It's amazing how cheap internet can be when the "company" providing it doesn't have to worry about a profit or keeping the shareholders happy.
You seem to have a very poor understanding of how democracies work.
My understanding is they are operating at break-even, so people that don't use it aren't really paying anything. In fact, it's saved the city government money that they were spending on very expensive commercial Internet access. Their problem is that demand has forced them to accelerate their build out (they projected very conservatively). Yes, being able to sell cheap municipal bonds helps. But capital isn't what's holding back the telcos. After all, a tiny city government just kicked their asses because they thought their customers had no other options. Also, it turns out that having widely available cheap and fast Internet has externalities that benefit even people that don't have it at home. Hard to fit on to a balance sheet, but still true!
You should really follow up on this, because it sounds like it would change your world view. Look up Jeremy Pietzold; he'd be happy to answer any reasonably worded questions you have about SandyNet. I think you'd find that he's generally an economic conservative, but perhaps he's more pragmatic than some. He's certainly invested more time than anybody here on this topic.
I'm really surprised Wired published that. TechFreedom is a well-known industry schill. They had an equally stupid article against net neutrality. I love this from a recent article of theirs:
The Wheeler FCC has fixated on building government-run gigabit networks to serve small numbers of users in heavily Democratic cities. We need a more humble, realistic, pragmatic and inclusive approach.
The best, cheapest Internet access in America is consistently community owned. And it doesn't even have to be a large community. The small town of Sandy, OR has the best, cheapest Internet in the country. Forty dollars for 300Mbps symmetric or $60 for gigabit. No bandwidth cap. And they work with content providers like Netflix so their citizens get the fastest, highest quality content they can. Far better than any of the cable companies, which refuse to work with Netflix without significant payment. It's amazing how well your incentives align when your shareholders are also your customers.
Sorry, but this is a horrible idea. That's like cutting a 160 foot swath across a state and then having each package delivery company pave their own roads. Or putting up power poles and forcing a bunch of power companies to run the wire. You've just significantly increased the costs. And when you're talking about tunneling, they go up fast. Just build the damn road. Run fiber to each building and run it as a utility. If you want to introduce competition, then allow ISPs to lease fiber connections to individual homes. There is simply no reason to run the exact same fiber to the exact same building three times so one of them can be used.
CompanyA sells a product that claims it contains magic. You find it has none, you sue them for false advertising.
So, I'm supposed to test the chemical makeup of every product I buy and keep some lawyers on hand so that I can sue and win... the few bucks I paid for the product. Sounds like a reasonable system. What seastead should I move to?
I think we saw with the ILECs in the 90's that unbundling doesn't work unless the infrastructure company can't provide any services on top of that infrastructure. Otherwise there is too much incentive to shift costs and play games with other service providers, favoring your services in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And they will still need to be regulated like a utility. It does allow a company to incrementally build competing infrastructure, but it's debatable whether that is an efficient allocation of resources.
If you look at Comcast's income statement for 2013, you'll see rising profits. They made 6.816 billion dollars in 2013. I find it disingenuous (fucking bullshit) for them to claim these content providers are costing them money.
In reality it is likely the opposite, the content providers are increasing the demand for their product and allowing Comcast to charge more for service. Their relation to content providers is somewhat like Apple's relation to App providers.
Except Apple doesn't make 97% margins (it's no longer break-even, but it is way, way less than 30%).
This is exactly what would happen if we'd given UPS a monopoly on all the roads. Would anyone be surprised that they started charging FedEx more? So why is anyone surprised by this? The solution is the same one we've used with roads: public infrastructure (municipal/public-utility fiber) that any company can build on top of.
I suspect that this is because cable and internet phone service are very high-margin, while internet service is not.
No, it's quite the opposite. Once you're making 97% margins on your Internet customers and have no competition, why in the hell would you put any money in to it? You're going to have a hard time finding any ROI.
