Now the nicest thing would be a site that is slow by itself, pays a lot to AT&T to be distributed at high speed, but still is slow as it is slow by itself. It shows the absurdity of these double "gates".

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

A propos...

http://www.wired.com/news/technology...tw=wn_index_13

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

Here I think, is a good analogy that I just came up with:

There is a toll bridge near where I live. Since I drive over the bridge a lot, I pay a month fee and get one of those "speed pass" things. Now, so long as I keep paying that monthy fee, I can drive over the bridge as often as I like.

One day, the owner of the toll bridge happens to see me driving home from the grocery store. He looks in the trunk of my car and sees my groceries and he thinks, "Hey! This isn't fair!! The grocery store is getting free use of my bridge!! The grocery store needs to pay me a toll!!"

Of course, in the real world, the grocery store will just laugh at the bridge owner. There's no way for the owner to enforce that double toll. But on a network, there is a way to enforce it.

The real reason that AT&T wants to do this is that they feel they have to in order to survive. Voice over IP is taking off, and AT&T looks and sees a major revenue stream about to evaporate right before their eyes. They feel that have to find something to replace it. AT&T and the cable companies have already gotten caught degrading Vonage's traffic. Vonage is a competitor. If you're a cable company, you want people to buy VOIP from you, not from Vonage. So when a customer goes against your wishes and gets vonage anyway, you punish them with degraded service.

I'm not sure they'll get away with this in the long run. The Internet is just too big and too important.

And something else just occured to me, how many people use google? It has to be close to 80 or 90%. So now, imagine what would happen if google picked one of the major ISPs and paid them the fee, but didn't pay any of the other ISPs AND google advertised what it had done.

"are you on AT&T DSL? Well, starting November 1st you may not be able to access google. Call this 1-800 number now to switch your internet to Cox Cable."

I'm guessing that would very nearly murder AT&T. Just the threat of that sort of thing has got to scare the bejesus out of AT&T. What are they thinking?

Cox, BTW, offers 3 Internet access speeds. After subscribing to their 'middle' speed, I realized no significant improvement, so now use their 'slowest' speed. Every so often, they will give subscribers a no-extra-cost 30-day highest-access-speed to encourage customers to upgrade. Do they use different equipment for these higher speeds, justifying higher fees, or is the 3-tiered system a scam?

The discussion is gaining momentum. Local analysts say the model proposed by the US telecoms has no chance of being applied here. It would require a constitutional amendment. And if the telecoms insist on pressing for an extra source of revenue the government will most likely subsidize broad band. That´s why I think the US will lose competitivity if this proposal goes ahead.

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

What's that old saying?

Capitalism is when people try to take advantage of their fellow man. Communism is the other way around.

Politicians are all the same, doesn't matter in which system they ply their trade.

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Don of Borg - Cool, Calm, Collective.

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

The telcoms were complaining that the bill would introduce uneeded regulations onto the Net. The only regulation should be "Thou shalt not scam thy customers into paying a double toll for access". I'm already paying $25 a month for cable ($45 normally). I'm not going to pay *more* just so I can load up "premium" websites faster.

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"4th Law of Modern Thermodynamics: Where Mihoshi is, Chaos Reigns." ~W. Hakubi
"Gun control is hitting your target; Recycling is reloading your brass." ~ Lex of Dirty Work.

Don't forget, ISP's aren't the only ones who can spend a lot on lobbyists. Google, Amazon.com, Yahoo, Micrososft and other big-name internet-related companies have very deep pockets as well, and they would be seriously hurt by this. They are fighting to have the law passed.

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I met this wonderful girl at Macy's. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.
-Steven Wright



My Website: The Black Cat's Web Page

Work is under way to change that. I was just hired by a large telecom to install fiber over the 'last mile." (Well, my part is the last few hundred feet when you order it.) You can get 5 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload for $35 US or even up to 30 Mbps/5 Mbps for $180. And your phone is on the fiber as well and TV over the fiber is on the way. They ran the main fiber lines in my neighborhood about 6 months ago. And all the new neighborhoods are getting it during construction.

Kizarvexis

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"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James D. Nicoll

That is indeed correct, and you didn't mis recall anything. China restricts content being accessed in China that the authorities consider may be counter to the interests of the continuation in power of the Communist Party.

Thngs like dissertations on the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 are next to impossible to be found or accessed in China for the average Chinese user, Falun Gong related sites are also completely blocked out and inaccesible, anything overly critical of the the ruling Communist Party or discussion of Communist Party mistakes - that sort of thing is also completely blocked out.

