But as long as you're trying to put things in first-person perspective, how would you expect the U.S. to respond if one or more states were to suddenly declare independence?
"Ok, no worries about the federal money and infrastructure build-up from which you've benefitted. We'll just relocate any strategic military assets we might have placed within your borders." I doubt it. More likely, a civil war.
Any "democratic" government probably ought to have a specific procedure for secession. Absent that, any attempt to break away from ones parent country has always been, and will always be, a morally grey area. While the U.S. certainly has benefited from, and engaged in the role of being, foreign aid to one side in a civil war, that doesn't make it right in the general case.
I'm not convinced either side (Georgia or Russia) is taking the "high road". I also don't claim to have the historical -- or even current event -- perspective to weigh all the factors in the rights-and-wrongs of a border dispute. Given the one-sided nature of most of the posts here, I'd wager most of the posters are in that same ill-informed boat.
My two cents: By default, I assume national sovereignty. If a population wants to secede, I generally consider it an internal affair; and just because the local population expresses a wish to be separate, that doesn't automatically make it so from a sound international standpoint.
But were there human rights violations, war crimes, etc. going on between Georgia and Southern Ossetia? That would certainly weaken any sovereignty claims... Lacking those things, what were peacekeepers doing on Georgian soil in the first place? Did Georgia accept their presence, or were they essentially an occupying force?
If I put my troops in harms way, can I really claim the right to retalliate when they get hurt? Can Russia draw a strategic connection between bombing near the Geogian capital (something like 30 miles out of their way) and protecting those in Southern Ossetia?
Simply too many questions to justify all the "Country X is good and Country Y is evil" rhetoric around here.
It's about a U.S. law (the Iran Nonproliferation Act), not an international non-proliferation treaty.
Congress has expressly forbidden the U.S. from making ISS-related payments to Russia unless it determines that Russia is taking steps to curb proliferation of weapons technoogy to Iran. On something of a "we have to or we're screwed" basis, they enacted a temporary exemption so we could pay Russia to carry our crewmembers to the ISS.
So when the exemption expires, Russia's authority to launch Soyuz vehicles will not fall under question. US authority to purchase passage on those vehicles will be gone, though.
So:
1) If current events create enough antipathy towards Russia in the US Congress, then they may be unwilling to extend the exemption. Essentially they'd be re-enacting an economic sanction even though we don't have an alternate vendor for the service in question.
2) Even if Congress extends the exemption, there's some question about Russia's ongoing willingness to sell us passage on their rockets (at a reasonable price, or maybe at all) if diplomatic relations worsen.
Don't get me wrong, I think this "hash an mp3" idea is pretty dumb, but come on...
"The difference between this dictionary and a traditional dictionary attack is that there is a GUARANTEE that at least ONE of the entries in the dictionary is the right one."
Sure. Unless you have advanced technology like removable media.
The question you really seem to raise is, could you use this cloak to hide a lit lamp? I think the answer is "no".
The visible light you use to see me, isn't light I produce. If I weren't present, the light still would be; so if I can bend it around and it stays in the enviornment, that can be pretty good cloaking.
The IR light you could use to see me, is light I produce. If I weren't present, the light wouldn't be either; so if I dump it into the environment in any way, then it provides an indication of my presence.
Now, if you could add a layer to this cloak that would capture the IR and store it somehow, you might have something.
An American-style standard of living is not a basic human right. It's a nice goal, yes, but not a basic right.
Providing what we (in wealthy countries) think of as a "genuinely good" option does not work. You can't disregard the economic context in which the factory operates. What do you think is actually going to happen if suddenly a handful of factory jobs pay orders of magnitude more than anything else you can do? My predictions range from misallocation of skilled resources to unskilled jobs, to corruption that controls just who gets these nice cushy, high-paid positions. Not things that will help conditions.
