If it does, then it's freaking worthless, no better than if I tried to tell everyone they could write text documents but had to pay me or I'd sue them. Because that's what happened with.gif and.mp3, and that's what makes those formats something to avoid at almost all costs because you can be sued if you use them without paying the man.
There are plenty of perfectly good formats that don't require payment to anyone. USE THEM INSTEAD.
I don't care because the only "designed" email I get is sent from spammers or has a virus/trojan attached.
If MS chose to toss out html email entirely and go to either plain or rich text, that would also be just fine with me, because I don't remember hearing about anyone having their computer taken over by security holes a text file and notepad. If this switch enhances security, then that's great too.
The thing is, the people who matter already respect India. The aviation and space industry has looked at India as an up-and-coming power for quite a while now. Yea they're not quite at the truly "graduate level" stuff yet like the US and Russia, but they're working hard at developing their own capabilities and that's what matters.
Plus they're not sitting on their butts whining about how nobody respects them or threatening to kill everyone who doesn't go to their church. That helps a lot.
This is such a great example of what is going RIGHT with the world.
Political decisions led the US to cut off certain space tech transfers to India, and instead of whining about it and complaining that the US was keeping them down, India developed their own space program, filling in the gaps of their technological capabilities as required. They worked hard and made it happen without relying on handouts or whining about how tough their life was.
Now the political realities have changed, but instead of India once again relying on US, UK, or Russian technology, they can compete and relate with the other space powers on a much more equal basis. They have their own capability, they don't owe anyone for it, and they have their national pride instead of being a nation of victims whining about how the US isn't giving them enough candy.
WTG India, the aerospace technology success story of the century. Way to be a winner, not a whiner. As an American sick and tired of every little country bitching about how the US doesn't give them enough money/respect/tech/whatever, I wish more countries would do this, even though it would result in the US ultimately having less influence in the world.
The best I've seen is in a place I can't talk about very much, however...
The room is a brand-new medium sized conference room with full global video-teleconference capability. The table seats about 20-30 people, and each seat has either one or two computers feeding a single LCD/kb/mouse per seat via an A/B switch. The funny part is that the requirement of how many seats would have 0, 1, or 2 computers grew between concept development and implementation, but they never sourced any kind of rackmount setup or even any place to put that many computers. So in the closet are dozens of PCs (mostly Dells) lying on their sides stacked from the floor nearly to the ceiling, hooked into 2 separate networks that must never be connected together.
I heard a good story about what happened when a computer near the bottom of the stack failed... It took half a day to unwire, unstack, fix, re-stack, re-wire, and then re-wire again because they'd hooked up the wrong computers to some of the conference table seats. I'm sure we "saved" a bunch of money going with all those Dells instead of a rack of blades or whatever, and the computers by themselves fit the requirements, but maintaining them is quite a chore.
I'm not saying Jobs will go to jail, but as there appear to be many forged and fake options documents surfacing, *someone* is going to jail. That's my prediction...
I'm predicting some jail time for a few Apple execs. Now that forged stock option paperwork linked to Jobs has appeared, it's just a matter of getting the legal thrash over with while they find out who goes to jail for being greedy bastards and who is merely unlucky enough to be within the frag pattern.
I hope the student wins, and the school board has to pay for the student to attend weekend or summer classes to make up for the missed school.
That's what he's suing for, the missed school, right? What else could he want, since he's not paying for the legal representation? It's not like he's losing wages...
+1 to the original poster, for letting us know his real feelings by claiming people have somehow been cheated by an entire industry.
Whether it's civil or military, the "industry" goes where the needs are matched with money, plain and simple. The military has identified a CRITICAL need for UAV technology and has consequently poured a ton of money into deveopment. There is apparently no corresponding critical need for civil UAVs, and with nobody putting money into the research OF COURSE there is no movement in the industry in this area.
But I guess the original poster feels we are all cheated somehow, and that makes me question very seriously his motivations and concept of how the world works.
Dude, you're investing someone else's money... That means you have a bigger responsibility to those people than you do to any number of open source companies.
If it was your own money, I'd say go ahead and invest wherever you want. But since you're just "in charge" of someone else's money, you have an obligation to invest it wherever you'll get the best return.
It was a nice thought, but in this case you really should try to make money instead of social policy.
You're absolutely right, I had forgotten the children.
