in other words, net neutrality would remain, but content providers could pay to BOOST the speed at which the internet provider customers received their content

Which only lasts until the next increment in consumer connection speed is rolled out. Then the companies that pay get to use it, but - SURPRISE! - nobody else does.

If this proposal had gone into effect before broadband became common you'd be hooked to on your, say, 5 Mbps DSL line, trying to watch videos at 56 kbps.

The problem here isn't differentiated services - which can be valuable to a lot of us. The problem is that here in the US we have effective ISP monopolies or duopolies in nearly every region.

The other part of the problem is that the net neutrality advocates have been fighting on the wrong battleground.

As you point out: The prblem isn't some packets getting preferences over others: Sometimes that makes things BETTER for users. The problem is companies using their ability to configure this to give their own (and affiliates') carried-by-ISPs services an advantage, or artificially DISadvatntge packets of other providers unless an extra toll is paid, to the disadvantage of their customers.

The FCC is not the place to fight that battle. The correct venues are the Department of Justice's Antitrust division (is giving content the ISP's affiliate provides an advantage over that of others an illegal "tying"?), the FTC (is penalizing others' packets a consumer fraud, providing something less than what is understood to be "internet service"?) and perhaps congress.

I don't see how this can reasonably be resolved short of breaking up media conglomerates to separate information transport from providing "content" and other information service beyond information transport. Allowing them to be combined into a single company is a recipie for conflict-of-interest, at the cost of the consumer.

No, no, no. This is just plain incorrect.

Copyright does what you're describing. Before anyone ever heard of DRM, we already had hundreds of years of experience with copyright doing the job. Nearly every corporate "content provider" you've heard of, built their fortune and become the big name that you recognize today, through sales or rentals of non-DRM content. (Netflix being a notable exception.)

DRM has nothing to do with arts-patron taxes, "giving away at a loss" or content-providers' revenue. (Uhr.. except so far as it decreases their revenue, the same way that telling customers "fuck you" decreases revenue in any industry.) If you want to prevent an arts tax and also support a society with many creators, you should be against DRM, not for it. DRM only keeps people out (both supply and demand).

You didn't read it, but that's forgivable considering this poster's windiness.

He's not really asking about how much bandwidth, but which bandwidth. Many people today have two ISPs:

1) a cord of some kind that goes into your house. This ISP's data is effectively unlimited, or if there's a cap, it's relatively high (a few hundred gigabytes per month).

2) a radio mostly used by handheld computers. This ISP's data is limited because everyone is using the same airwaves, and using even a single gigabyte in a month, might be considered extravagant and wasteful. But most importantly: it costs more per byte than the other ISP.

Customers of the second type of ISP use terminology like "data plan." Customers of the first ISP consider "data plan" to be funny talk. And yet many of us have a foot in both worlds.

The idea is that with conventional video files, you can download it whenever you want, using whatever ISP you want. If you want to watch the video on your handheld (e.g. while commuting on subway) then you copy it over wifi or even sneakernet to the handheld. On the other hand, with DRMed streams, you can only use the whatever ISP you're able to connect to at the time you play the media. Considering that the point of handhelds is that they're most useful when you're not at home, that typically means it's going to be your radio ISP, the more expensive one. With DRMed streams, there's no time-shifting (or "network-shifting"). With conventional files, there is. So one tech costs more than the others, independent of how many bytes are involved.

My math isn't very strong; can you explain the (1-0.3*0.03)^10 part?

You mean (1-0.3*0.03)^100? (You lost a digit.) Let's walk it:

0.3 land fraction = probability a given meteor hits over land (assuming equal likelyhood it hits any given area).
0.3 * 0.03 Multiply by the fraction of land that's urban to get the probability it hits over urban land.
1- 0.3*0.03 Convert to the probability it misses all urban land. (P(hit) + P(miss) = 1 (certainty)).
(1-0.3*0.03)^100 We get a hundred of 'em in 50 years (assuming 2000-2013 is typical). Raise to the hundredth power to get the jackpot probably that they ALL miss.
1-(1-0.3*0.03)^100 Convert to the probabiltiy that at least one doesn't miss.

