tc

In any case, I edited to make the anecdotal nature clear. Better?

[1] It feels somehow more 'scientific' to point out that some rule works 99.9% of the time, and to thereby dismiss anecdotes as non-evidence (not that zero-tolerance even comes close to meeting this standard). But if a rule unjustly destroys the lives of 0.1% of people who interface with it, I still consider that a lousy rule.

In some alternate universe, the story reads:

The librarian noticed Olly tucking the book under his jacket. Following school policy, she called the police. Olly spent the night in jail and was suspended from his school. Bitter and vengeful, he never went back. His street cred soared, and soon Olly was accepted into the local gang....

How will my autobiography read?

If I'm improving the quality of my autobiography every day, then I'm probably doing something right. If I'd be too embarrassed to write down some aspect of my life, or if it would have too tenuous a connection to the rest of the story, then I probably need to change course.

This metric also makes it clear that success is in how you live your life rather than where you end up. Your life's final destination is only going to fill one page. The journey of your life needs to fill the book.

Prosecutors identify defendants to go after instead of finding a law that was broken and figuring out who did it.

I thought it made the whole piece. It's quite clear to anyone who follows federal cases that this is exactly what is going on, and it is rather obvious why anything that enables this is perverting justice.

* If a comment is sitting at 1 or 0, I'll try to avoid downvoting it unless I really think the comment subtracts value from the site.

* If a child is attracting more votes than the parent, and I think this is because the child commenter didn't comprehend what the parent was saying, I vote to level out the comments.

* If I see a comment sitting in negative territory that I feel should only be a 0 or 1 because it wasn't that bad, I'll upvote it even if I otherwise wouldn't have.

* If a thread is already dominated by a couple of high-scoring comments, relative to its age, I'm less likely to post a new top level comment. My feeling is that if a good comment just sits at the bottom because it arrived slightly too late, I've only added noise to the thread. The lack of visible points makes it much harder to gauge how a new comment will 'compete' on the thread.

* If the scores indicate that something is being widely misunderstood, I might comment where I otherwise would not have to try to restore sanity.

Of course, if this change were to stick, it would alter the character of the site, and we would all develop new voting and commenting systems. I can already tell that this change magnifies my tendency to vote with an eye toward reordering comments rather than voting on each comment in relative isolation.

This is the danger of increasing regulation; the blade cuts both ways. You may think that Net Neutrality is about taking on big companies, but I guarantee that in just a few short years their smart legal teams will be using the regulation to increase each other's legal bills and to squash smaller competitors [1].

[1] Regulation is similar in this regard to patents. The defense of patents is always the hypothetical small inventor. In practice, though, the beneficiary always seems to be huge corporations (except for patent trolls, which are a fairly recent innovation).

[1] Which is not terribly dissimilar from his feeling that programming languages shouldn't pander to bad programmers.

Most nontechnical parents who see their son or daughter spending countless hours on a computer just think that he or she is wasting his or her time.

(That last sentence would be a good place for those mythical gender-neutral English pronouns.)

"All those expensive Congressional fund-raisers, and this is the best we get! There's no honor anymore..."

AT&T has quietly backed and financed (some might say "astroturfed") the whole push for net neutrality... of wired networks.

Why might they do that? Isn't AT&T an evil carrier? It's pretty simple, actually. AT&T has a massive network built for delivering phone calls. The operation of this network does not depend on packet prioritization, so it is not affected by net neutrality.

Who is affected though? Cable carriers rely on packet prioritization to deliver voice calls with the approximate quality of AT&T's separate network. Net neutrality doesn't affect AT&T much, but it harms their competitors' business plans.

So it's easy to see why AT&T, who backed net neutrality when it was in the interest of harming their upstart competitors, might feel that applying it to wireless networks, where it affects them, is a "bait and switch." They baited a bunch of Congress critters to interfere in the ISP business, and now the scope of that mandate is being switched on them.

Incidentally, one of the commenters had an effect on me quite opposite to his intention. The commenter noted how much he liked restaurants where the tip is included. This is completely foreign to my experience. My experience is that tipped service is consistently among the best service.

In all seriousness, telecom subsidies in the US mostly go to building out old-fashioned POTS lines and slow DSL into corn fields in the middle of nowhere. Don't blame the telecoms (except for the lobbying of the huge ones), that's what the grants specify.

AT&T has been spending big money supporting and astroturfing Internet Neutrality. If you don't understand why that would be, you don't understand the dynamics of the industry enough to know what is really going on. They aren't doing that out of the goodness of their hearts. This is the old struggle between the LECs and the cable franchises.

Internet Neutrality is a win for AT&T and the LECs because they already have a separate network (the time-division network) that doesn't rely on packet prioritization to deliver latency-sensitive media.

