Disqus - Latest Comments for Tom

Re: The Hollywood writer's strike (Scripting News)

Tom — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 11:21:52 -0000

I'm having a hard time locating it, but there's an excellent video juxtaposing the studios' statements on this issue. W/r/t the strike they'll say that the internet is too new and the meager ad revenue they get from it can't be counted yet. But when, say, Sumner Redstone is on Charlie Rose, he'll proudly crow that their online business is worth billions of dollars.

Anybody have the link?

Re: April Fool in July? (Scripting News)

Tom — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:49:37 -0000

$300 for a touchscreen tablet that can run Gnome and Mplayer? Yes, this is ludicrous. If Asus or someone else with an impressive system integration resume attempted it, perhaps it would be possible. But a blog? This is so ridiculous that it's kind of adorable.

Re: April Fool in July? (Scripting News)

Tom — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:05:11 -0000

Re: What is a liberal? (Scripting News)

Tom — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:39:10 -0000

My stab at it:

Conservatives wish to maintain the status quo, or what they perceive to have been the status quo in the recent past (with "recent past" varying by the individual, but potentially dating back to the state of nature described in Leviathan).

Liberals want to see the progressive evolution of society toward a more perfect state, and believe that such a project is feasible enough to be worth pursuing. This generally implies the creation of more complicated or powerful collective institutions (aka bureaucracy).

Re: What is a liberal? (Scripting News)

Tom — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:05:13 -0000

But Dave, don't you think it's a little futile to try to divorce the word from how it's commonly used and how it's evolved? Consider the futility of looking at the origins of the names of our political parties given that they've almost completely traded places ideologically since their inception.

Anyway, within the bounds of the problem as you've defined it, the answer is simple: liberals want more of something -- for it to be applied liberally, freely. It's as simple as the opposite of the definition of conservatives -- liberals want more change. But of course, that doesn't tell you much on its own, as Les's answer below shows.

Re: Today the MSI Wind really went back (Scripting News)

Tom — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:13:50 -0000

Glad to hear the D-Link's interface is good. You may want to try some custom firmwares, though, to see what the open source community has accomplished on this front. DD-WRT is quite good, and Tomato is a downright joy to use -- you'll immediately be bowled over by the realtime Flash graphs, then slowly come to appreciate the beauties of things like the MAC->DHCPD mapping interface.

Re: Full text in RSS? (Scripting News)

Tom — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:30:34 -0000

You'll have to excuse the self-promotion, but folks reading this thread might be interested in the partial-to-full conversion tool that I built:

http://labs.echoditto.com/fulltextrss

Since then I've struck upon an alternate algorithm (not yet implemented, I'm afraid) that should perform even better.

The point, aside from presenting a useful tool: extracting full-text is a solvable technical problem -- it can be automated. It's therefore a bit silly for feed providers to try to oppose it (although one can hardly blame them given the feed readers' slowness to implement this feature). Doing so will ultimately just force users to extract the full text themselves, which is easy but a waste of network and computational resources. Better to simply offer the full feed from the start and give yourself the ability to place ads within it.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Wi-Fi Piggybacking / Squatting Reconsidered

Tom — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:12:54 -0000

In the field of cable television, many consumers use splitters to redirect cable lines all around their house. No problem there, of course, because it's personal use and you paid for the line into the home.

I'm pretty sure that some cable companies try to charge for each termination (even for analog). It's pretty dumb, but there it is.

You correctly note that "There are very, very few cases where people are setting up neighborhood collectives and ditching their own providers." That's true, and I'm not sure there ever will be formal collective approaches for some of the reasons you mention. However, we won’t know for a few years until next-gen wireless networking technologies are more widely distributed in homes. Mass wi-fi sharing is simply not feasible with today’s 802 B & G standard equipment and their limit signal range.

