to be billionaires... and *you* exist to make it happen, not ask questions.
All right then, please complete your thought. You just need to explain who will invest in new infrastructure and services if you (or someone just as brilliant and compassionate as you) is wisely determining the prices for packet handling, and the salaries of all of the people who make it happen. Yes, a centrally managed, fixed-price government telecom run by career cubicle-jockeys that can't be fired, but who all make exactly the same pay... that would truly end up producing a wonderous, high performance network for all!
Or, we'd actually still be using rotary-dial phones.
Give the witless class-baiting and uninformed socialist fantasies a rest. The only reason you even have a broadband network on which to write your little rant is because private companies risked money to build it out into what it is today.
I'd be happy to, but it is illegal for another carrier to run lines to my house.
Then you're talking about it in the wrong venue. This is a discussion about federal legislation, and that has nothing to do with you local zoning rules. Talk to the people who are in charge of your local rights of way... your town council, county planning commissions, etc. The feds in no way make it "illegal" to compete with a carrier. I have four ISPs with fiber, coax, and other forms of copper to pick from (more, if you count wireless providers) - already run right to the curb in my neighborhood. Why? Because it's not illegal, and because the local voters and their elected representatives/commissioners listened to those business interests and allowed those (mostly large) companies to pull their lines through, provided they covered all install costs (including new poles as needed, all street repair, etc).
Don't muddy up a conversation about the merits of a silly, prospective federal act when your real frustration is about your inability to get your local zoning and utility commission people to wake up and allow businesses to compete for your network dollars.
So it is alright for them to charge quadruple to black people?
If you're trying to actually make any sort of rhetorical headway, here, you might consider pulling your head out of your ass. Looking at your IP traffic and noticing that a substantial part of your overhead is going into packets to/from a particular third party's network (say, eBay), or that certain kinds of traffic involve longer handshakes/keep-alives, or require more round trips because of regular losses in some router upstream... that's exactly the sort of thing that causes an ISP to evaluate with whom, and in what way, and on what grounds, they set up peering relationships.
You pay your typical residential ISP to get you onto their network, not to provide any particular, exact flavor of peering to any specific other network in a particular way. I think that misconception (that ISPs are obligated in some way to perfectly optimize every route) is at the heart of a lot of the confusion on this subject.
Google pays for terrabytes of data transfer from their servers, $random_blog pays for a few gigs from theirs; the upstream data transfer is covered. The users all pay their ISPs for access to these servers; the downstream transfer is covered. It seems to me that Verzion's customers (as in your example) are already paying for access to Google's data via Verzion's network and that Google are already paying to transfer that data from their network to Verzion's. Who is compensated by this extra charge that is not currently (other than the ISPs being paid twice in your model)?
There aren't too many situations where an average ISP is directly peered right into the "destination" network. For example, I'm at home right now, plugged into my local cable provider's network. If I trace a route to eBay, I'm wandering off through my local provider's few hops, then I spend some time rattling around Level3, and then I'm off into the eBay plumbing. Level3 has to provide peering both to eBay and to my cable provider. If my cable company and eBay BOTH want to use that route and have everything appear quick for both parties, then Level3 has to be persuaded to fine tune for just that scenario. That costs money, and pretending that the "cloud" is just one big, magical place where all packets are equal is crazy. Engineers have to screw with this stuff constantly, and the relationships between the heavy traffic magnets and the intermmediate carriers is entirely a matter of mutual interest... or not, if it's not covering the costs correctly.
I pay my ISP to get my home cable modem connected to their network, and for them to do their best to negotiate peering arrangements that give me what feels like good general access to the larger net. But - shocking! - I don't appear to have a 10-hop route to web sites in Korea. Damn it, that's not fair! Congress had better act quickly! Or, gee... maybe my provider isn't feeling the market pressure to barter/pay for peering to that trans-Pacific network. And if everyone on my cable provider's network was suddenly banging away at a network in Taiwan, they'd have to pay more money to spruce up that route. Or not, if they're not worried about keeping those customers.
I never understand why ISPs just want to charge more. Do they really just want to earn more money? Or do they really have a problem with current plans?
Are you really comfortable never contemplating another increase in your own household income? ISPs have to employ people. They have to replace billions of dollars of equipment on a regular basis. They have to compete with other companies and need the budget to attract better staff and better customers. Inflation is relatively low right now, but it's not non-existent. Would you rather tell them what rate they have to charge, or let them and their competition fight it out to offer you a better deal? Especially for businesses, it's a daily fight to offer them lower prices than the next guy. But if they don't earn a profit, they're dead.
And they have to earn a profit while also building up billions of dollars worth of new infrastructure (pulling new fiber into residential areas, building new peering links to growing sectors of the net, etc). They "want" to charge more because they have to provide and invest more or go out of business (leaving us with fewer choices, which is even worse).
