Chinese boy defaces ancient Egyptian sculpture, prompts online outrage - <AUTHOR> http://behindthewall.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/27/18532307-chinese-boy-defaces-ancient-egyptian-sculpture-prompts-online-outrage <comment><USER2> I find this wholly embarrassing as someone who is ethnically Chinese. This is not an isolated incident. I have personally witnessed domestic and international Chinese tourists behaving poorly, impolitely and without any consideration for the artifacts and other tourists. As an example -- whilst visiting the Ming tombs in Beijing, Ding Ling, to be specific, a couple let their child behind the cordoned off area to sit on the emperor's throne. This was a priceless 800 year old artifact and when I gently remarked upon this to them, it fell on deaf ears. Most warning signs are patently ignored -- examples such as smokers on the great wall, photographers in Buddhist Temples, screaming children in museums are just par for the course.

You have no idea how depressing it is to see the Great Wall of China littered with cigarette butts, or witnessing a small child defecating in the corner of the Forbidden City with the full blessing of its parent.

I would even go so far as to say that most people don't think the "rules" apply to them. This is true not just in tourism, but in everyday life. Any visitor to China will tell you stories of smokers in the pristine bathrooms of Beijing Capital Airport, or the subways, and people spitting on the street, jaywalking, or queue jumping.

Some personal pet peeves of mine include -- people getting on to subway cars before allowing passengers to get off, smoking in clearly designated non- smoking areas, littering anywhere and everywhere, line cutting, pushing and shoving others, blasting music from ipads on planes, and driving in the emergency lane on freeways.

This poor behaviour has only recently gained international attention because Chinese people have become more affluent and started travelling outside of China. However, prosperity doesn't correlate with class. Unless the Chinese government take drastic steps to cure this problem at home first -- the crass perception of its people will only perpetuate in the west as more and more start to travel internationally. Perhaps a system like Singapore where violations are fined severely might work -- provided it's implemented across the board everywhere.

Signed -- an embarrassed Chinese Canadian.

<comment><USER3> I can only relate here and I have seen the things you mentioned in the Forbidden city and the Great Wall as well. Not too long ago I was in Thailand (Pukhet), in a hotel resort for a couple of days off, and a couple of Chinese tourists came from the beach and washed their feet in the hotel swimming pool where everyone was swimming. Not embarrassed the least to do that. While there was a special hose, labeled and clearly visible for this particular use a few meters away for people to clean up their feet when coming back from the beach.

On another occasion, while flying domestically in China, I saw a guy just a couple of seats away from me on the left spitting on the aircraft floor several times during the flight. I was like... "huh?". I can kind of understand people spitting on the floor, outside, but in actual public transport? Seriously?

I have no idea what is going through their heads and why they even think it's remotely acceptable to do this. Would they like it if someone did it to them?

<comment><USER4> Did you tell them to stop it? I think a lot of problems like this would be solved if someone worked up the courage to speak up. It could have just been a major misunderstanding. Maybe they really didn't see the hose or thought it was only used for emergencies. I've seen people of all races do stupid things.

<comment><USER5> While I agree with you in that we shouldn't stereotype, this is a cultural issue, not a racial one. Like the top level comment above this states, a Chinese Canadian is going to have vastly different customs. The article is referring to inconsiderate trends in Chinese culture, not Chinese race.

<comment><USER4> And yet, there is a lot of condemnation from the mainland Chinese themselves.

Anyways, regardless of who is doing it, I think it's better to let them know they are doing it wrong, right when they are doing it because:

1) maybe they innocently don't know better and want to know better 2) you don't want that resentment to fester in your mind 3) you don't want to take out that resentment on someone else of the same race (which always seem to be happen)

Much easier said than done of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wonder how one teaches people who don't know better.

In India, there is a place called hampi which is near a village called hospet. It is one of the worlds most ancient and spectacular ruins. There is also literally pigs and sewer everywhere.

For a more popular example take taj mahal. Agra is dirty like hell and words cannot describe the sanitation situation there. The taj mahal doesn't need help to look awesome but with a background of a stinking river and a filthy city, it looks like a diamond in shit.

Actually why tourist places. Are you guys aware that Indian railways encourages defecating in the open? Yes sir visit any train station in India and you will see fresh human faeces on the tracks. All toilets of the train open up straight into the ground.

All this to say that in countries like India people cannot take care of their own land forget other people s land.

<comment><USER7> that's the classic traintoilet design across the world. only recently have toilets in trains been replaced with chemical ones - adoption was driven by high speed trains.

nothing particular about india in this little bit. i agree with your overall assessment though.

<comment><USER8> > that's the classic traintoilet design across the world.

I can confirm it's the same in the ex-USSR countries. That's why the lock the lavatory 10 minutes before arriving at a station and don't unlock it until the train is well clear of the town.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> At least in discussions on Western websites, the outrage always has an underlying racism permeating it. None of these people really have any right to be upset; they didn't care about the artifact, they've probably never _been_ to a museum, let alone done anything to help preserve these sorts of things. That, coupled with all sorts of Chinese stereotypes and slurs that happen to pop up in this outrage, makes me think it's less about an ancient artifact and more about getting their weekly fill of hating a faceless "other." You don't see the same hate for all of the American tourists who write their names on the Great Wall[0] or the Colosseum.[1]

Seriously, what do they want from him now? What sort of responsibility do they want him to take, years after it happened? Beat him, as the top comment on NBC News (and many other sites) suggested? Ridiculous. Pay restitution to the Egyptian government? I'm sure neither one of these governments care enough to waste time over such a trivial matter as graffiti, and it's not like China is a stranger to people messing with ancient pieces of their society.

So, really, most of the people "outraged" have acted more disgracefully than that child.

[0]: <http://i.imgur.com/rNsPC6V.jpg>

[1]: [http://www.hotsr.com/content/uploads/pictures/2013/01/Italy-...](http://www.hotsr.com/content/uploads/pictures/2013/01/Italy- Colorful-Coloss_Rasm.jpg)

<comment><USER10> > _None of these people really have any right to be upset; they didn't care > about the artifact, they've probably never been to a museum, let alone done > anything to help preserve these sorts of things._

Would you say the same of everyone who was horrified by the dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamiyan?

I find your concept of "'right' to be upset" to be rather suspect.

<comment><USER9> I would most certainly say the same to a bunch of anonymous, self-righteous Westerners crying for retribution in between parrotting disgusting stereotypes. But I'm not sure how you could think a child tourist scrawling his name on a statue is equivalent to a hateful organization completely destroying a monument.

<comment><USER10> I never stated that I thought they were equivalent, either in magnitude or severity. You are putting words in my mouth.

<comment><USER9> If you do not believe they are equivalent, then there was no point in asking if I would act the same way for both situations.

I understand you were trying to show some sort of hypocrisy in my logic, but that isn't an argument in itself, and since, by your own admission, they are different situations, it's wrong to compare them in the first place.

<comment><USER10> I believe that both situations have plenty of parrallels, but are not _equivalent_. Obviously blowing up multi-ton statues with explosives and graffiti are two very different activities in magnitude and severity. Nevertheless, they have many clear parallels.

My objection is to your assertion that some people are allowed to express their objection to the art and some people are not.

Many "westerners" who have never been in that hemisphere, nor have an particular interest in art, objected loudly to the dynamiting of those statues. Some of them did so anonymously on the internet.

Is this okay because that act was more energetic, dramatic, and irreversible _(the reason the two acts cannot be said to be equivalent)_? Is it okay for another reason? (I don't know what standard you are using to determine if somebody is _"self-righteous"_ , so perhaps that is the difference to you?) Or perhaps do you think that it was not okay for "westerners" who didn't care about art to object to that act anonymously on the internet?

These specific objections that you raised _("westerners", "anonymous", "don't care about the art anyway", "self-righteous")_ make much sense to me (you offered them with little to no justification), and I am trying to grok the extent to which you think they are valid.

<comment><USER9> I'm mostly talking about the folks who are calling for this kid, or his parents, to be beaten, fined, or punished in some way. I'm also talking about the people who use it as an excuse to complain about how Chinese people are louder, ruder, or generally worse than other cultures.

I don't have a problem with people complaining about defacing artifacts in general. It's shameful. But this kid was one of many who wrote his name on that statue, and one of many who defaced an ancient artifact as a tourist in another country. It only takes a few seconds to realize that to be the case, so the people condemning the child specifically are narrow-minded and probably just out to get their fill of hate, in my opinion.

<comment><USER10> > _"I'm mostly talking about the folks who are calling for this kid, or his > parents, to be beaten, fined, or punished in some way. I'm also talking > about the people who use it as an excuse to complain about how Chinese > people are louder, ruder, or generally worse than other cultures."_

These people are without doubt going to far, but I see no reason to say that they don't have a right to be offended in any capacity.

