A Turgid Tale of Net Neutrality

An article by Glenn Derene on net neutrality in Popular Mechanics is getting a lot of attention this week. It attempts to define net neutrality – always a perilous task – and to contrast the positions of our two presidential candidates on it: …there’s no accepted definition of network neutrality itself. It is, in fact, … Continue reading “A Turgid Tale of Net Neutrality”

An article by Glenn Derene on net neutrality in Popular Mechanics is getting a lot of attention this week. It attempts to define net neutrality – always a perilous task – and to contrast the positions of our two presidential candidates on it:

…there’s no accepted definition of network neutrality itself. It is, in fact, more of a networking philosophy than a defined political position. A pure “neutral” network is one that would treat all content that traveled across it equally. No one data packet would be prioritized above another. Image files, audio files, a request from a consumer for a web page—all would be blindly routed from one location to another, and the network would neither know nor care what kind of data was encompassed in each packet. For most but not all kinds of files, that’s how it works now.

When they were created, TCP/IP protocols were not intended to discriminate routinely between packets of data. The idea was to maintain a “best effort” network, one that moved packets from place to place in an effort to maximize overall throughput. But the protocols did allow for discrimination when it was needed. “Even the very first design for IP, back in 1980, had a “type of service” field, intended to provide different levels of traffic priority in a military setting,” says John Wroclawski, the director of the computer networks division at the University of Southern California’s revered Information Sciences Institute.

“The big question is not ‘can you do this technically,'” Wroclawski says. “It’s ‘how do you decide who to favor?'” In today’s multimedia-saturated Internet, streams of time-sensitive voice and video data are routinely prioritized over nonsequential data transfers such as Web pages. If one bit doesn’t follow another in a videoconference, for instance, the stream falls apart. For the most part, even proponents of net neutrality are okay with that level of discrimination.

This passage illustrates the problem with the kind of hardcore neutrality that was bandied about prior to the introduction of bills in the Congress to mandate fair treatment of network traffic, and it misses the point of a non-discriminatory network. There’s nothing wrong with prioritizing packets according to application requirements, and it would be silly not to do so. That’s one of the reasons that the IP header has a TOS field, as the quote indicates. The problem of who sets the TOS (actually DSCP in the current iteration of IP) is also not at all troubling – the application does it. So a proper definition of net neutrality is to treat all packets with the same requirements the same way, regardless of their origin, destination, or the application that generated them. And in fact that’s what the bills required: they didn’t ban QoS, they banned fees for QoS, embracing a flat-rate billing model.

And that’s a problem, of course. If we’re going to allow carriers to work with users to prioritize packets, which we should, we should also allow them to create service plans for this kind of treatment, and it should be legal for the carriers to sell QoS services to third parties (think VoIP providers) that would take effect when the consumer hasn’t purchased any QoS services. The problem of applications that set all their packets to highest priority is controlled by establishing account quotas for volume-per-minute (or less) for each priority. If you use up your quota for high-priority traffic with BitTorrent, your Skype is going to suck. And you have to deal with that. If your applications don’t signal their priority requirements to the network – and most don’t – you can allow your ISP to classify them for you, as they’ll be happy to do.

The flat-rate billing model that’s insensitive to load is a primary reason for the American controversy for net neutrality. Countries like Australia that have volume-metered pricing simply don’t have this issue as their ISP networks aren’t magnets for P2P file distribution. Net Neutrality is indeed an American problem. And moreover, there’s no particular need to cap data volume as long as the carrier is free to deprioritize bulk data. The postal service does this with very good effect, after all.

The fundamental dilemma behind the net neutrality controversy is the desire of activists to have it both ways: they want a QoS guarantee on the one hand, but no prioritization on the other. We can certainly do that in network engineering, but not without substantial changes in the network protocols and routers in use today. What we can do quite practically is provide high-confidence QoS for small amounts of data, sufficient for a single VoIP or gaming session over the typical DSL or wireless broadband link, and that should be sufficient for the time being.

If we can’t prioritize, then it follows that the only way to control network congestion is with crude caps and user-based QoS schemes that have unfortunate side-effects. And nobody really wants that, once they understand what it means

Both candidates are clueless on the issue, so I don’t see it as determinative of which to vote for.