It's true that this hasn't really taken off yet, but it's completely feasible. Spend enough time on Slashdot and you'll hear plenty of folks talking about how they got their neighbors together and purchased T1 service. It does require some technical know-how, but a $50 router loaded with open-source firmware can operate as a top-notch wifi repeater. I set one up this weekend, in fact -- it works great for spreading my girlfriend's neighbor's otherwise-hard-to-get signal throughout her apartment. She'll be giving the neighbor ten bucks or so a month, and he doesn't need to do anything besides share his WEP key -- not even allow the router to be placed in his house. $50-100 per household is not a very big infrastructure investment for setting up a connection sharing arrangement. If only one router is required, it'll actually end up being cheaper than the hardware required by an individual hookup.

Of course the other reason you haven't heard about these assuredly-extant arrangements -- besides the technical knowledge currently required -- is the previously mentioned fact that sharing a connection violates most ISPs terms of service. But I don't think this is very compelling: SpeakEasy, a DSL reseller with a heavy focus on customer service, specifically allows and even encourages this sort of arrangement. Users pay a slight premium for SpeakEasy service ($5 or $10/month), but it seems to be a sustainable business model.

Unfortunately, getting SpeakEasy installed tends to be a huge PITA due to their reliance on ILECs for part of the installation process.

I say it so often that I hesitate to repeat it, but I think the answer is metered bandwidth. Until users have an obvious incentive to examine whether they want to share their connections or not, they won't think about this seriously (and until the miniscule cost of piggybacking is made obvious, the courts will treat it much *too* seriously).

Aside from that, routers that ship with encryption enabled would help (the unit's serial number makes a handy default key). It also wouldn't kill router manufacturers to spend a little more time on their firmware in general. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to get an email whenever a new MAC address shows up on my network, with links allowing me to allow or deny access.

Re: Fire Sale

Tom — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 11:29:07 -0000

I think I can see why Apple did this. After the ROKR they must have been wary of getting back into the cellphone market. They priced the iPhone high, counting on at the very least making back part of their investment. And much of the R&D; could doubtless be applied to other products no matter what.

But the iPhone was a hit, and now they see an opportunity to sell a platform rather than just a product. They slashed their prices to near-cost, and are counting on volume and services to pay off in the future. It's no coincidence that the price cut was announced minutes after the integrated iTunes store.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Wi-Fi Piggybacking / Squatting Reconsidered

Tom — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 11:49:05 -0000

While I'm thinking of it, let me plug the La Fonera project, which supplies cheap routers to users that are preconfigured for sharing -- you can set bandwidth caps, whitelist certain sites, or even charge for sharing your connection. The routers provide two SSIDs -- one for public use and another unthrottled, unencrypted one for your own use. I've got one running and have been pleased with it (although admittedly it doesn't serve my primary SSID, so I wouldn't notice right away if it went down).

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Google Favoritism? Eric Schmidt’s 55 Minutes of YouTube Fame

Tom — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 11:53:03 -0000

As others have noted, this is a very silly post. There are plenty of other online video vendors out there -- the monopoly conditions that make net neutrality a concern have nothing to do with this case. If a company wants to offer one division's services to another cheaply, they're welcome to do so. Failing to grasp this makes me wonder if the author understands the concerns of the pro-neutrality faction at all. It's fine to disagree, but to assume some sort of online communism is at work isn't correct at all.
Besides which, Google offers this service to many others in a means similar to their Google Grants program. It's not spelled out on the site, but if you have a compelling need for no time limits you can get in touch with them and ask for an exception. I've heard this related directly by a Google employee.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Once Again, Why Not Meter Broadband Pipes?

Tom — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 12:07:45 -0000

Good points all around -- I'm sorry to be commenting so late. A few quick responses:

- Tim's point about ISPs needing to manage network segments differently is a good one, but I don't see that it'd be too much of a problem. ISPs already offer different terms in different areas in the form of varying prices and promotional offers. Users might be a little irked to find out that users elsewhere have higher caps, but in most cases they wouldn't know or care. I certainly don't know how my DSL bill would be different if I lived elsewhere (but I'm sure it would be).

- Consumers will need to be made aware of how much bandwidth they're using, but it's not a very hard problem, I don't think. Sending daily emails once users have hit a usage threshold (prior to the limit at which prices increase) would suffice -- it's what my web host does, and it works fine. And it'd be trivial for router manufacturers to stick a little LED bar graph on routers to provide even more immediate feedback -- it's easy to imagine all sorts of alert services that could spring up. Consumers can deal with metered electricity, water and gas. I think they'd be able to get used to metered bandwidth pretty quickly.