The problem is that they are being racist and calling for brutal punishment, _not_ that they are westerners, don't care about art, anonymous, or self- righteous. Those things are perfectly fine (or in the case of "self- righteous", ambiguous.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It comes down to manners, something that seem to be lacking all over the world. I've had to prompt parents to stop their kids from touching (more like pawing) artwork in museums and crawling all over historical sites, and the parents look at me like I'm an alien. It's all about them and their precious little snowflake, rather than appreciating the art or history.

You can see it in the parents' apologia for their son's atrocious behavior, focused on how their son is a "good student" which has nothing to do with anything.

>>They also confessed that they had not been watching their son while on tour in Egypt

How long did it take him to carve the characters. Was he really unsupervised that long???

Keep in mind also this kid and his family are very fortunate to be able to travel overseas and see these priceless treasures, especially considering how poor most of his countrymen still are.

</comment><comment><USER12> I find this quite amusing. Yes, it was out of place for the kid to deface the wall. Yes, he should have thought twice before proceeding with his actions, but at the end of the day, this is nothing more than a material object.

People are so quick to bash on somebody, as evident in the comments on the article. This raises the question of whether the true issue is that the kid did something that was immoral, or that these commenters and those other people who are lashing out in anger in response to this are merely using this as a way to feed their ego, or possibly as a way to justify something that they've done, that caused others to consider them to be "stupid, "irresponsible", etc.

My heart aches for each time I see a child, and often an adult, kill, a living creature. Something even so small as a fly, killed just because the fact that it is a fly and considered "annoying". Everyone has a right to life, a scratch in some 3.4 thousand year old limestone wall is not going to hurt anybody. In fact, three millennia into the future, people might regard that very same scratch to be of important historical value. The fact that people are focusing so much anger and hatred to this naive child, instead of focusing on something more important such as spreading peace and love, saddens me. And how ironic, that the very same people who are so against graffiti, graffiti on something themselves.

The reason that these artifacts exist is to tell a story, the true value in these is not the material aspect of this artifact, but the _informational_ value. The information, although now slightly altered, is not destroyed. This is what is important. And I don't doubt that there is photographic evidence of the egyptian glyph in it's preexisting form archived somewhere, possibly in a library.

If you _really_ wanted to deface it, you'd need to find a way to remove it from history. Only then will it's true purpose, historical archive of an important message, will be defeated.

And think about this, for everyone complaining about him defacing the artifact, wake up, you probably deface the oldest artifact in existence every day. The earth itself.

<comment><USER13> There's informational value, sure. Historical value, aesthetic value, certainly some material value. And, sure at the end of the day, it's one small scratch on one artifact in one small part of the world. But if this kid's behavior is okay, then where do you draw the line? Can everyone etch their names in ancient sculptures and artifacts? Why not take some of it home with you? (After all, removing one stone out of thousands hardly affects the historical value of a site, no?)

You see where I'm going with this. We react so strongly to one small incident of graffiti because it's simply not sustainable. I'd like my kids (and their kids) to be able to visit sites like, say, the Acropolis in Greece and find the Parthenon (which was historically subject to a ton of looting and careless damage) as well-preserved as possible.

One could always make the case that it's not worth preserving these sites at all, but that's a different argument, and those of us who are interested in the historical value would certainly beg to differ.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Call me radical, I think we should legalize both all drugs and all graffiti. To be honest, I don't think this should be a big deal.

We should teach the cycles that civilizations have gone through, we should teach all we know about former civilizations, but I don't think we should treat their old stones as sacred.

I think we should build new, ontop of the old. You can't build something new without destroying the old, sometimes.

<comment><USER15>
        I think we should legalize both all drugs and all graffiti.

Please provide your home address so I can spray paint "Convicted Child Molester" on your home and car. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wasn't there a guard or someone in charge to stop him scrawling his name? It should take long enough to notice scrawling something that large.

<comment><USER17> Interesting fact: the sculpture is full of graffiti. However, the Chinese characters are easier to spot

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I hope there will be a day when what one visible minority does doesn't reflect badly on his entire race. Not just thinking about what this Chinese kid did, but also about those two guys who killed that British serviceman. Muslims living in England must be on edge right now.

</comment><comment><USER19> In Chinese traditional culture, to write poems or paint on places or buildings or something, is some kinda, honor(?). And more famous persons's writing or painting, more famous the place to be. Then, the words or paints became important components of the place. It looks not shame, or bad but some behavior of culture.

Even one place is known by few people or none, or landscape is not attracting, if some well-known person defaced, then it will be well-known and be attracting.

Chinese belief in that nature and culture should be harmony. Later travelers come to see not only how beautiful the place, but also the marks left by whom, and how the words and paintings effected people to evaluate the place.

Now, people think to do so is damage the place.. It's bad, people who did that will be punished.

My point is, anything illegal, should be punished or maybe then discussed. If not, should be discussed.

<comment><USER19> looks some one negative my comment.

Could I have the reason why you think it's shitty?

Did I say something wrong? or unproper?

<comment><USER20> Your point isn't unique to Chinese culture.

Plus, the boy who wrote his own name didn't even have decent handwriting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I find that part of oriental culture great.

Had any of my classmates done something similar, their parents would have denied everything, downplayed the damage, and in general be overprotective and caring only about themselves.

</comment><comment><USER22> Note, when they say "quality and breeding", I'm pretty sure they're using a poor translation of the word 素质. I would translate it more like "character". I think it means how you behave when no one is looking.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why does the NBC headline need to mention that the boy is Chinese?

<comment><USER24> Because it's a relevant fact.

edit: By the way I find it very sexist they mentioned he was a boy.</comment></comment>


What's Agile To You? - <AUTHOR> http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/10/whats-agile-to.php

<comment><USER2> "iterative and incremental projects" that's it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Markham makes a good contrast between Agile with a capital 'a' invoking the marketing masses and high book sales, and agile with a lowercase 'a' alluding to simply quick and coordinated movement by a team. Markham would agree agile is different for every company, but I'd like to point out that if you want to implement agile for a student team of developers working on a software product, your timeboxes are stretched out--so you're still using agile but you make it work for your developers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to add a little here.

Agile, whether big or little 'a', is about some kind of stressors and some kind of adapting to meet those stressors. I described those stressors in general terms as "business value" -- making something quickly that people want -- but you can fit a lot of things into "business value"

For instance, on a student project, those stressors can be incremental timeboxes (if you have 3 months, why not have 2-week or 1-week cycles with a demo to one of your peer groups? After all, there's a difference between a build/demo iteration and a release iteration)

What I'm getting at is that you're always making some kind of sub-optimal trade-off for the greater good. That's why agile is so tough in schools and large organizations -- the lack of stressors means a lack of impetus to adapt. Many times the first sprint looks just like the last one, or you stretch your sprints to meet the class deadline, or you slipping schedules is routine, etc.

<comment><USER3> Nice point. But I would argue that the stressors are the same kinds of deadlines as you would see in any professional organization. From my experience working on a student developer team (attempting to use agile), the reason it doesn't work in a school setting is the lack of daily updates and meetings among team members since it's hard to coordinate the schedules any decent-sized team of students and to convince them to reorganize their workload to meet the weekly or bi-monthly deadlines. The worst case scenario is a lower grade on your project, rather than the stressor of losing your bonus or worse--getting fired.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I was unclear. Student agile and big-corp agile can have a lot in common.

In really large organizations, developers can be multi-allocated to several different development teams and be working on 5 or 6 projects at the same time. In addition, slipping schedules is the norm. And you can have multiple channels of managers, making accountability problematic. So the stressors don't always apply at big companies either.

That's why I use the startup metaphor. In the startup world, you produce value or you die.

There are techniques to use, of course. You can insist on daily stand-ups and an hour or two of co-located time per day -- to the point of refusing to be on the team if it's not done. But that gets into a whole other area of courage and agile teams which is probably another thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I still believe that the best definition of what agile is is to be found in the agile manifesto: <http://www.agilemanifesto.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> The agile manifesto is a marketing tool used to sell consulting services and books. Those who adhere to it quote it like it was some sort of revelation from on high. A new ten commandments. A great religious insight.

Nope, I'm not a fan, although I agree with the items. Software development does not need manifestos any more than it needs new methodologies. What it needs -- what it has always needed -- is pragmatism. Where the application of the manifesto is pragmatic, it is good. Where it is dogmatic, it is bad.

So I respectfully disagree. I'm just not a platitude kind of guy.

<comment><USER5> How is your comment any less platitudinous than the agile manifesto?

You could call it the Pragmatic Manifesto:

* What software development needs, is what it has always needed: pragmatism!

* Where it is pragmatic, it is good!

* Where it is not-pragmatic (dogmatic), it is bad!

Making a stand for _pragmatism_ , and against _dogmatism_ is basically saying nothing because what you define as pragmatic can be called dogmatic by others and vice versa. It's politician speak, using a vague word with inherent positive connotations to describe your own actions, and one with negative connotations for anything you dislike.

<comment><AUTHOR> LOL -- the new slogan is that there are no slogans!

