You don't allow for the possibility that a PHP developer is talented, works with talented people, and are generally happy writing good code in PHP.
Thank you, yes, that's much closer to what I was saying.
When I hire a dev, I'm looking for someone with good judgement. If I come across a candidate that was actively using PHP at their last job, then I am most definitely going to dig in to make sure that that candidate has a good grasp of its flaws and a good explanation for why it continued to be used anyway.
If they can't do a solid job of explaining that, then no, they probably aren't a very good dev.
It's not that I doubt that somewhere, somehow there exists a good dev who is using PHP for a good reason, it's just that it's typically a strong indicator of not-so-good devs. Even before the interview stage, when I'm looking at a resume, if PHP is highlighted or emphasized, I almost always just move to the next one in the stack - it's possible that I'm missing a great candidate but far more likely that I'm not.
Rewriting or porting software introduces bugs and security flaws.
And it can also remove bugs and eliminate security flaws. And in the case of replacing a PHP-based system, odds are very much in favor of a net improvement.
Good developers are good in any language. Hire good developers.
That sorta misses the point and is akin to arguing that knives shouldn't have handles because a good knife wielder can avoid getting cut. PHP is a handleless razor blade with a sharp edge all the way around.
I do try to hire good devs (which is why if I see the huge red flag of PHP on their resume, I'm going to dig into their view on it, and almost certainly not hire them if they don't seem to really grasp why it's bad).
Any developer who wants to rewrite everything when they come in isn't a good developer.
That's overstating it a bit, but I don't disagree (but also not sure why you're mentioning that because I didn't say otherwise).
How can you be surprised? I'm sorry, but PHP has been known to have security issues for *decades*. Security was basically non-existent at first and then haphazardly bolted on afterwards.
There was a time when I'd hire people who used PHP by choice, but that time is long gone. These days, if I'm interviewing someone who used PHP at their last gig, I expect to hear either
1) "...but then we rewrote the system in something else" or 2) "... and that's why I left that place".
Nearly anything else raises doubts about their judgement and competence. They probably bought lawn darts for their nephew's birthday present.
Yeah, those are some good points. Hmm... I guess I get hung up on the idea that it's all from the perspective of what we know now - e.g. as AI improves, there will be few, if any, doctors as we know them, but people will just do other stuff besides being doctors - it's really hard for us at present to imagine what that will be.
My grandfather was a farmer, and if you were to tell him years ago that technology would replace nearly all the farmers, it'd be hard for him to foresee anything but a ton of people sitting around with nothing to do - there's no way he could anticipate my job as a software developer, for example.
But yeah, you might be right - maybe this time it's different because the disruption is so widespread and fast. Of course, if we do get to the point where robots are better in every meaningful way, then the problem for humans could be far beyond anything UBI or guaranteed jobs could solve.
Thanks for sharing your insights - much appreciated!
This might sound evasive, but I think the problem with that line of thinking is that it's still looking at the problem from the perspective of what we know now and how things are now. But maybe it's fair since we're also discussing a problem that doesn't actually exist yet.:)
It seems like you could put your finger anywhere on the timeline of human history and have more or less the same situation - technological advancements will soon eliminate or reduce some burden off the shoulders of humans, freeing them up to do other stuff. Given our general inability to correctly predict what that new stuff would be (I mean, this cartoon was a great joke in its time, but now that's really a thing), I'm just really skeptical that this time it will be any different, especially since the technology that will supposedly make it different doesn't really exist yet.
When 95% of all work has been automated...we cannot provide meaningful jobs to people.
Maybe, I dunno - in a way it's already happened before, so what's to say it can't happen again and again and again? It's 95% of *existing* work that gets automated - the work that has already been invented.
Some very large percent of the people work were doing 200 years ago has been automated, and the world didn't end. New work got invented. People have trouble foreseeing what the yet-to-be-invented work will be like, but that's not surprising.