Rather than ask why they should want to charge more, you should understand the nature of network peering, and ask why certain content providers (Google might be a good example) that make a fortune off of the ISP's users should expect to be immune from the same competitive market forces that impact everything else in our lives. You can bet that when Google orders a truck load of printer paper for their offices that the pricing models used are very, very different than those that set the price you pay for one package at the retail store. Should the government get in the way of both of those transactions and dictate pricing schemes, or should the paper supplier be able to look at high-volume customers and set prices based on things like regular ordering, bulk transportation costs, seasonal changes, etc? Who knows that market better - the paper supplier trying to win more customers or a congressman trying to sound like he's protecting you from economic reality to win a couple more votes?
So with this what's the difference between the USA and China? We are supposed to have Freedom of Speech, but I guess not.
The difference is that in China, you've got the central government blocking/filtering (and arresting/jailing) based on the content of the communication. What you say triggers their actions.
In the case being discussed, the content of your blog (your speech) or the content of some streaming media spooling off of a small company's server (as opposed to, say, AOL's or Google's) have nothing to do with it. Censorship isn't even part of the discussion. What's being talked about is who pays for the bandwidth being used. That's it. Period. If Google wants to make billions of dollars by being the go-to search engine for millions of Verizon's customers, then Verizon has every reason to place a premium on that gigantic peering arrangement.
If a little mom-and-pop web site starts getting a ton of traffic from a Slashdotting, do you really think that their monthly costs don't go up? Who should pay for that... the ISP providing their pipe? How are they causing the Slashdotting? But it's the ISP's resources that have to suddently carry all of that traffic, and that comes at the expense of other capacity. This isn't about censorship, it's about the economic realities of the fact that huge IP pipes aren't a natural occuring resource - they're mostly built and run by private companies. You can talk all you want, about anything you want. But why should you be able to dictate to some other ISP how much of your traffic they should have to carry, and at what price?
If you don't like the price they charge, you change carriers. If you don't like any of the prices available (meaning, you don't like the market), then become your own carrier (and see just how willing you are to maintain an artificial pricing scheme when "one way" traffic on certain peering connections account for the vast majority of your day's work and financial costs).
The US Government should tell the Chinese that we will start giving a damn about whether an Intel monopoly hurts their homegrown wireless industry when they start giving a damn about all the software piracy and intellectual property theft going on in their country.
And this is marked Flamebait why? Ah! Because it uses the word "piracy," which touched too close to home for many of the mods here. Not minding ripping off entertainment makes for strange bedfellows, doesn't it?
Why, when we were in college, we couldn't afford to have all of that expensive automation gear. We had to get up off of our asses and actually turn lights off on and on, and we liked it that way. In-room fridge? Hah! We were so poor, we had to keep a little piece of Velveeta frozen on the dorm room window sill, saving it up for our big Friday night celebrations. But tell that to kids today, and they won't believe you. No sir.
Maybe only stockholding employees should be held accountable.
So, you'd be against the routine types of suits and prosecutions that occur when stockholders are lied to by corporate employees, consultants, accounting firms, etc? The whole point of holding a person responsible for their own actions is to allow things like business investment to proceed without all 100 million people who own a share of Sun or MS to not have to pay attention to the minutes from every meeting between every one of tens of thousands of employees.
Do you really think that some grandma that owns a few shares of Sony in her mutual fund should need to have the ability to know that the British company that was given the contract to handle the DRM technology in question was about to make a really bad decision on behalf of Sony? Are you that sure you want to make it that impossible for people to invest their money and keep the economy moving? If a particular employee in a large company wakes up one morning and decides to do something criminal, you'd rather that everyone in the company, and everyone who invested money to help grow the company pay the price (rather than the person who decided, that day, to do something criminal while on the clock)?
Your version of the world would have no companies large enough to produce reliable antibiotics, efficient refridgerators, or high speed video boards. Grow up.
Yes, you need to learn actual, practical things about the operating systems, DBs, and languages you'll be trading on. But the thing that too many would-be IT people seem to miss is that very few IT careers thrive without some context in the wider world. The programmers, even the server jockeys, that bring some "vertical" awareness to what they're doing, are way more valuable, and their employers are more willing to look past the lack of some particular new skill (and pay to have you go learn it).
Why? Because experience and an interest in what the organization is actually doing (and which the IT people are there to support) is harder to come by than someone who can remember some bit of API syntax or or write a select statement with a 5-way join right on the first try. Be well rounded in IT, sure, but also take time to understand where money comes from. Why projects fail. How Sarbanes-Oxley impacts database backups. What HIPAA is.
If you're going to expect an IT paycheck, get hip to what it is that generates the demand for what IT does, and what it means to be worth the money. That sounds rather vague, but if you follow the other advice you're seeing here (about how to get acquainted with various languages, coding structures, etc) you're only partway into a successful scenario. You'll be far more likely to be paid to learn the interesting new things that come along if the organization you're working for sees that you're interested in the bigger picture.
Have you not ever heard that it's better to err on the side of caution?