"Force the providers of bad options to provide good options instead"? I wonder what you think is going on over there. What you may not grasp is, our standard of living is artificially high in a global context. The majority case isn't that the "other options" are coming from local wealthly corporations that choose to exploit them. The "other options" are those that naturally arise in their social and economic environment.
You could simply decline to build your factory in that environment, and (as I've said elsewhere) there are arguments that can be made in favor of that approach; but don't kid yourself into believing that's the path to support the Chinese working person's interests. If you want the options to improve, you expand the job market. When you do that, things can improve... but not overnight.
There's certainly an argument for saying that a corporation should obey its home nation's wage-and-hour laws regardless of the source of their labor. That argument has nothing to do with protcting the citizens of poorer countries, though.
In such a regulatory system, you would have two options. Option 1 is to pay them equally, Sounds great from a small-picture perspective - these guys are gonna have the best job in town! Of course, the disruption of having a few people selectively living on a different economic standard than the society surrounding them has its drawbacks. But that doesn't really matter, because no company is going to go to the expense of outsourcing and still paying America-style wages.
So option 2 - don't hire workers there. Whatever good or ill effects this would have, it's not going to improve the lives of the people who now have one less option for how to make a living.
I think you're lacking a few facts about employment law.
First off, you can't contract away your rights under the wage and hour laws. There are many classes of worker who are exempt from certain provisions of the law, and IT workers are just about always categorized as exempt (though it seems the exemption categories are broadly misunderstood and oftentimes the exempt classification is not appropriate). But, if you're not in an exempt category, you can't concent -- even by contract -- to not get protection under the law.
Second, being salaried is not mutually exclusive from the overtime pay requirement. For that matter, the assumption that every salaried employee is exempt is common but incorrect.
Also, I don't see where in this story you're seeing a problem with US labor law. The workers' claim is that the right in question is enshrined in the labor laws. If, as you suggest, this were a problem of no laws to protect them, then there wouldn't be a case pending.
On one hand, I agree that the language seems to lack perspective -- though really, is that surprising in today's culture?
On the other hand, the reason baseline working conditions are higher here is because we enforce labor laws that don't exist there, which is what these workers claim to want done at Apple. I don't know the merits of their case, obviously; that's what the court is for. But if they honestly believe the laws aren't being followed, then a factory in China is actually a pretty good image to support their position, under the heading "we don't want to head down this path".
(And just to be clear -- I often argue against "slipperly slope" logic, and certainly I wouldn't claim that by allowing unpaid overtime we're necessarily starting a progression toward sweatshops with insane hours and no minimum wage. However, I am saying that either you enforce your laws or you don't -- there's no slope to talk about. If we want to discuss unpaid overtime as an isolated concept, then we would be discussing whether the law should change.)
True, these companies, in advocating for their interests, tried to get anything they could whether justified or not. This is what companies do, and it was the government's job to stop it. The government declined to do its job, so over-reaching concessions were made to a special interest.
However, that does not bear on their legitimate interests, such as copyright protection in the immediate term after a work is created. Saying it does is just a rationalization to ignore others' rights when they're inconvenient.
Wanting more than you should have doens't negate your right to what you should have.
Ok, what about intentional grounding in American football? I have a hard time calling the criteria objective even in theory.
(I know at least one of you is thinking of posting a list of criteria so you can say "what's subjective about those"; before you do, I suggest you double-check whether you know all the criteria involved in the intentional grounding rule.)
Back when I used to carry a knife regularly, I had it happen because the knife was in a jacket pocket, which didn't go through the metal detector. Instead it went through the x-ray machine, and apparently the operator missed it.
On the other hand, I've also lost pocket knives because the x-ray operator did see them.
All of which just goes to show, I should've paid more attention to when I have a knife in my jacket pocket.
That seems awfully subjective to be stated with such certainty.
