Interesting Links for 03-06-2014

[andrewducker]

• 23 Words That Have A Totally Different Meaning In Scotland
  (tags: Scotland language funny )
• Edinburgh trams ‘worth 400 year wait’
  (tags: Edinburgh trams )
• Smokers with gene defect have one in four chance of developing lung cancer
  Which I think means that those without it have a 10% chance. Anyone care to check my maths?
  (tags: cancer genetics

Comments

[quirkytizzy]

Wow, that's a really good article about Laverne and language. I know enough to refer to people as they prefer to be, but otherwise have a very deep "I don't get it" with trans issues.

But THAT article helps. Thank you.

[andrewducker]

Glad it helps!

I think it helps to remember that it's none of my business what genes, genitalia, or other body-characteristics a person has unless I am involved in very specific kinds of relationship with them.

But if someone wants to be referred to in a particular way, and that's not causing anything awful to happen (like fraud, or people taking their medical advice seriously), then it's simple politeness to do so.

[alitheapipkin]

Yes, really good article and I particularly appreciated the Gillian McKeith exception ;)

I find it really quite boggling how incredibly hateful and rude some people are over these issues.

[naath]

I think it is a nice article but the author may be astonished to know that many people are *very bad* at respecting change-of-name (or a lack of change-of-name that they expected to happen) even without the new name being differently gendered to the old one.

[fanf]

As far as I can tell, net neutrality is a collection of poorly specified bullshit workarounds for lack of proper competition in the last mile ISP market.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure I agree.

While last-mile competition is great, I'm not happy relying on competition to drive everything, and I think that basic standards are a good thing.

And as a basic standard "You shall not fuck with data because it's in competition with your own products/you don't like it." is a good one.

[fanf]

One of the things I don't understand about net neutrality is why it has been imported from the US to the EU. Here our last mile ISPs have much lower prices and better performance than in the US, and we generally don't hear about stupidities like that recent Level 3 blog post. The usual observation is that there is a positive correlation between competition and performance, both in the US and the EU

[andrewducker]

Oh, I think the level 3 thing was blown out of proportion - there has always been paid peering, and if you're trying to significantly transfer more data than your opposite number are currently dealing with then you'll have to come to some kind of arrangement.

I think that the argument is that if you're with, say, Comcast, and they have a deal with Hulu, then you don't want them streaming stuff in from Hulu's external servers faster than they stream stuff in from Netflix's external servers. But then they'll just put a cache in their network for their supported services anyway.

Having competition over the last mile certainly has made a big difference in the UK, and I'm not knocking it. But I can understand that people don't want to give their ISP any kind of control over the content they deliver - they want big, dumb, pipes.

[apostle_of_eris]

"proper competition" is exactly one of the things net neutrality is about.
If the conglomerate which owns my ISP (which has a monopoly in my area; arguably a "natural" monopoly) also owns a movie studio, it wants to discourage me from watching Brand X movies, whose owner also owns ISP company Z. So they slow down my streaming of Brand X movies unless Z pays danegeld a premium.
I pay my ISP to send my 1s and 0s back and forth. If they can double-charge the parties at the other ends, it's pure rent seeking, not to mention corporate censoring.
Permitting an ISP to select which 1s and 0s it will give first, second, and third class transportation is wildly anti-competitive. I really don't think Google's network would throttle queries to bing, but net neutrality would prevent it.