The situation with broadband is not like air travel.
They're not identical, but similar network-industry dynamics affect them similarly.
Tell me how it compares when a broadband carrier, formerly nothing more than a neutral transporter of internet traffic, decides to become a content provider as well and prioritizes it's own traffic over that of another content provider?
Who is actually doing this now, in the absence of regulation? If it did happen, do you mean to the extent that would degrade the other traffic noticably -- to its average consumer -- or would it mainly only be detectable using metering tools in your hypothetical scenario?
My guess is that you don't have a clue beyond the abstract drivel you've spouted.
No need for ad-hominums. If consumers really want unthrottled, source-neutral, and content-neutral bandwidth, then it stands to reason that providers will be attracted to the market, and that more providers competing in the market will produce a better chance of consumers actually getting it. At least this phenomenon has worked in countless other industries and product lines; market competition has enabled families who couldn't afford mobile phone service at all twenty years ago -- even if just a simple bag phone -- to have a phone for each family member today, with internet access and GPS navigation to boot. When wired internet goes down in our office, two people together can supply the entire office with usable wi-fi tethered broadband (better than 2.5MB speedtests), using our personal data plans on un-rooted devices.
Where did that come without regulation to force providers to give it to us?
Your logic for this seems to be based on the reasoning of "the enemy(Big Corps) of my enemy(Pushy government dickwads) is my friend," with some good, old-fashioned persecution complex mixed in for flavor.
How so? I may think of government as pushy dickwads, I may buy into "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" strategies in certain scenarios, and I may display display an egregious persecution complex at times (ok always)... I still don't see where my response was based on any of those things.
Have to disagree; relevance < 100, yes, but I'd wager > 63.2 if I were a betting man.:)
So what am I supposed to do, exactly, to get this increased neutral bandwidth?
Well, you could use political pressure to force all of the service providers in your area to give it to you now. That's an option. But if you'd done that to force brick phones to meet a fair and equitable price point 20 years ago, you wouldn't have devices as capable and relatively affordable as Android and iPhone today.
I believe you are looking at the issue wrong. Perhaps instead of insisting that the companies will do what is best for us and keep giving us increasing bandwidth for lower prices, assume they will do what they have been doing and giving us less service, lower caps, and threatening to fuck up other services coming to their customers in favor of theirs.
No, I'm insisting that both companies *and politicians* will do as little as they can that's in our interest, and they will both take as much money from us as they can in the process. But if the market is truly open (no artificial barriers to entry), then I can at least say "fuck you" to any company as soon as a better one comes along.
If the FTC or FCC are involved, then their political benefactors (i.e. the wealthy, currently-entrenched companies) can sway them to help ensure that the next "better company" never enters their market. Why should the FTC do your bidding when the big players in the market contribute so much more money to the people who appoint them?
I agree with you that companies will absolutely try to screw you. I just think that when you empower politicians to tilt the balance between winners and losers (a consequence of network regulatory authority), then those politicians become the most powerful weapon the companies have to screw you with. So, you actually have the most say when politicians have zero power over the the companies that are trying to screw you.
So what are you supposed to do? If I were you I would wait, and constantly look for the best deal. Switch providers on a dime when another one offers you something better, and influence everyone you can to do the same. I think you'll end up with better, cheaper service that way. Using government force is a seductive tactic, I'll give you that, but I think it's ultimately self defeating. Quebec outlawed the evil private medical insurance industry, only to realize that the noble, well-intentioned public medical insurance industry screwed the people even worse -- so now they're bringing back private insurance. Open markets force people who want to screw you to serve you instead. Bureaucracies cause people who claim want to help you to gradually milk the life force out of you in exchange for increasingly meager goods and services. You're free to take your pick, but please leave me some remnant of a free and open market to pick from for my own goods and services.
Carriers should be whatever their customers want them to be. If it costs roughly $5.00/user/month to deal with the problems introduced by having port 25 open for 100% of the users, but only 3% of the users want to use port 25, then carriers by and large should not open it up without charging for it.
Whether anyone "lets" TWC do this is a matter to be decided between TWC, Vonage, and their shared customers. If Vonage is smart, they will find a random-port way to route their traffic over difficult networks, the same way that open-source file sharing protocols have resisted efforts to defeat them.
Giving politicians the power to decide what ports shall be open and closed may result in many things, but one of them will not be a greater number of competitive network-industry startups offering you services such as VOIP on the cheap.
There is one exception to this that I would agree to: In places where a provider has a politically-created monopoly (other providers are legally prohibited from entering the market), then the terms of that monopoly should include an open access provision. In any other instance, the regulation will only deter competitors' entrance into the market, meaning more suckage for more consumers for a longer period of time than if you'd just left things alone.
Pro-corp is the same as pro-consumer. We see "big companies" and we reflexively envy the big sums of cash they control, since they're so much bigger than the sums of cash we control. We all want to force them to give us more for less, sure (and in a democratic society, it's fairly easy to leverage the political process to seemingly do just that).
