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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I agree with the other commenter that it sounds a bit like the Fediverse. It’s interesting to think about. I think part of what draws people to any messaging platform is continuity with the other services on the platform. The actual messaging experience can be duplicated or exceeded by anyone, like how RCS has made the humble text message more powerful and compatible than anyone at Apple could comprehend.

    With this idea, would any messaging platform that became ultra successful be then required to allow other platforms to message their users? Which platforms are allowed? How is spam managed? What about special privacy features like what’s built in to Signal or Telegram? How do the platforms manage linking to content embedded in other parts of the platform (think Instagram posts/reels/messenger).

    There are a lot of difficult issues to work out.



  • No shit, it’s the monopoly game all over again. I worked for a local provider for 4 years in engineering. I would personally like to see greater restrictions on ISP M&As, investor ownership of communication providers, and media company owners of communication providers.

    At my company, we were purchased by another provider that had mismanaged themselves to the brink of bankruptcy only to be saved by some investors at the last second. Our staff was cut by about half. A year or so after that we were bought by the biggest bunch of soulless monsters I’ve ever worked with. From there the company went growth-by-acquisition crazy, purchasing every Mom and Pop provider they could get their hands on.

    Years later I was working an IP address consolidation project when I came across an FCC filing from the late 90s written by former management at my original company asking the FCC to reject the GTE purchases that resulted in Verizon as we know it today. I was amazed, and also saddened. It was all coming true.





  • A few years back I worked for a regional Internet service provider in the northeast US. One day a guy who did finance and regulatory work for us asked me how many of our customer point to point links with A and Z locations in different states were either dedicated to voice traffic or carried more than x percent voice traffic.

    After asking a few thought provoking questions like if the percentage was based on traffic measurements or link capacity and how we would make that calculation on a circuit with asymmetrical speeds, I explained that it would be nearly impossible for us to tell unless the customer declared it to us.

    He then told me that there was some new federal tax on interstate circuits carrying voice traffic and that if we couldn’t tell if a customer circuit was carrying voice traffic or not, that we would just need to start charging them all the tax no matter what. It might even apply to regular Internet services where the edge router and customer site were in different states.

    And that is the story of how the ISP that I worked for added yet another fee to all of its customers.






  • Try not to dismiss everything so quickly. I came up with those in 5 minutes but a committee of experts could find many more. When the exceptions were written they had a reason. A few examples:

    • In a traffic fixture, the heat that the incandescent bulb generates often serves to melt ice, and early traffic fixtures with LEDs did have icing problems. Replacing the fixtures would represent a significant burden.

    • An LED wouldn’t survive in an oven and oven lights aren’t on for very long either so what would it matter?

    • A bulb in a refrigerator could be exposed to condensation.

    • Dimmer compatible LEDs require pulse width modulated dimmers. Incandescent dimmers are often resistance dimmers.

    The exception are there to make sure that a $1 part doesn’t render a $1000 appliance inoperable. Replacing the appliance would undoubtedly generate a ton more carbon than using an incandescent and the rule doesn’t say that LED bulbs are prohibited just that incandescent bulbs for those uses are not yet banned.

    I’ll also point out that LEDs are made of plastic and essentially become ewaste at the end of their life so there is a trade off to consider too.