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Ultra-cool Computers

My next personal computer is going to be an ultra-portable tablet. I’ve never bought a laptop of my own, since my employers tend to shower me with them, and they’ve had so many drawbacks I couldn’t see any point in shelling out for one of my own. But recent research shows that we’re officially in … Continue reading “Ultra-cool Computers”

My next personal computer is going to be an ultra-portable tablet. I’ve never bought a laptop of my own, since my employers tend to shower me with them, and they’ve had so many drawbacks I couldn’t see any point in shelling out for one of my own. But recent research shows that we’re officially in the Dynabook Era with great gear like the Dell Latitude XT Tablet, the Lenovo X200 Tablet, the Asus R1E, Fujitsu LifeBook T5010, and the recently-announced HP Elitebook 2730p

What these babies have in common is light weight, sharp but small screens, long battery life, a wealth of connectivity features, and other goodies like web cams and mikes, GPS locators, touch-sensitive displays, and handwriting recognition. They’re more like Smartphones than traditional PCs, but without all the annoying limitations that make Blackberries better in the demo than in real life. Unlike pure slate computers that lack keyboards, they have swivel-mounted screens that can be twisted and folded to cover the laptop’s clamshell base, so you have a touch-sensitive display for when you need to jot notes or draw, and a regular keyboard for high-volume typing.

Each excels in some areas. The Dell seems to have the clearest screen and the best handwriting recognition since it uses a capacitive touchscreen. It draws a bit more power, since capacitive touch keeps an electric field active across the screen, where the more common resistive touch relies on a magnetic stylus to alert the touch sensor that something’s happening. The stylus-activated system rules out using your finger as a pointing device, which is also unfortunate, and has a thicker overlay on the screen than the Dell. The iPhone uses a capacitive touch system.

Dell also has a nice graphics chip with some dedicated memory which signficantly outperforms the shared-memory systems that are commonplace. But Dell’s CPU is at the low end of the scale, and the 1.2 GHz Intel U7600, an ultra-low voltage 65nm dual-core CPU, is as good as it gets. This is apparently a soldered-in part that can’t be upgraded. Dell is also super-expensive.

The Lenovo is too new for much in the way of evaluation, but it has very nice specs and a great pedigree. While the XT Tablet is Dell’s first convertible, the X200 is Lenovo’s third or so, and the details show. If they would only stop white-listing their own wireless cards in the BIOS they’d be at the top of my list. X200 Tablet uses a more substantial and higher power Intel CPU, around 1.8 GHz, which makes is considerably faster than* the Dell. They also use Intel’s Centrino graphics, and suffer a bit for it, but that’s a classic engineering tradeoff. Lenovo has an amazing array of connectivity choices, including the UWB system AKA Wireless USB. With an internal Wireless WAN card with GPS, internal Wi-Fi (including 3×3 11n,) Bluetooth, and Wireless USB, this system has five kinds of wireless without a visible antenna, awfully sharp.

The Fujitsu and Asus convertibles have larger screens – 13.3 in. vs. 12.1 for the Dell and the Lenovo – and add a pound or so of weight. Asus is concentrating on their netbooks these days, and doesn’t seem to be serious about keeping up to date, while the Fujitsu makes some strange choices with noisy fans and heat.

To be avoided are the older HP’s using the AMD chipset. AMD can’t keep up with Intel on power efficiency, so convertible systems that use their parts are only portable between one wall socket and another.

None of these little Dynabooks has made me swipe a card yet, but the collections of technology they represent say a lot about the future of networking. With all that wireless, the obligatory Gigabit Ethernet looks like an afterthought.

Which brings me to my point, gentle readers. What’s your experience with Wireless WANs in terms of service – between AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon, who’s got it going on? I get my cell phone service from friendly old T-Mobile, but they’re not player in the 3G world. I like Verizon’s tiered pricing, as I doubt I’ll use 5GB/mo of random wireless, as close as I tend to be to Wi-Fi hotspots, but it seems like a much nicer fall-back than using my Blackberry Curve as a modem.

For a nice demonstration of the XT’s capacitive touch screen in comparison to the more primitive Lenovo, see Gotta Be Mobile.

*Edited. The X200 non-tablet has a faster processor than the X200 Tablet. The tablet sucks power out of the system, and Lenovo had to de-tune the CPU to provide it.