But you never actually take anything away from corporations in the long run; the most well-intentioned regulatory burdens still increase entry barriers, reduce competition, and favor the larger and more well-established players in a market. Costs are simply passed along to consumers in higher prices or reductions of other product features -- whether or not they would have voluntarily payed the same additional amount for whatever the regulation guarantees.
Saying that the FCC has no authority to impose regulations on the internet doesn't "favor corporations over the people." It simply says that a) regulatory bodies can only impose rules where they have jurisdiction, and b) in this case, companies and individuals are free to barter for bandwidth in whatever manner they see fit.
Broadband is a network industry, much like air travel. In the 30+ years since airline de-regulation in the US, prices have dropped over 38%, and service has tripled in terms of man-miles. Since then, a number of new low-cost carriers have been able to enter the market and challenge the oligopoly, offering consumers greater choice than they ever had before. The same dynamics are in play here; the less regulation there is, the more unthrottled, source-neutral and content-neutral bandwidth you are likely to have access to five years from now for the same dollar. Under regulation, you may force all providers to offer source-neutral and content-neutral bandwidth, but nobody said they have to offer you anything over 5 megabits without a huge surcharge.
Maybe IP is just yet another tool that large, established concerns can use to raise entry barriers for new competitors.
Coincidentally, I just read an article today -- Rethinking IP -- that suggests doing away with the concept of IP, entirely:
"We must start by taking a close look at the traditional libertarian assumption that IP is, in fact, a legitimate type of property right. And it turns out that advocates of the free market have made a mistake all along. Patent and copyright, to take the two worst manifestations of IP, are nothing but state monopolies that violate property rights. IP is antithetical to capitalism and the free market."
What would suddenly make politicians resistant to pettiness, bias and corruption for the first time in history?
Rule of thumb: Only let politicians make decisions where it doesn't matter if that's what's controlling them. Reserve the rest of the decisions for individuals. Reform will ebb and flow, it will look more chaotic and piecemeal, but on average you'll get the better end result sooner.
You could make that argument about literally any point of view. If you buy into moral equivalence, then sure, you could acknowledge and try to understand a concept of honor that glorifies and rewards the intentional mass murder of random civilians.
If concepts of honor are so flexible as to permit that though, then really there's simply no such thing as honor, just a bunch of disparate and conflicting delusions of it.
Someone with 10 years working in the field with the new technologies as they roll out ought AND a degree is more attractive than the person that doesn't have the degree.
My experience has been the opposite; my hires who rose to the same experience and responsibility level with no degree have tended to outperform the degree holders. Of course, I've needed people with high ambition levels, outside-the-box thinking, and the ability to execute quickly and decisively more often than people with strong academic knowledge in a certain area (I'm not discounting the need for them, btw, just making an all-else-being-equal comparison for the bulk of the roles).
Yes, have to concur on the eminent domain and monopoly agreements bits.
By themselves, corporations can do only so much damage. With the assistance of government, they can do much more. Not as much as government itself, but closer to it.
It would probably help if the first remedy against corporate misdeeds was the revocation of intellectual property (i.e., forms of exclusivity enforced by the government). You aren't a good corporate citizen? Fine, keep competing as best you can, just without our help any longer.
We agree about the problem; there's too little competition. But regulations, price controls and the like have a long and consistent history of creating shortages and *reducing* competition. Even the most benign and well-intentioned regulations raise entry barriers to the regulated industry and increase costs to consumers.
When you saddle an industry with a new obligation -- something they wouldn't have done absent the regulation -- it almost certainly reduces their margins. But no company in its right mind just absorbs that; you have to do better and better quarter over quarter or all the 401Ks and mutual funds that hold your stock will start fleeing. So you reduce value to the consumer somehow, by raising prices, cutting support, withholding bandwidth increases that you used to give for free, etc. All the while the industry has a bunch of new compliance costs, making it less attractive to speculators and harder for entrepreneurs to break into, thereby also making it even *less* likely that consumers will be able to respond to your increasing suckiness by going to a competitor.
Meanwhile, you've set a new precedent, giving a federal agency the authority to make the internet conform to its preferences. That's all well and good when the agency's preferences match yours and they make you feel like you've forced a company to give you something. (You haven't and they never do, incidentally.) But many others are just waiting for a chance to change the internet in very different ways. Obscenity guidelines will surely be close behind. Anonymous connections aren't good for anyone with lobbyists, so those will have to go. Official monitoring for terrorists and copyright infringers is no less likely than ATF agents breaking down doors at warehouses full of counterfeit DVDs. And since the DHS is already usurping domain names on behalf of the entertainment industry, imagine what they'd like do with all that new authority. And you know, all those cable channels have been operating like the wild west, not at all like the orderly and well behaved over-the-air broadcasters who are regulated. Maybe we could stretch that authority just a little teeny bit and bring some much needed reform to cable programming.
