who were to be working shortly after their arrival
What I heard was that none of them were due to be working until the next day, suggesting that they could have taken a few-hour car ride instead and still made it with plenty of time to spare before they would have been needed.
Overbooking incidents are resolved at check-in counters. This is an incident of someone being removed from a plane to make way for employees. Not only is this not overbooking, but it's also a mindbogglingly dickish move by an airline to de-board someone already sitting and expecting to reach their destination, even more dickish that it wasn't voluntary at all.
Exactly. People keep labeling this is an overbooking issue, but it's questionable whether that's really the case at all. And even if it was, it's likely that they didn't have the authority to remove him anyway.
Airlines have been granted limited authority by the Department of Transportation to deny boarding to confirmed passengers when they're overbooked. As you said, that sort of issue is handled at the check-in counter at the time of boarding, but if all of the confirmed passengers had already boarded and were in their seats, it should be self-evident that the plane wasn't overbooked, given that everyone was already in their seats. Moreover, even if the plane was overbooked, they still wouldn't have the authority to remove people from the plane, meaning that their only recourse would be to deny boarding to the passengers who hadn't boarded yet, namely their four employees. And really, that should have been their choice anyway, given that none of the employees needed to be at the destination until the next day and the destination was just a four-hour car ride away.
That the police went along with this is also appalling, given that they're supposed to be the sane ones who actually enforce the law. Yes, I know it's naive, but I've seen plenty of videos of law enforcement officers who've refused to obey whatever the hell a pissed off TSA agent is screeching at them to do, and have instead helped the passengers or visitors in going about their business (I seem to recall them even asking the passenger in one video if they wanted to press charges against the TSA agent, which shut that agent up immediately). What the officers did here was shameful.
That analogy misses a key distinction: these are technological restrictions placed on airlines, not behavioral restrictions placed on passengers. If you're able to make a call, you're generally already allowed to (takeoff, landing, and airline policies notwithstanding). The reason that isn't happening is because airlines are barred by the FCC from offering cellular service in flight, and cell phones tend to get rather poor (read: no) reception at cruising altitude. If you have WiFi on the flight, making Skype or FaceTime calls is already allowed (again, notwithstanding the earlier exceptions), though frowned upon by all of your fellow passengers. That won't change as a result of the FCC's decision.
Absolutely. I'm not saying that they're entirely devoid of merit. For people who are traveling regularly, they definitely can be well worth it. But I'd wager that most people view rewards miles as a way to afford a trip that they otherwise wouldn't have taken in the first place. For those people, the benefits are questionable.
The nature of netflix is more something that is per-household than per-person.
The terms of service used to say as much explicitly. I remember reading through the terms of service before sharing my password with family members a few years back. The ToS at that time made it clear that the license to view Netflix's content was extended to the entire household. I even seem to recall that they didn't care about geographic locations when it came to sharing the account (provided you were in the same region), suggesting that a family member away for college or on a trip could continue using the same account without running afoul of their terms. This was all back before they had multiple user profiles within accounts.
I just did a quick check of the ToS, and things seem to have changed to no longer contain those provisions. Instead, they basically just say that you share your password at your own risk, since anyone who has it has full control of your account.
Likewise. People always point out that the miles are a cheaper way to fly than paying with money, but that presupposes you'll fly in the first place. If that's true for you, then great, that's money (maybe) saved. If not, then why not enjoy the fact that a trip not taken is cheaper than either using miles or using cash?
When we got married, my wife was big on points rewards cards that offered watches, tech toys, and other such things. She pointed to a few things she bought with her points over the course of several years. When I asked how many of those things she would have bought in cash, had they handed her the cash instead, she said she wouldn't have bought any of them. When I showed her the prices should would have paid had she bought those things herself, she realized she wasn't actually getting a great deal at all (e.g. she thought the Apple TV 3rd gen was $100+ at retail, when it was actually $69 at the time). When I pointed to the cash rewards I had gotten from my card over that same period of time, she immediately switched cards.
Cash is fungible. I can apply it however I want, I can change my mind about how I want to use it, and I can accrue interest on it too. Points? Not so much. Miles? Not so much. When using those systems I'm tied to those rewards, and my currency in those systems is out of my control and subject to capricious rules designed to ensure that I get as little benefit as possible.
