Steele wasn't some random person who just sent Hillary an email, he was essentially her employee. Hillary's campaign specifically contracted the dossiers creation and then pushed it to the FBI to try and trigger an investigation without the slightest attempt at verification. How is she not responsible for it?
There's also the very strong likelihood (due to the specific nature and wording of some of the details) that large parts or even the entire document was in fact created by people even closer to Hillary than just paid contractors (Blumenthal being the top suspect) and Steele was only used as a go between to give it a semi-respectable face.
No evidence of tampering at all.. they just hacked into the voter registrations to take a peak.
That's literally what the article you linked says. They probed 21 States databases, managed to access 1, viewed the information (which for the most part is all publicly available) and made no alterations or additions.
The link to the Russian government is generally because these intrusions were related back to Russian hacking groups which have been know to work for the government in the past. In some cases the ties are just that they had a Russian IP address, because we all know the ip address connecting to the target system is ALWAYS the actual originators IP.
Two of the many possible explanations for this are, the Russians had some nefarious plot to take over the country by reading the public voter roles without paying the state fee for access, or some hackers (Russian, Chinese, Swiss, bored 16 year old, whoever) wanted to see what they could tap into on a lark.
Sure they may have been Russians trying to see what systems were vulnerable but no one has shown they ever went past the public data and the few reports of attempts at actual voter systems were later shown to be the feds actually doing security tests without telling the locals.
Steele did in fact release large parts of the memo to the public through a series of interviews with several news organizations. That is part of the reason he was terminated as a FBI source. He lied to investigators about whether or not he had communicated the contents of the dossier to journalists and he said no. This was later shown to be a lie during a British investigation where he testified that he had in fact talked to several journalists, including Yahoo News, which was used as a secondary source to help verify the contents of the dossier itself.
So Steele leaked his dossier to the news as an anonymous source, then Fusion gave it to the FBI who used those same leaked news stories to verify the dossier.
The history of the dossier is now quite well documented and it had nothing to do with the GOP or Republican leaning groups.
Fusion was hired by The Washington Free Beacon to do some background research on Trump. This did not involve Russia but was more just general opposition research during the primaries. In 2016 they terminated the contract and that was the end of their involvement.
After that contract was over Fusion was then hired by the DNC and Hillary campaign (through their lawyers) to research Trump with specific interest in Russia. Fusion then hired Steele as part of the DNC contract.
This all came out during congressional testimony and as far as I know is not in dispute by any of the named parties.
Any right leaning association with Fusion and their Trump research was over months before Steele was ever hired to create the dossier. The dossier and all the twisted details associated with it are 100% a DNC/Hillary 2018 creation.
I don't know but if they told users that they could opt for a $90 battery replacement and keep their phone at it's current performance level how many people do you think would have just opted for the $90 instead of shelling out $1000 for a phone that is just overkill for their needs?
Being born on American soil is only one method of being a natural born citizen; anyone born to an American father is also a natural born Citizen and eligible for President. I believe the law now, and possibly when Ivanka was born, just says born to an 'American Citizen' but I know it was the 'father' thing that gave rise to birtherism back when Hilary and Obama were duking it out in the primaries.
When Obama was born the law specifically stated 'fathers' as granting natural citizenship to their children and since his father wasn't American some people saw that as a disqualification. A lot of laws back then were pretty sexist and excluded women from a lot of things that were later decided to be unconstitutional. If it was ever shown he was born outside of the country I'm sure the fact that his mother was an American citizen would have been enough for any judge to say that that met the legal requirement for being natural born.
The primary system is just a method used for a political party to pick a candidate. It's not a requirement to hold any office. Since the US does not have a single election for President but instead 50+ separate elections (not sure how the territories count) the 2 big parties have the infrastructure to properly register their representative in all States to optimize their chance of winning on a Federal level. Anyone meeting the legal requirements for President can go ahead and register themselves but it takes a lot of manpower to do it on a national level (you have to know and meet each States requirements to get on their ballot).
