So you want YOUR things prioritized, but you don't care about other things being prioritized, even if they might be considered of value to other people.
Because it's the holiday season, I'm going to assume that you simply don't understand how the Internet works, rather than dismiss you outright as a paid shill. On the Internet, packets move between devices called routers at a speed determined largely by the type of physical interconnect between those routers. At each router, packets are delayed. The delay is usually very slight. However, when packets need to flow through a connection that cannot accommodate the full incoming data rate, they are delayed until there is enough room in that connection to accommodate the additional packets.
As long as that overload is relatively small, users usually do not perceive the delay. For example, if the user is playing streaming video, the player requests several minutes of content at a time, and requests the next few minutes of content long before it actually needs it, so that by the time it gets to the end of the content that it has already downloaded, the next chunk of content is already there. Similarly, when the user is loading a web page, that initial latency is usually only a small part of the total page loading time, so the user doesn't really notice it.
There are exceptions, however. Some technologies, such as real-time streaming—things like Skype, video chat, etc.—are considered inherently low-latency protocols. Delays of even a few hundred milliseconds can make the difference between being able to use the service and being unable to do so, both because talking to someone over a high-latency connection is very difficult and because echo cancellation fundamentally depends on low latency. Thus, there is a fundamental, unavoidable technical reason why these protocols must be prioritized; if they are not prioritized, they become completely nonfunctional. Quality-of-service prioritization is critical for preventing latency spikes that would otherwise break these latency-sensitive services. So when the GP said that VoIP needs to be prioritized, it was not an "I want my voice streams to be faster" sort of desire, but rather an "I want voice streams to work".
Other services, no matter how much value other people might consider them to have, do not have hard latency requirements, and thus prioritization of those services provides no benefit to users. A user either has enough bandwidth to the destination to handle streaming at a particular quality or he/she doesn't. If the bandwidth isn't there, that problem can't be fixed by changing the priority. There are only two ways in which paid prioritization could affect the average bandwidth between a user and a given service:
If the ISP is deliberately not buying enough bandwidth, it can use the lack of laws against paid prioritization to allow them to extort money from other companies on the Internet who are not their customers to pay for buying more bandwidth. This is bad, because it allows ISPs to hold arbitrary companies hostage and causes a complete breakdown in the way that Internet service is billed. Instead, those ISPs should either put pressure on their peers to get better peering agreements with faster service or raise the prices of their service so that they can afford the needed bandwidth.
An ISP can throttle some other service to make more room. So if Netflix paid for prioritization, the ISP could reduce bandwidth to other services and use it for making more bandwidth available to Netflix, breaking those other services. This is bad, because it is inherently an unfair distortion of the free market and represents unfair competition.
In every case, paid prioritization causes harm for consumers, and benefits only the ISPs. In no case can it create any benefit for any consumers. Period. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something—probably Internet service.
Fifty years ago was 1967. This was before the oil crunch. I would say, if you were getting out of college with -any- degree, you pretty much were set for life...
If you got out of college in 1967, you were probably one of the first ones to get drafted, so you might have been set for life, but "for life" wasn't necessarily a very long time.
Fifty years ago, Americans were being drafted to fight in the Vietnam war — a war so bloody and so largely useless that people were marching in the streets against it and fleeing the country to avoid it. In that same year, nationwide race riots led to over 100 deaths, and just three years later, the Kent State massacre happened, completely devastating Americans' trust in its government, followed shortly thereafter by Nixon's criminal conspiracy and resignation. And you can't even pretend that things were better a few years before that. After all, only fifty-five years ago, our country nearly ended the world during the Cuban missile crisis.
I hope and pray that most of the respondents didn't think very hard about that question before answering. Because if they did, then either our high school history books have become so whitewashed that nobody gets the full picture of just how bad things really were in America fifty years ago, the respondents slept through their American history classes, or the respondents did a little too much PCP in the 70s and don't remember the 60s anymore. Just saying.
