Various ML dialects had that before Python. The thing Python brought was a poor performance implementation of a language from the C++ school of language design: keep adding features without regard to how they interact and expect programmers to know all of them (if they ever work with anyone else) but only use a subset if they don't want totally unmaintainable code.

Exactly my point. Adequate peering should be defined in technical terms based on capacity and measured demand. It wouldn't be terribly difficult to come up with an effective rule.

Something along the lines of some thresholds that mandated that if a peering connection was regularly saturated for X number of hours the previous 3 months, then it would trigger some sort of upgrade negotiation process between the networks with the FCC as arbiter if agreement could not be made.

The hardware cost is irrelevant. It's the cost and time to thoroughly test / migrate / rewrite lots of bespoke software, made to the lowest quality by some company like Accenture on a contract, for which the source code probably wasn't supplied and all the original developers have left. And if the system fails the Daily Mail will write about it. And the tories slashed the budget, so all that's left can just about cover the new thing the new regulation requires.

Netflix wasn't looking for a free ride on Comcast's network to service Verizon's or some other network's customers... Netflix was looking to locally peer with Comcast to serve content that Comcast's own customers were themselves requesting and those customers had already more than adequately paid both Comcast and Netflix to have sufficient access to.

Net Neutrality is or should be about preventing that kind of monopolistic and destructive abuse of our communications infrastructure to cynically squeeze money out of monopolized customers. The Comcast/Netlfix deal is and was some sort of protection racket or payola scheme not a legitimate business practice.

No one is saying if I have a server in California that a Massachusetts ISP should be forced to connect to me in California. But if a network's customers are regularly saturating the local link to another network, then yes there should be an effective regulation to say that the Massachusetts ISP has some defined obligation to peer to the long haul network at sufficient bandwidth at a locally designated peering point.

That is how the Internet was built. In good faith, in the best interest of efficient communications without sabotaging peering arrangements to squeeze more money out of customers.

Interference and enforcement are two very different things. In every scenario in every transaction in a free market you have the potential for conflict over what constitutes an agreement, about what is fraudulent, about what is intimidation, about what is theft, and ultimately about what the regulators of a free market believe is worth using force to "enforce".

I agree with the point that regulation should be working towards the most competitive free market, but I don't think a free market means what you think it means, even in the ideal.

That fundamental disagreement about terms alone demonstrates that the idea of one rule "ensuring that all agreements and contracts are enforced" itself is poorly constructed as the sole basis and definition for a free market.

And by its nature an agreement is no longer an agreement if it needs to be enforced by a third party.

I agree with just about everything you just said. In a free market Comcast and I (or any other party) are free to come to any agreement within a broad range of legality. However, understanding that in a free society the government is always in a position to decide what agreements it is willing to enforce in the interest of the free market. Without a system where disputes can be equitably resolved, private agreements are either not free or not effective.

If I pay a shop keeper for something and they don't provide that good or service, then there needs to be a way to resolve that dispute within the rules. Likewise if I take a good or service outside of an agreement then regulations are needed to define the rules for dealing with that range of situations. In some clear cases it might be stealing or in some cases it is a civil matter. Likewise there is a very real issue when there is only one seller in the marketplace or a gang that has intimidated all the other sellers, that calls for regulation also.

There is no possibility of a free market without rules governing the free market which keep it free. The rules and the enforcement of those rules is what make a market free or not.

In the current environment where regulations at the local, state and federal levels have all contributed to creating local communications monopolies and there is very little room for an effective free market for Internet access, then there is a necessary place for regulatory reform to create better (usually simpler) rules to create a better free market system.

I agree with those that say the lack of competition is the real underlying issue, but you need rules to address that. I am not talking about more or less rules... just the right rules for the free market system we want.

For the branch instructions with the reused opcodes, this means that you need to do it up front. This means that things like JVMs and anything else with a JIT requires rewriting. This is where a big part of the cost of the software ecosystem comes from. It also means that disassemblers and debuggers (which are another big investment) also need significant rewriting, rather than just adopting.

Trap and emulate and trap and patch will only work if your MISPr6 processors have a special mode that will trap on any instructions that have had their opcodes reused. In such a mode, trap-and-patch usually won't work, because the compact branch instructions that are intended for use in the patching are in this set.