Being a private organization, the DNC can make whatever rules it wants to pick their candidate for President. The problem lies in the fact they published a clearly defined set of rules and standards for how that process is suppose to run and in many instances it appears to be the case that they violated those rules in order to weigh the scale in Hillary's favor.
It's essentially a contract dispute. They announced a free and fair primary system to their membership (although their excessive use of 'super-delegates' always made that a farce) and instead helped a single candidate behind the scenes.
CHIP is fully funded in the current Republican budget that passed the House and the Dems blocked in the Senate.
As for DACA most Republicans, including Trump, have already stated they are ok with allowing the current DACA recipients to stay but want to end other immigrations problems such as chain migration and the visa lottery; two system that effectively allow tens of thousands of immigrants into the country with no skills requirement. There may be some back and forth about funding the wall but if the Dems really cared about DACA they could agree to end or limit chain migration and the lottery and DACA could be signed tomorrow.
There are over 100 companies who have announced bonuses due directly to the new tax plan. Of those 100 several have also said that they would, in addition to the bonuses, be increasing their employees wages. I understand how you could have missed those announcements since they are just from some small mom and pop shops like Walmart and Wells Fargo.
That's because Obama preferred to use Presidential Memoranda as opposed to Executive orders. Legally they have the exact same weight but memoranda do not have to be filed with the federal registry in all cases whereas Orders do.
So while Obama was under the average for EO's at 277 or so, he issued more than twice that many PM's (over 600) and often for more serious issue than they had been used for previously.
It's like the difference between being shot with a revolver or a semi-auto handgun; for the person being hit it's about the hole in their chest and not the semantics about the weapon used.
He posted it on an internal forum specifically set up to address the issues he wrote about. This was not an unsolicited posting he made.
Effectively his bosses asked for his opinion and then fired him when another employee made those opinions public.
According to California law, which adds a lot of extra criteria to their list of 'protected groups' he actually has a pretty strong case. In many other states he wouldn't have much of a legal leg to stand on.
Making profit and making enough profit to reinvest in large scale R&D are 2 completely different things. One dictates whether it's worth making shipments to a region to sell your wares while the other determines if you actually have wares to sell in the first place.
Only in a world where math doesn't exist would eliminating the mark up in a market which makes up over 45% of the worlds pharmaceutical revenue not impact their R&D budgets. I'm not saying it's fair to the US, it clearly isn't, I'm just saying all you people saying the fix for the US is just to model other countries drug buying policies are living in a dream world. Drug companies are in the drug business to make money. They don't want to have to wait 30 years to see the ROI for a cancer drug. Sure they can make a profit off each sale of the pill @ $15 a bottle but that doesn't compensate then for the $250 million in research to come up with that drug in the first place. If the ability to make their money back in a reasonable timeline is removed they simply won't spend the $250 million in the first place.
Sask tends to have the best rates and from what I've seen Ontario the worst. On the Telus site using a 6gb unlimited talk and text plan as a base you get:
Now I can see Quebec from my office window but I have to pay almost double for access to the same network. The Quebec cable company however does offer cell plans across the border which also happen to use the Telus network but at Quebec rates. So I can go with Telus and pay $100+ or switch to Videotron, use the same network nationwide and pay $61. as an added bonus they often have a double data offer so if I wait till Christmas week to switch it would probably be 10gb data for $61.
Smart would mean being able to put some policies in place that couldn't simply be removed or modified by the simple stroke of a pen or vote of a panel. Lazy is a much more apt term for Obama's general governing philosophy. He didn't want to deal with the actual work of being the President so he simply granted powers to unelected groups or signed EO's (or various other executive statements) creating new laws that completely bypassed the legislative process. Even his own party members continually called him out for failing to meet with them to discuss policy plans or completing throwing them under the bus after they had worked across the aisle to come to some sort of agreement with Repubs on certain issues.
