One is that all punishment shall occur only when an offense is proven in court, and shall only be imposed by a court, not by a service provider.
And I'd like a pony, too. You know why this is never going to happen? Because it will be too expensive for corporations to track copyright infringement this way. Instead, what will happen is that media companies will pool their money, spend about $10M-$20M on lobbying for their law and a few attention grabbing lawsuits, and save $10M each every year that the new law is effect. Technically, this could probably be counter-balanced by citizens getting together and spending more money on lobbying and campaign donations than the corps, but that is so unlikely that we might as well just go back to sending data via smoke signals.
My point is that you can color a view of history not by lying, but simply by what you concentrate on.
Absolutely. My point though is that anybody's view of history is colored by so many things that it is impossible to eliminate them all. Heck, it can be colored by a nasty divorce, a bad cup of coffee that morning, or a head cold. It's no coincidence that the idea that "history is written by the victors" is common place.
The proper approach to fixing bias is not to say "it's too far right/left, we need to move left/right", it is to debate whether a specific interpretation is reasonable or not.
as demonstrated by profits going up, not just revenue.
And how exactly does that alleviate poverty?
Now you're just trying to live up to your sig, don't you?
Cause they go and sell their fish to the highest bidder now - not where it may be needed the most.
That is the definition of need. He who needs it the most,pays the most.
Did you also notice that the price of fish went down - which helps the wealth accumulation of where the price goes down?
Good grief, do you realize you're actually arguing against the fishermen increasing their profits? Where does the wealth accumulation start then? Education is good, but it is a tool - it is not wealth in and of itself. I really have no idea how you would increase the wealth in a community, because right now, you seem to complain that fishermen - the local population - actually make more money and that the final price of their good went down.
As much as I hate saying this or looking like I'm coming off as defending these changes, in my experience it's true that the experts in history have a left wing (progressive, more accurately) tilt,
Number one, if you can actually define a difference between a progressive person and a left wing one, and have one more person agree with your definition, I'll be impressed.
Number two, could it maybe just be that your coloration of history is the one that's too far right, and that the experts are the ones that are neutral/center? Because right now, this argumentation is not going to lead anywhere but a general pissing match. Either discuss history, or shut up. Dismissing positions because of what the person presenting that position might or might not think is, guess what, an ad hominem.
Notice that the problem in the first article had nothing to do with internet access, but with a certification process attached to their new crop.
Furthermore, what you fail to understand in your analysis of cell phone usage is that it takes only one person in the village to make one call to figure out what to do. The way it actually works is that someone who already has some money buys a used phone, and then resells phone calls to an entire village, or entire area. The costs are indeed spread out among many people, which makes the system work - as demonstrated by profits going up, not just revenue.
Seriously, if you want to critique something, at least know the systems in place. Not to mention that it is a straw man of epic proportions to argue that because neither technology was a silver bullet, it should never be used by anyone.
Internet access helps alleviate poverty in the same way that cell phones: by removing intermediaries and giving farmers access to up-to-date pricing information and buyers.
Or did technology that dramatically improves communication suddenly cease to be useful because you don't have derivatives to sell?
And science is only ever an approximation to the truth, it doesn't try to be anything else (though people try to make it more than it is).
The only people who try to make science into more than it is are religious people. Scientists are keenly aware of the approximations in their search for truth.
BTW, how nice of your God to keep moving the goal posts. It used to be: you can't create life out of dirt. Now you have to create dirt, too? And I presume that the goal posts will keep moving until they arrive at "Use your own space/time continuum."
... the first fully patented life forms. I'm really curious how that would work.... let's say an egg gets a fully artificial set of chromosomes that include patented genes for fixing Thyroid diseases, preventing breast cancer, and purple hair with green skin. Let's also say that that egg develops into a regular person. Is that person property? What happens if they have kids? Do they need to pay royalties?
I can't wait for this stuff, because it will allow for some truly awesome fixes to truly terrible diseases. But I'm also pretty sure that this will result in legal messes of epic proportions. Monsanto will be a side show compared to that.
