No. One way of looking at an airfoil is that there is a pressure difference between the top and bottom sides, causing an upwards force. However, this interpretation is totally equivalent to the one that the airfoil is deflecting the flow of air downwards, and so the helicopter moves up by conservation of momentum. Both interpretations are true and equivalent, just different ways of looking at the same thing. Therefore, this device works in the same way as a helicopter.
PS. I think it would be much easier to use the momentum explanation on kids in elementary school (I got the bernouilli one). Neither explanation, given at an elementary level, says why the airfoil has this effect (either causing air to move faster on top, or causing a downwards deflection - and no, the path length difference is an incorrect explanation), so they are just as incomplete, and the momentum one would be an intro to conservation of momentum.
As I replied elsewhere, I think relativity does conflict with newton's law with all the variables defined as they were. If you redefine momentum to something new, sure, I agree. But newtonian mechanics *is* wrong after all.
As for the rest.. I actually know almost nothing about MOND, and I can't tell whether this experiment is worthwile. But my point was that universal laws have been shown wrong before, even when most observations seemed to support them.
You're right that you can still use an equation that looks like F = dp/dt in GR, but I still think the original second law is wrong with all the quantities defined as they were. Writing it your way, it is then the definition of momentum which is wrong (or going on, the definition of velocity as dx/dt not dx/dTau). (Also in GR F= dp/dTau, not dp/dt if t is the time coordinate). The symbols in GR just happen to look and act quite like the newtonian symbols, but are interpreted differently.
Anyway, it is the error in predicted motion that is interesting here, where 'F=ma' gives the newtonian motion, but this becomes like 'F = ma + m Gamma Vi Vj' in GR. You can't clearly see the different motions each theory gives in F = dp/dt.
The key is that our experimental observations only cover the cases we have thought to test - he would be testing the law in a new way.
In fact, we already know that newton's second law is wrong from special and general relativity, but you only see so at high velocities/high curvature of space. It was only once we had the theory that we knew how to test it properly. Here he is testing the law in the case of very small accelerations, based on a theory which tries to explain an astrophysics observation that is not well understood. Who knows, he might find something.
In addition, we already know that our theory from general relativity is incomplete because it does not match up to quantum mechanics, so there is surely still something to be discovered there somewhere.
150W? So you could say the same about simply switching off the lights. Very enlightening.
I can look out my window and see that almost every single office in the skyscrapers downtown has the lights on, even though it's past working hours....
The signal is too weak to be able to differentialte between 1,000s of possible word 'brain patterns'. It can differentiate the 26 letter 'brain patterns' with effort:
The system today is also quite slow -- even a trained system can "read" only 18 characters per minute, or three or four words.
What I think might be cool to try is placing a pack of electrodes in a nerve leading to a non-essential muscle somewhere. I would guess you can get a much more reliable signal that way (if you set it up right), and maybe a more complex signal if that nerve carries multiple signals (eg one for each muscle in a pack of muscles). It would have much greater medical consequences than this brain-cap idea, though..
These studies concluded that the maximum radiation dose to an individual living within 1 km of a modern [coal] power plant is equivalent to a minor, perhaps 1 to 5 percent, increase above the radiation from the natural environment.
I think I got that link from a slashdot comment a while ago.
Not that I am totally convinced of global warming, but I feel you left out their main argument. In the next sentence after the part you quoted, they give their true explanation and a link to a more detailed explanation. They say that something besides CO2 causes a first small jump in temperature as well as a rise in CO2, but that this increased CO2 then causes the real warming. In other words they say there is a feedback system pushed by CO2 which is triggered by some unknown mechanism. So, maybe the idea in global warming is that *we* have triggered the feedback cycle.
Also, if you look at the graph of the temperature over the last 400000 years it appears to me that there is a really sharp increase in temperature when an ice age ends, and maybe this is the feedback cycle suddenly activating. But.. I'm not really qualified to interpret the data.
And anyway, the problem with CO2 isn't it's direct effect on plant and animal life, it is that it may cause global temerature increase. So the quote is doubly irrelevant.
However, the point that CO2 levels were higher millions of years ago is interesting. Here are two graphs from Wikipedia:
Data over the past 400 Thousand years showing the sudden increase after the industrial revolution. Also a subplot over the past 1000 years.
Data over the past 500 Million Years showing the higher levels of CO2 in the past.