The main difference now is that the pace of change is faster, so rather than having the work force shift over the course of a generation or two, it needs to shift in a shorter time frame.
There are already more people alive than useful work that they can do.
This is true *only if* you define "useful work" as only the stuff that currently exists.
A ton (most?) of the work that is done today didn't exist 200 years ago. A ton of the work that people will be doing 200 years from now doesn't exist yet.
Automating away current jobs isn't a problem, it's an opportunity. The real problem to solve is how to quickly refocus and train people for the developing jobs - shifting them away from the jobs that are no longer needed to the new ones.
(sorry, Slashdot notification email went to my spam folder and I just now saw it)
you WILL answer this one: Why are you for big corporations controlling the content that millions of people will or will not see? I don't give a shit how you raise your kids, mister, but you WILL explain to me why it is you think corporations should have control over what people do and don't get to access on the Internet. If you won't give a straight answer to that then you can get fucked.
It's simple, really: I use my money to buy some computers and some radio equipment and to get the computers hooked up to the internet backbone. I give my neighbor one of the radios and he pays me $10/month to access the internet via my equipment. What have I done? Well, I've created my own ISP.
It's mine. I can do whatever I want with it. The government has no business telling me what I do with the network packets coming into my computers. If I want to drop all the packets, these are my computers, so why should the government be able to say otherwise? If I want to drop some of them - based on whatever criteria I set - it's none of the government's business. It has nothing to do with being for or against "big corporations" controlling anything.
Again, if you disagree, then justify it - make a case for how the government has a right to tell me what to do with the network packets coming into my computers that I bought and maintain with my own money. If all you can do is evade this question, resort to insults, or rant about how you don't like it, then it looks like your point is invalid.
Also, I've already listed a number of other ways in which corporations (of various sizes) control the content that people see. Why do you not have a problem with them, but you do have a problem with an owner of a private ISP controlling their own equipment?
Agreed! Another way to address flopping would be to have the first 5 minutes of the game be a highlight reel of recent flops by anybody playing in today's match.
Bonus point if you add zany clown music, comical sound effects, and a laugh track.
Your 2->3 experience sounds similar to mine... lots of good changes were introduced with 3.x. I stayed with 2.x for a long time because it just worked really well. And I still have a few projects that are on 2, but at some point when starting a new project I just used Python 3 for it, and by then every library I needed had already been converted.
Honestly, the biggest hurdle was muscle memory on debug prints (statement vs function call), haha.
Yeah, overall I'm not a fan of the GIL, but I think this kinda misses a some of what the GIL provides - it's a bit more than thread safety inside a function library or around an FFI call. The GIL makes it so you can't corrupt the internal state of the VM including high level data structures like dictionaries and objects.
For example you can have any number of threads concurrently reading and writing to dictionary, sets, custom objects, arrays, etc. without any sort of explicit locking and it doesn't crash, there are no memory leaks, and your data structures don't get turned into corrupted garbage. And this happens automatically with pure Python code, regardless of whether it's built in, you wrote it, or it's from some third party.
So the cost of this feature is crazy high - sometimes too high - but it's not without its benefits.
'Censorship' can be done by anyone regardless of whether it's a company or a government it's only illegal if it's a government and it's against it's constitution
Ok, so we agree that ISPs do in fact have the right to censor. Cool.
but censorship in ANY form is a slippery slope and should NOT be encouraged
I take it you don't have any children.:)
You can disagree with that philosophy if you like but you will not change my mind about it so don't even try.
You have your right to your opinion and I'm not threatened by that, but I *am* curious about this philosophy. Say a company came into your town and build video billboards all along the road to your work, and then used them to play videos of graphic beastiality. It's safe to say that a large segment of the population of your town would object to this. But from what you've written, it sounds like you'd be on the side of this company, correct?
It is utterly dependent on public rights of way, it is at least nominally available to each and every member of the general public (unless they don't feel like servicing your area, despite getting massive tax breaks for 27 years to do so), and it is fundamentally a public utility because of the physical and financial realities of how it is deployed.