The problem with his data is that he seems to be doing nothing but time series prediction - which is crap, if one of the underlying variables keeps changing.
So let's turn the question around: what behavior would indicate to you that someone is taking it seriously, and not just exploiting it for commercial gain? Or do you assume that every behavior is an indication of cynical abuse, which means that there is no way to actually prove the opposite? If it's the latter, you're basically dishonest in your position - nothing can be done to prove you wrong.
It seems to me that you are a farmer, considering the we in the "We'll just cut off your fucking food supply." Threatening someone that you won't sell to them is capitalism at its finest. Then again, it also means that your demand is lower, your ROI is lower, and you run the risk of someone else just selling him the food anyway. All in all, probably as useful as you not buying a PS3.
Or are you advocating to starve someone to death by passing a law that says "Smug people don't get food?" In which case.... get the fuck out of my country.
Not necessarily. Machine learning algorithms are generally either neural networks or weighted Bayesian statistics. In other words, the magic comes from abstract numbers that have no human-readable equivalent.
I always found that the easiest way to learn rules for social behavior is to read manuals - i.e. things like Emily Post's Book of Etiquette, How to read a person like a book, etc. Yes, they're not perfect, but if I just treat human behavior like some buggy software package and the books as manuals, it works quite nicely. The manuals work frequently, the rest of the behavior is just bugs that need to be tabulated in a bug db.:)
It's defensible because someone had to do the research to figure out the H.264 algorithms.
Then they should copyright it.
Much of that research will screech to a halt if there's no prospect of making money licensing the resulting patents.
Not really. Math research was alive and well before software patents came about. And implementing a mathematical algorithm in software... well, isn't that the obvious fricking point of a computer?
So the benefit to society is we get a 2160i video standard this decade, not next. Is that worth it?
Maybe we get, maybe we don't. In the meantime, software patents are screwing a lot of people over who are just marginally tied to some software. I have to figure out whether we have to rearchitect our entire video delivery platform because I don't know how much the patents and royalties on h.264 are going to screw us over. That's a real cost.
It gives us an American manned launch capability in the near future, versus the complete unknown of relying on the private sector.
Wrong. Constellation was facing huge technical issues, none of which had known fixes. And isn't relying on the private sector what the US should be doing? I mean, it's what I hear from every red-blooded republican.
It's a tiny investment; Nasa needs about $6 billion a year to keep Constellation going.
Is that the current R&D, or is that its projected operating cost? And considering that the NASA budget stands currently at $20B, $6B is anything but a tiny investment. In fact, it is the single largest component of the budget, on par with the current entire Space budget.
The country needs a manned space program.
No, it does not. The space shuttle has stopped being exciting long ago. I got a bigger kick out of the Mars Rover than any Space Shuttle launch in the last 10 years (save the Save the Hubble missions).
We could easily cut a trillion or so dollars from our national budget and not even notice the difference.
Really? I mean, REALLY? You could cut 25% of the Federal Budget without there being riots in the entire country? I'm sorry, that's just delusional. As a matter of fact, you can look at the hubbub that came from just cutting 0.1% of the budget through the nixing of Constellation program, and see that there is never any cut that is going to be unopposed.
If you believe that providing social safety nets is really what modern leftism is about,
Off-topic and irrelevant. Parent was explicitly comparing the two.
you put your faith in people who, during your lifetime, have shown themselves to be liars, hypocrites and/or murderers.
Unsupported assertion, assumption of unstated activity, and, just because I've heard this little spiel before and know who you're talking about, ad-hominem and straw-man.
Man, what's with conservatives and being unable to debate a point?
Here are two I like to pull out: wage disparity and longevity. One is generally thought to indicate how egalitarian a society is, and the other how good the quality of life is. In both, the US shows some disturbing data.
For wage disparity, Wikipedia has an interesting world map from the World CIA Factbook of 2009: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA_Report_2009.png The US ranks above Russia in its GINI coefficient, and with China, Venezuela and Madascar. Even Greenspan thought that this level of wage disparity is disturbing.