Skype defense not persuasive

Now that the whole world knows that Skype’s Chinese partner, TOM, has been censoring IM’s and building a database of forbidden speakers for the government of China, Skype President Josh Silverman had to respond: In April 2006, Skype publicly disclosed that TOM operated a text filter that blocked certain words in chat messages, and it … Continue reading “Skype defense not persuasive”

Now that the whole world knows that Skype’s Chinese partner, TOM, has been censoring IM’s and building a database of forbidden speakers for the government of China, Skype President Josh Silverman had to respond:

In April 2006, Skype publicly disclosed that TOM operated a text filter that blocked certain words in chat messages, and it also said that if the message is found unsuitable for displaying, it is simply discarded and not displayed or transmitted anywhere. It was our understanding that it was not TOM’s protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords, and we are now inquiring with TOM to find out why the protocol changed.

We also learned yesterday about the existence of a security breach that made it possible for people to gain access to those stored messages on TOM’s servers. We were very concerned to learn about both issues and after we urgently addressed this situation with TOM, they fixed the security breach. In addition, we are currently addressing the wider issue of the uploading and storage of certain messages with TOM.

I don’t know what’s more disturbing, the fact that one of most vocal net neutrality advocates is colluding with the government of China to finger dissidents, or the fact that they didn’t know they were collaborating. Frankly, this corporate defense raises more questions than it answers.

There are always going to be countries where the local laws are antithetical to post-enlightenment values. I think the correct response to such situations is to just say “no” and go somewhere else. For particularly compelling services, such as Google and Skype, the fact that the foreign service provide can’t do business in the fascist state then becomes a pressure point for change. The companies that collaborate with China are selling out their futures to fund the current quarter. How much money does Skype need to make, anyhow?

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Debate Strategy Notes: Don’t debate, pontificate

Tom Shales saw what I saw in the VP debate, a lot of evasion: Palin basically stated early in the debate that this would be her strategy. She said she wasn’t necessarily going to respond to the questions of the moderator or charges from Biden, but instead, “I’m gonna talk right to the American people.” … Continue reading “Debate Strategy Notes: Don’t debate, pontificate”

Tom Shales saw what I saw in the VP debate, a lot of evasion:

Palin basically stated early in the debate that this would be her strategy. She said she wasn’t necessarily going to respond to the questions of the moderator or charges from Biden, but instead, “I’m gonna talk right to the American people.” Since this was billed as a debate, not a speech, her remark came across as arrogant, and as an admission she would duck tough questions.

And duck she did. Biden is an impressive person and he’ll make a fine vice-president.

I never realized that Peggy Noonan had a drug problem before reading this deranged piece of spin. She had to be high to write the last three paragraphs, in which she segues from Palin’s debate performance to some imagined love Tiny Fey must have for her subject. The incoherence is understandable, given what a bizarre event this was.

The so-called debate was actually a conversation between Joe Biden and Gwen Ifill on the issues, conducted while a perky little bunny hopped around the stage singing lines off index cards and weaving a maypole. I hope nobody saw this outside the US, because I’m going to Europe in a few days and I don’t want to have to explain the American political system to quizzical foreigners. Sometimes it sucks to be an American.

UPDATE: Uncommitted voters scored it a knock-out for Biden, with a 2-1 margin.

(CBS) Uncommitted voters who watched the vice presidential debate thought Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden did the best job by a margin of more than two to one, according to a CBS News/Knowledge Networks poll taken immediately following the debate.

My fellow citizens aren’t that dumb, you see.

Joe Gandelman has compiled the mother of all reaction lists, but most of it is boring. Read this instead and find out why some people think Palin won the debate: she’s regular, and Joe’s one of them damn elites. Totally.

FCC fills empty job

Kevin Martin’s FCC has hired a new chief technologist, Jon Peha: Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin named John Peha chief technologist, the senior adviser post at the commission on technology issues, based out of the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis. I’m a bit disappointed. Peha is the guy who delivered strong testimony … Continue reading “FCC fills empty job”

Kevin Martin’s FCC has hired a new chief technologist, Jon Peha:

Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin named John Peha chief technologist, the senior adviser post at the commission on technology issues, based out of the Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis.

I’m a bit disappointed. Peha is the guy who delivered strong testimony denouncing the Comcast management of BitTorrent without bothering to study BitTorrent’s use of TCP connections. His testimony was substantially wrong on a factual basis. Perhaps Peha can persuade me that he means well, but his performance so far has not been encouraging.

