Derek Kerton 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (2649) comment rss

  • On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 16 Apr, 2012 @ 01:07pm

    Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know

    "Caps don't solve anything"

    Yes they do. For carriers with capacity constraints trying to match the capital they must spend to extent capacity with increased revenues, they solve the problem quite surgically. People either reduce their consumption, or pay more for more.

    You'll find it in the encyclopedia under Supply and Demand. It is obvious from comments like yours that people still do not understand the role that economics plays in the market for braodband services. Economics doesn't care that you are "always on the net talking to people, streaming video or music, playiung online games, doing research, etc." Economics only cares that, if the impact of users like you pushes the demand curve to the right, either the equilibrium price will need to rise, or you will need to be constrained.

    The Internet is not a charity. Even if "it's a large part of life", that would mean that you want it more, and will pay more for more. Consider a parallel:

    Gas stations don't give me unlimited gas for each time I pay to fill up! Putting a limit on how much gas I can pump "greatly interferes with many aspects of what I do on a daily basis. I then have to choose do I give up [commuting] for a week or more so I can [pay my mortgage]?"

    Life has costs and trade-offs. Tough. Economics is the study of allocation of resources under scarcity. I think, good sir, that it is not I that fail to "get" these here Interwebs, but rather you that fails to "get" them thars economics laws.

  • On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 16 Apr, 2012 @ 12:58pm

    Re: Re: Nobody Needs To Know

    Your first point: They will know how much "stuff" they've done thus far that month, and therefore how much more of that stuff they can do. If they are 9/10 into the month and at 90%...well, they can pretty much carry on as before. People are stupid, but not completely. To Lobo Santo's point, if they don't get %ages, then then can at least see the pie chart and get a feel for areas. If they can't handle that, how do they buy meat at a butcher shop, gas from a gas pump, electricity from a meter, or anything else that's measured?

    To your second point on competition. That is completely correct.

  • On the post: The Stupidity Of Data Caps: No One Knows What A Megabyte Is

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 16 Apr, 2012 @ 12:31pm

    Nobody Needs To Know

    Ridiculous premise. Nobody needs to know what a MB is. They simply need to be given a good usage meter that shows their usage as a percentage of their cap.

    This can be a bar chart, a pie chart, etc. That's easy to understand. People understand proportions, don't they. Problem solved.

    The cognitive load you discuss can be reduced greatly by proactive notifications. Caps done correctly would include sufficient outbound notifications to users when they hit thresholds (50, 80, 90, 100%), or are off-pace with their caps: "Hey, you've used 50% of your month's allotment in just 8 days." Users at the cap should be throttled to respectable speeds (164Kb/s or so) or offered an up-sell to the next higher plan.

    The problem isn't caps. It's that carriers are terrible at implementing them well.

  • On the post: Feds Tried To Destroy All Evidence Of Memo Saying They Were Committing War Crimes With Torture

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 12 Apr, 2012 @ 01:50pm

    The "Deny" Checkbox

    Did anyone notice the rubber stamp from the State Department on the page bottom with the options to "Release, Excise, Deny, Declassify"?

    What exactly is the "Deny" check box for??

    And "Excise"...isn't that a.k.a. destroying evidence?

    Freedom of information. Ha!

  • On the post: Publishing Isn't A Job Anymore: It's A Button

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2012 @ 04:00pm

    Add Curation To The Services That Still Add Value

    I'd add "Curation" to the two lists that you had in the article.

    "Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers."

    "publicity, improving the product, monetizing"

  • On the post: Australian Police To Go Wardriving, Telling People To Lock Up Their WiFi

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 24 Mar, 2012 @ 10:57am

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    Sorry. Should have written 'Ladies and Gents'.

  • On the post: Australian Police To Go Wardriving, Telling People To Lock Up Their WiFi

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 24 Mar, 2012 @ 10:56am

    Re: Re: Re:

    Gents,

    The issue is silly. In this review of the top ten wifi home gateways:

    http://wireless-router-review.toptenreviews.com/

    FOUR of the 10 routers offer what they call a "guest network" (under the "Security" heading). This is actually a security feature that allows users to segregate guests from their own LAN.

    The guest networks are normally separate SSIDs and login credentials, which allow guest and public access to the Internet, but not the users's computers or Internet traffic.

    And, yeah, I have one and leave it open. Before this was an available feature, I had a separate wifi router that I used for guests.

    This police policy is stupid, misguided, and bucks 2 general trends towards securing one's personal wifi, and overall more available open wifi.

  • On the post: Lindsay Lohan's Lawyer's Loopy Legal Argument Laced With Lifted Language?

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 23 Mar, 2012 @ 01:30pm

    Re: Re:

    Litigation

    Lawsuit

    Lobo Santo

  • On the post: Guess What? Copying Still Isn't Stealing

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 16 Mar, 2012 @ 12:08pm

    Re: Assault of the Language

    "I hope that by the time their 10 years old"

    ugh. I mean "they're".

  • On the post: Guess What? Copying Still Isn't Stealing

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 13 Mar, 2012 @ 03:46pm

    Assault of the Language

    If I beat someone with two punches to the gut, that is a crime.

