> In 2014, this may not be the case. Level3 wants to send much more traffic to Comcast than Comcast would ever send to Level3. This is because Netflix (a Level3 customer) is asymmetric in nature.
Oh, you're so right! That awful, no-good, pesky L3 just keeps sending these packets that nobody wants and nobody ever asked for... oh wait. Oh yes. I just remembered. L3 sends those packets because Comcast's customers requested them. People pay Comcast to transfer packets between themselves and the internet services they wish to use. In a free market, Comcast's inability to do that would result in customers leaving in droves. It really shouldn't matter (within the bounds of legal reason) what's in the packets.
> That awful, no-good, pesky L3 just keeps sending these packets that nobody wants
You don't seem to understand peering at all. That's ok. Be quiet, listen to the rest of us that do.
No one gets to connect to Comcast's network unless they pay. You and me, we pay a monthly bill.
Peers pay the way by accepting Comcast's traffic in (roughly) equal amounts.
Level 3 isn't paying. You're absolutely right, Comcast doesn't want those. If you want them despite this, then the onus is on you to connect to Level 3 directly.
> People pay Comcast to transfer packets between themselves and the internet services
No they do not. If they believe this, they are mistaken. If that is a problem for them, they're free to discontinue doing business with Comcast.
Comcast cannot even charge them and offer a special "Netflix connectivity" service, because your herders have already taught you how to chant "network neutrality".
If all of this bothers you very much, then I would hope that you take the time to think carefully and profoundly and realize (as I have) that perhaps peering no longer works.
> In a free market, Comcast's inability to do that would result in customers leaving in droves.
They can leave now.
> It really shouldn't matter (within the bounds of legal reason) what's in the packets.
It doesn't matter. It matters where they're from, and that they're in roughly equal amounts to what Comcast sends.
"You don't seem to understand peering at all. That's ok. Be quiet, listen to the rest of us that do."
You don't seem to understand reality at all. If you can't say something nice, STFU.
As to reality:
Yes, peering often works the way you describe, but Netflix tweaking their player to ship back a bunch of garbage traffic to something on L3 (Netflix themselves, or otherwise) would balance those ratios and change "who should pay" in terms of your analysis, while being a total non-solution.
The simplistic analysis here is inappropriate. This is about 1) the fact that Comcast has a virtual (or actual) monopoly in many markets, and 2) Netflix competes with Comcast's other business. Abuse of market power to restrict unrelated trade is awful and often appropriately illegal.
No one else is saying anything nice at all. They're spouting dumb shit, they're directing it at politicians and bureaucrats who will only make it worse. They refuse to stop and think, even though that would only take a moment.
This is much worse than any words I've ever said on the issue. It's worse than any name-calling I've ever done.
> Yes, peering often works the way you describe,
Not often, but always.
It is a voluntary arrangement. And if we try to force it to work differently, even when it's to one side's disadvantage, the logical thing is for them to decide not to peer at all.
But you've not thought it through very far.
> but Netflix tweaking their player to ship back a bunch of garbage traffic to something on L3 (Netflix themselves, or otherwise)
So your argument is that Netflix could cheat and make the world a worse place, and that Comcast should just give in to the implied extortion?
Something's wrong with your head if you can say these things and not give them a second thought.
> Netflix competes with Comcast's other business.
That's even less reason for Comcast to cooperate then. Comcast isn't obligated to give away free service to competitors, either legally or morally.
> Abuse of market power
What abuse? The voluntary agreement was for settlement-free peering for (roughly) equal levels of traffic.
"Something's wrong with your head if you can say these things and not give them a second thought."
Again, there's no reason to be abusive. I'm not going to respond to any further comments in this thread that don't take a more respectful tone.
As it happens, I seem to have given it deeper thought than you have:
"So your argument is that Netflix could cheat and make the world a worse place, and that Comcast should just give in to the implied extortion?"
No, my argument was that "same amount of traffic" is obviously a meaningless metric. In my example with Netflix passing back garbage data, you can call it cheating... but what if that data was useful?
Let's imagine the following:
Netflix cuts a deal with some content providers, such that they will provide (anonymized) information on facial expressions and eye tracking of (opted-in) viewers while content plays. Studios are pay for this. Netflix passes some of that money along to customers who opt in. Netflix decides to do the processing server side, because of the resources required for whatever analysis they're doing.
Now the ratios are significantly more balanced, to the benefit of Netflix (who is making more money), the Netflix customers (who are paying less money), and the determent of Comcast (who is passing more traffic). How is it right that Comcast is owed less money in that case? They probably need to build out more infrastructure than in the present case.
