I, too, lived through that era in telecommunications, and as far as I know there was NEVER any expectation on anyone's part (at least in the industry) that TA96 would involve ubiquitous DS-1 or DS-3 speeds in the last mile. The High Speed services envisioned for that ALWAYS involved competitive offerings between the cable TV companies and the telcos (DSL, whether symmetric or not... SDSL had its champions among many of us in the business, but we lacked a sustainable business model to support it against the cheaper ADSL).
Video services were a totally different animal. Ameritech (now part of the AT&T behemoth) went through a period of reasonably aggressive expansion of its video service, Ameritech New Media, throughout the '90's. But this resembled conventional cable TV much more than it resembled "video dial tone". That venture was a casualty of the buyout by SBC, although by that time (1999) its expansion was not being carried forward as rapidly as it had been in prior years, I don't believe.
The telcos experimented with the idea of telephones that could carry pictures (the "PicturePhone" service) as far back as the early 1970's. The main reason it died at that time was because of the failure of New York regulators to permit its deployment in Manhattan, the one "must have" market of the day.
I left the business in early 2000. And no, I do NOT agree with the actions of the companies that proactively cooperated with government surveillance programs. I believe they violated a trust that, in our day, was regarded as nearly sacred... the customer's right of privacy. This was hammered into all of us who dealt in any way with customer records or any aspect of customer service... one NEVER discloses ANY aspect of ANY customer's service to ANYONE except the customer himself/herself. If there is to be any disclosure, such as to law enforcement, it is done reluctantly, to the minimum degree required by law, under court supervision, after approval by the company legal department, and under the supervision of the company security department. They didn't quite add that all employees involved should wash their hands afterwards before they were fit to associate with regular telephone people again, but that was pretty strongly implied.
I don't have my head in the sand at all. What I'm saying is that the telcos CAN be successfully regulated, and have been relatively recently. I can't speak from direct experience for the FCC since the beginning of the Powell era there, but prior to that time I know for sure that the telcos toed the mark and the regulators regulated.
As one who spent most of a 30 year career in or near telco regulatory, I would respectfully suggest that you don't know what you're talking about. Even in the days of the Bell System (a giant compared to the babies of today) the companies took regulatory restrictions seriously. And since then it's been the same.
In the late '90's and beyond, for example, they worked like mad to comply with the equal access provisions of TA96, in order to avoid the potential tens of millions of dollars in monthly fines associated with non-compliance. Give any company incentives like that and they'll listen VERY closely indeed. And do as they are ordered.
Somebody suggested recently that AT&T "owned" Senator Reid because people associate with the company had contributed $22,000 to his campaign. If the majority leader of the US Senate can be bought that cheaply then we really ARE in trouble. But I think people who try to build a case for corporate interference in government based on such flimsy "evidence" are just looking for an axe to grind.
And I am not aware of any government mandate regarding last mile buildout. By policy the FCC encourages better access for everyone, but can you cite any Order that requires specific actions? I don't even recall a NPRM along those lines.
The shocking thing is that the companies involved were all, once, part of the Bell System, which had a long and inviolate tradition of protecting customer privacy in the absence of absolute government force in the form of a warrant for customer information. It's sad to see how far these once respected companies have strayed from the ideals that helped make them great.
Just out of curiosity, what were the on-line meeting places like 11+ years ago?
Places like the WELL (San Francisco) and The MetaNet (Washington, DC) had thriving on-line communities in the early '90's that spawned many, many lasting friendships and more than one on-line relationship that developed into a RL relationships, even over long distances.
These were mostly discussion groups, but people grew to know one another pretty well and became personal friends (or more) through their interactions in these communities. Then, as now, once things started to get really personal it tended to move to direct email and to phone calls.
Further more, I think there might be some problems about this after the FCC has given them money to make sure their was normal coverage in remote locations. I think this is not only implied but required that they have the equivalent of the copper service available to these customers. I will read through the regulations to see, but I don't think Verizon can cut people off like this after they have taken the money to make sure they were connected in that way. Coverage in remote areas is handled under universal access fees, and is certainly not an issue anywhere Verizon is going to be laying fiber.
As far as the tariffs go, if Verizon was given the territory back in the monopoly days, they still have a legal obligation to provide residential service to anyone in that area who asks for it at rates covered by tariffs set by the relevant (usually state) regulatory authorities. In most cases, there are service level requirements as well. What there is NOT is any requirement that Verizon use a specific technology to provide this service
About outages-if the regulators are on their toes there are also provisions that outages over a certain level call for rebates and fines. In that case Verizon will find it in their interest to keep those fibers lit and humming.
