Yes and no. There are still plenty of CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carriers)/independent ISPs out there. But their prominence has been diminished, partly because of the FCC and partly not.

The bad thing the FCC did was to exempt fiber or cable systems from line-sharing requirements. CLECs were chartered under the idea that "the copper TDM PSTN has been around forever, it's paid off, so the ILECs who maintain that copper infrastructure should have to wholesale it at reasonable rates." But the ILECs and big cable companies said (not unreasonably, BTW), in effect, "well, it will cost us $billions to roll out all-new fiber or coax infrastructure to every customer (a la FiOS) so you can't expect us to wholesale that out to other people because it will make the time for us to recoup the investment so long that we just won't bother." The FCC said, "Okay, we accept that logic, so non-TDM/copper infrastructure doesn't have to be shared." The problem was that you could be competitive as an ISP providing DSL over copper, but once higher-speed cable and fiber Internet service speeds badly outstripped DSL, there was just no market demand for DSL. So the market window for CLECs to provide competitive services if they didn't want to spend the money to roll out their own pipes gradually dried up."

The flip side, though, is that many of those CLECs were bubble companies at best, having been set up to exploit an assumed (in the late '90s, anyway) neverending surge in demand for home phone/fax lines, DSL subscriptions, etc. Many were poorly capitalized bubble-fed "me too" companies that had little chance of long term success ... and furthermore the recent "cord-cutting" trend in favor of mobiles would have killed off most of those guys anyway. There is, by the way, plenty of ability in the US to set up a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) using the cellular carriers' infrastructure and be your own cellular provider, which partly fulfills the CLEC vision.

So it's partly the government, and partly the CLEC/independent ISPs themselves. There are many still around, but usually because they have found a comfortable niche in an underserved geographic area where that business is sustainable instead of, for example, trying to go head to head with Verizon in the big cities.

Not trying to be obtuse but I don't understand this. If I decide that the Income Tax is incompatible with the constitution, am I no longer liable to pay it?

Very interested because if the answer is "yes" then I need to e-mail my accountant before April 15.

Excellent point, but one that has been generally tested in the past under the DMCA "Safe Harbor" provisions. Generally speaking, this issue has only come to light in situations where a website was hosting copyright-infringing content posted by a user. The Safe Harbor provisions basically said "you aren't responsible for manually screening all content on your website, but if a user posts infringing material and the copyright owner sends you a 'DMCA takedown notice' then you must act swiftly to remove it." Obviously this process has been abused badly many times by content owners, but it has been the general model for websites: "you, website owner, aren't liable for user-posted content - but if someone tells you it's illegal, you have to quickly get rid of it."

Revenge porn, however, falls into a different category that necessitates a different legal approach. If you take a nude picture of someone with their knowledge - albeit with their understanding that you would not share it - and you post it online, you as the photographer own the copyright to it. So copyright infringement is no longer the issue, and whether a website has a responsibility to take it down is more of a gray area under current law which is copyright-driven.

I think all this is not aimed at legitimate user content-driven websites that inadvertently host "revenge porn" but rather to the sites that specifically traffic in it. According to some of the stories I have read, the business model of several of these sites basically amounted to blackmail wherein they posted the pics from users for free and hosted banner ads for viewers but most of their cash came from charging the women pictured therein $200+ a pop to remove them.

So while on a philosophical level it poses an interesting "slippery slope" argument, on a practical level I don't think it's aimed at "unknowing infringers" as the DMCA would put it, but rather at the sites which knowingly post it as part of their model and/or sites which are told about it but refuse to take it down. It's a fair argument to say that the implication is bad for its chilling effects, but in real world terms I don't think this is likely to be abused and will actually help real people.

Of course it's intentional but not for the reason you think. The reason that Detroit, Trenton and (at least previously) DC were/are cesspools is because of the evil force known as democracy. The residents of those cities and states voted for crap politicians who drove their respective areas into the ground economically. Nobody from outside imposed Marion Barry or Kwame Kilpatrick onto their cities, and nobody had to nefariously conspire to make them suck, they did that perfectly well on their own. Externalities can hurt a city or state, but to get it into Detroit territory you have to actively keep making it worse on your own - and the residents of those areas have nobody but their own votes to thank for it.