Are gun manufacturers held responsible for deaths caused by their products ?
No, but they're also not advertising their wares on sites dedicated to exchanging tips for committing murder, nor are they providing customer support to people who are apparently engaged in murdering others.
From the sounds of things, this guy was advertising on forums commonly used by hackers to sell their wares to each other, and was offering support to people who made it abundantly clear that they intended to use his software for illegal purposes.
Then you clearly don't interact with them much. They jacked up rates, introduced fees for standard features, switched me to a new type of account without notice, have some of the lowest interest rates in the entire industry (I'm literally getting 100x more interest on my savings at Ally, since BofA was 0.01% when I left), forced me to call them for virtually every interaction instead of being able to handle it online, and did all sorts of other crap, all in the span of a few years that I was with them fresh out of college. I thought this was all typical stuff, so I stayed with them for way too long.
I finally left them for USAA. The difference was night and day. Do yourself a favor and switch. USAA is great. Ally is great. Local credit unions are great if you like having branches you can go to. Pretty much just anything else is better. It's easy and you won't regret it.
No, the way it should work is that an untrusted touch sensor isn't trusted. Which is exactly what happens. They can use it as a button, but not as a Touch ID sensor to verify their identity. If the user wants to unlock their phone, they need to fallback to using their passcode or PIN instead.
The only way that your suggestion makes any sense is if you first get the user to unlock their phone using a passcode/PIN and then explicitly opt-in to using an untrusted Touch ID sensor. At that point all bets are off, since they've chosen to trust their repair guy and his parts. If they get burned, that's on them, but I can see why Apple may want to avoid that sort of situation, just because it opens them up to bad press, security, and various QA issues, akin to what they faced with the knock-off Chinese chargers that were electrocuting people.
Indeed. He's having to contort his arguments pretty hard to get them to sound in any way reasonable. This part in particular stuck out to me:
it isn't fair to impose different rules on ISPs than on websites
I assume he's playing the part of a willing fool by ignoring the obvious fact that the two are fundamentally different. Websites are inherently available to everyone, and thus are inherently capable of competing against every other one. ISPs are inherently regional, and thus are inherently incapable of competing against any others outside their region. The problem tends to sort itself out when they're able to enter new regions, but if there are barriers to entering new regions, which there are, then each company effectively acquires a regional monopoly that prevents competition within the region. As such, we either need to demolish the barriers or regulate the regional monopolies.
Google could have 99.9% of the market, and there would still be more competition among search engines than among ISPs where I live, given that there's exactly one ISP offering broadband speeds at my address (a suburban home in an area with a population of about 250K, so, not out in the boonies). The fact that other ISPs exist somewhere does nothing to change my situation here in the real world. This sort of situation is exactly what regulation is supposed to prevent; that he doesn't acknowledge this simple truth is utterly infuriating.
Saying "immediately in the red" was a poor choice of words on my part. What I meant to convey was that, as things are today and when taken by itself, the loss of Apple would be sufficient to put them into the red. You're quite right that that the loss isn't set to happen immediately and that they are likely to make adjustments in the meantime. Even so, what I was getting at is that I don't know that it will allow them to remain relevant.
Surely some percentage of their expenditures are also related to fulfilling their obligations to Apple and their costs go down too
As the article points out, their costs are almost entirely fixed R&D costs (i.e. they don't do any sort of work that revolves around per-unit costs), meaning that the gain or loss of any particular licensee does not affect their costs in any meaningful way. Typically that's a good thing, since any new licensee is pure profit, but in this case that's a bad thing, since they don't have any obvious costs to cut. They weren't specifically doing any design work for Apple before (Apple has been using in-house teams for that), so Imagination's costs post-Apple will be nearly identical to those before. As such, any cuts must come at the expense of their ability to produce technology for their other licensees.
It's possible (and likely) that they will slash their R&D budget, but this comes at a bad time for them. Imagination just announced their new Furian architecture a month or two ago. It's still in development, and their roadmap for it was built on the assumption that they'd be able to maintain their current level of spending on its R&D. Slashing their R&D budget now likely won't impact the launch of Furian too much, since it's pretty well locked down, but it leaves them in a poor state for picking off the low-hanging fruit that they otherwise would have easily gotten to post-launch. As such, the efficiency and performance gains we'd expect to see over the next few years will likely be significantly smaller and less frequent.