Both are areas where Americans like to beat their chests, and both are areas where the US not only fails, but is on a level with countries that Americans consider ignorant and authoritarian backwaters.
secular humanism isn't a defined group that has a central purpose
It seems to me you don't even know yourself what agenda, secular or humanism means.
Read the Communist Manifesto for some real insight into our college profs.
Wait, the one written by Karl Marx? The one that ends with "Working men of all countries, unite!" and proposes the overthrow of the tyranny from the educational and aristocratic elites? That Communist Manifesto?
Oh.... I get. Alright, I'll stop feeding the troll.
I think the root of the problem you described is rather in the work protection that exists in Europe. To make it short, it's basically impossible to fire someone. To the point that the company would rather have that person not come to work and still draw a pay check for 1-2 years, instead of firing them.
What this means is that there's no opening for new workers - and new workers are overwhelmingly those fresh out of school.
When I last checked, youth unemployment stood at 25% in France (it was a while ago). Whether people go into a trade school or not isn't going to change this problem - the only thing that will is to change the employment laws.
At what cost though? Even a piddly $10K loan, which really doesn't get you anything these days, is a minimum of $17K total cost. The cost for traditional colleges can easily be $100K. In order to make up that cost, people are going to have to be either wildly successful, or default on their loan.
Yes, all else equal, I'd prefer an education over no education. But all things aren't equal. There's a real cost associated with a college education, and if you only have a 10% chance of getting a job that will pay it off, maybe that wasn't the optimal way to go through life. Because, really, what's wrong with being a DMV clerk, a janitor or a telephone sanitation specialist? I mean, aside from not being able to buy the latest HD TV and going out for dinner every night?
How is this different than what your Right wing parents believe?
Wait, believing that the earth is 6000 years old and the Rapture is right around the corner is the same as believing that social safety nets promote a stable society? Is this what you have to resort to in order to make your point?
That right here is the problem with America. More than anything. The complete lack of critical thinking skills, desire for rational debate and the equivalence of truthyness and truth.
Really? Look, we all know that OnLive has serious, serious technical issues before it can be used for something like Crysis 2.
But has no one else noticed that this is another site that is directly associated with an ISP? Especially an ISP that has monopoly or near-monopoly status in various telecom areas? While I'm not concerned that this is done with OnLive, which I think is going to have a short life span anyway, but this is the slow move towards the TV-ification of the Internet. Replace carriers with ISPs and games, sites and services with channels, and you can see where this is heading.
The most toxic and subtle way this will happen is through waving of bandwidth caps. Any site or service that does more than serve basic text will find itself looking at a near insurmountable hurdle.
Fuck. OnLive can live and die on its own terms, but this bundling of sites and ISPs is the sign of the Internet Apocalypse.
the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which limits oil companies' total liability in case of an oil spill to $75 million.
It's worth noting this refers to Economic liability - i.e, liability for economic damage done to an area as a result of an oil spill. BP is still on the hook for cleaning up the mess, and that's a price tag without a limit.
The only thing stopping someone is the fact that the local government doles out the right to sell service in the form of exclusive franchise agreements.
Good point. This is free-market distortion as it best. However, remove that, and you still have the market problem of building a network - even a regional one. Finally, it is not tied to Net Neutrality, nor to any regulation around it.
I've maintained for awhile now that it would be better to remove the legal/regulatory barriers that keep new upstarts from entering the ISP market.
I agree in principle - except that what is keeping people out of the ISP market (and I'm not talking about subleasing access to lines, but ownership of real lines/fibers) is that it is a multi-billion dollar proposition to enter that market. That's why regulation is necessary - because it is trivial for incumbent companies to protect their market.
If you want a peek at the future of the Internet if ATT and Comcast get their wish, take a look at the sites that are tied to specific providers. nbcolympics had video only for the "right" ISPs, and same for espn360. The reality is that telecom providers have the ability to do anything they want to the packets going through their networks, and only the fear of the public outcry that will come from charging extra for access to Youtube is stopping them from doing so. Hence all their astroturfing campaigns.