Seriously though, I think I've addressed some of those questions elsewhere in the thread. Many other countries you would compare against have heavily subsidized consumer internet via government spending. Many countries also have a significantly higher population density than the US, or they had less existing infrastructure (laying fiber is cheaper if you are building all new roads anyway).

As for why Cisco or Juniper equipment is expensive: it is expensive because it is relatively low-volume industrial-strength gear that needs to run far in excess of 99.999% reliability while supporting an absurdly large number of protocols and standards. To put the problem as a bit of a tautology, if you think it is so absurdly overpriced, why aren't you raising a venture round to build cheaper gear?

(Incidentally, I think you probably could, but it is still a hard problem that requires time to solve. Not all things that could theoretically be improved can be improved instantly.)

Before you get too nostalgic about Japanese internet though, a friend who worked in Tokyo for a couple of months tells me it isn't really that much to write home about. Access to all of the services you care about as an American are slower, and my friend's provider explicitly blocked VoIP. I have no doubt that this isn't fully representative (except the latency/limited intercontinental bandwidth part). Perhaps patio11 could lend some experiences?

It doesn't so much even matter who the regulations favor. It's that at some point, after spending countless hours with lawyers, filing government paperwork, and fretting about current and future regulatory issues, you really begin to see your customers as being politicians and regulators rather than the people who pay you for service.

Which is all to say that, I believe, if you regulate enough, you will get the monopolies that you fear.

I don't want to be overly-harsh to you in particular, but I think this is the key to so much of the useless posturing and speculating on this issue.

It may in fact be similar to the familiar refrain that people become more tolerant of homosexuals when they realize that one of their friends, family members, or business partners is gay. It's easy to stigmatize and demonize internet carriers if you don't know anyone who runs a business in that field.

To your points though. Most carrier backbones are not regularly overloaded. The bottleneck is at the network edge. And it isn't that carriers don't want to build. Everyone I know in this industry loves expanding their network and increasing capacity. But at the end of the day, you have to make a return on investment or your go out of business. Building out the network edge is terribly expensive. You have to buy and place a lot of expensive equipment in a lot of different places. You have to lay or lease lots of fiber or copper, or you have to build towers (and lay fiber to backhaul). Amazingly, there are lots of carriers that do this. You wouldn't even recognize most of the names.

Speaking as someone who came to telecom from a software background, I think there is a tendency for software people to want to idealize telecom into an ethereal mass-less abstraction, like software. If you look at it that way, any limitation is artificial -- the man is holding you down for his own pleasure. But the business isn't anything like that. Think Fedex rather than Google, and you'd be on the right path.

As for Europe, Asia, etc., keep in mind that those networks were far more heavily subsidized than our own. You may think that's a good thing, but remember that this removed resources from other human endeavors. Not everyone on Earth rates decreasing his or her CounterStrike latency as the highest priority in life.

I suppose it is the difference between being a driver on a road, or perhaps even the manufacturer of an automobile, and knowing anything about the messy business of road construction.

For one thing, everyone seems to focus just on consumer internet. But this is hardly the whole picture. Most people spend over half of their waking hours at work. To the consternation of many employers, people probably spend more hours on the internet at work than at home. And the market for business internet services is highly competitive and quite far from monopolistic. It perhaps shouldn't be surprising that a smaller number of names stand out in the consumer space -- it seems to happen with all consumer products.

Further, even the argument you posed is self-contradictory. Do you know how much a 30% market share is worth? It's worth enough that plenty of people are building to compete in that space right now.

If you wanted to lay a few miles of fiber yourself, you'd find that it is fairly straightforward in most areas. You cross a bit of red tape, fill out all the forms, and pay the impact costs. If you don't want to do it yourself, companies like Comcast actually do a good bit of work laying fiber on contract for smaller carriers.

As far as cable monopolies, those are fortunately on their way out anyway, at least in Tier 2 cities and their near suburbs. Increasingly, Brighthouse is competing in Comcast territory, and vice-versa. That's the direction. But of course, networks take time to build, with or without a bunch of government mandates.

Carriers are bound by the same forces as other businesses. People buy expensive equipment if and only if they expect to see a return on their investment.

Third, the new regulations create an additional layer of government bureaucracy where the free market has already proven its effectiveness. The reason you’re not using AOL to read this right now isn’t because the government mandated AOL’s closed network out of existence: It’s because free and open networks triumphed, and that’s because they were good business.

You're using the word freedom in very different way than Jefferson ever meant it. In Jefferson's world, the Mint founders are no more or less free now than before selling to Intuit.

Otherwise, I agree that it isn't for us to judge. The founders were certainly free to sell their company.

Interestingly, if you think in Lisp, it's obvious how much more elegant Thompson's approach is (than a C struct-based state machine), and how you would implement it in Thompson's way with closures.