Seriously... not EVERYTHING is a gubmint conspiracy. Sometimes it's just stupid people electing terrible leaders, and that's the downside of democracy that comes along with all the other good stuff. Ask the people of Venezuela how electing people who promise free goodies works out in the long run.

I think people here (and throughout this thread) are conflating a few different things when they say "free TV." The following explanation is an oversimplification, but anyway...

In the US, back in the '70s and '80s, there was "free" satellite TV. The reason that it was free, though, is that you weren't supposed to have it. Big TV networks, HBO, ESPN, all those guys used analog C-band satellite transmissions to distribute their content to local TV affiliates and early cable TV providers. People discovered that if you bought your own analog C-band dish (the big 6+ footers) you could tap into those transmissions and watch them for free, and a cottage industry sprung up around getting people hooked into this feed. Note that it wasn't like "pay" satellite TV today where you point your dish at one satellite that gives you all the channels you subscribe to - you actually had to point your dish at different satellites to get different content feeds.

The content providers got upset about this and migrated to digital delivery, which could be encrypted. You could still buy de-scrambler gear for your home dish (not so legally) but for most people it was enough of a PITA that they just moved over to a paid cable TV service (whose reaches were growing in leaps and bounds then) or to one of the emerging paid satellite TV services, which sprang up to meet precisely this need. You still have DISH and DirecTV as the two main US paid satellite TV providers today, and they use higher frequencies than C-band (Ku or Ka) which enable those nice little .75m dishes you see everywhere today.

Elsewhere in the world, "Free To Air" TV has always had much more content. In my very limited experience, it's either state-funded TV like the BBC, or it's some other party that buys transponder space on a satellite and says "Okay, here it is for whoever wants to watch it." When travelling internationally I occasionally see ads for FTA TV, but it always seems to be creepy Phillipine megachurches or Al Jazeera wannabes that just can't get their content distributed any other way. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Maybe it's not legal, but I have kept myself happily entertained on many a plane flight by getting a TV season on DVD from Netflix => rip with Handbrake => import to iTunes => attach my iPad to the computer and sync videos. I'm also able to show all those ripped movies/TV shows that I imported to iTunes on my TV via the Apple TV that grabs them seamlessly via iTunes Home Sharing. Very convenient as far as I'm concerned.

In the old, old days (get off my lawn!) if you were a small ISP or web host you would just factor into your cost of doing business that you would buy transit from a Tier 1 ISP (MCI, UUNet, Sprint, AGIS[!]) who would deliver all your traffic to the rest of the Internet.

If you were cheap, you'd buy transit from a Tier 2 or Tier 3 provider who did the same thing - your customers would suffer longer latency but you'd save money. Those Tier 2/3 ISPs were paying the Tier 1s, et cetera, and factored that into their own costs.The Tier 1 ISPs recouped their network investment in part by the fees they collected from direct customers and indirect customers under those Tier 2/3 ISPs. When you moved up in the world, you bought transit from multiple Tier 1 ISPs to cut out the middlemen and get your traffic to the rest of the Internet faster.

Cogent has been trying forever to "jump the line" and get Tier 1 free peering, and it hasn't worked out so well for them. You either peer settlement-free (truly "peer") or you don't, and pay for it. There's no option, unfortunately, for differential payment. (BGP is BGP, and it would take a lot of work to try to DiffServ or partially bill for that.)

Netflix is suffering from the same desire Cogent and legions of Tier 2/3 ISPs have always had - to get free peering. It ain't gonna happen, but the only difference is that Netflix is trying to make this a Net Neutrality argument given their importance in the content consumption ecosystem. I'm not saying they're wrong, but it is a well worn argument that runs counter to the history of the Internet.

They certainly could and that's an interesting idea for a model. If ISPs could differentiate themselves on the quality of their Netflix connection, then it would be economically smart for them to do so.

Unfortunately, for the most part in the US "real" competition among broadband ISPs only exists in technologies covered under the 1996 Telecom Act. Under that Act, the incumbent telco is required to provide CLECs fair access for DSL or other copper-based technologies but not for fiber.

