I think you need to take a breath and realize that there are people trying to enable corporate power, and there are people trying to enable responsible agency for intelligent beings, and that they are not the same people, but they both find themselves under the libertarian banner.
NO, they don't. At all. The former are not even remotely Libertarians, even if they are trying to associate themselves with the Libertarian name.
Those are Republicans trying to pretend to be Libertarians. And by the way: progressives over the last years (Obama and friends are great examples) have been as supportive of "corporate power" as the Republicans. Just usually different corporations. But it's all the same game.
And honest Libertarian, however, is for free markets, with reasonable antitrust laws to keep the markets free. The latter part is integral to the capitalist system, and when it is lacking (as it has been under both Democratic and Republican rule since at least the late 90s), then what you have is oligopoly and monopoly (i.e., "corporate power"), not free markets.
So don't be fooled. Corporatists are NOT Libertarians. If they claim they are, show them where the Libertarian philosophy actually supports free competitive markets, not corporatism. They are not the same things.
Come on, we know that it was dead before word one was written. I'm just curious when libertarians will admit their people are just as in bed with money as the rest of us so we can finally fight the money together. The ones with money are the ones taking all your guns and taking all the jobs.
You are rather grossly confusing Libertarians with Republicans. They are NOT, even remotely, the same things.
If the Feds regulate interstate commerce, they will not be "enforcing" one state's law over another. They would be enforcing a federal law that collects sales tax on inter-state commerce.
Nice theory, but it doesn't work. States set their OWN sales taxes. It's not a Federal tax, and it varies from state to state. And apparently you forgot the part where I pointed out that the Federal government has no Constitutional authority to collect taxes on behalf of states. There is no law anywhere -- sure as HELL not in the Constitution -- that gives the Federal government that kind of taxation power. It's taxing powers are spelled out very clearly in black and white.
Can't you read or are you deliberately lying? From the very page you point to:
I can read quite well, thank you. But you seem to be having trouble. I was replying to this:
Also - couldn't you actually just sign the drivers that are needed for trim? What prevents that? Likely just time. But that doesn't make for an alarming headline.
No, you couldn't, since they are Apple's drivers not yours. Apple's driver takes over handling of external drives, but it refuses to TRIM them. Previously, people worked around that by patching the driver, but signing prevents that.
The reason I replied was that you are WRONG. Yes, you can. Or rather, you can simply bypass kext signing. It's easy enough.
To continue to use Trim Enabler and continue to get Trim for your third party SSD, you first need to disable the kext signing security setting.
... but apparently, you conveniently stopped there, rather than reading further where it said "Trim Enabler 3.3 will disable the kext-signing setting automatically for you..."
As I was saying: signing prevents modifying kernel extensions. That's the whole point!
And as *I* was saying, it's ridiculously easy to bypass. So technically no, you can't "sign your own drivers", but you can get around the requirement that they be signed at all. That's even easier, and the point I think GP was getting at.
Sure. "Nominated" in pretty much the same sense judges are. President nominates them, Senate approves them. People still refer to that as "appointments".
Whether you want to call it nomination or appointment, the process is the same. You are making a distinction without a difference.
No, you couldn't, since they are Apple's drivers not yours. Apple's driver takes over handling of external drives, but it refuses to TRIM them. Previously, people worked around that by patching the driver, but signing prevents that.
The is only possible if the hardware layer is separated from the rest of the business.
A lot of people don't know this, but that's why "Ma Bell" was broken up, way back when. In order to hold onto their position as a regulated monopoly, they had been enjoined by Federal court from participating in the hardware business. But for 20 years, they got away with controlling telephone hardware via their wholly-owned subsidiary Western Electric. Nobody could compete in the phone hardware business because Ma Bell made you have one of their techs install a "compatibility box" on the wall wherever one was used, and charged you for the visit, PLUS a hefty monthly fee for the box.