I don't get this. As I understand, tiers add one major parameter to the service you buy: Latency. We already pay based on bandwidth and traffic, now there is just one more variable. Yes, if decreasing latency solves the problems better than just increasing bandwidth, then indeed there is less incetive to increase bandwidth, and rightly because we wouldn't need it as much.
I think that any accounting tricks they can pull based on latency control, they can already pull based on bandwidth control.
Also, more generally: I think the argument against tiers will be purely technical: It seems plausible to me that decreasing latency would solve problems for eg online video or online games that aren't solvable by increasing bandwidh. However, as the parent pointed out, this is not necessarily the case. I don't know enough to say.
The other problems you and the parent point out (extortion, money tricks) are solved by common carrier laws. We need to keep those. It just happens that the people arguing for a tiered net are also arguing for removal of common carrier laws.
In that case there is no point to watermarking, from the point of view of the record companies. People could put songs up for download claiming they were stolen, and not get sued. It only takes one instance of the song being 'stolen' for the whole system to break down, as that one copy is available for download everywhere, with no one to sue about it. They might as well forget about watermarking. (not that I am in favor of drm, btw)
I imagine that in the not too distant future some perfectly healthy geek will have one of these implanted.
The problem is, the signal is sent to the optic nerve according to the article -- which is already being used by your eyes if they are healthy. The signal from the camera would interfere the signal from your eye, effectively blinding it (probably). Therefore the current system is only useful to blind people who aren't using their optic nerve.
Um.. if you read the pages you link, they give the answer, especially the What we need the money for page on the finances page. In short, it is because they are buying over $1,200,000 of new servers, increases in other expenses by around $200,000, and aim to increase their cash reserves by $300,000.
In the 2006 financial statement you link, they say they had $1,508,039 of revenue, they spent $791,907 on expenses (eg internet hosting) and spent another $428,309 on buying new servers. This, combined with the $137,237 they started with and $67,253 of other factors (inflation etc), leaves them with $512,313 in cash.
On the 'What we need the money for' page they say that in 2007 they plan to spend $1,670,000 on new servers (and also increase expenses by ~ $200,000). Compare this to the $428,309 spent in 2006 on servers. So, that seems to be where the money is going: new servers.
(disclaimer: I have no experience dealing with large amounts of money or accounting)
I agree, in all display systems the final conversion from electric signal to light is going to be analog. As long as the fluctuations in your signal are smaller than those introduced the final analog conversion, you have no image degradation.
So, analog signals should be fine if set up correctly, but you must admit that digital signals give much more protection against signal degradation. I have never set up anything like this, but I would expect that there is less to worry about if you use mostly digital signals. Therefore there is NO REASON to use analog over digital (at least with signal degradation in mind.. maybe pricing/availability make analog easier). The two are equivalent with regard to degradation, once set up correctly.
Couldn't that be a good thing? Then everyone could see how much they are getting screwed by buying big label crap, and decide not to buy it. It would help publicise the advantages of 'no drm', so that people would realize there is a choice.
So, Skype censors text messages in China, and has some kind of blacklist there too. That's news to me. Scary.
I also didn't realize companies go to such lengths to obfuscate their code. Putting all that work into obfuscation seems pointless as somebody is going to be able to undo it, as demonstrated by the link. As pointed out there, the fact that it's obfuscated is what makes it interesting to understand. Like the act of reading the bios, it hints that there's something sinister hidden (like censorship).
You say it's funny, but in the future your assumption that something from 120 years ago has expired copyright won't be true... copyright already lasts up to 120 years in the US (for work for hire, with delayed publication). No joke.
I agree there are a lot of things that affect the brain, and that many of these are different in men and women. However we don't really know what their effect on intelligence is. Yes, we know in a few cases that hormone A causes some neurons to fire differently, but that is far from describing that hormone's effect on intelligence. And from an evolutionary standpoint, I know of no obvious reason females should be less intelligent than males. I can understand differences sex drive, though. Anyway, I admit it is quite possible there is an intelligence difference between men and women, but I also think it is very possible that the gender imbalance is caused by culture, at least in part. Therefore, we should consider if we can fix the cultural aspect.
I think passing the issue off as 'gender differences' is too easy, as no one really understands all the mental differences between the genders. Also I think the reason people want to try to force balance in this case is because there is no obvious biological reason male and female brains should be that different, intellectually. The hypothesis that culture or environment is the cause seem more plausible to me. Anyway, we don't really know, so I think it's wrong to just plain ignore the issue of gender imbalance.
