Children detained at Guantanamo Bay

The London Independent reported yesterday that more than 60 detainees at Guantanamo Bay were under 18 at their time of capture, including some boys as young as 14. One child prisoner, Mohamed el Gharani, was accused of involvement in a 1998 al Qaeda plot in London, even though he was 12 years old at the time and living with his parents in Saudi Arabia.

British officials say the UK had been assured that juveniles would be held in a special facility called "Camp Iguana," but only three juveniles were treated as children.

A senior Pentagon spokesman says that no one being held now at Guantanamo Bay is a juvenile, though London lawyers say there are at least 10 still being held who were 14 or 15 when captured. (Those statements are not contradictory.)

Dishonesty from Paul Nelson

Paul Nelson, who has usually been known as one of the few honest major advocates of intelligent design at the otherwise disreputable Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, has fallen temptation to make his case stronger by being deceptive about what one of his opponents said in a debate. Ed Brayton gives the full account.

UPDATE (May 30, 2006): The discussion continues, with Paul Nelson's involvement in the comments, here.

Wine shipping in Arizona to become legal

Despite the attempted astro-turfing by beverage distributors, Arizona Senate Bill 1276 has passed. Actually, the wholesalers agreed to a compromise--the bill only allows shipping by wineries that produce less then 20,000 gallons of wine per year (and which obtain an Arizona domestic farm winery license and pay state taxes). The fact that the wholesalers agreed to a compromise based on wine production shows that they didn't really believe their own arguments that this created a new risk of underage drinking.

More on last-mile options in Phoenix

I've posted this as an update on the original post, but it's also worth bringing out as a separate posting. I've made a few minor changes here (e.g., to insert the point about Cable America that is made elsewhere in the original post).

Douglas Ross (directorblue) has called this list "bogus" and claimed that only two of the options (Qwest and Cox) actually count. He rightly dismisses Cable America from the list on the grounds that Cox entered into an agreement to acquire them in January of this year--I grant his point and that reduces the number of broadband providers by one.

He dismisses Covad because it uses Qwest last-mile wires, but goes on to say, inconsistently, that he would count other cable resellers if the Brand X decision had gone the other way and providers like Cox were forced to enter into relationships like Covad has with Qwest. My observation is that if those reseller relationships exist and the reseller provides access to its own Internet network, then that is enough to foster a competitive environment. It doesn't matter whether it's government-mandated, it matters whether it exists.

Doug rejects all the wireless options out of hand on the grounds of Verizon's EVDO terms-of-service. (His section about why WiMax isn't viable doesn't actually discuss WiMax at all, only EVDO terms-of-service.) He misses the point that Sprint Broadband and Sprint EVDO are *two different services*--he doesn't actually give a reason to reject Sprint Broadband.

He says he doesn't understand why I put the City of Tempe's municipal WiFi network in the list--I did so because Tempe is right in the middle of the Phoenix metropolitan area (and noted Chandler's metro WiFi in-development, which is just south of Tempe, for the same reason). These are real options for people moving to the Phoenix area and for anyone who is willing to move to get different broadband service. (And certainly broadband options in an area are an important factor in choosing a place to live.)

Finally, he rejects HughesNet because it is unsuitable for VOIP or P2P. At least he doesn't say that HughesNet should be mandated to change the laws of physics in order to provide those services under net neutrality.

Doug's position on net neutrality appears to be that nothing counts as broadband unless it supports every application he wants to use. But it's important to note that the net neutrality bills in Congress *do* count all these options and place regulations on them--they count anything as broadband that is greater than 200kbps in one direction, whether wired or wireless. I don't see Doug volunteering to exempt things he doesn't count as valid broadband options from broadband net neutrality restrictions.

It appears to me that Doug's position is that whoever builds an infrastructure capable of supporting what he wants has to provide it to him, without recovering the costs of that infrastructure by charging any third parties. But I bet he also is unwilling to pay an unsubsidized rate to use such a service.