None of the m-w definitions of "sport" back your claim. (There is something a little funny about the m-w entry, though; it lists "sexual play" before the more conventional -- or maybe just more general -- "physical activity engaged in for pleasure".) None of the dictionary.com definitions back you up either. Nor have I ever heard of "objective scoring" as a defining characteristic that makes an activity a sport -- so even taking language to be a living body, and accepting common usage as authoritative, I still see no justification for your claim.
But hey, why let any of that get in the way of a chance to reduce things to black and white?
Just because copyright terms have been extended beyond reason, has nothing to do with the validity or moral issues surrounding a movie/song/etc. that was created in the past year.
To be fair, the NFL is always tweaking the rules of American football, sometimes to the advantage of the offense, sometimes to the advantage of the defense. Some of the changes serve to make the game more spectacular to watch -- and on one level, this is to be expected, as the NFL is a business -- and some of them also serve to limit situations where people get hurt (at least, on paper). But overall, have scores in this particular sport gone up over the decades? Maybe I just haven't been watching long enough, but I haven't noticed.
Of course, it is true that in many games, there's a direct trade-off between "fun to watch" and "truly demanding test of skill". So I generally agree with the theme you're talking about, but I'm not sure it's universal, and I'm not sure most games as we have them today are in that terrible a condition.
Buying a CD gives me the right to own, store and archive a copy of that CD, but not the right to redistribute it.
What's inane, though, is that we're trying to nitpick our way through copyright law in a case that has nothing to do with the domain of activities copyright is meant to regulate.
If I take a picture of myself to send in a response to a personal ad, that picture is not a creative work. Copyright can be applied to it only to the extent that the law does an insufficient job of drawing the boundaries between what can or cannot be protected.
If I hire a studio to take my portrait, they probably do retain a copyright on that picture. This is borderline reasonable -- they should be putting creative work into staging the shot, etc. In that case, I probably have no right to send a copy in reply to a personal ad in the first place.
In any case, if we trace back to the root purpose and language of the Fair Use clause (as opposed to getting hung up on various fair-use guidelines that have been developed alongside the law to cover specfiic frequently-occuring scenarios like satire, parody, etc.), I think it's tough to argue that fair use wouldn't apply to this republishing.
If any right was violated, it was a privacy right. Copyright is not there to protect privacy, and using it in that way is an abuse that further weakens thw law with respect to its intended purpose. I have no respect for those who abuse the law by stretching it to shoehorn in "whatever that guy did that I don't like".
But really, why does everyone feel the need to choose between "the 'victims' are scum who got what they deserved" or "Fortuny was a jerk who violated their rights"? Both are probably true. While I don't think Fortuny is guilty of copyright violation, I'm not sure if he violated any actual privacy-related laws, and I'm betting he did violate the CL terms of use. And on the other side of it... maybe it's none of my business if some guy tried to cheat on his wife, but it is his wife's business.
Well, the whole "charge for cell use, and charge for no-phone section" idea is nothing but an economic fantasy concocted to sound plausible ("yeah, they'd like to get you coming and going") and make this law sound like a better idea than it is.
No matter what line items the airlines may throw at you, overall cost of flying (on average) is going to rise and fall per the market. If tomorrow they can charge everyone a $15 fee, that's $15 less in base fare increases (or an opportunity to advertise a $15 lower fare to draw customers from the competition).
Now, they might charge a fee for using phones, or they might charge a fee for a no-phones section. Which they would charge depends on which group is statistically likely to part with more money. That's basic price discrimination, and it really can make the airline more money (at the expense of a subset of passengers).
It's certainly true that the government can assign itself authority to override your property rights. The state of eminent domain today demonstrates that.
But is that really where you want to hang your hat in this debate? For my part, I don't think it's a good thing that the government can say "well, you've owned this land for your own use, but now that other people want to use it you have to give them what they want or give us your land".
First of all, I was arguing about a specific statement regarding alleged obligations on monopolies. If the previous poster meant "government-created monopolies" he should've said so; instead he said "natural monopolies", which is not the same thing.