That said, I'm not sure the special programs the GP mentioned are the right way to fix the imbalance, for the reasons he (she?) pointed out, but maybe there is a way to fix it (assuming it is a problem).
Trust them, IPTV is impossible without common carrier exceptions.
So, your point is that changing to a QOS system allows these companies to make up BS arguments for why they can violate common carrier rules (and I agree, they would try this). EG they say that they need to violate common carrier for QOS to work. But my point was that these arguments are BS, and if the people making the rules (the gov't) realize that they are BS we are OK, as then the gov't would not allow anyone to violate common carrier. That's how it is now. It all depends on whether the gov't screws up during the transition to a QOS system and removes common carrier, but once the transition is done we will have a better system overall (as QOS is an improvement if done right).
it will be in carrier's interest to make lower tiers progressively worse as they go down in price. I want carriers on my team.
But the whole point of a tiered net is that 'worse' tiers are lower price. Google *should* pay more if they want the higher tier, as it is a more valuable and rare resource, to be used when it is really needed. However, obviously backbone providers (or whoever google deals with) should not be able to arbitrarily say 'Google has to pay extra, but we let microsify get by at our "special" price for the same thing', as that is illegal in general regardless of the internet. They can say 'anyone pays X dollars to get on the 4th tier'.
But that is not even the argument against QOS. I don't see why anyone can think that is unreasonable. What people are really complaining about in QOS is not that the people google directly deals with (ATT in your example) are causing the pricing problem, it is people further down the line, eg the local ISP for home users who forces google to pay them or else degrades their packets, causing the ISP's users not to use google. Google controls who it directly deals with and so can make contracts & barter prices (so it is fair and capitalist), but the ISPs would just be extorting Google. However, my point was that if the ISPs wanted to extort, they could already do it now with traffic analysis, regardless of whether QOS exists. But common carrier rules stop them, and so common carrier would also stop them if QOS was implemented. So QOS is irrelevant. Common carrier is relevant.
In conclusion: QOS has little do do with common carrier rules, except for the fact that various groups are spewing BS trying to get rid of common carrier using QOS as an (incorrect) argument. As I noted before, 'net neutrality' is a jumble of these issues.
Breaking nuetrality means it will be the carrier's fudiciary duty to degrade all traffic and underinvest in their networks in order to force all users to pay unavoidable tolls.
My question is, why don't they do that now? Traffic analysis can be used today to filter people out. Common carrier rules stop them. Perhaps you are thinking that QOS will require users to uniquely identify themselves in some way (eg have an id# to look up your QOS), allowing more reliable and accurate filtering (and companies will abuse this). However, I don't think we *need* to have such an identification scheme to get QOS. (though it is one solution). Just implement an anonymous tiered net, giving you QOS with no ID. Common carrier rules would apply just as before.
As I pointed out in another post I think the net neutrality issue is a bunch of only partly related issues jumbled together.
The intelligence is in the search part. The program has to figure out what word relates to the topic and in what way. EG, in this post I use the word 'figure', but it does not relate to the topic of intelligence and is a verb.
That is what artificial intelligence is about: getting info out of a big mash of data with no calculable pattern. For example, to solve chess, you have to figure out which moves are good out of all the possible moves (the big mash of data). Chess is currently not calculable because there are too many possible moves, so the program has to 'guess' or reason to some degree.
Your average database search is not AI because the data is organized.
I'm against part of what I see in 'net neutrality', but against other parts.
It seems to me there are two mixed up issues in net neutrality: One is common carrier rules, and the other is tiered internet, and in reality they don't have too much to do with each other. Supposedly a tiered internet implies lack of common carrier rules, but I disagree.
I'm in favor of common carrier rules so that ISPs cannot hold their customers ransom to content providers. i.e., they shouldn't be able to block or filter packets based on who is sending them. (in other words, the packets are anonymous - you can't look at who they're from)
But what does that have to do with a tiered internet? As I understand, a tiered net is a bit more like having 4 (or whatever) nets. What stops each of these nets from being just as anonymous as the one we have now? I've heard one idea that it somehow allows ISPs greater ability to filter packets, but can't they already do that with traffic analysis anyway? (and I hear some have even tried to do so, and rightfully got sued) The article suggests another idea, that if we want common carrier rules, we have to have strict inflexible protocols stuck forever as they are now for it to work, and this would halt progress and block us from ever using a tiered net. I haven't read the guy's work, but don't we just need a rule that 'you can't discriminate against anyone'? No need to force everyone to use some particular protocol.