Most of the most vocal opponents of Trump's policies are only really complaining that he is effectively ripping up Obama's declarations. If any of those had actually been enshrined into law he wouldn't have been able to do that. That being said Trump shows a lot of the same laziness in that he doesn't seem to want to sweat the details but only wants to give the big idea speeches. He likes to bitch about how slow the process is to get things done but so far he is mostly living within the limits of the Executive branch.
You won't have to worry about all those testing procedures because there simply won't be much to test. Drug companies spend billions a year on R&D and it's not out of the goodness of their hearts. Take away the cash cow that is the US drug market and the incentives to continue to develop new treatments evaporates. Sure you can rely on public research but that's less than 1/5th the size of the private research being done on new drugs and procedures.
Simply put they can sell to other countries on the cheap because the US markets shoulders the costs. So we Canadians can get our pills for $40/bottle while Americans spend $400 because the companies do their math based on American sales, everything else is just gravy.
The problem is that under a proper constitutional reading Trump/Pai are doing exactly what should be done (though probably by accident); removing Federal regulations.
The local monopolies are truly the real problem but they are just that, a local matter and should be handled at the State and local levels not the Federal. The problem is that the media loves to make everything a federal case no matter how much the problem is not actually a federal one. It's sexier to blame the great and powerful "Trump administration" bogeyman than it is to blame Mayor Whatshisname and Councillor Whodat. Most people who live in these monopoly areas probably don't even know it was their local government who sold their rights to the highest bidder. The fight for ISP availability should be the real issue and depending on the various State constitutions that fight needs to happen at either the State capitals or at your own City Hall.
Exhibit B: Comcast allowing their peering connections to saturate so Netflix would slow down. This was to either a) keep Comcast users from using Netflix or b) force Netflix to directly pay Comcast to restore what should have been basic network operations.
This is almost everyone's goto example for the need for NN laws but even in your own description it has absolutely nothing to do with NN or the regulations that were passed to enact it. Allowing peering connections to become oversaturated has to do with interconnectivity between networks and NOT how the packets are handle within a given network. It's like throwing a party for 50 people at a house with a only a 2 car driveway and no street parking and then forcing the town to increase speed limits to try and deal with parking issues. The 'solution' has nothing to do with the problem.
In the Netflix case the problem was they opted for a service provider that wanted to go cheap and force their cost on the residential ISPs. Peering agreements tend to be balanced through either data transfers or monetary compensation. If traffic tends to be about equal in both directions then no money needs to change hands but when traffic is 90% going one way the abusing network is expected to compensate the other by some means. With the explosion of Netflix traffic their ISP wanted to continue with outdated peering agreements even though the data transfers were ridiculously unbalanced. NN does nothing to combat this.
#1 ISP customers requested all of the traffic that Netflix sent.
I can also ask my bank for a million dollars but they don't have to give it to me just because I'm a customer.
#2 ISP customers were not receiving the bandwidth that they had paid for.
Just because your connection to a single service isn't going as fast as you want does not impact your overall bandwidth.
#3 Netflix offered to put their servers closer to the ISP customers, lowering the bandwidth on backbones.
That's purely a business decision by the ISPs and they are under no obligation to host Netflix servers. Sure this is the best decision for the customer and it's ultimately what happened in most cases. The only real argument was were they going to follow Netflix's proposal of doing it all for free or the ISPs proposal of Netflix paying a fee for a direct connection.
#4 ISPs artificially throttled Netflix as evidenced by data collection, and proxies bypassing the issue.
Most of that 'evidence' is through the use of VPNs which, by their very definition are altering your connection. If the onramp near my house is always congested so I decide to leave from my girlfriends house across town I can't then claim the congestion at my onramp is artificial. So while it does show that there is some pathing available to get through the congested primary connection how many alternate pathways are they responsible for testing?
#5 Verizon pushed Netflix traffic through congested peer connections as evidenced by an unfortunate Verizon graphic.
