You think a few people have too much wealth and power? Well, in part that's been true throughout history. And to the extent it's even truer today, that's mainly because we're in an interconnected world, where talent, celebrity, and so on can be leveraged globally, for maximum benefit and creation of cash. This is true whether or not the talent, celebrity, etc. DESERVES to be paid by whatever your standard of "deserves" is. But whatever causes them to be paid has more power in a connected world than in a less-connected one, causing them to be paid yet more than they otherwise would have been.
And we all are part of the force making the world ever more connected.
As for gay marriage -- I totally agree that it should be legal, and the fact that it's a political issue is a disgraceful comment on both the politicians and and the voters.
It sounds as if you're saying everybody's afraid of the telcos for fear they'll tap our phone calls and blackmail us with the contents. Are you serious????
The empirical fact that that NEVER seems to happen should suggest to you that nobody except the paranoid is particularly afraid of the eventuality....
People call ME an alarmist about communications privacy. Sheesh.
Many things are wrong with the political process, in this instance as in all others. But the particular one that is burning me up right now is that both sides of the net neutrality issue are positing a false dichotomy.
* Telcos get to charge for QOS * Consumers may have to pay for QOS * Information providers can subsidize consumers' QOS payments * Even so, there is very little risk of information providers being discriminated against by telcos
In 1997-8, AOL had by far the best dial-up internet service in the US, as well as a very mixed bag of software and content (I'd be even harsher, but at that point the sheer mass of people in chat rooms and so on DID count for quite a bit on the quantity vs. quality scale). It rightly focused its marketing intensely on its virtues as an ISP, probably inspired by at least two very smart consultants (the other one being my partner Linda Barlow, but I digress...)
At the time, I thought they had about two years to bring their software up to the standard of (ever-shifting) user functionality expectations, or they'd be stuck with a perception and positioning -- well, the nerds' perception would also be adopted by the mainstream. As it happened, despite firing their head of development who was a great networking guy but lousy at UI, they didn't fix the software, and they did become scorned by the mainstream. I thought they'd do better -- but then, I thought Bob Pittman would be unto them as Ray Lane was unto Oracle, and I proved VERY wrong about that.
And now -- well, as everybody says, it sucks. The email client sucks. The general UI is clunky. The collection of "content" and functionality is inferior to Yahoo. There are lots of negative weirdnesses (article headlines changing before you can click) and few if any offsetting postive "Wow!" weirdnesses.
So how do they fix that? Pretty much the only strategy that could work is to do something new, and happen to do it right. The internet does keep evolving, so the opportunity is always there. Another note suggested this should be in multimedia/broadband; that is indeed the obvious place to look, for ta variety of reasons. It matches the current technical opportunity. It matches the strengths of the rest of Time Warner. It's just assumed by the generation even younger than people who post here -- i.e., the generation to young to know or care that "AOL sucks".
AOL will probably live or die on how it evolves in the video generation.
I have two major objections to this idea, and to the article that presents it.
1. The ONLY problem this solves is performance -- i.e., processing throughput. And that's not what's wrong with anti-spam systems today. They live and die on the precision/accuracy tradeoff, or maybe on UI.
2. The authors seem to assume that Bayesian systems work really, really well. While technically most or all current spam-filtering products are Bayesian in some sense, that still speaks of considerable naivete about real-world spam.
If we wanted to be mean, we could come up with quite a long list of possible "authoritative" entries we could create and show to him.:)
But seriously, he's respected by people I respect (hey, I can respect people who have blind spots!) and even work worth, so I probably shouldn't run with that idea too too far.
On many subjects -- especially various historical figures -- Wikipedia IS Britannica. After all, how much of the life story of King Henry II has changed since 1911, which IIRC is the date on the open-source Britannica Wikipedia uses.
About contemporary people and the like, Wikipedia is often far superior to Britannica, due to its currency. Of course, there can be a lot of spin in those articles, as there are still people alive and in many cases editing Wikipedia who benefit directly from that spin. But it's still better than no article at all.
