The end is nigh?

[Snakeadelic]

Looked up some maps and stats...lucky for me, Charter (our cable tv, phone AND internet provider) is now an AT&T subsidiary via the Time-Warner acquisition. So at least if the worst happens, we'll still have access to a lot of favorite televised content...the question is how much we'll be charged to access it.

[tw]

Electronic Design magazine discusses this threat to innovation. Everything in this article should be obvious to anyone educated in how things work. A benchmark that separates the politically brainwashed from others who come from where the work gets done:
Will the Internet of Things Survive Without Net Neutrality?

Question: how much innovation will be stifled by destroying net neutrality? Laws to free the market - to create net neutrality - liberated DSL - unfortunately 15 years later. Free market competition finally made DSL available after 1996.

The original IBM PC in 1981 operated on a 300 baud and later 1200 baud modem. Meanwhile, DSL at 1,000,000+ baud could have been available had monopolies (AT&T, baby Bells, etc) not stifled that innovation for so long.

Microsoft had to sue Qwest to finally get DSL service. Innovation (and the resulting increased living standards) is stifled when laws do not restrict and discourage monopolies.

Wackos want less government intervention. That is a secret code for more monopolies, resulting less innovation, and enriched top (entrenched) management.

Same political party also maintained drug prices 40% higher in the US. A deceptive expression spun monopoly protection as health care reform. Ten plus years ago, a law was passed to make criminal anyone who paid 40% less for prescriptions in Canada. According to party extremists, monopolies (and enriching top management MBAs) are good. Those same extremists protect laws that stifle innovation and protect people who hate innovation - MBAs.

Why did AT&T so hate net neutrality? David Isenberg wrote "Rise of the Stupid Network" in 1997. It demonstrated that circuit switch technology is massively inferior to packet switching. So much so that companies entrenched in circuit switch technology should face bankruptcy. We know why AT&T self destructed (had to be sold off in pieces). AT&T hated innovation - since MBA management (including people like Carly Fiorina) wanted profits - not better products and free market competition.

AT&T forced Isenberg to remove his paper from isen.com.
"Isenberg wanted to make AT&T happy so he took it off. (It didn't work; AT&T is still not happy.)".
AT&T wanted monopolies - not innovation. AT&T had long hated net neutrality (as they also did with System Signal 7 - a successful innovation and international standard for telephone communication).

Isenberg left Bell Labs (as did most innovators in that decade resulting in no more innovation in the Bell Labs) because AT&T wanted concepts taught in business schools - more profits, less innovation. less competition.

Philosophy of protecting legacy (anti-innovation) companies at the expense of consumers is demonstrated in this 2002 open letter to Michael Powell - who openly wanted to destroy net neutrality:
The Paradox of the Best Network
Those party extremists hate change and innovation - ie hate net neutrality.

[Snakeadelic]

Thank you, tw, for doing the research and providing information that would've made my brain shut down if I tried to assemble all that!

I still have my doubts about how much longer I'll be able to afford to be online...but we'll see what happens. There are a lot of possibilities for the next year or so that scare the hell outta me as a (deliberately) childless unmarried woman with an invisible disability. My mild OCD and hoarding tendencies are currently kept well in hand, but only by access to pretty much ALL the data from countries that don't disallow Internet contact with the USA. I figure it's better for me to worry about this than about the fate of my health insurance and slightly more than $700 a month to survive on...fewer major panic attacks associated with a luxury like net access than the fear of ending up unable to pay rent or see a doctor.

Hell, I can't even move back in with my parents--they're both in pretty bad shape, the kind of bad shape that having an extra person on their 1-acre farm would make a lot worse. And they have a huge dog with a biting fetish--this dog would not be alive if he had not landed with people willing to work with him, and I'd bet most of his siblings and half-siblings aren't still around! He decided right about the time his 'boy bits' dropped that some dogs bite out of anger, some out of fear, and some out of general stupidity, but he was gonna bite because what the hell ELSE are teeth for? He was 8 months old at the time and had been in my parents' care since he was 5 weeks; my mom especially is not only good with animals but with being super consistent about rules when training her animals. This past summer was the first time he was allowed to be in a room with me without a muzzle during my farm visit, and he's like 3 or 4 years old now. He bit me in the butt in 2015...makes me laugh to think I'd rather go back to that than face 2017 possibly stripping away everything that makes my life livable.

[Undertoad]

Who can solve all your problems?

A) the federal government with an enlightened approach to net neutrality

B) therapists

Hint: not A.

/thread

[BigV]

neither B.

[xoxoxoBruce]

At least Zombies could distract us.

[Undertoad]

Snake, here's the thing:

Your politics is entirely based on your emotional reaction, which is incorrect.

In all history, folks like you and me have invented political boogiemen so that we could live in a state of fear, which is comfortable to us as anxiety people.

Yes, we like it. We choose it. Do not deny.

In your case, however, you have chosen illogically. It is way too easy to prove that the FCC will not steal your string.

I could be extra snarky and say, yes, net neutrality will make you poor and you will be reduced to eating at McDonald's with all the other poor people. But ironically, McDonald's offers free Internet all day long, and has done for over a decade now.

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

In all history, folks like you and me have invented political boogiemen so that we could live in a state of fear, which is comfortable to us as anxiety people.