As long as ISPs are not allowed to intentionally degrade non-premium traffic on the back of direct-peering deals, I see no fundamental problem with it.
Non-premium traffic with be de-facto downgraded, because even if they don't actively do it, large monopoly ISPs will be incentivized to make non-premium traffic as unreliable as possible. So whether it is simply slashing the capital budget of non-premium infrastructure or not performing repairs in a timely manner or a hundred other small things, non-premium traffic has to suffer. How long before there are multiple tiers of premium traffic? The monopoly ISPs face no competition or regulation; now they simply have to figure out how to maximize their rents.
Still wrong battle. Franchises are simply agreements to use a city's rights-of-way. They've been non-exclusive since 1992. The problem is that building wireline infrastructure is extremely capital expensive and has severely diminishing returns in areas that are already saturated by a competitor. Your business plan is to sink a bunch of capital into a business and then compete on price with a company that has no capital costs? Good luck raising the billions you'll need for that.
No, the solution here is municipal fiber networks that are managed as public utilities that sell wholesale to ISPs. Just like how we have multiple shipping companies that use public infrastructure to transport packages between customers. Then you can have as many different competitors as the market will bear with as many different business plans. In that situation, the Comcast-Netflix deal would never have happened, because the competing ISPs would have been begging Netflix to install hardware in their data centers to make their customers' experience as good as possible. An ISP trying to make Netflix slower would have lost every customer that cares about Netflix (which apparently is a lot of them).
FTFA: "IPTV is digital television delivered through a high speed Internet connection, instead of by the traditional cable method." They are talking about FiOS and Google Fiber (which is why people who read it also noticed a reference to a comment from a Google). Don't worry, grandpa, the guvmint isn't coming to take away your Internets.
Yeah, the problem is that if you sell them at $75, you've now set the price expectation for all Surfaces going forward. What could Microsoft possibly do to justify selling a Surface 2 at $199? And that is taking a huge loss on any kind of decent tablet. The estimates for Apple's bill of materials on a $499 iPad is about $300 (remember, that doesn't include R&D and other costs) and they have the best supply chain in the world. Microsoft can't go below their current $349 if they ever plan on being successful in this market and even that is setting them up for failure.
How did this get marked insightful!? I'm pretty sure the Mormon Police aren't real and if they are, I have no special insight into them. It was a Simpsons joke. I guess season 9 was before the moderator's time. Instead of making me feel insightful, your moderation has made me feel old.
Trivial. The Mormon Police just have the bank send all of those people a bogus prize certificate for a free motor boat and then when they show up to get their boat, the Mormon Police arrest them and beat them to the full extent of the law.
Yes, you should absolutely get a mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable/adapter. Here's one at random: Accell UtraAV DisplayPort Adapter.
If you can return the other, do so, otherwise figure out some other use for it / put it up on E-Bay. If nothing else, the drop in lag should be noticeable.
Plain vanilla DVI (DVI-D) just requires a simple $5-$30 adapter on Macs. You're talking about dual link DVI (DVI-DL).
Apple's mini DisplayPort is really a Dual-mode DisplayPort (DP++), which allows backwards compatability with DVI/HDMI. Basically, the port is able to use the same pins it uses to send DisplayPort to instead send DVI/HDMI, which then just requires a passive adapter to rearrange the pins in the correct order. Apple's Thunderbolt port maintains that backwards compatibility. However, due to the limitations of using a DisplayPort socket to do this, it is limited to single link DVI-D, which maxes out at a resolution of 1920x1200 @ 60hz.
To use higher resolutions, you need an active converter that takes the actual DisplayPort signal and converts it into DVI/HDMI. That is why it costs ~$100 (whether from Apple or someone else) and why it requires power; it is actual processing the signal and translating it into the other protocol, not simply switching wires around. You would also need it for simple single link DVI is your DisplayPort where not a DP++ port.
Hope that makes things clearer.