Sure, but how do you define caution? To the extent that human activity can be directly associated with measurable, specific climate factors... and to the extent that specific changes in regulatory roles or carbon bartering, etc. will have some identifiable outcome, you've got something to talk about. But since there's absolutely no way to be that specific, we have to look at specific, economy-wounding proposals with a wary eye. Why? Because the only thing that will reduce emissions is better technology and the huge, culture-wide adoption of same.
And the only way that gets done is in the presence of a thriving economy that has the largess to invest in such things, and families with enough income to do things like build more efficient houses and take a net loss for driving a hybrid, etc. When you tax the bejesus out of people, or limit the high-tech economies most able to actually spend billions of dollars on researching/developing bio-fuels and other marginal improvements, you slow, rather than accelerate the cure for our part (such as it is) of the warming trend. But when the same protocols that would damage the most innovative economies allow the dirtiest (in terms of emissions and rapid growth thereof) economies (say, China, or India) to just blast away as if it were 100 years ago when no one knew any better... well, that's not "erring on the side of caution."
If you crush the profitable economies even as they are already leading the way to more efficient energy use... you're going to set back the progress more than by any other means.
PS. I wonder why you have to post as Anonymous Coward for this?/. moderators are usually quite kind to pro-Green posters.
He's posting anonymously because even he knows that claiming your comment shows you to be a right-wing nut is exactly the sort of wild exaggeration and baseless extrapolation that typifies the greeny-left political camp when it comes to this issue. It's ironic that in trying to poke at you for talking about how his camp can make poor, political-agenda-driven use of small bits of information, that he (deliberately - how else?) takes a few small bits of information and jumps to a shrill, whiny, ad hominem conclusion about you. You should just thank the coward for so nicely illustrating your point.
Yeah its wrong. But if Google refuses to play the game, they just forfeit to MS and Yahoo. Yeah, they can still claim to be moral, but they will be as dead as Netscape.
No, it's not! You're missing my point. We're not talking about a moral issue, here. We're talking about who gets to sell advertising, and is willing to strike deals to accomplish that. Dell ships machines with *nix installed, too, so choice, per se, isn't even an issue. When the end user chooses to buy a box loaded with Windows, the browser can be pointed at any search engine, any time, by that user, and changed any time after that. Choice is not limited, it's just up to the user to actually think for 5 minutes, and exercise their complete liberty to point their search engine wherever they want.
There's nothing more entertaining then some poster on slashdot who doesn't understand that once your a monopoly, the rules change.
I'm refering, of course, to all of the people who insist that if something must be bundled in a distribution (like Dell is pushing in this case), especially something that (gasp!) is there specifically to generate ad revenue dollars for Google, that end users be given some sort of organic, free-as-in-rainbows alternative that doesn't involve the Corporate Man limiting search choice, blah blah blah. We all know that your search choices on MSIE are wide open and totally user definable, but the common refrain here is that most people are too dumb to even look at how to change it. If that's true, then Dell is not presenting some array of choices, as the crowd here would seem to demand, they're simply spoon feeding Google instead of MSN. That has ZERO to do with whether or not MS was ever a monopoly. I'm identifying a practice that, because it involves Google and Dell, is getting only a minor semi-negative buzz from the groupthink... and I find it hypocritical, that's all. Why isn't the usual chorus screaming about how Google should instead work with Dell to force up a wizard that offers both Google and the Yahoo toolbars? Oh, because they (just like MS) aren't running a charity operation.
Yeah, look at all the pro-Google-bundling posts in this thread.
Thank you for exactly making my point. The Google fanboys are a fair-weather, depends-on-the-circumstances bunch. This is a perfect example of it in (in)action.
Or so one would think, were one to hang out here long enough. There's noting more entertaining than watching the groupthink have a go at the ol' double standards, though. So... go! Make us proud! Start tap dancing! The folks that say that dumb people are too dumb to alter defaults or install on their own (and thus, by their own stupidity, are having their choice removed from them) are also the first ones to say that Google just needs a "fair" shot at the desktop to completely stomp MS. Hmmm.
Sure it does. Your example of everyone "having their moments" in public is not the same as deliberately choosing to then describe, link to, and post photographs documenting your "moments." Those are usually moments that seem funny because they are outrageous while still endearing within your peer group, or don't seem too offensive by your own generation's standards... but those who have been raised with the web at their fingertips have absolutely no excuse for not being able to understand how visible this stuff is to a wider audience. And people who have judgement that poor absolutely are going to be problematic on the job. They have poor judgement, a lack of critical thinking, and an inability to grasp causality/consequences. If you think those failures/defects aren't going to have any impact on the job, then you must be talking about ditch digging or Wal-Mart door greeting, etc.
This is what happens when a corporate consortium declares itself a vigilante in the fight against pirrracy.
Declares itself a vigilante? How about, "declares itself to be doing exactly what all of its member recording companies and their artist business partners pay it to do?" They're not declaring themselves to be vigilantes, as much as that would make all of their idealogical oppoonents happy. And whether or not the accusation in the suit has any merit whatsoever... it's not possible for you to know that (unless you're participating in the litigation... are you?).
