What I'm saying is that we make the copper itself the utility as you suggested. Same for every /type/ of scarce resource (spectrum usage, whatever)... copper's the most straight forward.. the others may require some thinking about... but as I said, the goal is to take the lowest-level that's practical.

But if you did that, then the cable companies, phone companies, etc. all essentially become *SP's.... whether it's Media-Service Providers, Realtime Voice Service Providers, or Internet Service Providers.

At that level, people can compete. But it's impossible to really compete fairly if one company owns the scarce resource.

Yes I agree that sharing some of these hardline solutions (DOCSIS, and even DSL as you mentioned) may be difficult today... but I think that's simply because there's no market for it. The engineering effort to allow for it, while not trivial, certainly shouldn't be difficult. If the market for it existed, people will find a way to make it happen.

As for giving ISPs differentiators... I'm not sure I understand the problem. In the ISP space right now, there plenty of the available and I have my choices.... unfortunately, DSL as a technology is lagging behind some of the others controlled by the monopolies, so I'm no longer using an independent ISP (though generally I've had much better experience working with those types in the past).

But what you're asking is kind of like asking "how do we give differentiators to makers of facial tissue?" There's plenty of brands out there and people buy different ones for different reasons. Let those businesses figure out their model and which customers they want to go after; as long as it's a level playing field, it's fair... that's the best we can do at this level (this level being figuring out what government policy should be).

(ugh.. sorry for the repost didn't realize I wasn't logged in, and slashdot won't let me delete my anonymous post)

You're on the right track here... But I disagree with how quickly you resolved that ISPs shouldn't be turned into a utility and by assuming there is indeed competition. Where I think the breakdown is lies in the distinction between the infrastructure components required to delivering internet service (cables, spectrum, fiber, etc.) and the actual service itself.

You can see this quite clearly by simply examining how the different services position themselves in the market. The Cellular carriers (at least in the US) compete solely on their control of a scarce resource... spectrum and towers... they position themselves by marketing "coverage." This, I believe, is a bad monopoly. You'll never see "quality" service... only what's tolerable. This happens because it's cost prohibitive for new players, and in addition, the control of the resource gives them a huge amount of control to prevent new players from entering.

Cable companies position themselves as one-stop-shops that can offer all your media/communication needs. They do this because they own the copper and are actually allowed local monopolies by the government... most people live in an area where they only really have a choice of 1 cable provider. Again, they control a scarce resource and once they have that control, can exert a lot of power in preventing newcomers.

Local ISPs on the other hand are an entirely different animal. They provide internet service on-top of existing telco cables. In other words, they provide service on top of infrastructure without actually controlling the infrastructure. In this realm, you see plenty of competition in a way that's actually beneficial to the users... They position themselves as having better service, customer support, etc. than even the telcos they lease their lines from.

In general, I believe things that are based on a shared resource like these examples... things I call infrastructure, are best suited to be treated like utilities. They should be run by government regulated (not necessarily government run) monopolies whose sole purpose is to distribute the use of these resources fairly... not to necessarily to profit (not beyond operating, maintenance, and upgrade costs anyway). It's the same thing with your electricity and your water... it's not beneficial to society if companies are allowed to control these shared resources in order to maximize profit.

However, I'm only talking about managing the sharing of resources at the lowest level practical. In the case of wires, that means the physical wires. Everything else that's used on those wires (phone, DSL, etc.) should be purchasable by anyone on the free market, and they should be allowed to do whatever they want with it. In this way, we will have true competition of services that will work to the benefit of users and businesses.

Agreed. And the logical move is to get funding in order to perform the study. Research like this usually means getting funding from the government (i.e. politicians). So, the logical move by the scientists was to point out and say, "hey someone found a possible relationship here, we should investigate this further." And that's exactly what happened.

This is going to be the biggest hurdle to self-driving cars anytime in the near future. It really doesn't matter whether it does better than people will. Most people will get far more upset about the self-driving car hitting their kid than a person hitting their kid. The self-driving car will probably have to do 100x to 1000x times better before most of the population will really accept it.

My solution to the problem is just to make it symmetric. For any question the employer asks he must voluntarily provide his own answer. So if you want my credit score and background check, fine, but I should get the same for my (would be) boss, HR manager, and CEO.

I might be late to the conversation here, but here's my $0.02...

I agree with your supposition and arguments that morality is not necessarily tied to wealth. But I disagree with your viewpoint on the penalty system.

I like the idea of enforcing community service to people, especially the wealthy, as it gets people more grounded. However, your problem is people with money can pay people to do the community service for them. Or more importantly, the time doing community service will affect the poor person more. People who are poor are working like crazy to even make enough to eat/feed kids/whatever. While a rich person, 10 hours may affect millions of dollars of whatever their job is, but it doesn't directly affect their basic survivability and comfort as much.

