The whole "SUVs are safer" thing was a pile of crap. It managed to make the oil sheiks rich, and their buddies in Washington (recently departed), but it hurt the inhabitants and the planet.
SUVs are dangerous because they have a higher center of gravity than cars. Add the powerful engines and you have a recipe for rollover. So while an SUV is safer than a compact car in a head-on collision, head-on collisions just aren't all that common. SUVs added more deaths from rollover than they saved from their dead weight.
Plus the weight was a zero-sum game. SUV to SUV is like compact to compact. You win if you're the only SUV; you lose when everybody else has one. And you lose when the compact handles better, evades the collision, and the SUV rolls over while trying.
Childish whining like the OP about cable companies' not metering their own television broadcasts or telephone calls, but metering Internet, gets nowhere. You all want cake, and you want it free, and to eat it too. But the cake is a lie.
Cable runs telephone on reserved, engineered capacity (PacketCable) for which subscribers pay a fee. It doesn't touch the Internet; it goes to a media gateway into the phone network.
Cable runs video on many channels, some analog, most QAM nowadays. That's sent from the head end, mostly from satellite feeds, some from over-the-air receivers and ATSC-to-QAM remodulators.
Internet goes on a separate CMTS that goes over middle mile facilities to an ISP backbone. That all costs money. UPSTREAM capacity on cable is VERY limited; it only works upstream to 42 MHz, and broadband only above about 20 MHz. It is a terrible medium for providing content or running file servers, which is what Torrent is about.
So heavy uploaders in particular, and heavy users in general, tax the shared capacity of the Internet and worsen everyone else's usage (gaming response, data performance, etc.). So I'd rather be on a system that invites the heaviest users to go elsewhere, thank you.
Sure they could "buy" more capacity, but why should I pay more so that a handful of bozos can exchange movies? Tiered pricing allows my price, for using under 50 GB/month, to stay reasonable.
I would prefer a free market in ISPs, with DSL still open to any ISP so that there would be an open market. The FCC could fix that. But regulating ISPs per se is a truly, deeply dumb idea.
What a waste. I bought a cheapo no-name cable at our electronic discount parts store, but when I painted both ends of it with green Magic Marker, the bit error rate improved by an order of magnitude and my overall transfer speed went up by 17%!
Maybe I'll write a letter about it to Etherphile magazine.
Good point. COBOL is adequate.
It's just not k3w1. Script kiddi3z don't use it. Hax04 d00dz don't like it. Boring grownups with real work to do use it, and they do real work with it. How uninteresting!
What COBOL won't do well or at all -- write Linux device drivers, write 3D game engines, or overflow buffers and take control of somebody else's system in order to send spam. What it will do -- process lots of data, paying attention to every penny.
C, on the other hand, is a miserable language for almost everything except system-level (kernel, driver) hacking. Its widespread use for many other functions is a stupid fashion.
First off, I am acquainted with the owner of Core IP, and am aware of what he was doing with 800 numbers in 2005-2006 (when the 800 rules changed). The FCC rules for intercarrier compensation are not clear and he thought he was exploiting a real loophole, to allow dial-up Internet access to rural areas.
The FCC writes orders and rules for specific point cases, not general rules, so as things change, the rules don't cover them. That's how VoIP happened -- it is not in the rules and you can argue about what rules actually apply when. And they've not fixed this for 12 years. 800 had some ambiguities too.
The 800 issue was about direct calls between local carriers. You could point an 800 number at a local carrier to receive the call, and that carrier would get billed by the caller's carrier. A third party would own the 800 number itself and not get billed. Someone told Matt that there was no charge for such calls. In fact, Verizon didn't know how to bill for them (they fixed this) so they looked free, and in SBC's case, a contract quirk meant they really were free. But some smaller phone companies were really angry and they got the 800 system fixed to require more consent in setting up the numbers.
When this type of thing happens, the phone companies send out bills and argue about them. ISP servers have no connection. Core IP was not the company doing the 800 stuff.
I'm not going to get involved in the big debate over Keynes vs. the gold bugs. Just on the actual topic of the subject note...
The House had a $6B broadband appropriation, divided between rural (Dept. of Agriculture) and not-necessarily-rural (NTIA) programs. The Senate totally rewrote those sections. Sen. Rockefeller (D-Verizon) added about $2B for "advanced broadband" defined as 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up, in the form of a corporate tax credit, for new service to any residential customer. Even if only a tiny percentage took the higher speed, and it was totally closed to competitive Internet or telephone services.
So the grant could not be used by most standalone ISPs, because they're generally not profitable (so no need for a tax credit), or aren't Corporations (partnerships, municipalities, non-profits, etc., don't get anything). Nor could cable (upstream speed limits) or AT&T (U-Verse is too slow). The money had exactly one recipient in mind, It was a subsidy for pulling FiOS in suburban areas to compete with established cable companies and ISPs. The "underserved" areas could include Tampa, New York City, Short Hills, Santa Monica, or Chevy Chase.
The subsidy would have added precisely zero new FiOS lines, since it would have covered their existing plans. It was just more money for Ivan Seidenberg's bonus. Good riddance!