What makes it worse is there own twisted view of what is morally right and what isn't (suing students into bankruptcy and hacking into people's computers to justify there ends most certainly isn't).
I think you'll probably hear them say something more along the lines of, "If all of those same students didn't have a complete sense of entitlement to entertainment paid for by someone else, and didn't carry on in a morally bankrupt way by ripping off the artists they claim to like, who produce the entertainment they seem to demand for free, then none of this crap would even be an issue."
I can see, though, how you'd be sympathetic to the plight of students. I'm guessing you were tied up in court the day the teacher went over the difference between "their" and "there." Seriously, using the actually correct words in a sentence goes a lot farther towards persuading people you have a point. Not being able to demonstrate command of a simple thing like the difference between two similarly pronounced words isn't helping you. It immediately suggests (to any audience worth the rhetorical work) that the writer isn't really thinking all that clearly anyway, and it takes away from any impact your message - however convoluted or inaccurate - might otherwise make.
Slashdot Mirror
Since when does a profit motive exempt anyone, corporation or human, from morality? Would you say that there is no moral problem with what hit men do for a living?
Depends on who gets hit, and why.
How about a little less sophistry, and more reality. There is no way, on balance, that more information - seen by more people - can be anything but good for an eventually more open society in China. Stories about their government using data from businesses operating units in their country to deal unreasonably with dissidents are good things. What if Yahoo, Google, and MSN were not there? The oppression would be just as real (probably that much worse), but we wouldn't hear as much about it or talk out loud as much about it.
Every time we see a story like that, it ratchets up the pressure on China to grow up. I had really mixed feelings about the Olympics being awarded to that country, but on reflection, I think the white-hot media glare will probably be a good thing. Hordes of reporters in town, exactly when China doesn't want to be caught looking like what it is? That can only help, in the long run. And when the western search engine companies carry the results of some poorly/shrewdly chosen search terms to an increasingly savvy Chinese web audience, it's going to be that much harder for that government to keep up their nonsense.
9/11 (while being pretty symbolic) was not an attack on America
Right! They like America, and didn't want anyone to draw any conclusions about their feelings for the country as a whole. No. They just hated the people on the planes, in the World Trade Center, and in the Pentagon. The rhetoric from the people who planned the attack, describing it specifically as a blow against the country and against the west in general, was obviously just confused. They should really check with you before they talk again, just in case they once again inadvertantly let slip another "death to America," since they obviously don't mean that.
9/11 wasn't a catastrophe of national or even regional concern
How many flights do you suppose were coming and going from Texas, Oregon, Florida, California, etc., 12 hours later? None? Exactly. How many jobs were lost within months of the event because of the dramatic shift in economic activity? Hundreds of thousands? Exactly. Where thousands of people actually died that morning is hardly the only issue that impacted people across the entire country.
it didn't interrupt or negate the federal and regional bureaucracy's ability to operate
Spent a lot of time that day in DC, did you? If you don't live in the area (I do), don't comment on how or whether workers in DC were disrupted. They were. Enormously.
To this day its greatest long-term effect has been the destruction of an entire country as simple retaliation
You mean, of course, the removal of the Taliban thug-ocracy that had the Afghani people in a stranglehold, and was deliberately providing a sanctuary for the people that actually planned, financed, and ordered the attacks? The country wasn't destroyed, the medieval-minded, mysoginistic twits that were trying to turn back the local clock a few centuries were deposed. And the women that used to get dragged off to what used to be the soccer field in the middle of town and shot for daring to teach their daughters to read or for taking on work to feed their family are now running schools, holding jobs, and voting. If you think that's "destroyed," and would prefer that it all gets handed back to the Taliban because they're such swell guys, just say so, and justify it.
It's the promo for Dan Brown's new book. All of the fashionable Masons are using VoIP for their rituals and world control these days.
You're confusing the cause of the problem with what would have been the results if it had not been taken care of.
I worked on Y2K remediations that impacted everything from payroll to fire alarm systems. Another was responsible for scheduling medical supply deliveries to EMT rigs. I know people who worked on phone systems (911 dialing, anyone?), hospital HVAC, food storage systems, and water treatment facilities.
Why no big problem? Because we all worked our asses off, that's why. Calendar roll-forward trials on paralllel copies of the systems produced everything from total failures of HVAC to people not getting paid and medical shipments dying in the freight schedules. Those things were only avoided because they were fixed. Should the people who originally paid for those systems have not cut the corner, or pressed their original engineers on the issue? Sure. But they didn't. Just like the people that designed much of what's still vulnerable today - only instead of the calendar, it's accidents and malice to fret about.
It is disingenuous to imply that anyone could go out tomorrow and just recreate much of this infrastructure with private funds.
In many areas, true. That's what makes this a regional issue, and not a federal one. I've got plenty of providers to choose from, and I don't want another layer of government oversight/rules impacting something that's changing way, way faster than they can digest it.