The new ISA is a lot nicer than classic MIPS, but it's almost as much effort to support in software as RISC V or ARMv8. This is part of the reason why we (with my FreeBSD hat on) have been working closely with Cavium on ARMv8 recently. Existing customers for Cavium's MIPS parts (certain storage and networking vendors) have looked at MIPSr6 and seen that the cost of migrating their code from MIPS III or MIPS64r1 to MIPSr6 is about the same as the cost of migrating to ARMv8. They've also seen the lack of serious investment in LLVM (until very recently, and even then it's far smaller than ARM alone - Apple, Google and ARM are investing an order of magnitude more effort than the MIPS ecosystem) and decided that it's worth working out the cost of an ARMv8 migration.

I mentioned this to Daniel over a year ago, but apparently ImagTec decided that keeping their customers' customers on MIPS wasn't a priority.

The problem of stove piped networks clearly exists as smaller networks have been squeezed and squeezed using inadequate peering to force them to consolidate or go out of business. This has been a clear trend over the last two decades.

I see the problem as government regulations (including the current FCC version of Net Neutrality) being captured by monopolies to further their consolidation of power, not that there isn't a role for government regulation of the free market.

Unregulated free markets don't remain free. And unregulated communication networks aren't going to provide customers with the communication services they are paying for and which we all want. A free society needs honest cops ready to step in when needed to enforce simple and fair rules of free trade, not no cops.

If the FCC actually implemented technical net neutrality rules for inter-connectivity between networks it would help ensure that the customers of any one network would be provided sufficient peering to access content and communicate with other people on other networks.

Just as with the break up of ATT that you needed regulations to make sure that customers of one network would be able to call customers of another network and expect a sufficient level of service between the networks would be provided. The Internet is primarily a communications platform and not merely a cable content delivery network.

The problem with the Orwellian "net neutrality" as has been put forward by the FCC is that it does none of that necessary work to mandate sufficient network peering and focuses on content instead of substance. Prohibiting packet discrimination based on content or deep packet inspection would be a good thing (somewhat easily thwarted with some encryption and use of dynamic IP ranges by the way), but that wasn't the main issue of net neutrality which really is about providing sufficient peering bandwidth for content and communications requested by an ISP's own customers.

Bingo! You hit the nail on the head. Nothing in the FCC net Neutrality regulations prevent the ISPs from stove piping their networks to exclude peers that provide competing content. All it precludes them from doing is cherry picking packets.

Good FCC regulations would set some technical standards for peering so that if for instance Comcast customers were regularly requesting content from another network (for say Netflix) then the ISP would have to work with that other network to provide sufficient peering bandwidth to meet expected Comcast customer demand moving forward. The FCC regulations miss that and throw a bunch of red tape and aspirational words at the problem and delve into what should be FTC concerns about anti-competitive practices.

The Internet is a communications network, the whole point of any government regulations should be those technical standards of peering between the networks to provide enough bandwidth to meet the need.

I like Rand Paul and when it comes right down to it he can see the forest for the trees. He is basically right on this one, although I would prefer it if he came out and also strongly condemned the local monopolies that are undermining free market competition and clearly linked the issues.

As far as I have read, the FCC rules create red tape without providing the simple meaningful protections for net neutrality and protections for competition and connectivity of networks that are needed. The FCC net neutrality rules specifically excluded the practice of providing insufficient bandwidth to peer networks to handle requested content, which if you recall was how Comcast successfully shook down and squeezed Netflix/Comcast customers for more money because their network peering was insufficient to handle Comcast customer demand for Netflix content.

So, moving forward the FCC will continue to allow networks to effectively block and throttle content provided on other networks as long as they throttle the entire peer network and not specific content. That is Net Neutrality in name only and will lead to further consolidation of corporate control over the Internet as people won't be able to afford not to pay the local monopolies to host their content on those networks because the various stove piped networks are all connected via 56k modems in a broom closet unless their network owners have come to some "arrangement".

Worse, the very competition which could alleviate the problem will be further stifled instead of enabled by the FCC Net Neutrality regulations.

While there are some good symbolic nuggets in the regulations, allowing networks to provide half-assed peering to other networks that provide the content that their customers are requesting is the glaring loophole in the FCC regulations which undermines the entire house of cards.