I think that banking is actually a little more honorable than click ads.
Really? Because I don't anticipate having to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of our money to bail out Google and Facebook in order to prevent a global catastrophe. And yet, not only have I had to do that once already in my lifetime for the banking industry, I expect to have to do that again because little has changed since the last time we did it. So, fuck the banks. We're lucky that this bubble is in an industry that is not "too big to fail."
Sure, you could have an "open standard," but someone is controlling that, too.
No, that is why it is an open standard. Once it is out there, anyone can implement it and conform to the standard. Maybe someone maintains it and maybe someone is working on the next version, but no one controls it. To illustrate the difference, what platforms does DirectX run on? Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Xbox, and Microsoft Windows Mobile. Notice the pattern? And what platforms does OpenGL run on? All of those plus dozens or even hundreds more. If you want to port your app to the iPhone or the Palm Pre or an Android phone, who is going to have to do more work, the person with the app programmed in DirectX or the person with the app programmed in OpenGL? That is the advantage of an open standard.
[A union] can just beat you when you leave work for the day
Have you ever worked for a union? I have and I don't recall getting beaten for disagreeing with the representative we elected. Did you have a different experience?
Perhaps "open sourcing" was an imprecise choice of words. Obviously part of that would be royalty-free licensing of the patents on VP8. Presumably Google now owns most or all of those; any they don't they can either acquire or get a license that allows anyone to use it.
The point is that Google doesn't care about making money off of licensing the codec; what they want is something open that has virtually no barrier to entry, everyone can use, and is widely available on clients. Just like with browsers and OSes, they view this as the platform for their advertising and they want as many users as possible.
That's a bonus. They want the IP. YouTube lives or dies by Adobe Flash. They want a codec that is as efficient as H.264 that they can open source and get into HTML5. Google says Theora isn't; apparently they think VP8 is. Then they can start pushing people towards HTML5 browsers. I bet they could get a lot of YouTube visitors to upgrade if it meant they could watch clips in HD versus the quality you see now with Flash.
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You seem to have a very poor understanding of how democracies work.
My understanding is they are operating at break-even, so people that don't use it aren't really paying anything. In fact, it's saved the city government money that they were spending on very expensive commercial Internet access. Their problem is that demand has forced them to accelerate their build out (they projected very conservatively). Yes, being able to sell cheap municipal bonds helps. But capital isn't what's holding back the telcos. After all, a tiny city government just kicked their asses because they thought their customers had no other options. Also, it turns out that having widely available cheap and fast Internet has externalities that benefit even people that don't have it at home. Hard to fit on to a balance sheet, but still true!
You should really follow up on this, because it sounds like it would change your world view. Look up Jeremy Pietzold; he'd be happy to answer any reasonably worded questions you have about SandyNet. I think you'd find that he's generally an economic conservative, but perhaps he's more pragmatic than some. He's certainly invested more time than anybody here on this topic.
The best, cheapest Internet access in America is consistently community owned. And it doesn't even have to be a large community. The small town of Sandy, OR has the best, cheapest Internet in the country. Forty dollars for 300Mbps symmetric or $60 for gigabit. No bandwidth cap. And they work with content providers like Netflix so their citizens get the fastest, highest quality content they can. Far better than any of the cable companies, which refuse to work with Netflix without significant payment. It's amazing how well your incentives align when your shareholders are also your customers.
Sorry, but this is a horrible idea. That's like cutting a 160 foot swath across a state and then having each package delivery company pave their own roads. Or putting up power poles and forcing a bunch of power companies to run the wire. You've just significantly increased the costs. And when you're talking about tunneling, they go up fast. Just build the damn road. Run fiber to each building and run it as a utility. If you want to introduce competition, then allow ISPs to lease fiber connections to individual homes. There is simply no reason to run the exact same fiber to the exact same building three times so one of them can be used.
