DISQUS

Around where I live (for the past 18 years or so), there has bee a pretty rapid (it seems to me) conversion of land from corn, soybeans, and feeder cattle to houses, stores and hospitals.

The market in used houses appears to have died.

Has anybody measured the rate of conversion in light of the "biofuels" thing?

I remember when there was (at most) one phone per house, office, etc.


Telephone company was required to install a pay-phone every block or two because lots of places had no phone at all for emergencies.

Why the fixation on DNS? It has nothing to do with routing or prioritizing, which I take to be the issues in "neutrality".

And there is considerable pressure to block port 53 traffic from end-user locations.

ISP preventing it is not the issue.

The issue is if you select 100 people using the Internet to change the DNS servers they use, most will have no idea what you are talking about.

Of the remainder, most will use (be required to use) DHCP or a cable-clone of it where the configuration received will carry the DNS server to use.

Of the remainder, most will not know an alternative to use. And a lot od fire-walls won't allow it.

And in any case, I don't think DNS has much to do with the neutrality issues.


What does have to do with it is policy routing where the "policies" involve source, destination, protocol, and things like that.

See "packet shaping" http://www.packeteer.com/

I am not clear on what is mean some of the terms here, but one thing that grabbed me is that in general the ordinary user (including me, who for the sake of the discussion is very knowledgeable of the internal workings of networks) does NOT have the option of selecting other DNS servers (see the Ritz v. Sierra case in Fargo recently).

Most network providers disallow source routing. Period.

To me network neutrality means simply that the purchaser of services at some level in the protocol traffic is entitled to have his traffic treated exactly like every other purchaser of the same service. If somebody wants to introduce a notion of "class of service" I guess that is OK, but the network is going to need some re-engineering because the way it works now, when anybody hands the traffic off, they pretty much lose control of it.

I long ago got out of the rat-race of arguing "efficiency".

It simply is not possible with some words to define what in the local context is meant by "efficiency".

Let me show an example that does not have the current emotional hangups (CFL's are bad because they can't be used in closed fixtures, they contain mercury, and they don't produce enough light, end of that discussion.)

In an earlier life I was involved in writing computer programs, where the efficiency argument would come up over using so-called low-level codes to get the maximum amount of work out of a machine versus using high-level codes to get the maximum amount of work out of the programmers.

Which is more efficient? It depends.

Cheap phone bills? It depends.

When my parents has saved up enough money to afford Dad calling his parents in Madera, from Glendale he dialed 110 and tole the operator he was calling "Madera 417J". The "J" told the Madera operator how to do the ring thing (one long two short? I don't remember) because there were *four* parties on the line. Out of town in the rural areas there might be a lot more than 4.

Even after dialing came in there were lots of places that had way more than two parties on the line.

And yes, the letters were put on the dial for the Prefix or Exchange code.

And some dials had a "Z" on the zero hole because the precursor of "800" service was ZEnith service which you had to dial the operator for. I wonder if ZEnith 9000 will still get you the nearest California Highway Patrol office.

You might want to look at the Sierra v. Ritz case in Fargo for comfort.