(UPDATE: I was just looking at Doug's blogroll, and he's pretty strong evidence that net neutrality positions don't necessarily correlate with political positions. Doug's political blog links include Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, and the dishonest nutcases at "Stop the ACLU.")

Dave Siegel on QoS and net neutrality

Dave Siegel has given a very brief introduction to QoS (with some specifics about how it's engineered into Global Crossing's network today) and chimed in on the net neutrality debate.

A bit more detail about how QoS has been a problem in some networks but successfully engineered into Global Crossing's network can be found in this presentation by Dr. Xiao Xipeng of Alcatel, "The Elusive QoS" (PDF). Xiao Xipeng was one of the designers of QoS for Global Crossing and is the author or co-author of numerous IETF standards for QoS.

Good Math, Bad Math blog on Dembski's "Searching Large Spaces"

I'm about a month late in linking to this, but Mark Chu-Carroll has done a good job of debunking the Dembski's "Searching Large Spaces: Displacement and the No Free Lunch Regress." He shows that Dembski's use of the NFL theorems is dishonest and inappropriate (even after he's repeatedly been told that, even by the discoverer, David Wolpert), involves jargon-filled misdirection, and proves nothing.

Save the Internet: Fighting astroturf with astroturf

As the InOpinion blog has pointed out, Save the Internet-generated form letters have been published as letters to the editor here, here, and here. This is ironic given their complaints about astroturf by "Hands Off The Internet."

InOpinion has a project to identify astroturf where it appears, which appears to be nonpartisan.

35th Skeptics Circle

I've been a bit lax on reporting blog carnivals... the 35th Skeptics Circle is up at Skeptico's blog, and includes a contribution from Einzige.

Consumer broadband last-mile competition in the Phoenix metropolitan area

Net neutrality advocates claim that telcos (meaning the local telco providers) have a "virtual monopoly" on consumer broadband, or that they have a duopoly with the cable companies. In many regions, this is true, or nearly so (thus the "virtual" qualifier). (Note, however, that the statement becomes transparently false if it's not restricted to consumer broadband. There are far more options for Internet service for businesses, especially businesses that can put equipment into colo facilities.)

But if you look at the metropolitan Phoenix area, there are quite a few competing consumer broadband providers, e.g.:

* Qwest, the Regional Bell Operating Company formerly known as U.S. West, provides DSL services (as well as higher bandwidth wired connections from fractional T1 and up, and I think they still offer ISDN). This is one of the evil telcos that is enemy number one for many net neutrality advocates.
* Covad, a DSL provider that uses Qwest's last-mile network in Phoenix. In 2003 Covad acquired all of Qwest's business DSL customers, and it appears that they will or have exited the consumer broadband market--however, they can provide business-class DSL service to my residence (which is interesting because Qwest says they can't). Covad is also actively pursuing WiBro (wireless broadband, a Korean standard) and WiMax (wireless broadband, an Intel standard that will now be compatible with WiBro).
* Cox Communications, a cable company, provides cable modem services. (They also have higher speed connections for businesses.) Cox has done very well in recent years in taking away customers from Qwest for voice telephone services, as well as out-competing Qwest's DSL offering for consumer Internet access. I currently use Cox Business Services to my home.
* Cable America, a competing cable company, provides cable modem services in parts of the east Valley. (UPDATE May 27, 2006: As Douglas Ross (directorblue) has pointed out, Cox entered into an agreement to acquire Cable America in January 2006, so this doesn't really count as an independent broadband provider.)
* Sprint Broadband, a long distance and wireless provider, offers a point-to-point wireless broadband service (previously People's Choice, which Sprint acquired). Sprint also offers EV-DO mobile wireless service.
* Alltel, a wireless provider, offers EV-DO mobile wireless service (which is actually using Sprint's EV-DO network).
* Verizon Wireless, a wireless provider, offers EV-DO (3G) mobile wireless service.
* HughesNet, a satellite-based wireless provider (previously DirecWay, and DirecPC before that), offers satellite connectivity (with high latency as a drawback imposed by the laws of physics).
* City of Tempe municipal wireless service, provided and managed by NeoReach. Similar service is being deployed to the City of Chandler, also by NeoReach.