Let me clarify that. They wouldn't except non-Jewish coinage because of purity reasons, but it wasn't that the money was unclean, but rather that they considered that form of currency to be inherently unclean (graven images). My point is that they didn't screw the locals who used the local currency—only the foreigners. It's a subtle, but IMO important distinction.
At a fundamental human level, yes, but that doesn't mean the society is similar, and the discussion is, IMO, more about the nature of society than about the nature of people. These days, there isn't a ruling class that is completely isolated from the rest of society by layers of servants. Now there might be a few people who are rich enough and choose to isolate themselves like that, but those folks for the most part aren't running things; they're just nuisances, and aren't the norm among the wealthy by any means.
And in that era, only the rich were educated at all, typically. These days, although there are educational differences between the rich and the poor, the education level of even the average poor person today in most ways vastly exceeds the education level of the richest people in that era. It's an entirely different society in a lot of critical ways.
Marie Antoinette died over two hundred years ago. The aristocracy of France is even less similar to modern wealthy people than Andrew Jackson's duel is to modern presidential debates. (Then again, I suppose Dick Cheney did shoot somebody....)
This. And that's pretty much what I said the last time this copypasta showed up. You can replace Facebook by joining a different social networking platform and getting your friends to follow you, for a total cost of ~$0. To change ISPs, you had better be prepared to look for a new job in a different city, sell your house, and move. There is a much higher barrier to changing ISPs.
Not quite right. As I understand it, they were required to pay in the coinage accepted by the temple, which meant they had to give gifts in Jewish currency, not Roman or Greek currency. It had nothing to do with making the money pure, but rather with converting it to a form that the church would accept. And because they were far from home and did not have the advantage of knowing where to find good conversion rates, those money changers cheated them massively.
So it was, indeed, about making the temple pure from those who would prey upon the naïveté of foreigners, while at the same time sending their soldiers to attack other nations for theft and barbarity. The hypocrisy was what Jesus wanted to cleanse from the temple, along with the unethical commerce.
Those aren't alternatives to Facebook. Social capital is not something that is portable across social networks. If I use Google Plus instead of Facebook, are you seriously going to try to tell me that I'll be able to speak to the same people, make the same connections, find out about the same local events, etc. that I will on Facebook?
Yes, if your actual real-life friends switch with you.
Google+ already proved that that's not remotely sufficient to create an alternative, and a social network that essentially failed with Google's weight behind it is a clear sign that social networking is different from other platforms.
Snapchat is actually pretty popular among the younger generation, in part because it isn't Facebook. It's in a pretty good position to challenge Facebook going forward. Social networking isn't any more different than IM was before it. All disruptive innovators have to overcome inertia, and a large social graph is just another form of inertia.
That's not how freedom works, you say. Bullshit, because you're choosing to be vague. WHOSE freedom? Facebook's freedom, or the freedom of the people using it as a way to speak to other people?
You can't have one without the other—your right to swing your fist, and all. According to the law, you have a right to speech, but you don't have a right to make others listen, nor do you have a right to make others pay for it. What you propose involves forcing others (Facebook) to pay for it and forcing a second group of others (Facebook's users) to listen to types of speech that, by not leaving Facebook for another platform that allows that speech, those users have effectively said that they don't want to hear. That sort of policy would be highly problematic and contrary to a number of existing laws.
If the implementation of autonomous trucking is too hasty, there will indeed be many millions of jobs lost, and not all of them will be truck drivers. Fuel sales are typically minimal profit for all except the government, and roadside truck stops and service stations make a good bit of their present business off the human needs of the drivers.
While true, at least for now, they'll still have to have employees to plug the power cord into the fully automated rigs, and they can make up the difference by choosing their electricity prices to cover that cost. Eventually, the pumps will be able to plug the cords in by themselves, and that is the innovation that will cause the human attendants to lose their jobs (apart from a single 24x7 regional on-call employee who gets paid to sit at home and watch TV until something goes wrong).