Second, 3G networks have limited competition, but they are not a monopoly.
Lastly, does the agreement AT&T signed with the FCC to get that grant of spectrum stipulate that they have to provide whatever service the people request? I bet not, especially when issues of technical feasability come into play.
If you don't feel that the government is looking out for your interests when allocating spectrum and other resources, take it up with the government.
AT&T isn't saying what "type of customer" they'll serve.
They're saying what service they'll provide.
If you're the "type" of customer who wants P2P service, they'll still serve you. They just won't serve you P2P, because they don't serve that to anyone.
Your hypothetical business might not be able to say "we won't serve blacks", but that doesn't require them to provide goods or services that particularly appeal to blacks (whether said appeal be a reality or a stereotype being an unrelated issue).
Or do you suppose that all Apple stores are engaged in age discrimination?
It's not unreasonable to think they'd want to. But that doesn't matter.
It is unreasonable to expect to be allowed to. Why? Because of the impact on the other users. Because it isn't what the network is designed to support.
Just because it's reasonable to want soemthing, doesn't mean anyone can or should provide it.
"Does he really have many options if he wishes to choose another ISP?"
If we were talking about land-based ISP service, the answer would depend on where you live, but in most places there's at least one other option if you know where to look.
But we're not talking about land-based ISP service. We're talking about 3G cell phone service.
"ISPs due to infrastructure tend to have a natural monopolies. They have the responsibility of responding to the demands of their users."
Ah, the good old sense of consumer entitlement. So if I own the only lake-side property in town, and the folks in the town want a lake-side restaurant, I'm obliged to operate one for them? Nonsense.
The only special obligation placed on a monopoly is that it not abuse the free market with the power that being a monopoly gives it. Not being in the business you want them to be in isn't an abuse.
Slashdot Mirror
Consistant foreign policy would be nice, yes.
But as long as you're trying to put things in first-person perspective, how would you expect the U.S. to respond if one or more states were to suddenly declare independence?
"Ok, no worries about the federal money and infrastructure build-up from which you've benefitted. We'll just relocate any strategic military assets we might have placed within your borders." I doubt it. More likely, a civil war.
Any "democratic" government probably ought to have a specific procedure for secession. Absent that, any attempt to break away from ones parent country has always been, and will always be, a morally grey area. While the U.S. certainly has benefited from, and engaged in the role of being, foreign aid to one side in a civil war, that doesn't make it right in the general case.
I'm not convinced either side (Georgia or Russia) is taking the "high road". I also don't claim to have the historical -- or even current event -- perspective to weigh all the factors in the rights-and-wrongs of a border dispute. Given the one-sided nature of most of the posts here, I'd wager most of the posters are in that same ill-informed boat.
My two cents: By default, I assume national sovereignty. If a population wants to secede, I generally consider it an internal affair; and just because the local population expresses a wish to be separate, that doesn't automatically make it so from a sound international standpoint.
But were there human rights violations, war crimes, etc. going on between Georgia and Southern Ossetia? That would certainly weaken any sovereignty claims... Lacking those things, what were peacekeepers doing on Georgian soil in the first place? Did Georgia accept their presence, or were they essentially an occupying force?
If I put my troops in harms way, can I really claim the right to retalliate when they get hurt? Can Russia draw a strategic connection between bombing near the Geogian capital (something like 30 miles out of their way) and protecting those in Southern Ossetia?
Simply too many questions to justify all the "Country X is good and Country Y is evil" rhetoric around here.
Well, ok... Cookbook sucks!
Oh, did I parse that wrong?
It's about a U.S. law (the Iran Nonproliferation Act), not an international non-proliferation treaty.
Congress has expressly forbidden the U.S. from making ISS-related payments to Russia unless it determines that Russia is taking steps to curb proliferation of weapons technoogy to Iran. On something of a "we have to or we're screwed" basis, they enacted a temporary exemption so we could pay Russia to carry our crewmembers to the ISS.