This is true for some types of networks but isn't universally true (just in the past year in my area - which is far from being a big metro area - added 2 different wireless providers. And this is before the widespread deployment of 5G and is in addition to copper and fiber).
On the part about how screwed things up are we are very much in agreement. But look at it this way: some of these companies got in bed with the government and now we're trying to figure out how to untangle the mess. If for no other reason than this do I have trouble with the idea that even more government entanglement (dictating how they are run, more regulation, even nationalizing them) is the solution.
Public utilities can sometimes be a good solution, but it is so tricky to get right that it's probably a last resort option. A lot of the problem seems rooted in the fact that they become a monopoly, but one that is government sanctioned, so you have this weird situation where you're dealing with the anti-competitive downsides of a monopoly and the bureaucratic downsides of the government - it's a mess that resists fixing.
The government could instead work to roll back anti-competitive legislation that has prevented municipal ISPs to form. Or it could force AT&T (and others) to pay what they owe and use that money on incentives for providing better access to under-served areas. There are many things the government could try before getting further intertwined with running companies - a solution that pretty much always leads to sub-optimal results.
Well, the reason I asked is because you've been asserting very strongly that it's wrong (so wrong, in fact, that a SCOTUS nominee is automatically disqualified). But I think you are conflating something you personally dislike with things the government should force on others, and they really are two different things.
Here are the answers to my questions:
(a) Truth be told, the government doesn't really have legal justification it can use to tell a private company that it can't censor traffic on its own network. Put another way, it's completely legal for a private ISP to provide e.g. content filters. The Constitution provides citizens protection from the *government* censoring; it does not provide any protection between two private parties (indeed, censoring is itself a form of freedom of speech).
I can't stress this point enough, so lemme repeat it: censorship (generally speaking) is not illegal, it's not prohibited, it's not even necessarily wrong. So when you hear of censorship occurring, it's improper to automatically assume it's some evil thing. You have to wrap your mind around that fact.
What the Constitution does is say the *government* can't censor people's speech. And even then, there are many cases where the freedom of speech is still curtailed (bleeped naughty words on TV, internet filters in some libraries, outlawing of child porn, you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater, etc.).
(b) No, the government has no right whatsoever to prevent me from starting that stupid company because I'm censoring. That's not the government's job or role. Just because something is a terrible idea, it doesn't mean that we need the government to step in and police it. This is an example where the market will fix the problem and simple run my business into the ground. But it's 100% legal and allowed for me to start such a business.
To recap: private businesses are completely free to censor stuff - an ISP can block certain sites, a TV station can choose to not show certain programs, a newspaper is not obligated to print every story or every letter to the editor, I can hang up on telemarketers, Yelp can erase reviews if it wants, if you run a message board you can indiscriminately erase posts and threads on a whim, and on and on and on. You may not like it, but that's the way it is (and I assure you that on the whole it is a very good thing).
The point is that your original statement of "ISPs should NEVER have the right to censor traffic" is - no offense - wrong.
I'm willing to continue the discussion, but do you dispute the above at all? Because if we're not on the same page at this point, my answer to your question is not going to make any sense to you. To be clear, I'm not asking if you like how things are, I'm asking if you assert that the current reality is different than what I've explained above.
Oh yeah? What if you have NO CHOICE in what ISP you have? That's more people than you're comfortable to admit, I'm sure; let's say you're someone who has no choice except to have NO Internet or have Internet that has things excluded for it for no good reason other than it suits them. You still okay with that?
I'm assuming that, like me, you're interested in real dialog here, so please do me the courtesy of answering the questions I asked.
Once we've discussed those then I'll be happy to answer this question - and even, gasp!, admit to lots of people having poor choices when it comes to internet providers.:)
So your ISP has the right to decide that you can't read news from some sources, only from ones they approve of?