UPDATE: What am I talking about? Well take a look at the comments Peha filed in the Comcast matter, which are on-line at the FCC’s web site. He understands what’s at stake:

In the debate over network neutrality, both sides can make points that deserve serious consideration from policymakers. Such consideration requires clear and accurate statements of the facts, to say nothing of the broader issues at stake. Unfortunately, the public debate has often been filled with hyperbole and spin from advocates on both sides.1 Such rhetoric, combined with issues of technical complexity and subtlety, has made it unnecessarily difficult for policymakers to make informed decisions.

So what did he do? He misrepresented the facts and engaged in advocacy spin, to wit:

Comcast sends Device A a reset packet, with parameters set such that Device A will believe the reset is coming from Device B. Device A is therefore led to believe (incorrectly) that Device B is unwilling or unable to continue the session. The same may be occurring at Device B. Thus, the devices determine that the session must be ended, and no further packets can be sent.

It is factually incorrect to say that the process described above merely delays P2P traffic.

Bzzzttt, wrong answer. BitTorrent “sessions” consist of multiple TCP connections, so terminating one, or two, or any number less than the total number of TCP connections a given instance of BitTorrent can use at any particular time is in fact “delaying” instead of “blocking.” Peha makes the assumption that BitTorrent “sessions” are the same as TCP “sessions” and they clearly aren’t. Most of what makes BitTorrent troublesome, in fact, is the large number of TCP “sessions” it uses. It’s particularly outrageous that Peha charges Comcast with misrepresentation and then goes on to misrepresent in his own right.

He then goes on to contradict himself and admit that it’s really “delaying” after all:

After the flow of P2P from a given sender and recipient is blocked or terminated, the recipient is likely to seek some other source for the content. If the content is extremely popular, there are many options available. Consequently, this leads to a small delay, somewhat decreasing the rate at which this recipient can gather content.

So which is it, Dr. Peha, “blocking” or “delaying?” He can’t even make up his own mind. He then goes on to whack Comcast for targeting P2P:

Comcast has elected to employ mechanisms that degrade service for a particular application, i.e. P2P, instead of relying only on congestion control mechanisms that deal with traffic of all application types. Central to their justification of this approach has been the assertion that it is specifically P2P that has an adverse impact on other traffic. This assertion is untrue.

…and he goes on talk about blue cars and red cars, a lot of nonsensical fluff. The fact remains that P2P is the only application with such a great ability to consume bandwidth on a non-stop basis as to degrade the Internet experience of web browsing, and that’s what Comcast was trying to protect.

And more significantly, Peha fails to grasp the fact that applications are not created equal in terms of their tolerance for delay. P2P has no particular time constraints when running as a seeder (serving files to the rest of the Internet) but interactive applications like Web browsing and VoIP have very little tolerance for delay. And now we have a standard in place that requires ISPs to ignore these technical distinctions, thanks largely to the inept analysis of people like Peha.

In additional remarks he confesses his ignorance of network management techniques generally, and compares the Comcast method to a “man in the middle attack.” If that’s what he thinks, really and truly, he’s seriously under-informed. A “man in the middle attack” is means of breaking into a system by stealing passwords. What system did Comcast break into, and what password did they use to do so?

In Kevin Martin’s FCC this outlandish foolishness is a job interview. Peha is smarter than Sarah Palin, but he’s no Dave Farber. Surely the FCC can do better than to employ an advocate in the position that requires depth of technical knowledge and a commitment to impartiality. Kevin Martin has failed the American people again.

A more suitable candidate exists: Just a Girl in Short Shorts Talking about Whatever:

Comcast was regulating the download speeds of peer to peer networks, such as BitTorrent. I like to pirate movies as much as next cheapskate, but I do not think it is necessary that it be given equal priority with VoIP (voice over Internet).

That’s the level of insight we need in a Chief Technologist.

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European Event

There’s nothing like a quick trip to the Old Country to advise regulators on the folly of our New World ways. I’ll be speaking in Brussels on Oct. 14 and in London on the 15th to help our cousins structure their telecom regulations appropriately. These events are coordinated by my friends at the Institute for … Continue reading “European Event”

There’s nothing like a quick trip to the Old Country to advise regulators on the folly of our New World ways. I’ll be speaking in Brussels on Oct. 14 and in London on the 15th to help our cousins structure their telecom regulations appropriately. These events are coordinated by my friends at the Institute for Policy Innovation, an excellent free market think tank.

