That's funny. Because I'm so tired of engineers puffing up their own egos by downing the Arduino. I'm smart enough to know that there are far more elegant, powerful solutions than an Arduino for almost every possible situation. But I'm not educated enough to use them. Arduino is easy and accessible. Don't underestimate how attractive those qualities are for someone who simply wants a challenging hobby.

It doesn't matter, as long as they are not held liable for your actions, they have no reason to interfere with your traffic.

But they do have a reason to interfere with your traffic. It has been well documented that ISPs have implemented traffic shaping/filtering on peer-to-peer traffic. Strictly speaking peer-to-peer file sharing is legal. I have to assume that there was a reason to interfere with that traffic because they aren't liable for the content.

I think your last point is fundamentally flawed. There's a quote somewhere from the CEO of Bellsouth (or maybe AT&T, not sure) where he says something along the lines of "Google saturates my network and doesn't pay a dime for it." While technically true, a large amount of data sourced from Google's servers likely makes up a large portion of the data traversing the network, doesn't that ignore the fact that Google only sends that data because I ask for it? As a consumer I pay an ISP to provide X Mbps connectivity to "the internet" (oversubscription, etc, aside). I think it is completely fair to say that if my neighbor pays for more bandwidth, he deserves it. But "the senders" are only in the game because my neighbor and I brought them into it.

The problem I see with your argument is that there is a basic assumption that an ISP has an interest in fighting over the definition of "not illegal." It is generally argued that publicly sharing copyrighted works is illegal. If an accusation were made that you were publicly sharing copyrighted works,do you believe that your ISP would fight the legal battle on your behalf to protect your right to share files (let's you didn't mean to, just some random pdf of vendor documentation that happened to technically be copyrighted made it into your shared documents)? Or do you think it would be carefully written into the terms of service that they reserve the right to block any "lawful" protocol found to be used for illegal purposes, shifting the burden of proof to you to provide evidence that you were not breaking any laws?

Your last paragraph touches on what is actually being questioned and everyone seems to overlook. Do the terms of "common carrier" regarding non-discriminatory packet delivery cover internet "packet" data or do they only apply to voice "packet" data? Is internet traffic, like voice traffic, a "utility"? I would say yes because I believe that not having access to it, in the form of an uncensored platform, puts you at a general social disadvantage. Therefore I believe that citizens should be guaranteed access to an internet free of corporate "sponsorship" (one site's traffic delivery is artificially prioritized over another). With one minor exception, I generally tend to believe that the exception for wireless carriers is appropriate because I do not feel that we have reached a point where not having full, mobile access to the internet is a significant disadvantage. I would, however, love to see an exception to that exception, so that the same non-discrimination would apply to "data only" devices such as 3G modems.

Not that I necessarily agree with the GP, but who gets to define the "clean up" piece of that? If you had a family reunion planned for the weekend would I have to pay for a new venue? If it puddled up and killed the grass, would it be sufficient to just vacuum the puddle or am I responsible for landscaping too? Would you be comfortable swimming in your pool if I just filtered out the chunks or does it need to be drained and scrubbed? Say your house was on the market and you missed 6 weeks worth of potential buyers during the cleanup, what do I owe you for that? What if you found out that I knew about a tree root that had broken through the pipe and I was using an inexpensive patch rather than getting it properly repaired?

I'm not trying to be an ass about it. I think everyone can agree with the fact that what's done is done. BP hasn't avoided responsibility for stopping the leak, but that's an obvious benefit to them given that their investment is quite literally washing out to sea. They have, however, been very vague with their statements about cleanup. With so many people looking for a get-rich-quick lawsuit I don't really blame them. I don't know how you define the extent of responsibility, but the ultimate impact of this can hardly be estimated. And from my perspective, BP did not have sufficient safeguards or contingency plans in place.

I don't think the parent is "Flamebait" and I'm a Palm fanboy.

My guess is that AT&T and Verizon feel and act like they hold all the cards. Verizon has the network and AT&T has the iPhone. The Palm/Android Sprint/TMobile relationships are probably designed such that there is more "working with" rather than "working for". It's not a stretch to think AT&T "doesn't need that new phone" and Verizon has enough marketshare that "you should feel honored" to be on their network.

Exactly. Just ask HTC. Oh wait...

Seems like it would be easy enough to take the Windows WebOS emulator and adapt it to work with the touchscreen on the HP Slate, which runs Windows. My guess is that's the first place you'll see it in that form factor. They could use the same emulator/touchscreen concoction on the HP TouchSmart line of PCs as a desktop widget platform.

What I'd love to see is a full blown laptop/netbook with a detachable touchscreen, that when detached from the laptop/netbook boots WebOS.

I was talking to an attorney who was trying to explain to me that "dopers" love hot tubs. And said he could get me a good deal on a hot tub or a tanning bed. Anyway, he was representing the guy on an intent to sell charge for marijuana. He said, "I charged him $2500 and he paid me in cash with 20 dollar bills. You think he was guilty?"

Feel free to mod the parent up.