On math, science, and the like, it's a good quick reminder of what other topics and buzzwords to search on might be. That often makes it a great place to start.
But it is NOT authoritative, and regarding it as such can lead to all sorts of weirdnesses. For example, when I was blogging for Computerworld, I was annoyed that almost every post by every blogger was being listed in the "enterprise applications" category. When I complained to the online editor, he said that he regarded Wikipedia as authoritative, and pointed me at their definition, which indeed was ridiculously expansive. So I went and edited it to something more reasonable, and told him. He then circulated email to all the bloggers saying Wikipedia's definition of "enterprise applications" had changed, and since that was authoritative, their usage should conform to the new definition.
I am NOT making this story up, nor significantly distorting it. (And fortunately, he's an anomaly at a publication that in my experience otherwise has smart, knowledgeable, journalistically admirable editors.)
Besides the obvious MySQL/commodity low end stuff, you might want to look at specialty high end alternatives too. I have my shoes off as I write this, so counting SAP's BI Accelerator customers is no problem for me; still, that's an interesting product heralding an interesting trend. And I think DATallegro will be on brandname boxes soon too.
My backup for these opinions can be found at various places on http://www.dbms2.com/
You're right, Macka, and Oracle has been on both sides of that fence in the past.
On the one hand, the night the Sun/AOL/Netscape deal was announced, I was horrified at the inevitable train wreck ahead. I had pretty good relationships with both AOL and Oracle in those days, and I emailed Larry in the middle of the night urging him to intervene with a counteroffer. He shot back that he didn't want to annoy Sun.
On the other hand, it's not long after that that Oracle tried Raw Iron, which was to be a DBMS that didn't require an underlying OS.
What's happened in the meantime is that Sun is giving away dev tools, app servers, and even now shipping open source DBMS with an enthusiasm rivalling that with which they partner with Oracle. So Oracle really has very little left to lose in terms of loyalty from or cooperation with Sun.
Similar stories would be true for other vendors. E.g., HP is in bed with everybody.
The industry is ever more promiscuous. Figuratively speaking, at least; literal promiscuity probably peaked in the 1980s, or at least it did for me...
If you think about, there are a lot of cases of OS-DBMS integration, or at least highly OS-aware implementations. Examples include Teradata, mainframe DB2, data warehouse appliances, the AS/400 case mentioned in another note -- and arguably Oracle itself! Unlike other portable DBMS vendors, Oracle does a lot of OS-specific integration/interface work for each platform it supports.
There are at least two senses of "support" here, which are hand-holding and actual bugfix/upgrade code changing. Answering the phones is the easy one, although dismal performance by various cost-cutting, outsourcing big vendors can obscure that point.
So the real question is indeed, as already noted in this thread, will Oracle code, package, and support a particular Linux distro? I think it has to go that way. Here are two reasons why.
1. Enterprises use huge application-oriented technology stacks -- hardware, OS, DBMS, app server, OLTP apps, analytics, etc., etc. They increasingly resist paying "value prices" for all those layers. Thus, each vendor wants ITS tiers to be value-priced, while the other layers are commoditized, both to free up money for that vendor, and to generally undermine the other big companies. Sun likes giving away DBMS. SAP is pushing cheap DBMS. Microsoft introduced low-cost DBMS. And so Oracle needs to strike back by, for example, ensuring that the OS gets commoditized.
2. Oracle code is what Scott McNealy would call "a big hairball". Customers need to be protected from the complexity. Integrating the DBMS and OS is a potential way to do that.
The original article and much of the discussion focused on AMD vs. Intel competition. I chimed in about the Intel part of that. I've only given one named source (Stuart Frost, CEO of DATallegro), but I have other unnamed sources in agreement with him, and it's also a gut feel I have based on a bunch of conversations directly with Intel.
Sorry, but that's the best I have to offer. I'm a damned good analyst, but when it comes to chips I'm going on general analytic ability rather than a whole lot of detailed subject matter knowledge.