GP didn't make this point well enough, though, I think: competition leads to monopoly or oligopoly only when there isn't adequate enforcement of antitrust regulation. A real Capitalist free market system MUST have a reasonable body of antitrust laws in place, to keep everybody operating within the free-market rules. This has been recognized as far back as Adam Smith.
So people saying "capitalism is the problem" are wrong. Corporatism, and "crony capitalism", aren't capitalism. Capitalism includes antitrust law, and just as important: enforcement. Since we haven't been seeing much real enforcement, what we're seeing isn't capitalism.
The takedown provisions aren't as bad as they look, either.
The takedown provisions are terrible. There are innumerable documented cases of abuse, and the burden of proof is shifted away from the accuser and on to the defending party. That makes it an effective tool for censorship, if only temporary. And it has been used that way. Many, many times. Further, it discriminates against the poor who have less time/money to demonstrate documented ownership.
The burden of demonstrating infringement must be on the claimant before a takedown. The fact that it is not is inexcusable, and must change.
Sucks, but that's life in rural/unincorporated US.
No, that's life in more than 80% of the U.S., whether rural OR incorporated city. Very big cities and the areas around them are pretty much the only exceptions.
I am denying none of those things. I am pointing out that the FCC has five commissioners, not one, and your explicit insistence that this is entirely Wheeler's fault, and therefore Obama's fault, is wrong on two counts: one, it is not entirely Wheeler's fault, he wouldn't be getting anywhere without GOP support. Two, even if it was Wheeler's fault, he and Obama are two separate people.
Uh... read the news, pal. Obama appointed ALL FIVE of the current FCC commissioners. Yes, even the Republican ones.
The telcos have a monopoly because copper was installed to homes about 100 years ago via the only phone company in existence, the original AT&T. Their markets were "divided" by the antitrust breakup of AT&T, not a bunch of telcos deciding where to offer service.
We're talking about two different things here.
I was not referring to DSL. DSL barely fits a reasonable definition of "low-latency broadband", if it does at all anymore. Cable bypassed it years ago.
I would not be able to do my work on DSL. It's far too slow.
So I was referring to "modern" broadband: Docsis and fiber. And yes, areas for those are divided up among the major cable companies so they DON'T have to compete... they practically bragged as much to the FCC in the proposal to merge Comcast and Time Warner Cable: they said "Hey... we operate in different regions so we don't compete anyway." (Even though dividing the country up between erstwhile "competing" companies is a violation of Federal antitrust laws.)
Of course the Federal government has authority to regulate interstate commerce. But that is a straw-man argument; it is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Regulating interstate commerce still does not give the Federal government the authority to force somebody in one state to enforce the laws of another. A "use" tax is a STATE law. The Feds have no legal way to enforce state laws across borders, interstate commerce clause or not.
Nor does it have any authority to collect taxes on behalf of a state... again, that's state law, and that would definitely cross over the line between State and Federal authority.
This has all been done before, when mail-order purchases became common. NOTHING -- quite literally nothing -- has changed, except that you now look at the catalog online, and pay with a credit card. It's still "mail order" in every conceivable sense.
What you say is correct ONLY as it pertains to forcing the RETAILER to collect/pay the tax.
No, it's not. One state has no power to collect ANY taxes on a transaction made in another state.
A "use tax" is not a tax on the transaction! That would be illegal. It is a tax on the USE of the item purchases (thus the name).
The tax you pay on a vehicle purchased out-of-state is a USE tax.
NOW... the second thing you are forgetting, which has 2 aspects: (1) State A has no legal or Constitutional power to force anybody in state B to collect or use its use tax. It is a state-level tax and one state's laws have no authority in another state.
And (2), the Federal government also has no authority to collect such tax on behalf of a state.
So Constitutionally, the Federal government's hands are tied. I repeat what stated above: this was all hashed out in the courts 150 years ago. None of the legal principles have changed in that time.
No, someone else WON'T, and that's the whole problem. The vast majority of the U.S. has one, and only one, decent low-latency broadband provider. The big ISPs divided it up that way on purpose where they could. Heck, they even said testified as much to the FCC, even though dividing up the country that way is an illegal anti-competitive practice.
