Slashdot Mirror
Disney Strikes Against Net Neutrality
1 a bee writes "Ars Technica is running a story by Matthew Lasar about how Disney's ESPN360.com is charging ISPs for 'bulk' access to their content. According to the article, if you visit ESPN using a 'non-subscribing' ISP, you're greeted with a message explaining why access is restricted for you. This raises a number of issues: '... it's one thing to charge users an access fee, another to charge the ISP, potentially passing the cost on to all the ISPs subscribers whether they're interested in the content or not.' Ironically, the issue came to the fore in a complaint from the American Cable Association (ACA) to the FCC. A quoted ACA press release warns, 'Media giants are in the early stages of becoming Internet gatekeepers by requiring broadband providers to pay for their Web-based content and services and include them as part of basic Internet access for all subscribers. These content providers are also preventing subscribers who are interested in the content from independently accessing it on broadband networks of providers that have refused to pay.' So, is this a real threat to net neutrality (and the end-to-end principle) or just another bad business model that doesn't stand a chance?"
Think again.
Lifetime gets better ratings than the Discovery channel and SciFi.
TruTV gets better ratings than CNN, the History channel or Comedy Central.
Soap, Oxygen, and the golf channel all get better ratings than G4, the military channel, biography, or BBC America.
source
During college, I knew a lot of African immigrants (as in, people who'd come to the US from Africa, either to stay for good, or to get a degree).
Without exception they agreed on one thing: American blacks are racist dumb shits. They couldn't understand where the "dignity" was in rap "music", hip-hop "culture", or the idea of teaching your kids that it's "acting white" to be smart. And they were constantly assailed by American blacks who bugged them about precisely those things - "acting white", not sounding black when they talked, not listening to the "right" music, not being in the "right" major to be black, etc. They were some of the smartest people I knew, and that's because they held themselves to a high standard, worked hard, and didn't think the government owed them a living like 99% of American blacks seem to.
Political Correctness has always been bullshit. I've been to "America's Black Holocaust Museum" in Milwaukee. You know what? It's a piece of shit. Slavery was bad, but the deep South was never anywhere close to Nazi Germany, and they want to hide the truth that blacks sold blacks into slavery, and there were plenty of black slaveowners in America (over 3000 in New Orleans alone according to the 1860 census).
The so-called "history book" you learned from as a kid was a bastardized, sanitized, rewritten version of "history" that had about as much relation to the truth as a made-for-TV "based on a true story" movie.