All I can say is that this proves how computer engineering curricula today suck. I've been in the network business for decades, and work closely with people who were there when the IPNG fiasco led to IPv6. It ain't pretty and it was a total fustercluck.

Not wanting customers to have servers at home is a different problem entirely.

Yes, I did, and I stand by my words. But it has nothing to do with Julius or his successor. Except that the FCC now and then talks about encouraging IPv6, as if it were The Thing To Do, probably because some financial capital types told them there's money in it. This is one more reason why I don't trust the FCC to do their planned "IP transition", as if that were the solution to telephone network modernization. That and 759 pages of a relevant Order that never mentioned the existence of the session border controller.

First off, it should be understood that the existing "net neutrality" rules (FCC Rules 47CFR Part 8) are being challenged in the courts, and odds on will be overturned. That's because they were designed to be overturned! They were a political feint designed to get past the last elections before the (DC Circuit) court got to them, which will be this year. Before adopting Part 8, the FCC suggested other rule options that would have been legal, but they put flagrant errors in their actual Order, as if to say "overturn me!". (The biggest one was hanging it on Section 706, basically a legal footnote, which doesn't grant that power, rather than Title II of the law, which could, if applied correctly, which would probably have opened the telco networks a bit more.)

This is a good thing. The rules, were they to stand, would be very dangerous.

The commercial Internet did not get created by government-imposed rules; it was however created because government-imposed rules on the telephone companies required them to allow ISPs to use their facilities. The key rule, dating back to 1980, was called Computer II. So ISPs could lease lines for business and do dial-up for consumers. And until 2005 ISPs could lease DSL for consumers too. Then the FCC, which had shifted in 2001 (hmmm... who took over that year?) to become very strongly in cahoots with the Bell companies (SBC/ATT, VZ, Qwest). They "deregulated" the phone companies, allowing them to not provide access to ISPs, so the phone companies could be the only ISPs on their DSL and fiber networks.

Telco networks were common carriers. They had to be absolutely, totally content-neutral, as they were tariffed as "dumb" bit pipes. ISPs are legally treated as "information" providers, which grants editorial control and is meant to be the content, not the carriage. They are largely used like carriers, but that's because the carriers suck so bad.

It was a couple of months after that FCC move that the term "network neutrality" came out. It was a terrible idea, meaning that because there was no competition any more for Internet, just cable vs. telco, the Internet itself should become content-regulated. So spammers, pirate CDNs, and other miscreants would have the right to congest your ISP and your ISP would not be allowed to do anything about it. They could do "reasonable network management", though, which means, basically, "whoever makes the most campaign contributions wins". Small ISPs would be creamed; Verizon (the law firm with an antenna on the roof) could do anything, including block much-wanted content.

Julius did very little to fix this. Until 2011 he had a real hard-on for Verizon FiOS, though when VZ said they were discontinuing its expansion, he got ticked. The previous Chairman, Kevin Martin, hated hated hated Comcast (which is run by Democrats); Julius G was friendly to them. But didn't change the FCC's anti-competitive trajectory very much. Wall Street likes monopolies. Julius is a Wall Street kind of guy (a VC).

So long as people argue for Internet content regulation ("network neutrality"), instead of for a free choice of ISPs ("open networks"), they'll be spinning their wheels. Alas, the next Chairman (probably Wheeler, Kornbluh, Sandoval, Levin, or Strickling) is unlikely to change much. Susan Crawford would really shake things up, but is probably too controversial to get the job.

A blog post from "Diary of an X.264 developer" http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377 looked at VP8 and noted a number of probable infringements. The killer argument, though, was this:

The spec consists largely of C code copy-pasted from the VP8 source code -- up to and including TODOs, âoeoptimizationsâ, and even C-specific hacks, such as workarounds for the undefined behavior of signed right shift on negative numbers. In many places it is simply outright opaque. Copy-pasted C code is not a spec.

So while I don't like Microsoft's business practices or Nokia's for that matter, the idea that VP8 is patent-free seems rather optimistic.

Sad but apparently true. Microsoftie Steven Elop took over the reins at Nokia a couple of years ago, abandoned their Linux plans and other OSs, and declared that the company would stake its future on Windows Phone. Which Nokia now makes, not that it's a big hit. So the struggling company will happily swim in Microsoft's spit as it hopes to rely on them for a lifeline.

It won't work in the long term either. Microsoft has no strategic partners, only strategic victims.

Samsung's Alias 2 was a great phone. It had a twist-hinge in the middle that could be opened either like a clamshell phone (vertical, for talking) or horizontally as a text keyboard. And the buttons were e-ink, so they took different values depending on how you opened it. Since it was a clamshell, it couldn't butt-dial, and its keyboard was tactile.

But it was not "smart". It used BREW, Qualcomm's dumb-phone software. The screen wasn't touch-enabled and was small for a smartphone. Still, for someone doing more phoning than surfing, it would be better. Too bad they discontinued the line rather than do an Android version.