We will get neutral access from the marketplace. It may come at a premium at first, but consumers hate limits. No regulation gave us Amazon non-DRMd MP3s. Or AMOLED screens. Or 4G. Or Wi-Fi tethering (now at a premium price, but *actually* unlimited, and will surely be part of the basic package within a decade). No regulation gave us home internet service to begin with. Do we really need to use the nuclear option to get source-agnostic speeds?
Every expansion of authority begets another. Every one of them. Once people see government as a tool for righting wrongs, government acquires the ability to wrong rights as well. Our constitution placed extraordinary limits on federal authority to prevent that, and we'll piss those limits away to stop someone from throttling our Netflix or torrents.
I'm most suspicious of the people who *are* willing to put in the time and effort. Too many of them have ulterior motives that involve depriving me of some further fraction of my property or liberties.
Natural forces are such that corporations' powers inexorably weaken over time, while governments' powers inexorably strengthen between revolutions. At any given moment, the government will serve whoever it most owes favors too. Whoever this is, you can be pretty sure it's not you.
I hate Apple, but I'd rather have an iPhone as my only smartphone option than have Uncle Sam 'even the smartphone playing field.'
Furthermore, if his ISP built the network, they damn well do have the right to degrade the services they wish to. They'll ultimately drive customers away, but hey, it's their network.
I don't get why there is so much blind faith in bureaucracies and so much blind suspicion of companies. It's entirely backwards, when you think about it.
How does any of that answer the parent's point? Can the little guy lobby the Obama administration to have the DHS stop confiscating domain names of potential assisters of copyright infringement? No. They're funded the same way the Bush administration was, and have proven just as susceptible to regulatory capture.
I don't get it. It seems your complaint is that there are problems that net neutrality might solve... problems caused by control of the internet being in too few hands. But your solution is to put that control into even fewer hands, and harder hands to wrest it out of.
Let the ISPs throttle and choke. It will only accelerate the rise of darknets, Wi-Max competitors, and P2P mesh networks. Amazon is selling unencumbered MP3s now, and no regulatory action was needed to make that happen. Even the rate at which consumer tech is overtaking industrial tech is accelerating. At a time when it's getting harder and harder for any commercial interest to establish and maintain control of any resource, it's certainly not the moment to call for greater centralized power over those resources.
Give me AT&T, Comcast & Cox over John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi and the unaccountable commissions they spawn any day. I will be free of the former -- or at least their current shortcomings -- long before the regulations of the latter cease to exist.
Once the FCC has established its authority over teh internetz and is done defining 'neutrality', why shouldn't they get more involved in copyright enforcement? The DMCA is law, and vigorously defended by D and R alike.
Anything decided by a federal agency is something that can be bought by an industry.
So how about each polling place and printing machine have a mini digital signature. Polling place setup involves loading hashes of the printer signatures into each scanner at the location.
The receipt (that the voter takes with) has a code, and the ballot has a hash of that code. Voters scan the receipt code to "open" the scanner, *then* they can scan the corresponding ballot if the hash matches.
The ballot includes a barcoded signature block using the location key, printer key, creation timestamp and hash of the ballot code. Except when keys are cracked, this restricts the scanners / counters to accepting only ballots created at that location, that day (or hour), by a printer registered to that location.
You could probably also publish logs of all ballots printed, all ballots scanned, and all ballots voided. Polling places with irregularities > n standard deviations off the mean get sent to bed without any dessert.
1. User agent is just a few menus deep, no need to root
2. Hulu and the networks closed that loophole already
1. Informative, thanks.
2. I get how they could do this with e.g. android devices, since there are more ways to recognize their signature (screen resolution, other browser headers, perhaps a permacookie of some sort). But on Google TV, wouldn't it theoretically be possible to mimic the complete HTTP request signature of, e.g., a PC running Chrome?
Then there's the "root your Google TV box and change the user agent" option. *Maybe* a legal gray area at worst. Regardless, will probably be feasible for n00bs in 3... 2... 1... [blink]
Okay, have it your way, but I'm making factual claims and offering evidence for them, while you're making subjective assertions and offering no evidence for them.
There are effective ways to point out lies and distortions in a discussion, but issuing bare accusations isn't one of them. You're entitled to your opinion -- even if I happen to think yours is the more evil and destructive of our two philosophies -- but you're playing with an alternate set of facts from the actual ones.
Quoting this destructive sociopath defending himself on his own websites does not help your case one bit.
I didn't quote him, I offered links to evidence against your claims. But here, have some other evidence of Tea Party infiltration, and of zero-tolerance for racism:
Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams kicked out over 'Colored People' letter: Mark Williams, the flamethrower leading the battle against the Ground Zero mosque, was kicked out of the National Tea Party Federation Saturday for a racist blog post.But when he posted a satirical letter supposedly from "the Colored People" to President Lincoln praising slavery, that apparently crossed the line. [...] The federation, an umbrella organization that claims to represent 85 Tea Party groups, kicked out Williams' group when it wouldn't fire him. "We have expelled Tea Party Express and Mark Williams from the National Tea Party Federation because of the letter that he wrote," federation spokesman David Webb said on CBS's "Face the Nation." He called the letter - written after the NAACP called on Tea Party leaders to oust racists from their ranks - "clearly offensive."