As you said, they may be able to (and I'd wager will) stay in business, but I question their ability to remain relevant in this same space after the loss of Apple. They may need to focus on a much smaller niche if they want to stay in business, but that may cause Apple's competitors to scramble for alternatives if their needs aren't being served by Imagination's change in focus.
While the network writers don't seem to be hurting, those numbers for cable aren't great.
For instance, with an exclusivity agreement that limits you to, say, the 10 episodes per year that your show runs on cable, you'd get $54,320/year for writing the story. That comes out to $4527/mo. before taxes. After taxes, you're probably looking at something closer to $3700/mo., which would be decent in many parts of the country, but certainly wouldn't be that great if you were living in a place like Hollywood. It may not be as expensive as the Silicon Valley, but it's certainly not cheap.
Mind you, these are minimum numbers that you're posting, which in any other industry we'd interpret as being appropriate for entry-level positions. Were that the case here, they wouldn't seem unreasonable, but I suspect that the networks and studios don't think of those numbers as being strictly for entry-level positions. Instead, I'd wager only a fraction of the writers (e.g. the ones attached to popular shows who receive incentives to stay, those with a strong portfolio of successes, etc.) see numbers above the minimums.
Things are likely to get a lot more grim in the near future.
The article mentions that Apple's licensing payments account for 69% of Imagination's annual revenue (Imagination even referred to Apple as an "Essential Contract" in its filings). As is to be expected, that amount is larger than the entirety of their profits, meaning that the loss of Apple immediately plunges them into the red. It looks like they'll have 1.5-2 years to figure out how to reduce their R&D costs or increase the payments they receive, but that's not much time.
Of course, Apple isn't Imagination's sole licensee, so Apple may view this as a means to put all of Imagination's other licensees--Apple's competitors--on their back foot, thus giving them a competitive advantage. If they're one of the only few with the staff on hand today to continue the necessary R&D work, in a few years' time they may be one of the few putting out improved designs, with everyone else relying on outdated or subpar tech. Or else maybe someone else will step in to fill Imagination's shoes. Time will tell.
The debate is: should there be a law preventing Comcast from doing whatever the fuck they want with their business?
My take on this is: no.
That's a fair summarization, and I would say "it depends". In an actual free market, I'd agree with you that "no" is the answer, since the same would apply equally to Netflix, who would doubtless denounce Comcast's bad behavior and then raise their rates for Comcast's customers, thus prompting Comcast's customers to look for alternative ISPs. Some would leave, some would stay, and some would ditch Netflix. No matter what, problem solved.
Unfortunately, that isn't able to happen here, since most of those customers have no one else that they can switch to, meaning that without net neutrality, Comcast can (and has demonstrated that they will) leverage their monopoly position with regards to their customers to maximize their already-substantial profits. In a free market, that sort of thing should not be possible in the first place since monopolies are either broken up or regulated to prevent them from leveraging their position for ill-gotten gain. The fact that it happened after net neutrality fell off the books proves that there are still barriers to competition, but that net neutrality is not one of them.
Fix the exclusivity agreements and local/state laws preventing new entrants and you'll fix the competition problem. In the meantime, either break up or regulate the monopolies as you should.
You're looking at all of this backwards, presumably because you're not aware of the history here. Net neutrality was law from the mid-90s until about 2013 when those laws expired. Within about a year of them expiring, we saw shenanigans like the ones I mentioned above.
So when you ask what benefit we've seen from net neutrality: Google, Facebook, Netflix, and every other company that began and was able to flourish in that period because net neutrality ensured that they were able to each everyone equally. That's what net neutrality was able to foster.
On the other hand, I actually agree with some of what you've said in other posts about the free market taking care of things, but there's an issue preventing that from occurring here: exclusivity agreements. Most states and municipalities either signed explicit exclusivity agreements with ISPs (who were eventually bought out by the big players, thus conferring those rights to the big guys), or else granted implicit exclusivity by having laws on the books that prevent competitors from laying their own lines. Those agreements create regional monopolies (i.e. these ISPs are the only ones who even CAN have access to those subscribers), and where we allow monopolies to exist, the free market is incapable of addressing problems, hence why we we heavily regulate monopolies. That's why regulation is necessary here, just as it is in any other monopoly situation.