Such work can now proceed, said Dr. Francis S. Collins, the head of the National Institutes of Health, but only if a scientific panel decides that the benefits justify the risks. Some scientists are eager to pursue these studies because they may show, for example, how a bird flu could mutate to more easily infect humans, or could yield clues to making a better vaccine.
All of these things are pretty easy to fix. Just convince your state legislature to call for a constitutional convention in which you add an amendment such that for each political party with more than 1% of the registered voters in a state, that party's candidate for Congress will be chosen from the party's pool of registered voters by a pseudorandom number generator, and no other candidates will be allowed to run in the election except by write-in. Statistically speaking, we would have better outcomes, because instead of picking people who want power for themselves, we would instead merely be picking people who do not shirk their civic duty.
Net Neutrality is in the same way not as clear cut as you might think. That's not to say that I am not in favor of Net Neutrality. I am. Yet there are some things that clearly benefit from lower latency such as voice communications or video to video conversations or even remotely controlling devices from afar. Even electronic gaming and our own stock market would pay for a lower level ping if given the opportunity.
It actually is clear cut. The problem lies in your definition of net neutrality, which is subtly, but critically incorrect.
Net neutrality is unconcerned with protocols or ports or types of traffic. It is unconcerned with traffic shaping that affects latency, so long is it is done uniformly. Net neutrality means one thing, and one thing only: all traffic of a given type must be treated equally without regard to its source/destination on the Internet. This means:
Giving higher priority to VoIP and streaming media over downloads is fine.
Giving higher priority to the ISP's VoIP service but not to Skype or FaceTime is not.
Throttling BitTorrent traffic is fine.
Throttling BitTorrent traffic but not throttling the ISP's competing P2P service is not.
Limiting bandwidth to Netflix is fine (but awful).
Limiting bandwidth to Netflix while allowing the ISP's video-on-demand service to run at full speed is not.
Giving higher speed to Netflix is fine.
Giving higher speed to Netflix without giving it to YouTube is not.
Selling higher speed to someone who is not your customer is inherently not.
With that definition, no exceptions should even be considered. Unfortunately, if the summary above is correct, this definition is almost the precise opposite of what Congress is now proposing, which allows all of the bad things that Net Neutrality is intended to prevent, while preventing lots of perfectly valid things that ISPs do to keep the spice flowing.
On an iPhone sized touch screen device you need a very simple UI. On macOS you can have a much more full featured one.
And yet, if UIKit classes were available on OS X, at least for single-window apps, you could handle that with a different nib, in much the same way that you might have a more feature-rich interface on iPad or iPad Pro.
Obviously document-based apps would benefit from a multi-window treatment, and thus would be better with more significant enhancements. But even those could be immediately ported, then enhanced with multi-window support over time.
If you're still dependent on fiber to within a short distance from the premises, that's not going to solve much. You'll still be dependent on a single, for-profit regional fiber provider that can crank up prices on commercial fiber and crank down the price on residential fiber until it drives that competition out of business.
The highest degree of honesty consistent with success as a politician is what I call the prosecutorial standard. At a trial a prosecutor is actually expected to omit facts that might weaken his case (lies of omission). He is expected to present facts in an unfairly damning light (lies by equivocation).But he's not allowed to outright fabricate evidence. That would be a crime. The reason this standard works is that the prosecutor has an opponent who is highly trained in spotting the kinds of lies he's allowed to use, and who presents a rebuttal: the defense attorney. The jury understands that both the prosecutor and defense attorney are presenting misleading arguments, their job is to produce from those lies a more accurate and nuanced picture of the truth.
Yes, with the caveat that the prosecutor is not allowed (by law) to keep any of that information from the defense attorney. Politicians hide things from the other party all the time. So applying the prosecutorial standard to politicians is problematic.
