The FCC's Network Neutrality Ruling in the Comcast Case: Towards a Consensus with Europe?

In August 2008, the FCC found that Comcast's restrictions on peer-to-peer upload transmissions were unreasonably discriminatory, arbitrarily targeted a particular application, and deprived consumers of their rights to run Internet applications and use services of their choice. The Comcast ruling represents a significant change in the FCC's direction: given the FCC's past decisions that broadband Internet access services do not fall within the "common carrier" category, it is notable that the agency has now imposed nondiscrimination requirements on these services. This Article shows that the rationales articulated in the FCC's Comcast order, stressing both (i) concerns about protecting competition and (ii) concerns about protecting consumers from disruption of their ability to communicate freely and privately, are rooted in centuries of Anglo-American law defining he obligations of "common carriers." The FCC appears to be moving away from its traditional emphasis on the competition policy concerns, which justify asymmetrical regulation of dominant providers for the sake of enabling competition, and toward an emphasis on the consumer protection issues, which justify symmetrical regulation of all service providers regardless whether they have market power. These developments in the U.S. echo the discussion now going on in Europe in the context of the package of proposals on a new common regulatory framework for telecommunications, released by the European Commission on Nov. 13, 2007, and which is now being debated by the European Parliament and Council. On both sides of the Atlantic, a trend is emerging to permit network discrimination only if the discrimination is narrowly tailored to achieve legitimate objectives.network neutrality, discrimination, common carrier, network management, Comcast, European Directives.

Profession-Derived Names in Poznań Documents of the 16th-18th Centuries

The subject of studies of the article is the word-formation structure of the names moti-vated by the designations of professions. The analyses are conducted only at the level of the language system. The collected material does not allow us to conduct such analyses at the text level. The completed studies showed that most often nominal derivatives of the discussed type were formed with the use of word-formative models with formatives -czyk, -ski. Relatively high frequency represent the formatives with a basic -k. This kind of distribution of the form-atives indicates the exceptionality of this category of names, its close relationship with the formation of profession-derived nouns at the appellative level. The models according to which the profession-derived names were formed indicate great synonymity. These names create even five-part series, which never occurs in other nominal types. The subject of studies of the article is the word-formation structure of the names moti-vated by the designations of professions. The analyses are conducted only at the level of the language system. The collected material does not allow us to conduct such analyses at the text level. The completed studies showed that most often nominal derivatives of the discussed type were formed with the use of word-formative models with formatives -czyk, -ski. Relatively high frequency represent the formatives with a basic -k. This kind of distribution of the form-atives indicates the exceptionality of this category of names, its close relationship with the formation of profession-derived nouns at the appellative level. The models according to which the profession-derived names were formed indicate great synonymity. These names create even five-part series, which never occurs in other nominal types.

Guardian Knight or Hands Off: The European Response to Network Neutrality. Legal considerations on the electronic communications reform

Network neutrality refers to a policy principle regarding access for online content and service providers to broadband infrastructures. It implies a general and ex ante obligation of non-discrimination for network operators when granting access to providers of online services, with the aim of excluding practices such as blocking access to non-affiliated content, degrading the quality of transmission, imposing unreasonable restrictions or prioritising affiliated content. Whether such obligation should be "cast in the Stone Tables" of the law was first fiercely debated in the United States, and the issue is now gaining increased attention in other parts of the world, including the European Union, where the regulatory framework for electronic communications is currently under review. This article examines whether existing rules already provide the relevant authorities with the necessary tools to take action against broadband providers illegitimately discriminating or blocking content of those who are not prepared to pay a "toll" for the use of higher speed networks or better quality services. It focuses in particular on the EU regulatory framework for electronic communications networks and services, including the reform proposals published by the European Commission on November 13th (type should be like 24th below) 2007 and the resolution adopted by the European Parliament on 24th September 2008.network neutrality, regulation, electronic communications, reform proposals.

Dynamic fracture in dealloying induced stress-corrosion cracking

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Evolution of Nanoporosity in Dealloying

Dealloying is a common corrosion process during which an alloy is "parted" by the selective dissolution of the electrochemically more active elements. This process results in the formation of a nanoporous sponge composed almost entirely of the more noble alloy constituents . Even though this morphology evolution problem has attracted considerable attention, the physics responsible for porosity evolution have remained a mystery . Here we show by experiment, lattice computer simulation, and a continuum model, that nanoporosity is due to an intrinsic dynamical pattern formation process - pores form because the more noble atoms are chemically driven to aggregate into two-dimensional clusters via a spinodal decomposition process at the solid-electrolyte interface. At the same time, the surface area continuously increases due to etching. Together, these processes evolve a characteristic length scale predicted by our continuum model. The applications potential of nanoporous metals is enormous. For instance, the high surface area of nanoporous gold made by dealloying Ag-Au can be chemically tailored, making it suitable for sensor applications, particularly in biomaterials contexts.Comment: 13 pages, PDF, incl. 4 figures. avi movies of simulations available at http://www.deas.harvard.edu/matsci/downdata/downdata.htm

On certain limitations of recursive representation model

There is a strong research e ort towards developing models that can achieve state-of-the-art results without sacricing interpretability and simplicity. One of such is recently proposed Recursive Random Support Vector Machine (R2SVM) model, which is composed of stacked linear models. R2SVM was reported to learn deep representations outperforming many strong classifers like Deep Convolutional Neural Network. In this paper we try to analyze it both from theoretical and empirical perspective and show its important limitations. Analysis of similar model Deep Representation Extreme Learning Machine (DrELM) is also included. It is concluded that models in its current form achieves lower accuracy scores than Support Vector Machine with Radial Basis Function kernel

Field Thicket m the Neighbourhood of the Village of Olsztyn in the Northern Part of the Częstochowska Upland

The thicket communities grow in the fields in the neighbourhood of the village of Olsztyn near the town of Częstochowa. They include 235 species of vascular plants and 15 taxa of mosses. Two thicket associations of the class Rhamno-Prunetea are described.Zadanie pt. „Digitalizacja i udostępnienie w Cyfrowym Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego kolekcji czasopism naukowych wydawanych przez Uniwersytet Łódzki” nr 885/P-DUN/2014 zostało dofinansowane ze środków MNiSW w ramach działalności upowszechniającej naukę

A Review of European Owls as Predators of Bats

Fossil evidence indicates that owls have been preying on bats from as far back as the Pleistocene. Overall, bats form quite small portions (i.e. trace to 0.2%) of the diets (by prey frequency) of European owls. An assessment of dietary studies and anecdotal accounts reveals that five species of European owls, the Eurasian scops owl Otus scops, Pygmy owl Glaucidium passerinum, Tengmalm’s owl Aegolius funereus, little owl Athene noctua and Ural owl Strix uralensis, rarely feed on bats (with less than 0.1−0.4%) and a further two species, short-eared owl Asio flammeus and eagle owl Bubo bubo, may only take bats occasionally, while three species, long-eared owl Asio otus, barn owl Tyto alba and tawny owl Strix aluco, feed on bats more frequently. In this study, a total of 19,864 recorded bats have been preyed upon by these owls, with as many as 48 bat species being identified. Barn and tawny owls have captured most of this total (47.1 and 41.9%), followed by the long-eared owl (7.6%), while short-eared and eagle owls take similar amounts of bats (1.1 and 1.7%, respectively). Owl predation on bats deserves future research because it may help contribute to our knowledge on bat biodiversity and distribution and possibly identify an additional risk for small populations of endangered bats