It looks quite straightforward:
- No blocking
- No throttling
- No paid prioritization
That sounds pretty great to me!
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Deeeelightful. Time to slowly slog through thatâŚ
I think the comparison between net neutrality and the water/electricity supply is a bit wrong. Yes if you want more water you need a bigger pipe. That is like saying if you want faster internet you need to get a fiber cable instead of copper. That makes complete sense and has nothing to do with net neutrality. Net net neutrality is like an electricity company charging you more for powering a pc then for powering a television. That would be complete bullocks and should be illegal. An other comparison would be to mail. It would not make any sense that if you send a hallmark card it gets priority shipping of a day compared to say a homemade card which would take a week. It wouldnât make any sense at all!
The idea of net neutrality is essential for the internet in my opinion, because if we do not enforce it by law I think it will be abused. Not only by the providers, but possibly by governments as well. I wouldnât be surprised if the NSA would sneak in a deal with an internet provider to slow down all secure connections to TOR for example, which I think would make us move slowly towards a situation similar to chinaâs great firewall.
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That is exactly what happens (at least in the USA) right now. Different customers get different prices depending on what they use that electricity on.
This is true⌠but it should be pointed out that, depending on how much you pay, your parcel will have different total travel time.
I agree with this, as well. I think itâs important to remember that the US government has gotten involved in other utilities (like the electric grid) and the result is not exactly what you or I would like to see happen. As is made clear by your comments. :)`
Things in this regulation are a bit ambiguous. An example:
Ban Blocking: Consumers must get what they pay for â unfettered access to any lawful
content on the Internet
On the surface, this sounds quite reasonable. But the question is: what is lawful content? While we might first think of âunlawfulâ content as child pornography or pirated material, that would be correct and reasonable. But,for an example, there are efforts being made to make journalism a licensed profession. That could have serious ramifications for bloggers and the protections given to journalists would, under this effort, not apply to what would be suddenly considered ânon-journalistsâ. (How that pass constitutional muster is beyond me, but we are talking about government here.)
Or, it could easily turn out that it be considered that the only use for p2p is for âunlawfulâ things. While there is plenty of pirating done using p2p, much is done that is lawfull. But, since much bandwidth is used on p2p, an isp can, for itâs own reasons, block it, and do so crying âunlawful activityâ.
What I see here is a great potential for a big mess. Besides, as I mentioned, I think itâs just a smoke-screen for the intentions of being able to tax the internet.
In general we are very much on the same line. However this:
I agree with this, as well. I think itâs important to remember that the US government has gotten involved in other utilities (like the electric grid) and the result is not exactly what you or I would like to see happen. As is made clear by your comments. :)`
is not really what I was getting at. I do think the government can make it way better than the situation right now. I find the way electricity, water and gas are handled by the government were I live (NL) quite well. I think it would create a quite level playing field. Yes, the government fucks up all kind of thing, so too much power would be horrible. However the only solution I see is by the FCC duing 2 thing:
A: Net neutrality in a law!!! We need to be able to sew the crap out of a provider giving us more of the throttling BS. It is and will always be bullshit if you get less speed then you have paid for.
B: Get rid of all the monopolies! Right now, most users just have no choice between providers, that is the source of all evil. That is when the power makes them go corrupt. But that also means that a government monopoly is bad and evil and all the other bad things.
Gladly the situation here in Europe is a lot better. I hope that the plans of Neelie Kroes are not going to get f*ed up and we actually get some form of net neutrality.
Sorry for any bad language, I tend to get a bit emotional in the face of so much bull sh*t.
Are there any serious efforts to do this that you know of? Because, I tell you what, that idea scares the crud out of me.
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This sounds very similar to what people must have thought about power in the 30âs. Thus the Rural Electrification Administration was created. This has resulted in rural parts of the country having power provided by non-profit electric cooperatives. Perhaps there is room for something similiar in this realm?
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The last push that I know of was a couple of years ago, congress trying to define what a journalist is.
I think the impetus was wikileaks. That really made some people mad, and they couldnât bear the thought that it could be protected under âfreedom of speach.â
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This principle was eluding me in my foggy mind. I knew there was a precedent, but could not fix my thoughts on it. Thanks for helping an old man out! 
Former OpenSUSE user here. At least for a few months. I let it go, and Iâll briefly explain why.
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Package management: it pulls too many packages. This is way unnecessarily. While I find libzypp/zypper superior to yum (Fedoraâs/RHELâs package manager), its packages are not simple. KISS, please!
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YAST2: too much maintenance burden. You can have a great community, but then it will be occupied upgrading yast modules, or creating new ones. This is 1) reinventing the wheel (â> is there another distro which uses Yast? No, this work is only useful for *suse) and 2) discouraging users of understanding what is happening behind the scenes, since yast does everything for you. This limits the user knowledge only to OpenSUSE operations and configs.
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One-click installation is 1) way too bloated (adds a new repository, etc.), 2) it should be called 4-click or 5-click [âŚ] and 3) another waste of resources, since it only is kept available for OpenSUSE. People should be creating RPM repos (for example), and making it easier to add them; not creating specific 1-click files.
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Wiki is not very good (compare it, for example, with Gentoo or Arch or Ubuntu). Again, users could be improving it if they werenât occupied with yastâŚ
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Open Build Service for Arch Linux is very poor. It just contains 2 of the 3 official Arch repos.