Foes of tea party movement to infiltrate rallies: ALBANY, N.Y.--Opponents of the fiscally conservative tea party movement say they plan to infiltrate and dismantle the political group by trying to make its members appear to be racist, homophobic and moronic. [...] Levin says they want to exaggerate the group's least appealing qualities, further distance the tea party from mainstream America and damage the public's opinion of them.
The Crashers: They came, they saw, they failed: [Yes, it's a Michelle Malkin piece, but full of photographs of tea partiers using signs to denounce and ostracize extremists / infiltrators in their midst.] "Check out the Captain Obvious crasher getting called out for attempting to paint their peaceful protest as an incitement to violence and faking a vile sign."
As to your question...
There is no infiltration of the Teaz Party, those are the real views of real supporters who have never, as you claim, been denounced. In fact, if they were, it would be no problem for the Tea Party to do as the NAACP requested, and denounce the racists. Why won't they?
...again I ask, what racism? So far there's no evidence of it. You reiterate your claim and accuse me of lying and distortion, but you don't even mention a single occurrence that they should be denouncing, much less offer proof of any pattern of racism in the movement. Have you no sense of irony?
Okay, I understand your points, and a couple could be worth engaging in the interest of expanding common ground, but... well I applaud the bigger intention of Sherrod's speech, taking that at face value. But that said, seriously dude... you're obviously judging Breitbart on received wisdom, preconceived notions, or a very cursory firsthand examination plus some combination of the other two. The 'racist tea partier' meme might have currency with the willfully ignorant, but it comes off as really lazy -- or disingenuous -- to anyone who knows Breitabart's work for themselves. You don't accurately articulate a single real position of his, yet you manage to ascribe false motives and positions to him nonetheless. I expected better from a 4-digit/.er, really.
When was the last time the Tea Party chastised anyone for racism?
Well, just about every shred of "evidence" I've seen of Tea Party Racism(tm) has consisted of infiltrators who were being denounced verbally (and sometimes with signage) -- as they were attempting to infiltrate and discredit the movement. The movement is about limited government, fiscal responsibility and lower taxation. Those in it have no use for anyone who would attempt to hijack that agenda towards racist ends. I've seen no evidence of them being tolerant of such things, nor that such things even happen more than extremely rarely. If you have evidence to the contrary, Breitbart is offering a $100k bounty for proof. As for the Sherrod video, again, the `you're-racist-if-you-criticize-the-actions-of-a-minorty-individual-or-group` meme is getting boring beyond belief.
In contrast to the knee-jerk accusations of racism against tea partiers, there actually is plenty of evidence for widespread, openly racist attitudes within liberal organizations. While the Black Panthers take the cake lately, the NAACP is no angel & has quite a double standard when it comes to racist statements by those in their own ranks. So tell me, if you expect chastisements in response to zero-evidence (and sometimes demonstrably false) accusations of racism by the tea party, where are the corresponding chastisements for demonstrably accurate accusations of blatant racism by those on the left? For that matter, how much time does the left spend chastising Rev Wright or Louis Farrakhan?
Breitbart takes a color-blind, no-gloves approach towards hypocrisy and towards government-expanding ideals. As certain of their racism as you are, you should collect the $100k bounty offered to anyone who can find video evidence of the alleged racial epithets at the March 20th tea party event.
[...] the racist liar Breitbart, who is pushing the poisonous myth that all minorities will seek revenge against whites if they achieve positions of power [...]
Dude, that's just insane. Breitbart is pushing no such idea, and the racist label is just not going to stick. Maybe you should read one of the 24 or so black authors on BigGovernment.com who have written about race-relations subjects & condemn the NAACP position towards the tea party. Really, in the long term, the "call them racists" strategy is going to erode the left's own credibility. Calling an action racist is one thing. Falsely smearing a person or movement as racist is what leftists seem to go to lately when they have nothing... it's the new Godwin's Law (or Feldman's Law, as some call it).
I can't find the faked Shirley Sharrod video you refer to. I can't even find an edited one. I can find a short excerpt, which is a meaningfully different animal from a faked or edited video, and different even from a segment taken out of context, intentionally or not. However, I can also find the full speech, posted as the top link on biggovernment.com, which is Breitbart's habit whenever complete versions of something are or become available & there's any question about the context of the piece.
Ditto with the ACORN vids. Yes, I heard the phrase "heavily edited" and "deceptively edited" (literally!) precede "videos" in every mention of the story on NPR, but that's just laziness on their part -- or maybe excessive discord with their governing narrative. Yes, Breitbart and BigGovernment published juicy excerpts (or salient ones, depending on your viewpoint), the same way news organizations include sound bytes instead of entire speeches in their reporting. But BG also published the complete version of every one of them, and showed the context of the excerpts to be clearly faithful to the whole in most of them, and arguably so in the rest.