I see your point, but pragmatism has a lot more depth than simply being an adjective and the opposite of something else. "How to do stuff" is a philosophical exercise (sorry to go long here) and like all philosophical exercises, there are many schools of thought. After looking at all the camps, I'll go with Peirce and Dewey, who, looking at the field, said basically "so what?" "What's it mean to me right now?"

Now maybe the pragmatic school of philosophy has been a con job all along -- if so, hey, the money is good -- but I think there's a bit more to it than simply substituting one slogan for another.

But I loved your comment!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Over the years I've read about agile...it's more like a religion now, really.</comment>


When I stopped hearing the voices in my head - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/13/hearing-voices-head-drugs-therapy <comment><USER2> Book: "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" — [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)#Brea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_\(psychology\)#Breakdown_of_bicameralism)

Theory: The brain has two hemispheres: One does the talking and one does the listening. Sometimes we react because the "self" is the last to know or just reacts not realizing it is a self evaluation below our awareness. (Dog goes to bite your hand and you react.) We then try to assign order to that chaos with a reason such as "god[s]", or "spirit[s] warned us or made us do so.

Snippet: "..."... Leftovers of the bicameral mind today, according to Jaynes, include religion, hypnosis, possession, schizophrenia and the general sense of need for external authority in decision-making...."

<comment><USER3> Are there any more recent works that develop on this idea with new research and historical analysis, or is this 40-year old book still the best there is?

<comment><USER2> "The "bicameral mind" 30 years on: a critical reappraisal of Julian Jaynes' hypothesis" (2006)

[http://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/...](http://www.functionalneurology.com/materiale_cic/224_XXII_1/2108_the%20bicamiral/index.html)

a Institute of Neurology, London, UK

b Department of Neurology, Amedeo Avogadro University, Novara, Italy

c Department of Classical Philology, University of Bologna, Italy

Reprint requests to: Dr Andrea Eugenio Cavanna Amedeo Avogadro University Corso Mazzini, 18 - 28100 Novara - Italy E-mail: email@example.com

Received: October 2006 Accepted for publication: January 2007

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting article. Moreso for me as this is perhaps the one topic around here i have some first hand experience with.

That feeling is really really odd though. There's a moment when you go "wait, that's an apparently fully functioning consciousness that is capable of responding to my every thought, my brain/reality can DO THAT?". For me it took a long time to play off the many different possible solutions to that puzzle, and at the end of the day i settled for a mix of "currently unknown exactly how that is done" (sort of like consciousness itself, i guess) to "wow, reality sure does have some extra layers of "fun" i hadn't really been informed about.

If the voice(es) in any way confined themselves to the spectrum of being/knowledge that i as an individual acknowledged that i was in posession of, that would be one thing, but the world becomes a weird place when they go outside your acknowledged "knowns".

Now, i was lucky enough to have a very supportive and patient family that viewed it as something that could be managed outside of the realm of antipsychotic therapy. I'm not saying that handling it with prescribed drugs is necessarily a bad idea, if it works for you then i hope it continues to do so.

Sorry for the rant, but i was just reminded of how weird all of that stuff was to go through. Its been a while since i thought about it.

<comment><USER4> I guess it goes parallell to another question i have. How is it possible for a brain without anything but pretty basic musical training to conjure up a fully functioning, never before heard, tunable symphony. This was a place i occasionally ended up in the midst of all of the nightly mental hoolahoops i had to go through. (It would collapse on itself eventually, but still, the array of instruments and sounds was way more than i could ever make in my normal waking time).

It is basically the same question as "how does the brain conjure dream", i guess. But experienced from the awake state. And it just stays with you in a slightly different way when you experience it whilst awake.

I guess i'll never know.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious, since perception is an interesting thing when you can no longer trust your sense: are you _certain_ that you actually heard a fully functioning, never before heard, tunable symphony, or did you simply believe that you were? That is, did the symphony itself exist in your mind, or just your perception of it?

I ask because I often have the experience in dreams, that I experience something which I perceive to make sense until I actually try to make sense of it, whereupon it falls apart. My brain only generates my response to the input, not the input itself, and when queried for the input fails to produce it.

<comment><USER4> You raise some points which i may have neglected a bit.

Allow me to elaborate a bit on the setting from which my experience came. This was in the later phases of my whole hallucinatory "wonderland", and i spent my time pretty much solely within the realms of classical music (early spotify binges, time to kill, and a tendency to not be able to shut my brain down in the evening.)

Now, the easiest way to describe it is probably to say that my dreamstates seeped over from my "dreaming" brain to my waking brain so that what should be relegated to the realm of dream became something i played with from an "i am awake and physically present and this is all in my mind, hopefully" (when i was in the thick of it the paranoia of the external sometimes asserted itself).

So there are plenty of stories about people who find songs they've never heard in their dreams, or do stuff like that. What is interesting is that when you're awake, conscious, and interactive in your thinking and music manifests itself you (or at least i) end up with a very brittle construction that you need to keep a special kind of mental focus on for it to keep unfolding. This mental focus also affords at least the semblance of control over instruments and moods.

So yes, once the "how does this make sense" part kicks in, you end up tuning your brain away from the music and the music stops, but with the right mental tricks you can

Also, from my experience there was never any active input querying, this was more or less independently manifested from my brain based on the input (really quite excessive amounts of classical music/sensory depravation/scrambling of the daynight wakesleep cycle) that i had exposed it to.

I hope that was reasonably focused and relevant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It should be noted that studies looking at normal vs no/reduced antipsychotic therapy in patients with psychotic dieases have indicated that in the long term patients may do significantly better without antipsychotic therapy.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23824214](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23824214) [http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/antipsychotics-t...](http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/antipsychotics- taking-the-long-view.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER7> I often have intense fantasies about conversations with personal mentors, historical figures and/or deities (what would Buddha say? How about Einstein? etc). Obviously I can't reproduce their thoughts, but knowing a little about them, I can try to think like them

Surely they're not as visceral or reflexive as the author's voices. But I have always found value in empathizing with fantasized mentors, which has given me confidence in my opinions.

<comment><USER8> I sometimes talk to myself or to hypothetical instances of other people I know. I try to do this quietly at times since I know it might not be perceived favorably by others. Mainly I do this to verbally externalize thoughts and force them back into my auditory memory (deliberately), hopefully reinforcing or bolstering a position I want to take or a course of action I need to take later.

I hope I never lose track that I am initiating those conversations...I'm old enough to be well past the standard age for developing schizophrenia...but if I did lose track, I at least have my atheism to fall back upon and my memory of having read through Jaynes a couple of times.

<comment><USER9> > I try to do this quietly

If you hold a mobile phone to your ear, nobody will give you a second look.

<comment><USER10> Unless you get a real call while doing so.

<comment><USER11> "Please hold while I get the other line"

(what should really worry you is if you hear 'ok.')

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have this thing where I wake up at 5:00 AM and my internal monologue sounds like someone twisting the tuning knob back and forth on a radio. Anyone know a name for that?

<comment><USER13> Kind of a horrifying cacophony? Mind is racing but unfocused, and you can't force it to focus? Makes it difficult to go back to sleep?

Yeah, I get that every so often. Every couple months, maybe. No idea what it might be called.

<comment><USER14> I think have that multiple times a week; almost feels like a waterfall in my head. Sometimes a song gets stuck in my head, and I just hum it until I'm "done waking up".

<comment><USER13> Oof, the times when it's one or more songs are the _worst_. I'd forgotten about that one.

<comment><USER15> But isn't that just called 'having a song stuck in your head?'

I almost always have a song running in the background, never the same, but I wake up to a song and I go to sleep with a song.

<comment><USER16> Having a song stuck in your head is like having a working player stuck on repeat-1.

Sometimes "one or more songs" manifests not as one song at a time, but instead like a cacophony of players all stuck on repeat-1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sound different from the life experience of a woman I met recently who also had to withdraw from uni through overwork. That was over fifteen years ago. Unfortunately she was sectioned by her family (who all then skipped off to America). She's been prescribed a cocktail of psychotropic pharmaceuticals ever since. She has developed type two diabetes, disruption of thyroid activity, kidney damage, fluid retention and dangerously overweight. A once intelligent and good looking woman reduced to a shambling wreak like something out of the living dead and can't even remember what you told her yesterday. Not much of a cure after fifteen years of 'treatment'. The mental health professionals must know the damage the drugs are doing. But I guess they are making a good living out of her. \</comment><comment>-

I find that whole article manipulative and disingenuous in the extreme. A full page free advertisement for the psycho-pharma industry.

<comment><USER18> Did it ever strike you that maybe the physician recommended against the pharmaceutical treatment, but the patient still went for it anyway because "I have to do _something_ "?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> So the solution is to provide drugs that somehow deaden random neurons in somewhat random parts of the brain, and hope they don't cause massive side effects down the line?

Just like that dental article a few days ago, doesn't the current psychiatric medicine seem like using a backhoe on a flower pot? Sure, you move the soil, but you trash the porch.

<comment><USER20> > So the solution is to provide drugs that somehow deaden random neurons in > somewhat random parts of the brain, and hope they don't cause massive side > effects down the line?