Remove the barriers to competition and I'm fine with letting the free market handle things (net neutrality or not, I would LOVE to switch ISPs, but I only have one broadband choice in my area), but don't dismantle the one and only protection we have against bad behavior until you fix the market side first.
It wasn't resolved until Netflix was able to stop paying those fees, and that didn't happen until the laws were changed. Make up your own mind, by all means, but if you can't appreciate the distinction I was drawing and recognize that the other poster was being disingenuous in suggesting that things had been resolved, I doubt we'll be seeing eye to eye.
No it wasn't, and your link is proof of that. Your "resolution" involved Netflix paying a fee to Comcast to deliver packets that Comcast's customers had already paid for. Capitulating to extortion is not the same thing as a resolution.
Wasn't it Verizon who was putting tracking values into HTTP headers not that long ago that would allow their mobile customers to be individually identified across virtually any site? Even though the spyware thing is false, that doesn't mean they haven't been up to their usual tricks.
That's a movie I actually will watch in theaters, just because it looks to be a film that benefits from the big screen experience. I'm willing to pay to see large-scale films that take advantage of every inch of the screen and benefit from having big speakers...but tickets here are less than $5 for a regular screening and around $8 for an IMAX screening, so I can afford to do that easily. Were I paying as much for tickets as others mention they pay, my large, high-def TV with surround audio would have to suffice.
Of course, the vast majority of films are little more than "junk food" media. They don't push boundaries or improve significantly when viewed with a bigger screen and better audio, so the theater experience is wasted on them. I'll wait for those to come to Netflix or RedBox before watching them, assuming I watch them at all.
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who were to be working shortly after their arrival
What I heard was that none of them were due to be working until the next day, suggesting that they could have taken a few-hour car ride instead and still made it with plenty of time to spare before they would have been needed.
Overbooking incidents are resolved at check-in counters. This is an incident of someone being removed from a plane to make way for employees. Not only is this not overbooking, but it's also a mindbogglingly dickish move by an airline to de-board someone already sitting and expecting to reach their destination, even more dickish that it wasn't voluntary at all.
Exactly. People keep labeling this is an overbooking issue, but it's questionable whether that's really the case at all. And even if it was, it's likely that they didn't have the authority to remove him anyway.
Airlines have been granted limited authority by the Department of Transportation to deny boarding to confirmed passengers when they're overbooked. As you said, that sort of issue is handled at the check-in counter at the time of boarding, but if all of the confirmed passengers had already boarded and were in their seats, it should be self-evident that the plane wasn't overbooked, given that everyone was already in their seats. Moreover, even if the plane was overbooked, they still wouldn't have the authority to remove people from the plane, meaning that their only recourse would be to deny boarding to the passengers who hadn't boarded yet, namely their four employees. And really, that should have been their choice anyway, given that none of the employees needed to be at the destination until the next day and the destination was just a four-hour car ride away.
That the police went along with this is also appalling, given that they're supposed to be the sane ones who actually enforce the law. Yes, I know it's naive, but I've seen plenty of videos of law enforcement officers who've refused to obey whatever the hell a pissed off TSA agent is screeching at them to do, and have instead helped the passengers or visitors in going about their business (I seem to recall them even asking the passenger in one video if they wanted to press charges against the TSA agent, which shut that agent up immediately). What the officers did here was shameful.
That analogy misses a key distinction: these are technological restrictions placed on airlines, not behavioral restrictions placed on passengers. If you're able to make a call, you're generally already allowed to (takeoff, landing, and airline policies notwithstanding). The reason that isn't happening is because airlines are barred by the FCC from offering cellular service in flight, and cell phones tend to get rather poor (read: no) reception at cruising altitude. If you have WiFi on the flight, making Skype or FaceTime calls is already allowed (again, notwithstanding the earlier exceptions), though frowned upon by all of your fellow passengers. That won't change as a result of the FCC's decision.
Absolutely. I'm not saying that they're entirely devoid of merit. For people who are traveling regularly, they definitely can be well worth it. But I'd wager that most people view rewards miles as a way to afford a trip that they otherwise wouldn't have taken in the first place. For those people, the benefits are questionable.
The nature of netflix is more something that is per-household than per-person.