"Facebook is not a monopoly!" you might retort, but there's a clear monopoly for large social companies. It's like having a choice between slow cell phone internet and DSL and saying that the cell phone internet existing means there's "competition." Yeah, no. What's the alternative to Facebook?
Which one? There are plenty. Google+, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Tencent Weibo, Sina Weibo, email, SMS, IM.... And if you don't like Facebook, you can convince your friends to move to one of those alternatives, and then you can say whatever you want. And if you can't convince your friends to move, the problem might be that what you're saying isn't anything your friends care about hearing. Just saying.
The key difference is that you have choices. You can choose to use Facebook or some other social network. Other than getting your friends to join so you can talk to them, there is essentially zero effort required and exactly zero expense on your part to switch to another social network. By contrast, if you want to change ISPs, you have to pack up all your stuff, find somebody willing to buy your house, find a new house in a new city to buy, move to that new city, and find a new job in that new city, potentially losing significant amounts of money in the process. That's why ISPs need to be highly regulated, and social networks don't.
Look, I get it. You want to be able to say whatever you want, wherever you want. But your desire does not translate into a legal right. What makes it a legal issue for ISPs is that they are a true natural monopoly for which choosing an alternative is completely infeasible. That distinction matters, and no matter how much you might desire your rights to trump the rights of the companies that are running those services, that's just not the way freedom works.
2007: It won't be the case in a few years, when 3G is deployed broadly enough.
2011: It won't be the case in a few years, when LTE is deployed broadly enough.
2017: It won't be the case in a few years, when 5G rolls out.
The problem is, bandwidth needs obey Parkinson's law, i.e. the amount of data expands to fill the available bandwidth. According to that law, wireless connections will always be too slow to be a user's primary connection, because it will always be slower than wired.
Also, wireless is too inconsistent. You can have great speed one minute, and then a bird sits on one side of the tower and shifts the antenna by a few microns, and it causes enough of an increase in multipath interference to make you lose packets for five seconds. Things go badly wrong at that point. (On the plus side, if you're lucky, you can drive past the tower afterwards and get a pre-cooked meal, but I digress.)
That's why the right answer is to make the broad statement, then clarify. It's just like when writing documentation or textbooks or whatever. First, you tell them the general principle, and by the time the student gets to the end of the book, he or she has learned about all the exceptions. The difference between a liar and a good politician is that the former tries to hide the exceptions until he/she gets caught in a falsehood, whereas the latter says, "You can read about the details on my website."
Which is quite weird given the fact that they are actively advertising [tesla.com] that, "soon", you will be able to let your Tesla generate income for you driving other people around on autopilot while you are at work or on vacation.
But if you read the terms and conditions, it says that it may only be used in that way on Tesla's ride-sharing network, not Uber or Lyft. So they get a cut.:-)
More and more, the most commonly used internet is mobile broadband.
Well, that's half true. Mobile broadband has the disadvantage of being expensive and not working with computers unless you pay $$$ for a wireless hotspot feature that still doesn't work because there's too much multipath interference in your apartment downtown in a major city, and won't penetrate the walls with a strong enough signal at your parents' house in the country.
Mobile broadband is the most commonly used, but only because people tend to do lots of minor, trivial stuff with it while they're out and about. Serious Internet use is still almost entirely wired (or at best, Wi-Fi to a wired connection) and will be for the foreseeable future, because cellular wireless just can't handle the bandwidth needs of dense urban areas or the building penetration needs of low-density rural areas.
The removal of NN will allow new brands to emerge.
Boy, do you have that backwards.
Search engines that don't derank for US party political reasons.
Nope. Without NN, your ISP can redirect your search requests to their own search engine without even having to tell users that they're doing it. You might not even know that you're getting a substandard experience. Big search engines can, of course, afford to pay those ISPs to avoid that, but those new brands you're hoping will emerge? They won't have the money to do so, so they'll be stillborn.