If the internet was kept "the same" we'd be having this conversation on Usenet over a period of days while we each waited for the UUCP batch job to run and update the posts.
Really? The very first Internet transmission was synchronous, and not a batch job.
Do you actually believe that government control never leads to unforeseen problems?
Do you actually believe that corporate control never leads to unforeseen problems?
Many places have copper pair, coax, satellite, and cell network access to the Internet.
Satellite: unworkable for gaming. Cell: expensive, dependent on coverage, and subject to the whims of the network operator ("we sell an unlimited package, but will cut you off if you download too much"). Copper pair: rarely a competitive environment, even when considering coax a competitor. Often shoddy quality. Coax: do you really want Comcast in control of your internet access? Fiber: expensive, coverage sucks.
Yeah, competition my ass. And $800 for 100 mbit/s connections is ridiculous. Is that the price we pay to have respectable Internet connections?
I think most of the wining is people that want to p2p a lot and complain that they get shutdown.
No, I want a connection that is up-front about what it does, provides access to all ports, and has a pricing structure that isn't the laughing stock of the developed world.
You sound like the perfect mark for the scam that the ppt is trying to pull. Overly enamored with the Free Market ideals, ignorant of the state of the Telco market or their potential for monopolistic abuse, and naive when it comes to messaging.
Speaking of messaging: slick site. I was wondering why they wanted a Chinese blog, but the way they presented it on the site made sense. Hey look - even the dastardly Chinese are agreeing with us! We must be doing something right!
Leave a message on the site, spread the word that that campaign is astroturfing at its best, and move on.
Slashdot Mirror
One is that all punishment shall occur only when an offense is proven in court, and shall only be imposed by a court, not by a service provider.
And I'd like a pony, too. You know why this is never going to happen? Because it will be too expensive for corporations to track copyright infringement this way. Instead, what will happen is that media companies will pool their money, spend about $10M-$20M on lobbying for their law and a few attention grabbing lawsuits, and save $10M each every year that the new law is effect. Technically, this could probably be counter-balanced by citizens getting together and spending more money on lobbying and campaign donations than the corps, but that is so unlikely that we might as well just go back to sending data via smoke signals.
My point is that you can color a view of history not by lying, but simply by what you concentrate on.
Absolutely. My point though is that anybody's view of history is colored by so many things that it is impossible to eliminate them all. Heck, it can be colored by a nasty divorce, a bad cup of coffee that morning, or a head cold. It's no coincidence that the idea that "history is written by the victors" is common place.
The proper approach to fixing bias is not to say "it's too far right/left, we need to move left/right", it is to debate whether a specific interpretation is reasonable or not.
as demonstrated by profits going up, not just revenue.
And how exactly does that alleviate poverty?
Now you're just trying to live up to your sig, don't you?
Cause they go and sell their fish to the highest bidder now - not where it may be needed the most.
That is the definition of need. He who needs it the most,pays the most.
Did you also notice that the price of fish went down - which helps the wealth accumulation of where the price goes down?
Good grief, do you realize you're actually arguing against the fishermen increasing their profits? Where does the wealth accumulation start then? Education is good, but it is a tool - it is not wealth in and of itself. I really have no idea how you would increase the wealth in a community, because right now, you seem to complain that fishermen - the local population - actually make more money and that the final price of their good went down.
As much as I hate saying this or looking like I'm coming off as defending these changes, in my experience it's true that the experts in history have a left wing (progressive, more accurately) tilt,
Number one, if you can actually define a difference between a progressive person and a left wing one, and have one more person agree with your definition, I'll be impressed.
Number two, could it maybe just be that your coloration of history is the one that's too far right, and that the experts are the ones that are neutral/center? Because right now, this argumentation is not going to lead anywhere but a general pissing match. Either discuss history, or shut up. Dismissing positions because of what the person presenting that position might or might not think is, guess what, an ad hominem.
