You're lucky if you can average out to only $500 per household. Fiber typically costs ~$30k per mile, so you'll only get it down to that price if you have at least 50 houses per linear mile, or 1 house per 100 feet (including the cost of going over streets, mandatory open space, etc.). In the suburbs, it ends up often being somewhat higher than that, and in rural areas, you're probably low by an order of magnitude or more.
Arguably, that could make Redbox guilty of tortious interference, assuming such a bizarre and unexpected contract term is found to somehow be legal (see my reductio ad absurdum elsewhere in the comments), but either way, it isn't a copyright violation.
However, if I somehow charge you $1 to read this post, aware of the fact that you want to read this post to get the code and watch the movie, I have absolutely contributed to infringement of the copyright in the movie.
No, you haven't. The codes are one-time-use codes. If you charge me $1 to read the post, aware of the fact that I'm reading the post to get the code and watch the movie, you're guilty of fraud, not copyright infringement, because that code won't work for me or anyone else.
More to the point, it can reasonably be argued that statements of non-transferability are statements of fact rather than contractual terms binding upon the recipient, because once used, neither the codes nor the content that they allow you to access can be transferred to anyone, because the website doesn't provide that ability.
Finally, Disney's argument is utterly absurd prima facie. Here's a quick reductio ad absurdum. Consider the following two situations:
I by a Blu-Ray that contains a code for $10 and sell the code to my neighbor for $5.
My neighbor buys the same Blu-Ray for $10 and redeems the code, then sells me the Blu-Ray for $5.
In both cases, the result is exactly the same: my neighbor has the code, and I have the disc, and we each spent $5 for that privilege. However, under Disney's fallacious logic, the first one is a copyright licensing violation, and the second one is legal use of the right of first sale, even though the result is exactly the same, and the only difference is in how the funds were transferred. Nothing in the Copyright Act can be reasonably construed to intend such an utterly bizarre distinction in legality between those essentially identical acts, and any judge in his/her right mind should laugh in their faces, declare summary judgment for RedBox, and take the rest of the afternoon off for a round of golf.
Meaning that either some cars will be running empty or groups of people will be split up.
No, not a car. Your car. As in an automobile. And at the end, you drive your car off the side of the train, and you have your car for driving around town.
Not a coincidence. I'd be willing to bet 90% of Apple's engineers read Slashdot. I'd be willing to bet.90% of Apple's engineers read their support forums.
Apple had a QA team? I thought they just did dogfooding, plus hiring a handful of "QA engineers" straight out of college so that their team can evaluate them before letting them work on the actual codebase.
Like Florg Tweaking, Florg Alignment, Florg Replacement and Florg Synthesis. And then someone comes up with an algorithm that can boop any type of florg automatically and that field's gone, too.
But there will always be a market for people who know how to use a fleam.
Will this mean you'll have to supply a fresh photo every time you log in? Funny, replay attacks should now be awfully easy, even if they get a fresh picture every time. Pictures aren't hard to manipulate, after all.
I assume this is for people creating new accounts, i.e. not for authentication, but rather for drastically reducing the number of fake accounts that use the same two or three pictures of half-naked girls and send out friend requests to random people.
So now, the scammers will at least have to use bots to scour the web for pictures of people's faces before creating accounts....
Yeah, if I get banned from Youtube or FB I can go to Minds or Gab.ai. Where no one will see my post.
You have a fundamental right to speak. You do not have a fundamental right to make others hear you if they don't choose to do so.
It's like saying if you get banned from Moscow you can go and live in Siberia where you're not allowed to have a phone. Which the Soviet Union did to Sakharov when he said things they didn't like.
No, it isn't similar at all. Being forced to leave your home and your family and live in a forced labor camp in exceptionally cold temperatures with poor medical care is nothing like being told that a company won't let you say whatever you want on a server that they are paying for, so that you must provide your own hardware and Internet connection if you want to continue to exercise your free speech rights.