Settlement-free peering fits when there is roughly equal levels of value derived from the traffic. That only sometimes corresponds to roughly equal levels of traffic.
You haven't earned my respect. At every opportunity, you lose what little there might have ever been.
If you won't listen to reason unless reason strokes your ego, then you were never interested in it anyway. There are plenty of people willing to treat you with the false respect you think you deserve, you don't need me.
And everything you get, you'll deserve it.
> No, my argument was that "same amount of traffic" is obviously a meaningless metric.
It's not meaningless. It's what was agreed upon.
How would you like it if someone made a deal with you, and then a few months later wants to change it because "hey that stuff we agreed to is meaningless"?
Seriously, what the fuck would that even mean? It would be nothing more than someone trying to bully you.
No judge would rule in that guy's favor. If (when) it made it to court, the judge would say "this is not meaningless, it is what was agreed to in the contract".
When you say "meaningless", what you're saying is "I don't give a shit about the agreement, I just want things my way".
The real world doesn't work like this.
> Settlement-free peering fits when there is roughly equal levels of value derived from the traffic.
Yes. And when that is not the case, one party either pays the other... or they stop peering.
You get that right? Comcast has more than one peer. They don't need Level 3. As others have said in replies to my own comments, no one is going to dump Comcast over that, so Comcast wouldn't have much to lose except some bad press.
I'm not asking you to stroke my ego (or anything else). I'm asking you not to be a dick, because this forum is of most use to everyone when people aren't needlessly dicks. I'm done here, per my earlier statements.
> Level 3 isn't paying. You're absolutely right, Comcast doesn't want those. If you want them despite this, then the onus is on you to connect to Level 3 directly.
When Comcast stops advertising an Internet connection and starts advertising a "connection to the Comcast network", then you'll have a leg to stand on.
> When Comcast stops advertising an Internet connection and starts advertising a "connection to the Comcast network"
So you don't know what "internet" is either. That figures. It's just a magic computer thingy that let's you watch german scat porn and cat pics on Facebook.
Well, that's certainly one way of putting it. You could also say, "Academia has the potential to absorb about 10% of PhDs produced annually." That's fine for CS, where most people want to go into industry anyway and industry understands the product. Not so much for, say, physics, where more PhDs would rather stay in academia and you have to explain very quickly why someone should hire a PhD physicist before they slam the door in your face.
Actually, the Apple chargers in that link displayed the expected behavior for the USB 2.0 "extended power" (can't think of the actual title) specification. The author has a fancy oscilloscope, but that doesn't mean he/she knows everything.
Well, considering that altitudes above FL1000 have been, for the last 60-odd years, considered to be outside the FAA's jurisdiction... what is the problem exactly?
One presumes they still need to know the location of those flights to deal with them descending into the range of altitudes used by commercial aircraft.
No commercial aircraft operate at such altitudes. No, seriously: you run out of air for air-breathing engines above FL600 (the SR-71 flew at FL800 very fast indeed partly because it needed to go like a bat out of hell to keep enough airflow through its engines: and because it was able to go that fast due to there not being much air up there to produce drag), and the turbofans used on commercial airliners rapidly run out of wheeze above FL400.
The only civil aircraft that ever flew above FL500 were Concorde and the Tu-144, neither of which are in service. But they didn't fly at supersonic speed and high altitude in crowded airspace -- simply because getting an SST up to altitude and speed takes several minutes, a couple of hundred miles, and a prodigious amount of fuel. To say nothing of the sonic boom issue, which basically limited supercruise to over-ocean flight.
While there's been a lot of hot air about supersonic bizjets over the past two decades, so far nothing's escaped from the CAD package much less gone into flight testing.
So what you're asking for is for an FAA system to be retrofitted to handle exotic military requirements, future space shuttles, and a class of commercial aircraft that would not operate in that flight regime within a couple of hundred miles of any airport.
Isn't that a major functionality regression? I mean, didn't we stop saying "This website best viewed in IE4 with screen resolution set to 800x600" a decade ago?
Honda sold a CNG version of the Civic here in SoCal for a while. It didn't sell very well because the tank took up most of the trunk and the range wasn't much better than most electric cars (around 150 miles, as I recall).
On top of that, the number of refueling stations is very limited--natural gas pipes are ubiquitous in cities, but they deliver the gas at a much lower pressure. You still need a roughly $2k compressor to fill the tank overnight (which uses about as much electricity as you'd put in an electric car). Commercial stations have more expensive compressors that operate continuously to fill a holding tank which cars are filled from.
