So if I do only FTP and web browsing my ISP should charge me less, and the day I hook up my Vonage adapter they should start charging me more?

No, QOS should be a default practice for all traffic and it shouldn't cost more to get traffic that cannot manage high or intermittent latency issues through compared to an FTP transfer of the lastest distro (or whatever transport you use for that.)

Oh, so if they allow ANY SIP traffic through they should charge EVERYONE extra for that privilege. Got it. What?

If you want people to pay for the privilege of QOS shaping, then they need to know what kind of traffic you're sending/receiving so they can charge you extra for that privilege.

In other words, you want no ISP to have content without a separate charge for that content. You might want to reconsider your example, however. "Pay Per View" and "On Demand" (as Comcast calls theirs) is not carried via the ISP side of the house, it uses existing cable television bandwidth.

In any case, why should a company be prohibited from giving you stuff for free?

I think the point is that internal ISP traffic does not go through peering points and thus does not incur that cost.

Were I am employer, I would never hire Ron White. Unless I ran a comedy club. And then only if he promises to bring his blue collar friends around every so often to do shows. But they can't use the bathrooms, they'll have to go next door to the Chinese restaurant.

Another quite visible example is eyesight. In ages past if you couldn't see the sabre tooth tiger stalking you, you died. Or bear. Or any other predator. And boys didn't make passes at girls who wear glasses.

Over the last decades this has all changed. Predation is no longer a major factor in survival. Glasses are easy to get. They're common. And becoming more common as genes for poor eyesight are now more likely to survive and be passed on.

With regards to the Dutch, I think it's their massive genetic modification program that is causing them to be taller, enroute to global domination as they are the only ones who survive the rising sea levels. I mean, remember where they live. A government that is based primarily below sea level has a vested interest in modifying the population statistics towards taller people.

Don't know where you got the "reducing wages" bit in a discussion about tax rates, but who am I to get in the way of a good rant?

And higher taxes reduce the amount of money in people's pockets. That includes both the employees who can buy less, and the employer who can afford to hire fewer people and can invest less in infrastructure -- that HE buys from other companies who thus have less money ...

I think the example of the luxury taxes on boats is a good example. Increase the luxury tax on boats for rich people, not a bad way to redistribute wealth, right? Except fewer boats were bought, which meant fewer boat builders were needed, which meant that less money was spent by the out of work boat builders, more money was handed to them in unemployment so other people had to pay taxes for that, so they had less money to spend ... I think the phrase is "cut off your nose to spite your face".

But the actual question that started this is whether a company would move to get away from higher taxes, and the clear answer to that is "if they can, of course they will". You can't move the local MickyD, but the company that makes the cups and stuff the MickyD uses can certainly move to a lower tax area. And it is hardly uncommon to hear about a company making a location decision based on tax considerations.

Dalmations had to live in the streets, and suspender sales were lackluster at best?

It's also meaningless. Using that definition of "free", I have a free health club membership. I pay nothing "at point of use". I have free internet, because I pay nothing "at point of use". I have free cellphone service. I eat at restaurants for free, too. I get lots of free stuff from Amazon.com. My cable TV service is free. The list of free stuff is endless, using that meaning of "free", despite none of it actually being free.

I consider it dishonest to use the word "free" as if it meant "free" just because you aren't paying "at point of use".

You pay 7.65% of your employee's salaries in Medicare and SSI taxes. You pay some percentage in unemployment taxes and other state taxes. You pay more for employees because they want more to offset the higher income tax rate.

If you're hiring people you need then your productivity goes up and you make more income, which you pay taxes on. If you are hiring just to avoid taxes, then you are spending more money than you are saving, and part of that "more" is taxes.

In any case, your equation is wrong. Income - expenses is profit. Profit times tax rate is what you pay in taxes ON YOUR PROFIT. But you are also paying taxes on your expenses when they are wages.

And when you pay more in taxes, you have less to use for such things as hiring.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

It's only free if you are a completely non-productive leech on society and pay nothing in taxes. In that case, everyone else is paying for your education, your health care, your "social care" ...

The more people you hire, the more you pay in taxes, not less.

So, when taxes are high, where are you going to get more money to hire more people? How will you compete for the better employees who will want higher wages to offset the higher taxes they'll be paying? Not only will you have to come up with more to pay them, you'll pay more in employment taxes for them. And you'll be making less money because you'll be paying more in taxes, too.

Where's the "big lie", again?

