A couple years ago, youtube was extremely frustrating to watch on my DSL connection. Lots of buffering. I don't just mean one day youtube slow for some reason; this went on for several months and I basically gave up on youtube for a little while. Then I finally got around to googling the issue and I saw a bunch of people saying to use a VPN. So I did. Flawless performance from then on... this despite the VPN having significantly lower bandwidth than what I had through my ISP. Oh and my ISP was heavily pushing their own streaming on-demand video service at the time.

So tell me... what's YOUR explanation for what happened?

The problem with this sort of thing not being illegal is they really don't have to even tell people they are doing it. And if they're smart, they can and probably are taking measures to prevent people from realizing they're doing it--rotating out the customers they throttle, throttling only at certain times of day, etc.

So, that's my thesis. It has existed for quite a while, but it's growing and starting to involve third parties so that it really isn't possible to hide it any more. Oh yeah, and ISPs were throttling P2P users (not pirates--ANY use of p2p, like sharing ubuntu ISOS) a LONG time ago.

If they're "high-prestige" why aren't you willing to move? It's not like you own that apartment you're renting. Move out when your lease comes up and make sure you tell management why you're doing it. Good tenants are hard to find, if you complain infrequently and pay your rent on time (less common than you'd think) they'll be sorry to see you go and will listen to your reasons for doing so.

Doesn't solve your problem in the short term but it's more effective for long term change than griping about the problem on Slashdot.

Because corporations bad, mmm'kay?

That's really the crux of it. Any argument against this ruling is immediately shouted down. I posited this question on another forum and received the equivalent of -1, Troll: Why is everybody cheering a ruling that attacks hypothetical problems (the oft discussed "fast lane" has yet to actually happen) while ignoring the actual problems that are impeding innovation? The "killer app" that started this whole argument is streaming video, so ask yourself which of these two things are a greater threat to that: The data caps that are currently being imposed or the fast lane that only exists on paper?

We need to address the real underlying problem you are describing right there - code written by different people that does not conform to any standards is hard to manage over its lifecycle - and this goes double for limited frameworks that may get some things right, at the expense of not allowing you to get all things right.

This is one thing that open source has gotten right on occasion - think of the Linux kernel for example, and how many people contribute to that and keep it going.

So really the answer I think is twofold - on the one hand people need better tools that make it easier to integrate their efforts, on the other hand entities engaged in this activity need to develop standards that ensure when people develop things - they document and build interfaces that are consistent, if not globally, at least between members of the groups expected to work on the code. If you do both of these things - and by extension some other things that those recommendations imply (e.g. code reviews, agile development methods etc).

Now, if you are only building software for yourself, then this isn't so important. However, if you expect other people to extend and manage your code over the long term, then I would still opt for leaning towards either creating and documenting standards, or selecting and learning existing well known standards - and sticking to that in your own code. Keep it consistent between all the things you build that you want to share, and you just might get people to help - if that's what you are looking for.

I would not consider being overly risk averse as being rational behavior.

There are many rational reasons to take risks:

1. Gives you, and by extension your company the opportunity to learn and grow. If you never take risks you stagnate and learn nothing.

2. Real invention occurs through taking risks. If you never take risks you don't innovate.

3. Taking responsibility, and therefore risk is what men and women do. Being overly risk averse is immature slug-like, weasel word behavior.

If your company does not reward risk-taking - then you are in the wrong company.

I've told this story elsewhere, but it applies directly to this issue, so I'll recap in short:

Vender is contracted to create an integrated support application for large sums of money ($millions) over a 6 month period; contractor chooses an obscure commercial java framework to build the system on. The application is delivered and appears to work fine for several months, then starts getting sluggish, then a month later the application locks up - and has to be restarted. This progressively gets worse, and is asymptotic with the growth of the underlying customer base - and soon becomes completely useless - shutting down within minutes of being started with a memory exhaustion error.

The main problem we found was the equivalent of a memory leak in Java. The code would instantiate objects based upon the framework in the main loop, and they would never go out of scope. Furthermore the code imported hundreds of libraries that were never used - further impacting clarity and understanding of what the thing was doing.

To make a long story short, since this was already in production and now there was even more pressure to get a solution in place fast (and all the lawyers threats in the world can't replace a knowledgeable developer) - we rebuilt the whole system using perl in a little over 1 week. That solution is still running today - even as we've scaled orders of magnitude since then.

So - to your point - this stuff really does happen, and wastes godawful amounts of time and money, when a more simpler home grown solution would do just as well, if not better.

Last Halloween I got suckered into running a 13k in costume; since the only costume I own is a TNG uniform and one of my friends wore a TOS redshirt it wasn't much of a leap to get smashed afterwards on Romulan Ale. Alas, I found out the hard way that my Playmates Type II Phaser doesn't work on the bouncer at our local pub. He's a big guy, so maybe I just needed to bump it up to maximum stun....