If they are a private company and are up front about what they are doing to the traffic, then yes, absolutely (and yes to all of the other things you listed). Would I be their customer? Of course not not. But the point is whether or not the *government* can or should try to prohibit that company from operating that way, and the answer is 'no'.
I'm giving that private company money and they are providing a service to me, a private consumer - both sides are willingly choosing to do business together. It's really that simple.
Two questions for you:
(a) On what specific legal grounds could the government say that an ISP can *not* censor traffic? (hint: you can't use the 1st Amendment, since it's a restriction on the government, not on a private business)
(b) Let's say I decide to start an email provider company called NoSandwhichEmail. where the #1 feature I advertise is that out of all the emails that land in your inbox, we will delete any of them that contain the word "sandwich". It's a terrible business idea, and is sure to fail, but does the government have the right to *prohibit* me from starting that company and trying to get customers? Why?
Sure. But again, though, issues like Dodd-Frank legislation have considerable nuance (it had over 2000 pages, haha), so it's a bit of a stretch to judge someone good or bad on their high level reaction to it (e.g. person X is in favor of it, therefore person X is good, person Y is against it, so Y is bad, and so on).
I mean, speaking of that law specifically, it had some pretty onerous stuff but it seemed like a good idea since it would fix the "too big to fail" institutions, which at best it has only partially done (and that's being fairly generous). And in the process it's been rough on lots of smaller banks. So I'm not sure that the congressfolk (regardless of party) that have worked to fix it or remove the bad parts are necessarily in the wrong.
Great question, but I think that is actually a slightly different point (see below). The post I replied to suggested that ISP's should never be allowed to censor (which is false) and then from there extrapolated that the SCOTUS nominee is completely unsuitable (which is silly).
As far as protections afforded to carriers, ISPs don't have to be the police and do much, if anything, proactively (they have to respond to DMCA requests, help the cops bust child porn distributors, etc. - but it's almost always reactive), and that protection isn't dependent upon them inspecting the traffic. Further, tons of ISPs specifically market the fact that they do censor content - so not only is it something they are allowed to do (contrary to what that other poster said), it's something they sell as a feature (typically in the form of 'family friendly' or parental browsing controls).
I guess it depends on what you mean by 'support' him. I didn't vote for him, I don't own any Trump hats or anything, I wish somebody would close his Twitter account. But I'm also not in the camp of instantly opposing everything he does solely because he did it. For better or for worse, he's our (I'm an American) president, so I "support" him just like I supported all prior presidents. I thought the Republicans acted like idiot children towards Obama and the Democrats so far have shown they are no better with Trump.
Trump's polling numbers are consistent with other presidents at this point in time in their tenure. You've mentioned some things he's done you don't like, but to any of those issues there is almost always considerable nuance (anyone who thinks net neutrality, TPP, etc. are easy-to-decide black and white issues have almost certainly not studied them very closely) so for me that's not exactly a damning list. Further, there's a number of decent things he's done (both his SCOTUS nominees are pretty good, for example).
As a person, I think Trump is a bit of a buffoon (or the best ever troll in the history of the world, but I struggle to give him that much credit) but if I try to look at his presidency so far objectively, then he's not actually that much of an outlier (which is both positive and kinda depressing).
As a moderate who doesn't consistently vote for either party, I will say this though: the bizarre hysteria on the far-left has actually made me dislike Trump a little less than I did originally. I hate extremes on either side and I don't for a minute believe a majority of Democrats are like the "liberals" that get on the news these days, but man those people are completely unhinged lately.
So it's not so much that Trump has gotten any better, it's just that the alternative continues to look pretty bad, so it casts him in a better light. I think that's a big part of how he got elected in the first place.
If I wanted to start an ISP that blocked any website that starts with the letter S, why should anyone have the right to tell me I can't do that? (this is not a rhetorical question - I'd really like to hear your answer)
I love reports like this. Some people are going to say that government regulation is the way to go and that people should cut back on consumption, etc. Maybe that's true to some extent, I dunno.
