" imposes rules on broadband Internet services that were written in the era of the steam locomotive and the telegraph."
Oh, you mean back in the days when giant corporations used their monopoly status to squeeze huge amounts of money out of their customers in the absence of competiton? Those days?
Yes, some beekeepers use a queen excluder. But they can cause problems. For example, worker bees, which can pass through the excluder, move eggs around all the time. So if they move an egg across the excluder into an area where the queen cannot spread her supression pheromone, the workers may decide to raise a new queen on the "wrong" side of the excluder. Also, you have the issue of worker-laid eggs which make up about 10% of all the eggs laid in a hive. If the queen pheromone is not stong enough in the "excluded" part of the hive, those worker eggs will be raised as queens.
Nobody who raises bees only opens their hive twice a year. Once is enough to harvest honey. And honey can be harvested when the hive is opened for other reasons. So the reduction in work is miniscule and comes at a great cost in terms of equipment cost. Also, the exposure of honey on the tap is very dangerous to the hive because it will attract all kinds of parasites and bee preditors. Yellow jackets and Japanese hornets will be drawn to the honey and will end up attacking the hive.
Sorry but this is ridiculous. For one thing, taking care of bees involves moving frames around for many reasons other than collection of honey. So you are not going to create a hive that never has to be opened. Honey collection is not the main reason for opening a hive.
And bees to NOT obligingly lay their eggs only in the brood frames. There will be eggs, and thus baby bees in the honey section as well, so when you turn the tap you will get baby bees.
Those 300 pages of regulations codify how the internet has always been. These regulations were necessary becasue the ISPs embarked on a new plan to squeeze content providers. They wanted to be paid both by the subscriber and by the content providers. But by nature these ISPs are utilities because they rely on access to the public domain in the form of conduits, telephone poles, street rights-of-way, and municipal owned fiber. Bu using Title II regulation, the FCC ensures that competitors like Google Fiber will have the same access to the public domain assests. That is the only way to have competition for the last mile of the network.
When I clicked on this story, I checked my Privacy Badger listing. It showed 3 trackers operating on Slashdot:
b.scorecardresearch.com
cdn.taboola.com
googlea....doubleclick.net
I'm using Privacy Badger (from the Free Software Foundation) to block all three.
Actually "the" indefinite article is not required. "The" definite article is also acceptable.
The title of this post refers to "intellectual property". There is no such thing. There are patents, copyrights, and trademarks. But none of these is property. If they were we would not need a special part of the US Constitution to deal with these things (Article 1, Section 8). Because none of this is "property" it is not covered by property law.
And that's the problem. Patents, copyrights, and trademarks exist to further innovation. They represent a monopoly limited in time and held by the innovator who created the thing that is patentable, copyrightable, or tradmarkable. But when we treat those temporary monopolies as property that can be bought and sold, inherited and used as collateral, we have destroyed the impetus to innovation and replaced it with an impetus to profit even at the peril of innovation.
And so we have the ridiculous spectacle of a copyright extended and extended
As Linus makes clear, there is no decrease in non-paid contributions. They are a smaller percentage becasue more professionals are now being paid to develop Linux. That is a good sign becasue it means more businesses see Linux development as something worth investing in. And it's probably the same people doing the programming. Previously they would have to do it for free but now they get paid. Nothing wrong with that.
That's the point of the GPL. It doesn't matter if one or many projects are disfunctional. The code they produce is available to everyone so they still contribute to progress on software that belongs to everyone. What could be more democratic?
Yes the article says "growth in Google's primary business, search advertising, has flattened out at about 20 percent a year" But a constant growth RATE year after year is not flat. It is exponential growth. It is compounded growth where each 20% increase is an increase over and above the 20% increase of the previous year. Where else can you get a 20% compounded interest rate on your savings?
User defined launchers (apps, locations, folders) and user configurable docking panels were standard until Gnome 3. Even the "Classic" Gnome that came with Ubuntu 12.04 allowed launchers with a bit of scripting. But the newest Gnome requires detailed
Xfce permits user defined launchers with a right-click on the desktop. And docking panels for those launchers are easily configurable.
Unity and Gnome take away the simple usability features that make a desktop efficient. I understad why Unity is doing this. Their vision is to be one desktop for PCs and mobile devices. Everything has to work from menus on a small screen. It's harder to understand why Gnome is following along without even the option of launchers and panels on a PC.
Bottom line is that Xfce works and improves usability of the desktop. That's all I can ask.
I think you're right Dragon. Truly free markets are a very efficient means of allocating resources. The problem is that markets have no way of determining the will of the majority of people. Maximizing profits is not hte same thing as determining what is best for society. The belief that it is the same thing is what I call a religion. Once society, through it's elected representatives, has decided on a course of action, truly free markets within a regulatory framework are the most efficient way to reach that goal.
You are exactly right. The ISPs have always been short term in their thinking. Under Title II they will be providing better and cheaper content to thier customers which will result in more customers. There is a reason that Comcast has the worst consumer satisfaction of any US company, with Time Warner a close second. They try to milk their customers for every penny they can get with their predatory "promotional" pricing. And now they have begun to milk the third party providers of internet content as well.
Ironically, in the long run these ISPs will do very well under Title II becasue they will be forced to grow their user base instead of shrinking it as has been the case in recent years.
You ask a good question. Democrats could have passed a law in 2009 or 2010 when they controlled House, Senate, and White House. But they didn't, partly becasue they were busy collecting campaign contributions from these same ISPs. Obama has waited until after his personal last election and until after the next- to-last election under his presidency to propose rules that should have been in effect the whole time.
Aside from campaign contributions, there may be one other reason for the late start on Title II regulation. It is only recently that content providers such as Netflix and Amazon have started producing quality programming and distributing it on the internet rather than on the TV channels controlled by the ISPs. This has undercut the revenue stream of these ISPs and encouraged them to begin differential pricing based on content provider. Comcast now charges extra to Netflix even though Netflix customers already pay for their internet service directly to Comcast. So they are "double billing" for the same service. If allowed to get away with this, the ISPs can be expected to continue to ratchet up the cost of accessing third party content, becasue they control the pipes. But the pipes were developed at public expense and using public right-of-way and so should be treated as a regulated utility.
Does anyone think the sponsors of this legialation have serioulsly considered the issues of user access and cost? Of course not. As in so many areas of public life, Republicans have adopted the mantra of "free markets". Which is another way of saying on behalf of large corporations, "Let the Wookie win". Let the big strong arm-ripping behemoth have its way. This disregards the needs of the majority of the population and lets corporations take the profits resulting from public investment and tax dollars.
The internet has never been about "free markets". The internet was developed by the government and universities (with public funding). As far as the big ISPs are concerned, most of them, such as Comcast and Time Warner, make use of public right-of-way to carry thier signals to their customers. Most of this right-of-way was obtained either through imminent domain (for the public good) or for other purposes entirely (to carry power lines). This has resulted in a protected monopoly for these ISPs. They have no competition, the exact opposite of a free market.
Title II will treat the ISPs as utilities so that their rates will be controlled and their fiber optic cables will be available to all content providers under competitive conditions. This is really a free market in content, rather than the coroporate oligarchy envisioned by this Repucblican legislation.
Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user!