It seems to me equally fair that the ISP should have to pay Google for helping it's customers find what they want on the network.
Where have you been? Portals and ISPs have been striking mutually useful deals for years now. Mixed results, since many of the deals were half-baked. But look at what Google's doing with WiFi... there isn't, and won't be, some solid wall between the content and infrastructure worlds.
Exactly like UPS. UPS does not get to double charge everyone
Nope, just consumers. Of course they're not getting two payments, per se. But when you drop off a package at a UPS retail affiliate for a shipment, that box, which travels a different shipping "network" route than a large shipper's single bulk pickup, is priced completely differently. Two identical businesses shipping exactly the same items in the same quantities can wind up paying wildly different rates because of the relative mix of the destination demographics (say, the ratio of apartments to single family homes over the course of a month's deliveries).
There is considerable variation in how a carrier treats a customer, including (speaking of freight) things like the way that customer's customers make use of the carrier's services.
You suffer from the delusion that Google is the local ISP's customer.
No, read my comment. I'm more interested in the third party pipes that have to have relationships with all of the parties involved. But some ISPs are also, more or less, backbone providers (in as much as they put out the cash/sweat to do the heavy-duty peering).
If this were not the case I would agree that market forces would work this out.
But in some cases, it is more market-driven. It depends on the local history and other factors. That's what makes a federal act along these lines such an over-reaching, slippery, and unwise thing.
Ahh, but the local and state governments enforce the monopoly and the federal government then provides special privileges
Are you not actually reading what I'm typing? That must be it. There is no monopoly unless your local people cause it to be so. You can complain all you want about it, hopefully in the interests of getting different policy-setters into your local decision-making positions. Which "special privileges" are you referring to? The several competing providers who have chosen to set up in my area are trying very hard to win me over, always offering better deals and counter-deals on bandwidth. They are the exact opposite of a monopoly, and you have only your locally elected people to blame for a less competitive environment. And that means it's the voters you have to blame, and that means you and your persuasive skills. Which brings us to:
You think ad hominem attacks are going to make me consider your arguments more seriously?
No, I think your previous implication that anyone, like me, that thinks it's OK to adjust prices based on what you're actually having to do to carry traffic to/from thousands of networks is also comfortable being a racist is... exactly an ad hominem attack, and worthy of that response. Did you> really think that playing the race card was helping to make your argument seem more rational?
but handling it differently depending upon whether they get a kickback from someone who is not even their customer, well that is just extortion
I don't think you're really understanding what "extortion" means. Recognizing that a third party is routing an enormous portion of their traffic over your finite network, and making a lot of money doing so, does make talking to that user about traffic optimization a very legitimate objective. It's already being done every day. My ISP has a peering relationship with Google. It's direct... from my home cable modem to Google's network is four hops. Do you think it's free for my ISP to set that up? Knowing them, it's probably a bartering arrangement, or Google is actually subsidizing the infrastructure already, because it's in their interests to do so. Google is not a customer of my ISP, but they have overlapping financial interests (in the form of me, who brings business to each of them).
No. I pay them to impartially transmit and receive whatever data I decide, without regard for who it is to or from or what is in the packet. That is what a common carrier is obligated to do.
A common carrier like UPS, you mean? You know, the ones that take into account the presence of a FedEx depot in the area when deciding what rate to charge a local business for large volume pickups? Or, a common carrier like the US Postal Service? You know, the ones that look at the type of shipments you're making and - while not directly adjusting the price - dedicate hugely more resources in the way of people and infrastructure to woo people away from other carriers in competitive markets? Common carriers don't discriminate on packages (or packets), but they'll still make large concessions and adapt their operations around the demands of the market (including individual large-volume businesses).
have a heart, alright? these poor guys need to be billionaires... and *you* exist to make it happen, not ask questions.
All right then, please complete your thought. You just need to explain who will invest in new infrastructure and services if you (or someone just as brilliant and compassionate as you) is wisely determining the prices for packet handling, and the salaries of all of the people who make it happen. Yes, a centrally managed, fixed-price government telecom run by career cubicle-jockeys that can't be fired, but who all make exactly the same pay... that would truly end up producing a wonderous, high performance network for all!
Or, we'd actually still be using rotary-dial phones.
Give the witless class-baiting and uninformed socialist fantasies a rest. The only reason you even have a broadband network on which to write your little rant is because private companies risked money to build it out into what it is today.
I'd be happy to, but it is illegal for another carrier to run lines to my house.
Then you're talking about it in the wrong venue. This is a discussion about federal legislation, and that has nothing to do with you local zoning rules. Talk to the people who are in charge of your local rights of way... your town council, county planning commissions, etc. The feds in no way make it "illegal" to compete with a carrier. I have four ISPs with fiber, coax, and other forms of copper to pick from (more, if you count wireless providers) - already run right to the curb in my neighborhood. Why? Because it's not illegal, and because the local voters and their elected representatives/commissioners listened to those business interests and allowed those (mostly large) companies to pull their lines through, provided they covered all install costs (including new poles as needed, all street repair, etc).