That makes some sense given that the telco is incurring a very high cost to build out the infrastructure, dig and put that fiber in, probably $5K+ per household given my somewhat wild guesses. (I recall that figure coming from a Verizon 10K filing a while back detailing why they were cutting back on FiOS rollouts, but I'm too lazy to look it up.) That means it takes an unacceptably long time to pay back at $50/month for Internet access, and far far longer if you are reselling fiber access to other ISPs and only collecting $10/month or so). Cable access is franchised at the city/county level so you only have one option. Satellite Internet provides choice among multiple providers but it's still satellite Internet, so the laws of physics guarantee you crappy latency and the economics of satellite guarantee you a low upload speed.

So I think your idea is great and ISPs differentiating themselves by the quality of content access would be a good market driver. Unfortunately, in the US at least, most consumers can only choose between one cable Internet provider, one fiber provider (if they have that) and multiple DSL over copper providers (which offer far smaller data rates than fiber or cable) - not enough to make the competition meaningful. Google Fiber et. al. may show up to make things more interesting, but honestly any new fiber/broadband run to the home with all-new physical plant is such an expensive proposition that I wouldn't expect to see much penetration anytime soon. Google itself is slow-rolling its Fiber To The Home buildout to select areas where the municipal government is in effect willing to subsidize it (their cross-country dark fiber buildouts do nothing to help the last mile) so that should tell you something about the hard economic realities of the situation.

Kinda sorta. Here's the problem which makes the situation a little more nuanced than it appears at first. Think of this more like one of those occasional disputes you see where "DirecTV stops carrying ESPN because ESPN jacked up their rates" or something like that. One side wants to pay less, the other side wants to charge more, and it's tough to easily pick out who the good guys and bad guys are in that kind of situation.

Netflix buys most of their bandwidth from Cogent. Cogent has historically been the Wal-Mart of bandwidth - they sell dirt cheap but scrimp on quality to do it. The Tier 1 ISPs have said to Cogent, in effect, "you are not our peer. You will buy bandwidth from us rather than getting it for free," and Cogent doesn't want to pay. That constrains the bandwidth between Cogent and the Tier 1s (which Cogent is definitely not).

Netflix has only gotten involved because, as Cogent's #1 customer, they are feeling the pinch of Cogent's bandwidth crunch. Remember, Cogent is no stranger to peering disputes. The Tier 1s have said to Netflix, in essence, "we aren't upgrading our bandwidth to Cogent for free, and if you want your customers to have better performance you can connect to us directly instead of going through Cogent. Oh, and by the way, you're a content provider (albeit a huge one) and not our ISP peer so don't expect to get it for free, either."

It may sound like a Net Neutrality issue, but settlement-free peering vs. purchased transit has been a contentious issue since the mid-'90s if not before, and it has always been sorted out among the ISPs rather than being regulated by the government. Peering and its market dynamics have always been one of the most sensitive topics among ISPs, but it has almost always been dealt with inside the industry without exposing its gory details to the public - just like how you rarely hear about those "cableco vs. content network" disputes even though those negotiations are always going on... you only hear about it when the crap really hits the fan.

It's a perpetual issue that pits the Tier 1s vs. the Tier 2/3s, and always will be: the smaller ISPs want free peering of course, and the bigger ones don't want to give it away. The Tier 1s argue that they have to pay for a much larger network infrastructure than the Tier 2/3s so they are in effect subsidizing the networks of the smaller ISPs if they peer for free; the Tier 2/3s argue that they shouldn't have to pay to connect to other networks when the end result is (theoretically) better service for everyone.

It is a dangerous and very slippery slope to cast peering as a "Net Neutrality" issue because it invites the government to stick its nose into a topic that the world's ISPs have quietly managed among themselves for many years. "Settlement-free peering for all" sounds good at first blush but creates a dangerous precedent potentially for content providers to be considered as networks. What if CNN.com decides it doesn't want to pay for bandwidth anymore and wants all the ISPs to peer with it as a network for free? What happens when bobshardwarestoreintuscaloosa.com makes the same request? Where do you draw the line? Why should any business pay for transit bandwidth when it is providing content that users want to see? You could theoretically see the whole cost of the Internet flip onto the consumer ISPs if you follow the model to its furthest conclusion.