With my idea, children won't have to worry about being abused over trivial things like bad grades or busting curfew. As soon as Dad threatens a spanking, the cops can arrest Dad for attempted child abuse. When I was 8, I sure wished the cops would bust in and arrest my parents when I got spanked for mouthing off to my parents when they told me to put away my toys. Why they couldn't have just let me be a smartass brat?
Yea, think about the children and all those terrible parents who discipline their children. Toss the lot of them in jail. They're all subversives and only people with something to hide will complain anyhow.
Here's an extention of it - modern cable tuner boxes have to send some information back to the cable company, so why not just put a little microphone in the tuner boxes? Then the special police software can be fed the sounds from inside your house, and if there is any sound of violent disturbance, they can respond. It's commonly known that rape and murder often occur in the home, and we're finding out more and more that in this new age of terrorism, violent crimes against society often begin in the home as well.
Since not everyone has cable tv, the government can put one of these boxes in everyone's house using the same infrastructure that tracks and enforces the TV tax. They have the customer records and housing database, so it's stupid to let such a volume of government collected personal information go unused.
Think of all the crime we could stop before it's committed! If crime can be stopped at the point when it's still just griping about the government or your boss, then we'll all be safer.
For those who don't THINK about what you read, reference "sarcasm" and "satire", along with "Orwell: 1984".
How long ago was it a capital offense to possess a written copy of the bible? Back then, that was considered to be just as bad, but we (society) decided that merely posessing information was not a crime. So, are we back to the dark ages? Shall we start destroying printing presses again? Maybe we should stop teaching children to read, since it apparently leads to terrorism charges.
Two possible solutions. First, part together a basic system using old/cheap parts, and run a live cd version of linux on it. knoppix comes to mind immediately, but if you're technically inclined you could probably find a customized solution that would fit on a cheapish USB flash drive so you wouldn't even need the cdrom drive. If you pick slower/cooler components, you can go with a small and quiet case that wouldn't even have many (if any) fans to go bad over time.
Second solution is to bite the bullet and go with an imac or mac mini. There are plenty of cheap LCD displays on sale "out there", so the cheapest mac mini plus the cheapest 17" LCD you could find would give you a rather usable system for not a whole lot of cash. If you pay out a bit more money, you'd even have the benefit of the apple service plan in case things go sour.
I won't even go into the wide variety of custom boards or even the epia series, because you seem to have ruled out pretty much everything on the market so I don't see you being willing to do the work that would go into a customized boot-cd style linux installation that would run on an epia or other small form factor board using a flash drive image. If you are, then it's just a matter of picking the parts, shelling out your cash, and following the howtos/faqs/readmes. Otherwise, the two solutions above are probably the easiest way to get a usable system at a reasonable price while spending only a limited amount of time getting it working and stable.
The warning labels say really bad things could happen if you dispose of the phone in a fire... Well, I WANT the darn thing destroyed beyond repair so how about tossing it into a fire? Outdoors of course because there is a non-zero chance that it could explode, and it WILL release stuff you don't want to breath, but that's what outdoor bonfires are for. Ok, it would be bad for the environment if everyone did this, but most people just toss them in the trash, trade them in, or give them to charity so it wouldn't be much of an enviro impact. If you're worried about it, just use a REALLY hot fire.
There ought to be other warnings that could be useful without using fire... For example, I had a phone that recommended against eating the phone and/or battery. I'm pretty sure that eating the phone (or convincing another critter to eat it) would render the memory unreadable, nearly as thoroughly as disposing of it in a fire.
Make sure you retain a lawyer the next time you reinstall windows or linux, because you never know if the RIAA is going to hit you at random.
I recommend suing Bill Gates the next time he buys a new hard drive, on the theory that he's deleting evidence. No actual proof is required, merely wiping a hard drive (identity theft protection, right?) is PROOF he's up to something!
The real reason why is that they're a bunch of unrealistic commie liberal pussies who think the concept of evil doesn't exist, and the world would be at peace if only the people who defend their cushy existence suddenly quit going to work one day.
Assholes like this piss me off because their retarded worldview invites invasion and war, and then everyone else has to fight to save the weak ass pacifists from the hell they created.
