NB here in Canada, the large cable and telephone providers basically *must* license their connections to your home to other service providers. This is a regulation of course, and not just a 'free market' concept, but it does mean not having sixteen companies all trying to run their own copper down your street.

My local service provider is Cogeco for instance, and I switched to Teksavvy without having a single piece of coax changed in my house. Teksavvy pays Cogeco, Cogeco still maintains the wire, and I pay Teksavvy instead of Cogeco.

Does this fix all the problems? No, but it does mean that ISPs have to deal with customer service or simply be switched off by users.

How much time have you spent managing backbone BGP routers? Just curious ...

You're either confused or you've read some purposely disseminated misinformation. Please do more research so you understand the actual issue, and please share where you got this terrible data from so we can criticize it at the source.

Net neutrality has nothing to do with what you're arguing about.

Hi, I'm a volunteer for the Poetic License bureau, and we'd like to inform you that you've violated rule #8; taking something too literally when an obvious point is being made.

You're welcome.

Except they do http://www.forbes.com/sites/je... ... even if they shouldn't.

For example, this week I saw a video of a beheading. Now after watching it I probably wish that somebody had filtered that for me.

I haven't seen a video of a beheading because someone filtered it for me. "Someone" being myself. I'm not going to purposefully watch a beheading video. So unless someone tricks me into watching one, I'm not going to see it.

The whole country is a secret: the government of the day suffered a hostile takeover by space aliens masquerading a toupees. Just have a look at any picture of the PM (;-))

Just don't look at Rob Ford. He's not even trying to disguise himself.

THE HORROR! THE HORROR!

Not to mention the US Postal Service which doesn't get taxpayer money and needs to earn its own money to cover operating expenses.

Luckily, that would NEVER happen in America. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to work my 8 hour day just to make enough money to barely support my wife and kids while leaving zero left over for retirement.

What would be so bad about changing American capitalism? As if moderating part of it would automatically send the American society deep into communism.

Easy. The Koch brothers have made a lot of money off of America's current system. If you change any of it (apart from any changes THEY lobby for), you might cause them to earn less money. This is just not acceptable and therefore [scary voice] COMMUNISM! [/scary voice]

I'm not one to support government regulation for the sake of regulation. I think government regulation is a useful tool but can also be abused. The problem in the Net Neutrality debate is that the large ISPs have virtual strangleholds on their markets. For example, I can get Time Warner Cable for wired broadband service. That's it. So if Time Warner Cable decided that Netflix packets would be pushed to the slow lane, and I wanted to watch a Netflix video, here wouldn't be much I could do. Time Warner Cable could force Netflix to either pay them for faster access, or lose customers. (There's competition for Netflix, not for TWC, so Netflix would feel the greater pressure.) Or perhaps Amazon would pay TWC to make Amazon VOD the exclusive Internet Video provider for TWC, locking Netflix out and regulating them to the slow lane. What Internet video provider you could watch might wind up depending on who signed a deal with the ISP in your area, not with what provider you WANT to watch. Furthermore, TWC could make Internet video slow while making sure that their own video offerings ran at full speed, leveraging their ISP monopoly to boost their video business.

In an ideal world, the government wouldn't need to step in. ISPs would abide by Network Neutrality just like they have been doing for years. It's their own talk of setting up "fast lanes" that companies could pay them to use to speed past the competition (and make the ISPs richer) that sparked these discussions. I don't WANT the government involved, but I do think that their involvement is better than just letting the companies do as they wish and hoping that they don't set up fast lanes.

As for enforcement, that might be tricky, but people who know networking better than I do should be able to come up with some tests to determine whether a provider is slowing down a service. And if an ISP starts offering (either publicly or via a backroom deal) "fast lane" access to a company if they pay more, the ISP could be smacked down. It's not perfect, but things rarely are.

The problem with fighting the local monopolies? The big cable company ISPs have carved up the country into blocks where they almost never compete. The phone company ISPs can overlap with the cable company ISPs in some areas, but they are big as well and don't want to disrupt the market. Whenever something disruptive starts to show itself, the big ISPs either lobby to crush it (see: Municipal Broadband) or buy it out and crush it. They're using their monopoly might to keep their monopoly might. In other words, the big ISPs keep their monopolies because they are big ISPs and there's nothing us little guys can do to stop them.