The bizarreness of Thomas' justification is pretty over-the-top. He's saying that an anonymous call creates probable cause because its not anonymous? The progression of that argument would be the government can authorize itself to search anything. A cop could just call 911, non-anonymously and even give his name, to create the tip that authorizes himself to search. Wouldn't that trigger the newly-created exception and make it legal?

Maybe there's some way that 911 calls could circumvent the 4th, but a not-really-anonymous anonymous call angle? WTF.

That's preposterous. Scalia wrote the decision in Kyllo v. United States where use of thermal imaging was declared in violation of the 4th Amendment.

He also dissented in another 4th Amendment case, County of Riverside v. McLaughlin where the majority decision weakened protections.

No if I was going to inflict lunch choking on someone it would be Clarence Thomas.

The empirical evidence in this case is that the tip was indeed reliable.

In some state odor of marijuana is in itself enough to justify a search.

I'll add, most of these controversies purportedly about "science" are really controversies about "the status quo that cherrypicks bits of science to lend itself credibility". Powerful men have defined reality for the proles long before they had any sort of science by which to claim legitimacy. "Scientific data proves it (and only an idiot would question THAT)" can be used (abused by dishonest people) in a manner very similar to "God told me I should rule over you!" The purpose is the same: "don't argue with me, accept it as truth".

If you want to see that in action, look at why aspartame as a food additive was originally not allowed, then why the FDA director was pressured out of the agency, and who replaced him and what his primary goal was (which was of course approving aspartame). That's what money does to what was formerly good science.

How do you read what he wrote and come up with that in response to it? Do you secretly believe everyone other than yourself is a moron?

It's like Slashdotters think it is weakness to try and understand what the other person believes and in what way it could be reasonable. It depends on the part where what the guy wrote must also be interpreted by the reader, and everything except rigorous mathematical formulae has multiple ways that it can be construed.

There actually are lots of problems with vaccines but you will never find this information without sincerely searching for it yourself, because there are too many monied interests who profit from a single view of the situation.

The last time I bought a dedicated device like this, I got a PC Engines WRAP, which is similar to the boards that Soekris sells. For about £100, I got a 266MHz AMD Geode (x86) CPU, a board that could boot from a CF card, and had 3 wired sockets and 2 miniPCI slots (with an 802.11g card in one), a metal case and a couple of antennae. That was quite a few (actually, almost ten) years ago.

The first search result has a similar kit for £139, which is a bit more, but if you shop around you can probably get it for cheaper. That includes a 500MHz x86 CPU and 256MB of RAM, so it will happily run most stock *NIX distributions, or something firewall-centric like pfSense.

No, you shouldn't, but the laptop is probably drawing something on the order of 60-85W and there's no reason why it couldn't get that from a power supply in the display, rather than a separate wall wart...

Thunderbolt doesn't do USB, however the fact that it does PCIe means that you can run a USB controller on the other end. You wouldn't want a Thunderbolt mouse, because it would require sticking a USB controller in the mouse as well as a Thunderbolt interface and a load of PCIe bus logic. USB is nice because the client component is relatively simple and can be made very cheap. It's also nice because there are a number of standard higher-level protocols built on top of it (e.g. HID for keyboards, mice and so on, DUN for things that look a bit like modems). Thunderbolt doesn't replace USB, it's the connection that you use between your laptop and the display or docking station that has all of the USB devices plugged into it.

With Thunderbolt, since it can carry two DP signals, you can plug in one cable to drive two monitors. Since it also carries PCIe, you can drive a USB hub and SATA controller and NIC in one display and also connect the keyboard and mouse and an external disk and network at the same time. Having the same connector able to deliver power would mean that you'd be able to drop a phone in a dock and have it gain access to all of those things and charge, which sounds pretty compelling to me.

We're also finding it useful because you can get PCIe enclosures so we can plug FPGA boards directly into laptops, rather than needing to have a desktop sitting under the desk doing nothing except exposing a high-speed JTAG interface, but that's a fairly niche use.

It's not as well known as it deserves to be, but the early Christians were actually a very diverse group. What we now call Gnosticism was representative of many if not most of them.

Sadly it was systematically stamped out, largely in part because there is such great power in organized religion and adherence to its dogmas.

Excluded, "non-canonical" books like the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Enoch, and the Gospel of Judas are really fascinating to read.