GeorgeBMac

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GeorgeBMac
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  • FCC to limit ISP monopolies on apartments

    GeorgeBMacGeorgeBMac
    mike1 said:
    AppleZulu said:
    mike1 said:
    rob53 said:
    It would be better for the tenants if the apartment building installed a fiber gig service without an ISP, that would save them money and headaches dealing with crazy ISPs. It would be even better if each city created their own fiber service, just like my city has. 

    Oh great. Another taxpayer funded, poorly run government "service" that is better handled by private enterprise. Because governments at every level have shown that they are able to keep up with technological advances and consumer hardware.
    We have now been through an entire generation's worth of the reflexive propaganda trope of "gubmint bad, bidness good."

    ISPs, telcom and cable companies are all giant corporations with lumbering bureaucracies. Pick any one of them, combine its name with the words "customer service" in a search box, and you will find endless laments and horror stories that are as bad or worse than any comparable complaints about government bureaucracies. Whether the MBA dogmatists like it or not, broadband internet service necessarily functions as a basic infrastructure utility. 

    Government rightfully operates or heavily regulates utility infrastructure because the national economic interest lies with assuring that everyone has equal access to these resources. It is incredibly ironic that the libertarian impulses of folk living in red-state flyover country works hard against their own interests and flies in the face of the fact that, based on purely private-market considerations, they are in an even weaker bargaining position than poor urban folk in deep blue territory. From an ISP's perspective, if there's enough population density, providing cheap service to poor city dwellers is vastly more lucrative than stringing fiber for miles and miles just to hook up a handful of suburban sprawl dwellers or more rural customers, even if those folks are more affluent and can afford to pay a premium over standard full-price. It's the same as the loonies who want to privatize the post office, claiming FedEx is much more efficient, and not considering that sending a birthday card to grandma costs between 40 to 80 times more with FedEx than it does with USPS, depending on where grandma lives.

    Likewise, it's ironic that any libertarian-minded person would object to requiring increased competition of ISPs in apartment buildings. The density argument noted above means that apartment buildings naturally lend themselves to greater ISP competition. It's worth stringing the relatively short lines to compete for relatively large numbers of customers. The only reason that doesn't happen is because the apartment building owners prefer to block that competition in order to scrape money from the ISPs by granting 'exclusive access' to those relatively large numbers of customers. ISPs benefit because, rather then competing through price and service for only a percentage of a building's customers, paying a single, hefty tribute to the landlord gives them all the building's customers, with no need to offer competitive pricing to any of them. Landlords win, ISPs win, and screw the tenants. 

    Tell us again how is it private enterprise always handles things better?
    Oh please.

    The big government socialists are out in force here.
    Yes, Opening up complexes to multiple providers might be a good thing. Not 100% convinced that property owners should be forced to do so, but I'm open to being convinced. My objection is to just about any government run anything.

    Governments at any level do not know how to run a business, struggle to keep up with the latest advances, mire themselves in politics and bureaucracy and eventually become a burden to the taxpayer.






    Is it government that screws things up?  Or is it private enterprise?  That's been our debate since Reagan.

    And, that's why we're losing to China.   Rather than get tied up fighting ideological battles, they focus on what is the best thing for their country and their people.  If the best thing is private enterprise then that's fine.  if the best thing is government, then that's fine.  They don't get bogged down in ideology.  They just solve the problem.

    Here we get bogged down debating one ideology versus the other and forget about the actual issue.

    Government, like corporate structure, is not the end game.  It's a means to the end.  A tool to get you where you want to be.

    Here, the debate is whether government should use their regulatory authority to eliminate a mini-monopoly and instead create private enterprise competition.  But both history and logic says:  this is a utility that is best served by a single, tightly regulated private enterprise player.   Do you have multiple gas, electric and water lines running through your neighborhood?   No!  You have one of each and each is tightly regulated to control them from abusing their monopoly.  It's the right blend of government and private enterprise.   Nothing else makes logical sense -- only ideological sense.

    But, while broadband was originally viewed as another utility, we turned it completely over to the control of private enterprise --- and the result is, like health care, we pay very high prices for very mediocre service.

    Ideology provides guidelines, but it can't drive the boat -- especially when it is myopic.
    Detnator

  • FCC to limit ISP monopolies on apartments

    GeorgeBMacGeorgeBMac
    MplsP said:
    good start. Now we need to work on providing competition for the remaining 2/3rds of the population. I have a choice of exactly one provider in my suburban Minneapolis home. 

    The flip side of that are that "somebody" (that ultimately means us!) would have to pay to build out duplicate and maybe even triplicate services -- which is a complete, total waste of money.

    Better, I would think, would be to go back to the original setup where ISPs were regulated monopolistic utilities -- obligated to provide quality service at reasonable prices that people can afford and that provide them with a reasonable profit.  It's worked for over 100 years with other utilities.  But somehow the ISPs weazeled out of it.

    The savings from not having to pay for duplicate and triplicate services in one area could be used to roll out broadband to those areas of the nation that do not have access to it.


    mike1

  • Apple teases return of 'The Problem with Jon Stewart' with new video

    GeorgeBMacGeorgeBMac
    Ya either love him or you hate him.
    FileMakerFeller

  • FDA approves first iOS app to control insulin pump

    GeorgeBMacGeorgeBMac
    One more step forward in the struggle with insulin dependent diabetes....
    People who can't produce (enough) insulin need all the help we (or Apple) can give them.

    Now all we have to do is make it so they can afford the insulin they need to stay alive without forcing them to move to another country.
    qwerty52jroywatto_cobraFileMakerFeller

  • Major websites may stop working soon for Firefox and Chrome users

    GeorgeBMacGeorgeBMac
    DAalseth said:
    *sigh* Y2K all over again. We found and fixed SO MANY things leading up to that. Mostly silly shortcuts that programmers took. They cut corners and it came back to bite them. Same thing here. Why did they give a fixed digit space for version. The article even said they ran into this going from single to two digit version numbers. They should have taken care of it once and for all. 

    No, nobody "took shortcuts" leading up to the Y2K thing:
    Through the 70's, 80's and most of the 90's storage, particularly hardrive storage (called "DASD"), was severely limited and VERY expensive.   An expensive, washing machine sized 3350 disk drive held 300Mb -- less than many mobile devices and PCs today (less than 5%  that the iPhone 14 might hold).   Think about storing payroll data for a large corporation with 30,000 employees on one of those things!  And, to make things worse, each track of that device held 19,000 bytes -- so even the length of a record had to be carefully calculated and grouped into blocks:  for a simple example:  if you had a record 5,000 bytes long, you would waste 4,000 bytes of each track -- an unforgivable programming error that would get you chastised if not fired for incompetence.

    So, every effort was made to insure that every one of of those 300Mb's was used wisely and not a single one was wasted.   The result was that using a 2 digit year was a calculated decision to save storage and maximize computing power.  Otherwise, applications would have to run from mag tape rather than harddrives which would bog down the entire process because the datasets would have to be accessed sequentially (meaning, for example, to look up employee number 9999 the computer would have to read through 9998 other employees to find him.)

    By the year 2000 things had loosened up and DASD was both much cheaper and more plentiful.  So, instead of changing the calculation, programmers added the other two digits onto the date so, when you subtracted 1998 from 2001 you didn't get (negative) -97.
    Prometheuwatto_cobradarkvader