So when the exemption expires, Russia's authority to launch Soyuz vehicles will not fall under question. US authority to purchase passage on those vehicles will be gone, though.
So:
1) If current events create enough antipathy towards Russia in the US Congress, then they may be unwilling to extend the exemption. Essentially they'd be re-enacting an economic sanction even though we don't have an alternate vendor for the service in question.
2) Even if Congress extends the exemption, there's some question about Russia's ongoing willingness to sell us passage on their rockets (at a reasonable price, or maybe at all) if diplomatic relations worsen.
Don't get me wrong, I think this "hash an mp3" idea is pretty dumb, but come on...
"The difference between this dictionary and a traditional dictionary attack is that there is a GUARANTEE that at least ONE of the entries in the dictionary is the right one."
Sure. Unless you have advanced technology like removable media.
The question you really seem to raise is, could you use this cloak to hide a lit lamp? I think the answer is "no".
The visible light you use to see me, isn't light I produce. If I weren't present, the light still would be; so if I can bend it around and it stays in the enviornment, that can be pretty good cloaking.
The IR light you could use to see me, is light I produce. If I weren't present, the light wouldn't be either; so if I dump it into the environment in any way, then it provides an indication of my presence.
Now, if you could add a layer to this cloak that would capture the IR and store it somehow, you might have something.
An American-style standard of living is not a basic human right. It's a nice goal, yes, but not a basic right.
Providing what we (in wealthy countries) think of as a "genuinely good" option does not work. You can't disregard the economic context in which the factory operates. What do you think is actually going to happen if suddenly a handful of factory jobs pay orders of magnitude more than anything else you can do? My predictions range from misallocation of skilled resources to unskilled jobs, to corruption that controls just who gets these nice cushy, high-paid positions. Not things that will help conditions.
"Force the providers of bad options to provide good options instead"? I wonder what you think is going on over there. What you may not grasp is, our standard of living is artificially high in a global context. The majority case isn't that the "other options" are coming from local wealthly corporations that choose to exploit them. The "other options" are those that naturally arise in their social and economic environment.
You could simply decline to build your factory in that environment, and (as I've said elsewhere) there are arguments that can be made in favor of that approach; but don't kid yourself into believing that's the path to support the Chinese working person's interests. If you want the options to improve, you expand the job market. When you do that, things can improve... but not overnight.
There's certainly an argument for saying that a corporation should obey its home nation's wage-and-hour laws regardless of the source of their labor. That argument has nothing to do with protcting the citizens of poorer countries, though.
In such a regulatory system, you would have two options. Option 1 is to pay them equally, Sounds great from a small-picture perspective - these guys are gonna have the best job in town! Of course, the disruption of having a few people selectively living on a different economic standard than the society surrounding them has its drawbacks. But that doesn't really matter, because no company is going to go to the expense of outsourcing and still paying America-style wages.
So option 2 - don't hire workers there. Whatever good or ill effects this would have, it's not going to improve the lives of the people who now have one less option for how to make a living.
I think you're lacking a few facts about employment law.
First off, you can't contract away your rights under the wage and hour laws. There are many classes of worker who are exempt from certain provisions of the law, and IT workers are just about always categorized as exempt (though it seems the exemption categories are broadly misunderstood and oftentimes the exempt classification is not appropriate). But, if you're not in an exempt category, you can't concent -- even by contract -- to not get protection under the law.
Second, being salaried is not mutually exclusive from the overtime pay requirement. For that matter, the assumption that every salaried employee is exempt is common but incorrect.
Also, I don't see where in this story you're seeing a problem with US labor law. The workers' claim is that the right in question is enshrined in the labor laws. If, as you suggest, this were a problem of no laws to protect them, then there wouldn't be a case pending.
On one hand, I agree that the language seems to lack perspective -- though really, is that surprising in today's culture?