Other than being highly regressive and requiring a massive federal agency to manage it, it's just a peachy idea. Unless you create a whole series of exemptions and credits just like the exemptions and loopholes we have today, which then means even more federal employees to manage and enforce.

Not all of them, and none of them have anything in place to cope with a federal sales tax.

Uhhh, no, there are a large number of sales tax exempt organizations. You're talking about the existing ways of keeping a sales tax from being highly regressive by exempting food, etc, but then you fail when you don't recognize the existing tax-exempt entities.

OMG, you're actually going to tax intangibles and not consumption.

And a sales tax on money conversions? Do you have any idea what that would do to the value of the dollar and the world economy?

Cool. Loophole number 1: all transactions are done in euros. No dollars change hands, no tax.

So you leave the poor people who will find this tax extremely regressive and repressive with lower buying power while the rich folks don't see much impact at all.

So what percentage is YOUR tax going to be? 10%? 5%?

I've given up trying to find a router that doesn't have hardwired network connections to mama. The last router I bought makes repeated connections to an NTP server run by the company that makes it, to the point that there is no manual way to set the date and time and no way to change the configuration for NTP.

I wanted to use this device behind a slow network connection where I already have a stratum 2 server of my own. The only way to do this was to hard-configure the first DNS nameserver to the nameserver on my network and put in entries for each of the 10 hardwired NTP servers. I asked customer support what all the names were, and they told me they were not permitted to tell me. That's ok, tcpdump and dig eventually got the information.

Netgear WNR2000v5.

And after a bit I found that it was also pinging an update server.

That's not the worst offender. I have some internet-controllable power switches that send data packets off to some Chinese server for some reason that is completely undocumented. Customer service for that company claims it is to implement a dynamic DNS service.

How dare those scum at MIT teach people how to surveil their neighbors and stuff.

For many aircraft and many airports, it doesn't. I would go so far as to say "most".

And if the ILS being used fails, for example someone transmits a strong lower beam signal (creating a full scale "too low" indication), the landing has to be aborted.

In the "remote controller" system, the only reason you would need to rely on communications is if there were a major systems failure on board and the on-board pilot could not control the aircraft.

In other words, at the time when communications becomes most critical, you are already experiencing systems failures that may make communications ineffective. Combine that with the potential for active jamming (DOS) at least and maybe a security issue that allows unauthorized remote control, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

To those who say that a remote control operator can do as well as pilots on scene, keep in mind the DC9 (or DC10, I forget) that almost landed at Sioux City after a complete loss of hydraulics. Three pilots saved a lot of lives that day, and it would be impossible for that to have been done by a guy sitting in a dark room. Even if for no other reason than he wasn't invested in the process of saving that airplane. Now, if you make it a rule that anyone who takes such a remote controller job is executed if any aircraft he controls has a fatality, that might make him concentrate a bit harder.

And an under-served market is an under-served market no matter where it is.

Yep. However, the solutions are different for the two. For a dejure monopoly, the solution could be as simple as removing the grant. For a defacto monopoly you have to figure out IF there is a problem and then what a fair solution is. (If there's one company in a city selling a specific service, is that because the market is saturated, because the customers love that one company but won't buy anywhere else, or something else.) Is it fair to the existing company to give preferential treatment to competitors if the company isn't doing anything wrong? If the company is abusing the customers, then why would they remain loyal to that company and why wouldn't another company come in and rake in the cash by giving good service? It wouldn't need preferential treatment, it would thrive by being better.

But, as you point out, there are at least two other services in the area, they just don't want to provide service to your specific location. Please cite the section of the new net neutrality regulations that will solve this problem.

And you ignored the question I asked, which is specifically where in the country there is a government-granted monopoly to any ISP. Not cable company, not telephone company, an ISP. Net neutrality deals with ISPs, not cable television or telephone, and it has nothing to do with breaking monopolistic powers.

That is a false statement. Refer to the City of Atlanta Cable Ordinances found here and you will note that the law grants a non-exclusive franchise. That there is only one company who has chosen to go through the franchise process does not mean the government has created a monopoly. The laco of competition is not created by the city council, it's created by the economic disincentive to split a market where the costs of infrastructure are so high.

No, actually, it doesn't. All Charter would have to do is follow the process to get a franchise just like Media One of Colorado did (which was then transferred to Comcast). While a franchise agreement is a bit more than just a business license, it is very similar. When a city grants a business license to one company to do something, they are not granting that company a monopoly even if nobody else applies.