Rather like people in the pro left media refer to gab as 'a social network for neo Nazis'. I.e. they want to control the dominant network, force anyone who disagrees with their narrative off that network off it and then refer to where they go as 'alt right' or neo Nazi networks.
If enough people believe that the content being forced off of Facebook is mainstream content, then they will leave Facebook and join that network, and you will be heard. If what you're posting really is fringe content, then they won't follow you, and the only people who will hear it are the people who choose to see fringe content. This is as it should be. I do acknowledge that in theory there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in terms of discovering that the content is filtered in the first place, but in practice, any action that prevents people from hearing about other social networks would be a *blatant* anti-trust violation, which is already solidly covered by existing laws.
And of course even if you run your own website the ISP might decide to pull it and stop you registering another domain name as happened to Daily Stormer. Daily Stormer really are Neo Nazis of course but Brendan O'Neill makes the case for free speech for Neo Nazis pretty well here
Not the ISPs. The domain name registrars. Sufficiently extreme groups are free to use any of half a dozen other DNS systems, darknet sites, etc. The more generally unacceptable the content, the more it will be pushed underground. That's pretty much expected, intentional, and generally desirable.
And the transparency rule that we announce today should allay any
concerns about the ambiguity of ISP commitments,511 by requiring ISPs to disclose if the ISPs block or
throttle legal content.
Except, as I and others pointed out in our responses to the FCC, most of the abuse has not been actual throttling. Comcast was technically correct when they said that they didn't throttle Netflix. What they actually did was refuse to provide more bandwidth at their peering point with Netflix's ISP. They weren't throttling Netflix. They just didn't upgrade their bandwidth proportional to the number of their customers that were using Netflix. Which means that the transparency requirements aren't worth the paper they're printed on, because we have already seen misbehavior by ISPs that wouldn't have been protected by it.
And the Net Neutrality advocates won't confront the fact that their argument for net neutrality should apply to Google and FB which are decidedly non neutral for political content.
That's a very silly argument that falls apart under even the slightest scrutiny. Changing ISPs means selling your house and moving to another city. Changing to a new search engine or social network requires merely typing a different address at the top of your browser window. The two situations are simply not comparable.
The reality is that anybody with sufficient technical experience could pull together a team and build a new social network or search engine from the ground up in O(months). That's why everybody on the planet has access to multiple social networks and multiple search engines. Regulating them makes no sense, because if you don't like the policies of one, you can trivially leave and go to another, and bring all of your friends with you, if necessary.
By contrast, starting a new ISP involves attaching to utility poles that are owned by a third party and/or digging up roads and people's yards. And the telcos recently managed to get a federal judge to overturn Nashville's laws that are designed to make it more feasible to move existing utility lines in ways that make it practical to add new utilities. The current regulatory environment makes it largely infeasible to start a new ISP in most places. Worse, because of the relatively high cost per customer, it would still be infeasible even without those regulations except in dense urban areas. There's a reason that outside of the big cities, the fiber network in Tennessee is being built by the state government. There's not enough profit in it for a single ISP to run fiber, much less multiple ISPs.
And it's more likely that both the Democrats and Republicans decide on regulation based on whether it helps companies that donate to them and hurts ones who don't than that they're acting out of anything resembling principle.
Not at all. The Democrats feel we should regulate monopolies because they are monopolies, and should not regulate industries that have healthy competition, while the Republicans feel we should not regulate anybody, and believe that somehow competition will magically appear in markets with an obvious natural monopoly even though history has shown repeatedly that this almost never occurs in practice. Basically, Democrats believe in the notion of a natural monopoly, whereas Republicans just put their hands over their eyes and pretend that the problem doesn't exist, to the benefit of monopolies owned by their buddies.
WHY would you invite them in to regulate the internet? Are you that in love with how they handle your taxes?
Regulating ISPs != regulating the Internet. The Internet is a multinational network. No government can regulate the Internet.