- There's no reason it has to be either/or. ISPs can simply offer both payment options, then slowly adjust the flat fee upward over the course of a few years to shift customers over to metered pricing. The limited broadband choices in most areas make me think that this wouldn't send customers fleeing -- they're already used to prices gradually going up.

Re: A Free Software Experiment

Tom — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 11:52:00 -0000

As with so many things, I suspect its success will be determined by the people rather than the arrangement. After all, Linus Torvalds draws a salary for maintaining Linux; so do the maintainers of Samba, I believe. And of course Mozilla's had a lot of money for a while now, as you note. There are more corporate sponsors of prominent open source contributors than you might think -- enough that you'll occasionally hear it argued that open source is a crock, that the movement is just marketing. I wouldn't go that far, but it's true that a lot of FOSS superstars end up getting paid to do what they do. Their projects continue to accept patches from the community, and their technical direction doesn't generally change.

But it's true that those projects are more often related to low-level drivers and servers than consumer products. And the history of open source GUI mail clients is littered with failures, so I can't say I'm betting on these guys (although I'm certainly rooting for them).

Re: TV vs. Computer

Tom — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:56:40 -0000

This is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem because nobody is going to buy a set-top box unless there's content available for it, but few people are going to produce content for a given network unless there's a large enough installed base to make it worthwhile.

I think Tivo probably already counts. I'm stuck with a DirecTivo, so I'm not sure what the state of the art is. But I know that around the debut of series2 you could buy a USB wifi card for around $50 -- I'm sure it could be done more cheaply now. That + firmware update = plenty set-top devices. The situation's even rosier for digital cable company-supplied DVRs.

But re: your final paragraph -- I'm not sure I agree. DVD box sets of TV shows have been one of very few bright spots for TV purveyors over the last few years; it's understandable that they'd be wary of losing that revenue.

Interstitial advertising won't work for digital downloads -- people will always figure out a way to skip it -- so the companies will have to work out a way to embed it during the show itself, perhaps using empty letterbox space or more product placement. I think they're still trying to figure out how to sell that to clients, and how to get show creators to play along with it.

Re: Saturday Night Geekery

Tom — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:58:33 -0000

It shouldn't be too hard to brute-force the word numbers problem. You'd just have to segment your sorting algorithm so that it shuttles data to and from your disk smartly. In practice you could probably just allocate a ton of memory and count on your OS to make a swap disk half-cleverly.

Better still, just shove everything into MySQL and then ask it to sort it. Hey, it might work! Of course, I doubt that's the sort of approach ITA is looking for.

I suspect that the Right Way to tackle the problem is to break the spelled-out numbers into the word-tokens that will comprise them (e.g. "eight", "forty", "million", etc). Those'll be easy to alphabetize -- you'll know what the first column of a properly-sorted list would look like.

If you can develop an algorithm that can fully explore the space underneath a given token (not simple, but not mind-bendingly difficult I don't think), then proceed through that space while counting letters (and ignoring order) you can eliminate chunks of the problem's space, token by token. Narrow it down to the left-most token that contains the 51 billionth letter -- the order of the elements belonging to the tokens before it doesn't matter, thanks to the commutative property. This lets you simply keep a count of total letters instead of keeping each word in memory. Once you hit the target letter, you'll know the left-most token in whose neighborhood the answer resides. You can repeat the process with the next-to-left-most token; then do it with the next-to-next-to-left-most token; etc. Eventually you'll have a set of possible answers that's small enough to sort easily.

In practice this would be pretty tedious to code (and I'd hate to risk missing a token while defining the first step), so I can't say I'm champing at the bit to try implementing it. I bet there's a more elegant solution.

Re: Verizon/NARAL an Argument for Regulation?

Tom — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 16:30:34 -0000

What happens when a lower-profile or less popular organization is censored by Verizon? It's wonderful that market pressure forced Verizon to change their policy so quickly in this case. What I don't understand is why Verizon needs or ought to censor SMSes that I intentionally elected to receive.