And by the way, a tiered internet could be a good thing for everyone, if the economics works out: It could help stop ISPs overselling their service, since they could more easily partition out their service to customers, rather than the one-size-fits-all we have now. Content providers who don't need the extra advantages of the 'higher' tiers also wouldn't have to pay for them, while those who do need them can get them.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
One way of looking at an airfoil is that there is a pressure difference between the top and bottom sides, causing an upwards force. However, this interpretation is totally equivalent to the one that the airfoil is deflecting the flow of air downwards, and so the helicopter moves up by conservation of momentum. Both interpretations are true and equivalent, just different ways of looking at the same thing. Therefore, this device works in the same way as a helicopter.
PS. I think it would be much easier to use the momentum explanation on kids in elementary school (I got the bernouilli one). Neither explanation, given at an elementary level, says why the airfoil has this effect (either causing air to move faster on top, or causing a downwards deflection - and no, the path length difference is an incorrect explanation), so they are just as incomplete, and the momentum one would be an intro to conservation of momentum.
As I replied elsewhere, I think relativity does conflict with newton's law with all the variables defined as they were. If you redefine momentum to something new, sure, I agree. But newtonian mechanics *is* wrong after all.
As for the rest.. I actually know almost nothing about MOND, and I can't tell whether this experiment is worthwile. But my point was that universal laws have been shown wrong before, even when most observations seemed to support them.
You're right that you can still use an equation that looks like F = dp/dt in GR, but I still think the original second law is wrong with all the quantities defined as they were. Writing it your way, it is then the definition of momentum which is wrong (or going on, the definition of velocity as dx/dt not dx/dTau). (Also in GR F= dp/dTau, not dp/dt if t is the time coordinate). The symbols in GR just happen to look and act quite like the newtonian symbols, but are interpreted differently.
Anyway, it is the error in predicted motion that is interesting here, where 'F=ma' gives the newtonian motion,
but this becomes like 'F = ma + m Gamma Vi Vj' in GR. You can't clearly see the different motions each theory gives in F = dp/dt.
The key is that our experimental observations only cover the cases we have thought to test - he would be testing the law in a new way.
In fact, we already know that newton's second law is wrong from special and general relativity, but you only see so at high velocities/high curvature of space. It was only once we had the theory that we knew how to test it properly. Here he is testing the law in the case of very small accelerations, based on a theory which tries to explain an astrophysics observation that is not well understood. Who knows, he might find something.
In addition, we already know that our theory from general relativity is incomplete because it does not match up to quantum mechanics, so there is surely still something to be discovered there somewhere.
150W? So you could say the same about simply switching off the lights. Very enlightening.
I can look out my window and see that almost every single office in the skyscrapers downtown has the lights on, even though it's past working hours....
The signal is too weak to be able to differentialte between 1,000s of possible word 'brain patterns'.
It can differentiate the 26 letter 'brain patterns' with effort:
The system today is also quite slow -- even a trained system can "read" only 18 characters per minute, or three or four words.
What I think might be cool to try is placing a pack of electrodes in a nerve leading to a non-essential muscle somewhere. I would guess you can get a much more reliable signal that way (if you set it up right), and maybe a more complex signal if that nerve carries multiple signals (eg one for each muscle in a pack of muscles). It would have much greater medical consequences than this brain-cap idea, though..
Actually it is not much at all (from here):
These studies concluded that the maximum radiation dose to an individual living within 1 km of a modern [coal] power plant is equivalent to a minor, perhaps 1 to 5 percent, increase above the radiation from the natural environment.
I think I got that link from a slashdot comment a while ago.
Not that I am totally convinced of global warming, but I feel you left out their main argument. In the next sentence after the part you quoted, they give their true explanation and a link to a more detailed explanation. They say that something besides CO2 causes a first small jump in temperature as well as a rise in CO2, but that this increased CO2 then causes the real warming. In other words they say there is a feedback system pushed by CO2 which is triggered by some unknown mechanism. So, maybe the idea in global warming is that *we* have triggered the feedback cycle.
Also, if you look at the graph of the temperature over the last 400000 years it appears to me that there is a really sharp increase in temperature when an ice age ends, and maybe this is the feedback cycle suddenly activating. But.. I'm not really qualified to interpret the data.
And anyway, the problem with CO2 isn't it's direct effect on plant and animal life, it is that it may cause global temerature increase.
So the quote is doubly irrelevant.