Look at the body count for the 60 years prior to 1945 and the body count for the 60 years after 1945, and then come back and try to tell me why military research is a bad thing. Come up with one single instance where a nation has started a war by dropping a nuclear weapon. Compare the body count for wars between nuclear armed countries with the body count in wars between nations without nuclear weapons.
If you look at the situation from an honest, analytical non-emotional perspective, those stupid ass "no military use" clauses are more likely to cause great harm to people than the software would if it was used to further develop military weaponry. The raw numbers don't lie. Computer people like to brag about how analytical they are, but most are just as fucking stupid and hysterical on this issue as any mud-hut squatting jungle savage or illiterate flower child hippie.
It's as if toll booths were being put up on interstate freeways... We already paid for those roads and we keep paying for them through income and gasoline taxes, so the local govts have no right to collect additional tolls. But that's what's being threatened here, and it needs to be fought tooth and nail. Another example is if cities started charging extra phone fees for incoming calls because they originated outside the city limits. The govt absolutely forbids that kind of gouging, but it's exactly what they're trying to do with internet bandwidth.
2 examples of why we need govt regulation to ensure network neutrality. It's become an essential national resource just like the phone system or the telegraph before that, so what's different this time? Oh yea, it's congress who has changed course 180 degrees from protecting national resources to ensuring that more money gets into a select group of hands. That's all that's changed.
We used to be able to trust congress to at least pretend to act in the national interest, but the DMCA, the repeated MPAA/RIAA copyright modification attempts, and now this make it pretty clear who congress is working for.
By "sending an internet", I think he was thinking "sending a funny pRoN clip", but halfway through he realized he was a dumbass and the first word he could think of was "internet".
By his argument, my ISP should chop bandwidth to your site unless you or your ISP coughs up extra money, because ones and zeroes to and from your site should somehow be more expensive than ones and zeros to and from sites on my ISP's subnets... That is, unless you pay EXTRA. See, paying for bandwidth only ONCE isn't enough, and to ensure that this senator's internets (I think he meant email but he could mean pRoN) isn't held up a few minutes by me browsing your site once or twice a day, ones and zeroes passing along the public funding subsidized internet should pass through various tollbooths, with each carrier charging whatever they can get on top of the network access and bandwidth fees I personally pay.
Most places call this extortion, and the mob made quite a living doing this. Apparently the mob has gotten to congress in a big way, since approx 50% of the senate commerce committee seems to have been bought off (plus/minus the ones who are simply ignorant). I'm not sure whether to send a letter to my congressman or stockpile.45 ammo and bottled water, but it's clear that the telecom mob is pulling strings here. Pay up or get cut off is the message, no different than the moonshiners back during prohibition, and congress is dancing like the drunken bought-off puppets they are.
Over the top? Maybe. But read the distinguished Senator's attempt to explain how the internet is made up of "tubes", and you'll realize why I'm convinced they're dipping at both the cash and booze troughs. A 2nd grader sopping full of Jack Daniels could come up with a better explanation of how the internet works...
He even claims that net neutrality has caused the DoD to create it's own "separate internet". What a load of crap. This guy is either stupid, amazingly ignorant, chemically imbalanced, flat-out-drunk, or, since we assume senators don't fit into those categories, bought off by someone. He's so wrong that as a citizen I'd like to believe that he's merely ignorant, but it's not POSSIBLE to be that wrong about the structure of the internet. What part of DARPAnet and the relationship between NIPR and SIPR nets, and the fact that the "internet" is merely ones and zeros running around wires and glass, is he unable to understand?
There is so much excess capacity laying around that Google is buying up so-called "dark fiber" (unused fiber optic cable) by the hundreds of miles. How long until these corrupt senators figure out a way to blackmail google into halting their purchases? I give it a year, because net neutrality is big money, the mob never backs off of money this big, and senators need their cut because it's going to be a tough election cycle and campaigns are expensive.
I think it's a smart hedge against current infrastructure owners who are trying to make certain ones and zeros cost more than other ones and zeros. They say buying bandwidth isn't enough, they also want more money for certain ones and zeros depending on the aggregate meaning of certain groups of ones and zeros.
Google, benefitting in general from flat-rate fees for bandwidth regardless of content, only naturally would like to keep this from happening. In the event that they fail in the courts and in congress, it would make a whole lot of sense for them to simply own a LOT of the basic infrastructure themselves. This gives them leverage in two ways - first, they can sell this bandwidth at whatever fee structure they find fair, enhancing their business by catering to their customers. Second, they can use their infrastructure as a bargaining chip to ensure that other carriers do not levy additional content-based and company-specific fees. Try to charge google and google customers extra fees, and get cut out of google's search engine and lose access to their fiber.