I expect that Verizon, assuming that it retains its status as the ILEC in a given territory, is still obligated to supply residential POTS service to anyone who applies for it at tariffed rates regardless of the technology they use to deliver that service. There has never been any provision that I know of in a telephone tariff that specified the technology through which basic residential service had to be delivered.
In Heinlen's book Juan Rico was ethnically Filipino.
Actually, I believe all the initial major characters (including Rico) who joined the service came from Buenos Aires, which was destroyed rather early in the book by hostile fire. Correct me if I'm wrong... it's been 15 years or so since I've read that particular book.
Nowadays we live in a world in which neurologists and psychologists have demonstrated that this is fundamentally flawed, that much of our decision making is unconscious, and that in reality there is rarely such a thing as a free choice. These are things that Heinlein was wont to refer to as the "fuzzy studies" in academia. Areas in which there is rarely an expert so respected that there is not another one equally respected who calls his or her theories bunk and him or her a charlatan and/or a fool.
Not to mention the water bed and the concept (too sadly true) of a "false dawn" in manned space flight.
As far as the "service breeds citizenship" equation is concerned, he simply reduced to an individual level what is a tautology at the societal level... a free society cannot continue to exist absent the will of its citizens to defend it.
There are a few people out there who will actually BUY a legitimate copy of a given software program and then try to "steal" it from themselves (i.e., gain access to it without using the legal means at their disposal to unlock and install the program on their machine).
This presents them with the same sort of technical challenge as is faced by the hacker/cracker, and while this activity may very well be a technical violation of the DMCA or other laws I see very little chance that such a person could ever be prosecuted successfully as long as they confine their activities and the results to their own machine. After all, they bought and paid for the copy of the software that they are using. The software manufacturer can hardly claim a monetary loss on the deal.
I'd be a WHOLE lot more convinced about this whole DRM thing if the folks (RIAA) behind it weren't involved in a lawsuit right now trying to overturn a contract RIAA signed some years ago so that they can now CUT the amount of money that RIAA members have to pay to people like songwriters for the use of their creative output. RIAA feels that THEY should be entitled to keep more of the money themselves and not pass it on the the artists behind the songs we hear.
This is the same RIAA that just filed a suit to try to nullify a 1981 contract that gives the songwriters a substantial percentage of the income from their songs. Apparently they feel that with all the additional money coming in from things like ring tones and such, the artists who actually create the content are making too much money and the RIAA's corporate members don't get to keep enough.
>I wonder what else they need in order to enforce laws. Prisons? Armed agents? The power to arrest and seize property?
There's a wonderful song by Tom Smith http://tomsmithonline.com/lyrics/illuminati_polka. htm that shows where this MAY be leading when it says "The entertainment industry just got the Aton Bomb".
The song was written, by the way, as a sort of tribute to Steve Jackson, whose name is legendary in the fight for individual rights in the digital age.
Many bands never play in the larger venues at all. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of smaller venues in this country where some very fine music is performed regularly by bands that will probably never play in a "big stadium", but who do a fine job of keeping their fans by the hundreds (instead of by the tens of thousands) entertained.
So the cities are not providing anything to these providers that they wouldn't provide to anyone else, then? If that's the case, what are the telco's basing their case on? The telco's have been in competition with independent ISP's since the telcos first figured out what the heck the internet was all about back in the mid '90's (at the retail level, I mean... they'd been doing backbone work forever of course). And they've never had any complaints about it. They've cheerfully sold backbone services to the competitors when asked, and competed for retail customers.
I think if you check out most of those provider's opposition to municipal broadband systems, they are usually very general in scope. The big telcos and cable companies really don't care about small municipalities and counties opening their own broadband setups. What they don't want is to have to compete against a local government in a viable broadband market.
If they have invested the resources to provide broadband in a city, they don't want that city (which pays no taxes and is exempt from most other regulation as well) competing with them for customers.
Sounds like a reasonable attitude to me.
Under an intelligent regulation system, unserved areas would have the right to file plans with regulators to form their own broadband systems, giving the incumbent telcos and cable outfits a short time to object and a reasonable time after that to serve the affected area or cede it (along with a meaningful monetary penalty if they objected and then didn't come through with service) to the municipality. This would be a very good alternative to the statutory/regulatory framework that some of the incumbent carriers are pushing to restrict municipal systems.