They pushed it through a congested peer connection because that was their connection to Netflix's ISPs backbone.
The gist is you had 3 companies all looking out for their own best interest and none really too worried about the customers. Netflix choose a cheap ISP (Level 3), Level 3 tried to get other providers to adapt to an ever growing imbalance in data transfers without paying up and local ISPs (like Verizon) refused to increase the available bandwidth between them and Level 3 because they wanted Level 3 to pay.
Nobody comes out looking good in this situation but for the most part it's been handled by Netflix and the local ISPs forging agreements that skip over the middle man.
Regardless, the whole situation has nothing to do with Net Neutrality as it's not about how data is handled on a particular network. It's about the interrelationships of the various individual networks that make up the internet as a whole.
No ISP is responsible to giving you an amazing connection to every site and service on the internet. Once that data is on their network you can make a case that they shouldn't interfere with it (true net neutrality) but they aren't responsible if the sender is using a TRS-80 on a dial-up modem to serve up their music service and that was effectively the issue with Netflix/Comcast.
The problem wasn't Comcast paying the other network for peering, it's was that the other network WASN'T PAYING for peering. For a long time Comcast et al. were letting them freeload off an outdated and unbalanced peering agreement then when they decided enough was enough they told them to pay. Netflix's ISP refused and told everyone that they needed to let the continue because everyone needed Netflix. At that point it was just a waiting game and while a lot of smaller ISPs folded Comcast decided to wait it out for better terms.
The fact Netflix was offering a direct connect for free is besides the point, that is just a business decision; you might not like it but that's the way business is done, the owner of the network gets to decided who or what connects to it. But since it was offered and in your world Comcast was under some type of moral obligation to accept Netflix' terms I'm sure you've already signed up for Amazon's in home deliveries right? After all Amazon is offering to deliver their parcels right inside your house even when your not home. It's so much better than having to deal with going to some pick up spot or calling and getting a time for delivery so why shouldn't you be obligated to sign up?
The Netflix issue was never about Net Neutrality, it was simply about paying for services rendered. The backbone Netflix connected to had lopsided peering agreements with pretty much everyone they connected to as there is a lot more data headed downstream than up. This caused a bottleneck that could only have been alleviated by downstream backbones allowing the data transfer to get even more lopsided. Sure they could have done this but instead they offered Netflix direct access to their networks for a fee; bypassing Netflix's own ISP. That didn't affect the speed of data once it was on their network, it just bypassed the bottleneck between backbones.
And it doesn't matter if both the end user and Netflix paid for internet access, it matters what peering agreements exist between both the sender and the receiver. I might pay the same gas taxes for road maintenance as the next guy but if I choose to live near a small rural road instead of near a 4 lane highway I can't complain that it takes me an extra 45 minutes to get to work because my speed limit is limited to 30mph and theirs is 65.
There are exactly 2 Podesta's mixed up in all this and they are brothers and co-founders of the Podesta group. Both worked with Manafort on Russias's behalf (often paid through shell charities) it's just that one also happens to have been Clinton's campaign chair.
The Podesta's (either one, take your pick) have a pretty long and very deep relationship with Russia but they seem to be more than willing to take money from anyone so there's always that defense.
The dossier in question, produced by Christopher Steele, was 100% funded by the DNC and Hillary campaign (although there is some question as to whether the FBI contributed any funds to the research - though that is highly doubtful at this point); the campaign is now under review for hiding their funding through their lawyers which is illegal under campaign finance rules without proper disclosure (it could lead to a hefty fine but not much else).
Fusion was also hired to do generate a report about Trump's businesses. It was this report that was funded by a, as of yet unidentified, Republican supporter. That 'project' was already completed prior to this second report and the hiring of Steele.
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Steele wasn't some random person who just sent Hillary an email, he was essentially her employee. Hillary's campaign specifically contracted the dossiers creation and then pushed it to the FBI to try and trigger an investigation without the slightest attempt at verification. How is she not responsible for it?