It's best for government to only do the few things it MUST do like national defense and to stay the hell out of everything else.
Yup. We should all go back to driving on dirt paths, because the Interstate Highway System was a mistake.
[pauses a moment for emphasis]
The Internet, or at least the portion of it within the bounds of the United States, is basically equivalent to our system of roads. It's a complex, interconnected series of links between various places. And those connections have to be big enough to handle the capacity needs, or else you get collisions and everything slows to a crawl. And, like all infrastructure, local governments tend to do a better job building it out and maintaining it than private companies, because they have no profit motive.
One port per truck. The battery pack couldn't handle more power anyway.
That's kind of surprising, really. Most diesel trucks have two tanks with separate fillers, precisely because there's no other way to get enough fuel into them quickly enough. Having a power port on each side would reduce the amount of current draw through that cable, which would probably simplify... well, everything.
Maybe they'll do that five years from now when they decide to add a long-haul version.:-)
That was because 250 years ago, guns COULD help stand against tyranny. Now? Not so much. Please update what is needed at least every 100 years or so.
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear nuclear weapons shall not be infringed."
There is certainly an argument to be made that free speech should allow a company to provide access to full Wikipedia, for free.
No, not really (and even if there is an argument, it is moot) for multiple reasons:
Wikipedia without access to the citations and external links is a half-a**ed experience that is far inferior to primary sources.
Providing services is not speech. If it were, prostitution would be legal.
Nobody in their right minds would accept a free wired internet service that provides access to only one website. (The net neutrality laws do not apply to wireless ISPs).
Even if they did, a provider that provides access to specific websites doesn't meet the legal definition of an ISP, and thus wouldn't be covered under the net neutrality laws as written.
Even if it did, it would still be okay as long as the other sites were blocked. It would be a violation of the existing rules only if the ISP did metered billing by the megabyte and excluded only that traffic. Metering is almost nonexistent in the non-mobile ISP world, so this is highly unlikely.
In short, this argument is so purely theoretical that it is moot. By contrast, the things these rules were intended to prevent are not theoretical, and caused actual harm.
Firstly, I don't think you know what "objective" means; it means you can measure it, empirically.
Yes, and when the FCC says that there is no evidence of ISPs abusing their power and I list several instances thereof, that makes their statement objectively wrong, because several is objectively greater than zero. I know precisely what "objectively" means. The problem is that you're so completely convinced of your correctness that you're failing to actually objectively evaluate evidence to the contrary.
Secondly, if it is "objectively right" to force one set of companies to carry a message they do not want to carry, then it is objectively right to force other companies to do so as well.
No, it isn't. The purpose of laws is to limit the damage that people with power can do to people who are powerless. Whether laws should apply, then, depends on the extent of the difference in relative power between the two parties.
In this regard, ISPs are objectively (measurably) different from companies that merely provide services on the Internet, in that they provide the sole pipe available to their users. If an ISP blocks something, you aren't getting access to it. (Yes, you can sometimes get around it by using VPNs, but that quickly becomes a technological arms race.) Most Americans don't have a choice in broadband ISPs. They get whatever one ISP is available in their neighborhood. So it is very necessary to limit what those monopolist ISPs can do to limit users' access to content.
Other companies that are not ISPs do not have that power over their users, because users are free to use other services that don't have those limitations. When there are thousands of hosting providers, no one hosting provider has absolute power over its users. When there are dozens of search providers, no one search provider has absolute power over its users. When social media posts can be replaced by SMS messages, email messages, bulletin board postings, or the use of any number of other technologies, no social media provider has absolute power over its users. These companies are not natural monopolies, and cannot truly censor anything in an absolute sense of the word.
Their absolute power to control access to services within a market is the reason that natural monopolies like ISPs are and should be highly regulated, whereas companies that are not natural monopolies are and should be only lightly regulated. The mere fact that two entities are companies does not automatically make them equivalent, because their influence is not presumptively equivalent, and it is unconscionable to imply otherwise.