It's not just the big guys, either. I frequently send mail to a particular domain run by a local (relatively small) cable tv provider in the midwest. From time to time I get a rejection because they say that they are receiving too much spam from my originating domain and are blocking all mail from my domain until the problem is corrected. My originating domain is 'ameritech.net', and is owned by AT&T, the country's largest telecom company. I've had similar problems, by the way, with this same cable tv outfit blocking email I send from my email address with "yahoo.com'.
So it's not just the big guys who are not playing nice in this game. Sometimes the customers of the big providers get hit the same as anybody else.
I was a Peapod customer until I moved out of Chicago, and they did a magnificent job. Deliveries were always within their time window, and their selections of produce were always fresh and "as specified" by me. It was a tremendous advantage when I was a technoslave for a major high-tech company and my wife was almost totally disabled. They were very understanding, and would deliver things right to our refigerator if needed.
I would never agree to any receipt that could be used by itself to invalidate the concept of the secret ballot. If I have a receipt that can tell anyone who sees it how I voted, there is nothing to stop my boss from forcing me to vote HIS way instead of my own. We went through this arguement more than a century ago.
Fortunately, with today's technology it IS possible to give a person a receipt that verifies that they voted, and to retain a record in the voting machine itself which, when matched with that person's reciept can reconstruct the individual vote, but which by itself does NOT reveal for whom one voted. THIS is the technology we must adopt to avoid re-fighting the battles of a century ago.
Absolutely right. I was in a debate that took place in the mid 1980's when Ameritech (the former midwest telephone company, now part of the reconstituted AT&T) was debating how to introduce Email internally. One of the senior managers opined that it was fine for supervisors but "we can't have the first levels [lowest two levels of mamgement, which included most of the programmers] emailing one another back forth... nothing would ever get done."
I'm glad to hear from sincere religious people who can understand the proper use and role of fiction. I teach (mostly math and computer courses) at a small school run by the Baptists, and during informal discussions it is not unusual for me to hear students say things like "I enjoy Harry Potter, leaving aside the fact that it's evil...".
On the other hand, I doubt that more than one or two of them would know who Terry Pratchett is. Or what Slashdot is either, come to think about it. Education is a slow process.
Slashdot Mirror
I, too, lived through that era in telecommunications, and as far as I know there was NEVER any expectation on anyone's part (at least in the industry) that TA96 would involve ubiquitous DS-1 or DS-3 speeds in the last mile. The High Speed services envisioned for that ALWAYS involved competitive offerings between the cable TV companies and the telcos (DSL, whether symmetric or not ... SDSL had its champions among many of us in the business, but we lacked a sustainable business model to support it against the cheaper ADSL).
... the customer's right of privacy. This was hammered into all of us who dealt in any way with customer records or any aspect of customer service ... one NEVER discloses ANY aspect of ANY customer's service to ANYONE except the customer himself/herself. If there is to be any disclosure, such as to law enforcement, it is done reluctantly, to the minimum degree required by law, under court supervision, after approval by the company legal department, and under the supervision of the company security department. They didn't quite add that all employees involved should wash their hands afterwards before they were fit to associate with regular telephone people again, but that was pretty strongly implied.
Video services were a totally different animal. Ameritech (now part of the AT&T behemoth) went through a period of reasonably aggressive expansion of its video service, Ameritech New Media, throughout the '90's. But this resembled conventional cable TV much more than it resembled "video dial tone". That venture was a casualty of the buyout by SBC, although by that time (1999) its expansion was not being carried forward as rapidly as it had been in prior years, I don't believe.
The telcos experimented with the idea of telephones that could carry pictures (the "PicturePhone" service) as far back as the early 1970's. The main reason it died at that time was because of the failure of New York regulators to permit its deployment in Manhattan, the one "must have" market of the day.
I left the business in early 2000. And no, I do NOT agree with the actions of the companies that proactively cooperated with government surveillance programs. I believe they violated a trust that, in our day, was regarded as nearly sacred
I don't have my head in the sand at all. What I'm saying is that the telcos CAN be successfully regulated, and have been relatively recently. I can't speak from direct experience for the FCC since the beginning of the Powell era there, but prior to that time I know for sure that the telcos toed the mark and the regulators regulated.