Right. It's not about clock speed any more. It's about interprocessor communication speed, cache speed, etc., etc.
Judging chips has gotten a lot more complex than it used to be, and not just because power consumption rivals speed in performance. There are a lot of factors affecting total throughput now. Reality is catching up to Intel's marketing hype.:D
.. Woodcrest is the real deal. Companies that held their noses and supported Intel in the past for financial reasons now say that Woodcrest has actually caught up with or leapfrogged Opteron. DATallegro is just the most visible example. At the risk of yet another shameless plug, you can see some details via http://www.dbms2.com/2006/06/28/good-datallegroint el-white-paper/
I'm sorry, but that was a pretty stupid comment. Of course jobs help the Indians a lot. They help the people with the jobs and they help some more Indians that those people buy goods and services from. The gist of the article was just that there are lots MORE people to be helped than seem likely to be reached in the near future by merely the growth engines that are already going strong.
If you look at not just those 1.3 million workers and their families, but the top 100 or 200 million people in India, you have a relatively healthy country. The problem is the other billion or so who desperately need to be dragged along. Or so I understand; I've never actually been to India myself.
What I mean by "not an immediate threat" is that, in fact, very few people have been harmed as a result of this monitoring (some terrorists aside), and for at least a few years to come, that's likely to continue to be true.
The really scary scenarios about what it could lead to are more plausible 2 decades out than they are 2 months or 2 years from now.
But to repeat -- we have to start doing something about those scenarios NOW, because the fixes will happen just as slowly as the unfolding of the threats themselves.
Governments around the world are -- or are on the verge of -- tracking essentially all electronic communications. Examples include recent revelations of National Security Agency data capture, legislation in the U.S. and Europe that would mandate multiyear retention of all Internet connection data, massive government-plus-commercial data integration projects, biometric passports, national ID cards and electronic health records, to name a few. The net effect is simple but profound: Governments around the world are seeking access to substantially every bit of information about you.
True, this isn't an immediate threat. (We're talking about the largest data-integration projects in the history of the world -- and they're government projects. Imagine the implementation cycle.) But most of the technical approaches to limiting the dangers in this trend need to be reflected at system design time. What's more, the ones that fall purely in the legal sphere are clearly going to require years to achieve political adoption.
System architecture is changing in a profound way that will somewhat limit the commoditization on which virtualization depends. It's not just a matter any more of CPUs doing calculation and ordering up random disk accesses. RAM speeds, memory bus speeds, interprocessor pipeline speeds -- that stuff all matters a lot now. This is most evident in data warehousing/analytics, where data warehouse appliances (Netezza, DATallegro) and even memory-centric technologies (SAP, Applix) are becoming more important, but it could also be a broader trend.
Long, long ago, in a millenium far, far away, my partner and I wrote Upside Magazine's cover story "AOL Doesn't Suck". The title came because editor Richard Brandt emailed me saying "Everybody knows AOL sucks" and I wrote back "No it doesn't!"
But that was then, in the brief period when AOL shone as a dial-up ISP, when the chat rooms beat most alternatives, when alternate IM systems weren't widespread, when there were few good forums anywhere (Usenet had already been wrecked and the software for the alternatives wasn't there yet), when some of its content was competitive, and so on.
Now -- well, it's sucked for a long time now. What a waste.
That said, I've been meaning to do a piece on how net-nonneutrality would turn the whole internet into AOL. This throws a monkeywrench into that plan...
You're absolutely right that Saudia Arabia and a few other countries are as bad or worse than China.
But China is the most technically sophisticated of the lot. Right now that's because they have lots of engineers; in the future they may roll some of their own technology as well.
Beat the Chinese censors and you probably can beat all the rest that matter too.
What's more, I suspect you'll find that the fraction of people in any given educational/economic class who Really Believe in China is higher than it is in Saudia Arabia. They can train perfectly good engineers in China without exposing them to "harmful ideas" from abroad. But in Saudia Arabia, say, everybody competent pretty much as to go to school in the West, there are few decent natively-written textbooks, etc., etc.