But don't worry because if we let Comcast and Time Warner merge into an even bigger ISP, then they'll be kept in check by Google Fiber being in a handful of markets. (Before anyone points out Google Fiber as proving me wrong, AT&T tried to stop Google Fiber from expanding. Probably the only reason that Comcast doesn't try to crush them is that they're using them as an example of "competition" during the merger the same way Microsoft pointed to Apple as competition in the desktop PC market when Apple had about 1% of the market and Microsoft had about 99%.)

What efficient methodology is there to write a large codebase using a scripting language that can't be used with a compiled language exactly? The "you need better developers" fallacy is exactly that, a fallacy - it doesn't matter how good your developers are, all developers introduce bugs, certainly the number decreases as you increase the skill of developers but there is not a developer on this earth that does not introduce bugs.

So there lies the problem with scripting languages, because many scripting languages don't have any kind of toolchain that prevents bugs from creeping all the way through until runtime, you have entire classes of bugs that a compiler would catch creeping through to your executing application at runtime, as the codebase grows scripted applications therefore by and large almost entirely all become much more time consuming to debug, as bugs only appear in fringe cases and it is not immediately obvious how to reproduce them. Often you find yourself having to implement tremendous logging infrastructure and so on and so forth to have confidence that your application is solid and the net result is that it's just way more efficient to develop large projects with a compiled technology. Also, whilst it's not a fault of scripting languages per-se, you tend to find that compiled languages have far superior toolchains for developing large projects in the first place anyway.

I don't say this as someone spouting opinion and theory, I say this as someone who has had experience as both a lead developer and technical architect in implementing large projects in both compiled (native and managed) and translated languages (which is usually what people mean when they say scripting, though it's getting muddier with more use of just in time compilation etc.), and even some projects mixing it all together.

For anything large the amount of time spent debugging scripted applications just gets too large for it to be worth it, at that point you might as well have used compiled because any early benefits of getting up and running quickly have long been lost.

Which isn't to say I'm of the opinion that scripting languages are always useless, not at all, I think they're fine for small non-mission critical tasks such as task automation, and for prototyping, but I think the larger a project gets, the less worthwhile scripting languages become - that's not to say you can't use them, as I say, I have myself been involved in such projects, but the project is always much more costly. This is evident at companies like Facebook with their use of PHP - last time they released server specs they had equivalent of 8gb of RAM per user of Facebook which is insane, even if a lot of that is being put into big data type processing and analytics, and the amount they've spent trying to turn PHP into something compiled similarly paints the same picture. So yeah, sure, Facebook is there, and it works, most of the time, but it's also costing them way more to run than it should if it was a properly planned project using something like Java, C++, or even C# from the outset. The flip side is, someone like Zuckerberg who was just hacking a de-facto prototype together may also never have been bothered, (or potentially even competent enough?) to do so with a compiled language and a more professional architecture, so it's a double edged sword in that respect, and I can see why many startups like to just get something developed no matter how crappy using the quick to launch (but poor to maintain) benefits of scripting languages.

The Google approach (well, it's probably unfair to call it the Google approach, other big players were doing it long before them) of writing the mission critical or speed critical stuff in Java or C++ respectively and using something like small manageable chunks of a scripting language like Python to string it together is not a bad option.

People do use it outside of Windows, it's become the defacto primary language for indie game developers nowadays developing on engines like Unity, or game development frameworks like MonoGame. Both of which support iOS, Android, Linux, MacOS X, and of course Windows.

As a Windows developer I never saw Mono as a viable option for development on Linux/MacOS X so I always reverted back to C/C++ or Java, but when I started fiddling with MonoGame and used it on Linux I was actually incredibly pleasantly surprised as to how good it is - it's good to the point of being a perfectly viable option, which is not something I expected.

The battle is between the distros who decided to ship systemd and the users who didn't realize they were having their OS tools they know how to use thrown out.

The vast majority of users are not involved in the development of their distros ... they find out the hard way *after* things become default, like this.