This was the whole issue with Google, searching on the Google.cn site is vetted by the communist party and produces different search results than searching on the google.com site. All this sort of thing is commonplace in China, and places like Iran, Syria, Turkmenistan as well - if you can find the Internet in Turkmenistan to start with!

As for this idea to charge for different access speeds on the Internet, if that is ever passed into law it'll be a sad day for the Internet and a sad day for humanity frankly, I fervently hope the US congressman who vote on this won't be swayed by the telco lobbyists and whatever goodies they have to offer.

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BugMeNot A portal to bypass free-site registration.

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident." Arthur Schopenhauer - renowned 19th Century German philosopher.

I think the law currently being debated is meant to prevent that from occuring, not encourage it. The law is being pushed by Google and Microsoft and some other companies I can't remember, but is being opposed by major telecommunications companies.

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I met this wonderful girl at Macy's. She was buying clothes and I was putting Slinkies on the escalator.
-Steven Wright



My Website: The Black Cat's Web Page

Tanks and protesters in Tiananmen square. Now you see them...
http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl...spell=1&tab=wi
...now you don't.
http://images.google.cn/images?hl=zh...A2&sa=N&tab=wi

And before this stuff about google making different sets of pages searchable in china blows up, just remember that that's been in place since the very first country got their own google site. google.de doesn't show any pages relating to nazism.

What happened with google.cn isn't anything new, the only thing that changed is what pages aren't shown.
There wasn't an outrage then why should there be one now?

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‘To those who regard “crime fiction” as some sacred icon which must follow a rigid formula, I will always be the man who writes 18-syllable haiku.’Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

June 28th, 2006
"The Senate Commerce Committee fell a single vote short [11-11] of passing an amendment [to S.2686 (.pdf)] to safeguard the free and open Internet as momentum builds toward a full Senate vote on Net Neutrality..." SaveTheInternet

so are you Americans going to go back to calling them chips "French Fries"?

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Interesting. A google.com, google.co.uk, and google.dk search turn up 68,400,000 hits on the term "nazi". google.de turns up 63,100,000 hits. So there do seem to be some search limits.

So in Germany, can you access the other google search sites and get access to the "other" NAZI web pages? That is, is it just a restriction on the specific search site? Or are there national web access restrictions?

And the same question about China, if anyone knows for certain. My understanding was that they did have some fairly serious filtering, but I'm not sure.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Censorship is a baaaad thing...Hope it doesn't spread.

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I'm pretty sure folks in Germany can still access Google.com and get unfiltered search results.

Google.com is still accessible from China. The Chinese government, though, had blocked it for a 2 week period around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests...

China Restores Google.com

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13601613/

Feel free to remove if this threatens to get political.

Right now, I'm feeling my "Hulk Smash" mode kicking in...

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

I'm sure that the phone and cable companies will spend their increased profits on upgrading their systems and will provide better service for everyone in the long run. In the short term, I don't expect things to turn out to be as bad as feared.

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Life is like a box of chocolates. All of your choices are bad for you.

So, now everyone has to pay twice to get the same service... I feel oddly like Alice when she meets the Red Queen, running as fast as she can so that she can stay still.
What next, will Earthlink want to charge people a monthly fee to use their modems? What about people who manufacture monitors? I mean, the data is travelling through cables to them, surely they should get something out of that >_<.

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I'd rather see Congress stay out of the situation and deal with problems that might arise, rather than trying to anticipate problems that haven't even happened yet.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

Thank goodness it's not "Thing Clobbering time" mode though

I think this topic is already underway here?

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N6MAA10816
Faber '62 ΔTX
Are you a Bright?

Yeah, I guess it is. I suppose one of the mods can fuse the threads. That one was more worrying about it, now it looks like a reality.

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The last time I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, I was informed by my doctor that it was just gas.

And the vote was so close as well

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N6MAA10816
Faber '62 ΔTX
Are you a Bright?

Well, I´m not worried.

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What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart

Yet...

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N6MAA10816
Faber '62 ΔTX
Are you a Bright?

"You know what I always say- in for a penny, in for a pounding."-
Mr. Fantastic (as the Thing jumps into the frey), Spiderman #500

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Carl Matherly

Offical Battlestar Galactica Apologist

Named Time Magazine's 2006 "Person of the Year"

MSNBC needs a grammar checker! "Effort's"?

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"