In a truly "free market", private companies would have to own the telephone poles on which they run their lines, and to own the telephone poles, they'd probably have to own the sidewalks. So then they'd snap up sidewalks in walled-off shapes that keep anyone else from putting up poles or running wires into their fiefdom.

Or the government would have to lease the right to run data lines on public property to anyone who asked. But then that government would have to set a price, which means the government is now in the internet business whether they like it or not.

I guess what I'm getting at is that a "free market" for broadband cannot and will never exist.

Not the newspeak-named lie of a policy that just came out.

Well, yes, I'm sure they would love that. I was just trying to illustrate the ludicrousness of claiming that ISPs need to do traffic shaping and QoS.

I think he's probably referring to his wireless internet plan, and you're thinking strictly in terms of wires.

Neither, but I do trust one simple-to-understand-and-enforce rule ("you shall indiscriminately handle and deliver packets") to take it out of the hands of both.

If there were only a name for such a rule...

If they were willing to either A) deliver all of us the kind of bandwidth promised in their Unlimited*** plans, or B) charge by the megabyte instead of by the month, this should be moot. I paid for that bandwidth, and I'll use it as I see fit. If I need to prioritize my own traffic, I'll do so with my router. That way my streaming video doesn't interfere with my VOIP calls.

But they're not talking about that, are they? They don't want my streaming video to interfere with their other customers' VOIP calls... which would seem to suggest that they don't actually have the capacity to deliver their Unlimited****** (up to) 10Mbps** that they sold to everyone in my neighborhood.

We have this fundamental problem where these companies have oversold the bandwidth, and the only solution they're willing to consider is to invent rules that will give you less of what you paid for. Because any other solution would force them to abandon an already-misleading marketing gimmick.

That has never stopped anyone from filling something with ads anyway.

If you're using real, common words and phrases and just transcribing them to 1337, I'm pretty sure there are password cracking tools out there to account for that.

You mean the Facebook info and pictures that I can get you to voluntarily give me by:

1. Creating a fake Facebook account.
2. Using a picture of an attractive female in your age range.
3. Locating your friends.
4. Carpet-bombing them with friend requests. (Surely someone will bite.)
5. Sending you a friend request. (I'm a friend of a friend, so we've probably met, and you've just forgotten.)
6. Reading everything about you.

It doesn't matter what your privacy settings are. I would bet money that you could get access to 99% of Facebook targets' info by following that pattern. Social networks are practically designed for social engineering hacks.

My cable company doesn't have to specifically block competing entertainment services. All they have to do is throttle media streaming in general in the name of "traffic management."

Hash = 1-way crypto

The only way to "un-md5" anything is to crack it. Also, I'm not sure you actually put any real thought into this.

Since it's best practice to store only password hashes (and not the passwords themselves) in your database (or whatever), your process is apparently:

1. Client md5's the password, sends it to server
2. Server "un-md5"s the password (let's say for argument's sake that this makes perfect sense)
3. Server md5's the un-md5'd password
4. Server checks hash against user's hash in the database

Yeah, I'm pretty sure a computer could beat me at shogi all day long, seeing as I have no idea how it's played.

True deregulation means that there is no artificial barriers to entry. Without that "deregulation" is simply a bailout of a protected monopoly.

In which case "true deregulation" may be realistically achievable after you become monarch of the Principality of Aynrandland, but it will never happen in a republic, where competing ideologies and interests must negotiate with one another in order to pass legislation.

That's not really ironic, seeing as those taxpayers voted the idiots onto the school board. It seems pretty appropriate to me. If I hire an employee who does something stupid on behalf of the company, I have to suffer for it. Taxpayers have to suffer for their bad hires, too.

I voted for Kodos.