Comcast was right, FCC was wrong

A fellow named Paul Korzeniowski has written a very good, concise piece on the Comcast action at the FCC for Forbes, Feds And Internet Service Providers Don’t Mix. He manages to describe the controversy in clear and unemotional language, which contrasts sharply with the neutralists who constantly use emotionally-charged terms such as “blocking,” “Deep Packet … Continue reading “Comcast was right, FCC was wrong”

A fellow named Paul Korzeniowski has written a very good, concise piece on the Comcast action at the FCC for Forbes, Feds And Internet Service Providers Don’t Mix. He manages to describe the controversy in clear and unemotional language, which contrasts sharply with the neutralists who constantly use emotionally-charged terms such as “blocking,” “Deep Packet Inspection,” “forgery,” and “monopoly” to describe their discomfort.

What Comcast actually did, and still does today, is simply limit the amount of free upstream bandwidth P2P servers can use to 50% of capacity. This isn’t “blocking” or “censorship,” it’s rational network management:

Cable giant Comcast is at the center of a very important controversy for small businesses. In the summer of 2007, it became clear that the carrier was putting restrictions on how much information selected customers could transmit. BitTorrent, a P2P application-sharing company, had been using lots of bandwidth, so the ISP throttled back some its transmissions.

“Throttled back some of its transmissions” is correct. Comcast doesn’t throttle back P2P downloads, which you can prove to yourself if you happen to have a Comcast account: download a large file using P2P and notice that it moves faster than it possibly can on any flavor of DSL. My recent tests with Linux have files downloading at 16 Mb/s, the advertised maximum for my account.

Korzeniowski then explains the facts of life:

The reality is that all ISPs are overbooked–they have sold more bandwidth than they can support.

This overbooking has been an issue since the old Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) days. In that situation, individuals would receive a busy signal when the network was overloaded. Because the Internet has an antithetical design, ISPs don’t have a busy signal option.

ISP’s actually do have a “busy signal option:” it’s the Reset packet that Comcast uses to limit active upstream sessions. But neutrality regulationists call it “forgery” and abhor it.

“Overbooking” bandwidth isn’t a bad thing, and in fact it’s central to the economics of packet-switching. The PSTN forces each caller into a bandwidth ghetto where he is allocated a small chunk of bandwidth, 4 KHz, regardless of how much he currently requires. If you’re on the phone and have to set it down to check on your chili, you have 4 KHz. If you’re blasting files over a modem connection, you have 4 KHz. It doesn’t matter how many other callers are on-line and what they’re doing: you each get 4 KHz. That’s the law.

But packet switching, of which the Internet is an example, allows your bandwidth allocation to float depending on what you need to do and what other people are doing. You share network facilities with your neighbors (and this is true whether you use DSL or cable, you just share at different points on these technologies), so you can get a larger chunk of bandwidth when they’re idle than when they’re banging the net hard.

Overbooking allows you to use very large amounts of bandwidth for short periods of time, which is ideal for web surfing: you click on a link, you get a ton of graphics sent to you computer. While you’re reading, your neighbors get to use the bandwidth that would be wasted if you had PSTN connections. It works for everybody, most of the time. It works so well, in fact, that ISPs haven’t bothered to meter actual bandwidth use: the resource is so abundant, and the demands so few (especially in the upstream direction, where your clicks move) that there’s never been a need to control or meter it.

Enter P2P, a method of moving large files across networks that relies on free upstream bandwidth. Now the abundant broadband upstream is constantly occupied, not by an interactive application that sends a click now and click 5 seconds from now and a click a minute from now, you’ve got applications running that constantly stream traffic up the wire, to the detriment of the others in the neighborhood. Something has to give.

One approach is to cap upstream traffic:

However, the “all you can eat” model may no longer be viable–a change the government seems to be ignoring. ISPs could use the open salad bar model when users were mainly transmitting small textual data. But with video becoming more common, users increasingly transmit very large high-definition files.

In response, Comcast plans to cap customer usage at 250 GB of data each month. That translates to about 50 million e-mails, 62,500 songs, 125 standard-definition movies, or 25,000 high-resolution digital photos. That amount would seem to meet the needs of most customers, including small and midsize businesses. The only folks affected would be companies such as BitTorrent, that have based their business on the “all you can eat” model, and hackers, who routinely spew out tons of unwanted solicitations and malware.

