We are remodelling our kitchen - we are now three months into chaos. For various reasons we decided to take temporary residence (refuge?) in a house we rented on the beach.
That house is serviced by a cable-TV based ISP, a very large one.
I am appalled at the garbage quality of the service. Anyone who wanted to try VOIP would find it impossible to comprehend the conversation due to the incredible jitter. TCP connections stall and retreat into deep congestive backoff due to lost packets and the jitter.
I noticed that the cable modem was blinking up a storm. So I disconnected the NAT/Router and plugged my laptop into the raw packet feed coming out of the ISP and took a look. Gack! There were hundreds of ARP requests every second, there were unanswered DHCP queries, there were lost routers (some IPv6) looking for peers.
I can only imagine what the non-broadcast traffic must be like. On most nets, the non-broadcast portion is considerably larger than the broadcast component.
This ISP advertises super-fast download rates (as compared to the typical ADSL). And yes, on occasion I've seen up to about 8mbits/second (which I consider rather a yawn compared to the 100 mbits/second I believe is the minimum for modern networking.) But the usable portion of the bandwidth is severely compromised by the ISP squeezing far too many users onto the shared cable plant.
There is a concept in the law of sales of goods called "merchantability". This means that the product being sold is, among other things, "fit for the ordinary purposes for which such goods are used". There is a related notion, "fitness for a particular purpose", which kicks in under certain circumstances. There are implied warranties for both "merchantability" and "fitness for a particular purpose".
To some extent these warranties can be excluded from a contract. And these warranties are probably not applicable to internet service - it being a service and not involving the sale of a "good". And, if there were a scintilla of a chance that internet service might have to meet these warranties, I'd suspect that this ISP would have plenty of language in its agreement to that minimizing or eliminating any such warranties.
But whether or not these warranties apply or have been excluded, it is my opinion, based on my observations, that this ISP is delivering a very poor quality product.
I wonder to what degree other ISP's are selling consumers an internet product that is equally shoddy?
I saw the press release from EFF today regarding their defense of a person who linked from a web blog to an "internal" document by the producer of a prescription drug.
I don't know the case or its merits, although I generally believe that the EFF stands on the right side of most things.
My own feeling is that the drug producers simply do not publish adequate information for physicians or patients to evaluate the benefits and risks.
I had a recent very bad experience with a prescription drug - Cymbalta (duloxetine hydrochloride).
This drug is often prescribed as an antidepressant. It is also prescribed for neuropathic pain. It's "on label" use is for diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, but physicians are able to-, and do-, prescribe it for other kinds of neuropathic pain, although that is "off label" (and insurance companies often use that as an excuse to avoid paying for it.)
For the last year I have had severe neuropathic pain that has significantly interfered with pretty much everything. (I undergo surgery for it this week.)
In an effort to avoid surgery we went through the whole standard litany of things from physical therapy and osteopathy to spinal epidural injections (made me sick - and even gave me hiccups for three days!), oral anti-inflammatories, acupuncture (Adam White in Capitola is great!, but the relief was only temporary), etc, etc.
I've been poked, pinned, electro-shocked, and even put onto something that I swear is the modern day version of "the rack".
So the doctor suggested Cymbalta.
I read all the normal papers that come with the drug and that are on the web.
So, feeling that I had made an informed choice, I went ahead and one evening took a tablet.
My gawd! The next 12 hours were a horror of anxiety and psychotic delusions. I had enough contact with reality to realize that I was in trouble, but I was unable to articulate that realization and ask for help. It was a very scary experience. I did not take another dose. But I did re-read the materials from the drug vendor and did not see anything that would have warned me.
Two weeks later the continued pain drove me to consider whether my bad experience with Cymbalta was perhaps a fluke caused by something else.
So I tried again. Same horrible result.
I have since learned that others have had similar psychotic episodes from even a single dose of Cymbalta.
I have since mentioned my experience to several doctors and physicians. Most were interested; I got the impression that some had already heard similar reports.
I consider Cymbalta to be dangerous - I can readily comprehend that someone under its effects might jump off a bridge or otherwise harm themselves.
Now, I realize that good is often leavened with bad and that drugs are not panaceas and that they come with risks. I am glad we have access to modern drugs - the world is a better place because of them. However, it is my belief that doctors and patients do not have adequate information about the side effects of Cymbalta.
Movies and books to the contrary, I don't believe that the pharmaceutical industry is necessarily evil, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. And I fully understand that they must recoup their expenses and make a reasonable profit.
However, I feel that because it is so very important that doctors, patients, and researchers have access to full data, even if it is anecdotal and obtained through less that perfectly controlled experiments, that the scope of copyright protection afforded to documents related to prescription drugs should be measured using a broad scale of social value rather than any limited scale of commercial protection.