And the same problem exists with all of your other ill-informed beliefs about net neutrality. Repealing net neutrality doesn't create opportunities for new Internet companies to emerge. In point of fact, the repeal of net neutrality does the exact opposite, providing new ways for existing large companies to become entrenched in ways that keep new players from being able to enter the field at all.
It is different because no internet company is in the position of AT&T and the Bell System, not even close.
Yeah they are. In fact, nearly every ISP is in exactly the same position as the original AT&T.
The part you're missing is that when it comes to consumer impact, it doesn't matter if there's a better ISP in a city a hundred miles away. You still live in your town, and you're not going to pack up, sell your house, and move to another city just to get better Internet service. You're stuck with what is available in your geographical area.
The reason they broke up the Bell system and, in the process, massively regulated the resulting smaller companies, is that geographical monopolies are fundamentally bad, and it doesn't make a dime's worth of difference how big the geographical area is. The critical part of the AT&T breakup was not splitting up the nationwide monopoly on end-user access, but rather splitting the long-distance provider from the end-user access provider, eliminating any real opportunity for the latter (which were regional monopolies) to limit which long-distance carrier you could use. We have almost the exact same problem now, with ISPs also being cable providers and voice telephone providers that can (and often do) unfairly compete with other streaming video and voice providers that operate over the Internet.
As for the equipment thing... well, Comcast won't provide static IP blocks without renting a Comcast Business Gateway from them. So we've kind of gotten back to that problem, too.
In other words, in every way other than the nationwide aspect, we've been at the exact same point that led to the breakup of AT&T for at least half a decade, if not longer. And as I said earlier, it doesn't matter if an ISP has a monopoly only in your town, in the county, or in an entire region. Unless your house has wheels, you're not going to move it to the next town over, the next county over, or the next state over just to get a better ISP. So anybody claiming that regional wire-line monopolies are somehow different from national wire-line monopolies in any meaningful way is kidding him/herself.
"Not so handsome now", thought Harry as he dipped Hermione in hot source. The Death Eaters were dead now, and Harry was starting to get hungry.
One can interpret some of those words in a couple of different ways, and one of the interpretations (not the literal one, the vulgar one) sounds very much like typical fanfic.
Slashdot Mirror
Because it's the holiday season, I'm going to assume that you simply don't understand how the Internet works, rather than dismiss you outright as a paid shill. On the Internet, packets move between devices called routers at a speed determined largely by the type of physical interconnect between those routers. At each router, packets are delayed. The delay is usually very slight. However, when packets need to flow through a connection that cannot accommodate the full incoming data rate, they are delayed until there is enough room in that connection to accommodate the additional packets.
As long as that overload is relatively small, users usually do not perceive the delay. For example, if the user is playing streaming video, the player requests several minutes of content at a time, and requests the next few minutes of content long before it actually needs it, so that by the time it gets to the end of the content that it has already downloaded, the next chunk of content is already there. Similarly, when the user is loading a web page, that initial latency is usually only a small part of the total page loading time, so the user doesn't really notice it.
There are exceptions, however. Some technologies, such as real-time streaming—things like Skype, video chat, etc.—are considered inherently low-latency protocols. Delays of even a few hundred milliseconds can make the difference between being able to use the service and being unable to do so, both because talking to someone over a high-latency connection is very difficult and because echo cancellation fundamentally depends on low latency. Thus, there is a fundamental, unavoidable technical reason why these protocols must be prioritized; if they are not prioritized, they become completely nonfunctional. Quality-of-service prioritization is critical for preventing latency spikes that would otherwise break these latency-sensitive services. So when the GP said that VoIP needs to be prioritized, it was not an "I want my voice streams to be faster" sort of desire, but rather an "I want voice streams to work".