Another side note - it's not entirely true that "subscribers pay for their Internet, and content providers pay for their hosting." Larger ISPs factor in the revenue of paid transit to their business model - and they *always* have, since the earliest days of the commercial Internet - so that is in effect subsidizing your home Internet connection. And if that goes away and consumers really do end up paying for all of that Internet connection, that cost will probably be passed on to the consumer, just like when your cable bill goes up because ESPN wants more money for its content.

Not saying either side is entirely right or wrong, but just that it is complicated enough to warrant a deeper view - and not necessarily something you want the government to get involved in "solving."

Very true. It can be argued that the same statement is true of labor unions, for example.

I think if you look deeply today, you'll find two major schools of "feminism" - the "academic" and the "popular." The "academic" branch of feminism - like all academia - is safely removed from the real world and traffics mainly in the Andrea Dworkin "all heterosexual intercourse is rape" and Starhawk-style schools of radical feminism. This is a holdout from pre-'80s feminism and remains the intellectual vanguard of feminism but is a small niche among women. It is, however, what Rush Limbaugh used to call "Feminazis" and Fox News still likes to call "feminism."

Popular feminism today more or less equates to what Wikipedia describes as "post-feminism" - a school of thought that basically argues that women have overcome many of the blatantly discriminatory issues of the past and need to focus on more practical issues like wage discrimination, workplace sexual harassment, etc. rather than the academic "feminist" utopian vision of a matriarchal world where everyone lives by consensus, sharing of feelings and government mandated mani-pedi sessions (except for the "butch partner" lesbians who can opt out).

All joking aside, "feminism" is not only fractured among multiple groups, but the mainstream idea of feminism today that most women subscribe to has nothing to do with the academic, radical-driven "feminism" of the 1970s that scared the bejeezus out of conservatives (and most heterosexual men). Like most things, it has evolved into something more mature and sustainable.

If you're interested in how "feminism" has meant many things over the years, the Wikipedia entry on Feminism is not a bad primer, although its editors skew towards the academic side.

The first statement is racist and the second is incorrect. The correct statement is that "poor and lower-to-middle class culture doesn't reward or encourage intelligence."

I will bet you anything that the exact same premium on intelligence and achievement is shared among white, black and hispanic families in wealthy Orange County CA suburbs; while the same lack of interest is expressed among poor black families in Philadelphia, latino families in East LA and poor white families in Arkansas. I grew up solidly middle class but from my youngest years it was just understood that I *would* go to college, no excuses otherwise. I would like to think that I would have gone to college because of my intelligence and interests no matter what my upbringing ... but who knows?

Sadly, this is a self-perpetuating theme that increases the economic divide in the US over time. I am certainly no fan of affirmative action but the situation does imply that a lack of an initial "hand up" to reach the economic and educational status that will value intelligence is a strong barrier to making that part of the culture. You generally have to get your head above water before you can see that there is land there, and the value of education and upward mobility is usually hidden from those who have never glimpsed it because it's just alien to their experience.

You're referring to the GlobalStar SPOT satellite beacon system (not Inmarsat). It's a neat idea but using this as an example falls victim to the same fallacies as 99% of the other speculation about this topic on Slashdot: people try to transpose their experiences with bandwidth availability on land to over the ocean... which is to say that bandwidth is just so much more rare and expensive there that most people can't imagine how it is.

It is a truism that telecom providers build their bandwidth where the users are. Have you ever noticed how much worse your bandwidth costs/options are in East Dead Cow Skull Texas vs. Austin? Well, take that and extrapolate it to an area of the world where there is literally no land for hundreds or thousands of miles to hang infrastructure on, and the ONLY users to ever pass through are a few dozen ships or aircraft per day.

To take your example, GlobalStar SPOT only works within the range of a SPOT Hub because their satellites can't connect sat-to-sat (which is ridiculously more expensive to build). So over the ocean would not work. (A poster above wondered why their $30/day Hertz rent-a-car could be tracked but a $200M airplane couldn't ... for the same reason, because the Hertz car can use cell phone towers.) If the plane was over the continental US then tracking would be no problem but in "the space in between" ... not so much.)

