You think things in the world are so "obviously" black and white.
Comcast making shitty business decisions is not burning Jews in ovens. And the fact your not immediately laughed out of the room when you make such comparisons is the real sad reflection of society in this thread.
or
"Good" as in technically competent? (in which case untrue).
In any case, here the intended meaning was clearly "technical ability", which doesn't require morality
"good" as in having the qualities required for a particular role, as per Google.
A million Shakespeares typing on typewriters write no better than a monkey!
I like it, although I think the analogy fails here. How about "An infinite amount of Shakespeares typing on the same typewriter will inevitably produce garbage"? :)
Would we have gotten twice as many plays out of him?
He was clearly slacking.
Eh, telco infrastructure is a natural monopoly. No government needed for that.
The EU member states implementation of deregulation of the telecoms sector is far from perfect, but most of them have ended with something that works reasonably well.
E.g. in the UK, while the cable operator (there's only one of note left standing) has mostly escaped regulation, but BT had it's last-mile infrastructure subjected to heavy regulation to the point where it's been split out into its own company (OpenReach) that maintains the network and is legally obliged to resell access to anyone at the same terms.
You can even get the prices to terminate an IP connection with a subscriber on their website.
ISPs can put equipment in the BT exchanges and get a raw connection, or can pay for "backhaul" to a set of central locations.
I know the US also has a form of local-loop unbundling, but it's clearly not working very well given the level of complaints people have about these services in the US. Possibly because of the price-setting mechanism?
As a result there's a lot of competition in the ISP space in the UK (as there is elsewhere in the EU).
(Where it's not perfect is that the way the regulations have been set up gives too few incentives for BT to invest and innovate in the last mile network and is often accused of milking OpenReach for profit; two ways of improving on that would be to restrict how much profit they could take out as dividends to a proportion of how much they reinvest in network improvements and/or split maintenance/operation into regional franchises and force companies like OpenReach to bid for it on a franchise basis; though the latter is hard to get the evaluation-criteria right for)
It's worth noting this involves two different layers of regulatory separation.
Most ISPs don't run their own LLU operation. They buy access from one of BT Wholesale or TalkTalk Wholesale (who are technically LLUers and both, in turn, use the last-mile network run by Openreach). As you say, the prices which both of the BT Group companies are allowed to charge are regulated and published and companies can "innovate" at quality of service or features offered.
The relevant part here is that the US has never AFAIK had the same wholesale access model. With that, an upstart ISP could have the same coverage as Verizon/Comcast/etc but have the option of not doing these scummy things and/or being as network-neutral as they pleased, within the limits of their business model, without having to spend boatloads of money building a network to access those customers. LLU, on the other hand, requires way more investment so it's not surprising that it never really took off in the US where DSL always seemed like the poor relation compared to the cable networks.
In my time in the US several years ago I was horrified at the cost and quality of internet (and mobile) service compared to the UK.
Any strong libertarian ideals I once had were crushed by the reality of things like this. (Healthcare too but that’s another discussion).
It's worth noting, though, that this is the EU's doing, through the Telecoms Directive, not something the UK government did of its own accord.
https://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-ju...
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/04/12/0345217/tennessee-c...
The current problems are that a) since Trump the FCC is shit, b) local municipalities "vowing" to not enter the market (and others have no incentive).
See these for b: - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/voters-reject-ca... - https://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-ju...
Oh please, he’s been in office less than a year - none of this amazing ‘sharing’ happened under the previous administration either. It’s totally understandable to have (in my case many) disagreements with the Presidents and their policies, but this knee-jerk habit of blaming whoever is currently in office for everything because he’s not on our team is counterproductive.
It's safe to say at this point that we have a clear idea of what decisions Trump and his FCC will make in the future, and that there would little to no hope for decisions which will increase competition. A year is plenty of time for assessing the character of an adminstration, and Trump's has been remarkably consistent in this regard.
Not for everything.
I blamed O'dog for the fucking shady counterproductive NSA practices that he allowed to continue.
The Obama DoJ took a dump regularly on whistleblowers.
And the infamous CIA kill-by-drone program.
And those are just the obvious big ticket items.
The problem with anti-government rhetoric in the US is it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Government is not inherently as incompetent and weak as yours often is.
There is no reason why a regulatory solution cannot work in the US when they work well in many other countries of greatly varying size and population density.
If your government fails you, that is not a failure of government: it is a failure of your government.
I mean, there are weekend hacks of similar age and quality, with my name on them, that I know are still in active service. Because, for all their myriad other faults, they mostly work, and everyone who works with them is used to using them and to dealing with the occasional cases in which they misbehave. These are not things which anyone rebuilds just for the sake of it. So they go on being used until they stop working entirely, and the the business replaces them with something else.
Whether or not that's a sensible way to go about things is an open question, if you like. I don't think it is, because these aren't the sorts of things which cripple a business if they misfire - or make much impact even if they don't. So investing heavily in them would seem like a waste of money, though perhaps you disagree. But the world need not be mad for this to be the way of things.
The random classList polyfill at the bottom was a nice touch. As I scrolled to this bit I was initially like "oh this'll be nice they encrypted some of--oh. :("
My favorite bit was the "this detects the browser type and version" snippet that was copyrighted 2001. Nice!
I think the move to open-source the code was a ham-fisted way to get the "we're modifying copyrighted documents in flight" part past the lawyers. It's admittedly a pretty decent legal move.
I don't get it, how does that work?
Lots of ads, undercut your competition by something like $1 and "new customer deals" and then shaft your customers after a while
The average customer just go to the store with the flashier lights (or the one which is more convenient)
"A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors."
When there even is any competition. Where I live, it's literally Comcast or else tether my mobile phone. Satellite is technically an option, but realistically between the cost and my tree coverage there's no way to make it work.
The average customer just goes to their cable company (coax cable) or their telephone company (DSL).
(And the kicker is... they both suck!)
Microsoft in the last 10 years, and consider how much talent and budget they have access to.
i remember when zynga had to lay off programmers by the thousands. I was thinking, they had THOUSANDS of programmers and the best they came up with was skins over top of farmville?
Once you get up to around 20+ people on the team, the collective IQ of that teams drops to level where stupid things like this happen...
Nothing good from development by committee, this appears to be a project that was developed by committee
Rather than arguing, I guess, many (who haven't left for one reason or another) would just go with "uh, whatever" attitude and slap something together just enough for PHB to see that popup (and let customer complaints do the rest).
What makes that obvious to you - appears to pass the "we're unlikely to be fined and any fine will be too small to bother us" legal review.
Because "National Security".
I mean, look at the code. Look at the function of this code. Look at the business purpose of this code. Look at the security aspects of using this code. Look at the legal ramifications (why the hell is that LGPL thing up top there ?). Look at their internal communication. Look at how easy it is to see exactly what they're doing ...
All of it screams "no double digit IQs anywhere near this thing".
And yes, I mean, I know that's not true. Their people are not this stupid (though some must be). But they do this anyway. The organisation does business analysis at the level of a 5 year old, codes like a 10 year old, obviously this has not passed legal review, ...
How can an organisation that executes this badly become this big ? I mean, I know the answer is "government" and government making them a monopoly, but still. WTF.