The author didn't share a diagnosis, nor did he or she share the specific medication(s) that helped. Given that, how can you conclude that the drugs "deadened neurons"?

I share your skepticism of modern psychiatric medicine, and yet I think you might be missing some understanding and/or empathy for the patient. He or she is describing schizophrenia and major depressive disorder [1], and while often found together, either one can be utterly debilitating. It would not surprise me if the patient had the same concerns as you and I, but was so desperate, so hopeless that they were willing to take the risk.

[1] not a doctor, therapist, counselor or anything close

[edited to fix footnote]

<comment><USER6> I am a physician. The few studies comparing long term antipsychotic use in schizophrenia have found that people do better with low/no medication. They are more functional, have fewer relapses and better quality of life. This is still a controversial view in psychiatry but the tide may be turning. Thomas Insel, the head of the NIMH, has stated

"antipsychotic medication, which seemed so important in the early phase of psychosis, appeared to worsen prospects for recovery over the long-term" in reference to these studies.

<comment><USER6> This is a nice overview. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23512950](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23512950)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For a few years, every time my mind was momentarily still it would repeat the word "death". It never bothered me, and I always interpreted it philosophically (eg. as a meditational aid) and put it down to reading too much Buddhist literature.

<comment><USER22> Sounds a bit like OCD. If I keep my mind still, something terrible always fills the void and I have to give my consciousness something to focus on. When I was younger, I referred to this as "hearing voices"; it was a huge relief when I eventually found out about OCD and its symptoms. It's exhausting!

<comment><USER21> Thanks for your response, though I don't believe my experience matched the symptoms of OCD, as there was no O-C relation, C or D.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can't help but be reminded of Jayne's Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.

</comment><comment><USER24> We all have at least one of these voices in our heads. Like the author, some of us give them names, and fancy conversations among them. But for the most part, they simply occur to us as "I".

"I" likes to think that it's running the show, but really it's at best a commentator. All too often, that "I" fucks up and sabotages. As HenryTheHorse notes, in Buddhism it's called the "monkey mind". It's a machine that evolved for survival and reproduction.

Anyway, it's useful to distinguish "It" \-- the "monkey mind" survival machine -- from ones identity. And that's a practice to engage in. Understanding is the booby prize ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> No, hearing voices is a very different experience to the regular internal monologue that everyone has.

People hearing voices perceive those heard voices in the same way they'd perceive an actual person talking to them.

People experience different voices, but it's reasonably common to experience the voice as male and standing behind you. But the voice could be whispering (like white noise), or robotic, and it could appear to come from people actually in the room or from objects.

<comment><USER24> How do you know that? Have you experienced both? Otherwise, you're at best interpreting what others have said. Or maybe just what others have written about the subject.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've spoken to people who hear voices and they decribe the differences very clearly, and there's plenty of research about this.

<comment><USER24> Fair enough. But I've heard many sorts of voices in my head. There's the usual one that observes and echoes what I'm doing. But there are other voices that come with stress and anxiety. Sometimes they warn me, alert me to danger. Sometimes they converse, and get into arguments. Then there are other fainter voices that come with various drugs, under various circumstances.

When people seek help about such matters, they often find themselves working with therapists who have this or that conceptual framework. And so patients learn to frame their experience accordingly. Explanations are comforting.

So anyway, I'm dubious about the distinction. I think that it's an artifact of social norms and therapeutic bullshit.

<comment><USER4> In so far as what the brain could be without the strictures of society and its learned/forced behaviours, thats an interesting question that i hope no psychologist ever really goes too deep into trying to figure out. I guess parts of it can be deconstructed, if that is your cup of tea, and as long as that works for an individual then hey, thats pretty great.

What i find missing in most conceptual frameworks is a greater response to the raw constructive capacity of the human brain. Most inquiries into mental voice states (non-consciously controlled ones) deal not directly with the capacity of the brain for such activity, and its implications for phenomenology of being, but with it as an outlier to normal human function. Granted, the reason for this being that its what pays the bills, and i assume a lot of people don't want the hassle and can't really afford to spend time trying to figure it out. Thats perfectly reasonable.

As for the great phenomenology of mind/being/brain discussion, its good fun. I'm pretty much consigned to the fact that artifacts are what we have, and what we will forever work with. In my opinion the idea that the natural state is superior in matters of mind is as much an artifact of a particular social conception as all others. Often the conscious sabotages, often the unconscious does. Believing either to be naturally superior without any form of proper data sets relating to weighted choicemaking over an extensive period of time for multiple individuals is still just a statement of faith, regardless of how you assemble it. (And good luck finding the objective criteria on which judgements as to superiority of choices are concerned.)

Basically, its a tug of war between conscious and unconscious, and i think we should be glad that it is thus and not unnecessarily elevate one over the other. But hey, thats just like, my opinion man.

<comment><USER24> My framework draws primarily on Burroughs, Hofstadter, NLP and est/Landmark. Plus lots of SF, lately Greg Egan and Peter Watts. I've also practiced Aikido, and played in hardcore whitewater.

The distinction between conscious and unconscious is too simplistic, I think. There's a continuum in multiple dimensions. But I do agree that it's all useful in one way or another. It was simplistic of me to dismiss consciousness.

We're all familiar with the process of learning motor skills. Much conscious attention is required at first. We screw up and get feedback. We think about it. We listen to coaching. We keep practicing. And eventually, it becomes automatic.

I believe that the same process applies in all areas of being. It's a little hard to get, because the learning goes out of consciousness. You know what you've learned only through measuring performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I offer her kudos for suceeding!</comment>


Only You Can Prevent git Merge Commits - <AUTHOR> http://www.viget.com/extend/only-you-can-prevent-git-merge-commits/ <comment><USER2> Git tries pretty hard to avoid this now; it won't treat fast-forwards as merge commits, it will just fast-forward you. Apparently this was not always the case.

Anyway, "git pull --rebase" is your friend. (And so is "git push --force". git pull will DTRT on the other end, so this shouldn't mess anyone else up.)

<comment><USER3> _And so is "git push --force"._

Wait, what? I thought you were supposed to avoid "push --force" when pushing to a public repo?

<comment><USER4> I'm thinking that he means, if _everyone_ is doing _git pull --rebase_ then a _git push --force_ won't screwup the people you are sharing with.

My manpages still seem to warn against using both commands, but I'm locally running on a version dated 2/09/2009 (I have a cronjob at work that pulls down the latest version of git and compiles it daily).

[edit] Maybe by 'do the right thing' he means that it won't overwrite their local history (i.e. the pull/merge will fail because the histories are different)

<comment><USER2> All I know is that I "git push --force" all the time, and it has never caused anyone tracking my repositories to complain or stop sending me patches. I assume this means git handles it fine. (I just tested this, and git does handle it fine. It says "forced update", and everything works normally. The reflog stores the old pre-force-push tree still, so you are free to revert and push -f the "old" tree, if you really feel the need to.)

Anyway, "git push --force" has the potential to lose data, but less potential than "rm -rf .". You will destroy your central repository, not anyone's actual work. ("Destroy your central repository" sounds bad, but isn't. The important copy is the one on your disk.)

A clean history is better than never using "push -f" IMHO. The manual authors apparently disagree.

<comment><USER4> > _The manual authors apparently disagree._

Pushing doesn't always mean to a central repository. Since there is no distinction, you _could_ be _git push_ ing while on a branch that is tracking a topic branch in someone else's local (local to them) repo.

<comment><USER2> Pushing to non-bare repositories is always considered harmful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've read a number of times that you should never rebase commits that other people may have fetched already. Is this a possible danger here, or will git only rebase your strictly-local commits?

<comment><AUTHOR> It will only rebase your local commits.

<comment><USER6> That doesn't necessarily help you. If somebody has pulled from you, you'll rebase your supposedly local commits and screw over the person who pulled from you.

Whenever you're rebasing, you should make sure you understand how git works and what the consequences are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> it's funny how some people hate merges and want to do everything with rebasing and fast-forwarding (like this) and others hate ff-ing and think everything should be done with merges to maintain branch history (<http://nvie.com/archives/323> thinks the '--no-ff' option should be the default).

personally, i use a combination - i tend to rebase when it's only a couple of commits and i merge when there are dozens of commits off, whichever is easier/cleaner. if there are likely going to be conflicts to resolve, rebase is often a bit more difficult, and people tend to have a harder time understanding rebase conceptually so i tend not to encourage it's use to beginners. however, it's interesting to see how each person subtly differently sees how the world of VCS should be, and how Git makes it relatively easy to have such different workflows.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been using git-up (<http://github.com/aanand/git-up>) for a while now - it takes care of rebasing _all_ of your tracking branches, as well as stashing & unstashhing any local, uncommitted changes you may have lying around.</comment>


"Restoring Internet Freedom" Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017/db0427/DOC-344614A1.pdf <comment><USER2> On page 15:

> Following the 2014 Notice and in the lead up to the Title II Order, Internet > service providers stated that the increased regulatory burdens of Title II > classification would lead to depressed investment.