Both sides are lying, somewhat, although one is indeed a lot worse than the other. The (relatively) good guys want enhanced QOS to be free. The bad guys want to use the legitimate need to charge for enhanced QOS as an excuse to turn the whole Internet into AOL.
I propose calling the bluffs of both sides, via Tariff Rebate Passthrough. The essence of the idea is:
Pricing of internet services to consumers will be based wholly on technical characteristics such as volume and quality of service, and not on the identity of the information provider, the content of the information, or the equipment (hardware or software) used by the consumer to consume it.
Pricing of "last-mile" delivery to information providers will be based on those same factors only, and be in the form of standard per-byte tariffs only. Pricing will not discriminate in any way among information providers, nor among types of application.
Telecom service vendors can't charge two parties for delivering the same byte.
I'm going to take a very strong position here in my first-ever Slashdot post -- China absolutely should be hacked, on a systematic and worldwide-basis. Their desire to censor a whole country should be opposed on both moral and enlightened-self-interest grounds. But it will be tough at best to beat.
Ironically, the situation is a kind of reverse spam-antispammer set up, in which the folks trying to get through the defenses are the good guys. Amnesty International's Irrepressible.info, while terribly primitive, is at least a start, and I think everybody with a web site should play along and see what happens. A more advanced idea may be found at http://www.monashreport.com/2006/04/17/how-to-beat -chinese-censorship-operation-peking-duck/.
And if the censoring can be used for some kind of DOS, so much the better. Make it as expensive and difficult for the oppressors as ever possible.
Slashdot Mirror
You think a few people have too much wealth and power? Well, in part that's been true throughout history. And to the extent it's even truer today, that's mainly because we're in an interconnected world, where talent, celebrity, and so on can be leveraged globally, for maximum benefit and creation of cash. This is true whether or not the talent, celebrity, etc. DESERVES to be paid by whatever your standard of "deserves" is. But whatever causes them to be paid has more power in a connected world than in a less-connected one, causing them to be paid yet more than they otherwise would have been.
And we all are part of the force making the world ever more connected.
As for gay marriage -- I totally agree that it should be legal, and the fact that it's a political issue is a disgraceful comment on both the politicians and and the voters.
There isn't a whole lot of known problem, except at the local-delivery end.
Your comment is one more reason to think there won't be, but there wasn't much anyway. (Except for the snooping, of course.)
It sounds as if you're saying everybody's afraid of the telcos for fear they'll tap our phone calls and blackmail us with the contents. Are you serious????
....
The empirical fact that that NEVER seems to happen should suggest to you that nobody except the paranoid is particularly afraid of the eventuality
People call ME an alarmist about communications privacy. Sheesh.
Many things are wrong with the political process, in this instance as in all others. But the particular one that is burning me up right now is that both sides of the net neutrality issue are positing a false dichotomy.
c y-and-privacy/net-neutrality/) -- it is possible to design a system whereby:
g islative-language-for-tariff-rebate-passthrough/), and the technical requirements aren't forbidding either.
As I've documented elsewhere -- I hope convincingly (http://www.monashreport.com/category/public-poli
* Telcos get to charge for QOS
* Consumers may have to pay for QOS
* Information providers can subsidize consumers' QOS payments
* Even so, there is very little risk of information providers being discriminated against by telcos
In fact, it's a really simple to design such a system conceptually (http://www.monashreport.com/2006/06/26/simple-le
In 1997-8, AOL had by far the best dial-up internet service in the US, as well as a very mixed bag of software and content (I'd be even harsher, but at that point the sheer mass of people in chat rooms and so on DID count for quite a bit on the quantity vs. quality scale). It rightly focused its marketing intensely on its virtues as an ISP, probably inspired by at least two very smart consultants (the other one being my partner Linda Barlow, but I digress ...)