Some good experiences with OpenSUSE:
- A very good (GUI) installer!
- snapper! (snapshot of btrfs partitions)
- KDE is very well integrated (canât speak about other environments)
- I would recommend it for beginners. But I would not do that for medium/advanced users.
Now I use mainly Arch or *untoo (Gentoo/Funtoo).
By the way, you guys asked for some tasks. Here are my 2 cents:
- Install media codecs on openSUSE and successfully play a .mp3 audio and a .mp4 video.
- Run openSUSE inside openSUSE via virtualization software (systemd-nspawn is a suggestion).
- Use Tumbleweed for a week without breaking your system.
Thatâs a good writeup. There is an actual concern that being able to say âbut Iâm a journalist!â is a convenient shield for people even when theyâre not; some do not consider that concern to be well-founded, but I think that if we think about it rationally thereâs at least a subject for discussion there. Of course, saying âah, youâre a blogger, not a journalist; journalists work for the New York Times and thatâs itâ is waaaaay too far in the other direction. So having a conversation about this is a good idea; it is a little difficult to do so with the right-wing wanting to violate the journalistic shield any way they can and the left-wing shrieking that being prevented from shouting âFire!â in a crowded theatre is an unconscionable violation of their constitutional rights. I exaggerate, but not by all that much, which is why this conversation is difficult to have in public; itâs an important one, though, and discussing it here seems a good idea.
So, what are peopleâs views? How do we balance the need to protect the free press with the need to not shield too many people by allowing them to inaccurately claim journalism as a defence?
It does all come down to: Who defines what? What is considered responsible?
A silly scenario: @bryanlunduke receives some credible information from someone in government that there is an order being presented by the administration that will ban all programming languages except FORTRAN. The reason sited is ânational security.â Here is the question: should Bryan reveal the information in his blog? It may depend on the circumstances revolving around reasons behind the ban being implemented. Are lives being put at risk? Or does research into the issue reveal that ânational securityâ is just being used as a cover for some other reason?
Now, the authorities go after Bryan because he felt he should reveal the information. Should he, as a blogger, have the same protections as a journalist? Should it be him they pursue (for you know heâs going to be running to @jonobacon 
) or should they focus on finding who leaked the information? Should Bryan be pressed into revealing his source because, after all, he is not a journalist, but a blogger?
I have also heard, but have not verified (will be looking into it (hint: HELP )) that there is the discussion of having to license even podcasts under the same rules of OTA broadcasts. That restriction might also come under this ruling of the FCC, but more digging would be required to substantiate that.
I agree with @sil that a discussion would be interesting and informative.
Edit: Iâm still digging on the licensing of podcast thing, but it might be the following that I heard and thought it was being considered in the USA: http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2013/06/regulating-singapores-internet
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I donât see how the end result is any different than adding a PPA to Ubuntu - except that we have a single document & a CLI handler to do it.
As for âwaste of resourcesâ⌠theyâre generated dynamically by software.opensuse.org. There is no amorphous group of code squirrels spending hours writing .ymp files 
You have good points. I donât like PPAs either =P
But, in this case, openSUSE repositories are better, because they are more manageable than PPAs â you can handle them all using just zypper (or YAST, whatever). PPAs are not trivial for a newbie user: while they can use add-apt-repository easily, it is not easier for him to remove a PPA. I know it is just a matter of deleting one or two lines of code from /etc/apt/<something>, but this proved to be non-trivial for novice users I know.
About waste of resources, Iâll trust what youâre saying: I probably injustly infested 1-click repos with my argument about YAST. I didnât know about that 
. Feel free to correct my other points if I missed anything.
because thatâs not who PPAs are for. PPAs are not meant for distributing software to end-users. If youâve got an app you want people to run, put it in the store. PPAs are there for things such as testing tools, temporary upgrades of a core part of the system, and things for developers. They are not meant to be used or even known about by ordinary users. This is part of the reason that they are deliberately not easy to add to or remove from your system â OpenSuSEâs one-click-installation thing is cool, and Ubuntu does the same thing for things in the store/repositories (see http://apps.ubuntu.com), but adding a PPA is a bad idea because once youâve done it, the owner of the PPA can overwrite any package on your system by pushing an update to it. (People thinking âbut thatâs horrible!â: it is ideal for what PPAs were designed for, which is installing new test versions of a thing and maybe new test versions of many dependencies because youâre on the dev team. It is not ideal if what you want is some twitter app built by someone too lazy to get their app in the store, because thatâs not what PPAs are for.)
(Yes: getting things in the store was way harder than it should have been. Is that why people started using PPAs for stuff? No it isnât. This is now, thankfully, resolved with the click store, where approval is done by a script, not a person.)
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I so, very much, disagree with that. Maybe this is show-topic-worthy.
Interestingly, at least in the U.S.A., it feels to be somewhat the opposite at the moment. Though that seems to change every few years.
Maybe I donât fully understand what the practical implication is here. Do you (or anyone else reading this) have any specific examples of people that have benefited from claiming they are a journalist⌠but should not be allowed to do so?
Hmm. That actually helped clarify this a bit for me. Wait. No. I lost it again.
I need more examples.