Yes, we like it. We choose it. Do not deny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares

At the same time in the United States, a group of disillusioned liberals, including Irving Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz, look to the political thinking of Leo Strauss after the perceived failure of President Johnson's "Great Society". They conclude that an emphasis on individual liberty was the undoing of Johnson's plans. They envisioned restructuring America by uniting the American people against a common evil, and set about creating a mythical enemy. These factions, the neoconservatives, came to power during the 1980s under the Reagan administration, with their allies Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. They alleged that the Soviet Union was not following the terms of a disarmament treaty between the two countries, and together with the outcomes of "Team B", they built a case using dubious evidence and methods to prove it to Ronald Reagan.

[Undertoad]

But footer, now the neoconservative movement has become your boogieman. And so the circle is complete.

You could say politics is mine and so my circle is also complete.

[footfootfoot]

That's an excerpt from the synopsis of part one of three. I admit to not having watched all 6 or 8 hours of the series. My take away (ugh) is that fearful people are easy to control. The boogeyman is the boogeyman, doesn't matter who is pulling the strings if I am watching the show.

So, the winning moves are to not watch the show or choose not to be afraid.

[Snakeadelic]

The kind of anxiety I have lives in a couple of areas of the brain that are not under the control of the frontal cortex or any other higher-functions part of the brain. I'll always be scared about something--having so much information that contradicts my fears about losing Net access is actually a very good thing! A hell of a lot of my time is spent on solitary online research; losing that would be extremely tough to weather.

Meanwhile:

http://arstechnica.com/information-t...d-under-trump/
Quote, the first line of the article:
Federal Communications Commission member Ajit Pai yesterday vowed to take a "weed whacker" to FCC regulations after President-elect Donald Trump takes office, with net neutrality rules being among the first to be cut down.

http://www.recode.net/2016/12/12/139...l-trump-senate
Quote, second line of article:
That means when (or if) Chairman Tom Wheeler, the current head of the FCC, steps down, Republicans will hold a majority. And their first order of business will likely be to reverse the historic network neutrality rules that were finalized in 2015.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...telecom-panel/
Quote, first line of article:
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who has tried to overturn net neutrality rules and help states impose limits on municipal broadband, will be the new chairperson of a Congressional telecommunications subcommittee.

It sure looks like someone out there wants us to think net neutrality is about to end.

[Undertoad]

A hell of a lot of my time is spent on solitary online research; losing that would be extremely tough to weather.

Are you sure, because at least some of that time seems to be spent looking up articles to scare yourself!

Still, it doesn't matter what the FCC does. They are nearly irrelevant. There are forces more powerful than government in this world.

You may look at the music industry for an example. They tried everything they could to control how bits and bytes were shipped around so that they could maintain their business model. They even got the feds to agree to several approaches such as the DMCA.

But the Internet laughed and laughed, and stepped all over everything they came up with, until finally now the music industry has learned that it can't control shit, and is trying to do what it can to work with the tides.

WE are in charge here. Not the big government, not the powerful moneyed industries.

~

The argument over whether you will be able to get small amounts of bandwidth to research things, is OVER. We are now arguing over whether you will be able to get the amount needed to stream a Hollywood movie on demand.

Size of a Standard Def movie = 2000000000 bytes
Size of a High Def movie = 5000000000 bytes
Size of a book = 1000000 bytes

The bandwidth for a single HD movie can fit 5,000 books.

The size of a single standard HD movie is larger than the size of the entire Cellar: 15 years of words, content and code. That's right, one single movie is enough bandwidth to keep you reading an hour a day for 15 years.

The bandwidth for a single, rather poor cable connection is enough to transfer 7000 books per hour.

And that, my friends, is why tw's arguments about this include things from 1997. Partly because his brain stopped adding new things that year, but mostly because that was the last year we argued about whether the scarce bandwidth available could cheaply transfer the books you wanted.

[Undertoad]

The bandwidth for that post ^ is 2000 bytes. 2.5 MILLION of those posts can fit in one HD movie.

[Snakeadelic]

AAAAAAaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnddddd yesterday the big announcement: Sprint has bought a 33% stake in the music service Tidal (which I believe owns just about everything Prince ever recorded). Guess who can't even access Tidal any more? People who aren't Sprint customers!

This is EXACTLY what I think AT&T is going to do with content it now owns due to the Time-Warner acquisition being allowed to go through. THIS is why my stomach hit the floor when I read about said acquisition.

[Snakeadelic]

Undertoad, on the advice of friends, loved ones, family members, AND my therapist, I only look up skeeeeery stuff if I think it is likely to directly impact me. I use neutral search strings to limit the hyperbole in the responses and avoid most major news outlets for information. As an example, when I typed in the search string "changes to Medicaid in 2017", the third result on the list and the one I read first was a medical journal. They're not perfect but they're sure's hell not MSNBC either!

Also, THANK YOU for the data-usage information. As long as they don't start timing me, I should indeed be just fine, since my favorite kinds of websites are pet/livestock breeders, photo aggregators, and other such low-size destinations. No HD movies for us--our TV is probably too cheap to see the difference. Still, I've been known to spend more than 8 hours a day online, so that's where my "charging by time increment" worries were coming from.