Orbital.

[reddragdiva]

• The Internet without net neutrality. (courtesy picturecool)

• It's time to give up on civilisation as a noble but utterly failed experiment.

• AHAHAHAHA chuggers.

• Domas Mituzas on what MySQL process states really mean.

• NotN: Did humans and Neanderthals interbreed?; "Three strikes" to ensure security of all private communications.

Pumped full of steroids as I was, today was quite productive. Got up at 6:45am, wrote two NotN, one got Slashdotted. arkady and I cleaned the hall and the lounge. The place looks a bit like a house. Next: under the couch, the kitchen and the laundry.

neonchameleon came over to visit this evening. He and Arkady geeked horribly about role-playing games.

Comments

[vampwillow]

I was making an estimate of my bandwidth requirements earlier and reckoned my traffic level is roughly 1.5Gbyte per day.

::gulp::

[reddragdiva]

We run about 2-3 GB/day - use most of a 100GB cap each month. Most of that is telly for Freda.

[vampwillow]

Thankfully London (virgin) has no cap, and servers have a semi-cap of 30GB pcm between defined Monday-to-Friday daytime hours (which I don't hit - so far anyway!)

[canticle.livejournal.com]

A world with net neutrality would look like this:




I used to be a HUGE proponent of net neutrality, but having worked for telecoms in two countries for over 12 years, I've learned a few things, and among them?

95% of 'awesome' ISPs that people love go out of business not because the man keeps them down, but because they simply suck at what they do other than making people feel good.

Case in point in Canada? All the ISPs that demand to use telco lines to deliver their service cheaper than the telcos themselves.

They don't build any infrastructure. When the infrastructure goes down, they don't pay to repair it. They don't hire anyone to upgrade the infrastructure, or get it out to places 300 km away (maybe not a problem in the UK, huge problem here). They do nothing except lease lines below cost and resell the time on those lines at a profit.

And yet they still always go out of business. Why? It's not because the big bad telcos play unfairly, it's because they simply suck.

Another case in point? Even after insurance pays out, a single, solitary fiber cut in Canada can cost a telco upwards of $10,000 to repair (time and labour for the crews repairing it and NOT doing other things they could be doing). There was one situation where a single fiber break cost a telco over $100,000, because the cut was on the side of a mountain (lightning strike hit a tower that severed an aerial cable, because aerial cable is the only option on the side of a mountain sometimes). Insurance paid a lot of that cost.

Did any of the small, local, heroic ISPs pay a dime? Newp, but they demand cheap access to that fiber.

I could spend pages upon pages upon pages going over why the internet will never be free, never should be free, and why true net neutrality will bring it down faster than a marine on leave in Thailand, but I don't have the time nor the patience.

Suffice it to say, it's great in theory, and would be a disaster in practice.