But really, I hope most people see this as a huge opportunity and that it lures creative entrepreneurs. That's how these problems are most effectively solved, and somebody is going to get absurdly rich off it, and I'm excited to see what they come up with. Don't bury it, don't send it to the sun, but find some way to make it useful again.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't allow for the possibility that a PHP developer is talented, works with talented people, and are generally happy writing good code in PHP.
Thank you, yes, that's much closer to what I was saying.
When I hire a dev, I'm looking for someone with good judgement. If I come across a candidate that was actively using PHP at their last job, then I am most definitely going to dig in to make sure that that candidate has a good grasp of its flaws and a good explanation for why it continued to be used anyway.
If they can't do a solid job of explaining that, then no, they probably aren't a very good dev.
It's not that I doubt that somewhere, somehow there exists a good dev who is using PHP for a good reason, it's just that it's typically a strong indicator of not-so-good devs. Even before the interview stage, when I'm looking at a resume, if PHP is highlighted or emphasized, I almost always just move to the next one in the stack - it's possible that I'm missing a great candidate but far more likely that I'm not.
Rewriting or porting software introduces bugs and security flaws.
And it can also remove bugs and eliminate security flaws. And in the case of replacing a PHP-based system, odds are very much in favor of a net improvement.
Good developers are good in any language. Hire good developers.
That sorta misses the point and is akin to arguing that knives shouldn't have handles because a good knife wielder can avoid getting cut. PHP is a handleless razor blade with a sharp edge all the way around.
I do try to hire good devs (which is why if I see the huge red flag of PHP on their resume, I'm going to dig into their view on it, and almost certainly not hire them if they don't seem to really grasp why it's bad).
Any developer who wants to rewrite everything when they come in isn't a good developer.
That's overstating it a bit, but I don't disagree (but also not sure why you're mentioning that because I didn't say otherwise).
How can you be surprised? I'm sorry, but PHP has been known to have security issues for *decades*. Security was basically non-existent at first and then haphazardly bolted on afterwards.
There was a time when I'd hire people who used PHP by choice, but that time is long gone. These days, if I'm interviewing someone who used PHP at their last gig, I expect to hear either
1) "...but then we rewrote the system in something else"
or
2) "... and that's why I left that place".
Nearly anything else raises doubts about their judgement and competence. They probably bought lawn darts for their nephew's birthday present.
The bill contains this little nugget in the footnotes:
" “Female” means an individual who self-identifies her gender as a woman, without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth."
I was already hoping the bill would pass because of the silliness of it, but with the above it's gonna be comedy gold.
Yeah, those are some good points. Hmm... I guess I get hung up on the idea that it's all from the perspective of what we know now - e.g. as AI improves, there will be few, if any, doctors as we know them, but people will just do other stuff besides being doctors - it's really hard for us at present to imagine what that will be.
My grandfather was a farmer, and if you were to tell him years ago that technology would replace nearly all the farmers, it'd be hard for him to foresee anything but a ton of people sitting around with nothing to do - there's no way he could anticipate my job as a software developer, for example.
But yeah, you might be right - maybe this time it's different because the disruption is so widespread and fast. Of course, if we do get to the point where robots are better in every meaningful way, then the problem for humans could be far beyond anything UBI or guaranteed jobs could solve.
Thanks for sharing your insights - much appreciated!
This might sound evasive, but I think the problem with that line of thinking is that it's still looking at the problem from the perspective of what we know now and how things are now. But maybe it's fair since we're also discussing a problem that doesn't actually exist yet. :)
It seems like you could put your finger anywhere on the timeline of human history and have more or less the same situation - technological advancements will soon eliminate or reduce some burden off the shoulders of humans, freeing them up to do other stuff. Given our general inability to correctly predict what that new stuff would be (I mean, this cartoon was a great joke in its time, but now that's really a thing), I'm just really skeptical that this time it will be any different, especially since the technology that will supposedly make it different doesn't really exist yet.