Don't muddy up a conversation about the merits of a silly, prospective federal act when your real frustration is about your inability to get your local zoning and utility commission people to wake up and allow businesses to compete for your network dollars.
So it is alright for them to charge quadruple to black people?
If you're trying to actually make any sort of rhetorical headway, here, you might consider pulling your head out of your ass. Looking at your IP traffic and noticing that a substantial part of your overhead is going into packets to/from a particular third party's network (say, eBay), or that certain kinds of traffic involve longer handshakes/keep-alives, or require more round trips because of regular losses in some router upstream... that's exactly the sort of thing that causes an ISP to evaluate with whom, and in what way, and on what grounds, they set up peering relationships.
You pay your typical residential ISP to get you onto their network, not to provide any particular, exact flavor of peering to any specific other network in a particular way. I think that misconception (that ISPs are obligated in some way to perfectly optimize every route) is at the heart of a lot of the confusion on this subject.
Google pays for terrabytes of data transfer from their servers, $random_blog pays for a few gigs from theirs; the upstream data transfer is covered. The users all pay their ISPs for access to these servers; the downstream transfer is covered. It seems to me that Verzion's customers (as in your example) are already paying for access to Google's data via Verzion's network and that Google are already paying to transfer that data from their network to Verzion's. Who is compensated by this extra charge that is not currently (other than the ISPs being paid twice in your model)?
There aren't too many situations where an average ISP is directly peered right into the "destination" network. For example, I'm at home right now, plugged into my local cable provider's network. If I trace a route to eBay, I'm wandering off through my local provider's few hops, then I spend some time rattling around Level3, and then I'm off into the eBay plumbing. Level3 has to provide peering both to eBay and to my cable provider. If my cable company and eBay BOTH want to use that route and have everything appear quick for both parties, then Level3 has to be persuaded to fine tune for just that scenario. That costs money, and pretending that the "cloud" is just one big, magical place where all packets are equal is crazy. Engineers have to screw with this stuff constantly, and the relationships between the heavy traffic magnets and the intermmediate carriers is entirely a matter of mutual interest... or not, if it's not covering the costs correctly.
I pay my ISP to get my home cable modem connected to their network, and for them to do their best to negotiate peering arrangements that give me what feels like good general access to the larger net. But - shocking! - I don't appear to have a 10-hop route to web sites in Korea. Damn it, that's not fair! Congress had better act quickly! Or, gee... maybe my provider isn't feeling the market pressure to barter/pay for peering to that trans-Pacific network. And if everyone on my cable provider's network was suddenly banging away at a network in Taiwan, they'd have to pay more money to spruce up that route. Or not, if they're not worried about keeping those customers.
I never understand why ISPs just want to charge more. Do they really just want to earn more money? Or do they really have a problem with current plans?
Are you really comfortable never contemplating another increase in your own household income? ISPs have to employ people. They have to replace billions of dollars of equipment on a regular basis. They have to compete with other companies and need the budget to attract better staff and better customers. Inflation is relatively low right now, but it's not non-existent. Would you rather tell them what rate they have to charge, or let them and their competition fight it out to offer you a better deal? Especially for businesses, it's a daily fight to offer them lower prices than the next guy. But if they don't earn a profit, they're dead.
And they have to earn a profit while also building up billions of dollars worth of new infrastructure (pulling new fiber into residential areas, building new peering links to growing sectors of the net, etc). They "want" to charge more because they have to provide and invest more or go out of business (leaving us with fewer choices, which is even worse).
Rather than ask why they should want to charge more, you should understand the nature of network peering, and ask why certain content providers (Google might be a good example) that make a fortune off of the ISP's users should expect to be immune from the same competitive market forces that impact everything else in our lives. You can bet that when Google orders a truck load of printer paper for their offices that the pricing models used are very, very different than those that set the price you pay for one package at the retail store. Should the government get in the way of both of those transactions and dictate pricing schemes, or should the paper supplier be able to look at high-volume customers and set prices based on things like regular ordering, bulk transportation costs, seasonal changes, etc? Who knows that market better - the paper supplier trying to win more customers or a congressman trying to sound like he's protecting you from economic reality to win a couple more votes?
So with this what's the difference between the USA and China? We are supposed to have Freedom of Speech, but I guess not.
The difference is that in China, you've got the central government blocking/filtering (and arresting/jailing) based on the content of the communication. What you say triggers their actions.
In the case being discussed, the content of your blog (your speech) or the content of some streaming media spooling off of a small company's server (as opposed to, say, AOL's or Google's) have nothing to do with it. Censorship isn't even part of the discussion. What's being talked about is who pays for the bandwidth being used. That's it. Period. If Google wants to make billions of dollars by being the go-to search engine for millions of Verizon's customers, then Verizon has every reason to place a premium on that gigantic peering arrangement.