I believe the fair penalty really is a flat percentage based on wealth. This will impact a poor person as much as rich person. The current system (flat value based fees) is discrimination against poor people.

Well it's consistent with GNOME's approach to things since about 2.0. Copy the bad features of other UIs and make sure to do it worse.

I think what Runaway was trying to say is that Android is open source, but Android-based phones are not generally a very open platform because of the carrier's Tivo'ization.

In addition to your points, it also raises the issue of what is "important." Pokemon for better or worse is a big part of our culture, as are celebrities, The Simpsons, and Seinfeld. Wikipedia's job shouldn't be to rewrite what we think we should be.... it should be to document what we are. And there shouldn't be a limit to the amount of information, only that information is as factual as we can get it. But that's just my opinion.

Umm... that was my point, or part of it. It is a people problem. The second part of my point is that companies that implement a technology solution do so because they lack the ability to manage their people.... ie. the managers are unable to correctly deal with the problem.

Think of it this way... imagine you have a company where you have "free" stationary. Anyone can go ahead and get whatever they need. 99 out of 100 employes never have an issue. But then one day 1 employee decides to steel staplers and calculators and whatever. Then the company decides to institute a plan to require everyone to fill out a request form and justify why they need 3 pens.

It's an overreaction (and not even a correct one) to what should have been a discipline issue. That's what the facebook/twitter blocking is to me. It's overkill for the wrong reasons. And all it does is make everyone else's lives more inconvenient.

I recently started working at a company that blocks certain websites. I'm not sure that blocking Facebook/Twitter does a whole lot for the company... personally I think it hurts more than it helps. The reason is that quite a few people these days have some sort of mobile that allows them to access those sites anyway. So all you've done is make it so it takes them more time to deal with it. Before, I'd check my personal mail using the company network because it was faster and more convenient, in and out, and I'm good. Now I have to deal with slower connections through the cell network. I'm not abusing the time or anything (and far within what would normally be considered a reasonable break), but it is less efficient. Heck there are smokers that take up far more time smoking than most others do with Facebook/Twitter.

So the problem you have is people who do abuse their distractions. You don't solve that by making things inconvenient for everyone with technological barriers. You solve that, as you said, as a "people problem" and warm/fire them as appropriate.

Resorting to technological barriers does two things: potentially lowers productivity/morale by making the company appear intolerant to people's emotional needs (eg. the purpose of breaks), and it makes the company seem like it doesn't know manage it's employees, allowing unproductive people to stick around (if they were unproductive before your barrier, they're going to find ways to be unproductive with your barrier), which will also lead to the productive people asking why they should be that productive.

The board members also tend to think this way. Hence my phrase "CEos and other decision makers".

I agree this is all opinion. But out of all the people I know (myself included) that have worked in startups, private companies, public companies, etc... I don't know anyone that's actually made any money off an employee stock purchase program, for example. Maybe I just have really unlucky friends. I saw this exact sort of thing happen at the last company I worked at... where the CEO's public statement was to "increase the value of the company" and all that good stuff... but it really seems like they were more focused on increasing the stock price.

I've since left the company, and my new company seems to be a lot more reasonable. So it's certainly not always true. Again, I'm merely stating that the short-term nature of stocks seems to encourage short-term success. Some leaders (CEO/Board/President/etc) can do well despite this, but many don't appear to.

Are you sure "investment" doesn't have a time limit? I mean if you wanted to start a company, and I say I'm willing to invest $1000 but only for 13 microseconds. Does that help either one of us? I understand you can say that it allows you to pool together lots of investors and minimize risk... but let's say you have a million investors willing to invest $1000 for 13 microseconds... Well now you've got $1000 to spend for 13 seconds. I'm sure I'm missing some clever financial way of thinking about things... but I just fail to see how this provides me (an investor) with any substantial benefit or you (someone theoretically wanting to provide a useful product/service to people) with anything substantially useful. This whole mechanism to me only seems to server one purpose and that's a pyramid scheme for big institutions to shuffle money around.

Yes. But my argument is that short-term windows encourage business owners to focus on short-term success... essentially driving them to failure. You could argue that's just the way it is and they shouldn't have been in business if they didn't know how to run it. But my question remains, why have a system that encourages "bad" behavior in the first place?

Ah... Nice idea. I really like this actually. It allows the people who really want to do it continue to do so at a cost, while encouraging the "correct" behavior.

Please take a step back and re-read what I said. You've argued exactly the point I was not making.

I was not arguing anything about what HFT was doing to stocks, liquidity of stocks, or any such thing. I completely accept that. What I was arguing about was the mindset any "short-term" stock system places upon the CEOs and other decision makers of companies. This is not a technology problem, it's a people problem. The technology is merely enhancing the people problem.