At the time, I thought they had about two years to bring their software up to the standard of (ever-shifting) user functionality expectations, or they'd be stuck with a perception and positioning -- well, the nerds' perception would also be adopted by the mainstream. As it happened, despite firing their head of development who was a great networking guy but lousy at UI, they didn't fix the software, and they did become scorned by the mainstream. I thought they'd do better -- but then, I thought Bob Pittman would be unto them as Ray Lane was unto Oracle, and I proved VERY wrong about that.
And now -- well, as everybody says, it sucks. The email client sucks. The general UI is clunky. The collection of "content" and functionality is inferior to Yahoo. There are lots of negative weirdnesses (article headlines changing before you can click) and few if any offsetting postive "Wow!" weirdnesses.
So how do they fix that? Pretty much the only strategy that could work is to do something new, and happen to do it right. The internet does keep evolving, so the opportunity is always there. Another note suggested this should be in multimedia/broadband; that is indeed the obvious place to look, for ta variety of reasons. It matches the current technical opportunity. It matches the strengths of the rest of Time Warner. It's just assumed by the generation even younger than people who post here -- i.e., the generation to young to know or care that "AOL sucks".
AOL will probably live or die on how it evolves in the video generation.
I have two major objections to this idea, and to the article that presents it.
1. The ONLY problem this solves is performance -- i.e., processing throughput. And that's not what's wrong with anti-spam systems today. They live and die on the precision/accuracy tradeoff, or maybe on UI.
2. The authors seem to assume that Bayesian systems work really, really well. While technically most or all current spam-filtering products are Bayesian in some sense, that still speaks of considerable naivete about real-world spam.
If we wanted to be mean, we could come up with quite a long list of possible "authoritative" entries we could create and show to him. :)
But seriously, he's respected by people I respect (hey, I can respect people who have blind spots!) and even work worth, so I probably shouldn't run with that idea too too far.
On many subjects -- especially various historical figures -- Wikipedia IS Britannica. After all, how much of the life story of King Henry II has changed since 1911, which IIRC is the date on the open-source Britannica Wikipedia uses.
About contemporary people and the like, Wikipedia is often far superior to Britannica, due to its currency. Of course, there can be a lot of spin in those articles, as there are still people alive and in many cases editing Wikipedia who benefit directly from that spin. But it's still better than no article at all.
On math, science, and the like, it's a good quick reminder of what other topics and buzzwords to search on might be. That often makes it a great place to start.
But it is NOT authoritative, and regarding it as such can lead to all sorts of weirdnesses. For example, when I was blogging for Computerworld, I was annoyed that almost every post by every blogger was being listed in the "enterprise applications" category. When I complained to the online editor, he said that he regarded Wikipedia as authoritative, and pointed me at their definition, which indeed was ridiculously expansive. So I went and edited it to something more reasonable, and told him. He then circulated email to all the bloggers saying Wikipedia's definition of "enterprise applications" had changed, and since that was authoritative, their usage should conform to the new definition.
I am NOT making this story up, nor significantly distorting it. (And fortunately, he's an anomaly at a publication that in my experience otherwise has smart, knowledgeable, journalistically admirable editors.)
Besides the obvious MySQL/commodity low end stuff, you might want to look at specialty high end alternatives too. I have my shoes off as I write this, so counting SAP's BI Accelerator customers is no problem for me; still, that's an interesting product heralding an interesting trend. And I think DATallegro will be on brandname boxes soon too.
My backup for these opinions can be found at various places on http://www.dbms2.com/
You're right, Macka, and Oracle has been on both sides of that fence in the past.
...
On the one hand, the night the Sun/AOL/Netscape deal was announced, I was horrified at the inevitable train wreck ahead. I had pretty good relationships with both AOL and Oracle in those days, and I emailed Larry in the middle of the night urging him to intervene with a counteroffer. He shot back that he didn't want to annoy Sun.
On the other hand, it's not long after that that Oracle tried Raw Iron, which was to be a DBMS that didn't require an underlying OS.