Notice that the problem in the first article had nothing to do with internet access, but with a certification process attached to their new crop.
Furthermore, what you fail to understand in your analysis of cell phone usage is that it takes only one person in the village to make one call to figure out what to do. The way it actually works is that someone who already has some money buys a used phone, and then resells phone calls to an entire village, or entire area. The costs are indeed spread out among many people, which makes the system work - as demonstrated by profits going up, not just revenue.
Seriously, if you want to critique something, at least know the systems in place. Not to mention that it is a straw man of epic proportions to argue that because neither technology was a silver bullet, it should never be used by anyone.
Internet access helps alleviate poverty in the same way that cell phones: by removing intermediaries and giving farmers access to up-to-date pricing information and buyers.
Or did technology that dramatically improves communication suddenly cease to be useful because you don't have derivatives to sell?
And science is only ever an approximation to the truth, it doesn't try to be anything else (though people try to make it more than it is).
The only people who try to make science into more than it is are religious people. Scientists are keenly aware of the approximations in their search for truth.
BTW, how nice of your God to keep moving the goal posts. It used to be: you can't create life out of dirt. Now you have to create dirt, too? And I presume that the goal posts will keep moving until they arrive at "Use your own space/time continuum."
... the first fully patented life forms. I'm really curious how that would work.... let's say an egg gets a fully artificial set of chromosomes that include patented genes for fixing Thyroid diseases, preventing breast cancer, and purple hair with green skin. Let's also say that that egg develops into a regular person. Is that person property? What happens if they have kids? Do they need to pay royalties?
I can't wait for this stuff, because it will allow for some truly awesome fixes to truly terrible diseases. But I'm also pretty sure that this will result in legal messes of epic proportions. Monsanto will be a side show compared to that.
The problem with his data is that he seems to be doing nothing but time series prediction - which is crap, if one of the underlying variables keeps changing.
So let's turn the question around: what behavior would indicate to you that someone is taking it seriously, and not just exploiting it for commercial gain? Or do you assume that every behavior is an indication of cynical abuse, which means that there is no way to actually prove the opposite? If it's the latter, you're basically dishonest in your position - nothing can be done to prove you wrong.
It seems to me that you are a farmer, considering the we in the "We'll just cut off your fucking food supply." Threatening someone that you won't sell to them is capitalism at its finest. Then again, it also means that your demand is lower, your ROI is lower, and you run the risk of someone else just selling him the food anyway. All in all, probably as useful as you not buying a PS3.
Or are you advocating to starve someone to death by passing a law that says "Smug people don't get food?" In which case.... get the fuck out of my country.
Not necessarily. Machine learning algorithms are generally either neural networks or weighted Bayesian statistics. In other words, the magic comes from abstract numbers that have no human-readable equivalent.
I always found that the easiest way to learn rules for social behavior is to read manuals - i.e. things like Emily Post's Book of Etiquette, How to read a person like a book, etc. Yes, they're not perfect, but if I just treat human behavior like some buggy software package and the books as manuals, it works quite nicely. The manuals work frequently, the rest of the behavior is just bugs that need to be tabulated in a bug db. :)
It's defensible because someone had to do the research to figure out the H.264 algorithms.
Then they should copyright it.
Much of that research will screech to a halt if there's no prospect of making money licensing the resulting patents.
Not really. Math research was alive and well before software patents came about. And implementing a mathematical algorithm in software... well, isn't that the obvious fricking point of a computer?
So the benefit to society is we get a 2160i video standard this decade, not next. Is that worth it?
Maybe we get, maybe we don't. In the meantime, software patents are screwing a lot of people over who are just marginally tied to some software. I have to figure out whether we have to rearchitect our entire video delivery platform because I don't know how much the patents and royalties on h.264 are going to screw us over. That's a real cost.
It gives us an American manned launch capability in the near future, versus the complete unknown of relying on the private sector.