Some of the digital stations aren't yet at full power. But you might need an outdoor antenna. One tree doesn't usually do that much harm to TV signals (below 700 MHz).
The FCC's "map book" shows that the Houston DTV stations will have comparable, but not identical, coverage.
http://www.fcc.gov/dtv/markets/
No, Clearwire isn't involved in the DTV transition.
Clearwire and Sprint have a near-lock on the 2500-2690 MHz band. Nextel and Sprint (before the merger) had been buying up licenses there, some of which were originally MMDS "wireless cable" (an early-1990s failure). They also have leases on some of the educational channels there (held by universities, schools, and churches -- the Catholic Church is the largest holder).
The 700 MHz bands were auctioned off, with Verizon, ATT, T-Mobile, and other cellular/mobile providers being the major buyers. VZW and ATT bid them up high in a desperate move to keep newcomers from getting the licenses. Also, Qualcomm bought two TV channels (55 and 56) for MediaFlo.
No, the cable companies have been reducing the number of analog channels. RCN has completed "project crush", to get rid of them all. You thus need a cable box. Comcast still has some analog channels and the FCC has given them a hard time about removing them.
But this has NOTHING to do with the issue at hand. That's downstream video capacity, unrelated to PacketCable, a separately-multiplexed two-way service that uses some of the cable's scarce upstream capacity. "Congestion" is not usually caused by scarcity; that's an obvious, but wrong, assumption (sort of the flat earth theory of operations research).
Good synopsis.
On his last weekend before his resignation took effect, former FCC chairman Kevin Martin let off his final dump on Comcast, a personal battle he has waged his whole time at the FCC. He suggested that Comcast is disobeying a non-rule about an undefined concept called "network neutrality" that he never wants to apply to the big telephone companies.
He knows that CDV is a PacketCable service, not on the Internet, so it is not really comparable. But at the bottom of the Notice is a question about whether the service, if not Internet, can take advantage of the non-rule that maybe allows VoIP companies to not pay telephone companies the same terminating access charges on long distance calls that real phone companies pay. Here's the catch-22 that Comcast is in. The non-rule (Martin had trouble making rules the way the law defines them) applies to interconnected VoIP (not well defined) but is not clear if it applies only to nomadic Internet VoIP (like Vonage), all Internet VoIP, or all VoIP.
Comcast is non-Internet but uses VoIP encapsulation, so it decided that it does not need to act as a state-regulated telephone company any more. (Its older TDM-based Comcast Digital Phone did.) And thus it doesn't owe the access charges, which add about a half-cent per minute on nonlocal interstate calls delivered to Bell companies, but can go over a dime a minute on some intrastate calls to smaller (rural) phone companies. (Vonage doesn't pay them.)
So they're suggesting that Comcast is either a phone company (no neutrality question applies) or it's an Internet company (no rules apply, but a certain type of neutrality is a sort of deal Comcast made under protest). The net result could be that Comcast admits to being a phone company (like some other cable companies, including RCN and Cox). Some state regulators have already so ruled, but again the FCC hasn't made its own rules clear on this.
No, it uses the same modem but differently. PacketCable uses reserved cable capacity, separate from the Internet service. It does not touch the Internet. There is multiplexing in the physical layer to sort the services out.
To clarify... Comcast Digital Voice, like any PacketCable service, uses reserved capacity. It comes off of the cable modem channel, at the physical layer (minislots), and it keeps the telephone calls off of the Internet. CDV is NOT an Internet phone service at all. It's a separate access network, using MGCP-derived signaling and RTP/IP encapsulation of voice.
If the phone is not in use, then a tiny bit more capacity on the cable (100 kbps/call) is made available for data. If you think that's unfair, fine, but that's how PacketCable works, and it maximizes efficiency for the whole system. It's safe, legal, and non-fattening.
It's never justified. Names, not IP addresses, should be used. The historical rationalization is that FTP did it. But FTP did it for a very specific reason (printing to a BBN PTIP) that no longer applies.
And I do know layering. Putting an IP address in the application layer breaks layering! Addresses belong to the IP layer, and thus should be resolved there.
TCP/IP breaks layering all the time, but then it's a sloppy 30+ year old prototype. Good for its day, obsolete today. And v6 makes it worse.
Because IPv6 was an awful mistake, an abortion created by a project group (IPNG) that had become so politicized that the best people had left. The remaining participants were hardly even the B team; they were F Troop. IPv6 was a mashup of two undergrad-level hacks, Steve's IP and Paul's IP, by Steve Deering and Paul Francis. Steve has disclaimed IPv6 and Paul's in a daze. All this was done before "ISP" was a household word -- it was still the NSF's private network.
So IPv6 perpetuates IPv4's mistakes and adds more of its own. It is costly but doesn't fix anything.
The existing v4 space is not well utilized. Blocks can be traded/bought/sold in the interim until something smarter than IPv6 comes along. IPv6 at this point is mainly a hack by equipment vendors to make you buy costly new stuff.
NAT is harmless to any application that is not broken in the first place. There is never justification for putting an IP address inside the application layer. Look at HTTP: It uses names, not addresses. In fact, it was a mistake to have applications resolve DNS; that should be a function of TCP/IP itself.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce