Clarification: no co-op with a reach bigger than a city or country!

I like the idea of a co-op, especially down at the level of cities and towns. To avoid eliminating rural areas, it should be bootstrapped from the existing companies, with the process of "rural electrification" under a single management, so we can keep it under tight oversight initially, when the expensive mistakes and bad behaviours are likely but are large-scale, then devolve operations onto the smaller areas. In my view, nothing bigger than a county or a city should manage day-to-day operations, like water and sewer, with the province setting the rules and providing the occasional cop.

Relax, they're talking about letting someone run it and policing their behaviour. Just like Ontario Hydro, which misbehaved a few years back and got broken up into parts, with more oversight applied. We're about to have a provincial election where the main question is around the government's involvement in Hydro planning, which demonstrates that the electors (us!) are providing proper oversight.

Yup, the cloudies reinvented timesharing (;-))

What they don't have, however, is a uniform memory architecture. Modern large processors (running AIX, Solaris, etc) are non-uniform memory (NUMA) machines, with memory on the same board as the cpu being faster then memory on the buss.

Memory on cloud/array-computing machines is the extreme of NUMA: the "bus" is an ethernet (;-))

On mainframes, the memory is in the "center" with the CPUs around it in a ring, using a "system controller" (the Honeywell term) to mediate multiple accesses to memory and manage cache consistency. That used to be the most expensive part on the machine, and typically scaled to between 4 and 8 CPUs on the Honeybun. On modern machines it's part of the CPU and cache structure and scales to about 4 sockets on a board. Six on a good day.

Thus you see lots of effort to handle NUMA effects, and get more ALUs and decoders per chip, to get more threads per socket.

Courtesy of Nat Torkington of O'Reilly and BoingBoing, video interview with Susan Crawford about why the Internet should be treated like a utility. She’s the only policy person I see talking sense. There’s a multilarity coming, when a critical mass of everyday objects are connected to each other via the Internet and offline devices become as useful as an ox-drawn cart on railway tracks. At that point it’s too late to argue you need affordable predator-proof Internet, because you’re already over the (sensing, e-ink covered, Arduino-powered) barrel.

In some countries, it would be obtaining a service (the takedown) based upon a false and fraudulent pretense. That's a criminal offence, and an injured party can call upon the Crown to prosecute it as such. Consult a lawyer in the jurisdiction in question, get a quote and take them with you to the fraud squad, to ensure the process happens correctly. It's arguably hard to do correctly in the U.S, as suggested by the low number of convictions reported...

I would expect it to be updated, just like the updates to ssh that have added newer encryption schemes. We're talking IETF, not Telcos!

This is a classic solved problem in computer science: chose an algorithm that you can support in the generation of machines you plan to deploy, even if it's slow in the lab.

MIT specified an amazing fast processor for Project Athena, an entire 1 MIPS. Unheard of! Of course, it was perfectly normal when Athena rolled out. [Origin: the guys there explaining we could use the DEC 2100s we already had at York if we wanted to deploy Athena]

--dave

To be fair, he's proposed a classic solution to a queuing problem, albeit from outside. My usual response to "I suggest X" in such a scenario is a quick sanity check followed by "do you volunteer to implement it?"

We're seeing a natural result of a lack of refactoring (;-))

The law in this area is now complex enough that one can easily hold two mutually contradictory opinions with decent precedent for both. That calls for a superior court to disambiguate them, and/or a legislature to set a legislative intent and test.

And yes, this means that antitrust law is suffering from technical debt.

--dave

Yup!
Some days I think judges and (in this case) lawyers are the politest people in the world, even more understated than the English. I'm just hoping this chap is as polite and implacable as an englishman who's luggage has been stolen in a foreign country.

--dave
[* Historically, killing englishman was OK, but stealing their luggage could get your country a new and improved government, or at least a visit from the Fleet (:-)]

That's snail-mail he's talking about.

(Courtesy John Winterton)

Thanks of the background information! We have several telcos, but they tend to be later generations of the Ma Bell family, roughly one per province. They in turn own non-regulated cell companies, who compete mostly nation-wide.

The things which, IMHO, need to be regulated monopolies are the companies who own the poles in front of my house. One set carries the wires for the local baby Bell, the other carries hydro and the TV cables. As you might guess from the first paragraph, there is one cable company in any given area, often province-wide.

I'd be perfectly happy to ease up Bell and Rogers Cable* if we had a common carrier that they didn't own outright, have a huge stake in, or have overlapping boards with.

--dave
[* To paraphrase a friend, "The company to go to when Bell isn't hard enough on you"]

I like that: I'd only hash data about recipients, locations, etc, but not sender and duration, so I could use it when disputing usage with the phone's owner.

Thanks!

I wonder if we could encrypt the sensitive bits with the phone's public key, so the owner could read the details off the bills but we couldn't???