The terms of service used to say as much explicitly. I remember reading through the terms of service before sharing my password with family members a few years back. The ToS at that time made it clear that the license to view Netflix's content was extended to the entire household. I even seem to recall that they didn't care about geographic locations when it came to sharing the account (provided you were in the same region), suggesting that a family member away for college or on a trip could continue using the same account without running afoul of their terms. This was all back before they had multiple user profiles within accounts.
I just did a quick check of the ToS, and things seem to have changed to no longer contain those provisions. Instead, they basically just say that you share your password at your own risk, since anyone who has it has full control of your account.
Likewise. People always point out that the miles are a cheaper way to fly than paying with money, but that presupposes you'll fly in the first place. If that's true for you, then great, that's money (maybe) saved. If not, then why not enjoy the fact that a trip not taken is cheaper than either using miles or using cash?
When we got married, my wife was big on points rewards cards that offered watches, tech toys, and other such things. She pointed to a few things she bought with her points over the course of several years. When I asked how many of those things she would have bought in cash, had they handed her the cash instead, she said she wouldn't have bought any of them. When I showed her the prices should would have paid had she bought those things herself, she realized she wasn't actually getting a great deal at all (e.g. she thought the Apple TV 3rd gen was $100+ at retail, when it was actually $69 at the time). When I pointed to the cash rewards I had gotten from my card over that same period of time, she immediately switched cards.
Cash is fungible. I can apply it however I want, I can change my mind about how I want to use it, and I can accrue interest on it too. Points? Not so much. Miles? Not so much. When using those systems I'm tied to those rewards, and my currency in those systems is out of my control and subject to capricious rules designed to ensure that I get as little benefit as possible.
Are gun manufacturers held responsible for deaths caused by their products ?
No, but they're also not advertising their wares on sites dedicated to exchanging tips for committing murder, nor are they providing customer support to people who are apparently engaged in murdering others.
From the sounds of things, this guy was advertising on forums commonly used by hackers to sell their wares to each other, and was offering support to people who made it abundantly clear that they intended to use his software for illegal purposes.
It could use a comma after the imperative statement that he started with, given that the rest of it is a noun of direct address.
Did anyone at all bother to RTFA before commenting???
No. Why would we? This is Slashdot. We let others rightly correct us...and then tell them they're wrong.
Then you clearly don't interact with them much. They jacked up rates, introduced fees for standard features, switched me to a new type of account without notice, have some of the lowest interest rates in the entire industry (I'm literally getting 100x more interest on my savings at Ally, since BofA was 0.01% when I left), forced me to call them for virtually every interaction instead of being able to handle it online, and did all sorts of other crap, all in the span of a few years that I was with them fresh out of college. I thought this was all typical stuff, so I stayed with them for way too long.
I finally left them for USAA. The difference was night and day. Do yourself a favor and switch. USAA is great. Ally is great. Local credit unions are great if you like having branches you can go to. Pretty much just anything else is better. It's easy and you won't regret it.
No, the way it should work is that an untrusted touch sensor isn't trusted. Which is exactly what happens. They can use it as a button, but not as a Touch ID sensor to verify their identity. If the user wants to unlock their phone, they need to fallback to using their passcode or PIN instead.
The only way that your suggestion makes any sense is if you first get the user to unlock their phone using a passcode/PIN and then explicitly opt-in to using an untrusted Touch ID sensor. At that point all bets are off, since they've chosen to trust their repair guy and his parts. If they get burned, that's on them, but I can see why Apple may want to avoid that sort of situation, just because it opens them up to bad press, security, and various QA issues, akin to what they faced with the knock-off Chinese chargers that were electrocuting people.
You're a 100% fucking moron.
Says the guy who can't even spell "you're" correc....
Wait a sec. You spelled it correctly. That's some "end of the world" levels of weirdness there, what with our trolls spelling "you're" correctly.
Yeah, the summary got it wrong. It's GDDR5, which, as you were getting at, isn't at all the same thing as DDR5.