And thus I feel that in the case that the EFF is undertaking that there is great merit in giving the benefit of the copyright doubt to the web blogger who links to drug information.
Certainly had I known in advance that Cymbalta might cause me to become a raving, psychotic lunatic, capable of drug induced self-harm, I might have avoided my first encounter with it. I would have most definitely have avoided my second.
Today on Dave Farber's IP list, someone revived the ancient argument that ICANN imposes limits on the number of top level domains (TLDs) because to have more than a few will cause DNS to wobble and cause the internet to collapse.
Although long discredited, that argument hangs around like a zombie.
ICANN has never been able to adduce a shred of proof that there is anything to support that assertion. Yet, on the opposite side we have both mental and empirical tests (real software running on real computers) that show that DNS roots can readily hold and handle millions upon millions of TLDs. No one has demonstrated a concrete upper limit.
As a practical matter, it is likely that administrative overhead and risks of human and procedural error will be the limiting factor. But that would be a very soft limit, and the numbers of top level domains would still be huge compared to what we have today - measured in millions rather than today's hundreds.
The notion of imposing artificial limits has no place - one may as well argue that because have a pretty decent word-based search engine in Google, that we should not allow IP address space to be consumed (and thus wasted) by would-be competitors, such as Yahoo or Ask - or the next set of university kids who come up with a better way.
Looking back at 2006 we can see how the once flexible domain name system continues to be reduced by ICANN to a money pump for the few lucky ICANN chosen top level domain registries and a lifetime employment plan for intellectual property attorneys.
And yet as year 2007 begins, the ability of the internet to survive natural or human catastrophes is no greater than it was at the end of 2005. Indeed, through neglect and increased loading, the critical infrastructures that hold the internet together, particularly the domain name system, are more vulnerable than ever. ICANN, which was to have been our protective fireman, defending the domain name system against technical instability has lost any memory of that role and has left the technical stability of the domain name system to luck. We should thank our lucky stars that the root server operators have served us so well, so far.
And as year 2007 begins at least one thing remains the same: were ICANN to vanish (in a cloud of money colored smoke) the internet would keep on ticking, packets would continue to flow from source IP addresses to destination IP addresses, domain name queries would be received by domain name servers and answered with alacrity and accuracy. Only a few domain name businesses would notice But we all would be annoyed by the loud wailing noise emitted by the trademark industry.
ICANN, like all 501(c)(3) Federally tax exempt bodies, must file a yearly report, called a Form 990, that describes their finances and what they have done to continue to deserve exception from taxation.
ICANN's year 2005 Form 990 is up on the web via guidestar.com (free subscription and login required).
The form asks the following question:
Q. All organizations must describe their exempt purpose ...
Here is ICANN's full and complete answer:
A. TO ASSIST IN THE DESIGN, DEVELOPMENT AND TESTING OF THE MECHANISMS, METHODS AND PROCEDURES NECESSARY FOR OVERSIGHT OF THE ROOT SERVERS AND OTHER POLICIES TO MAINTAIN UNIVERSAL CONNECTIVITY OF THE INTERNET.
Yes, you read it right, ICANN is claiming that it is involved with oversight of the DNS root servers. That is flat out false. About the most that ICANN does is to talk to root server operators on occasion. But if that minor level of talking deserves an exemption from Federal taxes, than I think that perhaps many of us also ought to have such an exemption.
I am disgusted by those signing statements that our president often publishes when he signs legislation into law.
Take for example the recent Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act and the signing statement.
Under our Constitution the job of Congress is to say what is to be done and the job of the President is to faithfully do it.
In signing statements our president is saying he will not obey his oath to "faithfully execute" his job.
Instead he is saying that he has legislative authority that trumps that of Congress. What hogwash. If Congress enacts a law that says that the President has to dress in a clown suit when flying on the airplane (Air Force One) that Congress has provided (and which we taxpayers pay for) then the President would be obligated to wear a clown suit.
Most of us believe that the judiciary should refrain from making laws and should instead endeavor to apply laws to concrete cases. The president and his party are among those least willing to give any flexibility to the judiciary on this matter. Yet, our president is legislating with these signing statements.
And let's not even begin to go into the inane claims of presidential authority emitting from the nonsense called the "unified executive".
Were I in Congress I would suggest that Congress pass a resolution indicating that it is the sense of Congress that these "signing statements" should be given no weight whatsoever by the Federal judiciary when trying to ascertain legislative intent when resolving ambiguities in the law.
If our president were trying to be constructive he could point out perceived ambiguities during the legislative process and ask Congress to resolve them.