To support this notion, they cite two reports that purport to show that capital expenditure by ISPs went down as a result of common carrier regulation.

The first [1] has data only from 2014 on, so has hardly any "before" data; and shows wild enough variability in the "after" data that it seems unreasonable to draw any conclusions from the average value over such a short time frame.

The second [2] is a convoluted enough statistical analysis that I'm not really able to evaluate it -- though it does appear to show that telecom investment in infrastructure appears to have grown at roughly the same rate as it had since the 1980s (save for some wild up and down swings prior to 2010) -- just not as fast as an invented "control group" of imaginary telecoms that never heard they might be classified as common carriers (see figure 3.)

That's shady, right? It sure seems shady.

[1] [https://haljsinger.wordpress.com/2017/03/01/2016-broadband-c...](https://haljsinger.wordpress.com/2017/03/01/2016-broadband- capex-survey-tracking-investment-in-the-title-ii-era/)

[2] [http://www.phoenix- center.org/perspectives/Perspective17-02F...](http://www.phoenix- center.org/perspectives/Perspective17-02Final.pdf)

<comment><USER3> ISPs, like all corporations, always have the best interests of their customers as heart. In the unlikely event that an ISP abuses their position another ISP startup will immediately spring up and start a brand new network.

<comment><USER4> Yes, exactly. And now I am simply flooded with so many choices in ISPs that I hardly know which one to try next.

<comment><USER5> this and parent comment is both sarcasm right ?

<comment><USER6> This reminds me of the idea of the "irony flag" that I recall discussing with my fellow-immigrants when I arrived in the US years ago, to make its presence clear. But now, thanks to globalization, irony can be easily found in America, along with Marmite and Sam Smith's.

<comment><USER3> I apologize for the sarcasm Dboreham, I usually try to make arguments in better faith. The anti-consumerism is just so obscene that I feel like a bit of absurdity is necessary.

<comment><USER7> Ridicule and a good memmory are whats needed here. Because this is farce.

The ideal communication now would be spot on recall of previous bad behavior, interleaved with humor/abusrdity.

The current FCC's communication expects a certain context, and meta cultural structure. If those features are removed (corporate speak, governance speak), and the response are couched in absurdity+accurate facts, then they dont have much.

They're claim to authority is undermined and the legitimacy of the action is removed.

This is about the way the facts are communicated, as it is about the facts themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As soon as you see 'Freedom' in some official publication you can bet your last buck that you're _losing_ freedom.

<comment><USER9> Or someone's about to be bombed.

<comment><USER10> With the maniac currently in charge, that's also a possibility for Americans right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> They keep using terms like "Internet Freedom" or "Open Internet", but this isn't so much about the internet as it's about ISPs. They are the gatekeepers of the internet and Net Neutrality requires them to keep the gate open and free of obstacles.

<comment><USER12> In fairness, it _does_ restore the freedom of ISPs to hold you upside down and shake you until money stops falling out of your pockets. So there's that.

<comment><USER13> That is, in fact, freedom.

<comment><USER13> Meant as sarcasm. I do not favor these changes, just to be clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've been working on a tool to help people team up and discover important facts from documents like this. It's still very early going, but I've uploaded the document here: [https://docsift.com/docs/restoring-internet-freedom- notice-o...](https://docsift.com/docs/restoring-internet-freedom-notice-of- proposed-rulemaking-fcc/)

At the very least, it will provide an easy way to share links to specific pages of the documents (of course, you can add notes and annotations to the pages, and there's been some rudimentary fact extraction done already).

I just loaded the document a moment ago, so I haven't had a chance to scan through and make sure all the details are correct, but wanted to share it so folks can scan through it now.

Feedback is definitely welcome, and I'll hold off on doing non-critical deploys today so it stays up while people read it. I've only been working on it for a few weeks so there's still quite a lot to do :)

<comment><USER15> Pretty cool, you should make a dedicated post when you finish!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here is a draft of a comment I plan to submit to the FCC regarding this notice:

The draft seeks comment on the analysis in Paragraph 27. This analysis purports to show that broadband Internet service is an information service because it provides users the "capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications." The argument given is that broadband Internet service _allows_ users to do all these things. However, this is not the same as _providing the capability_ to do these things. To see why, consider that providing users Internet services over dialup phone lines also allows users to do all these things; but the phone lines themselves are telecommunications services, not information services. Why? Because providing the user dialup Internet, by itself, does _not_ provide them the capability to do all these things. That capability is provided by the endpoints: the users' computers, and the computers hosting the Internet services that the users connect to.

Exactly the same is true of broadband Internet services provided by ISPs: by themselves, they do _not_ provide users the capability to do all these things. They only provide connections between computers at the endpoints that provide those capabilities. It is the services provided by the Internet hosts that users connect to that are "information services". The broadband Internet services that allow users to connect to those hosts are telecommunications services, and should be regulated as such.

ISPs object to analyses like the one above because they claim that they also provide the actual information services--in other words, they also provide Internet hosts that function as email servers, web servers, etc. But it is obvious that those services are _separate_ from the broadband connection services provided by those same ISPs, because users can make use of the latter without making use of the former at all. I am such a user: I use the broadband Internet connection provided by my ISP, but I do not use any of the information services they provide; I do not use their email, their web hosting, etc. I use other Internet hosts provided by other companies for those services. The fact that ISPs offer information services as well as telecommunications services does not make their telecommunications services into information services; an ISP's choice of business model cannot change the nature of a particular service it provides. Broadband Internet connections are obviously a telecommunications service, and should be regulated as such, regardless of what other services ISPs would like to bundle with them. The FCC should continue to regulate broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service.

<comment><USER17> Your comment does not address the second clause of the sentence you quote: "...or making available information via telecommunications." Which is cited as a reason to classify it as an Information service.

Your third paragraph, "ISPs object to..." claims that the telecommunications portion is separable from the services provided (such as email, etc.), and yet the document you are critiquing claims the opposite in paragraph 11.

I'm trying to find the reasoning as to why they claim inseparability. It's worth reading a relevant supreme court opinion to get an understanding of the opposing viewpoint [10].

I find that paragraph 67 of the universal service report (USR) to congress from the fcc (Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service, FCC 98-67 [20], seems to be a counterpoint to yours. Specifically, the idea of an ISP apart from the physical connection -- ISPs make use of telecommunications but are not themselves the telecommunications service.

      "67. With regard to the lines leased by Internet
      service providers to provide their own internal
      networks, the analysis is straightforward. We
      explain below that the Internet service providers
      leasing the lines do not provide
      telecommunications to their subscribers, and thus
      do not directly contribute to universal service
      mechanisms."

Paragraphs 80 and 81 of the USR states

      "The provision of Internet access service
      involves data transport elements: an Internet
      access provider must enable the movement of
      information between customers' own computers
      and the distant computers with which those
      customers seek to interact. But the provision
      of Internet access service crucially involves
      information-processing elements as well; it
      offers end users information-service capabilities
      inextricably intertwined with data transport.
      As such, we conclude that it is appropriately
      classed as an "information service."

      In offering service to end users, however, they
      do more than resell those data transport
      services. They conjoin the data transport with
      data processing, information provision, and other
      computer-mediated offerings, thereby creating an
      information service."

[10][https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/04-277P.ZO](https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/pdf/04-277P.ZO) [20][https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/fc...](https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/fcc98067.pdf)

<comment><USER18> I think the report mostly agrees with the grandparent; it's just that the meaning of "ISP" has drifted over the past 20 years. Paragraph 63 lists "America Online, AT&T WorldNet, Netcom, Earthlink, and the Microsoft Network" as examples of ISPs. Paragraphs 66-68 assume that an ISP pays for service from a telecommunications carrier.

Paragraphs 75-76 use email and web hosting as examples of the services discussed in paragraphs 80-81, things the grandparent points out he doesn't use. They may be intertwined with data transport, but data transport isn't intertwined with them. Paragraph 75 does identify web access as an information service, but the same logic could be used to classify telephone service as an information service because you can use it to retrieve information from a PBX. Paragraph 81 repeats the assumption that ISPs consume telecommunications services.

In general, the report seems to assume that Congress expected information services to coexist with telecommunications services, not to replace them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is it normal for these proposals to read like a plagiarized high school report?

They repeat "open internet" 43 times (disregarding the fact that the proposal is for quite the opposite) and copy-paste whole sections around the document, over and over again.

<comment><USER20> By "open internet" they mean, "open to becoming monopolized" or "open to the highest bidder".

<comment><USER21> ISPs (at least around where I live) pretty much are already a monopoly. Can you tell me how this is will be worse then our current situation?

<comment><USER22> That fact is the basis for the problem.

Net neutrality prevents ISPs from abusing their customers.

Without net neutrality, the free market must react by creating alternatives.

Since these ISPs are essentially monopolies, the free market cannot react.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the ELI5! :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The one question that I have is how do we stop this? Do I go somewhere to vote? Do I send a letter? Do I go to petition.org or something? Can I only donate to the EFF and that's it?