Wrong. Constellation was facing huge technical issues, none of which had known fixes. And isn't relying on the private sector what the US should be doing? I mean, it's what I hear from every red-blooded republican.
It's a tiny investment; Nasa needs about $6 billion a year to keep Constellation going.
Is that the current R&D, or is that its projected operating cost? And considering that the NASA budget stands currently at $20B, $6B is anything but a tiny investment. In fact, it is the single largest component of the budget, on par with the current entire Space budget.
The country needs a manned space program.
No, it does not. The space shuttle has stopped being exciting long ago. I got a bigger kick out of the Mars Rover than any Space Shuttle launch in the last 10 years (save the Save the Hubble missions).
We could easily cut a trillion or so dollars from our national budget and not even notice the difference.
Really? I mean, REALLY? You could cut 25% of the Federal Budget without there being riots in the entire country? I'm sorry, that's just delusional. As a matter of fact, you can look at the hubbub that came from just cutting 0.1% of the budget through the nixing of Constellation program, and see that there is never any cut that is going to be unopposed.
Not if you've been to college recently.
Unverifiable assertion, anecdote. Dismissed.
If you believe that providing social safety nets is really what modern leftism is about,
Off-topic and irrelevant. Parent was explicitly comparing the two.
you put your faith in people who, during your lifetime, have shown themselves to be liars, hypocrites and/or murderers.
Unsupported assertion, assumption of unstated activity, and, just because I've heard this little spiel before and know who you're talking about, ad-hominem and straw-man.
Man, what's with conservatives and being unable to debate a point?
Here are two I like to pull out: wage disparity and longevity. One is generally thought to indicate how egalitarian a society is, and the other how good the quality of life is. In both, the US shows some disturbing data.
For wage disparity, Wikipedia has an interesting world map from the World CIA Factbook of 2009: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_Coefficient_World_CIA_Report_2009.png The US ranks above Russia in its GINI coefficient, and with China, Venezuela and Madascar. Even Greenspan thought that this level of wage disparity is disturbing.
For life expectancy, see again the CIA world factbook for 2009: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html. The US ranks 49th, below any EU country except Poland. Heck, Ireland scores higher.
Both are areas where Americans like to beat their chests, and both are areas where the US not only fails, but is on a level with countries that Americans consider ignorant and authoritarian backwaters.
[citation needed] http://lmgtfy.com/?q=marxism+in+universities [lmgtfy.com]
In other words, you got nothing.
the secular humanist agenda
secular humanism isn't a defined group that has a central purpose
It seems to me you don't even know yourself what agenda, secular or humanism means.
Read the Communist Manifesto for some real insight into our college profs.
Wait, the one written by Karl Marx? The one that ends with "Working men of all countries, unite!" and proposes the overthrow of the tyranny from the educational and aristocratic elites? That Communist Manifesto?
Oh.... I get. Alright, I'll stop feeding the troll.
I think the root of the problem you described is rather in the work protection that exists in Europe. To make it short, it's basically impossible to fire someone. To the point that the company would rather have that person not come to work and still draw a pay check for 1-2 years, instead of firing them.
What this means is that there's no opening for new workers - and new workers are overwhelmingly those fresh out of school.
When I last checked, youth unemployment stood at 25% in France (it was a while ago). Whether people go into a trade school or not isn't going to change this problem - the only thing that will is to change the employment laws.
At what cost though? Even a piddly $10K loan, which really doesn't get you anything these days, is a minimum of $17K total cost. The cost for traditional colleges can easily be $100K. In order to make up that cost, people are going to have to be either wildly successful, or default on their loan.
Yes, all else equal, I'd prefer an education over no education. But all things aren't equal. There's a real cost associated with a college education, and if you only have a 10% chance of getting a job that will pay it off, maybe that wasn't the optimal way to go through life. Because, really, what's wrong with being a DMV clerk, a janitor or a telephone sanitation specialist? I mean, aside from not being able to buy the latest HD TV and going out for dinner every night?