Similarly, the "Rahn Curve" proposes that economic growth peaks with public budgets of 20% of GDP or lower (we don't know how low because we don't have data on sub-20% governments to draw inferences from).
Slashdot Mirror
The situation with broadband is not like air travel.
They're not identical, but similar network-industry dynamics affect them similarly.
Tell me how it compares when a broadband carrier, formerly nothing more than a neutral transporter of internet traffic, decides to become a content provider as well and prioritizes it's own traffic over that of another content provider?
Who is actually doing this now, in the absence of regulation? If it did happen, do you mean to the extent that would degrade the other traffic noticably -- to its average consumer -- or would it mainly only be detectable using metering tools in your hypothetical scenario?
My guess is that you don't have a clue beyond the abstract drivel you've spouted.
No need for ad-hominums. If consumers really want unthrottled, source-neutral, and content-neutral bandwidth, then it stands to reason that providers will be attracted to the market, and that more providers competing in the market will produce a better chance of consumers actually getting it. At least this phenomenon has worked in countless other industries and product lines; market competition has enabled families who couldn't afford mobile phone service at all twenty years ago -- even if just a simple bag phone -- to have a phone for each family member today, with internet access and GPS navigation to boot. When wired internet goes down in our office, two people together can supply the entire office with usable wi-fi tethered broadband (better than 2.5MB speedtests), using our personal data plans on un-rooted devices.
Where did that come without regulation to force providers to give it to us?
Your logic for this seems to be based on the reasoning of "the enemy(Big Corps) of my enemy(Pushy government dickwads) is my friend," with some good, old-fashioned persecution complex mixed in for flavor.
How so? I may think of government as pushy dickwads, I may buy into "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" strategies in certain scenarios, and I may display display an egregious persecution complex at times (ok always)... I still don't see where my response was based on any of those things.
Relevance = zero.
Have to disagree; relevance < 100, yes, but I'd wager > 63.2 if I were a betting man. :)
So what am I supposed to do, exactly, to get this increased neutral bandwidth?
Well, you could use political pressure to force all of the service providers in your area to give it to you now. That's an option. But if you'd done that to force brick phones to meet a fair and equitable price point 20 years ago, you wouldn't have devices as capable and relatively affordable as Android and iPhone today.
I believe you are looking at the issue wrong. Perhaps instead of insisting that the companies will do what is best for us and keep giving us increasing bandwidth for lower prices, assume they will do what they have been doing and giving us less service, lower caps, and threatening to fuck up other services coming to their customers in favor of theirs.
No, I'm insisting that both companies *and politicians* will do as little as they can that's in our interest, and they will both take as much money from us as they can in the process. But if the market is truly open (no artificial barriers to entry), then I can at least say "fuck you" to any company as soon as a better one comes along.
If the FTC or FCC are involved, then their political benefactors (i.e. the wealthy, currently-entrenched companies) can sway them to help ensure that the next "better company" never enters their market. Why should the FTC do your bidding when the big players in the market contribute so much more money to the people who appoint them?
I agree with you that companies will absolutely try to screw you. I just think that when you empower politicians to tilt the balance between winners and losers (a consequence of network regulatory authority), then those politicians become the most powerful weapon the companies have to screw you with. So, you actually have the most say when politicians have zero power over the the companies that are trying to screw you.
So what are you supposed to do? If I were you I would wait, and constantly look for the best deal. Switch providers on a dime when another one offers you something better, and influence everyone you can to do the same. I think you'll end up with better, cheaper service that way. Using government force is a seductive tactic, I'll give you that, but I think it's ultimately self defeating. Quebec outlawed the evil private medical insurance industry, only to realize that the noble, well-intentioned public medical insurance industry screwed the people even worse -- so now they're bringing back private insurance. Open markets force people who want to screw you to serve you instead. Bureaucracies cause people who claim want to help you to gradually milk the life force out of you in exchange for increasingly meager goods and services. You're free to take your pick, but please leave me some remnant of a free and open market to pick from for my own goods and services.
The point is carriers should be dumb pipes
Carriers should be whatever their customers want them to be. If it costs roughly $5.00/user/month to deal with the problems introduced by having port 25 open for 100% of the users, but only 3% of the users want to use port 25, then carriers by and large should not open it up without charging for it.
Whether anyone "lets" TWC do this is a matter to be decided between TWC, Vonage, and their shared customers. If Vonage is smart, they will find a random-port way to route their traffic over difficult networks, the same way that open-source file sharing protocols have resisted efforts to defeat them.
Giving politicians the power to decide what ports shall be open and closed may result in many things, but one of them will not be a greater number of competitive network-industry startups offering you services such as VOIP on the cheap.