I'm all for market solutions... when there is a real, competitive market. There isn't, in most of the U.S.
There's no state sales tax on out of state purchases; that would be an unconstitutional tax on interstate transactions.
Actually, it isn't even that... it would be an unconstitutional attempt by one state to tax a transaction that takes place in another state. Not an "interstate" transaction at all. And allowing such taxation would open up a can of worms the size of China.
If one state can tax a transaction in other state -- for ANY reason -- what's next? Wisconsin taxing your grocery purchases in Los Angeles? It's easy to see how absurd that concept is.
BUT... there is also this fact, which is uncomfortable to lawmakers: the ONLY way to effectively have online transactions is to consider the purchase made in the state of the seller. This is very much old hat, as it was hashed out in the courts to a VERY definite conclusion more than 150 years ago, when mail order became common. That's why the company having a "physical presence" in your state makes a difference... only then can the sale be considered to be in your state.
And... internet sales are mail order. The ONLY differences are how the payments are made, and how you view the catalog. You're still getting your product by mail.
When you add all these things up, the inescapable conclusion is that an internet sales tax is unconstitutional, since it is de facto an absurd tax on transactions made in other states. (Except, of course, when the company has a presence in your own state.)
I meant exactly what I wrote. Are you denying that Obama put Wheeler there? An ex- lobbyist for cable company interests? Are you denying that just about any reasonable person would think a guy who lobbied for the cable industry would take the cable industry view when proposing rulings?
No, it's not "other parts of the same law" that require the DMCA's safe harbor provisions, it's traditional, old school common law. If you aid and abet someone in committing a crime, then you are liable as an accomplice, or a secondary/contributory infringer in the case of copyright.
Irrelevant. Those things were already illegal! Further, MOST copyright infringement is not a crime. Genuine piracy (copying & distributing for profit) is, but the vast majority of copyright infringement isn't piracy.
DMCA added nothing substantial to reasonable copyright laws. What it did was make attempts to break (and even research about!) "protections" illegal. While courts have held parts of those restrictions don't hold water, some still do.
It also created the DMCA "takedown" provisions, which border on prior restraint. Those moved the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, which is an abomination in the eyes of U.S. (and Common Law) legal principles.
All in all, the majority of DMCA is a violation of Common Law principles.
They are not under pressure from everybody to do that. There are some who believe rightly that it is nonsensical to apply a law written in 1934 for telephone/telegraph to internet providers.
Yeah, well, your right to free speech was written into the Constitution more than 200 years ago. So what?
It's a matter of relativity. It's a hell of a lot MORE right than the current situation, and it's vastly better than what Wheeler was proposing.
Why should the providers shoulder this burden? They're not marketing, charging for, or making the content available. It's ridiculous. And invasive.
Nonsense. The reason they should "shoulder the burden" is that you already paid them to do so via your monthly bill. And instead of investing in improved infrastructure to carry the extra bits, as has been done in other civilized countries, in the U.S. they've just been pocketing the money and taking vacations in Jamaica.
Seriously. U.S. has worse speed AND higher prices than most of the Western world, including pretty much all of Europe.
I pay for bandwidth. It doesn't (should not) matter where that bandwidth comes from. And the suppliers of the content, on the other end, should not have to be forced to pay AGAIN for bandwidth I already paid for.
Not to mention that the proper role of ISPs is as carriers anyway, which means they should be content-neutral.
Imagine if they were old land-line telephone companies (as they should be): if you called Aunt Martha, and she talked a lot, you still paid the phone bill for that call. It didn't matter if she talked for hours, or how fast she talked, you still paid the bill. Further, if people were calling your teenage daughter all damned day because she was popular and spent all damned day on the telephone, as many teenagers did, should SHE have to pay just because she was popular, and talked a lot? No. The people who called HER paid the bill for the calls.
There is not one single legitimate reason why ISPs in the U.S. should get to double-dip for their services, when they already aren't delivering good service for the money anyway.