Considering the prevalence of Marxism in colleges
[Citation needed]
How is this different than what your Right wing parents believe?
Wait, believing that the earth is 6000 years old and the Rapture is right around the corner is the same as believing that social safety nets promote a stable society? Is this what you have to resort to in order to make your point?
That right here is the problem with America. More than anything. The complete lack of critical thinking skills, desire for rational debate and the equivalence of truthyness and truth.
Really? Look, we all know that OnLive has serious, serious technical issues before it can be used for something like Crysis 2.
But has no one else noticed that this is another site that is directly associated with an ISP? Especially an ISP that has monopoly or near-monopoly status in various telecom areas? While I'm not concerned that this is done with OnLive, which I think is going to have a short life span anyway, but this is the slow move towards the TV-ification of the Internet. Replace carriers with ISPs and games, sites and services with channels, and you can see where this is heading.
The most toxic and subtle way this will happen is through waving of bandwidth caps. Any site or service that does more than serve basic text will find itself looking at a near insurmountable hurdle.
Fuck. OnLive can live and die on its own terms, but this bundling of sites and ISPs is the sign of the Internet Apocalypse.
the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which limits oil companies' total liability in case of an oil spill to $75 million.
It's worth noting this refers to Economic liability - i.e, liability for economic damage done to an area as a result of an oil spill. BP is still on the hook for cleaning up the mess, and that's a price tag without a limit.
The only thing stopping someone is the fact that the local government doles out the right to sell service in the form of exclusive franchise agreements.
Good point. This is free-market distortion as it best. However, remove that, and you still have the market problem of building a network - even a regional one. Finally, it is not tied to Net Neutrality, nor to any regulation around it.
I've maintained for awhile now that it would be better to remove the legal/regulatory barriers that keep new upstarts from entering the ISP market.
I agree in principle - except that what is keeping people out of the ISP market (and I'm not talking about subleasing access to lines, but ownership of real lines/fibers) is that it is a multi-billion dollar proposition to enter that market. That's why regulation is necessary - because it is trivial for incumbent companies to protect their market.
If you want a peek at the future of the Internet if ATT and Comcast get their wish, take a look at the sites that are tied to specific providers. nbcolympics had video only for the "right" ISPs, and same for espn360. The reality is that telecom providers have the ability to do anything they want to the packets going through their networks, and only the fear of the public outcry that will come from charging extra for access to Youtube is stopping them from doing so. Hence all their astroturfing campaigns.
If the internet was kept "the same" we'd be having this conversation on Usenet over a period of days while we each waited for the UUCP batch job to run and update the posts.
Really? The very first Internet transmission was synchronous, and not a batch job.
Do you actually believe that government control never leads to unforeseen problems?
Do you actually believe that corporate control never leads to unforeseen problems?
Many places have copper pair, coax, satellite, and cell network access to the Internet.
Satellite: unworkable for gaming. Cell: expensive, dependent on coverage, and subject to the whims of the network operator ("we sell an unlimited package, but will cut you off if you download too much"). Copper pair: rarely a competitive environment, even when considering coax a competitor. Often shoddy quality. Coax: do you really want Comcast in control of your internet access? Fiber: expensive, coverage sucks.
Yeah, competition my ass. And $800 for 100 mbit/s connections is ridiculous. Is that the price we pay to have respectable Internet connections?
I think most of the wining is people that want to p2p a lot and complain that they get shutdown.
No, I want a connection that is up-front about what it does, provides access to all ports, and has a pricing structure that isn't the laughing stock of the developed world.
You sound like the perfect mark for the scam that the ppt is trying to pull. Overly enamored with the Free Market ideals, ignorant of the state of the Telco market or their potential for monopolistic abuse, and naive when it comes to messaging.
Speaking of messaging: slick site. I was wondering why they wanted a Chinese blog, but the way they presented it on the site made sense. Hey look - even the dastardly Chinese are agreeing with us! We must be doing something right!
Leave a message on the site, spread the word that that campaign is astroturfing at its best, and move on.