Other services, no matter how much value other people might consider them to have, do not have hard latency requirements, and thus prioritization of those services provides no benefit to users. A user either has enough bandwidth to the destination to handle streaming at a particular quality or he/she doesn't. If the bandwidth isn't there, that problem can't be fixed by changing the priority. There are only two ways in which paid prioritization could affect the average bandwidth between a user and a given service:
In every case, paid prioritization causes harm for consumers, and benefits only the ISPs. In no case can it create any benefit for any consumers. Period. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something—probably Internet service.
If you got out of college in 1967, you were probably one of the first ones to get drafted, so you might have been set for life, but "for life" wasn't necessarily a very long time.
Fifty years ago, Americans were being drafted to fight in the Vietnam war — a war so bloody and so largely useless that people were marching in the streets against it and fleeing the country to avoid it. In that same year, nationwide race riots led to over 100 deaths, and just three years later, the Kent State massacre happened, completely devastating Americans' trust in its government, followed shortly thereafter by Nixon's criminal conspiracy and resignation. And you can't even pretend that things were better a few years before that. After all, only fifty-five years ago, our country nearly ended the world during the Cuban missile crisis.
I hope and pray that most of the respondents didn't think very hard about that question before answering. Because if they did, then either our high school history books have become so whitewashed that nobody gets the full picture of just how bad things really were in America fifty years ago, the respondents slept through their American history classes, or the respondents did a little too much PCP in the 70s and don't remember the 60s anymore. Just saying.
Let me clarify that. They wouldn't except non-Jewish coinage because of purity reasons, but it wasn't that the money was unclean, but rather that they considered that form of currency to be inherently unclean (graven images). My point is that they didn't screw the locals who used the local currency—only the foreigners. It's a subtle, but IMO important distinction.
At a fundamental human level, yes, but that doesn't mean the society is similar, and the discussion is, IMO, more about the nature of society than about the nature of people. These days, there isn't a ruling class that is completely isolated from the rest of society by layers of servants. Now there might be a few people who are rich enough and choose to isolate themselves like that, but those folks for the most part aren't running things; they're just nuisances, and aren't the norm among the wealthy by any means.
And in that era, only the rich were educated at all, typically. These days, although there are educational differences between the rich and the poor, the education level of even the average poor person today in most ways vastly exceeds the education level of the richest people in that era. It's an entirely different society in a lot of critical ways.
Marie Antoinette died over two hundred years ago. The aristocracy of France is even less similar to modern wealthy people than Andrew Jackson's duel is to modern presidential debates. (Then again, I suppose Dick Cheney did shoot somebody....)
This. And that's pretty much what I said the last time this copypasta showed up. You can replace Facebook by joining a different social networking platform and getting your friends to follow you, for a total cost of ~$0. To change ISPs, you had better be prepared to look for a new job in a different city, sell your house, and move. There is a much higher barrier to changing ISPs.
Not quite right. As I understand it, they were required to pay in the coinage accepted by the temple, which meant they had to give gifts in Jewish currency, not Roman or Greek currency. It had nothing to do with making the money pure, but rather with converting it to a form that the church would accept. And because they were far from home and did not have the advantage of knowing where to find good conversion rates, those money changers cheated them massively.
So it was, indeed, about making the temple pure from those who would prey upon the naïveté of foreigners, while at the same time sending their soldiers to attack other nations for theft and barbarity. The hypocrisy was what Jesus wanted to cleanse from the temple, along with the unethical commerce.
Yes, if your actual real-life friends switch with you.
Snapchat is actually pretty popular among the younger generation, in part because it isn't Facebook. It's in a pretty good position to challenge Facebook going forward. Social networking isn't any more different than IM was before it. All disruptive innovators have to overcome inertia, and a large social graph is just another form of inertia.
You can't have one without the other—your right to swing your fist, and all. According to the law, you have a right to speech, but you don't have a right to make others listen, nor do you have a right to make others pay for it. What you propose involves forcing others (Facebook) to pay for it and forcing a second group of others (Facebook's users) to listen to types of speech that, by not leaving Facebook for another platform that allows that speech, those users have effectively said that they don't want to hear. That sort of policy would be highly problematic and contrary to a number of existing laws.