The carriers have been entrusted with a national resource and have benefitted from huge government concessions and subsidies for decades, but now that they have a little wiggle room they're turning around and trying to gouge more money out of both the average consumers, but also content providers on a deliberately biased basis. Some customers are simply going to be charged more for their bandwidth than others, and some customers will find themselves throttled or cut off entirely if they don't pay the proper extortion fee.
The phone system was supposed to be equally accessable by EVERYONE in the nation. That's why the govt set up the telcos the way they did from the beginning. Minor variations by region and based largely on actual costs aside, it cost about as much to get a phone in new york city as it did in the middle of Arizona. And calling from California to Nevada or California to Maine cost the exact same amount per minute. But now the data carriers are going to take this nationally funded infrastructure and make it inherently unequal.
That's abuse of a national resource, but knowing that congress is hopelessly in the pockets of lobbyists and big business, it makes complete sense for google to bank away some insurance against this sort of thing.
Back when the automobile was a new thing, laws were passed to protect among other entrenched industries, the makers and sellers of buggy whips. The protections became more and more hysterical as buggy whip maker after maker went out of business.
Leap ahead 80 or so years, and now it's the internet's turn to retire the current generation of buggy whip makers. And yes we'll see the buggy whip makers and sellers of today get more and more hysterical trying to protect their old ways instead of embracing an inevitable change. The government follows the money and the old men/women who make and enforce the laws are inclined to join the ranks protecting the buggy whip industry, but in the end the buggy whip will be retired.
Telecoms fighting VoIP and anyone agitating to suppress the open sharing/distribution of raw information are today's buggy whip industries, and this is yet more hysteria from a dying group of old men. The sooner their industry is killed off, the better.
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The real question - does it have to be licensed?
.gif and .mp3, and that's what makes those formats something to avoid at almost all costs because you can be sued if you use them without paying the man.
If it does, then it's freaking worthless, no better than if I tried to tell everyone they could write text documents but had to pay me or I'd sue them. Because that's what happened with
There are plenty of perfectly good formats that don't require payment to anyone. USE THEM INSTEAD.
Get one of these.
http://www.jdteck.com/repeaters-consumer.htm
Yea they cost a few hundred bucks, but they look really simple.
The stuff in that movie isn't ball lightning... It's just burning stuff bouncing around on the floor.
I don't care because the only "designed" email I get is sent from spammers or has a virus/trojan attached.
If MS chose to toss out html email entirely and go to either plain or rich text, that would also be just fine with me, because I don't remember hearing about anyone having their computer taken over by security holes a text file and notepad. If this switch enhances security, then that's great too.
The thing is, the people who matter already respect India. The aviation and space industry has looked at India as an up-and-coming power for quite a while now. Yea they're not quite at the truly "graduate level" stuff yet like the US and Russia, but they're working hard at developing their own capabilities and that's what matters.
Plus they're not sitting on their butts whining about how nobody respects them or threatening to kill everyone who doesn't go to their church. That helps a lot.
This is such a great example of what is going RIGHT with the world.
Political decisions led the US to cut off certain space tech transfers to India, and instead of whining about it and complaining that the US was keeping them down, India developed their own space program, filling in the gaps of their technological capabilities as required. They worked hard and made it happen without relying on handouts or whining about how tough their life was.
Now the political realities have changed, but instead of India once again relying on US, UK, or Russian technology, they can compete and relate with the other space powers on a much more equal basis. They have their own capability, they don't owe anyone for it, and they have their national pride instead of being a nation of victims whining about how the US isn't giving them enough candy.
WTG India, the aerospace technology success story of the century. Way to be a winner, not a whiner. As an American sick and tired of every little country bitching about how the US doesn't give them enough money/respect/tech/whatever, I wish more countries would do this, even though it would result in the US ultimately having less influence in the world.
The best I've seen is in a place I can't talk about very much, however...