There's also the very strong likelihood (due to the specific nature and wording of some of the details) that large parts or even the entire document was in fact created by people even closer to Hillary than just paid contractors (Blumenthal being the top suspect) and Steele was only used as a go between to give it a semi-respectable face.
No evidence of tampering at all.. they just hacked into the voter registrations to take a peak.
That's literally what the article you linked says. They probed 21 States databases, managed to access 1, viewed the information (which for the most part is all publicly available) and made no alterations or additions.
The link to the Russian government is generally because these intrusions were related back to Russian hacking groups which have been know to work for the government in the past. In some cases the ties are just that they had a Russian IP address, because we all know the ip address connecting to the target system is ALWAYS the actual originators IP.
Two of the many possible explanations for this are, the Russians had some nefarious plot to take over the country by reading the public voter roles without paying the state fee for access, or some hackers (Russian, Chinese, Swiss, bored 16 year old, whoever) wanted to see what they could tap into on a lark.
Sure they may have been Russians trying to see what systems were vulnerable but no one has shown they ever went past the public data and the few reports of attempts at actual voter systems were later shown to be the feds actually doing security tests without telling the locals.
Steele did in fact release large parts of the memo to the public through a series of interviews with several news organizations. That is part of the reason he was terminated as a FBI source. He lied to investigators about whether or not he had communicated the contents of the dossier to journalists and he said no. This was later shown to be a lie during a British investigation where he testified that he had in fact talked to several journalists, including Yahoo News, which was used as a secondary source to help verify the contents of the dossier itself.
So Steele leaked his dossier to the news as an anonymous source, then Fusion gave it to the FBI who used those same leaked news stories to verify the dossier.
The history of the dossier is now quite well documented and it had nothing to do with the GOP or Republican leaning groups.
Fusion was hired by The Washington Free Beacon to do some background research on Trump. This did not involve Russia but was more just general opposition research during the primaries. In 2016 they terminated the contract and that was the end of their involvement.
After that contract was over Fusion was then hired by the DNC and Hillary campaign (through their lawyers) to research Trump with specific interest in Russia. Fusion then hired Steele as part of the DNC contract.
This all came out during congressional testimony and as far as I know is not in dispute by any of the named parties.
Any right leaning association with Fusion and their Trump research was over months before Steele was ever hired to create the dossier. The dossier and all the twisted details associated with it are 100% a DNC/Hillary 2018 creation.
I don't know but if they told users that they could opt for a $90 battery replacement and keep their phone at it's current performance level how many people do you think would have just opted for the $90 instead of shelling out $1000 for a phone that is just overkill for their needs?
Being born on American soil is only one method of being a natural born citizen; anyone born to an American father is also a natural born Citizen and eligible for President. I believe the law now, and possibly when Ivanka was born, just says born to an 'American Citizen' but I know it was the 'father' thing that gave rise to birtherism back when Hilary and Obama were duking it out in the primaries.
When Obama was born the law specifically stated 'fathers' as granting natural citizenship to their children and since his father wasn't American some people saw that as a disqualification. A lot of laws back then were pretty sexist and excluded women from a lot of things that were later decided to be unconstitutional. If it was ever shown he was born outside of the country I'm sure the fact that his mother was an American citizen would have been enough for any judge to say that that met the legal requirement for being natural born.
The primary system is just a method used for a political party to pick a candidate. It's not a requirement to hold any office. Since the US does not have a single election for President but instead 50+ separate elections (not sure how the territories count) the 2 big parties have the infrastructure to properly register their representative in all States to optimize their chance of winning on a Federal level. Anyone meeting the legal requirements for President can go ahead and register themselves but it takes a lot of manpower to do it on a national level (you have to know and meet each States requirements to get on their ballot).