What's happened in the meantime is that Sun is giving away dev tools, app servers, and even now shipping open source DBMS with an enthusiasm rivalling that with which they partner with Oracle. So Oracle really has very little left to lose in terms of loyalty from or cooperation with Sun.
Similar stories would be true for other vendors. E.g., HP is in bed with everybody.
The industry is ever more promiscuous. Figuratively speaking, at least; literal promiscuity probably peaked in the 1980s, or at least it did for me
If you think about, there are a lot of cases of OS-DBMS integration, or at least highly OS-aware implementations. Examples include Teradata, mainframe DB2, data warehouse appliances, the AS/400 case mentioned in another note -- and arguably Oracle itself! Unlike other portable DBMS vendors, Oracle does a lot of OS-specific integration/interface work for each platform it supports.
o n/.
I posted a little support for that argument at http://www.dbms2.com/2006/07/09/os-dbms-integrati
There are at least two senses of "support" here, which are hand-holding and actual bugfix/upgrade code changing. Answering the phones is the easy one, although dismal performance by various cost-cutting, outsourcing big vendors can obscure that point.
So the real question is indeed, as already noted in this thread, will Oracle code, package, and support a particular Linux distro? I think it has to go that way. Here are two reasons why.
1. Enterprises use huge application-oriented technology stacks -- hardware, OS, DBMS, app server, OLTP apps, analytics, etc., etc. They increasingly resist paying "value prices" for all those layers. Thus, each vendor wants ITS tiers to be value-priced, while the other layers are commoditized, both to free up money for that vendor, and to generally undermine the other big companies. Sun likes giving away DBMS. SAP is pushing cheap DBMS. Microsoft introduced low-cost DBMS. And so Oracle needs to strike back by, for example, ensuring that the OS gets commoditized.
2. Oracle code is what Scott McNealy would call "a big hairball". Customers need to be protected from the complexity. Integrating the DBMS and OS is a potential way to do that.
Spy vs. Spy!
Resolving the references in the title and content of this comment is an exercise left to the reader ...
The original article and much of the discussion focused on AMD vs. Intel competition. I chimed in about the Intel part of that. I've only given one named source (Stuart Frost, CEO of DATallegro), but I have other unnamed sources in agreement with him, and it's also a gut feel I have based on a bunch of conversations directly with Intel.
Sorry, but that's the best I have to offer. I'm a damned good analyst, but when it comes to chips I'm going on general analytic ability rather than a whole lot of detailed subject matter knowledge.
Right. It's not about clock speed any more. It's about interprocessor communication speed, cache speed, etc., etc.
Judging chips has gotten a lot more complex than it used to be, and not just because power consumption rivals speed in performance. There are a lot of factors affecting total throughput now. Reality is catching up to Intel's marketing hype. :D
.. Woodcrest is the real deal. Companies that held their noses and supported Intel in the past for financial reasons now say that Woodcrest has actually caught up with or leapfrogged Opteron. DATallegro is just the most visible example. At the risk of yet another shameless plug, you can see some details via http://www.dbms2.com/2006/06/28/good-datallegroint el-white-paper/
I'm sorry, but that was a pretty stupid comment. Of course jobs help the Indians a lot. They help the people with the jobs and they help some more Indians that those people buy goods and services from. The gist of the article was just that there are lots MORE people to be helped than seem likely to be reached in the near future by merely the growth engines that are already going strong.
If you look at not just those 1.3 million workers and their families, but the top 100 or 200 million people in India, you have a relatively healthy country. The problem is the other billion or so who desperately need to be dragged along. Or so I understand; I've never actually been to India myself.
What I mean by "not an immediate threat" is that, in fact, very few people have been harmed as a result of this monitoring (some terrorists aside), and for at least a few years to come, that's likely to continue to be true.
The really scary scenarios about what it could lead to are more plausible 2 decades out than they are 2 months or 2 years from now.
But to repeat -- we have to start doing something about those scenarios NOW, because the fixes will happen just as slowly as the unfolding of the threats themselves.