When 95% of all work has been automated...we cannot provide meaningful jobs to people.
Maybe, I dunno - in a way it's already happened before, so what's to say it can't happen again and again and again? It's 95% of *existing* work that gets automated - the work that has already been invented.
Some very large percent of the people work were doing 200 years ago has been automated, and the world didn't end. New work got invented. People have trouble foreseeing what the yet-to-be-invented work will be like, but that's not surprising.
The main difference now is that the pace of change is faster, so rather than having the work force shift over the course of a generation or two, it needs to shift in a shorter time frame.
There are already more people alive than useful work that they can do.
This is true *only if* you define "useful work" as only the stuff that currently exists.
A ton (most?) of the work that is done today didn't exist 200 years ago. A ton of the work that people will be doing 200 years from now doesn't exist yet.
Automating away current jobs isn't a problem, it's an opportunity. The real problem to solve is how to quickly refocus and train people for the developing jobs - shifting them away from the jobs that are no longer needed to the new ones.
Yup. See https://krebsonsecurity.com/20...
(sorry, Slashdot notification email went to my spam folder and I just now saw it)
you WILL answer this one: Why are you for big corporations controlling the content that millions of people will or will not see? I don't give a shit how you raise your kids, mister, but you WILL explain to me why it is you think corporations should have control over what people do and don't get to access on the Internet. If you won't give a straight answer to that then you can get fucked.
It's simple, really: I use my money to buy some computers and some radio equipment and to get the computers hooked up to the internet backbone. I give my neighbor one of the radios and he pays me $10/month to access the internet via my equipment. What have I done? Well, I've created my own ISP.
It's mine. I can do whatever I want with it. The government has no business telling me what I do with the network packets coming into my computers. If I want to drop all the packets, these are my computers, so why should the government be able to say otherwise? If I want to drop some of them - based on whatever criteria I set - it's none of the government's business. It has nothing to do with being for or against "big corporations" controlling anything.
Again, if you disagree, then justify it - make a case for how the government has a right to tell me what to do with the network packets coming into my computers that I bought and maintain with my own money. If all you can do is evade this question, resort to insults, or rant about how you don't like it, then it looks like your point is invalid.
Also, I've already listed a number of other ways in which corporations (of various sizes) control the content that people see. Why do you not have a problem with them, but you do have a problem with an owner of a private ISP controlling their own equipment?
Agreed! Another way to address flopping would be to have the first 5 minutes of the game be a highlight reel of recent flops by anybody playing in today's match.
Bonus point if you add zany clown music, comical sound effects, and a laugh track.
Your 2->3 experience sounds similar to mine... lots of good changes were introduced with 3.x. I stayed with 2.x for a long time because it just worked really well. And I still have a few projects that are on 2, but at some point when starting a new project I just used Python 3 for it, and by then every library I needed had already been converted.
Honestly, the biggest hurdle was muscle memory on debug prints (statement vs function call), haha.
Yeah, overall I'm not a fan of the GIL, but I think this kinda misses a some of what the GIL provides - it's a bit more than thread safety inside a function library or around an FFI call. The GIL makes it so you can't corrupt the internal state of the VM including high level data structures like dictionaries and objects.
For example you can have any number of threads concurrently reading and writing to dictionary, sets, custom objects, arrays, etc. without any sort of explicit locking and it doesn't crash, there are no memory leaks, and your data structures don't get turned into corrupted garbage. And this happens automatically with pure Python code, regardless of whether it's built in, you wrote it, or it's from some third party.
So the cost of this feature is crazy high - sometimes too high - but it's not without its benefits.
'Censorship' can be done by anyone regardless of whether it's a company or a government it's only illegal if it's a government and it's against it's constitution
Ok, so we agree that ISPs do in fact have the right to censor. Cool.
but censorship in ANY form is a slippery slope and should NOT be encouraged
I take it you don't have any children. :)
You can disagree with that philosophy if you like but you will not change my mind about it so don't even try.