The room is a brand-new medium sized conference room with full global video-teleconference capability. The table seats about 20-30 people, and each seat has either one or two computers feeding a single LCD/kb/mouse per seat via an A/B switch. The funny part is that the requirement of how many seats would have 0, 1, or 2 computers grew between concept development and implementation, but they never sourced any kind of rackmount setup or even any place to put that many computers. So in the closet are dozens of PCs (mostly Dells) lying on their sides stacked from the floor nearly to the ceiling, hooked into 2 separate networks that must never be connected together.
I heard a good story about what happened when a computer near the bottom of the stack failed... It took half a day to unwire, unstack, fix, re-stack, re-wire, and then re-wire again because they'd hooked up the wrong computers to some of the conference table seats. I'm sure we "saved" a bunch of money going with all those Dells instead of a rack of blades or whatever, and the computers by themselves fit the requirements, but maintaining them is quite a chore.
I'm not saying Jobs will go to jail, but as there appear to be many forged and fake options documents surfacing, *someone* is going to jail. That's my prediction...
I'm predicting some jail time for a few Apple execs. Now that forged stock option paperwork linked to Jobs has appeared, it's just a matter of getting the legal thrash over with while they find out who goes to jail for being greedy bastards and who is merely unlucky enough to be within the frag pattern.
I hope the student wins, and the school board has to pay for the student to attend weekend or summer classes to make up for the missed school.
That's what he's suing for, the missed school, right? What else could he want, since he's not paying for the legal representation? It's not like he's losing wages...
+1 to the original poster, for letting us know his real feelings by claiming people have somehow been cheated by an entire industry.
Whether it's civil or military, the "industry" goes where the needs are matched with money, plain and simple. The military has identified a CRITICAL need for UAV technology and has consequently poured a ton of money into deveopment. There is apparently no corresponding critical need for civil UAVs, and with nobody putting money into the research OF COURSE there is no movement in the industry in this area.
But I guess the original poster feels we are all cheated somehow, and that makes me question very seriously his motivations and concept of how the world works.
Dude, you're investing someone else's money... That means you have a bigger responsibility to those people than you do to any number of open source companies.
If it was your own money, I'd say go ahead and invest wherever you want. But since you're just "in charge" of someone else's money, you have an obligation to invest it wherever you'll get the best return.
It was a nice thought, but in this case you really should try to make money instead of social policy.
You're absolutely right, I had forgotten the children.
With my idea, children won't have to worry about being abused over trivial things like bad grades or busting curfew. As soon as Dad threatens a spanking, the cops can arrest Dad for attempted child abuse. When I was 8, I sure wished the cops would bust in and arrest my parents when I got spanked for mouthing off to my parents when they told me to put away my toys. Why they couldn't have just let me be a smartass brat?
Yea, think about the children and all those terrible parents who discipline their children. Toss the lot of them in jail. They're all subversives and only people with something to hide will complain anyhow.
That's a great idea!
Here's an extention of it - modern cable tuner boxes have to send some information back to the cable company, so why not just put a little microphone in the tuner boxes? Then the special police software can be fed the sounds from inside your house, and if there is any sound of violent disturbance, they can respond. It's commonly known that rape and murder often occur in the home, and we're finding out more and more that in this new age of terrorism, violent crimes against society often begin in the home as well.
Since not everyone has cable tv, the government can put one of these boxes in everyone's house using the same infrastructure that tracks and enforces the TV tax. They have the customer records and housing database, so it's stupid to let such a volume of government collected personal information go unused.
Think of all the crime we could stop before it's committed! If crime can be stopped at the point when it's still just griping about the government or your boss, then we'll all be safer.
For those who don't THINK about what you read, reference "sarcasm" and "satire", along with "Orwell: 1984".
How long ago was it a capital offense to possess a written copy of the bible? Back then, that was considered to be just as bad, but we (society) decided that merely posessing information was not a crime. So, are we back to the dark ages? Shall we start destroying printing presses again? Maybe we should stop teaching children to read, since it apparently leads to terrorism charges.
Two possible solutions. First, part together a basic system using old/cheap parts, and run a live cd version of linux on it. knoppix comes to mind immediately, but if you're technically inclined you could probably find a customized solution that would fit on a cheapish USB flash drive so you wouldn't even need the cdrom drive. If you pick slower/cooler components, you can go with a small and quiet case that wouldn't even have many (if any) fans to go bad over time.