If a little mom-and-pop web site starts getting a ton of traffic from a Slashdotting, do you really think that their monthly costs don't go up? Who should pay for that... the ISP providing their pipe? How are they causing the Slashdotting? But it's the ISP's resources that have to suddently carry all of that traffic, and that comes at the expense of other capacity. This isn't about censorship, it's about the economic realities of the fact that huge IP pipes aren't a natural occuring resource - they're mostly built and run by private companies. You can talk all you want, about anything you want. But why should you be able to dictate to some other ISP how much of your traffic they should have to carry, and at what price?
If you don't like the price they charge, you change carriers. If you don't like any of the prices available (meaning, you don't like the market), then become your own carrier (and see just how willing you are to maintain an artificial pricing scheme when "one way" traffic on certain peering connections account for the vast majority of your day's work and financial costs).
The US Government should tell the Chinese that we will start giving a damn about whether an Intel monopoly hurts their homegrown wireless industry when they start giving a damn about all the software piracy and intellectual property theft going on in their country.
And this is marked Flamebait why? Ah! Because it uses the word "piracy," which touched too close to home for many of the mods here. Not minding ripping off entertainment makes for strange bedfellows, doesn't it?
uphill both ways, and steal milk from the cows
Cows? We used to dream about milking cows. We had to milk the rats that infested the cardboard box we called a dorm room. Cows indeed!
It's possible I'm romanticizing my college years a bit, though.
Why, when we were in college, we couldn't afford to have all of that expensive automation gear. We had to get up off of our asses and actually turn lights off on and on, and we liked it that way. In-room fridge? Hah! We were so poor, we had to keep a little piece of Velveeta frozen on the dorm room window sill, saving it up for our big Friday night celebrations. But tell that to kids today, and they won't believe you. No sir.
Maybe only stockholding employees should be held accountable.
So, you'd be against the routine types of suits and prosecutions that occur when stockholders are lied to by corporate employees, consultants, accounting firms, etc? The whole point of holding a person responsible for their own actions is to allow things like business investment to proceed without all 100 million people who own a share of Sun or MS to not have to pay attention to the minutes from every meeting between every one of tens of thousands of employees.
Do you really think that some grandma that owns a few shares of Sony in her mutual fund should need to have the ability to know that the British company that was given the contract to handle the DRM technology in question was about to make a really bad decision on behalf of Sony? Are you that sure you want to make it that impossible for people to invest their money and keep the economy moving? If a particular employee in a large company wakes up one morning and decides to do something criminal, you'd rather that everyone in the company, and everyone who invested money to help grow the company pay the price (rather than the person who decided, that day, to do something criminal while on the clock)?
Your version of the world would have no companies large enough to produce reliable antibiotics, efficient refridgerators, or high speed video boards. Grow up.
Yes, you need to learn actual, practical things about the operating systems, DBs, and languages you'll be trading on. But the thing that too many would-be IT people seem to miss is that very few IT careers thrive without some context in the wider world. The programmers, even the server jockeys, that bring some "vertical" awareness to what they're doing, are way more valuable, and their employers are more willing to look past the lack of some particular new skill (and pay to have you go learn it).
Why? Because experience and an interest in what the organization is actually doing (and which the IT people are there to support) is harder to come by than someone who can remember some bit of API syntax or or write a select statement with a 5-way join right on the first try. Be well rounded in IT, sure, but also take time to understand where money comes from. Why projects fail. How Sarbanes-Oxley impacts database backups. What HIPAA is.
If you're going to expect an IT paycheck, get hip to what it is that generates the demand for what IT does, and what it means to be worth the money. That sounds rather vague, but if you follow the other advice you're seeing here (about how to get acquainted with various languages, coding structures, etc) you're only partway into a successful scenario. You'll be far more likely to be paid to learn the interesting new things that come along if the organization you're working for sees that you're interested in the bigger picture.
Have you not ever heard that it's better to err on the side of caution?
Sure, but how do you define caution? To the extent that human activity can be directly associated with measurable, specific climate factors... and to the extent that specific changes in regulatory roles or carbon bartering, etc. will have some identifiable outcome, you've got something to talk about. But since there's absolutely no way to be that specific, we have to look at specific, economy-wounding proposals with a wary eye. Why? Because the only thing that will reduce emissions is better technology and the huge, culture-wide adoption of same.
And the only way that gets done is in the presence of a thriving economy that has the largess to invest in such things, and families with enough income to do things like build more efficient houses and take a net loss for driving a hybrid, etc. When you tax the bejesus out of people, or limit the high-tech economies most able to actually spend billions of dollars on researching/developing bio-fuels and other marginal improvements, you slow, rather than accelerate the cure for our part (such as it is) of the warming trend. But when the same protocols that would damage the most innovative economies allow the dirtiest (in terms of emissions and rapid growth thereof) economies (say, China, or India) to just blast away as if it were 100 years ago when no one knew any better... well, that's not "erring on the side of caution."
If you crush the profitable economies even as they are already leading the way to more efficient energy use... you're going to set back the progress more than by any other means.