You have your right to your opinion and I'm not threatened by that, but I *am* curious about this philosophy. Say a company came into your town and build video billboards all along the road to your work, and then used them to play videos of graphic beastiality. It's safe to say that a large segment of the population of your town would object to this. But from what you've written, it sounds like you'd be on the side of this company, correct?
It is utterly dependent on public rights of way, it is at least nominally available to each and every member of the general public (unless they don't feel like servicing your area, despite getting massive tax breaks for 27 years to do so), and it is fundamentally a public utility because of the physical and financial realities of how it is deployed.
This is true for some types of networks but isn't universally true (just in the past year in my area - which is far from being a big metro area - added 2 different wireless providers. And this is before the widespread deployment of 5G and is in addition to copper and fiber).
Until AT&T pays the $400 billion in back taxes they owe for failing ...[snip] ...
On the part about how screwed things up are we are very much in agreement. But look at it this way: some of these companies got in bed with the government and now we're trying to figure out how to untangle the mess. If for no other reason than this do I have trouble with the idea that even more government entanglement (dictating how they are run, more regulation, even nationalizing them) is the solution.
Public utilities can sometimes be a good solution, but it is so tricky to get right that it's probably a last resort option. A lot of the problem seems rooted in the fact that they become a monopoly, but one that is government sanctioned, so you have this weird situation where you're dealing with the anti-competitive downsides of a monopoly and the bureaucratic downsides of the government - it's a mess that resists fixing.
The government could instead work to roll back anti-competitive legislation that has prevented municipal ISPs to form. Or it could force AT&T (and others) to pay what they owe and use that money on incentives for providing better access to under-served areas. There are many things the government could try before getting further intertwined with running companies - a solution that pretty much always leads to sub-optimal results.
I think we're on the same page as to what the problem is and just disagree on the solution.
Well, the reason I asked is because you've been asserting very strongly that it's wrong (so wrong, in fact, that a SCOTUS nominee is automatically disqualified). But I think you are conflating something you personally dislike with things the government should force on others, and they really are two different things.
Here are the answers to my questions:
(a) Truth be told, the government doesn't really have legal justification it can use to tell a private company that it can't censor traffic on its own network. Put another way, it's completely legal for a private ISP to provide e.g. content filters. The Constitution provides citizens protection from the *government* censoring; it does not provide any protection between two private parties (indeed, censoring is itself a form of freedom of speech).
I can't stress this point enough, so lemme repeat it: censorship (generally speaking) is not illegal, it's not prohibited, it's not even necessarily wrong. So when you hear of censorship occurring, it's improper to automatically assume it's some evil thing. You have to wrap your mind around that fact.
What the Constitution does is say the *government* can't censor people's speech. And even then, there are many cases where the freedom of speech is still curtailed (bleeped naughty words on TV, internet filters in some libraries, outlawing of child porn, you can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater, etc.).
(b) No, the government has no right whatsoever to prevent me from starting that stupid company because I'm censoring. That's not the government's job or role. Just because something is a terrible idea, it doesn't mean that we need the government to step in and police it. This is an example where the market will fix the problem and simple run my business into the ground. But it's 100% legal and allowed for me to start such a business.
To recap: private businesses are completely free to censor stuff - an ISP can block certain sites, a TV station can choose to not show certain programs, a newspaper is not obligated to print every story or every letter to the editor, I can hang up on telemarketers, Yelp can erase reviews if it wants, if you run a message board you can indiscriminately erase posts and threads on a whim, and on and on and on. You may not like it, but that's the way it is (and I assure you that on the whole it is a very good thing).
The point is that your original statement of "ISPs should NEVER have the right to censor traffic" is - no offense - wrong.
I'm willing to continue the discussion, but do you dispute the above at all? Because if we're not on the same page at this point, my answer to your question is not going to make any sense to you. To be clear, I'm not asking if you like how things are, I'm asking if you assert that the current reality is different than what I've explained above.