Indeed. He's having to contort his arguments pretty hard to get them to sound in any way reasonable. This part in particular stuck out to me:
it isn't fair to impose different rules on ISPs than on websites
I assume he's playing the part of a willing fool by ignoring the obvious fact that the two are fundamentally different. Websites are inherently available to everyone, and thus are inherently capable of competing against every other one. ISPs are inherently regional, and thus are inherently incapable of competing against any others outside their region. The problem tends to sort itself out when they're able to enter new regions, but if there are barriers to entering new regions, which there are, then each company effectively acquires a regional monopoly that prevents competition within the region. As such, we either need to demolish the barriers or regulate the regional monopolies.
Google could have 99.9% of the market, and there would still be more competition among search engines than among ISPs where I live, given that there's exactly one ISP offering broadband speeds at my address (a suburban home in an area with a population of about 250K, so, not out in the boonies). The fact that other ISPs exist somewhere does nothing to change my situation here in the real world. This sort of situation is exactly what regulation is supposed to prevent; that he doesn't acknowledge this simple truth is utterly infuriating.
Saying "immediately in the red" was a poor choice of words on my part. What I meant to convey was that, as things are today and when taken by itself, the loss of Apple would be sufficient to put them into the red. You're quite right that that the loss isn't set to happen immediately and that they are likely to make adjustments in the meantime. Even so, what I was getting at is that I don't know that it will allow them to remain relevant.
Surely some percentage of their expenditures are also related to fulfilling their obligations to Apple and their costs go down too
As the article points out, their costs are almost entirely fixed R&D costs (i.e. they don't do any sort of work that revolves around per-unit costs), meaning that the gain or loss of any particular licensee does not affect their costs in any meaningful way. Typically that's a good thing, since any new licensee is pure profit, but in this case that's a bad thing, since they don't have any obvious costs to cut. They weren't specifically doing any design work for Apple before (Apple has been using in-house teams for that), so Imagination's costs post-Apple will be nearly identical to those before. As such, any cuts must come at the expense of their ability to produce technology for their other licensees.
It's possible (and likely) that they will slash their R&D budget, but this comes at a bad time for them. Imagination just announced their new Furian architecture a month or two ago. It's still in development, and their roadmap for it was built on the assumption that they'd be able to maintain their current level of spending on its R&D. Slashing their R&D budget now likely won't impact the launch of Furian too much, since it's pretty well locked down, but it leaves them in a poor state for picking off the low-hanging fruit that they otherwise would have easily gotten to post-launch. As such, the efficiency and performance gains we'd expect to see over the next few years will likely be significantly smaller and less frequent.
As you said, they may be able to (and I'd wager will) stay in business, but I question their ability to remain relevant in this same space after the loss of Apple. They may need to focus on a much smaller niche if they want to stay in business, but that may cause Apple's competitors to scramble for alternatives if their needs aren't being served by Imagination's change in focus.
While the network writers don't seem to be hurting, those numbers for cable aren't great.
For instance, with an exclusivity agreement that limits you to, say, the 10 episodes per year that your show runs on cable, you'd get $54,320/year for writing the story. That comes out to $4527/mo. before taxes. After taxes, you're probably looking at something closer to $3700/mo., which would be decent in many parts of the country, but certainly wouldn't be that great if you were living in a place like Hollywood. It may not be as expensive as the Silicon Valley, but it's certainly not cheap.
Mind you, these are minimum numbers that you're posting, which in any other industry we'd interpret as being appropriate for entry-level positions. Were that the case here, they wouldn't seem unreasonable, but I suspect that the networks and studios don't think of those numbers as being strictly for entry-level positions. Instead, I'd wager only a fraction of the writers (e.g. the ones attached to popular shows who receive incentives to stay, those with a strong portfolio of successes, etc.) see numbers above the minimums.
Poor guys, the stock was down 63% this morning.
Things are likely to get a lot more grim in the near future.
The article mentions that Apple's licensing payments account for 69% of Imagination's annual revenue (Imagination even referred to Apple as an "Essential Contract" in its filings). As is to be expected, that amount is larger than the entirety of their profits, meaning that the loss of Apple immediately plunges them into the red. It looks like they'll have 1.5-2 years to figure out how to reduce their R&D costs or increase the payments they receive, but that's not much time.
Of course, Apple isn't Imagination's sole licensee, so Apple may view this as a means to put all of Imagination's other licensees--Apple's competitors--on their back foot, thus giving them a competitive advantage. If they're one of the only few with the staff on hand today to continue the necessary R&D work, in a few years' time they may be one of the few putting out improved designs, with everyone else relying on outdated or subpar tech. Or else maybe someone else will step in to fill Imagination's shoes. Time will tell.