    If I kill the same person with two stabs to the gut, that is a crime.

    Since they are both illegal, are they both murder? No. There is some difference between the two crimes, and thus we have created language to remove the ambiguity: the former is an assault, and the latter is a murder.

    Don't call an assault a murder, because it isn't. Even if you are really, really, really angry at me for the assault, it's still not murder. The correct word exists...why not just use it?

    I have young kids. I tell them every tree is a "tree" and that's all. But some are maples and some are elms. I hope that by the time their 10 years old, they'll understand that, although both are trees, elms are not maples. I wish the debater here understood the same thing.

    And when he calls a pine an elm, I'm not using "weasel words" when I tell him he's wrong.

    Words matter. People try to deliberately use words that serve their needs. Techdirt tries to use the correct words, and dispel the bias that is being *deliberately* inserted by the consistent incorrect word choice.

  • On the post: Guess What? Copying Still Isn't Stealing

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 13 Mar, 2012 @ 03:26pm

    Re:

    Noooo! If you download it several times, it economically harms him more. Every $10 copy you make costs him $10 - don't you see?

    If you set up a script to do it non-stop, he will starve overnight, turning to dust like vanquished monsters in horror films.

  • On the post: Guess What? Copying Still Isn't Stealing

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 13 Mar, 2012 @ 03:04pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: It can be.

    Wait...so if I hear music, say on a "public forum" like a radio broadcast...then I have rights to enjoy it and can make use if it?

  • On the post: Study Confirms What You Already Knew: Mobile Data Throttling About The Money, Not Stopping Data Hogs

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 27 Feb, 2012 @ 12:53am

    Re: Unlimited abuse

    Good point. They have changed the meaning of "unlimited" to something contrarian. Very "Alice in Wonderland".

    But given that "unlimited" doesn't mean what you think it means, even then if their top tiered plan is 5GB, wouldn't it be rational to expect that the "unlimited" plan is a notch above the top tiered plan. Yet it is not.

    As a rare techdirt citizen who is in favor of tiered pricing, I agree that this is exactly the kind of implementation that makes people hate their carrier.

    Here's three ways they could have made this work better/fairly:

    - make the cut-off a clear cut, publicized, no BS, 5GB for "unlimited" customers

    - make the throttling drop speeds to a usable, but noticeably slower 128Kbps - NOT the unusable trickle they current throttle to.

    - alert the user pro-actively BEFORE they reach the threshold, not just as it is reached.

    If they had done that, they would have been able to argue "unlimited" semi-credibly. As it is, I have to agree with Masnick that it looks not like a way to manage "data hogs", but a way to force legacy 'unlimited' users to switch to tiered plans.

  • On the post: Why You Should Regret LightSquared's Setbacks

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 22 Feb, 2012 @ 01:16pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    Strange that it is so against the Laws of Physics, yet the NTIA testing concluded that LS interfered with older legacy GPS devices, yet current smartphones with GPS could determine their location during testing.

    Somehow these phones defied the laws of physics? Listen, I don't care how well/not well it worked in the smartphones. The fact is that it worked. That is enough to prove that we aren't talking about something that is totally impossible.

    I'm totally on board with the people here arguing that LS interfered with legacy devices, and that this is not acceptable. But I don't buy into the "LS defied the laws of physics" line so many have repeated, nor do I understand the anger or glee with which it is delivered.

  • On the post: Smart TVs: Not Such A Smart Idea

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 22 Feb, 2012 @ 11:33am

    Re: Consumer Hype

    ...and Apple's original Apple TV was $200, but Jobs later released a version for $99. Thin is in. Lowest cost to meet today's needs. Future proofing be damned.

  • On the post: Smart TVs: Not Such A Smart Idea

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 22 Feb, 2012 @ 11:29am

    Re: I see your point, but somewhat disagree.

    True enough. So how much more would you pay for it?

  • On the post: Smart TVs: Not Such A Smart Idea

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 22 Feb, 2012 @ 11:27am

    Re:

    And a number of wireless solutions for making the connection are emerging, not the least of which could be Intel's WiDi.

  • On the post: Smart TVs: Not Such A Smart Idea

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 22 Feb, 2012 @ 11:25am

    Re:

    To be fair, Samsung has launched just such a modular system, but I didn't get into it in the article because it's a detail. How many mass market PC owners upgrade the processors in their PCs? Are they really going to upgrade the processor in their TV!

  • On the post: Smart TVs: Not Such A Smart Idea

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 22 Feb, 2012 @ 02:11am

    Re:

    Right. The ports, and interconnected digital home technologies are what counts. Make it stream from Samba or DLNA or Apple file shares, and I'm interested. I want the TV to be a fantastically connectable monitor. I can locate the smarts someplace else...in fact I can use smarts I already have.

  • On the post: Smart TVs: Not Such A Smart Idea

    Derek Kerton ( profile ), 22 Feb, 2012 @ 02:05am

    Re:

    True. Plus, it could be a laptop, tablet, phone, streamed over DLNA from a computer, etc. Not necessarily what we consider a STB today.

    But for your point, how about "Set Twin Device", or STD? I think that has a ring to it.

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