More to the point, net neutrality puts regulations on companies that are, by their nature, regulated monopolies (the ISPs) to promote competition among companies that are not monopolies (tech companies, companies that provide services over the Internet). It specifically prevents those monopolies from taking actions that would be detrimental to competition in other areas. How anyone could honestly believe that removing those regulations would do anything other than reduce competition is absolutely beyond my comprehension, because it pretty much requires those people to have no concept of how the Internet actually works.
You have never been free to dig up people's yards to provide infrastructure to bring your platform to people's homes. That's why most Americans have only a single choice (if any) in broadband ISPs. (As of last year, 78% of U.S. markets had one or fewer ISPs meeting the federal minimum standards for broadband.) So without net neutrality guaranteeing that the public can get unfettered access to the public Internet, you can build the platform, but an ISP suddenly can decide whether or not to allow its users to access that platform.
ISPs should not have the right to censor traffic, because they can do far more harm than any mere platform. To use a car analogy, the difference between platforms censoring content and ISPs censoring content is like the difference between telling someone that they can't build a wine store within the city limits and telling everyone in town that they're not allowed to use the town's roads to drive to the wine store in the next town over. The latter is taking censorship to an entirely different level altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
You're lucky if you can average out to only $500 per household. Fiber typically costs ~$30k per mile, so you'll only get it down to that price if you have at least 50 houses per linear mile, or 1 house per 100 feet (including the cost of going over streets, mandatory open space, etc.). In the suburbs, it ends up often being somewhat higher than that, and in rural areas, you're probably low by an order of magnitude or more.
It's not the second gas giant that's the reason they're avoiding us. It's the rings around Uranus.
Arguably, that could make Redbox guilty of tortious interference, assuming such a bizarre and unexpected contract term is found to somehow be legal (see my reductio ad absurdum elsewhere in the comments), but either way, it isn't a copyright violation.
Gah. Buy, not by. Stupid typos.
No, you haven't. The codes are one-time-use codes. If you charge me $1 to read the post, aware of the fact that I'm reading the post to get the code and watch the movie, you're guilty of fraud, not copyright infringement, because that code won't work for me or anyone else.
More to the point, it can reasonably be argued that statements of non-transferability are statements of fact rather than contractual terms binding upon the recipient, because once used, neither the codes nor the content that they allow you to access can be transferred to anyone, because the website doesn't provide that ability.
Finally, Disney's argument is utterly absurd prima facie. Here's a quick reductio ad absurdum. Consider the following two situations:
In both cases, the result is exactly the same: my neighbor has the code, and I have the disc, and we each spent $5 for that privilege. However, under Disney's fallacious logic, the first one is a copyright licensing violation, and the second one is legal use of the right of first sale, even though the result is exactly the same, and the only difference is in how the funds were transferred. Nothing in the Copyright Act can be reasonably construed to intend such an utterly bizarre distinction in legality between those essentially identical acts, and any judge in his/her right mind should laugh in their faces, declare summary judgment for RedBox, and take the rest of the afternoon off for a round of golf.
Just saying.
No, not a car. Your car. As in an automobile. And at the end, you drive your car off the side of the train, and you have your car for driving around town.
It's also pretty short. Contrast with the TransBay Tube in San Francisco, which is having a bit of a mid-life crisis at only 43 years of age.
This is not to say that the problems aren't solvable, just that they have to be thought through.
Okay. A flat-bed bus, then.
Not a coincidence. I'd be willing to bet 90% of Apple's engineers read Slashdot. I'd be willing to bet .90% of Apple's engineers read their support forums.
Apple had a QA team? I thought they just did dogfooding, plus hiring a handful of "QA engineers" straight out of college so that their team can evaluate them before letting them work on the actual codebase.
But there will always be a market for people who know how to use a fleam.
They'll become matte happy people?