When was America not great? Same principle applies. :-)
While true, at least for now, they'll still have to have employees to plug the power cord into the fully automated rigs, and they can make up the difference by choosing their electricity prices to cover that cost. Eventually, the pumps will be able to plug the cords in by themselves, and that is the innovation that will cause the human attendants to lose their jobs (apart from a single 24x7 regional on-call employee who gets paid to sit at home and watch TV until something goes wrong).
MAGA = Make America Genocidal Again?
All of these things are pretty easy to fix. Just convince your state legislature to call for a constitutional convention in which you add an amendment such that for each political party with more than 1% of the registered voters in a state, that party's candidate for Congress will be chosen from the party's pool of registered voters by a pseudorandom number generator, and no other candidates will be allowed to run in the election except by write-in. Statistically speaking, we would have better outcomes, because instead of picking people who want power for themselves, we would instead merely be picking people who do not shirk their civic duty.
It actually is clear cut. The problem lies in your definition of net neutrality, which is subtly, but critically incorrect.
Net neutrality is unconcerned with protocols or ports or types of traffic. It is unconcerned with traffic shaping that affects latency, so long is it is done uniformly. Net neutrality means one thing, and one thing only: all traffic of a given type must be treated equally without regard to its source/destination on the Internet. This means:
With that definition, no exceptions should even be considered. Unfortunately, if the summary above is correct, this definition is almost the precise opposite of what Congress is now proposing, which allows all of the bad things that Net Neutrality is intended to prevent, while preventing lots of perfectly valid things that ISPs do to keep the spice flowing.
And yet, if UIKit classes were available on OS X, at least for single-window apps, you could handle that with a different nib, in much the same way that you might have a more feature-rich interface on iPad or iPad Pro.
Obviously document-based apps would benefit from a multi-window treatment, and thus would be better with more significant enhancements. But even those could be immediately ported, then enhanced with multi-window support over time.
If you're still dependent on fiber to within a short distance from the premises, that's not going to solve much. You'll still be dependent on a single, for-profit regional fiber provider that can crank up prices on commercial fiber and crank down the price on residential fiber until it drives that competition out of business.
Yes, with the caveat that the prosecutor is not allowed (by law) to keep any of that information from the defense attorney. Politicians hide things from the other party all the time. So applying the prosecutorial standard to politicians is problematic.
Which one? There are plenty. Google+, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Tencent Weibo, Sina Weibo, email, SMS, IM.... And if you don't like Facebook, you can convince your friends to move to one of those alternatives, and then you can say whatever you want. And if you can't convince your friends to move, the problem might be that what you're saying isn't anything your friends care about hearing. Just saying.
The key difference is that you have choices. You can choose to use Facebook or some other social network. Other than getting your friends to join so you can talk to them, there is essentially zero effort required and exactly zero expense on your part to switch to another social network. By contrast, if you want to change ISPs, you have to pack up all your stuff, find somebody willing to buy your house, find a new house in a new city to buy, move to that new city, and find a new job in that new city, potentially losing significant amounts of money in the process. That's why ISPs need to be highly regulated, and social networks don't.
Look, I get it. You want to be able to say whatever you want, wherever you want. But your desire does not translate into a legal right. What makes it a legal issue for ISPs is that they are a true natural monopoly for which choosing an alternative is completely infeasible. That distinction matters, and no matter how much you might desire your rights to trump the rights of the companies that are running those services, that's just not the way freedom works.
Yes, yes.
The problem is, bandwidth needs obey Parkinson's law, i.e. the amount of data expands to fill the available bandwidth. According to that law, wireless connections will always be too slow to be a user's primary connection, because it will always be slower than wired.