In the meantime I hang on to my old Sammy clamshell, since I use the phone for, uh, phoning and use my computers for email and the web. This way I use appropriate keyboards and no touch screen. Touch screen require good hand-eye coordination and as a fast touch-typist, I don't look at the keyboard, I feel the keys. Touch screens are just useless to me.

And as others noted above, touch screens in cars should be outlawed as an imminent hazard.

The rest of the world has income taxes too, mostly much higher than in the US, especially on higher incomes.

VAT is additional. Of course most countries have public funding of health care, higher education, and other services that are mostly private in the US.

As to censorship, the ITU never proposed censoring the Internet. That's not their bailiwick -- national governments can and do censor domestic Internet access, and the ITU can't stop them. Nor can it force a government to do anything. The US can simply declare an Exception to an ITU rule and it doesn't apply here. Enough bilateral Exceptions and the ITU is irrelevant.

I did read the more controversial proposals. What a lot of countries wanted was to treat the Internet as if it were telecommunications (it is seen in the US as the content of telecommunications, not the telecommunications itself) and to apply telephone call-like charging to packets. So if somebody in Benin or Fiji downloaded a movie from YouTube, their country would receive payment from YouTube. In many countries this would go to the government, supposedly to pay for the network facilities but of course many of these countries are remarkably corrupt...

And unlike a phone call, where the party who dials the call pays, Internet payments would be made by the side sending the packets, even if the other side asked them to. This would of course probably cause YouTube and other high-volume information sources to shut off access to those countries. Not censorship per se, but pay to talk.

Other proposals on the table are technically unworkable, but then the old PTT (post-telegraph-telephone) guys who dominate ITU-T don't understand how the Internet works (very, very tenuously).

Nope, that's backwards. From Amazon's description:

Connects a SATA hard drive to a computer with a PATA/ATA/IDE/EIDE interface.

What you want is the opposite. I have some great old PATA DVD drives that won't work when I get a new motherboard (SATA only). There are ways, but the ones I've seen are basically PATA adapters for PCI or PCIe slots, not nearly as cheap.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but the Windows user community seems very upset with the Windows 8 UI. When I attended a group demo where a Microsoftie was showing it off, there was a positive reaction to the fixes in the new version (faster boot and shutdown, for instance) but nobody liked the UI. Consensus is that this is the next Bob/ME/Vista (flops), not the next 98/XP/7 (hits).

Linux, though, is not really prepared to take advantage of the opportunity. It is at heart a server OS, with programmers as its key desktop audience. The problem isn't the desktop per se, but the overall experience. If you can get it all to run (drivers are always a problem), it is still a mix of aimed at super-geeks and (the Ubuntu problem) geeks talking down at "lusers". Neither approach feels right to Windows users, many of whom are not idiots..

But the standard SD card isn't what goes into a phone; it's more likely to be found in a camcorder. A phone will have a microSD slot.

It sounds like Nokia wants to play Apple and charge a huge markup on having more flash.

Shiva (who I assume is the AC here), some electronic mail systems in use prior to 1978 were far more advanced than "EMAIL" at UMDNJ ever was. Just because you didn't play with them at Livingston High doesn't mean that they weren't fully-functional interorganizational mail systems.

It's one thing to coin a term and another to invent something. They are just different accomplishments. Maybe Shiva coined "EMAIL" independently, though it is rather certain that his coinage did not influence later use. But he did not invent the product. Likewise, a copyright is not about invention; it's about expression.

Commander Taco may have coined the term "slashdot", but he wasn't he first to slashdot something.

In one of his screeds, Shiva sort of brags that because the crappy computer that Rutgers Med, er, UMDNJ was using only supported 5-character program names, he came up with the name "EMAIL" in order to fit. Electronic mal was already commonplace, though not a consumer product yet, and not something the Livingston schools routinely used.

But claiming credit for being first to use an abbreviated name is not the same as inventing it. Recall that "Saturday Night Live" was originally the Howard Cosell variety show that ran at 10:00 on ABC. It lasted a few weeks. NBC Saturday Night made fun of it, but years after Cosell's show was gone and forgotten, it formally adopted its name, which people had been calling it all along.

I was there too. The system in question was called EMS, or Corporate Electronic Mail System. It only supported a couple of thousand users because it wasn't networked. It ran on a standalone computer with about 30 modems on it, so you dialed in to read or send mail. All messages stayed on that machine, in one big MUMPS global file. And the program went down daily to maintain the global. Plug-ugly. Many more DEChies used the DECnet email system on the Engineering Network. That one had ARPAnet gateways, and was a real networked mail system.

Shiva's work was more like CEMS, a closed non-network toy system. By the standards of its day, it was pretty primitive. By 1977, BBN's HERMES did more than Shivas ever did, over the ARPAnet. And was user friendly, not just a geek tool.