What do I need to do to have a concrete affect on the outcome of this instead of just commenting here or in some other thread?

<comment><USER24> What you can do now to stop a political process that ended last November is: nothing. It's in the past.

What you can do now to impact political processes in the near future (no policy is immutable, after all) is to work in your community to build consensus around policies you believe in, so that those policies are reflected in future decisions.

I don't know when, but at some point we as a country of citizens got really bad at understanding this, it seems like!

<comment><USER25> Exactly. The thing to do is to convince people you know that this is a bad idea. I think there are lots of pro-small-business Republicans who see this as a good reduction in regulation that will benefit the dynamic tech entrepreneurship sector, and who would be surprised at its unpopularity within the hotbed of exactly those entrepreneurial techies that is HN. Most Republican voters are no friend to regulatory capture, they just haven't been convinced that's what is going on in this administration.

<comment> jay-anderson Advice I've heard is to appeal to your audience's principles (moral reframing is the term I've heard it called: [https://www.fastcompany.com/3067593/how-to- use-moral-reframi...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3067593/how-to-use-moral- reframing-to-persuade-conservatives-to-support-immigration)). In this case which principles that republicans/conservatives/etc. hold dear would provide good arguments for opposing this proposal? I don't think I have a good answer for that yet. Here are some ideas: \- Personal Freedom: This change will allow ISPs to restrict or hobble sites you choose to go to. \- Free market: This is allowing entrenched ISPs to restrict competition in what web sites we visit. Only the big players will be able to afford access artificially restricting the free market. \- Purity: From what I understand this change hinges on the ability to define a broadband ISP as an information service rather than a telecommunication service. I could see an argument here that ISPs are attempting to use a loophole to skirt the law defining the service they provide.

If anyone has ideas here I'd love to hear them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> From page 3, on the regulation of ISPs as utilities:

 _...the order has weakened Americans' online privacy by stripping the Federal Trade Commission — the nation's premier consumer protection agency — of its jurisdiction over ISPs' privacy and data security practices._

That's pretty rich, coming from the government that just overturned an Obama- era privacy ruling.

</comment><comment><USER27>
        $99/month Family Freedom package:
         - 200GB "Streaming Gigs" for up to four authorized devices
         - 100GB "Gaming Gigs" (with Super-Ping technology!)
         - 25GB "Other"
         - Unlimited email, Facebook and Snapchat!

Little glimpse in to our future, ladies and gents.

<comment><USER28> And that is when you configure an unused set-top box to stream new releases 24/7 to /dev/null.

<comment><USER29> \- drop in the bucket

\- they won't actually care

\- your taxpayer dollars will already have done (likely continue to be doing) more than enough for them in the opposite direction

\- effectively amounts to neutralizing you the way signing a petition neutralizes others

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There's a giveaway in my opinion in the length the NPRM goes to in questioning the necessity of the existing rules, and the small space afforded to providing a legal basis for enforcing them should Title II authority be revoked as proposed.

The idea seems to be: if the rules themselves (no throttling, no paid prioritization etc) are not necessary (i.e. voluntary), neither is a legal framework to support them.

So statements that net neutrality is not under fire here, only the current legal basis for it, sound pretty hollow in my opinion. By failing to provide an alternative authority to support the existing rules, they're sentencing them to unenforceability and effective repeal. (edit: grammar)

</comment><comment><USER4> This seems to be a common theme in this administration to "restore freedoms" to corporations with bald-faced lies that they restore freedoms to individuals. The current rhetoric surrounding the recent order to review many national monuments is steeped in very similar twisted logic - that somehow the land needs to be "returned to the people". But wait, wasn't that national monument set aside exactly for preserving a small chunk of pristine wilderness for "the people"?

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't think I can put up with 4 more years of these bozos.

Since I'm a nice, law-abiding citizen, I can only suggest further unearthing and bringing into the light of day all the sleaze in these people's backgrounds and getting them disqualified and removed from office.

The 2008 financial crisis should have ended a lot of sleazy careers. Instead, here we are.

There are good people on both the "liberal/progressive/whatever" side of the arbitrary political fence, and on the "small-c-conservative/values/whatever" side.

It's the sleaze. On whatever side.

Arrogant sleaze. Slime-y sleaze. Delusional sleaze. Psycho-/Socio-pathic sleaze.

Time for the War on Sleaze.

Only, we don't want war. We want reasonably rational and emotionally mature discussion and the ability to get along and get things done. And enough trust in good intentions to invest in a variety of plans and figure out _and measure_ what actually works.

And... it'd be nice to have an open network left to do this on. For a reasonable price.

P.S. Sorry for my "outburst." Just, exhausted with this whack-a-mole against moneyed self-interests that can afford to just keep trying again and again and again until they get their way.

Because, they aren't about creating the most (absolute) value. Just capturing the most (relative) value, for themselves.

<comment><USER32> > law-abiding citizen

Unfortunately, there really are enough laws that everyone is constantly breaking some. Selective enforcement can be used to shut up critics…

<comment><USER31> And part of my point is that I am not calling for anything that would invoke several of them to rain down upon me.

I only ask that the sleaze be held to the same standard...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the link for submitting comments: [https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=17-...](https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/search/filings?proceedings_name=17-108&sort=date_disseminated,DESC)

Just click "New Filing" or "New Express" depending on what kind of comment you want to leave.

We just submitted comments here in case you need ideas: [https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/DOC-56ec3d08ba000000-A.pdf](https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/DOC-56ec3d08ba000000-A.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER33> "Restoring Internet Freedom" It reminds me of some Newspeak the government in 1984 would say. Just blatantly saying the opposite of what they are doing like that will make it true.

War is Peace

Freedom is Slavery

Ignorance is Strength

<comment><USER34> No, you are the one who has redefined freedom. Freedom originally meant that you could deal with whoever you wanted on whatever terms both parties could agree on. It didn't mean the government regulating private businesses to ensure some specific outcome.

I understand why HN wants net neutrality: the majority here think that ISPs have undeserved control, and so the government needs to step in to ensure a level playing field. Still, if someone advocated "search engine neutrality", arguing that the govt should regulate Google's search results to ensure everyone had a fair chance, there would be uproar. Similarly, if someone argued for "platform neutrality", holding that every startup that offered some kind of API had to register with the gov't to ensure their services were equally available to all others, the insanity would be obvious.

<comment><USER35> The difference is a question of infrastructure. If your ISP trottles your connection you have maybe one local competitor (doing the same thing) or live without internet. Utilites are treated as public works; imagine if the power company charged higher rates depending on what electronics were used.

There simply is no comparison to regulation at a platform level and I wish people would stop using that straw-man every time they rush to defend the poor telecoms and their "freedom".

<comment><USER36> Power companies _do_ charge different rates depending on what electronics are used.

Energy utility rate structures are both complex and unique to the individual company, but at a high level different classes of consumer pay different rate plans, such as residential vs. commercial/industrial vs. agricultural, and which is ultimately determined by the type of and quantity of certain electronic devices installed on premise as is normal for that class.

With that said, as a residential consumer there is little chance that you could ever legally or physically install one of the devices at your home that would necessitate being charged a CI or agricultural rate.

And interestingly enough those rates are all regulated by very heavy weight local/state and federal regulatory commissions.

<comment><USER2> That's tiered pricing based on quantity consumed, isn't it? Which is already very much allowed for ISPs.

Net neutrality is a completely different thing. Without it, it'd be as if the electric company could charge more if you used this 700 watt toaster than if you used that 700 watt toaster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> From Page 10:

> In contrast, Internet service providers do not appear to offer > "telecommunications," i.e., "the transmission, between or among points > specified by the user, of information of the user's choosing, without change > in the form or content of the information as sent and received," to their > users. For one, broadband Internet users do not typically specify the > "points" between and among which information is sent online. Instead, > routing decisions are based on the architecture of the network, not on > consumers' instructions, and consumers are often unaware of where online > content is stored. Domain names must be translated into IP addresses (and > there is no one-to-one correspondence between the two). Even IP addresses > may not specify where information is transmitted to or from because caching > servers store and serve popular information to reduce network loads.

This is absurd. Under this logic, telephones "do not offer 'telecommunications'":

* Telephone users _never_ specify the 'specify the "points" between and among which information is sent'. When I call a particular phone number, I can't choose which cell towers are used, or what internal routing is used to connect my call.

* Users are often unaware of 'where [content] is stored'. When I place a call, I don't know if I'm calling a SIP phone, landline, cell phone, or something else entirely.

* If the existence of DNS means that the ISPs don't provide 'telecommunications', then the existence of phone directory services (e.g. Version 411) should mean that telephone companies also don't provide 'telecommunications'.

* IP addresses are _logical_ address, not physical addresses. Neither phone numbers nor IP dresses specify exactly where information will end up - a call could be handled by a phone company-provided voicemail service, or redirected to another phone entirely.