There is one exception to this that I would agree to: In places where a provider has a politically-created monopoly (other providers are legally prohibited from entering the market), then the terms of that monopoly should include an open access provision. In any other instance, the regulation will only deter competitors' entrance into the market, meaning more suckage for more consumers for a longer period of time than if you'd just left things alone.
Pro-corp is the same as pro-consumer. We see "big companies" and we reflexively envy the big sums of cash they control, since they're so much bigger than the sums of cash we control. We all want to force them to give us more for less, sure (and in a democratic society, it's fairly easy to leverage the political process to seemingly do just that).
But you never actually take anything away from corporations in the long run; the most well-intentioned regulatory burdens still increase entry barriers, reduce competition, and favor the larger and more well-established players in a market. Costs are simply passed along to consumers in higher prices or reductions of other product features -- whether or not they would have voluntarily payed the same additional amount for whatever the regulation guarantees.
Saying that the FCC has no authority to impose regulations on the internet doesn't "favor corporations over the people." It simply says that a) regulatory bodies can only impose rules where they have jurisdiction, and b) in this case, companies and individuals are free to barter for bandwidth in whatever manner they see fit.
Broadband is a network industry, much like air travel. In the 30+ years since airline de-regulation in the US, prices have dropped over 38%, and service has tripled in terms of man-miles. Since then, a number of new low-cost carriers have been able to enter the market and challenge the oligopoly, offering consumers greater choice than they ever had before. The same dynamics are in play here; the less regulation there is, the more unthrottled, source-neutral and content-neutral bandwidth you are likely to have access to five years from now for the same dollar. Under regulation, you may force all providers to offer source-neutral and content-neutral bandwidth, but nobody said they have to offer you anything over 5 megabits without a huge surcharge.
It ought to be... isn't the melody ©, beginning of time, whoever wrote the laws of physics and invented numbers?
Maybe IP is just yet another tool that large, established concerns can use to raise entry barriers for new competitors.
Coincidentally, I just read an article today -- Rethinking IP -- that suggests doing away with the concept of IP, entirely:
"We must start by taking a close look at the traditional libertarian assumption that IP is, in fact, a legitimate type of property right. And it turns out that advocates of the free market have made a mistake all along. Patent and copyright, to take the two worst manifestations of IP, are nothing but state monopolies that violate property rights. IP is antithetical to capitalism and the free market."
What would suddenly make politicians resistant to pettiness, bias and corruption for the first time in history?
Rule of thumb: Only let politicians make decisions where it doesn't matter if that's what's controlling them. Reserve the rest of the decisions for individuals. Reform will ebb and flow, it will look more chaotic and piecemeal, but on average you'll get the better end result sooner.
You could make that argument about literally any point of view. If you buy into moral equivalence, then sure, you could acknowledge and try to understand a concept of honor that glorifies and rewards the intentional mass murder of random civilians.
If concepts of honor are so flexible as to permit that though, then really there's simply no such thing as honor, just a bunch of disparate and conflicting delusions of it.
Someone with 10 years working in the field with the new technologies as they roll out ought AND a degree is more attractive than the person that doesn't have the degree.
My experience has been the opposite; my hires who rose to the same experience and responsibility level with no degree have tended to outperform the degree holders. Of course, I've needed people with high ambition levels, outside-the-box thinking, and the ability to execute quickly and decisively more often than people with strong academic knowledge in a certain area (I'm not discounting the need for them, btw, just making an all-else-being-equal comparison for the bulk of the roles).
Interestingly, Zoho has started hiring most of their engineering team straight out of high school.
Yes, have to concur on the eminent domain and monopoly agreements bits.
By themselves, corporations can do only so much damage. With the assistance of government, they can do much more. Not as much as government itself, but closer to it.
It would probably help if the first remedy against corporate misdeeds was the revocation of intellectual property (i.e., forms of exclusivity enforced by the government). You aren't a good corporate citizen? Fine, keep competing as best you can, just without our help any longer.
We agree about the problem; there's too little competition. But regulations, price controls and the like have a long and consistent history of creating shortages and *reducing* competition. Even the most benign and well-intentioned regulations raise entry barriers to the regulated industry and increase costs to consumers.
When you saddle an industry with a new obligation -- something they wouldn't have done absent the regulation -- it almost certainly reduces their margins. But no company in its right mind just absorbs that; you have to do better and better quarter over quarter or all the 401Ks and mutual funds that hold your stock will start fleeing. So you reduce value to the consumer somehow, by raising prices, cutting support, withholding bandwidth increases that you used to give for free, etc. All the while the industry has a bunch of new compliance costs, making it less attractive to speculators and harder for entrepreneurs to break into, thereby also making it even *less* likely that consumers will be able to respond to your increasing suckiness by going to a competitor.