I was referencing to the very real possibility that while a law may not be passed to disband the fcc, they may zero it's budget which is effectively the same to prevent any sort of net neutrality. utility or otherwise.
Pure fantasy.
The FCC is under pressure from EVERYBODY to reclassify ISPs as Title II Common Carriers. And the reason is simple: it is what should have been done in the very beginning.
It is the obvious and RIGHT thing to do, and so much is clear to just about everyone. Even the ISPs know that, they just don't want it to happen.
The GOP really, really, really needs to get it through their heads that their ideology is NOT why they were overwhelmingly elected this year. In fact that had little if anything to do with it. What the voters did was throw the other bums out. If the new Congress behaves badly, it will just be their turn in 2016.
Seriously. People are fed up. And it's Obama's guy, Wheeler, who has been pushing for Internet "Slow Lanes" on behalf of the ISPs. So no matter Obama's rhetoric, no matter how many things Ted Cruz idiotically blurts, you can point the finger straight at Obama if you're looking for blame. Not the GOP.
Well, in fairness, I should qualify that. In 2000 I was working for a company that was using an older system, which would have been considered outdated by anyone starting a new project at that time. (Not as old a system as COBOL, by any means, but it was a few years old even then.)
So it's more like a difference of 20 years, really.
And you also have to figure that hardware has gotten much better. I don't claim that I'm writing 20 times as much code in a given day, but that code does a lot more. I'm certainly accomplishing at least 20 times as much.
More interesting: what happens to the footage actually contains something covered by DMCA?
There's an easy answer to that one: get rid of the goddamned DMCA.
There is no legitimate reason for it to exist in a free society. Even the "safe harbor" provisions would not be necessary, if it weren't for other parts of the same law.
So just get rid of it. Things were demonstrably better before it existed.
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I think you need to take a breath and realize that there are people trying to enable corporate power, and there are people trying to enable responsible agency for intelligent beings, and that they are not the same people, but they both find themselves under the libertarian banner.
NO, they don't. At all. The former are not even remotely Libertarians, even if they are trying to associate themselves with the Libertarian name.
Those are Republicans trying to pretend to be Libertarians. And by the way: progressives over the last years (Obama and friends are great examples) have been as supportive of "corporate power" as the Republicans. Just usually different corporations. But it's all the same game.
And honest Libertarian, however, is for free markets, with reasonable antitrust laws to keep the markets free. The latter part is integral to the capitalist system, and when it is lacking (as it has been under both Democratic and Republican rule since at least the late 90s), then what you have is oligopoly and monopoly (i.e., "corporate power"), not free markets.
So don't be fooled. Corporatists are NOT Libertarians. If they claim they are, show them where the Libertarian philosophy actually supports free competitive markets, not corporatism. They are not the same things.
Come on, we know that it was dead before word one was written. I'm just curious when libertarians will admit their people are just as in bed with money as the rest of us so we can finally fight the money together. The ones with money are the ones taking all your guns and taking all the jobs.
You are rather grossly confusing Libertarians with Republicans. They are NOT, even remotely, the same things.
If the Feds regulate interstate commerce, they will not be "enforcing" one state's law over another. They would be enforcing a federal law that collects sales tax on inter-state commerce.
Nice theory, but it doesn't work. States set their OWN sales taxes. It's not a Federal tax, and it varies from state to state. And apparently you forgot the part where I pointed out that the Federal government has no Constitutional authority to collect taxes on behalf of states. There is no law anywhere -- sure as HELL not in the Constitution -- that gives the Federal government that kind of taxation power. It's taxing powers are spelled out very clearly in black and white.
Can't you read or are you deliberately lying? From the very page you point to:
I can read quite well, thank you. But you seem to be having trouble. I was replying to this:
Also - couldn't you actually just sign the drivers that are needed for trim? What prevents that? Likely just time. But that doesn't make for an alarming headline.
No, you couldn't, since they are Apple's drivers not yours. Apple's driver takes over handling of external drives, but it refuses to TRIM them. Previously, people worked around that by patching the driver, but signing prevents that.