I assume this is for people creating new accounts, i.e. not for authentication, but rather for drastically reducing the number of fake accounts that use the same two or three pictures of half-naked girls and send out friend requests to random people.
So now, the scammers will at least have to use bots to scour the web for pictures of people's faces before creating accounts....
Or it might cause North Korea to invade South Korea and steal the working nuclear weapons, allowing them to make a big leap in their nuclear program.
You have a fundamental right to speak. You do not have a fundamental right to make others hear you if they don't choose to do so.
No, it isn't similar at all. Being forced to leave your home and your family and live in a forced labor camp in exceptionally cold temperatures with poor medical care is nothing like being told that a company won't let you say whatever you want on a server that they are paying for, so that you must provide your own hardware and Internet connection if you want to continue to exercise your free speech rights.
If enough people believe that the content being forced off of Facebook is mainstream content, then they will leave Facebook and join that network, and you will be heard. If what you're posting really is fringe content, then they won't follow you, and the only people who will hear it are the people who choose to see fringe content. This is as it should be. I do acknowledge that in theory there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem in terms of discovering that the content is filtered in the first place, but in practice, any action that prevents people from hearing about other social networks would be a *blatant* anti-trust violation, which is already solidly covered by existing laws.
Not the ISPs. The domain name registrars. Sufficiently extreme groups are free to use any of half a dozen other DNS systems, darknet sites, etc. The more generally unacceptable the content, the more it will be pushed underground. That's pretty much expected, intentional, and generally desirable.
Except, as I and others pointed out in our responses to the FCC, most of the abuse has not been actual throttling. Comcast was technically correct when they said that they didn't throttle Netflix. What they actually did was refuse to provide more bandwidth at their peering point with Netflix's ISP. They weren't throttling Netflix. They just didn't upgrade their bandwidth proportional to the number of their customers that were using Netflix. Which means that the transparency requirements aren't worth the paper they're printed on, because we have already seen misbehavior by ISPs that wouldn't have been protected by it.
That's a very silly argument that falls apart under even the slightest scrutiny. Changing ISPs means selling your house and moving to another city. Changing to a new search engine or social network requires merely typing a different address at the top of your browser window. The two situations are simply not comparable.
The reality is that anybody with sufficient technical experience could pull together a team and build a new social network or search engine from the ground up in O(months). That's why everybody on the planet has access to multiple social networks and multiple search engines. Regulating them makes no sense, because if you don't like the policies of one, you can trivially leave and go to another, and bring all of your friends with you, if necessary.
By contrast, starting a new ISP involves attaching to utility poles that are owned by a third party and/or digging up roads and people's yards. And the telcos recently managed to get a federal judge to overturn Nashville's laws that are designed to make it more feasible to move existing utility lines in ways that make it practical to add new utilities. The current regulatory environment makes it largely infeasible to start a new ISP in most places. Worse, because of the relatively high cost per customer, it would still be infeasible even without those regulations except in dense urban areas. There's a reason that outside of the big cities, the fiber network in Tennessee is being built by the state government. There's not enough profit in it for a single ISP to run fiber, much less multiple ISPs.
Not at all. The Democrats feel we should regulate monopolies because they are monopolies, and should not regulate industries that have healthy competition, while the Republicans feel we should not regulate anybody, and believe that somehow competition will magically appear in markets with an obvious natural monopoly even though history has shown repeatedly that this almost never occurs in practice. Basically, Democrats believe in the notion of a natural monopoly, whereas Republicans just put their hands over their eyes and pretend that the problem doesn't exist, to the benefit of monopolies owned by their buddies.
Years of experience have taught me never to click on anything with the word "goat" in the URL. What the heck were they thinking with that name?
Regulating ISPs != regulating the Internet. The Internet is a multinational network. No government can regulate the Internet.
Yup. We should all go back to driving on dirt paths, because the Interstate Highway System was a mistake.