Being a private organization, the DNC can make whatever rules it wants to pick their candidate for President. The problem lies in the fact they published a clearly defined set of rules and standards for how that process is suppose to run and in many instances it appears to be the case that they violated those rules in order to weigh the scale in Hillary's favor.
It's essentially a contract dispute. They announced a free and fair primary system to their membership (although their excessive use of 'super-delegates' always made that a farce) and instead helped a single candidate behind the scenes.
CHIP is fully funded in the current Republican budget that passed the House and the Dems blocked in the Senate.
As for DACA most Republicans, including Trump, have already stated they are ok with allowing the current DACA recipients to stay but want to end other immigrations problems such as chain migration and the visa lottery; two system that effectively allow tens of thousands of immigrants into the country with no skills requirement. There may be some back and forth about funding the wall but if the Dems really cared about DACA they could agree to end or limit chain migration and the lottery and DACA could be signed tomorrow.
There are over 100 companies who have announced bonuses due directly to the new tax plan. Of those 100 several have also said that they would, in addition to the bonuses, be increasing their employees wages. I understand how you could have missed those announcements since they are just from some small mom and pop shops like Walmart and Wells Fargo.
That's because Obama preferred to use Presidential Memoranda as opposed to Executive orders. Legally they have the exact same weight but memoranda do not have to be filed with the federal registry in all cases whereas Orders do.
So while Obama was under the average for EO's at 277 or so, he issued more than twice that many PM's (over 600) and often for more serious issue than they had been used for previously.
It's like the difference between being shot with a revolver or a semi-auto handgun; for the person being hit it's about the hole in their chest and not the semantics about the weapon used.
He posted it on an internal forum specifically set up to address the issues he wrote about. This was not an unsolicited posting he made.
Effectively his bosses asked for his opinion and then fired him when another employee made those opinions public.
According to California law, which adds a lot of extra criteria to their list of 'protected groups' he actually has a pretty strong case. In many other states he wouldn't have much of a legal leg to stand on.
Making profit and making enough profit to reinvest in large scale R&D are 2 completely different things. One dictates whether it's worth making shipments to a region to sell your wares while the other determines if you actually have wares to sell in the first place.
Only in a world where math doesn't exist would eliminating the mark up in a market which makes up over 45% of the worlds pharmaceutical revenue not impact their R&D budgets. I'm not saying it's fair to the US, it clearly isn't, I'm just saying all you people saying the fix for the US is just to model other countries drug buying policies are living in a dream world.
Drug companies are in the drug business to make money. They don't want to have to wait 30 years to see the ROI for a cancer drug. Sure they can make a profit off each sale of the pill @ $15 a bottle but that doesn't compensate then for the $250 million in research to come up with that drug in the first place. If the ability to make their money back in a reasonable timeline is removed they simply won't spend the $250 million in the first place.
Sask tends to have the best rates and from what I've seen Ontario the worst. On the Telus site using a 6gb unlimited talk and text plan as a base you get:
Sask = $55
Ontario = $100 (but only 5gb)
Quebec = $63
Now I can see Quebec from my office window but I have to pay almost double for access to the same network. The Quebec cable company however does offer cell plans across the border which also happen to use the Telus network but at Quebec rates. So I can go with Telus and pay $100+ or switch to Videotron, use the same network nationwide and pay $61. as an added bonus they often have a double data offer so if I wait till Christmas week to switch it would probably be 10gb data for $61.
Smart would mean being able to put some policies in place that couldn't simply be removed or modified by the simple stroke of a pen or vote of a panel. Lazy is a much more apt term for Obama's general governing philosophy. He didn't want to deal with the actual work of being the President so he simply granted powers to unelected groups or signed EO's (or various other executive statements) creating new laws that completely bypassed the legislative process. Even his own party members continually called him out for failing to meet with them to discuss policy plans or completing throwing them under the bus after they had worked across the aisle to come to some sort of agreement with Repubs on certain issues.