PS. I wonder why you have to post as Anonymous Coward for this? /. moderators are usually quite kind to pro-Green posters.
He's posting anonymously because even he knows that claiming your comment shows you to be a right-wing nut is exactly the sort of wild exaggeration and baseless extrapolation that typifies the greeny-left political camp when it comes to this issue. It's ironic that in trying to poke at you for talking about how his camp can make poor, political-agenda-driven use of small bits of information, that he (deliberately - how else?) takes a few small bits of information and jumps to a shrill, whiny, ad hominem conclusion about you. You should just thank the coward for so nicely illustrating your point.
Yeah its wrong. But if Google refuses to play the game, they just forfeit to MS and Yahoo. Yeah, they can still claim to be moral, but they will be as dead as Netscape.
No, it's not! You're missing my point. We're not talking about a moral issue, here. We're talking about who gets to sell advertising, and is willing to strike deals to accomplish that. Dell ships machines with *nix installed, too, so choice, per se, isn't even an issue. When the end user chooses to buy a box loaded with Windows, the browser can be pointed at any search engine, any time, by that user, and changed any time after that. Choice is not limited, it's just up to the user to actually think for 5 minutes, and exercise their complete liberty to point their search engine wherever they want.
There's nothing more entertaining then some poster on slashdot who doesn't understand that once your a monopoly, the rules change.
I'm refering, of course, to all of the people who insist that if something must be bundled in a distribution (like Dell is pushing in this case), especially something that (gasp!) is there specifically to generate ad revenue dollars for Google, that end users be given some sort of organic, free-as-in-rainbows alternative that doesn't involve the Corporate Man limiting search choice, blah blah blah. We all know that your search choices on MSIE are wide open and totally user definable, but the common refrain here is that most people are too dumb to even look at how to change it. If that's true, then Dell is not presenting some array of choices, as the crowd here would seem to demand, they're simply spoon feeding Google instead of MSN. That has ZERO to do with whether or not MS was ever a monopoly. I'm identifying a practice that, because it involves Google and Dell, is getting only a minor semi-negative buzz from the groupthink... and I find it hypocritical, that's all. Why isn't the usual chorus screaming about how Google should instead work with Dell to force up a wizard that offers both Google and the Yahoo toolbars? Oh, because they (just like MS) aren't running a charity operation.
Yeah, look at all the pro-Google-bundling posts in this thread.
Thank you for exactly making my point. The Google fanboys are a fair-weather, depends-on-the-circumstances bunch. This is a perfect example of it in (in)action.
Or so one would think, were one to hang out here long enough. There's noting more entertaining than watching the groupthink have a go at the ol' double standards, though. So... go! Make us proud! Start tap dancing! The folks that say that dumb people are too dumb to alter defaults or install on their own (and thus, by their own stupidity, are having their choice removed from them) are also the first ones to say that Google just needs a "fair" shot at the desktop to completely stomp MS. Hmmm.
It has nothing to do with job performance.
Sure it does. Your example of everyone "having their moments" in public is not the same as deliberately choosing to then describe, link to, and post photographs documenting your "moments." Those are usually moments that seem funny because they are outrageous while still endearing within your peer group, or don't seem too offensive by your own generation's standards... but those who have been raised with the web at their fingertips have absolutely no excuse for not being able to understand how visible this stuff is to a wider audience. And people who have judgement that poor absolutely are going to be problematic on the job. They have poor judgement, a lack of critical thinking, and an inability to grasp causality/consequences. If you think those failures/defects aren't going to have any impact on the job, then you must be talking about ditch digging or Wal-Mart door greeting, etc.
This is what happens when a corporate consortium declares itself a vigilante in the fight against pirrracy.
Declares itself a vigilante? How about, "declares itself to be doing exactly what all of its member recording companies and their artist business partners pay it to do?" They're not declaring themselves to be vigilantes, as much as that would make all of their idealogical oppoonents happy. And whether or not the accusation in the suit has any merit whatsoever... it's not possible for you to know that (unless you're participating in the litigation... are you?).
What makes it worse is there own twisted view of what is morally right and what isn't (suing students into bankruptcy and hacking into people's computers to justify there ends most certainly isn't).
I think you'll probably hear them say something more along the lines of, "If all of those same students didn't have a complete sense of entitlement to entertainment paid for by someone else, and didn't carry on in a morally bankrupt way by ripping off the artists they claim to like, who produce the entertainment they seem to demand for free, then none of this crap would even be an issue."
I can see, though, how you'd be sympathetic to the plight of students. I'm guessing you were tied up in court the day the teacher went over the difference between "their" and "there." Seriously, using the actually correct words in a sentence goes a lot farther towards persuading people you have a point. Not being able to demonstrate command of a simple thing like the difference between two similarly pronounced words isn't helping you. It immediately suggests (to any audience worth the rhetorical work) that the writer isn't really thinking all that clearly anyway, and it takes away from any impact your message - however convoluted or inaccurate - might otherwise make.