However, the point that CO2 levels were higher millions of years ago is interesting. Here are two graphs from Wikipedia:
Data over the past 400 Thousand years showing the sudden increase after the industrial revolution. Also a subplot over the past 1000 years.
Data over the past 500 Million Years showing the higher levels of CO2 in the past.
I can see how the effect of CO2 is controversial.
I don't get this. As I understand, tiers add one major parameter to the service you buy: Latency. We already pay based on bandwidth and traffic, now there is just one more variable. Yes, if decreasing latency solves the problems better than just increasing bandwidth, then indeed there is less incetive to increase bandwidth, and rightly because we wouldn't need it as much.
I think that any accounting tricks they can pull based on latency control, they can already pull based on bandwidth control.
Also, more generally:
I think the argument against tiers will be purely technical: It seems plausible to me that decreasing latency would solve problems for eg online video or online games that aren't solvable by increasing bandwidh. However, as the parent pointed out, this is not necessarily the case. I don't know enough to say.
The other problems you and the parent point out (extortion, money tricks) are solved by common carrier laws. We need to keep those. It just happens that the people arguing for a tiered net are also arguing for removal of common carrier laws.
... exactly -40 F (by definition)
In that case there is no point to watermarking, from the point of view of the record companies. People could put songs up for download claiming they were stolen, and not get sued. It only takes one instance of the song being 'stolen' for the whole system to break down, as that one copy is available for download everywhere, with no one to sue about it. They might as well forget about watermarking. (not that I am in favor of drm, btw)
I imagine that in the not too distant future some perfectly healthy geek will have one of these implanted.
The problem is, the signal is sent to the optic nerve according to the article -- which is already being used by your eyes if they are healthy. The signal from the camera would interfere the signal from your eye, effectively blinding it (probably). Therefore the current system is only useful to blind people who aren't using their optic nerve.
damn, typo, should be $1,600,000 of new servers, not $1,200,000.
Um.. if you read the pages you link, they give the answer, especially the What we need the money for page on the finances page. In short, it is because they are buying over $1,200,000 of new servers, increases in other expenses by around $200,000, and aim to increase their cash reserves by $300,000.
In the 2006 financial statement you link, they say they had $1,508,039 of revenue, they spent $791,907 on expenses (eg internet hosting) and spent another $428,309 on buying new servers. This, combined with the $137,237 they started with and $67,253 of other factors (inflation etc), leaves them with $512,313 in cash.
On the 'What we need the money for' page they say that in 2007 they plan to spend $1,670,000 on new servers (and also increase expenses by ~ $200,000). Compare this to the $428,309 spent in 2006 on servers. So, that seems to be where the money is going: new servers.
(disclaimer: I have no experience dealing with large amounts of money or accounting)
I agree, in all display systems the final conversion from electric signal to light is going to be analog. As long as the fluctuations in your signal are smaller than those introduced the final analog conversion, you have no image degradation.
So, analog signals should be fine if set up correctly, but you must admit that digital signals give much more protection against signal degradation. I have never set up anything like this, but I would expect that there is less to worry about if you use mostly digital signals. Therefore there is NO REASON to use analog over digital (at least with signal degradation in mind.. maybe pricing/availability make analog easier). The two are equivalent with regard to degradation, once set up correctly.
Couldn't that be a good thing? Then everyone could see how much they are getting screwed by buying big label crap, and decide not to buy it. It would help publicise the advantages of 'no drm', so that people would realize there is a choice.
Whoa! Good link.
So, Skype censors text messages in China, and has some kind of blacklist there too. That's news to me. Scary.
I also didn't realize companies go to such lengths to obfuscate their code. Putting all that work into obfuscation seems pointless as somebody is going to be able to undo it, as demonstrated by the link. As pointed out there, the fact that it's obfuscated is what makes it interesting to understand. Like the act of reading the bios, it hints that there's something sinister hidden (like censorship).
You say it's funny, but in the future your assumption that something from 120 years ago has expired copyright won't be true... copyright already lasts up to 120 years in the US (for work for hire, with delayed publication). No joke.
I agree there are a lot of things that affect the brain, and that many of these are different in men and women. However we don't really know what their effect on intelligence is. Yes, we know in a few cases that hormone A causes some neurons to fire differently, but that is far from describing that hormone's effect on intelligence. And from an evolutionary standpoint, I know of no obvious reason females should be less intelligent than males. I can understand differences sex drive, though. Anyway, I admit it is quite possible there is an intelligence difference between men and women, but I also think it is very possible that the gender imbalance is caused by culture, at least in part. Therefore, we should consider if we can fix the cultural aspect.