There are no doubt others I've missed--if you're willing to pay for business service, many providers can get that service to your home, which includes services like a T1 connection (where your provider, if not Qwest, will have to pay monthly local loop charges to Qwest and pass that along in your bill) and may include other sources of wireless service. When I had a Global Crossing T1 to my home, the local loop costs were slightly over $200/mo--consumer broadband, by contrast, costs substantially less for more bandwidth, at least in the downstream direction, when delivered to a residence. On the other hand, bandwidth costs in a colo facility can be as low as $10/Mbit/mo, in quantity, i.e., $1000/mo for a 100Mbps Ethernet port. You pay more per Mbit to get data to your residence because of the costs of getting the data out to all those residences and the overhead of dealing with a lot more customers whose individual bills are much smaller than those of a business, and who, on the average, need a lot more hand-holding and support.

Salt River Project, a power generation and transmission company (and a water delivery/irrigation company) that operates in Phoenix, also has about 1,000 route-miles of fiber throughout the city. It resells its excess capacity to businesses (including Qwest) from the entity SRP Telecom. I don't know if they would ever consider using their network to provide consumer services themselves, but there's clearly the potential for a consumer broadband provider to purchase capacity on their network in order to move data around the city.

In Phoenix, if one provider decided to start blocking access to or degrading certain kinds of services that their customers want, there are multiple alternative options. Any provider that engaged in such behavior would see an increase in churn, to the benefit of its competition.

UPDATE (May 27, 2006): Douglas Ross (directorblue) has called this list "bogus" and claimed that only two of the options (Qwest and Cox) actually count. He dismisses Covad because it uses Qwest last-mile wires, but goes on to say, inconsistently, that he would count other cable resellers if the Brand X decision had gone the other way and providers like Cox were forced to enter into relationships like Covad has with Qwest. My observation is that if those reseller relationships exist and the reseller provides access to its own Internet network, then that is enough to foster a competitive environment. It doesn't matter whether it's government-mandated, it matters whether it exists. Doug rejects all the wireless options out of hand on the grounds of Verizon's EVDO terms-of-service. (His section about why WiMax isn't viable doesn't actually discuss WiMax at all, only EVDO terms-of-service.) He misses the point that Sprint Broadband and Sprint EVDO are *two different services*--he doesn't actually give a reason to reject Sprint Broadband. He says he doesn't understand why I put the City of Tempe's municipal WiFi network in the list--I did so because Tempe is right in the middle of the Phoenix metropolitan area (and noted Chandler's metro WiFi in-development, which is just south of Tempe, for the same reason). These are real options for people moving to the Phoenix area and for anyone who is willing to move to get different broadband service. (And certainly broadband options in an area are an important factor in choosing a place to live.) Finally, he rejects HughesNet because it is unsuitable for VOIP or P2P. At least he doesn't say that HughesNet should be mandated to change the laws of physics in order to provide those services under net neutrality.

Doug's position on net neutrality appears to be that nothing counts as broadband unless it supports every application he wants to use (even though the proposed net neutrality bills count anything as broadband that is greater than 200kbps in one direction--they don't restrict it to wireline services), and that whoever builds an infrastructure capable of supporting what he wants has to provide it to him, without recovering the costs of that infrastructure by charging any third parties. But I bet he also is unwilling to pay an unsubsidized rate to use such a service.

Newmark vs. McCurry on net neutrality

Craig Newmark of Craigslist and Mike McCurry of "Hands Off the Internet" debate "Should the Net Be Neutral?" at the Wall Street Journal. I'm struck by a number of things that Newmark says:

Do you believe Yahoo should be allowed to outbid Google to slow down Google on people's computers? That's the kind of thing that the big guys are proposing.