It's not impossible. But the infrastructure required to put energy in the vehicle costs the same or more as for an electric car. And you use just as much electricity as an electric car (in addition to the natural gas). And the cars aren't that much cheaper than battery EVs. And the cars have similar range and refilling limitations as EVs.
The trucks are driving between relatively fixed points, so it's a simple matter to build CNG stations there. Plus, the cost of a battery scales linearly with the capacity of the battery, while the cost of the CNG tank scales the square root of the capacity. Batteries are also heavier per unit energy, which reduces the truck's legal payload capacity.
So that use case has a strong argument for CNG.
Weight doesn't really matter for a personal automobile, and you can't (easily) make the tank big enough to argue that a large tank is cheaper than a large battery. It's true, but costs unrelated to tank size are still important, and the bigger issue is that the range sucks unless you give up the entire trunk (since you can't make a CNG tank flat (like Tesla) or T-shaped (like GM).
Most journals now have a "supplementary content" section where authors upload their results. Anyone can download that without a subscription. Obviously, older results are still locked up in scanned PDFs that you can only download with a subscription, but your database idea doesn't solve that, either. As for making something mandatory... well, that's probably the best way to get scientists not to do something.
Practically speaking, papers probably won't look substantially different under your proposal than they do now, except that there is the extra step of uploading data to the "methods and data" database. Separating the body of the paper from the results and methods would be a pain in the ass to read, which means that you'll need to continue to include those things if you want anyone to cite your papers. As a result, I can't see anyone doing anything more than having an undergrad copy and paste the relevant sections into the database.
Frankly, I think you'd get better results by just declaring that the publishers have to give non-institutional readers free access.
Tesla uses a induction motor... which is AC and they use a frequency control unit to modulate the speed of the motor. So frequency isn't really a consideration...
When Musk unveiled Hyperloop, he used sleight of hand to make it look dramatically less expensive than the conventional rail system currently being built. Specifically, Hyperloop, as proposed, only runs within the central valley, from the northern side of the San Gabriel Mountains to the eastern side of the Diablo Range. San Francisco is on the western side of the Diablos and Los Angeles is on the southern side of the San Gabriels. It adds an one to two hours (on each end) to drive from the city center to the proposed hyperloop endpoint.
It should surprise no one that it is less expensive to build a track which avoids crossing two mountain ranges--yet Musk compared the cost of building a hyperloop in the central valley to that of a building a conventional train from LA to San Francisco. When you compare apples to apples (conventional vs. hyperloop in the central valley), conventional rail comes out much cheaper.
It's hard for me to square your assertion that the article was not a hit piece with the verbiage of the article. For example, the reporter used heavily loaded language to convey the idea (without saying so explicitly, because that would be a lie) that he had to turn off the heater and drive dangerously slow in order to reach the next charger. When called out on it, the Times' ombudsman wrote it off as sloppy note-taking. There were a series of such small 'mistakes.'
> However, no one ever apologized for essentially calling the journalist's entire professional reputation into question.
And why should they? It's true that unusually cold weather causes unusually high battery drain, but the fundamental reason the reporter ran of out charge is simply that he tried to. At his last "supercharger" stop, he unplugged the car about 30 minutes before it would have finished charging. Had he waited even an additional 5 minutes, there would have been more than enough charge to return to New York at a comfortable speed, even allowing for the cold weather overnight.
The reporter has nobody but himself to blame for his soiled reputation. Frankly, I think there was an interesting angle about the limitations of electric vehicles, but he tried to push the envelope a little too far. The cold weather limitations of the battery would have made for good reading. The need to plug in overnight and the amount of time required to charge in cold weather could have also been interesting points. Lost in the noise is the fact that he wasn't able to gain charge on a 120V outlet in cold weather (the battery heater used more power than the outlet provided).
But, no, he tried to shoot for the moon with a story about how you just can't trust these newfangled contraptions, and he burned his fingers. Boo hoo.
Oh, you're so right! That awful, no-good, pesky L3 just keeps sending these packets that nobody wants and nobody ever asked for... oh wait. Oh yes. I just remembered. L3 sends those packets because Comcast's customers requested them. People pay Comcast to transfer packets between themselves and the internet services they wish to use. In a free market, Comcast's inability to do that would result in customers leaving in droves. It really shouldn't matter (within the bounds of legal reason) what's in the packets.