As one who spent most of a 30 year career in or near telco regulatory, I would respectfully suggest that you don't know what you're talking about. Even in the days of the Bell System (a giant compared to the babies of today) the companies took regulatory restrictions seriously. And since then it's been the same.
In the late '90's and beyond, for example, they worked like mad to comply with the equal access provisions of TA96, in order to avoid the potential tens of millions of dollars in monthly fines associated with non-compliance. Give any company incentives like that and they'll listen VERY closely indeed. And do as they are ordered.
Somebody suggested recently that AT&T "owned" Senator Reid because people associate with the company had contributed $22,000 to his campaign. If the majority leader of the US Senate can be bought that cheaply then we really ARE in trouble. But I think people who try to build a case for corporate interference in government based on such flimsy "evidence" are just looking for an axe to grind.
And I am not aware of any government mandate regarding last mile buildout. By policy the FCC encourages better access for everyone, but can you cite any Order that requires specific actions? I don't even recall a NPRM along those lines.
The shocking thing is that the companies involved were all, once, part of the Bell System, which had a long and inviolate tradition of protecting customer privacy in the absence of absolute government force in the form of a warrant for customer information. It's sad to see how far these once respected companies have strayed from the ideals that helped make them great.
Just out of curiosity, what were the on-line meeting places like 11+ years ago?
Places like the WELL (San Francisco) and The MetaNet (Washington, DC) had thriving on-line communities in the early '90's that spawned many, many lasting friendships and more than one on-line relationship that developed into a RL relationships, even over long distances.
These were mostly discussion groups, but people grew to know one another pretty well and became personal friends (or more) through their interactions in these communities. Then, as now, once things started to get really personal it tended to move to direct email and to phone calls.
As far as the tariffs go, if Verizon was given the territory back in the monopoly days, they still have a legal obligation to provide residential service to anyone in that area who asks for it at rates covered by tariffs set by the relevant (usually state) regulatory authorities. In most cases, there are service level requirements as well. What there is NOT is any requirement that Verizon use a specific technology to provide this service
About outages-if the regulators are on their toes there are also provisions that outages over a certain level call for rebates and fines. In that case Verizon will find it in their interest to keep those fibers lit and humming.
I expect that Verizon, assuming that it retains its status as the ILEC in a given territory, is still obligated to supply residential POTS service to anyone who applies for it at tariffed rates regardless of the technology they use to deliver that service. There has never been any provision that I know of in a telephone tariff that specified the technology through which basic residential service had to be delivered.
Thanks. As I said, it's been more than a decade since I've read the book.
Actually, I believe all the initial major characters (including Rico) who joined the service came from Buenos Aires, which was destroyed rather early in the book by hostile fire. Correct me if I'm wrong
Not to mention the water bed and the concept (too sadly true) of a "false dawn" in manned space flight.
... a free society cannot continue to exist absent the will of its citizens to defend it.
As far as the "service breeds citizenship" equation is concerned, he simply reduced to an individual level what is a tautology at the societal level
I notice that this article in Alternatives pays due respect to the esteemed Mr. Godwin and his law from the very beginning.
Actually, there IS another class of people.
There are a few people out there who will actually BUY a legitimate copy of a given software program and then try to "steal" it from themselves (i.e., gain access to it without using the legal means at their disposal to unlock and install the program on their machine).
This presents them with the same sort of technical challenge as is faced by the hacker/cracker, and while this activity may very well be a technical violation of the DMCA or other laws I see very little chance that such a person could ever be prosecuted successfully as long as they confine their activities and the results to their own machine. After all, they bought and paid for the copy of the software that they are using. The software manufacturer can hardly claim a monetary loss on the deal.
I'd be a WHOLE lot more convinced about this whole DRM thing if the folks (RIAA) behind it weren't involved in a lawsuit right now trying to overturn a contract RIAA signed some years ago so that they can now CUT the amount of money that RIAA members have to pay to people like songwriters for the use of their creative output. RIAA feels that THEY should be entitled to keep more of the money themselves and not pass it on the the artists behind the songs we hear.
This is the same RIAA that just filed a suit to try to nullify a 1981 contract that gives the songwriters a substantial percentage of the income from their songs. Apparently they feel that with all the additional money coming in from things like ring tones and such, the artists who actually create the content are making too much money and the RIAA's corporate members don't get to keep enough.