It gets worse. From the same page:

> For another, Internet service providers routinely change the form or content > of the information sent over their networks—for example, by using firewalls > to block harmful content or using protocol processing to interweave IPv4 > networks with IPv6 networks

Again, all of those items are analagous (no pun intended) to similar parts of telephone networks. Phone companies can block calls by scammers (e.g. [http://fortune.com/2017/03/24/how-t-mobile-plans-to-block- ph...](http://fortune.com/2017/03/24/how-t-mobile-plans-to-block-phone- scammers-and-crooks/)), and can change the encoding and encapsulation of the call audio as many times as they want to.

<comment><USER16> These are good points; do you mind if I add them to the draft comment I am preparing (which I've posted--in two installments--in this discussion thread)?

<comment><USER37> Go ahead! Glad to have been of help :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I feel like this belongs here: [https://twitter.com/fightfortheftr/status/855144442898132992](https://twitter.com/fightfortheftr/status/855144442898132992)

It's a disgustingly disingenuous billboard near the FCC headquarters that is being seen by many FCC employees on their commute to work.

<comment><USER2> "Tech-socialists", huh? Do we get t-shirts?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> To whom it may concern at the FCC, As the head of an ISP I must tell you that I am entirely dissatisfied with the billions of dollars I make providing a mediocre utility service with near zero competition to customers who pay for that service. I see the billions of dollars being made by Facebook and Google through innovation and user consent and I want to take that money with political and regulatory force. I'll need you to first make it entirely legal for me to capture and sell all data about my users. Not because they consent, not because they want this but because I want a new cash cow to slaughter. I'm going to use this information to become an alternative provider of targeted ads to my customers. Next, I'll need you to allow me to throttle back the speed by which customers can access my competitors services because mine aren't as good. This isn't so much a toll road as a team of aggressive traffic cops, pulling over any business making too much money on my big dumb pipe to slow them down... fine them and then let them slowly attempt to carry on. I need this all because I don't innovate, I don't like my customers or give a shit what they want. I am simply used to using raw power and corrupt regulatory force to act as a parasite extracting the maximum tariff from productive businesses, people and entrepreneurs possible while keeping some of my hosts alive... but killing the smaller ones. I am big business. I am angry because I am losing. The actual free and open internet is allowing actual free market capitalism and user choice in too many things. I used to fight this kind of thing in back rooms quietly but this fight has escalated so now I must come out in the open and ask the government publicly to please take from the poor and give to me in new ways... because the poor keep innovating their way out of the traps I set. Finally, I disrespectfully request that the rules I propose be named the exact opposite of what they stand for, so it's clear this isn't a discussion with reasonable people but a raw show of force. -Old Rich Guy

</comment><comment><USER40> The funny thing is that this will likely lead to a lot more significant losses in online privacy. The ISPs will now extort money from Google/YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, and Amazon...at least two of whom will need to track users more in order to better target ads (since they're already at max-ad-display thresholds) to increase ad yields. So to generate more revenues to feed ISP extortion, it's likely to drive companies to track you further.

</comment><comment><USER41> Read as: _Restoring Internet [Providers '] Freedom [from oversight]_.

Hypocrites.

<comment><USER42> Restoring networking equipment owner's control of their own property?

<comment><USER41> Property isn't a problem. Using it in a way that monopolizes the market is.

I.e. imagine you own a property which delivers water to the city. Saying that you can do anything you want with it is clearly a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Time to build out those mesh networks, make sure you are in the loop when your town wants to grant favor to one or the other of the carriers. Consider this the step... that wont ratchet back anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER44> Is the argument here that if "net neutrality" goes away, carriers will provide service to "poor, rural area" because they are able to serve their content better than the generally available content on the internet? Not arguing for it, just trying to understand the argument for a less "equal" internet.

Also, I thought this was how it already worked, but it was just called home cable? Don't most homes in the US got a decent hookup to their home for "cable", that usually includes an internet package?

<comment><USER32> I think the argument is this: "The best possible service for customers always necessarily comes from unregulated free-market competition. Therefore, we should remove all regulations, even if they are removed one-by-one with potential imbalances occurring in the regulatory ecosystem. Removal of any regulation is at least closer to true free market. So, we'll start with removing the regulations that my lobbyist friends identify as the ones they most want removed. It's a step in the right direction. Since fewer regulations equals more market freedom, whatever happens will necessarily be an improvement overall compared with whatever would have happened with the regulation in place."

In short: "free markets are the best because whatever result we get from whatever we choose to call free markets is, by definition, the best result."

<comment><USER22> The argument is not an argument at all, but an appeal to ideology.

Ironically, the ideology that is appealed to is the best argument for net neutrality.

<comment><USER45> > The argument is not an argument at all, but an appeal to ideology.

All arguments for policy (or action more generally) are, at root, appeals to ideology. You can't get "should do" results anywhere else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> _to preserve the future of Internet Freedom, and to reverse the decline in infrastructure investment, innovation, and options for consumers put into motion by the FCC in 2015._

There has been a decline in innovation since 2015? How did they determine that? I must be missing something...

 _Propose to reinstate the determination that mobile broadband Internet access service is not a commercial mobile service..._

Really! _Commercial_ must have a special meaning here.

</comment><comment><USER47> >We propose to return jurisdiction over Internet service providers' privacy practices to the FTC, with its decades of experience and expertise in this area.157 We seek comment on this proposal.

Somehow I feel that their "decades of experience and expertise" is not the kind appropriate for dealing with privacy on the modern internet.

</comment><comment><USER48> One thing is interesting is that Google Fiber rollout slowed down with the Net Neutrality rules. Maybe they did not see it as quite as vital to their business. Now with Net Neutrality gone, given they view an open Internet as vital to their business, they actually may give more priority to Google Fiber.

</comment><comment><USER49> This document is so incredibly professionally framed and laced with layers upon layers of spindoktering that I can't help to conclude that the FCC is intentionally violating the congressional statutes forming their mandate. Perhaps the EFF or similar should drag them in front of a judge.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here is an updated comment (thanks everyone for feedback!). Please feel free to pass this on to your elected representatives, or anyone else who you think should see it.

Re: Notice of Proposed Rulemaking – WC Docket No. 17-108

The subject notice seeks comment on the analysis provided. The following comments are hereby submitted.

Paragraph 27 purports to show that broadband Internet service is an information service because it provides users the "capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications." The argument given is that broadband Internet service _allows_ users to do all these things. However, this is not the same as _providing the capability_ to do these things. To see why, consider that providing users Internet services over dialup phone lines also allows users to do all these things; but the phone lines themselves are telecommunications services, not information services. Why? Because providing the user dialup Internet, by itself, does _not_ provide them the capability to do all these things. That capability is provided by the endpoints: the users' computers, and the computers hosting the Internet services that the users connect to.

Exactly the same is true of broadband Internet services provided by ISPs: by themselves, they do _not_ provide users the capability to do all these things. They only provide connections between computers at the endpoints that provide those capabilities. It is the services provided by the Internet hosts that users connect to that are "information services". The broadband Internet services that allow users to connect to those hosts are telecommunications services, and should be regulated as such.

ISPs object to analyses like the one above because they claim that they also provide the actual information services--in other words, they also provide Internet hosts that function as email servers, web servers, etc. But it is obvious that those services are _separate_ from the broadband connection services provided by those same ISPs, because users can make use of the latter without making use of the former at all. I am such a user: I use the broadband Internet connection provided by my ISP, but I do not use any of the information services they provide; I do not use their email, their web hosting, etc. I use other Internet hosts provided by other companies for those services. The fact that ISPs offer information services as well as telecommunications services does not make their telecommunications services into information services; an ISP's choice of business model cannot change the nature of a particular service it provides. Broadband Internet connections are obviously a telecommunications service, and should be regulated as such, regardless of what other services ISPs would like to bundle with them.

Paragraph 28 asks whether "offering Internet access is precisely what makes the service capable of 'generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information' to consumers?" The answer to this question, as noted above, is no, because all of those capabilities are not provided by the mere fact of Internet access; they are provided by the endpoint computers that implement those capabilities. The question of how those computers are connected to each other, which is the relevant question for the purpose of determining whether broadband Internet service is a telecommunications service, is a separate question from the question of what capabilities the endpoint computers provide.

Paragraph 28 also asks whether consumers could "access these online services using traditional telecommunications services like telephone service or point- to-point special access?" Obviously the answer to this question will depend on what connectivity the providers of such telecommunications services choose to provide. But that is a different question from the question of what the nature of a particular service is. Again, the question of how computers are connected to each other is separate from the question of what capabilities the endpoint computers provide.