Also, wireless is too inconsistent. You can have great speed one minute, and then a bird sits on one side of the tower and shifts the antenna by a few microns, and it causes enough of an increase in multipath interference to make you lose packets for five seconds. Things go badly wrong at that point. (On the plus side, if you're lucky, you can drive past the tower afterwards and get a pre-cooked meal, but I digress.)
That's why the right answer is to make the broad statement, then clarify. It's just like when writing documentation or textbooks or whatever. First, you tell them the general principle, and by the time the student gets to the end of the book, he or she has learned about all the exceptions. The difference between a liar and a good politician is that the former tries to hide the exceptions until he/she gets caught in a falsehood, whereas the latter says, "You can read about the details on my website."
But if you read the terms and conditions, it says that it may only be used in that way on Tesla's ride-sharing network, not Uber or Lyft. So they get a cut. :-)
Well, that's half true. Mobile broadband has the disadvantage of being expensive and not working with computers unless you pay $$$ for a wireless hotspot feature that still doesn't work because there's too much multipath interference in your apartment downtown in a major city, and won't penetrate the walls with a strong enough signal at your parents' house in the country.
Mobile broadband is the most commonly used, but only because people tend to do lots of minor, trivial stuff with it while they're out and about. Serious Internet use is still almost entirely wired (or at best, Wi-Fi to a wired connection) and will be for the foreseeable future, because cellular wireless just can't handle the bandwidth needs of dense urban areas or the building penetration needs of low-density rural areas.
The removal of NN will allow new brands to emerge.
Boy, do you have that backwards.
Search engines that don't derank for US party political reasons.
Nope. Without NN, your ISP can redirect your search requests to their own search engine without even having to tell users that they're doing it. You might not even know that you're getting a substandard experience. Big search engines can, of course, afford to pay those ISPs to avoid that, but those new brands you're hoping will emerge? They won't have the money to do so, so they'll be stillborn.
And the same problem exists with all of your other ill-informed beliefs about net neutrality. Repealing net neutrality doesn't create opportunities for new Internet companies to emerge. In point of fact, the repeal of net neutrality does the exact opposite, providing new ways for existing large companies to become entrenched in ways that keep new players from being able to enter the field at all.
Yeah they are. In fact, nearly every ISP is in exactly the same position as the original AT&T.
The part you're missing is that when it comes to consumer impact, it doesn't matter if there's a better ISP in a city a hundred miles away. You still live in your town, and you're not going to pack up, sell your house, and move to another city just to get better Internet service. You're stuck with what is available in your geographical area.
The reason they broke up the Bell system and, in the process, massively regulated the resulting smaller companies, is that geographical monopolies are fundamentally bad, and it doesn't make a dime's worth of difference how big the geographical area is. The critical part of the AT&T breakup was not splitting up the nationwide monopoly on end-user access, but rather splitting the long-distance provider from the end-user access provider, eliminating any real opportunity for the latter (which were regional monopolies) to limit which long-distance carrier you could use. We have almost the exact same problem now, with ISPs also being cable providers and voice telephone providers that can (and often do) unfairly compete with other streaming video and voice providers that operate over the Internet.
As for the equipment thing... well, Comcast won't provide static IP blocks without renting a Comcast Business Gateway from them. So we've kind of gotten back to that problem, too.
In other words, in every way other than the nationwide aspect, we've been at the exact same point that led to the breakup of AT&T for at least half a decade, if not longer. And as I said earlier, it doesn't matter if an ISP has a monopoly only in your town, in the county, or in an entire region. Unless your house has wheels, you're not going to move it to the next town over, the next county over, or the next state over just to get a better ISP. So anybody claiming that regional wire-line monopolies are somehow different from national wire-line monopolies in any meaningful way is kidding him/herself.
Just saying.
One can interpret some of those words in a couple of different ways, and one of the interpretations (not the literal one, the vulgar one) sounds very much like typical fanfic.