Diegetics

No comments on the end of net neutrality huh?

whats to say, big boys and control freaks are being big boys and control freaks and the population has defined freedom as an odd mix of lazyness and schauedenfraude and doesnt have the capacity to challenge them... too busy having left/right wars and arguing over the definition of a tree to see the forest.

wikileaks has accelerated all this and the dissonance will become even more extreme as all the kiddies whine about their precious free speech and zero responsibility requirements simulatenously enjoy it when the "other" gets on the wrong side of the establishment and gets boned.

personally i dont give a shit about net neutrality because in my country its irrelevant - we are currently arguing over a single centralised public service net run by the government which is the same thing, but without pretending to be anything other than the attempt to turn the cowboy internet into the highly restricted television

BUY NOW.

every other aspect of our media is controlled in such a way, I dont know why some people think the net is different and cant be.

in the "small" its definately possible to bypass most restrictions - my friends and I can talk "around" subjects, we can also knock up one off protocols tunneled through other protocols and all sorts of obscure things that make most restrictions moot... much the same as 2 people can do so in the real world, no matter how oppressive the police are.

however the "small" is not the mainstream.. and the mainstream will be reduced to the licensed big boys only, like every other media, its the only "responsible" outcome that leaves both the public and private powers happy.

america has public cable tv - ive said before there are points where the differences in countries do make conversation difficult... i dont have that, i have 3 government approved multinationals providing my tv, which is why i dont watch it.

also, america is quite good at letting loons talk freely, you only get in trouble with the "tax department" (or any other law they can find to fuck you) if they worry you arent an irrelevant loon and may actually influence people.

we will have the youtubes and public blogs for a while yet - we may even keep them indefinately, provided they feel its all fractured sub communities and not a source of revolution... in which case their will be a rash of media complaints about pedophiles and abusive aholes and much mature nodding of heads that says we need to have more restrictions.

I don't suspect that it's ever going to affect this forum. The problem is not that sites like this will fall on hard times. They won't, the ghetto of tomorrow will have faster download speeds than the equality we have today. That part is more or less irrelevant. I don't have problems with corporations making private networks for the massive corporate traffic that must go along it. That just makes sense from a systems administration POV.

The real problem here is the provision that allows cell phone providers to be gatekeepers on what you can and cannot access via your phone. That's frakked up. Since Apple is already using that to keep people from using the wikileaks app, the opening salvo tells you all you need to know about where that's headed.

Can the Internet be thoroughly regulated? It's highly distributed nature makes it an iffy proposition in my book. Bandwidth sure, but the most damning information and the stuff they most want to control is in the form of text- very little bandwidth requirement there.

the myth of the internet automatically routing around problems is one of the most problematic

yes, the protocol can fallover to alternative routes, but their has to be alternative routes for this feature to work.

the EXCEPTION is that if you are in a landlocked country AND you are quite techincally cluey AND you have an open operating system which lets you add and edit the routes and gateways AND you have contacts with the same skills and conditions THEN you should be able to hack up all sorts of private links and workarounds in all sorts of ways.. until you get caught.

for the rest of us which arent on the main eurasian continent... you cant put up a new sattelite, you cant lay a new optic cable and you are at the mercy of your government.

sneaker net and pigeon net can move portable drives around, its not all bad, but its very old school and not particularly technical

If we had to , I am pretty much certain that between us , Tinker and I could smuggle a pregnant elephant coast to coast inside of 72 hrs ( cf Smokey and the Bandit II ).* But in a free country , we ought not have to do that.



*= Even Han Solo gets boarded every now and then.

I have just the dress, and was recently telling the wife of my need for a Trans Am.

Anybody got an elephant ? I don't really think it needs to be pregnant as a proof of concept. If it does. , then give me a 55 gallon drum of Courvoisier and a Barry White collection , and I will see what I can do over a three- day weekend.

personally i find the topic of impregnating elephants a difficult one to discuss with the better half, she doesnt seem to take it the right way.

Some say corporations have won, other, the government and regulatory bureaucracies....

If that's the case, could it possibly be a win win situation here?