Believe me, SMS is a world where the market is decidedly not working -- particularly not premium SMS, where carriers take up to a 50% cut (and inexplicably disallow charities from using it, at least in this country).

Fortunately relatively neutral data services seem likely to replace the laughably expensive and limited SMS standard, so I can't get *too* worked up about this. But it really is a pretty bad situation. A very few gatekeepers continue to increase prices (despite increasing demand and no practical limit on supply) and prevent small players from using the medium.

Re: INSURGENCY FTW!!

Tom — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 11:13:25 -0000

You know Don, you might want to check out the testimony -- your Troll Force idea is pretty much included. They actually use the word troll, and suggest enlisting American citizens to disrupt these online forums. They didn't think to televise it, though.

I don't think that example does answer my question though, Tim -- obviously that rocket would probably be fired without the contest. Weighing the technical difficulty of such a setup against the benefit that a new stylesheet provides to the cause of global jihad, it's still not obvious to me that the online operation is providing anything meaningful other than propaganda value.

Re: Is Comcast discriminating against BitTorrent?

Tom — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 19:22:30 -0000

Richard, you seem to misunderstand what Comcast's doing. In most areas the RSTs start firing after the user begins seeding. Your example doesn't show any completed downloads.

And this makes no sense at all:

And also note that the slickest way to throttle BitTorrent is to limit the number of uploads a given user can offer, which is exactly what the TCP Reset (RST flag) spoofing does.

It's not clear that this is an efficient way to limit Bittorrent use. It IS an extremely sneaky and hard-to-detect means of throttling traffic, however. This is consistent with Comcast's other traffic-limiting behavior, like enforcing bandwidth caps that they refuse to disclose. The idea seems to be to scare away unprofitable consumers without actually admitting that their service is limited.

As Jerry points out, this is a pretty lousy way to treat your customers. Comcast should disclose what they think their customers' subscription fees do and don't entitle them to. Unfortunately even if they do, most users will only have one alternative for broadband. Is that good enough? I hope so.

Re: Is Comcast discriminating against BitTorrent?

Tom — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 20:54:52 -0000

I think you're incorrect, Richard. Look, it's great that the EFF is doing work to determine if other protocols are affected, but they've also confirmed that Comcast's throttling responds to BT-specific network events. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they're capping other forms of P2P, too -- the Sandvine product that they're reportedly using targets other forms of P2P besides BT (it's odd that it's affecting Lotus Notes, which is not P2P, but I'm not at all surprised that some applications are being unintentionally broken by this system).

And until we do know the scope of what Comcast is doing (something we can't gather from a couple of test points on a network of millions of customers) we don't know if it's worth getting excited about.

You seem to be under the impression that the AP broke this story. They didn't -- it's been discussed in the BroadbandReports forums for months. Torrentfreak's been following it closely, and Wired News picked it up in August. Many, many people have confirmed that they're affected. Comcast is applying the measures erratically, but they seem to be widespread. I'm on Verizon, but I've got a neighbor who's now unable to seed; check out BBReports and you'll find hundreds more.

Packet networks like the Internet are built on the assumption of good user behavior, and when this doesn't pan out they provide few administrative tools for enforcement of norms. One method is simply to drop TCP segments, but that simply causes them to be retransmitted. Spoofing Reset is actually the only means of cutting off a flow at its root, and is therefore the most efficient means of throttling P2P.

A few things. First, relatively high network utilization does not constitute a deviation from "good user behavior" — the user has no way of knowing how loaded his or her network segment is, and can't reasonably be expected to manage Comcast's bandwidth for them. The second is flatly incorrect — many if not most ISPs already use per-user throttling to provide high burst speeds that are useful for web browsing, yet manage to put on the brakes for sustained traffic. There are many tools available for handling these sorts of issues.