Second solution is to bite the bullet and go with an imac or mac mini. There are plenty of cheap LCD displays on sale "out there", so the cheapest mac mini plus the cheapest 17" LCD you could find would give you a rather usable system for not a whole lot of cash. If you pay out a bit more money, you'd even have the benefit of the apple service plan in case things go sour.
I won't even go into the wide variety of custom boards or even the epia series, because you seem to have ruled out pretty much everything on the market so I don't see you being willing to do the work that would go into a customized boot-cd style linux installation that would run on an epia or other small form factor board using a flash drive image. If you are, then it's just a matter of picking the parts, shelling out your cash, and following the howtos/faqs/readmes. Otherwise, the two solutions above are probably the easiest way to get a usable system at a reasonable price while spending only a limited amount of time getting it working and stable.
The warning labels say really bad things could happen if you dispose of the phone in a fire... Well, I WANT the darn thing destroyed beyond repair so how about tossing it into a fire? Outdoors of course because there is a non-zero chance that it could explode, and it WILL release stuff you don't want to breath, but that's what outdoor bonfires are for. Ok, it would be bad for the environment if everyone did this, but most people just toss them in the trash, trade them in, or give them to charity so it wouldn't be much of an enviro impact. If you're worried about it, just use a REALLY hot fire.
There ought to be other warnings that could be useful without using fire... For example, I had a phone that recommended against eating the phone and/or battery. I'm pretty sure that eating the phone (or convincing another critter to eat it) would render the memory unreadable, nearly as thoroughly as disposing of it in a fire.
Make sure you retain a lawyer the next time you reinstall windows or linux, because you never know if the RIAA is going to hit you at random.
I recommend suing Bill Gates the next time he buys a new hard drive, on the theory that he's deleting evidence. No actual proof is required, merely wiping a hard drive (identity theft protection, right?) is PROOF he's up to something!
The real reason why is that they're a bunch of unrealistic commie liberal pussies who think the concept of evil doesn't exist, and the world would be at peace if only the people who defend their cushy existence suddenly quit going to work one day.
Assholes like this piss me off because their retarded worldview invites invasion and war, and then everyone else has to fight to save the weak ass pacifists from the hell they created.
Look at the body count for the 60 years prior to 1945 and the body count for the 60 years after 1945, and then come back and try to tell me why military research is a bad thing. Come up with one single instance where a nation has started a war by dropping a nuclear weapon. Compare the body count for wars between nuclear armed countries with the body count in wars between nations without nuclear weapons.
If you look at the situation from an honest, analytical non-emotional perspective, those stupid ass "no military use" clauses are more likely to cause great harm to people than the software would if it was used to further develop military weaponry. The raw numbers don't lie. Computer people like to brag about how analytical they are, but most are just as fucking stupid and hysterical on this issue as any mud-hut squatting jungle savage or illiterate flower child hippie.
Back in my day, we called that a prank.
Ha. Hah.
*golf clap*
It's as if toll booths were being put up on interstate freeways... We already paid for those roads and we keep paying for them through income and gasoline taxes, so the local govts have no right to collect additional tolls. But that's what's being threatened here, and it needs to be fought tooth and nail. Another example is if cities started charging extra phone fees for incoming calls because they originated outside the city limits. The govt absolutely forbids that kind of gouging, but it's exactly what they're trying to do with internet bandwidth.
2 examples of why we need govt regulation to ensure network neutrality. It's become an essential national resource just like the phone system or the telegraph before that, so what's different this time? Oh yea, it's congress who has changed course 180 degrees from protecting national resources to ensuring that more money gets into a select group of hands. That's all that's changed.
We used to be able to trust congress to at least pretend to act in the national interest, but the DMCA, the repeated MPAA/RIAA copyright modification attempts, and now this make it pretty clear who congress is working for.
By "sending an internet", I think he was thinking "sending a funny pRoN clip", but halfway through he realized he was a dumbass and the first word he could think of was "internet".
By his argument, my ISP should chop bandwidth to your site unless you or your ISP coughs up extra money, because ones and zeroes to and from your site should somehow be more expensive than ones and zeros to and from sites on my ISP's subnets... That is, unless you pay EXTRA. See, paying for bandwidth only ONCE isn't enough, and to ensure that this senator's internets (I think he meant email but he could mean pRoN) isn't held up a few minutes by me browsing your site once or twice a day, ones and zeroes passing along the public funding subsidized internet should pass through various tollbooths, with each carrier charging whatever they can get on top of the network access and bandwidth fees I personally pay.