The reason I replied was that you are WRONG. Yes, you can. Or rather, you can simply bypass kext signing. It's easy enough.
To continue to use Trim Enabler and continue to get Trim for your third party SSD, you first need to disable the kext signing security setting.
... but apparently, you conveniently stopped there, rather than reading further where it said "Trim Enabler 3.3 will disable the kext-signing setting automatically for you..."
As I was saying: signing prevents modifying kernel extensions. That's the whole point!
And as *I* was saying, it's ridiculously easy to bypass. So technically no, you can't "sign your own drivers", but you can get around the requirement that they be signed at all. That's even easier, and the point I think GP was getting at.
Sure. "Nominated" in pretty much the same sense judges are. President nominates them, Senate approves them. People still refer to that as "appointments".
Whether you want to call it nomination or appointment, the process is the same. You are making a distinction without a difference.
No, you couldn't, since they are Apple's drivers not yours. Apple's driver takes over handling of external drives, but it refuses to TRIM them. Previously, people worked around that by patching the driver, but signing prevents that.
Yes, you can. People are already making kext-modification scripts and other tools that get around the signing.
This is pretty much a non-issue.
The is only possible if the hardware layer is separated from the rest of the business.
A lot of people don't know this, but that's why "Ma Bell" was broken up, way back when. In order to hold onto their position as a regulated monopoly, they had been enjoined by Federal court from participating in the hardware business. But for 20 years, they got away with controlling telephone hardware via their wholly-owned subsidiary Western Electric. Nobody could compete in the phone hardware business because Ma Bell made you have one of their techs install a "compatibility box" on the wall wherever one was used, and charged you for the visit, PLUS a hefty monthly fee for the box.
GP didn't make this point well enough, though, I think: competition leads to monopoly or oligopoly only when there isn't adequate enforcement of antitrust regulation. A real Capitalist free market system MUST have a reasonable body of antitrust laws in place, to keep everybody operating within the free-market rules. This has been recognized as far back as Adam Smith.
So people saying "capitalism is the problem" are wrong. Corporatism, and "crony capitalism", aren't capitalism. Capitalism includes antitrust law, and just as important: enforcement. Since we haven't been seeing much real enforcement, what we're seeing isn't capitalism.
The takedown provisions aren't as bad as they look, either.
The takedown provisions are terrible. There are innumerable documented cases of abuse, and the burden of proof is shifted away from the accuser and on to the defending party. That makes it an effective tool for censorship, if only temporary. And it has been used that way. Many, many times. Further, it discriminates against the poor who have less time/money to demonstrate documented ownership.
The burden of demonstrating infringement must be on the claimant before a takedown. The fact that it is not is inexcusable, and must change.
Sucks, but that's life in rural/unincorporated US.
No, that's life in more than 80% of the U.S., whether rural OR incorporated city. Very big cities and the areas around them are pretty much the only exceptions.
Maybe it was the way it was worded, but it looked serious to me.
I am denying none of those things. I am pointing out that the FCC has five commissioners, not one, and your explicit insistence that this is entirely Wheeler's fault, and therefore Obama's fault, is wrong on two counts: one, it is not entirely Wheeler's fault, he wouldn't be getting anywhere without GOP support. Two, even if it was Wheeler's fault, he and Obama are two separate people.
Uh... read the news, pal. Obama appointed ALL FIVE of the current FCC commissioners. Yes, even the Republican ones.
The telcos have a monopoly because copper was installed to homes about 100 years ago via the only phone company in existence, the original AT&T. Their markets were "divided" by the antitrust breakup of AT&T, not a bunch of telcos deciding where to offer service.
We're talking about two different things here.
I was not referring to DSL. DSL barely fits a reasonable definition of "low-latency broadband", if it does at all anymore. Cable bypassed it years ago.
I would not be able to do my work on DSL. It's far too slow.