This is not super-high-tech: I've got throttling turned on for unauthenticated users here on my apartment's WLAN; at work we've got per-protocol throttling to provide priority for VoIP traffic. In both cases the network management is done without breaking TCP connections (and done with cheap hardware and free software, I might add -- Comcast can't plead poverty when they're buying more expensive proprietary products like Sandvine). Forging reset packets is not the sort of thing that network administrators typically do to shape traffic. It's a very, very blunt instrument.

I'm not trying to imply that Comcast should allow unrestricted BT traffic. But they should disclose what they're doing, and use less destructive means of managing their network.

Re: Is Comcast discriminating against BitTorrent?

Tom — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 23:35:33 -0000

Richard, why are you so convinced that throttling has to involve the destruction of data (and why are you using scare quotes around the word throttling?)? Have a look at the Wikipedia page on the subject. As it makes clear, throttling can be achieved by queuing requests, allowing them through at an appropriate rate. There's no need to throw away the packet or tell the client that the connection has broken. It's destructive and unnecessary. I don't know why you keep insisting that this is the only way to implement traffic shaping.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Comcast “Traffic Shaping”?

Tom — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:10:27 -0000

This doesn’t conclude the discussion of whether there should be regulation. It allows us to refine the discussion: The proponents of regulation should now be challenged to write the regulation that would suss out this kind of (still alleged) misbehavior, distinguish it from appropriate network management, and ban it - without wrapping provision of Internet service in red tape or creating regulatory capture that suppresses competition. Good luck with that!

I agree that it's a tricky problem, but it doesn't seem appropriate to simply deem it intractable. Requiring Comcast to disclose the limits and measures they're imposing would be a great first step. Prohibiting them from impersonating third parties with whom their users are trying to communicate -- as they are doing when they send these RST packets -- would be another useful measure. These two things are the bare minimum that any solution should include.

From there it might be appropriate to mandate some more transparent pricing -- require that Comcast offer a metered option, perhaps, similar to how they've been required to offer a broadcast-only package. No one's arguing for price controls or for congress to get into the sysadmin business. But right now Comcast is stifling innovation by seeking rent on bandwidth-sipping users who're content to use the web and email their grandkids. There needs to be a way for new technologies to flourish, too.

Ideally the FTC would simply require Comcast to fully disclose what they're up to, then allow the market to decide what the result will be. In practice I doubt there's enough competition for that to work very well. We should at least think about what we can do to improve the situation.

Re: George Ou on Comcast traffic management and NN

Tom — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 22:15:11 -0000

Luis is right. And even flat throttling isn't necessary: many home routers can provide dynamic QoS, prioritizing traffic that needs low-latency connections -- VoIP is a red herring. But then, that keeps the pipe fully utilized, which doesn't help Comcast's bottom line. They have to pay for that data on a metered basis once it leaves their network, after all.

Re: Observation of Dark Energy Shortens the Life of the Universe

Tom — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 23:31:30 -0000

I can't pretend I've got the chops to evaluate the argument, but the Slashdot thread was informative -- a number of people making plausible claims to being quantum mechanicists in a professional capacity said that the paper was ludicrous. The idea that consciousness is the only way to collapse quantum states has been pretty well debunked, apparently.

And I'm a little surprised at the Ars article. It's definitely got the stink of something written by someone smart but unqualified who's trying to make clever inferences while sounding "authoritative enough."

Re: Contractual Omnipotence

Tom — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:01:01 -0000

I have to disagree, Tim. It's true that the ISPs are currently stuck playing whack-a-mole with users who violate the TOS. Beyond a certain point it's not worth their time: if I set up a web server on port 80 I'm pretty sure I'd get an angry letter -- but they're not going to find the SSH daemon I run on a non-standard port. Right now it's technical users who find themselves butting up against the TOS. And there's the problem: technical users can find ways around the countermeasures.

But if a popular application ran afoul of an ISP, it would typically be pretty easy for them to block or throttle it -- it'll use an established port or identifiable headers. And the nontechnical users who're using it won't have any recourse.

Of course, the app author can keep issuing new releases, but that cat and mouse game is likely to result in the same situation: technical users do what they want and average users remain stymied.

The exception to all of this is encryption, of course, which the ISPs can't examine. Some, like Rogers, have decided to just throttle all encrypted traffic. I doubt their customers will let them get away with that for too long, though.

