And people wonder why my wife and I homeschool our children...

JED@55:

Blog Commenting, by design, is an intellectually lazy excersize, a diversion.

OMG. someone is WRONG on the internet....Resisting that urge to correct is simply, useless, as I have proven by doing exactly what I criticize, thus overloading my irony circuit and pzzz..tt..!!))**&^^%$$$

@ 46 - My argument is that the large providers shunt all internet-based traffic off to the worst tier of service, and that providing internet-based businesses a way of getting out of that tier is a good thing.

Tell me what is flawed?

#40 -- Yeah, neutrality means that everything gets treated equally. Your internet traffic is treated as equally crappy as everyone else's.

Carriers only carry internet traffic because they have to by law, not that they really want to.

Seriously people, none of these carriers are any obligations whatsoever to provide you any reliability, and they don't. If you want reliability, be prepared to pay more for it.

If you think about it, the whole original point of the internet was survivability, not performance. That is the whole reason TCP/IP was designed - to overcome the gap between survivability and reliability.

But whatever, this is for the politicians and academics to decide. I will continue to grouse that you people are hogging to much bandwidth...

I am a network engineer. (NAL)

Everything today is going over an MPLS backbone at the big Tier 1 provider level. ALL of it, business traffic, internet traffic, home DSL traffic.

Businesses today pay providers for thier WAN traffic to have some kind of SLA across these MPLS pipes. (though rarely are they peered with other major carriers...)

ALL internet traffic *today* is tagged "BE" across these major pipes. BE stands for Best Effort. If the business class customers are clogging the pipes then the QoS terms kick in, and ALL, I repeat ALL network traffic is reprioritized to make way for the business customer WAN traffic.

The above paragraph means that we already have QoS marking internet-based traffic as the least cared for, least reliable transport lane available for customers. To put it more bluntly, all internet traffic is treated equally crappy.

So why, when these companies offer to major internet-facing businesses, a better deal than being treated as the worst crap on thier pipes, does everyone freak out as if thier much coveted "internet traffic" is going to somehow be negatively impacted, when it is already given the worst treatment available?

Your internet-based traffic has NO SLA WHATSOEVER, and no one is under any obligation to reliably deliver it. And you people are complaining about getting better terms of service?

It's just goofy.

reminds me of a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Far Rockaway of the Heart".

Possibly the best book of poetry in the last 60 years.

Power Tubes can only take so much at the top. I had a 50 watt bassman ten that needed retubing every year as I had to constantly drive the hell out of it to keep up with larger wattage amps. At 15 watts, this thing would have to be driven HARD to keep up with say, a Fender Super Reverb. This would most assuredly limit the lifespan of the power tubes.

The preamps would probably last 20 years, but the power tubes will not.

What happens when those NOS hard to find Power Tubes need servicing?

I think this is a joke BTW.

We have mainly wooden toys for our kids. They love them. For that matter they love the plastic toys too.

I keep telling my wife that we should get them acorns, pecans, rocks and sticks next year for christmas, as they play with that stuff for hours on end too.

Kids are good at making anything play (including hammers).

Considering the federal gubment *gave* the Telco's Billions of tax dollars in the 90's to build out the infrastructure that makes them hundreds of billions per year today, I'd say that ATT ain't got that right.

It's our national data infrastructure, our tax dollars provided the seed money to finance it, and they are only there to maintain it for us and make themselves a little kitty while doing so.