CompanyA sells a product that claims it contains magic. You find it has none, you sue them for false advertising.
So, I'm supposed to test the chemical makeup of every product I buy and keep some lawyers on hand so that I can sue and win... the few bucks I paid for the product. Sounds like a reasonable system. What seastead should I move to?
I think we saw with the ILECs in the 90's that unbundling doesn't work unless the infrastructure company can't provide any services on top of that infrastructure. Otherwise there is too much incentive to shift costs and play games with other service providers, favoring your services in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. And they will still need to be regulated like a utility. It does allow a company to incrementally build competing infrastructure, but it's debatable whether that is an efficient allocation of resources.
If you look at Comcast's income statement for 2013, you'll see rising profits. They made 6.816 billion dollars in 2013. I find it disingenuous (fucking bullshit) for them to claim these content providers are costing them money.
In reality it is likely the opposite, the content providers are increasing the demand for their product and allowing Comcast to charge more for service. Their relation to content providers is somewhat like Apple's relation to App providers.
Except Apple doesn't make 97% margins (it's no longer break-even, but it is way, way less than 30%).
This is exactly what would happen if we'd given UPS a monopoly on all the roads. Would anyone be surprised that they started charging FedEx more? So why is anyone surprised by this? The solution is the same one we've used with roads: public infrastructure (municipal/public-utility fiber) that any company can build on top of.
I suspect that this is because cable and internet phone service are very high-margin, while internet service is not.
No, it's quite the opposite. Once you're making 97% margins on your Internet customers and have no competition, why in the hell would you put any money in to it? You're going to have a hard time finding any ROI.
As long as ISPs are not allowed to intentionally degrade non-premium traffic on the back of direct-peering deals, I see no fundamental problem with it.
Non-premium traffic with be de-facto downgraded, because even if they don't actively do it, large monopoly ISPs will be incentivized to make non-premium traffic as unreliable as possible. So whether it is simply slashing the capital budget of non-premium infrastructure or not performing repairs in a timely manner or a hundred other small things, non-premium traffic has to suffer. How long before there are multiple tiers of premium traffic? The monopoly ISPs face no competition or regulation; now they simply have to figure out how to maximize their rents.
Still wrong battle. Franchises are simply agreements to use a city's rights-of-way. They've been non-exclusive since 1992. The problem is that building wireline infrastructure is extremely capital expensive and has severely diminishing returns in areas that are already saturated by a competitor. Your business plan is to sink a bunch of capital into a business and then compete on price with a company that has no capital costs? Good luck raising the billions you'll need for that.
No, the solution here is municipal fiber networks that are managed as public utilities that sell wholesale to ISPs. Just like how we have multiple shipping companies that use public infrastructure to transport packages between customers. Then you can have as many different competitors as the market will bear with as many different business plans. In that situation, the Comcast-Netflix deal would never have happened, because the competing ISPs would have been begging Netflix to install hardware in their data centers to make their customers' experience as good as possible. An ISP trying to make Netflix slower would have lost every customer that cares about Netflix (which apparently is a lot of them).
Sounds like a horribly inefficient allocation of resources. Even wolves spread teaching amongst the pack.
FTFA: "IPTV is digital television delivered through a high speed Internet connection, instead of by the traditional cable method." They are talking about FiOS and Google Fiber (which is why people who read it also noticed a reference to a comment from a Google). Don't worry, grandpa, the guvmint isn't coming to take away your Internets.
Yeah, the problem is that if you sell them at $75, you've now set the price expectation for all Surfaces going forward. What could Microsoft possibly do to justify selling a Surface 2 at $199? And that is taking a huge loss on any kind of decent tablet. The estimates for Apple's bill of materials on a $499 iPad is about $300 (remember, that doesn't include R&D and other costs) and they have the best supply chain in the world. Microsoft can't go below their current $349 if they ever plan on being successful in this market and even that is setting them up for failure.