On the other hand, the reason baseline working conditions are higher here is because we enforce labor laws that don't exist there, which is what these workers claim to want done at Apple. I don't know the merits of their case, obviously; that's what the court is for. But if they honestly believe the laws aren't being followed, then a factory in China is actually a pretty good image to support their position, under the heading "we don't want to head down this path".
(And just to be clear -- I often argue against "slipperly slope" logic, and certainly I wouldn't claim that by allowing unpaid overtime we're necessarily starting a progression toward sweatshops with insane hours and no minimum wage. However, I am saying that either you enforce your laws or you don't -- there's no slope to talk about. If we want to discuss unpaid overtime as an isolated concept, then we would be discussing whether the law should change.)
That would be a non-sequitar.
True, these companies, in advocating for their interests, tried to get anything they could whether justified or not. This is what companies do, and it was the government's job to stop it. The government declined to do its job, so over-reaching concessions were made to a special interest.
However, that does not bear on their legitimate interests, such as copyright protection in the immediate term after a work is created. Saying it does is just a rationalization to ignore others' rights when they're inconvenient.
Wanting more than you should have doens't negate your right to what you should have.
Ok, what about intentional grounding in American football? I have a hard time calling the criteria objective even in theory.
(I know at least one of you is thinking of posting a list of criteria so you can say "what's subjective about those"; before you do, I suggest you double-check whether you know all the criteria involved in the intentional grounding rule.)
Meh.
Back when I used to carry a knife regularly, I had it happen because the knife was in a jacket pocket, which didn't go through the metal detector. Instead it went through the x-ray machine, and apparently the operator missed it.
On the other hand, I've also lost pocket knives because the x-ray operator did see them.
All of which just goes to show, I should've paid more attention to when I have a knife in my jacket pocket.
That seems awfully subjective to be stated with such certainty.
None of the m-w definitions of "sport" back your claim. (There is something a little funny about the m-w entry, though; it lists "sexual play" before the more conventional -- or maybe just more general -- "physical activity engaged in for pleasure".) None of the dictionary.com definitions back you up either. Nor have I ever heard of "objective scoring" as a defining characteristic that makes an activity a sport -- so even taking language to be a living body, and accepting common usage as authoritative, I still see no justification for your claim.
But hey, why let any of that get in the way of a chance to reduce things to black and white?
Just because copyright terms have been extended beyond reason, has nothing to do with the validity or moral issues surrounding a movie/song/etc. that was created in the past year.
To be fair, the NFL is always tweaking the rules of American football, sometimes to the advantage of the offense, sometimes to the advantage of the defense. Some of the changes serve to make the game more spectacular to watch -- and on one level, this is to be expected, as the NFL is a business -- and some of them also serve to limit situations where people get hurt (at least, on paper). But overall, have scores in this particular sport gone up over the decades? Maybe I just haven't been watching long enough, but I haven't noticed.
Of course, it is true that in many games, there's a direct trade-off between "fun to watch" and "truly demanding test of skill". So I generally agree with the theme you're talking about, but I'm not sure it's universal, and I'm not sure most games as we have them today are in that terrible a condition.
Buying a CD gives me the right to own, store and archive a copy of that CD, but not the right to redistribute it.
What's inane, though, is that we're trying to nitpick our way through copyright law in a case that has nothing to do with the domain of activities copyright is meant to regulate.
If I take a picture of myself to send in a response to a personal ad, that picture is not a creative work. Copyright can be applied to it only to the extent that the law does an insufficient job of drawing the boundaries between what can or cannot be protected.
If I hire a studio to take my portrait, they probably do retain a copyright on that picture. This is borderline reasonable -- they should be putting creative work into staging the shot, etc. In that case, I probably have no right to send a copy in reply to a personal ad in the first place.
In any case, if we trace back to the root purpose and language of the Fair Use clause (as opposed to getting hung up on various fair-use guidelines that have been developed alongside the law to cover specfiic frequently-occuring scenarios like satire, parody, etc.), I think it's tough to argue that fair use wouldn't apply to this republishing.