Capping has its critics, mostly the same people who object to traffic management as well:

For whatever reason, some believe ISPs should not be able to put any restrictions on the volume of information that any user transmits. That’s absurd. Per-bit and per-byte pricing models have long been used for data transmissions. In trying to build and sustain their businesses, carriers constantly balance their attractiveness and viability versus unlimited usage pricing models. By government decree, they no longer have that option. In effect, the FCC has decided to tell ISPs how to run their networks.

Capping frees up bandwidth for sharing by taking free bandwidth off the table for P2P. But it’s not a technically elegant approach. Humans respond to caps month-by-month, but networks experience congestion and overload millisecond-by-millisecond. So the sensible engineering approach is to manage traffic in pretty much the way that Comcast does it today: identify the bandwidth requirements of applications, and allocate bandwidth to those that need it the most, as we would with any scarce resource: grant transmission opportunities (that’s a technical term we use in network architecture) to highly interactive applications such as VoIP ahead of non-interactive applications such has HDTV file transfers. This is sound practice, but the FCC has now said it’s illegal. The FCC is anti-consumer.

Net neutrality supporters have pressured the FCC because they believe cable companies are unfairly monopolizing the Internet access marketplace. This conveniently ignores a couple of factors. First, there is no Internet access monopoly. A small or midsize business can get access from cable companies, telcos or wireless suppliers. True, there are not 50 choices, as you might have when buying a new pair of pants, but there is a reason why so few companies compete in the Internet access arena–it’s not a great business.

In fact, net neutrality advocates have turned a blind eye to the history of the dot-com bubble. Internet access start-ups burned through more cash with fewer positive results than any market sector in memory–and perhaps ever. Providing Internet access requires a lot of capital for the network and support infrastructure, and there’s not a lot of money to be made when customers pay about $20 a month for unlimited access.

The alternative to application-sensitive traffic management is a crude user-based system that treats all of each user’s traffic the same. This means, for example, that your VoIP streams get the same service from your ISP as your web clicks and your file transfers. This is insane.

Each Internet user should be able to multitask. We should be allowed to share files with P2P or any other non-standard protocol of our choice at the same time that we’re video-chatting or surfing the web. The heavy-handed FCC ruling that all packets must be treated the same undermines the economics of packet switching and delays the day when the Internet will make the PSTN and the cable TV systems obsolete.

Comcast was right to take the ruling to the courts to get it overturned. ISPs should be allowed to deploy a traffic system that combines elements of the protocol-aware system currently in use at Comcast with the new “protocol-agnostic” system that’s under test, such that each customer has a quota for each class of traffic. This is sound network engineering, but the current state of law makes it illegal.

This is not good.

Cross-posted to CircleID.

UPDATE: See Adam Thierer’s comments on this article at Tech Lib.


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Debate Verdict: McCain snatches defeat from the jaws of victory

I score the debate for McCain. The first part, on the financial crisis & bailout, was even, since neither candidate is truly in the loop. They’ve both tried to look they were involved, with McCain pulling the stunt about suspending his campaign to rescue the bill, but it didn’t work: the deal was still uncertain … Continue reading “Debate Verdict: McCain snatches defeat from the jaws of victory”

I score the debate for McCain. The first part, on the financial crisis & bailout, was even, since neither candidate is truly in the loop. They’ve both tried to look they were involved, with McCain pulling the stunt about suspending his campaign to rescue the bill, but it didn’t work: the deal was still uncertain at debate time, so McCain had to break his promise to stop campaigning and work on the deal to make the debate. He didn’t have enough specifics to give straight answer on the bill, and neither did Obama. McCain was weak throughout the whole segment, and Obama should have decked him but didn’t.

The second part, on foreign affairs and national defense, went to McCain. Obama continues with the ill-advised strategy of trying to paint McCain as a Bush clone, and that’s just not going to work. Sure, it plays well with Democratic audiences, but Obama has to reach out to the indifferent voters who still see McCain as a maverick. As Debra Saunders puts it,

George W. Bush is not running for re-election. The gratuitous Bush-bashing has gotten old – and it makes Obama sound like a college student at a political rally. Maybe it works with the moveon.org crowd, but most voters are looking for a leader for the next four to eight years. And it takes no leadership to kick someone with an approval rate higher only than that of Congress.