Long story short, even satellite services (like GlobalStar, Hughes, ViaSat and others) focus their capacity on where the users are. The mid-Oceanic spans and areas like the Arctic, Antarctic and Indian Oceans face the worst and most expensive bandwidth crunch on the planet for the simple reason that almost any investment in serving those areas will be a failure because there just aren't enough vehicles/people there to hang up $250M+ satellites to provide connectivity... and if you do (as Inmarsat and others have), you will find that cheapskate airlines will refuse to pay the requisite costs because, honestly, how often does a plane go down in these areas?

I don't. I already have too many cables hanging off my computer as it is and desperately do not want another. Why would you want more cables rather than less?

True, and that's also a highly desirable state for us to get back to. But it's not going to happen anytime soon, and for some very good reasons.

High-paying blue collar jobs have been disappearing in the US for decades, largely due to globalization. For every person who might once have had a blue-collar manufacturing job here, there is probably someone elsewhere in the world willing to do it for less. And that's bad for American blue collar workers but actually good for the world overall - there are a lot of people in countries like Bangladesh, China etc. who a generation ago who might have been subsistence farmers not really participating in the global economy and now they are moving to cities, taking jobs and buying things. That fuels tax revenues in their countries, allowing the building of infrastructure and the improvement of quality of life in many of these third world countries. Again, that's bad for us but good for the world's economic development overall.

This is certainly an arguable point among economists, but there is a lot of data pointing to the idea that pensions were always a bit of a ponzi scheme. When people are living longer, it's just not economically sustainable to carry costs like that when you could be spending that money on hiring new workers or paying your active workers more. Paying for retiree pensions and health care benefits used to add around $1500 in "dead weight" to the cost of each car for General Motors, as I recall. You saw in most of the recent airline bankruptcies that their pension obligations were the first thing that they shed to return themselves to sustainable profitability. Defined benefit plans are on the way out everywhere in the US - except the government - and arguably should be because, while it's great for the worker - was never really going to make sense in the long run to begin with.

And job security has always been a bit of a lie. In the postwar US economy that the baby boomers grew up in, the economy as a whole expanded significantly and a rising tide lifted all boats. Nobody needed to be laid off because everything was growing. But when you reach a point where some industries are going away, others change rapidly and companies reach an equilibrium point where they grow or shrink organically, people are going to lose their jobs sometimes. It's unfortunate but it's a reality.

So all your points are desirable and the US really does need to find a way to bring back a real blue collar middle class. But many of the things these folks got used to were temporary things rather than permanent. The US economy is rapidly splitting in two, into a blue-collar/lower education economy where unemployment is high and job prospects are low; and a white-collar/higher education economy where unemployment is low and that's where all the growth is happening (tech, finance, etc.) That's unlikely to change in the foreseeable future and the US needs to find a way to bring more of its workforce into the second economy where there are jobs because the first one is just not coming back.

In the US, at least, there are different rules for people based on whether they are "public figures" or not. Libel (for the record, slander applies to something you say; libel applies to something you print) laws generally say that if you are Joe/Jane Average, you can successfully sue someone for saying something wrong about you. If that wrong thing caused you harm, you can win monetary or other damages. If you are someone who is already "in the public eye" then in order to successfully sue for libel you must also prove that the publication knowingly printed false information about you.

This is why, for example, Richard Jewell was able to successfully sue the Atlanta Journal-Constitution when they incorrectly accused him of being the Olympic Bomber: they were wrong, he was a private shmoe, so the barrier of proof was just being wrong. It is also why Tom Cruise couldn't win against that German gossip rag that said he was gay: it was incorrect(?) but he couldn't prove that it was printed while the newspaper knew (or reasonably should have known) it was false. It's set up this way because there would be a major chilling effect on public discourse if, for example, a newspaper could be sued for reporting today on allegations of corruption by an official that seem credible but are ultimately proven false tomorrow.

Should he decide to sue, Nakamoto could probably make a good case that he is a private citizen rather than a public figure. Assuming, of course, that all this turns out not to be true in the first place, which is still very open to debate.