If any right was violated, it was a privacy right. Copyright is not there to protect privacy, and using it in that way is an abuse that further weakens thw law with respect to its intended purpose. I have no respect for those who abuse the law by stretching it to shoehorn in "whatever that guy did that I don't like".
But really, why does everyone feel the need to choose between "the 'victims' are scum who got what they deserved" or "Fortuny was a jerk who violated their rights"? Both are probably true. While I don't think Fortuny is guilty of copyright violation, I'm not sure if he violated any actual privacy-related laws, and I'm betting he did violate the CL terms of use. And on the other side of it... maybe it's none of my business if some guy tried to cheat on his wife, but it is his wife's business.
Well, the whole "charge for cell use, and charge for no-phone section" idea is nothing but an economic fantasy concocted to sound plausible ("yeah, they'd like to get you coming and going") and make this law sound like a better idea than it is.
No matter what line items the airlines may throw at you, overall cost of flying (on average) is going to rise and fall per the market. If tomorrow they can charge everyone a $15 fee, that's $15 less in base fare increases (or an opportunity to advertise a $15 lower fare to draw customers from the competition).
Now, they might charge a fee for using phones, or they might charge a fee for a no-phones section. Which they would charge depends on which group is statistically likely to part with more money. That's basic price discrimination, and it really can make the airline more money (at the expense of a subset of passengers).
It's certainly true that the government can assign itself authority to override your property rights. The state of eminent domain today demonstrates that.
But is that really where you want to hang your hat in this debate? For my part, I don't think it's a good thing that the government can say "well, you've owned this land for your own use, but now that other people want to use it you have to give them what they want or give us your land".
So, you're claiming that the FCC license to AT&T stipulates that they will offer P2P service? I think not.
Where does AT&T advertise that you can use their 3G network for P2P applications?
First of all, I was arguing about a specific statement regarding alleged obligations on monopolies. If the previous poster meant "government-created monopolies" he should've said so; instead he said "natural monopolies", which is not the same thing.
Second, 3G networks have limited competition, but they are not a monopoly.
Lastly, does the agreement AT&T signed with the FCC to get that grant of spectrum stipulate that they have to provide whatever service the people request? I bet not, especially when issues of technical feasability come into play.
If you don't feel that the government is looking out for your interests when allocating spectrum and other resources, take it up with the government.
AT&T isn't saying what "type of customer" they'll serve.
They're saying what service they'll provide.
If you're the "type" of customer who wants P2P service, they'll still serve you. They just won't serve you P2P, because they don't serve that to anyone.
Your hypothetical business might not be able to say "we won't serve blacks", but that doesn't require them to provide goods or services that particularly appeal to blacks (whether said appeal be a reality or a stereotype being an unrelated issue).
Or do you suppose that all Apple stores are engaged in age discrimination?
It's not unreasonable to think they'd want to. But that doesn't matter.
It is unreasonable to expect to be allowed to. Why? Because of the impact on the other users. Because it isn't what the network is designed to support.
Just because it's reasonable to want soemthing, doesn't mean anyone can or should provide it.
"Does he really have many options if he wishes to choose another ISP?"
If we were talking about land-based ISP service, the answer would depend on where you live, but in most places there's at least one other option if you know where to look.
But we're not talking about land-based ISP service. We're talking about 3G cell phone service.
"ISPs due to infrastructure tend to have a natural monopolies. They have the responsibility of responding to the demands of their users."
Ah, the good old sense of consumer entitlement. So if I own the only lake-side property in town, and the folks in the town want a lake-side restaurant, I'm obliged to operate one for them? Nonsense.
The only special obligation placed on a monopoly is that it not abuse the free market with the power that being a monopoly gives it. Not being in the business you want them to be in isn't an abuse.
High levels of intellect?
I guess you play Killer Bunnies differently than the folks I hang out with...