Most of the most vocal opponents of Trump's policies are only really complaining that he is effectively ripping up Obama's declarations. If any of those had actually been enshrined into law he wouldn't have been able to do that. That being said Trump shows a lot of the same laziness in that he doesn't seem to want to sweat the details but only wants to give the big idea speeches. He likes to bitch about how slow the process is to get things done but so far he is mostly living within the limits of the Executive branch.
You won't have to worry about all those testing procedures because there simply won't be much to test. Drug companies spend billions a year on R&D and it's not out of the goodness of their hearts. Take away the cash cow that is the US drug market and the incentives to continue to develop new treatments evaporates. Sure you can rely on public research but that's less than 1/5th the size of the private research being done on new drugs and procedures.
Simply put they can sell to other countries on the cheap because the US markets shoulders the costs. So we Canadians can get our pills for $40/bottle while Americans spend $400 because the companies do their math based on American sales, everything else is just gravy.
The problem is that under a proper constitutional reading Trump/Pai are doing exactly what should be done (though probably by accident); removing Federal regulations.
The local monopolies are truly the real problem but they are just that, a local matter and should be handled at the State and local levels not the Federal. The problem is that the media loves to make everything a federal case no matter how much the problem is not actually a federal one. It's sexier to blame the great and powerful "Trump administration" bogeyman than it is to blame Mayor Whatshisname and Councillor Whodat. Most people who live in these monopoly areas probably don't even know it was their local government who sold their rights to the highest bidder. The fight for ISP availability should be the real issue and depending on the various State constitutions that fight needs to happen at either the State capitals or at your own City Hall.
Exhibit B: Comcast allowing their peering connections to saturate so Netflix would slow down. This was to either a) keep Comcast users from using Netflix or b) force Netflix to directly pay Comcast to restore what should have been basic network operations.
This is almost everyone's goto example for the need for NN laws but even in your own description it has absolutely nothing to do with NN or the regulations that were passed to enact it. Allowing peering connections to become oversaturated has to do with interconnectivity between networks and NOT how the packets are handle within a given network.
It's like throwing a party for 50 people at a house with a only a 2 car driveway and no street parking and then forcing the town to increase speed limits to try and deal with parking issues. The 'solution' has nothing to do with the problem.
In the Netflix case the problem was they opted for a service provider that wanted to go cheap and force their cost on the residential ISPs. Peering agreements tend to be balanced through either data transfers or monetary compensation. If traffic tends to be about equal in both directions then no money needs to change hands but when traffic is 90% going one way the abusing network is expected to compensate the other by some means. With the explosion of Netflix traffic their ISP wanted to continue with outdated peering agreements even though the data transfers were ridiculously unbalanced. NN does nothing to combat this.
#1 ISP customers requested all of the traffic that Netflix sent.
I can also ask my bank for a million dollars but they don't have to give it to me just because I'm a customer.
#2 ISP customers were not receiving the bandwidth that they had paid for.
Just because your connection to a single service isn't going as fast as you want does not impact your overall bandwidth.
#3 Netflix offered to put their servers closer to the ISP customers, lowering the bandwidth on backbones.
That's purely a business decision by the ISPs and they are under no obligation to host Netflix servers. Sure this is the best decision for the customer and it's ultimately what happened in most cases. The only real argument was were they going to follow Netflix's proposal of doing it all for free or the ISPs proposal of Netflix paying a fee for a direct connection.
#4 ISPs artificially throttled Netflix as evidenced by data collection, and proxies bypassing the issue.
Most of that 'evidence' is through the use of VPNs which, by their very definition are altering your connection. If the onramp near my house is always congested so I decide to leave from my girlfriends house across town I can't then claim the congestion at my onramp is artificial. So while it does show that there is some pathing available to get through the congested primary connection how many alternate pathways are they responsible for testing?
#5 Verizon pushed Netflix traffic through congested peer connections as evidenced by an unfortunate Verizon graphic.
They pushed it through a congested peer connection because that was their connection to Netflix's ISPs backbone.