Re: Here Comes Another Bubble

Tom — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:22:49 -0000

I'm inclined to surrender to your greater familiarity with copyright law, Tim, but I still don't think this use is very ambiguous. Consider how the picture was originally used (and sold): Wired News purchased the rights to use it to adorn some of their blog posts. It was used in a decorative, illustrative manner.

If the video is fair use, then I don't see why Wired was obliged to pay the photographer for her work in the first place. In other words, I don't see how this could be considered fair use without invalidating the entire freelance news photographer business model.

Preserving business models is not a good way to determine appropriate IP policy, of course, but given that people have made their living selling photographs for quite a while I'm going to go out on a limb and assume they're doing so from a solid legal foundation.

As a parallel case, consider music samples. The use seems similar to me (in fact, the video seems less transformative), but of course artists still have to clear samples and/or pay royalties.

Re: Debunking Rural Broadband Myths

Tom — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:56:58 -0000

Those numbers aren't very compelling to me. Clearly phone penetration is much better than cable (incidentally, why might this be? could it be... big government meddling?). The number of homes that can get cable but not a phone line is almost certainly vanishingly small, making the cable number meaningless.

And 80% doesn't strike me as a particularly great number for penetration -- are we really ready to leave 1 in 5 citizens out of the broadband revolution that's now, what, a decade old? When you consider that those first four quintiles were doubtless from denser areas, allowing for investments to pay off in large numbers of connected customers, it's clear that we still have a lot of work ahead of us.

Re: Cartesian Theater

Tom — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:57:27 -0000

I probably should have explained a bit more: I was angry (pleasantly so) because a grad student friend of mine had been recounting how her somewhat-famous and certainly well-respected professor had recently opined to her class that computers can't be considered to make decisions because at no point in what might be called their decision-making process is there anything occurring that is anything other than straightforwardly deterministic.

As if there's any evidence that human consciousness is nondeterministic! At that point you get into the usual problem of finding that you want your own decisions to be reliable/nonrandom but also not boringly, mechanically predictable. This is basically incoherent -- all that's left is to retreat into mystery, filing consciousness under other physical processes that we don't yet understand (see e.g. Roger Penrose's belief that quantum weirdness is to blame, which I complain about at length here).

(I should probably mention that none of this falls within the aforementioned professor's particular field, that he probably is a brilliant guy, etc etc).

Anyway as Yglesias will tell you I'm not a huge Dennett fan -- I think the Cartesian theater is incoherent for the reasons he (and you) state, but that the apparent unity of experience (and the very concept of apparentness!) still needs to be accounted for, and that Multiple Drafts' conclusion that there's actually nothing to explain isn't very satisfactory.

But I think the Libet experiment is disconcerting for more than just its disproof of the Cartesian executive. It's a little weird but still basically okay to say that consciousness and the neuronal action of your brain are the same thing observed in different ways. But the time lag demonstrated by these experiments shows that this isn't the case, and strongly implies that our conscious selves are epiphenomenal, entirely the one-way product of the unknowable whims of a three-pound lump of fat and water.

In other words you are a slave to a stranger, the dream of a sleeping beast, and there's nothing you can do about it. That is pretty disconcerting.

Re: Tragedy of the Spectrum Commons?

Tom — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:13:26 -0000

Although a crowded spectrum might degrade speed, I don't think it should cause your connection to drop.

There are a few other possibilities, though. I agree that a flaky card might be to blame -- a flaky router (or router firmware) is even more likely, given that your machine is from Apple. Is there construction near you? If someone's spewing out EM noise by, say, arc welding in a nearby building that's being constructed, that'll kill your connection very quickly, too. That was a constant nuisance when we moved into our present offices.

Re: Tragedy of the Spectrum Commons?

Tom — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:16:16 -0000

Oh, and I forgot the most obvious possibility: don't forget that microwave ovens run at 2.4 GHz, too. If someone near you has a poorly-shielded one or is using a 3-to-2 prong power plug adapter to run it ungrounded, it's very possible that that is to blame. Whenever Emily turns on her microwave the network immediately goes down, for instance.

