571–580 of 745 posts
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The headline could say that world hunger was cured but the top comment on HN would still be something like "yes, but X people are still dying in car crashes every year"
There does seem to be a bias towards overly worded critical comments.
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A rural Washington state regulatory and infrastructure organization, KPUD, is attempting to encourage access to the fiber they've added to the Kitsap county area. They have implemented this rule in a fairly watered down sense. The result is that, years after the large federal government grant to help high speed rural internet access, and almost two years after construction has been completed, no one in Kitsap county…
Is this something that might be cured by a technical means in the future? Should we be opening up more radio spectrum for "last mile" connectivity? Maybe blimps instead of satellites? Microwave? Line-of-site laser towers? I'm reminded of an acquaintance who was busy wiring his house with cat5 cable in the late 90s, when wifi was available, but not ubiquitous. Now I can't imagine anyone but the most super-hardcore run…
I am personally not sure what blimps would add, but this is ignorance, not even an attempt at saying they won't matter.
That all being said: Comcast is a big pain in the butt. But I'd prefer not to worry about downloading more than 3 gigs of data a month. So if the future is in cell network internet we should all except them to be nicer if they want our money.
There's a lot of echoing of telco FUD in here. Let's get some things straight: - The FCC is unelected, but so is the EPA, FBI, CIA, DOD, DOJ, etc. We can't elect everybody who works in government. That wouldn't work. - This does not mean the FCC is uncontrollable or unanswerable for what it does. It answers to both the executive and legislative branches of government, and of course anything it does can be subject to…
For those interested, here is a fact sheet outlining the rules (PDF from NPR): http://media.npr.org/documents/2015/feb/fcc-wheeler-openinte...
That rules governing the internet are not immediately available on the internet after approval does not bode well.
Unfortunately the Net Neutrality 'debate' was another lose-lose situation for the United States. What we wanted wasn't for the big telecom duopoly to be forced to either run their business as a tiered service or as a regulated utility. What we wanted was for the US Government to exercise its Anti-Trust capabilities and bust the universally hated Comcast and Time Warner into a bunch of small companies, and set "Goldil…
Even then it wouldn't necessarily be good in the long run, because consumers will prefer the cheaper (tiered) service, not "realizing" the long-term effect that would have on inhibiting startups and competition among internet services.
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Except the ISPs were never actually throttling content (well, other than BitTorrent, which the FCC promptly told them to stop doing), and the title II regulations passed today would have had no impact on the entire Netflix vs. Comcast/Verizon dispute. That boiled down to a dispute over settlement-free peering contracts, which the FCC does now have some oversight, though based on past comments I doubt their decisions…
> Except the ISPs were never actually throttling content (well, other than BitTorrent, which the FCC promptly told them to stop doing) Yeah, but Comcast took that FCC order -- made without any advance regulation -- to the courts, which struck it down on the basis that the FCC could not issue such an order under its ancillary authority. Comcast v. FCC , 600 F. 3d 642, D.C. Cir. (2010). As this specific order to Comcas…
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Wouldn't drastically increased competition solve problem one over time?
Quite possibly the opposite: new entrants wouldn't try to compete on general-purpose internet service but would deploy a service that's cheap because it's sponsored by large content providers, and those content providers would get preferential treatment.
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I actually can't tell if you're joking or not, because, well... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
I was not joking. Some additional consideration of how monopoly and deregulation plays into this discussion: http://youtu.be/5Z_nBhfpmk4?t=47m25s
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There are two problems, and the FCC has solved one of them perfectly. Problem 1: ISPs trying to charge to (de)prioritize packets. Problem 2: The two biggest ISPs suck, and should be broken up, and/or it should be mandated that competition is much easier. Would you be happy if they solved problem 2 without solving problem 1? Leave problem 2 for another day, and celebrate that problem 1 has been dealt with.
Wouldn't drastically increased competition solve problem one over time?
Another example: advertising-subsidized media. Used to be (100 years ago) newspapers didn't necessarily runs ads. There was a rich working-class press. Then the ad-subsidized model came out and it slashed the price of newspapers, but on the condition that the content was generally business friendly. (Otherwise they wouldn't get many advertisers.) So nobody bought the working-class newspapers anymore because they were too expensive. This had a massive impact on the tone and perspective of published media that persists to this day.
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This is a probematic comment in any forum, but I'd think it'd be especially unwelcome in a forum filled with programmers. Because even assuming it's true that there are 700 new distinct regulations, programmers should know better than to use regulations as a pejorative or high numbers of them as a proxy bugaboo. We're people whose job includes filling text editors with regulations specifying the inputs, tranformation…
Yes but by drawing that parallel, you have to realize that programmers represent totalitarian dictators. Software isn't a democracy. America is.
And the FCC is an agent deriving its authority to regulate from legislation and working under elected executive authority.
So I'm not sure what the connection with totalitarian dictatorship is.
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There does seem to be a bias towards overly worded critical comments.
I think at least part of it is because the people on HN enjoy solving problems so much. When there's a post that says "we solved this problem", a lot of people here (me included) think "great, what's the next problem to solve". The focus is on "the next problem to solve" more than the "great", sometimes to the degree that the "great" is completely ignored. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it can get…
Possibly, but there are a couple more factors.
1) In the general population, criticism is still the norm. The default reaction to any change is neutral to negative. If any response is made, chances are it will be negative.
2) On HN, vacuous responses are discouraged. And since substantive positive responses are hard to make (most of the positive spin usually ends up in the article, not in responses), positive responses in general are uncommon. Comparatively, substantive negative responses are easier to make, not least because it's almost always easier to see a problem than to see a solution.
Either one of those would push the responses towards negative criticism. Combined with yours, you now have three not-insignificant forces. There are probably more. There probably aren't many forces pushing towards positive response, and demonstrably not enough to balance the scales.