So I was referring to "modern" broadband: Docsis and fiber. And yes, areas for those are divided up among the major cable companies so they DON'T have to compete... they practically bragged as much to the FCC in the proposal to merge Comcast and Time Warner Cable: they said "Hey... we operate in different regions so we don't compete anyway." (Even though dividing the country up between erstwhile "competing" companies is a violation of Federal antitrust laws.)
Of course the Federal government has authority to regulate interstate commerce. But that is a straw-man argument; it is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Regulating interstate commerce still does not give the Federal government the authority to force somebody in one state to enforce the laws of another. A "use" tax is a STATE law. The Feds have no legal way to enforce state laws across borders, interstate commerce clause or not.
Nor does it have any authority to collect taxes on behalf of a state... again, that's state law, and that would definitely cross over the line between State and Federal authority.
This has all been done before, when mail-order purchases became common. NOTHING -- quite literally nothing -- has changed, except that you now look at the catalog online, and pay with a credit card. It's still "mail order" in every conceivable sense.
What you say is correct ONLY as it pertains to forcing the RETAILER to collect/pay the tax.
No, it's not. One state has no power to collect ANY taxes on a transaction made in another state.
A "use tax" is not a tax on the transaction! That would be illegal. It is a tax on the USE of the item purchases (thus the name).
The tax you pay on a vehicle purchased out-of-state is a USE tax.
NOW... the second thing you are forgetting, which has 2 aspects: (1) State A has no legal or Constitutional power to force anybody in state B to collect or use its use tax. It is a state-level tax and one state's laws have no authority in another state.
And (2), the Federal government also has no authority to collect such tax on behalf of a state.
So Constitutionally, the Federal government's hands are tied. I repeat what stated above: this was all hashed out in the courts 150 years ago. None of the legal principles have changed in that time.
They're ALREADY regulated. It's illegal to fly the damned things in "navigable" airspace.
Further, OUTSIDE navigable airspace, a Federal judge has ruled FAA has no authority over them.
Because if they don't, someone else will.
This is a joke, right?
No, someone else WON'T, and that's the whole problem. The vast majority of the U.S. has one, and only one, decent low-latency broadband provider. The big ISPs divided it up that way on purpose where they could. Heck, they even said testified as much to the FCC, even though dividing up the country that way is an illegal anti-competitive practice.
I'm all for market solutions... when there is a real, competitive market. There isn't, in most of the U.S.
There's no state sales tax on out of state purchases; that would be an unconstitutional tax on interstate transactions.
Actually, it isn't even that... it would be an unconstitutional attempt by one state to tax a transaction that takes place in another state. Not an "interstate" transaction at all. And allowing such taxation would open up a can of worms the size of China.
If one state can tax a transaction in other state -- for ANY reason -- what's next? Wisconsin taxing your grocery purchases in Los Angeles? It's easy to see how absurd that concept is.
BUT... there is also this fact, which is uncomfortable to lawmakers: the ONLY way to effectively have online transactions is to consider the purchase made in the state of the seller. This is very much old hat, as it was hashed out in the courts to a VERY definite conclusion more than 150 years ago, when mail order became common. That's why the company having a "physical presence" in your state makes a difference... only then can the sale be considered to be in your state.
And... internet sales are mail order. The ONLY differences are how the payments are made, and how you view the catalog. You're still getting your product by mail.
When you add all these things up, the inescapable conclusion is that an internet sales tax is unconstitutional, since it is de facto an absurd tax on transactions made in other states. (Except, of course, when the company has a presence in your own state.)
That's what you meant, right?
I meant exactly what I wrote. Are you denying that Obama put Wheeler there? An ex- lobbyist for cable company interests? Are you denying that just about any reasonable person would think a guy who lobbied for the cable industry would take the cable industry view when proposing rulings?
No, it's not "other parts of the same law" that require the DMCA's safe harbor provisions, it's traditional, old school common law. If you aid and abet someone in committing a crime, then you are liable as an accomplice, or a secondary/contributory infringer in the case of copyright.
Irrelevant. Those things were already illegal! Further, MOST copyright infringement is not a crime. Genuine piracy (copying & distributing for profit) is, but the vast majority of copyright infringement isn't piracy.