Re: Regulators to Save Us from Loud TV Ads and Product Placements

Tom — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:10:32 -0000

I'm quite please to hear that action is being taken regarding the loudness problem, which has recently become dramatically worse. Do you really think regulation in this regard is likely to work more efficiently than the market -- that consumers should be relied upon to flock to stations with quieter ads? Or, perhaps, to buy new devices that counteract the loudness?

That seems a bit ridiculous. Mandating some kind of sane RMS normalization criterion on broadcast TV is an obviously more efficient way to address the problem. If enough Americans feel it's a problem that their representatives will enact such legislation, then what's the problem? It should be self-evident that imposing some limits on advertising techniques are necessary and reasonable if we want to have a livable society.

This post is just knee-jerk anti-regulation rhetoric. But that's not enough to constitute an argument, I'm afraid: what is the alleged cost or inefficiency that this proposed rule will introduce?

Re: Regulators to Save Us from Loud TV Ads and Product Placements

Tom — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:22:11 -0000

I'm seeing a lot of rhetorical tricks, and not a lot of explanations of what normalizing the volume costs us. This is not a restriction of speech any more than are the laws saying I can't stand outside your bedroom window with an airhorn all night. The content of speech is protected, not its physical volume.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Tim Wu’s “Mother-May-I” World of Net Neutrality Regulation

Tom — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:13:03 -0000

"Amsterdam and some cities in Utah have deployed their own fiber to carry bandwidth as a public utility," he says.

Not only that -- some of these bastions of socialism publicly finance tracts of asphalt for collective use by their citizens. Outrageous! Why not just let people drive where they want and let the market sort it out!?

Seriously: it's long past time for us to start treating the pipes that carry our bits in the same manner we treat the pipes that carry our water. There are reasons to doubt the viability of muni wifi as currently conceived, but the CLEC model is hardly without its problems.

Re: Why Congestion Pricing for the iPhone & Broadband Makes Sense

Tom — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 23:02:39 -0000

I have similar concerns to Bradford, and worry that this would amount to a profitable land-grab for AT&T during the transition. If it was introduced in a revenue-neutral way, though, then I'm all for it -- I'm convinced that metered pricing is the only way to make network markets get better. And I say this as an iPhone user with very heavy data demands.

Disqus - Latest Comments for Tom

Re: The Hollywood writer's strike (Scripting News)

Re: April Fool in July? (Scripting News)

Re: April Fool in July? (Scripting News)

Re: What is a liberal? (Scripting News)

Re: What is a liberal? (Scripting News)

Re: Today the MSI Wind *really* went back (Scripting News)

Re: Full text in RSS? (Scripting News)

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Wi-Fi Piggybacking / Squatting Reconsidered

Re: Fire Sale

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Wi-Fi Piggybacking / Squatting Reconsidered

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Google Favoritism? Eric Schmidt’s 55 Minutes of YouTube Fame

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Once Again, Why Not Meter Broadband Pipes?

Re: A Free Software Experiment

Re: TV vs. Computer

Re: Saturday Night Geekery

Re: Verizon/NARAL an Argument for Regulation?

Re: INSURGENCY FTW!!

Re: Is Comcast discriminating against BitTorrent?

Re: Is Comcast discriminating against BitTorrent?

Re: Is Comcast discriminating against BitTorrent?

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Comcast “Traffic Shaping”?

Re: George Ou on Comcast traffic management and NN

Re: Observation of Dark Energy Shortens the Life of the Universe

Re: Contractual Omnipotence

Re: Here Comes Another Bubble

Re: Debunking Rural Broadband Myths

Re: Cartesian Theater

Re: Tragedy of the Spectrum Commons?

Re: Tragedy of the Spectrum Commons?

Re: Regulators to Save Us from Loud TV Ads and Product Placements

Re: Regulators to Save Us from Loud TV Ads and Product Placements

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Tim Wu’s “Mother-May-I” World of Net Neutrality Regulation

Re: Why Congestion Pricing for the iPhone & Broadband Makes Sense

Re: Today the MSI Wind really went back (Scripting News)