I've seen a lot of recipes over the years; the one that comes the closest to the effects of the "real" thing is equal parts Everclear, Bacardi 151, and Blue Curacao. It kind of tastes like gasoline but that's part of the appeal, along with pretending it was smuggled across the neutral zone after you've consumed too much of it.... ;)

Human beings are one of the few (the only?) species on this blue marble that can override their baser instincts in favor of reason. I personally know several people who quit smoking cold turkey after many years. It's simply a matter of will power. Don't whine about the "tobacco" companies if you can't summon it even when you know the consequences.

Programmers have to take more responsibility and think holistically about what they are building - and integrate testing to validate their assumptions against the hard light of the real world. To be a great programmer, you should know how to test and build tests and test rigs as needed. To be a great tester, you should know how to code - so you can automate what you're testing. I think the lines have to blur - a firewall between the two only leads to silos, and limits what can be done if they were to work seamlessly (the quote attributed to Aristotle applies here, "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts").

Of course, in many development shops the 'just a programmer' mentality is baked into the whole process - so as a developer you might feel that you are stuck. That being said, if you know better, then it is in the interests of your business if not yourself to champion the issue and effect change.

That reading would seem to permit the Feds to override any and all State laws against political subdivisions doing anything. Some States have decided as a matter of public policy not to engage in public solid waste collection but rather to rely on the private sector for such services. Can Uncle Sam override such decisions?

I would agree with the FCC's action if it was limited to overriding laws that preclude people from starting co-ops. I think it's a bridge too far for the FCC to tell a State that it must allow a political subdivision into the telecommunications business.

*shrug*, Rush makes his living by being a showman. I don't really care for the show, though as a human being I have respect for anyone that can laugh at himself, which Rush does (he has played himself on Family Guy, amongst other things), so there's that. If you're looking for an in-depth and impartial analysis of the issues you're probably not tuning into The Rush Limbaugh Show. Conservatives see a slippery slope here to further regulation. I don't entirely discount that argument and it's hard to escape the fact that the internet became what it is today by being unregulated and free of top-down mandates that impede innovation.

I'm generally supportive of what the FCC is trying to accomplish but I think the means they're using is questionable at best. They're also going after hypothetical impediments to innovation (the oft-discussed fast lane hasn't actually happened) while ignoring real threats (data caps) to innovation. Frankly I'd rather see them in the business of regulating tariffs than telling the ISPs how to run their networks (*), because I view data caps as a far more serious threat to internet video (the "killer app" that started this whole conversation) than a fast line that has yet to come to fruition.

(*) Here's a hypothetical for you: Is it "reasonable network management" to prioritize one's voice service over other applications? Keep in mind that circuit switched voice is fast becoming a thing of the past, on both wireless and wireline. On the wireline side you've got the cable company's VoIP service running on the same DOCSIS node as your neighbor's bittorrent download. On wireless you've got VoLTE replacing circuit switched voice, so voice is just another data application there as well, one that's competing for bandwidth on an increasingly congested wireless data network.

If the answer is "Yes" then you've advantaged Time Warner/Verizon/et. al's voice product over Skype and similar offerings. If the answer is "No" then you're placing phone calls at the same "best effort" level as your neighbor's porn addiction.

That model does make sense for the internet and very few people argue with pricing broke down by speed tiers. It breaks down when people expect that they can utilize 100% of their pipe 100% of the time. In my area Time Warner sells 50mbit/s connections and has eight DOCSIS channels on their coax plant. At ~42mbit/s per channel that's a maximum of 336mbit/s shared amongst all users on a particular node. Some simple division will reveal that less than seven users subscribing to the highest speed tier are enough to completely saturate that pipe. You can translate this into your water analogy easily enough by observing what happens to your water pressure when the fire department decides to flush the hydrants in your neighborhood.

Caps really aren't the best way to manage this "problem" because they ignore the actual limiting factor of bitrate. 95th percentile billing would make more sense but good luck explaining that to the masses.

Rush Limbaugh remembers the days of the fairness doctrine. There are a handful of politicians who think it should make a comeback. I'm not a big fan of Mr. Limbaugh's but in his defense if you read what has been said by supporters of the Fairness Doctrine it would send shivers up your spine:

The shooting is cause for the country to rethink parameters on free speech, Clyburn said from his office, just blocks from the South Carolina Statehouse. He wants standards put in place to guarantee balanced media coverage with a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, in addition to calling on elected officials and media pundits to use 'better judgment.'

Most people, left or right would recoil whenever a politician starts talking about a need to rethink the "parameters of free speech."

If you're a Libertarian how do you feel about the second vote, the one where the FCC is claiming for itself the authority to preempt State level legislation against municipal broadband services? I am not a Libertarian, nor a Republican, but I find that vote extremely disturbing; it has always been the sole province of the States to set the parameters within which their political subdivisions operate. If New York State wishes to preclude my municipality from setting up an ISP what business is that of the FCC? Can the Feds also preempt a decision that precludes municipalities from operating solid waste services? Sewer services?

I am generally supportive of what the FCC is trying to do with Title II but they're going a bridge too far if they think it's appropriate to step into the middle of the relationship between States and their political subdivisions. Three of five unelected Federal bureaucrats do not get to override the parameters my State Legislature sets for my city.