The gist is you had 3 companies all looking out for their own best interest and none really too worried about the customers. Netflix choose a cheap ISP (Level 3), Level 3 tried to get other providers to adapt to an ever growing imbalance in data transfers without paying up and local ISPs (like Verizon) refused to increase the available bandwidth between them and Level 3 because they wanted Level 3 to pay.
Nobody comes out looking good in this situation but for the most part it's been handled by Netflix and the local ISPs forging agreements that skip over the middle man.
Regardless, the whole situation has nothing to do with Net Neutrality as it's not about how data is handled on a particular network. It's about the interrelationships of the various individual networks that make up the internet as a whole.
No ISP is responsible to giving you an amazing connection to every site and service on the internet. Once that data is on their network you can make a case that they shouldn't interfere with it (true net neutrality) but they aren't responsible if the sender is using a TRS-80 on a dial-up modem to serve up their music service and that was effectively the issue with Netflix/Comcast.
The problem wasn't Comcast paying the other network for peering, it's was that the other network WASN'T PAYING for peering. For a long time Comcast et al. were letting them freeload off an outdated and unbalanced peering agreement then when they decided enough was enough they told them to pay. Netflix's ISP refused and told everyone that they needed to let the continue because everyone needed Netflix. At that point it was just a waiting game and while a lot of smaller ISPs folded Comcast decided to wait it out for better terms.
The fact Netflix was offering a direct connect for free is besides the point, that is just a business decision; you might not like it but that's the way business is done, the owner of the network gets to decided who or what connects to it. But since it was offered and in your world Comcast was under some type of moral obligation to accept Netflix' terms I'm sure you've already signed up for Amazon's in home deliveries right? After all Amazon is offering to deliver their parcels right inside your house even when your not home. It's so much better than having to deal with going to some pick up spot or calling and getting a time for delivery so why shouldn't you be obligated to sign up?
The Netflix issue was never about Net Neutrality, it was simply about paying for services rendered. The backbone Netflix connected to had lopsided peering agreements with pretty much everyone they connected to as there is a lot more data headed downstream than up. This caused a bottleneck that could only have been alleviated by downstream backbones allowing the data transfer to get even more lopsided. Sure they could have done this but instead they offered Netflix direct access to their networks for a fee; bypassing Netflix's own ISP. That didn't affect the speed of data once it was on their network, it just bypassed the bottleneck between backbones.
And it doesn't matter if both the end user and Netflix paid for internet access, it matters what peering agreements exist between both the sender and the receiver. I might pay the same gas taxes for road maintenance as the next guy but if I choose to live near a small rural road instead of near a 4 lane highway I can't complain that it takes me an extra 45 minutes to get to work because my speed limit is limited to 30mph and theirs is 65.
Interference in the past didn't usually make it far: there were editors and fact checkers and journalists who had integrity.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
The "Birthday Problem" you refer to excludes the use of the year and only uses the actual day.
So while there are a lot of issues with the overly simplistic criteria that was used for this search it isn't quite as bad as a you make it appear.
There are exactly 2 Podesta's mixed up in all this and they are brothers and co-founders of the Podesta group. Both worked with Manafort on Russias's behalf (often paid through shell charities) it's just that one also happens to have been Clinton's campaign chair.
The Podesta's (either one, take your pick) have a pretty long and very deep relationship with Russia but they seem to be more than willing to take money from anyone so there's always that defense.
The dossier in question, produced by Christopher Steele, was 100% funded by the DNC and Hillary campaign (although there is some question as to whether the FBI contributed any funds to the research - though that is highly doubtful at this point); the campaign is now under review for hiding their funding through their lawyers which is illegal under campaign finance rules without proper disclosure (it could lead to a hefty fine but not much else).
Fusion was also hired to do generate a report about Trump's businesses. It was this report that was funded by a, as of yet unidentified, Republican supporter. That 'project' was already completed prior to this second report and the hiring of Steele.