.45 ammo and bottled water, but it's clear that the telecom mob is pulling strings here. Pay up or get cut off is the message, no different than the moonshiners back during prohibition, and congress is dancing like the drunken bought-off puppets they are.
Most places call this extortion, and the mob made quite a living doing this. Apparently the mob has gotten to congress in a big way, since approx 50% of the senate commerce committee seems to have been bought off (plus/minus the ones who are simply ignorant). I'm not sure whether to send a letter to my congressman or stockpile
Over the top? Maybe. But read the distinguished Senator's attempt to explain how the internet is made up of "tubes", and you'll realize why I'm convinced they're dipping at both the cash and booze troughs. A 2nd grader sopping full of Jack Daniels could come up with a better explanation of how the internet works...
He even claims that net neutrality has caused the DoD to create it's own "separate internet". What a load of crap. This guy is either stupid, amazingly ignorant, chemically imbalanced, flat-out-drunk, or, since we assume senators don't fit into those categories, bought off by someone. He's so wrong that as a citizen I'd like to believe that he's merely ignorant, but it's not POSSIBLE to be that wrong about the structure of the internet. What part of DARPAnet and the relationship between NIPR and SIPR nets, and the fact that the "internet" is merely ones and zeros running around wires and glass, is he unable to understand?
There is so much excess capacity laying around that Google is buying up so-called "dark fiber" (unused fiber optic cable) by the hundreds of miles. How long until these corrupt senators figure out a way to blackmail google into halting their purchases? I give it a year, because net neutrality is big money, the mob never backs off of money this big, and senators need their cut because it's going to be a tough election cycle and campaigns are expensive.
I think it's a smart hedge against current infrastructure owners who are trying to make certain ones and zeros cost more than other ones and zeros. They say buying bandwidth isn't enough, they also want more money for certain ones and zeros depending on the aggregate meaning of certain groups of ones and zeros.
Google, benefitting in general from flat-rate fees for bandwidth regardless of content, only naturally would like to keep this from happening. In the event that they fail in the courts and in congress, it would make a whole lot of sense for them to simply own a LOT of the basic infrastructure themselves. This gives them leverage in two ways - first, they can sell this bandwidth at whatever fee structure they find fair, enhancing their business by catering to their customers. Second, they can use their infrastructure as a bargaining chip to ensure that other carriers do not levy additional content-based and company-specific fees. Try to charge google and google customers extra fees, and get cut out of google's search engine and lose access to their fiber.
The carriers have been entrusted with a national resource and have benefitted from huge government concessions and subsidies for decades, but now that they have a little wiggle room they're turning around and trying to gouge more money out of both the average consumers, but also content providers on a deliberately biased basis. Some customers are simply going to be charged more for their bandwidth than others, and some customers will find themselves throttled or cut off entirely if they don't pay the proper extortion fee.
The phone system was supposed to be equally accessable by EVERYONE in the nation. That's why the govt set up the telcos the way they did from the beginning. Minor variations by region and based largely on actual costs aside, it cost about as much to get a phone in new york city as it did in the middle of Arizona. And calling from California to Nevada or California to Maine cost the exact same amount per minute. But now the data carriers are going to take this nationally funded infrastructure and make it inherently unequal.
That's abuse of a national resource, but knowing that congress is hopelessly in the pockets of lobbyists and big business, it makes complete sense for google to bank away some insurance against this sort of thing.
Back when the automobile was a new thing, laws were passed to protect among other entrenched industries, the makers and sellers of buggy whips. The protections became more and more hysterical as buggy whip maker after maker went out of business.
Leap ahead 80 or so years, and now it's the internet's turn to retire the current generation of buggy whip makers. And yes we'll see the buggy whip makers and sellers of today get more and more hysterical trying to protect their old ways instead of embracing an inevitable change. The government follows the money and the old men/women who make and enforce the laws are inclined to join the ranks protecting the buggy whip industry, but in the end the buggy whip will be retired.
Telecoms fighting VoIP and anyone agitating to suppress the open sharing/distribution of raw information are today's buggy whip industries, and this is yet more hysteria from a dying group of old men. The sooner their industry is killed off, the better.