The odds that your residential broadband is limited by the technical limitations of your carriers backbone routers is slim to none. If you've seen the FiOS or uVerse trucks in your neighborhood, you've likely had the opportunity to increase bandwidth substantially. That would be because the "last mile" is why you can't get more than a few megs for a reasonable price. So unless that new backplane somehow mysteriously allows you to squeeze more juice through an infrastructure that is simply incapable, they've still got you by the balls.

Look around (I don't have time to find a citation, sorry) and you'll find plenty of examples of carriers (AT&T is a major offender) suing to prevent anyone else from fixing that piece. And as long as the courts say you can't fix it yourself, it won't get fixed.

If we allow municipalities to build out the updated infrastructure (last mile) and manage it like a utility, then there is the opportunity for competition to affect availability and rates. Let's make the LECs deal with US like the CLEC's had to deal with them.

Please bear with me. Opera is a relatively small company that puts out a fantastic product, that just happens to be closed source. If it's anything like the Opera Mini version they offer for cell phones, it would be a free app to download for an iPhone. Given that there is a browser built into the iPhone, they would need to offer a helluva better experience for anyone to take the app seriously. So let's say they have found a way to make browsing on the iPhone that much better, such that it's worth the effort to use it rather than the built in Safari. Would there really be any justification for Apple rejecting the app? Assume that Opera created the app completely within the iPhone app approval guidelines. Wouldn't you be getting cheated as a customer if Apple rejected the app just for political reasons?

I don't get why it's a FanBois v. Fanbois issue. Unless you just absolutely won't use closed source software at all, I don't see why one side of that debate has to be labeled "Opera FanBois". But then if you absolutely won't use closed source software under any circumstances, you probably wouldn't be using an iPhone.

Yeah. If you think there's any partisanship AT ALL in the current Supreme Court, just wait until that little law gets passed. It's sad that the point of the Supreme Court is to be completely unbiased, yet they vote suspiciously down party lines so often.

I too have run out of tinfoil. But I haven't replaced it with blinders either. One of their goals states:

The way I read that, Google isn't offering a gigabit connection to the internet. They're offering a gigabit connection to Google. You'll still have to pay somebody else to get anywhere else. And that person may or may not have throttling, bandwidth caps, etc.

I'm sure the guys at Google have considered that, and this is no doubt a shot across the bow of the major ISPs to drop the net neutrality debate. But if they (the major ISPs) are the only ones who step up to the plate to offer ISP access FROM Google, it's hardly a loss to them. And I hate to mention it because I can't recall the specifics, but I remember reading that there are regulatory reasons Google wouldn't want to get into the "official" ISP business due to the way their backbone is built out, and the major ISPs know this.

But what if you could offer the opportunity to get some of the end-user cash to the Tier 1 and Tier 2 carriers that don't currently offer end-user service, without really having to add anything to their network. That would be a more beneficial and effective shot on a number of levels.

For one, the big guys of the web (Akamai, Limelight, etc) are already multi-homed to the major backbones. So if you have AT&T service at home, odds are you're never leaving AT&T's network to watch your Netflix movie. In which case AT&T holds all the cards because you're paying for the service, and if they could, they'd be charging Netflix to prioritize their traffic to your house. Netflix has to pay because it's the only way to get the packets to you. This starts making other Tier 1 carriers irrelevant...that is unless they had a cost effective way to offer end-user service.

And if the model holds up, the loophole might just work for municipal broadband. There's a long list of examples for municipalities trying to build out fiber networks and getting shut down by the major carriers. But the "I'm not the ISP" loophole (if it holds up) might be big enough for municipalities to jump on the "GoogleNet" without Common Carrier interference.

I suppose tinfoil isn't needed in some scenarios, but I wouldn't expect gigabit "internet" access any time soon, just gigabit access to Google.

I'm not being completely naive. There is a tremendous amount of effort required to organize a project like that. A week is nowhere near enough time for me, to find a needy village, learn the language, find the nearest population with resources to provide an internet connection, collect the necessary hardware, build the infrastructure to support the upstream link, configure the equipment for the link, install the equipment, test the equipment, document the installation, configure PCs/laptops/OLPCs for users, and train the users on how to maintain and take advantage of their new equipment. But there are plenty of tasks in that list that, individually, I could do in that timeframe. What I hoped to find is a charity that acts as the project manager and takes volunteers to "do the grunt work."

There have been some good responses, and I haven't had time to research all of them but maybe one is hidden in here somewhere. If it's not...anybody want to help me start a charity?

And I'm not so certain that Doctors/Dentists operate on a longer timeframe at the individual level. My wife's great uncle spends one week a year with Dentists w/o Borders. Again, I am not trying to compare the importance of health and IT. It just seems like there are a lot of similarities between the organization effort required to do either project (collecting supplies/donations, finding/organizing skilled volunteers, etc).

I think a lot of what Doctors Without Borders and Dentists Without Borders do is volunteer work, but I'd never assume they do it because their time isn't worth much. By no means am I comparing IT work to preventing malaria. But if you could somehow help provide access to Google and Wikipedia to a classroom that's never even seen a computer, I think the impact of that would be worth the investment.