In fact, nobody has proposed slowing down anything--the consumer broadband telcos have proposed adding new, higher-bandwidth physical circuits (fiber to the home) which contain virtual circuits dedicated to content with requirements for higher bandwidth and low latency and jitter, for which the primary application they have in mind is IP television. And they want to charge content providers to use those virtual circuits. Now, one can argue that dedicating bandwidth to new applications that content providers have to pay for will have a future consequence that Internet bandwidth will be consumed and not upgraded, leading to degradation for best-effort Internet services, but that requires argument to support the likelihood of that outcome in the face of competition from cable companies and wireless providers.

With all that empty fiber, bandwidth is not an issue. A bigger issue is that we're running out of [Internet protocol] addresses. The new net protocols, IPv6, address that, but the big telecoms are already very late implementing that. (Hey, I'm an engineer, and their engineers talk to me.)

Newmark is confusing Internet backbone bandwidth with last-mile consumer broadband bandwidth. I've addressed this confusion at length. BTW, IPv6 is rife with difficulties and not quite ready (or useful) for the average consumer, but my employer, Global Crossing, has been one of the first to make it widely available to its customers. (I run IPv6 on my home network via a tunnel to Global Crossing.)

No one's talking about "government lawyers and regulators engineer[ing] the future of the Internet," except, well, you, Mike. We're trying to prevent that, and trying to get Congress to maintain the level playing field we have right now, that the FCC just tried to ruin. We're just asking everyone to play fair.
...
I'm being completely straight: no one's interested in regulation in the sense you're thinking, we just want the existing level playing field to continue… Beyond that, we're not interested in mandating performance criteria, none of that stuff.
...
What we're looking for is just fairness, a level playing field, no regulation or stuff like that. In America we believe that if you play fair and work hard, you get ahead. We don't want the government to give special privileges to the big guys, particularly not at the expense of small business and consumers. We don't want more regulation and we don't need lawyers involved where the free market functions well. I guess we're for capitalism.

Here, Newmark is simply failing to recognize what's in the actual network neutrality bills in Congress, which have unintended consequences about how networks are engineered, what can be in acceptable use policies, what kinds of contracts network providers are permitted to enter into with their customers, and how they can charge for access to different services--rules that to date have not existed for Internet services.

Today, many Internet providers have acceptable use policies that prohibit spam, going beyond the requirements of the relatively weak federal CAN-SPAM law. Under all of the net neutrality bills I've seen, providers must permit customers to send or receive any "lawful content," which forces them to reduce their AUPs to the lowest common denominator of whatever is prohibited by law in the jurisdictions where they provide service. These bills prohibit providers in the United States from setting the conditions of contract with their customers regarding activities they consider abusive which are not codified in law. The "pink contract" would thus become a government mandate.

UPDATE: FCC Commissioner Michael Copps and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas back up McCurry's statement in this debate that the FCC already has authority under Title I to prevent anti-competitive discrimination without the need for new statutory powers from Congress.

McCurry at the WSJ:

And doesn't the FCC have authority already (under Title I) to step in and act if necessary?

Copps:

The Federal Communications Commission has authority under current law to ensure that broadband-access providers -- currently mainly cable and phone companies -- do not discriminate against Web-based providers of content, search services and applications, FCC commissioner Michael Copps said Tuesday.

Thomas:

“The [FCC] remains free to impose special regulatory duties on facilities-based [Internet-service providers] under its Title I ancillary jurisdiction,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in National Cable & Telecommunications Association vs. Brand X Internet Services.

This means net neutrality advocates who support the bills in Congress don't think this is enough, and owe an explanation of specifically what powers they want to add to the FCC, what rules they want the FCC to make, and how those rules will be enforced.