Meanwhile, you've set a new precedent, giving a federal agency the authority to make the internet conform to its preferences. That's all well and good when the agency's preferences match yours and they make you feel like you've forced a company to give you something. (You haven't and they never do, incidentally.) But many others are just waiting for a chance to change the internet in very different ways. Obscenity guidelines will surely be close behind. Anonymous connections aren't good for anyone with lobbyists, so those will have to go. Official monitoring for terrorists and copyright infringers is no less likely than ATF agents breaking down doors at warehouses full of counterfeit DVDs. And since the DHS is already usurping domain names on behalf of the entertainment industry, imagine what they'd like do with all that new authority. And you know, all those cable channels have been operating like the wild west, not at all like the orderly and well behaved over-the-air broadcasters who are regulated. Maybe we could stretch that authority just a little teeny bit and bring some much needed reform to cable programming.
We will get neutral access from the marketplace. It may come at a premium at first, but consumers hate limits. No regulation gave us Amazon non-DRMd MP3s. Or AMOLED screens. Or 4G. Or Wi-Fi tethering (now at a premium price, but *actually* unlimited, and will surely be part of the basic package within a decade). No regulation gave us home internet service to begin with. Do we really need to use the nuclear option to get source-agnostic speeds?
Every expansion of authority begets another. Every one of them. Once people see government as a tool for righting wrongs, government acquires the ability to wrong rights as well. Our constitution placed extraordinary limits on federal authority to prevent that, and we'll piss those limits away to stop someone from throttling our Netflix or torrents.
I'm most suspicious of the people who *are* willing to put in the time and effort. Too many of them have ulterior motives that involve depriving me of some further fraction of my property or liberties.
Natural forces are such that corporations' powers inexorably weaken over time, while governments' powers inexorably strengthen between revolutions. At any given moment, the government will serve whoever it most owes favors too. Whoever this is, you can be pretty sure it's not you.
I hate Apple, but I'd rather have an iPhone as my only smartphone option than have Uncle Sam 'even the smartphone playing field.'
Furthermore, if his ISP built the network, they damn well do have the right to degrade the services they wish to. They'll ultimately drive customers away, but hey, it's their network.
I don't get why there is so much blind faith in bureaucracies and so much blind suspicion of companies. It's entirely backwards, when you think about it.
How does any of that answer the parent's point? Can the little guy lobby the Obama administration to have the DHS stop confiscating domain names of potential assisters of copyright infringement? No. They're funded the same way the Bush administration was, and have proven just as susceptible to regulatory capture.
I don't get it. It seems your complaint is that there are problems that net neutrality might solve... problems caused by control of the internet being in too few hands. But your solution is to put that control into even fewer hands, and harder hands to wrest it out of.
Let the ISPs throttle and choke. It will only accelerate the rise of darknets, Wi-Max competitors, and P2P mesh networks. Amazon is selling unencumbered MP3s now, and no regulatory action was needed to make that happen. Even the rate at which consumer tech is overtaking industrial tech is accelerating. At a time when it's getting harder and harder for any commercial interest to establish and maintain control of any resource, it's certainly not the moment to call for greater centralized power over those resources.
Give me AT&T, Comcast & Cox over John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi and the unaccountable commissions they spawn any day. I will be free of the former -- or at least their current shortcomings -- long before the regulations of the latter cease to exist. Once the FCC has established its authority over teh internetz and is done defining 'neutrality', why shouldn't they get more involved in copyright enforcement? The DMCA is law, and vigorously defended by D and R alike. Anything decided by a federal agency is something that can be bought by an industry.
The receipt (that the voter takes with) has a code, and the ballot has a hash of that code. Voters scan the receipt code to "open" the scanner, *then* they can scan the corresponding ballot if the hash matches.
The ballot includes a barcoded signature block using the location key, printer key, creation timestamp and hash of the ballot code. Except when keys are cracked, this restricts the scanners / counters to accepting only ballots created at that location, that day (or hour), by a printer registered to that location.
You could probably also publish logs of all ballots printed, all ballots scanned, and all ballots voided. Polling places with irregularities > n standard deviations off the mean get sent to bed without any dessert.
1. User agent is just a few menus deep, no need to root 2. Hulu and the networks closed that loophole already
1. Informative, thanks. 2. I get how they could do this with e.g. android devices, since there are more ways to recognize their signature (screen resolution, other browser headers, perhaps a permacookie of some sort). But on Google TV, wouldn't it theoretically be possible to mimic the complete HTTP request signature of, e.g., a PC running Chrome?
Then there's the "root your Google TV box and change the user agent" option. *Maybe* a legal gray area at worst. Regardless, will probably be feasible for n00bs in 3... 2... 1... [blink]
Okay, have it your way, but I'm making factual claims and offering evidence for them, while you're making subjective assertions and offering no evidence for them.
There are effective ways to point out lies and distortions in a discussion, but issuing bare accusations isn't one of them. You're entitled to your opinion -- even if I happen to think yours is the more evil and destructive of our two philosophies -- but you're playing with an alternate set of facts from the actual ones.
Quoting this destructive sociopath defending himself on his own websites does not help your case one bit.