Paragraph 29 attempts to argue, in effect, that if most Internet users rely on their ISPs for _any_ additional service beyond the bare fact of Internet connectivity--for example, DNS--then broadband Internet service must be an information service. Paragraph 29 also claims that the ISP, not the user, "specifies the points between and among which information will be transmitted", because, first, users only specify domain names, not IP addresses, and second, users do not make the routing decisions that determine the specific path information packets take through the network. Neither of these considerations affects the proper classification of broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service. Users might only specify domain names, but the _service_ of translating domain names into IP addresses is provided by an endpoint--a DNS server--not by the bare provision of an Internet connection. (And even if the ISP typically provides this endpoint, that is still a separate service from the service of providing an Internet connection, and, as above, bundling the two together cannot change the nature of the latter.) Once the DNS service has provided an IP address corresponding to a domain name to the user's computer, the user's computer, not the network, specifies that IP address as the target of information packets, so once again, it is an endpoint, not the network itself, that determines where the information goes. And routing information packets, in and of itself, is not an information service, because it does not change the information being routed; it just accomplishes the information transmission specified by the user, from one endpoint to another. The intermediate routers that pass on information packets are not endpoints: they are not specified by the user as the targets of any information, and they do not provide any of the capabilities that make an endpoint a provider of an information service.

The analysis of Paragraph 29 also fails to take into account that, if it were valid, it would apply equally well to traditional phone service, which is admitted to be a telecommunications service. Users specify phone numbers to dial, but that does not require knowledge of the physical location of the target phone (and the user will often not have such knowledge), nor does it specify the route that will be taken by the information transmitted by the call. Also, traditional phone service includes directory service (411) and other "add-ons" that go beyond the basic provision of a connection. What makes those "add-ons" telecommunications services rather than information services is that they are for the purpose of facilitating the connection (or facilitating the refusal of connections which are not desired), rather than acting on the information exchanged between the users at the endpoints.

Paragraph 30 attempts to argue that network management activities such as firewalling and IPV4 - IPV6 translation constitute changing the information being transmitted. This analysis fails in two ways. First, refusing to transmit information (e.g., a firewall blocking content deemed to be harmful) is not the same as changing it. Refusing to provide a connection to a user is not the same as changing the information transmitted by the user. Second, the "information" which is changed by such activities as IPV4 - IPV6 translation is not the information sent by the user; it is network management information which is _added_ to the information packets specified by the user, outside the user's control and indeed without the knowledge of most users (since most users are not familiar with the technical details of IP networking). These network management activities are no different from the activities routinely performed by phone networks to route calls--indeed, today the same physical infrastructure is often used to perform both functions, since the phone service backbone and the Internet backbone are in many cases the same networks. Similar remarks apply to services such as filtering by firewalls: phone networks can block calls from certain numbers, for example. Again, the key distinction which the analysis in Paragraph 30 fails to make is between "add-on" services that are for the purpose of facilitating connections, and services that are for the purpose of manipulating the information exchanged by the users at the endpoints. Only the latter are information services; the former are part of the telecommunications service that provides the connection.

In the light of all of the above considerations, the FCC should continue to regulate broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service.

<comment><USER16> I have submitted this as a filing to the FCC. When it becomes visible on their site I will post a link to the filing.

<comment><USER16> Link here:

[https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filing/10427019504580](https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filing/10427019504580)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Further comment after reading more of the notice:

The draft also seeks comment in Paragraph 28 on whether "offering Internet access is precisely what makes the service capable of 'generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information' to consumers?" The answer to this question, as noted above, is no, because all of those capabilities are not provided by the mere fact of Internet access; they are provided by the endpoint computers that implement those capabilities. The question of how those computers are connected to each other is a separate question from the question of what capabilities they provide.

Paragraph 28 also asks whether consumers could "access these online services using traditional telecommunications services like telephone service or point- to-point special access?" Obviously the answer to this question will depend on what connectivity the providers of such telecommunications services choose to provide. But that is a different question from the question of what the nature of a particular service is.

Paragraph 29 attempts to argue, in effect, that if most Internet users rely on their ISPs for _any_ additional service beyond the bare fact of Internet connectivity--for example, DNS--then broadband Internet service must be an information service. Paragraph 29 also claims that ISPs, not users, "specifies the points between and among which information will be transmitted", because, first, users only specify domain names, not IP addresses, and second, users do not make the routing decisions that determine the specific path information packets take through the network. Neither of these considerations affects the proper classification of broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service. Users might only specify domain names, but the _service_ of translating domain names into IP addresses is provided by an endpoint--a DNS server--somewhere, not by the bare provision of an Internet connection. (And even if the ISP typically provides this endpoint, that is still a separate service from the service of providing an Internet connection, and, as above, bundling the two together cannot change the nature of the latter.) Once the DNS service has provided an IP address to the user's computer, corresponding to a domain name, the user's computer, not the network, specifies that IP address as the target of information packets, so once again, it is an endpoint, not the network itself, that determines where the information goes. And routing information packets, in and of itself, is not an information service, because it does not change the information being routed; it just realizes the information transmission specified by the user, from one endpoint to another. The intermediate routers that pass on information packets are not endpoints.

Paragraph 30 attempts to argue that network management activities such as firewalling and IPV4 - IPV6 translation constitute changing the information. This analysis fails in two ways. First, refusing to transmit information (e.g., a firewall blocking content deemed to be harmful) is not changing it. Refusing to provide a connection to a user is not the same as changing the information transmitted by the user. Second, more generally, the "information" which is changed by such activities as IPV4 - IPV6 translation is not the information sent by the user; it is network management information which is _added_ to the information packets specified by the user, outside the user's control and indeed without the knowledge of most users (since most users are not familiar with the technical details of IP networking). These network management activities are no different from the activities routinely performed by phone networks to route calls--indeed, today the same physical infrastructure is often used to perform both functions, since the phone service backbone and the Internet backbone are in many cases the same networks.

<comment><USER16> Updated comment here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14215198](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14215198)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> That URL seems dead.

This one works: [https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344614A1.p...](https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344614A1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER51> PBS NewsHour: FCC chair Ajit Pai explains why he wants to scrap net neutrality [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q5_oV4JB10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q5_oV4JB10)

</comment><comment><USER52> Does being reclassified as "Title 1 - Information Services" put them under the regulatory authority of the FTC instead of the FCC?

</comment><comment><USER53> Time for another march? We are having them weekly as of late. Organized anger can be a powerful tool.

<comment><USER54> "Paid protesters march for internet socialism. Sad!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> As someone who feels like this might be a good thing, can someone politely explain the objections?

<comment><USER55> My (and many others') objections are that ISP's in the US have been known for a while to be lagging behind the curve across the world in terms of quality of service and pricing. On top of that, they actively lobby against competing startup ISP's and pull dirty tricks to prevent anyone else from entering the market. Now, they want to roll back laws preventing them from charging for traffic based on content. This will make it more difficult to guarantee consistent quality of service to consumers and may also prevent new technology businesses from getting off the ground. It may even lead to a de facto form of censorship if content that large players don't agree with can be throttled. I've heard the argument that it's their business and they can do what they want. The problem with this, however, is that they are providing a service that is essential and not a luxury. Historically, organizations whose main purpose is to benefit shareholders have not been very good at keeping the public's interests in mind. That's why the government needs to regulate services which are essential and why the ISP's have no argument here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Why isn't this called "Protecting the Internet for Patriots"?

<comment><USER32> Because that would sound like foreign terrorists are the concern. For _this_ issue, the goal is to present the enemy as being government and anyone who supports government regulation of any sort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I posted a comment! Hooray for participation in government.

</comment><comment><USER22> > Propose to return authority to the Federal Trade Commission to police the > privacy practices of Internet service providers

This must have been the promise during S. J. Res 34.

</comment><comment><USER57> Anyone notice that they took the PDF down?

<comment><USER58> The OP linked to their daily feed which isn't quite an anchor. The actual docket landing page is at [0] and pdf at [1]. Their "Fact Sheet" is also at [2] and [3].

[0] - [https://www.fcc.gov/document/public-notice-filing- comments-r...](https://www.fcc.gov/document/public-notice-filing-comments- restoring-internet-freedom)

[1] - [https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344623A1.p...](https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344623A1.pdf)

[2] - [https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344592A1.p...](https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344592A1.pdf)

[3] - [https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344592A1.p...](https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344592A1.pdf)

@mods could the OP URL get updated to the anchor url for folks searching later?

-edit, formatting

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> Restoring corporate tyranny.

</comment><comment><USER60> ISPs should be able to manage their networks without government incompetence.

As smart as everyone here is when it comes to building internet endpoints, most of these comments betray an utter lack of understanding of what goes on in the ISP level.

<comment><USER32> could you be specific about the "most of the comments"? Most of what I see isn't even _relevant_ to the technical on-the-ground details about ISPs. Most comments are just about the idea of whether ISPs that have monopoly/oligopoly status will be permitted to violate net neutrality. What of "what goes on in the ISP level" that is even insightful to bring up?

<comment><USER61> He's saying that if he wants to sell "Chicken Noodle Soup" with zero chicken in it, that's his God given right and if we could only remove those pesky regulations the free market will set us free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> And so the internet dies...

</comment><comment><USER63> Some of the first speech that censored will be by freedom loving ISPs will be hate speech and pro-nazi related speech, a bit ironic</comment>