>I wonder what else they need in order to enforce laws. Prisons? Armed agents? The power to arrest and seize property?. htm that shows where this MAY be leading when it says "The entertainment industry just got the Aton Bomb".
There's a wonderful song by Tom Smith http://tomsmithonline.com/lyrics/illuminati_polka
The song was written, by the way, as a sort of tribute to Steve Jackson, whose name is legendary in the fight for individual rights in the digital age.
Are we paranoid yet? If not, maybe we should be!
Many bands never play in the larger venues at all. There are hundreds, probably thousands, of smaller venues in this country where some very fine music is performed regularly by bands that will probably never play in a "big stadium", but who do a fine job of keeping their fans by the hundreds (instead of by the tens of thousands) entertained.
So the cities are not providing anything to these providers that they wouldn't provide to anyone else, then? If that's the case, what are the telco's basing their case on? The telco's have been in competition with independent ISP's since the telcos first figured out what the heck the internet was all about back in the mid '90's (at the retail level, I mean ... they'd been doing backbone work forever of course). And they've never had any complaints about it. They've cheerfully sold backbone services to the competitors when asked, and competed for retail customers.
I think if you check out most of those provider's opposition to municipal broadband systems, they are usually very general in scope. The big telcos and cable companies really don't care about small municipalities and counties opening their own broadband setups. What they don't want is to have to compete against a local government in a viable broadband market.
If they have invested the resources to provide broadband in a city, they don't want that city (which pays no taxes and is exempt from most other regulation as well) competing with them for customers.
Sounds like a reasonable attitude to me.
Under an intelligent regulation system, unserved areas would have the right to file plans with regulators to form their own broadband systems, giving the incumbent telcos and cable outfits a short time to object and a reasonable time after that to serve the affected area or cede it (along with a meaningful monetary penalty if they objected and then didn't come through with service) to the municipality. This would be a very good alternative to the statutory/regulatory framework that some of the incumbent carriers are pushing to restrict municipal systems.
THEY'RE the side of the family with all the money, remember?
It's not just the big guys, either. I frequently send mail to a particular domain run by a local (relatively small) cable tv provider in the midwest. From time to time I get a rejection because they say that they are receiving too much spam from my originating domain and are blocking all mail from my domain until the problem is corrected. My originating domain is 'ameritech.net', and is owned by AT&T, the country's largest telecom company. I've had similar problems, by the way, with this same cable tv outfit blocking email I send from my email address with "yahoo.com'.
So it's not just the big guys who are not playing nice in this game. Sometimes the customers of the big providers get hit the same as anybody else.
It not only wouldn't have gotten a laugh, it would not have been modded up to 5 for "funny" either.
I was a Peapod customer until I moved out of Chicago, and they did a magnificent job. Deliveries were always within their time window, and their selections of produce were always fresh and "as specified" by me. It was a tremendous advantage when I was a technoslave for a major high-tech company and my wife was almost totally disabled. They were very understanding, and would deliver things right to our refigerator if needed.
I would never agree to any receipt that could be used by itself to invalidate the concept of the secret ballot. If I have a receipt that can tell anyone who sees it how I voted, there is nothing to stop my boss from forcing me to vote HIS way instead of my own. We went through this arguement more than a century ago.
Fortunately, with today's technology it IS possible to give a person a receipt that verifies that they voted, and to retain a record in the voting machine itself which, when matched with that person's reciept can reconstruct the individual vote, but which by itself does NOT reveal for whom one voted. THIS is the technology we must adopt to avoid re-fighting the battles of a century ago.
Absolutely right. I was in a debate that took place in the mid 1980's when Ameritech (the former midwest telephone company, now part of the reconstituted AT&T) was debating how to introduce Email internally. One of the senior managers opined that it was fine for supervisors but "we can't have the first levels [lowest two levels of mamgement, which included most of the programmers] emailing one another back forth ... nothing would ever get done."
I've wondered since if he wasn't right.
I'm glad to hear from sincere religious people who can understand the proper use and role of fiction. I teach (mostly math and computer courses) at a small school run by the Baptists, and during informal discussions it is not unusual for me to hear students say things like "I enjoy Harry Potter, leaving aside the fact that it's evil...".
On the other hand, I doubt that more than one or two of them would know who Terry Pratchett is. Or what Slashdot is either, come to think about it. Education is a slow process.