I didn't quote him, I offered links to evidence against your claims. But here, have some other evidence of Tea Party infiltration, and of zero-tolerance for racism:
As to your question...
There is no infiltration of the Teaz Party, those are the real views of real supporters who have never, as you claim, been denounced. In fact, if they were, it would be no problem for the Tea Party to do as the NAACP requested, and denounce the racists. Why won't they?
...again I ask, what racism? So far there's no evidence of it. You reiterate your claim and accuse me of lying and distortion, but you don't even mention a single occurrence that they should be denouncing, much less offer proof of any pattern of racism in the movement. Have you no sense of irony?
Okay, I understand your points, and a couple could be worth engaging in the interest of expanding common ground, but... well I applaud the bigger intention of Sherrod's speech, taking that at face value. But that said, seriously dude... you're obviously judging Breitbart on received wisdom, preconceived notions, or a very cursory firsthand examination plus some combination of the other two. The 'racist tea partier' meme might have currency with the willfully ignorant, but it comes off as really lazy -- or disingenuous -- to anyone who knows Breitabart's work for themselves. You don't accurately articulate a single real position of his, yet you manage to ascribe false motives and positions to him nonetheless. I expected better from a 4-digit /.er, really.
When was the last time the Tea Party chastised anyone for racism?
Well, just about every shred of "evidence" I've seen of Tea Party Racism(tm) has consisted of infiltrators who were being denounced verbally (and sometimes with signage) -- as they were attempting to infiltrate and discredit the movement. The movement is about limited government, fiscal responsibility and lower taxation. Those in it have no use for anyone who would attempt to hijack that agenda towards racist ends. I've seen no evidence of them being tolerant of such things, nor that such things even happen more than extremely rarely. If you have evidence to the contrary, Breitbart is offering a $100k bounty for proof. As for the Sherrod video, again, the `you're-racist-if-you-criticize-the-actions-of-a-minorty-individual-or-group` meme is getting boring beyond belief.
In contrast to the knee-jerk accusations of racism against tea partiers, there actually is plenty of evidence for widespread, openly racist attitudes within liberal organizations. While the Black Panthers take the cake lately, the NAACP is no angel & has quite a double standard when it comes to racist statements by those in their own ranks. So tell me, if you expect chastisements in response to zero-evidence (and sometimes demonstrably false) accusations of racism by the tea party, where are the corresponding chastisements for demonstrably accurate accusations of blatant racism by those on the left? For that matter, how much time does the left spend chastising Rev Wright or Louis Farrakhan?
Breitbart takes a color-blind, no-gloves approach towards hypocrisy and towards government-expanding ideals. As certain of their racism as you are, you should collect the $100k bounty offered to anyone who can find video evidence of the alleged racial epithets at the March 20th tea party event.
[...] the racist liar Breitbart, who is pushing the poisonous myth that all minorities will seek revenge against whites if they achieve positions of power [...]
Dude, that's just insane. Breitbart is pushing no such idea, and the racist label is just not going to stick. Maybe you should read one of the 24 or so black authors on BigGovernment.com who have written about race-relations subjects & condemn the NAACP position towards the tea party. Really, in the long term, the "call them racists" strategy is going to erode the left's own credibility. Calling an action racist is one thing. Falsely smearing a person or movement as racist is what leftists seem to go to lately when they have nothing... it's the new Godwin's Law (or Feldman's Law, as some call it).
From the headline, I thought this *was* an Onion story.
I can't find the faked Shirley Sharrod video you refer to. I can't even find an edited one. I can find a short excerpt, which is a meaningfully different animal from a faked or edited video, and different even from a segment taken out of context, intentionally or not. However, I can also find the full speech, posted as the top link on biggovernment.com, which is Breitbart's habit whenever complete versions of something are or become available & there's any question about the context of the piece.
Ditto with the ACORN vids. Yes, I heard the phrase "heavily edited" and "deceptively edited" (literally!) precede "videos" in every mention of the story on NPR, but that's just laziness on their part -- or maybe excessive discord with their governing narrative. Yes, Breitbart and BigGovernment published juicy excerpts (or salient ones, depending on your viewpoint), the same way news organizations include sound bytes instead of entire speeches in their reporting. But BG also published the complete version of every one of them, and showed the context of the excerpts to be clearly faithful to the whole in most of them, and arguably so in the rest.
Similarly, the "Rahn Curve" proposes that economic growth peaks with public budgets of 20% of GDP or lower (we don't know how low because we don't have data on sub-20% governments to draw inferences from).
I wish there was a text summary of this, but in 6:43... The Rahn Curve and the Growth-Maximizing Level of Government.
There's some related (probably polarizing) discussion at http://biggovernment.com/dmitchell/2010/06/29/the-rahn-curve-shows-government-is-far-too-big/.
Why don't we just breed bigger hamsters?
Properly engineered, nuclear could give clean raw energy on its own, plus giant mutant hamsters. Win win!