To quote my favorite columnist,
Governments around the world are -- or are on the verge of -- tracking essentially all electronic communications. Examples include recent revelations of National Security Agency data capture, legislation in the U.S. and Europe that would mandate multiyear retention of all Internet connection data, massive government-plus-commercial data integration projects, biometric passports, national ID cards and electronic health records, to name a few. The net effect is simple but profound: Governments around the world are seeking access to substantially every bit of information about you.
True, this isn't an immediate threat. (We're talking about the largest data-integration projects in the history of the world -- and they're government projects. Imagine the implementation cycle.) But most of the technical approaches to limiting the dangers in this trend need to be reflected at system design time. What's more, the ones that fall purely in the legal sphere are clearly going to require years to achieve political adoption.
From A Public Policy Troika for Techno-Activists
That works too.
System architecture is changing in a profound way that will somewhat limit the commoditization on which virtualization depends. It's not just a matter any more of CPUs doing calculation and ordering up random disk accesses. RAM speeds, memory bus speeds, interprocessor pipeline speeds -- that stuff all matters a lot now. This is most evident in data warehousing/analytics, where data warehouse appliances (Netezza, DATallegro) and even memory-centric technologies (SAP, Applix) are becoming more important, but it could also be a broader trend.
I've written about some of the details at http://www.dbms2.com/
No way do I dispute the benefits of virtualization in OLTP, messaging, and so on. It's just not the be all and end all.
Long, long ago, in a millenium far, far away, my partner and I wrote Upside Magazine's cover story "AOL Doesn't Suck". The title came because editor Richard Brandt emailed me saying "Everybody knows AOL sucks" and I wrote back "No it doesn't!"
But that was then, in the brief period when AOL shone as a dial-up ISP, when the chat rooms beat most alternatives, when alternate IM systems weren't widespread, when there were few good forums anywhere (Usenet had already been wrecked and the software for the alternatives wasn't there yet), when some of its content was competitive, and so on.
Now -- well, it's sucked for a long time now. What a waste.
That said, I've been meaning to do a piece on how net-nonneutrality would turn the whole internet into AOL. This throws a monkeywrench into that plan ...
You're absolutely right that Saudia Arabia and a few other countries are as bad or worse than China.
But China is the most technically sophisticated of the lot. Right now that's because they have lots of engineers; in the future they may roll some of their own technology as well.
Beat the Chinese censors and you probably can beat all the rest that matter too.
What's more, I suspect you'll find that the fraction of people in any given educational/economic class who Really Believe in China is higher than it is in Saudia Arabia. They can train perfectly good engineers in China without exposing them to "harmful ideas" from abroad. But in Saudia Arabia, say, everybody competent pretty much as to go to school in the West, there are few decent natively-written textbooks, etc., etc.
Plus there's the whole military-rival thing ...
Both sides are lying, somewhat, although one is indeed a lot worse than the other. The (relatively) good guys want enhanced QOS to be free. The bad guys want to use the legitimate need to charge for enhanced QOS as an excuse to turn the whole Internet into AOL.
I propose calling the bluffs of both sides, via Tariff Rebate Passthrough. The essence of the idea is:
Discussion of this idea can be found at http://www.monashreport.com/category/public-policy -and-privacy/net-neutrality/
I'm going to take a very strong position here in my first-ever Slashdot post -- China absolutely should be hacked, on a systematic and worldwide-basis. Their desire to censor a whole country should be opposed on both moral and enlightened-self-interest grounds. But it will be tough at best to beat.
Ironically, the situation is a kind of reverse spam-antispammer set up, in which the folks trying to get through the defenses are the good guys. Amnesty International's Irrepressible.info, while terribly primitive, is at least a start, and I think everybody with a web site should play along and see what happens. A more advanced idea may be found at http://www.monashreport.com/2006/04/17/how-to-beat -chinese-censorship-operation-peking-duck/.
And if the censoring can be used for some kind of DOS, so much the better. Make it as expensive and difficult for the oppressors as ever possible.