I think passing the issue off as 'gender differences' is too easy, as no one really understands all the mental differences between the genders. Also I think the reason people want to try to force balance in this case is because there is no obvious biological reason male and female brains should be that different, intellectually. The hypothesis that culture or environment is the cause seem more plausible to me. Anyway, we don't really know, so I think it's wrong to just plain ignore the issue of gender imbalance.
That said, I'm not sure the special programs the GP mentioned are the right way to fix the imbalance, for the reasons he (she?) pointed out, but maybe there is a way to fix it (assuming it is a problem).
But the whole point of a tiered net is that 'worse' tiers are lower price. Google *should* pay more if they want the higher tier, as it is a more valuable and rare resource, to be used when it is really needed. However, obviously backbone providers (or whoever google deals with) should not be able to arbitrarily say 'Google has to pay extra, but we let microsify get by at our "special" price for the same thing', as that is illegal in general regardless of the internet. They can say 'anyone pays X dollars to get on the 4th tier'.
But that is not even the argument against QOS. I don't see why anyone can think that is unreasonable. What people are really complaining about in QOS is not that the people google directly deals with (ATT in your example) are causing the pricing problem, it is people further down the line, eg the local ISP for home users who forces google to pay them or else degrades their packets, causing the ISP's users not to use google. Google controls who it directly deals with and so can make contracts & barter prices (so it is fair and capitalist), but the ISPs would just be extorting Google. However, my point was that if the ISPs wanted to extort, they could already do it now with traffic analysis, regardless of whether QOS exists. But common carrier rules stop them, and so common carrier would also stop them if QOS was implemented. So QOS is irrelevant. Common carrier is relevant.
In conclusion: QOS has little do do with common carrier rules, except for the fact that various groups are spewing BS trying to get rid of common carrier using QOS as an (incorrect) argument. As I noted before, 'net neutrality' is a jumble of these issues.My question is, why don't they do that now? Traffic analysis can be used today to filter people out. Common carrier rules stop them. Perhaps you are thinking that QOS will require users to uniquely identify themselves in some way (eg have an id# to look up your QOS), allowing more reliable and accurate filtering (and companies will abuse this). However, I don't think we *need* to have such an identification scheme to get QOS. (though it is one solution). Just implement an anonymous tiered net, giving you QOS with no ID. Common carrier rules would apply just as before.
As I pointed out in another post I think the net neutrality issue is a bunch of only partly related issues jumbled together.
The intelligence is in the search part. The program has to figure out what word relates to the topic and in what way. EG, in this post I use the word 'figure', but it does not relate to the topic of intelligence and is a verb.
That is what artificial intelligence is about: getting info out of a big mash of data with no calculable pattern. For example, to solve chess, you have to figure out which moves are good out of all the possible moves (the big mash of data). Chess is currently not calculable because there are too many possible moves, so the program has to 'guess' or reason to some degree.
Your average database search is not AI because the data is organized.
I'm against part of what I see in 'net neutrality', but against other parts.
It seems to me there are two mixed up issues in net neutrality: One is common carrier rules, and the other is tiered internet, and in reality they don't have too much to do with each other. Supposedly a tiered internet implies lack of common carrier rules, but I disagree.
I'm in favor of common carrier rules so that ISPs cannot hold their customers ransom to content providers. i.e., they shouldn't be able to block or filter packets based on who is sending them. (in other words, the packets are anonymous - you can't look at who they're from)
But what does that have to do with a tiered internet? As I understand, a tiered net is a bit more like having 4 (or whatever) nets. What stops each of these nets from being just as anonymous as the one we have now? I've heard one idea that it somehow allows ISPs greater ability to filter packets, but can't they already do that with traffic analysis anyway? (and I hear some have even tried to do so, and rightfully got sued) The article suggests another idea, that if we want common carrier rules, we have to have strict inflexible protocols stuck forever as they are now for it to work, and this would halt progress and block us from ever using a tiered net. I haven't read the guy's work, but don't we just need a rule that 'you can't discriminate against anyone'? No need to force everyone to use some particular protocol.
And by the way, a tiered internet could be a good thing for everyone, if the economics works out: It could help stop ISPs overselling their service, since they could more easily partition out their service to customers, rather than the one-size-fits-all we have now. Content providers who don't need the extra advantages of the 'higher' tiers also wouldn't have to pay for them, while those who do need them can get them.