[pauses a moment for emphasis]
The Internet, or at least the portion of it within the bounds of the United States, is basically equivalent to our system of roads. It's a complex, interconnected series of links between various places. And those connections have to be big enough to handle the capacity needs, or else you get collisions and everything slows to a crawl. And, like all infrastructure, local governments tend to do a better job building it out and maintaining it than private companies, because they have no profit motive.
That's kind of surprising, really. Most diesel trucks have two tanks with separate fillers, precisely because there's no other way to get enough fuel into them quickly enough. Having a power port on each side would reduce the amount of current draw through that cable, which would probably simplify... well, everything.
Maybe they'll do that five years from now when they decide to add a long-haul version. :-)
That was because 250 years ago, guns COULD help stand against tyranny. Now? Not so much. Please update what is needed at least every 100 years or so.
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear nuclear weapons shall not be infringed."
Somehow, this does not fill me with confidence.
No, not really (and even if there is an argument, it is moot) for multiple reasons:
In short, this argument is so purely theoretical that it is moot. By contrast, the things these rules were intended to prevent are not theoretical, and caused actual harm.
Yes, and when the FCC says that there is no evidence of ISPs abusing their power and I list several instances thereof, that makes their statement objectively wrong, because several is objectively greater than zero. I know precisely what "objectively" means. The problem is that you're so completely convinced of your correctness that you're failing to actually objectively evaluate evidence to the contrary.
No, it isn't. The purpose of laws is to limit the damage that people with power can do to people who are powerless. Whether laws should apply, then, depends on the extent of the difference in relative power between the two parties.
In this regard, ISPs are objectively (measurably) different from companies that merely provide services on the Internet, in that they provide the sole pipe available to their users. If an ISP blocks something, you aren't getting access to it. (Yes, you can sometimes get around it by using VPNs, but that quickly becomes a technological arms race.) Most Americans don't have a choice in broadband ISPs. They get whatever one ISP is available in their neighborhood. So it is very necessary to limit what those monopolist ISPs can do to limit users' access to content.
Other companies that are not ISPs do not have that power over their users, because users are free to use other services that don't have those limitations. When there are thousands of hosting providers, no one hosting provider has absolute power over its users. When there are dozens of search providers, no one search provider has absolute power over its users. When social media posts can be replaced by SMS messages, email messages, bulletin board postings, or the use of any number of other technologies, no social media provider has absolute power over its users. These companies are not natural monopolies, and cannot truly censor anything in an absolute sense of the word.
Their absolute power to control access to services within a market is the reason that natural monopolies like ISPs are and should be highly regulated, whereas companies that are not natural monopolies are and should be only lightly regulated. The mere fact that two entities are companies does not automatically make them equivalent, because their influence is not presumptively equivalent, and it is unconscionable to imply otherwise.
More to the point, net neutrality puts regulations on companies that are, by their nature, regulated monopolies (the ISPs) to promote competition among companies that are not monopolies (tech companies, companies that provide services over the Internet). It specifically prevents those monopolies from taking actions that would be detrimental to competition in other areas. How anyone could honestly believe that removing those regulations would do anything other than reduce competition is absolutely beyond my comprehension, because it pretty much requires those people to have no concept of how the Internet actually works.
No, you aren't. Not anymore.
You have never been free to dig up people's yards to provide infrastructure to bring your platform to people's homes. That's why most Americans have only a single choice (if any) in broadband ISPs. (As of last year, 78% of U.S. markets had one or fewer ISPs meeting the federal minimum standards for broadband.) So without net neutrality guaranteeing that the public can get unfettered access to the public Internet, you can build the platform, but an ISP suddenly can decide whether or not to allow its users to access that platform.
ISPs should not have the right to censor traffic, because they can do far more harm than any mere platform. To use a car analogy, the difference between platforms censoring content and ISPs censoring content is like the difference between telling someone that they can't build a wine store within the city limits and telling everyone in town that they're not allowed to use the town's roads to drive to the wine store in the next town over. The latter is taking censorship to an entirely different level altogether.