McCain was able to rattle off a long list of areas where he’s disagreed with Bush, and it’s persuasive. Obama scored points on being opposed to the Iraq War in the first place, but it’s academic at this point, and besides, most of America was where McCain was on that issue.

So at the end of the debate, McCain was the winner, and by a significant margin. The only saving grace for Obama is that a lot of voters probably tuned out before McCain gathered steam toward the end. But the McCain team soundly lost the post-debate debate. Joe Biden was all over the place giving interviews and sounding like an elder statesman, while Palin was in some undisclosed location getting a brain transplant. It was like a tag-team wrestling match on one side against a team of one on the other. Palin’s absence from the airwaves reinforces her lack of ability, and McCain’s pre-debate dramatics made him look less serious as well. So McCain did fine in the second half of the debate, but lost all the surrounding events.

One theory about McCain’s pre-debate dramatics holds that he was trying to buy time for Palin by delaying Thursday’s VP debate. The Couric interview suggests that’s a plausible ploy.

The VP selections are important, because there’s a greater than average chance that the winner of this election won’t live out his term. McCain is old and infirm, and Obama’s black. We have a nasty history of assassinations in this country, and Obama is bound to have his haters among the segment of the population that goes for that. That’s gruesome, but that’s the way I see it. I remember the Kennedy assassination and the attempts on Ford and Reagan all too well.

Another way to look at it: if we consider the candidates even in terms of temperament, preparation, and intelligence, then we have to turn to the VPs to be the tie-breaker. Biden vs. Palin’s not even close.

So how should Biden deal with Heidi Doody in their debate? Certainly, he can’t be snide or condescending, and he can’t be aggressive because she’s a girl. But it’s a real challenge for somebody who’s not an insult to the American system of politics to share a stage with someone who is. I’d suggest he take a page from Obama’s playbook on Bill O’Reilly and tune it for the occasion. Like Palin, O’Reilly’s completely insane, and while he’s probably not a dunce in real life, he certainly plays one on TV. Obama didn’t let O’Reilly ramble, politely interjecting his comments as soon as it was apparent he’d made some sort of point or asked some sort of statement.

Biden should let Palin talk, because she’s her own worst enemy. Let her talk, ramble, and tie herself up in knots, and then summarize her answers for the audience. When she trots out multiple talking points and connects them incorrectly, play it straight and say something like “Gov. Palin says the bailout is a job-creation umbrella program, I think, but I have to disagree. We don’t look to government to create jobs, that’s what free enterprise is for. The bailout is about preserving our financial system so that people *with jobs* won’t be thrown out of their homes. I’m all for job creation, but that’s not what the bailout is about.” He can also look quizzical and scratch his head when she makes some boneheaded remark, and there will be several. McCain tried to protect her by over-using the phrase “Obama’s naive and clueless,” but it won’t be necessary for Biden to say that in so many words, because the voters are going to see it with their own eyes.

But in any event, this is the high point of the McCain campaign. He’s just had his military debate, against a backdrop of high anxiety about the future of our economy. The next three debates are all downhill for him, as are current events, and at this rate the election could easily be a colossal blowout.

Google’s Telephony Patent Application not Novel

Google has apparently filed an application for a system that allows bandwidth provider to bid on phone calls: Google’s patent is called “Flexible Communication Systems and Methods” and the abstract says: “A method of initiating a telecommunication session for a communication device include submitting to one or more telecommunication carriers a proposal for a telecommunication … Continue reading “Google’s Telephony Patent Application not Novel”

Google has apparently filed an application for a system that allows bandwidth provider to bid on phone calls:

Google’s patent is called “Flexible Communication Systems and Methods” and the abstract says:

“A method of initiating a telecommunication session for a communication device include submitting to one or more telecommunication carriers a proposal for a telecommunication session, receiving from at least one of the one or more of telecommunication carriers a bid to carry the telecommunications session, and automatically selecting one of the telecommunications carriers from the carriers submitting a bid, and initiating the telecommunication session through the selected telecommunication carrier.”

Read the full patent here

The thing I find interesting about this is that I invented a similar technique in 1997, motivated by the desire to get bandwidth-on-demand for video conferences. If this is granted, it certainly won’t survive a court challenge.

I’ll post some details on my invention, which was never patented, shortly.

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