Well, this is a pleasant surprise. This weekend, we ran a story about the carrier situation in the The Netherlands. The largest carrier in The Netherlands has announced it's going to charge for services like IM and Skype, while the other two carriers were thinking about following suit. I stated I expected little from our politicians - but boy, turns out I was wrong. Basically the entire lower house - left to right, progressive to conservative - is not happy with the carriers' moves, and are now exploring options to prohibit them from implementing their plans - including the option to embed net neutrality in our telecommunications act. Go go... Politicians?!
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Member since:2009-09-17
Member since:2009-05-19
Well apparently he thinks he can start his own ISP just like opening a corner coffee shop. The funny thing, the ones that he is defending will fight tooth and nail to make sure that their monopolies/oligopolies stay in place.
Since actual competition has a negative effect on profits and we all know that profit is king in capitalism...
Member since:2009-03-27
Here in the US, we recently had a case where William Cronon, a historian from the University of Wisconsin, ran an op-ed piece in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/opinion/22cronon.html) in response to the labor unrest in his home state (the governor of Wisconsin and Republicans in the state were pushing to virtually ban teachers in the state from unionizing as part of a "budget balancing" maneuver). He didn't take sides, but rather argued that Gov. Walker's position went against deeply-rooted Wisconsin traditions--shared by Republicans and Democrats alike--of political transparency and cooperation.
What was the response? The Wisconsin Republican Party filed a freedom of information request to access all the e-mails sent from and received by Cronon's university e-mail account. How is this possible? Because Cronon, who works for a public university, is a civil servant of the state, and therefore his e-mail is technically public property.
Regardless of how one interprets Cronon's original piece, it's obvious how such an abuse of power made big waves in the news here. Not only was someone's private correspondence forcibly made public through a legal loophole, but Cronon is a tenured faculty member. The whole point of being a professor with tenure is to be able to make independent statements even if society might not want to hear them. Plus, the move was carried out by a major political party, which has deep implications. One can see how the freedom of information request is tantamount to a political attack on an intellectual and freedom of speech.
None of this is to say that the request is "illegal". My point is that--and apparently this is a worldwide phenomenon--people are so "legally-bound" in their thinking that they can't imagine that laws and the principles behind them change or that we should change them. Yes, the network is the telco's, so I guess one should be able to do what one wants with one's private property, or in the case of Cronon, any citizen from Wisconsin should in principle be able to access (according to one interpretation) the e-mails of a public employee. But do we want to live in that world? If yes, enjoy your status quo. If no, gain power and pressure your politicians into doing The Right Thing. Or, once in a blue moon, you might just be able to get by with the politicians doing it by themselves.
It's called democracy, baby. (According to one interpretation ;-)
Edited 2011-04-28 01:54 UTC
Member since:2005-07-12
Member since:2007-03-26
Should your phone company be able to collect a surcharge from you if you called your local pizza place to have them deliver a pizza?
In a way, this does happen with different dialling codes, premium / free phone numbers and so forth.
However I've never really agreed with a lot of phone tariffs either.
Member since:2010-05-06
You pay for using their network to access the internet. They want to charge for free of cheaper services provided by others, that happen to compete with their overpriced products in their broken business-model, that only exists because all cellphone providers do the same thing? I mean: €0.10+ for a 160 character text-message which is not even guaranteed to arrive?
Member since:2007-09-22
bits are bits, if I download 10 ebook PDF's or 1 YouTube video, to the telco this should not matter and they should not distinguish between them.
VoIP might be a problem for them, because they also sell voice services themselfs.
But their are rules for landlines, so probably for mobile it should be the same.
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Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
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"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
2008-12-10
The network belongs to the telco, so why are they not allowed to have their network in their own way? I don't see how this is different to me putting up a squid proxy in a corporate network to keep users from accessing youtube.
It is the consumers choice to use a telco (and we have so many choices in the Netherlands). If our government wants to dictate the information infrastructure then they ought to own it.