The debate is: should there be a law preventing Comcast from doing whatever the fuck they want with their business?
My take on this is: no.
That's a fair summarization, and I would say "it depends". In an actual free market, I'd agree with you that "no" is the answer, since the same would apply equally to Netflix, who would doubtless denounce Comcast's bad behavior and then raise their rates for Comcast's customers, thus prompting Comcast's customers to look for alternative ISPs. Some would leave, some would stay, and some would ditch Netflix. No matter what, problem solved.
Unfortunately, that isn't able to happen here, since most of those customers have no one else that they can switch to, meaning that without net neutrality, Comcast can (and has demonstrated that they will) leverage their monopoly position with regards to their customers to maximize their already-substantial profits. In a free market, that sort of thing should not be possible in the first place since monopolies are either broken up or regulated to prevent them from leveraging their position for ill-gotten gain. The fact that it happened after net neutrality fell off the books proves that there are still barriers to competition, but that net neutrality is not one of them.
Fix the exclusivity agreements and local/state laws preventing new entrants and you'll fix the competition problem. In the meantime, either break up or regulate the monopolies as you should.
You're looking at all of this backwards, presumably because you're not aware of the history here. Net neutrality was law from the mid-90s until about 2013 when those laws expired. Within about a year of them expiring, we saw shenanigans like the ones I mentioned above.
So when you ask what benefit we've seen from net neutrality: Google, Facebook, Netflix, and every other company that began and was able to flourish in that period because net neutrality ensured that they were able to each everyone equally. That's what net neutrality was able to foster.
On the other hand, I actually agree with some of what you've said in other posts about the free market taking care of things, but there's an issue preventing that from occurring here: exclusivity agreements. Most states and municipalities either signed explicit exclusivity agreements with ISPs (who were eventually bought out by the big players, thus conferring those rights to the big guys), or else granted implicit exclusivity by having laws on the books that prevent competitors from laying their own lines. Those agreements create regional monopolies (i.e. these ISPs are the only ones who even CAN have access to those subscribers), and where we allow monopolies to exist, the free market is incapable of addressing problems, hence why we we heavily regulate monopolies. That's why regulation is necessary here, just as it is in any other monopoly situation.
Remove the barriers to competition and I'm fine with letting the free market handle things (net neutrality or not, I would LOVE to switch ISPs, but I only have one broadband choice in my area), but don't dismantle the one and only protection we have against bad behavior until you fix the market side first.
It wasn't resolved until Netflix was able to stop paying those fees, and that didn't happen until the laws were changed. Make up your own mind, by all means, but if you can't appreciate the distinction I was drawing and recognize that the other poster was being disingenuous in suggesting that things had been resolved, I doubt we'll be seeing eye to eye.
That was resolved (correctly) BEFORE REGULATION.
No it wasn't, and your link is proof of that. Your "resolution" involved Netflix paying a fee to Comcast to deliver packets that Comcast's customers had already paid for. Capitulating to extortion is not the same thing as a resolution.
Can you give an example where the net neutrality rules actually did anything useful in terms of stopping an ISP from doing something they should not?
Like the Netflix vs. Comcast spat? Seemed like it suddenly resolved itself once the new rules came out...
Wasn't it Verizon who was putting tracking values into HTTP headers not that long ago that would allow their mobile customers to be individually identified across virtually any site? Even though the spyware thing is false, that doesn't mean they haven't been up to their usual tricks.
That's a movie I actually will watch in theaters, just because it looks to be a film that benefits from the big screen experience. I'm willing to pay to see large-scale films that take advantage of every inch of the screen and benefit from having big speakers...but tickets here are less than $5 for a regular screening and around $8 for an IMAX screening, so I can afford to do that easily. Were I paying as much for tickets as others mention they pay, my large, high-def TV with surround audio would have to suffice.
Of course, the vast majority of films are little more than "junk food" media. They don't push boundaries or improve significantly when viewed with a bigger screen and better audio, so the theater experience is wasted on them. I'll wait for those to come to Netflix or RedBox before watching them, assuming I watch them at all.
I think you have me confused for someone else. My screen name is Anubis IV, not Jesus.