DMCA added nothing substantial to reasonable copyright laws. What it did was make attempts to break (and even research about!) "protections" illegal. While courts have held parts of those restrictions don't hold water, some still do.
It also created the DMCA "takedown" provisions, which border on prior restraint. Those moved the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, which is an abomination in the eyes of U.S. (and Common Law) legal principles.
All in all, the majority of DMCA is a violation of Common Law principles.
They are not under pressure from everybody to do that. There are some who believe rightly that it is nonsensical to apply a law written in 1934 for telephone/telegraph to internet providers.
Yeah, well, your right to free speech was written into the Constitution more than 200 years ago. So what?
It's a matter of relativity. It's a hell of a lot MORE right than the current situation, and it's vastly better than what Wheeler was proposing.
Why should the providers shoulder this burden? They're not marketing, charging for, or making the content available. It's ridiculous. And invasive.
Nonsense. The reason they should "shoulder the burden" is that you already paid them to do so via your monthly bill. And instead of investing in improved infrastructure to carry the extra bits, as has been done in other civilized countries, in the U.S. they've just been pocketing the money and taking vacations in Jamaica.
Seriously. U.S. has worse speed AND higher prices than most of the Western world, including pretty much all of Europe.
I pay for bandwidth. It doesn't (should not) matter where that bandwidth comes from. And the suppliers of the content, on the other end, should not have to be forced to pay AGAIN for bandwidth I already paid for.
Not to mention that the proper role of ISPs is as carriers anyway, which means they should be content-neutral.
Imagine if they were old land-line telephone companies (as they should be): if you called Aunt Martha, and she talked a lot, you still paid the phone bill for that call. It didn't matter if she talked for hours, or how fast she talked, you still paid the bill. Further, if people were calling your teenage daughter all damned day because she was popular and spent all damned day on the telephone, as many teenagers did, should SHE have to pay just because she was popular, and talked a lot? No. The people who called HER paid the bill for the calls.
There is not one single legitimate reason why ISPs in the U.S. should get to double-dip for their services, when they already aren't delivering good service for the money anyway.
I was referencing to the very real possibility that while a law may not be passed to disband the fcc, they may zero it's budget which is effectively the same to prevent any sort of net neutrality. utility or otherwise.
Pure fantasy.
The FCC is under pressure from EVERYBODY to reclassify ISPs as Title II Common Carriers. And the reason is simple: it is what should have been done in the very beginning.
It is the obvious and RIGHT thing to do, and so much is clear to just about everyone. Even the ISPs know that, they just don't want it to happen.
The GOP really, really, really needs to get it through their heads that their ideology is NOT why they were overwhelmingly elected this year. In fact that had little if anything to do with it. What the voters did was throw the other bums out. If the new Congress behaves badly, it will just be their turn in 2016.
Seriously. People are fed up. And it's Obama's guy, Wheeler, who has been pushing for Internet "Slow Lanes" on behalf of the ISPs. So no matter Obama's rhetoric, no matter how many things Ted Cruz idiotically blurts, you can point the finger straight at Obama if you're looking for blame. Not the GOP.
Well, in fairness, I should qualify that. In 2000 I was working for a company that was using an older system, which would have been considered outdated by anyone starting a new project at that time. (Not as old a system as COBOL, by any means, but it was a few years old even then.)
So it's more like a difference of 20 years, really.
And you also have to figure that hardware has gotten much better. I don't claim that I'm writing 20 times as much code in a given day, but that code does a lot more. I'm certainly accomplishing at least 20 times as much.
More interesting: what happens to the footage actually contains something covered by DMCA?
There's an easy answer to that one: get rid of the goddamned DMCA.
There is no legitimate reason for it to exist in a free society. Even the "safe harbor" provisions would not be necessary, if it weren't for other parts of the same law.
So just get rid of it. Things were demonstrably better before it existed.
This. You'd have to present your ID to get the license in the first place. So the idea that it's to verify age is nonsense.