http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

you really can't conceive of the simple obvious fact that running all that fiber is fucking expensive?

oh, EUR, euro

you guys understand the concept of a natural monopoly so much better than americans

in the usa we believe letting a rent seeking parasite siphon more money for shoddier service, and buying off our government to keep the arrangement, such as with healthcare, is "capitalism." and anyone who suggests dealing with natural monopolies as they should be dealt with: government control or heavily regulated, as you describe, is "evil socialism"

propagandized morons

Money. More specifically, revenue from advertisers. Once they had the motive, it's pretty easy to justify the means to the end.

From who? Thirteen enraged nerds on Slashdot? Their average customer doesn't understand the difference between their phone and their browser; they certainly won't get up in arms over a "super-cookie".

Verizon could easily afford to piss off every paranoiac on the planet, and they'd still have so much money they'll need to buy another dump truck to haul this month's profit to the bank. They have no real reason to change, so I'd recommend a strategy other than OMGPANIC!

Yeah, the more I dig into it, the more it looks like an investigative tool than an evidence analysis tool. That's pretty cool, but as you say, it looks a lot like Wireshark. Still, when you're facing an unknown attacker, it may not hurt to have a couple different views on the problem.

Being produced by the Army, this has the chance to be taken seriously enough by companies that are currently beholden to Encase. I know Autopsy and the Forensic Toolkit have been around for quite a while, but I haven't seen them really take off as a serious competitor.

additionally, no one wants their roads constantly dug up by various companies all the time, or the poles by their house an ugly rats nest of various cables

better: one cable, fractionally leased

as tech improves and one cable means much more bandwidth, government progressively upgrades the single cable, and has more bandwidth to lease

i see that as a half measure but i still approve, it is an improvement over the status quo elsewhere. how expensive is your cable bill?

We all have to eat.

Besides, it's not like the NSA comes down to where you work and slaps all the dicks out of your mouth.

If you are at all interested in the actual answer, The Sword and the Shield is an absolutely fascinating book that answers your question. It was written by Vasily Mitrokhin, a senior historian for the KGB, who brought over thirty years of KGB mission records to the British after the fall of the Soviet Union. He discusses "active measures", which were propaganda campaigns designed to fracture public opinion and cast the US position in a questionable light. This includes really awful and regrettable things, like AIDS being formulated by the US Army at Ft. Detrick, those kinds of lies. Many of these rumors started by agents were spread to CPUSA members, who had members on college campuses around the country.

For a more entertaining version of how the Soviets influenced America and operated on her soil, I recommend watching 'The Americans' on FX network. Set in the 80's during the height of the cold war, the plotlines in the show are based roughly on actual events documented in the book, and from other sources of KGB history.

and that's exactly how wireline should work

government should build and maintain the fiber, and companies should lease it for any and every service, comprehensive or fractional, that the free market commands

the current american system is a fucking joke- there's no competition in wireline because the barrier to entry is too high, it's just too expensive to build the shit

so we have a monopoly. it should be the government that governs it. because letting an economic parasite drain us like a vampire for shoddy service is certainly worse than any criticism you want to level at government, and competition from google isn't coming for another 40-50 years to your town

Maybe where you live, but the cost of my iPad 2 3G service is $15 a month. On top of that, if you I've in an urban centre, you're probably well covered by WiFi anyway. So that $15 goes quite a long way. I can pay for 2 years of 3G service at the cost of what a Windows laptop would cost me, with the benefit being (wait for it)...I don't have to carry a crappy sub-$300 Windows laptop with me everywhere I go. The EC2 Windows instance living in the cloud I use most frequently is a quad-core with 24GB of RAM and a few TB of hard disk space -- and you're not going to find a cheap sub-$300 Windows laptop with those sorts of specs.

Yaz

can you make a plain language argument countering my point?

i am saying a high cost to market entry creates a natural monopoly. no government is needed to create it. it's a natural consequence of the underlying costs of the market sector in question

where am i wrong?

i think my statement is pretty straightforward and without error

you simply paste a link

i'm sorry, but "go read my religious literature" is not an argument. in fact, i would say you have no argument. you have an unfounded faith in an unsupported belief. a bit of foolish trendiness, which is all your link represents, that will fade to history, along with such nonsense as phrenology and lamarckism, as dead ends of academic thought

the emperor has no clothes my friend

the cult of the free market fairy: the free market fairy solves all problems! how? don't ask silly questions, don't think, just BELIEVE

thank you

a toast to the day we do not have to suffer anymore the economically illiterate fools and their magic cult of the free market fairy, peace be unto her