How did this get marked insightful!? I'm pretty sure the Mormon Police aren't real and if they are, I have no special insight into them. It was a Simpsons joke. I guess season 9 was before the moderator's time. Instead of making me feel insightful, your moderation has made me feel old.
No, they won't. That would be breaking the law and the whole point of this approach is to avoid breaking the law.
Trivial. The Mormon Police just have the bank send all of those people a bogus prize certificate for a free motor boat and then when they show up to get their boat, the Mormon Police arrest them and beat them to the full extent of the law.
Yes, you should absolutely get a mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable/adapter. Here's one at random: Accell UtraAV DisplayPort Adapter.
If you can return the other, do so, otherwise figure out some other use for it / put it up on E-Bay. If nothing else, the drop in lag should be noticeable.
Plain vanilla DVI (DVI-D) just requires a simple $5-$30 adapter on Macs. You're talking about dual link DVI (DVI-DL). Apple's mini DisplayPort is really a Dual-mode DisplayPort (DP++), which allows backwards compatability with DVI/HDMI. Basically, the port is able to use the same pins it uses to send DisplayPort to instead send DVI/HDMI, which then just requires a passive adapter to rearrange the pins in the correct order. Apple's Thunderbolt port maintains that backwards compatibility. However, due to the limitations of using a DisplayPort socket to do this, it is limited to single link DVI-D, which maxes out at a resolution of 1920x1200 @ 60hz.
To use higher resolutions, you need an active converter that takes the actual DisplayPort signal and converts it into DVI/HDMI. That is why it costs ~$100 (whether from Apple or someone else) and why it requires power; it is actual processing the signal and translating it into the other protocol, not simply switching wires around. You would also need it for simple single link DVI is your DisplayPort where not a DP++ port. Hope that makes things clearer.
No, I'm not forgetting, I just didn't pay taxes or vote then.
I think that banking is actually a little more honorable than click ads.
Really? Because I don't anticipate having to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of our money to bail out Google and Facebook in order to prevent a global catastrophe. And yet, not only have I had to do that once already in my lifetime for the banking industry, I expect to have to do that again because little has changed since the last time we did it. So, fuck the banks. We're lucky that this bubble is in an industry that is not "too big to fail."
I think you meant to say "Hulu Plus" rather than "Hulu".
Sure, you could have an "open standard," but someone is controlling that, too.
No, that is why it is an open standard. Once it is out there, anyone can implement it and conform to the standard. Maybe someone maintains it and maybe someone is working on the next version, but no one controls it. To illustrate the difference, what platforms does DirectX run on? Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Xbox, and Microsoft Windows Mobile. Notice the pattern? And what platforms does OpenGL run on? All of those plus dozens or even hundreds more. If you want to port your app to the iPhone or the Palm Pre or an Android phone, who is going to have to do more work, the person with the app programmed in DirectX or the person with the app programmed in OpenGL? That is the advantage of an open standard.
[A union] can just beat you when you leave work for the day
Have you ever worked for a union? I have and I don't recall getting beaten for disagreeing with the representative we elected. Did you have a different experience?
Perhaps "open sourcing" was an imprecise choice of words. Obviously part of that would be royalty-free licensing of the patents on VP8. Presumably Google now owns most or all of those; any they don't they can either acquire or get a license that allows anyone to use it. The point is that Google doesn't care about making money off of licensing the codec; what they want is something open that has virtually no barrier to entry, everyone can use, and is widely available on clients. Just like with browsers and OSes, they view this as the platform for their advertising and they want as many users as possible.
That's a bonus. They want the IP. YouTube lives or dies by Adobe Flash. They want a codec that is as efficient as H.264 that they can open source and get into HTML5. Google says Theora isn't; apparently they think VP8 is. Then they can start pushing people towards HTML5 browsers. I bet they could get a lot of YouTube visitors to upgrade if it meant they could watch clips in HD versus the quality you see now with Flash.