Oh yeah? What if you have NO CHOICE in what ISP you have? That's more people than you're comfortable to admit, I'm sure; let's say you're someone who has no choice except to have NO Internet or have Internet that has things excluded for it for no good reason other than it suits them. You still okay with that?
I'm assuming that, like me, you're interested in real dialog here, so please do me the courtesy of answering the questions I asked.
Once we've discussed those then I'll be happy to answer this question - and even, gasp!, admit to lots of people having poor choices when it comes to internet providers. :)
So your ISP has the right to decide that you can't read news from some sources, only from ones they approve of?
If they are a private company and are up front about what they are doing to the traffic, then yes, absolutely (and yes to all of the other things you listed). Would I be their customer? Of course not not. But the point is whether or not the *government* can or should try to prohibit that company from operating that way, and the answer is 'no'.
I'm giving that private company money and they are providing a service to me, a private consumer - both sides are willingly choosing to do business together. It's really that simple.
Two questions for you:
(a) On what specific legal grounds could the government say that an ISP can *not* censor traffic? (hint: you can't use the 1st Amendment, since it's a restriction on the government, not on a private business)
(b) Let's say I decide to start an email provider company called NoSandwhichEmail. where the #1 feature I advertise is that out of all the emails that land in your inbox, we will delete any of them that contain the word "sandwich". It's a terrible business idea, and is sure to fail, but does the government have the right to *prohibit* me from starting that company and trying to get customers? Why?
Sure. But again, though, issues like Dodd-Frank legislation have considerable nuance (it had over 2000 pages, haha), so it's a bit of a stretch to judge someone good or bad on their high level reaction to it (e.g. person X is in favor of it, therefore person X is good, person Y is against it, so Y is bad, and so on).
I mean, speaking of that law specifically, it had some pretty onerous stuff but it seemed like a good idea since it would fix the "too big to fail" institutions, which at best it has only partially done (and that's being fairly generous). And in the process it's been rough on lots of smaller banks. So I'm not sure that the congressfolk (regardless of party) that have worked to fix it or remove the bad parts are necessarily in the wrong.
Great question, but I think that is actually a slightly different point (see below). The post I replied to suggested that ISP's should never be allowed to censor (which is false) and then from there extrapolated that the SCOTUS nominee is completely unsuitable (which is silly).
As far as protections afforded to carriers, ISPs don't have to be the police and do much, if anything, proactively (they have to respond to DMCA requests, help the cops bust child porn distributors, etc. - but it's almost always reactive), and that protection isn't dependent upon them inspecting the traffic. Further, tons of ISPs specifically market the fact that they do censor content - so not only is it something they are allowed to do (contrary to what that other poster said), it's something they sell as a feature (typically in the form of 'family friendly' or parental browsing controls).
I guess it depends on what you mean by 'support' him. I didn't vote for him, I don't own any Trump hats or anything, I wish somebody would close his Twitter account. But I'm also not in the camp of instantly opposing everything he does solely because he did it. For better or for worse, he's our (I'm an American) president, so I "support" him just like I supported all prior presidents. I thought the Republicans acted like idiot children towards Obama and the Democrats so far have shown they are no better with Trump.
Trump's polling numbers are consistent with other presidents at this point in time in their tenure. You've mentioned some things he's done you don't like, but to any of those issues there is almost always considerable nuance (anyone who thinks net neutrality, TPP, etc. are easy-to-decide black and white issues have almost certainly not studied them very closely) so for me that's not exactly a damning list. Further, there's a number of decent things he's done (both his SCOTUS nominees are pretty good, for example).
As a person, I think Trump is a bit of a buffoon (or the best ever troll in the history of the world, but I struggle to give him that much credit) but if I try to look at his presidency so far objectively, then he's not actually that much of an outlier (which is both positive and kinda depressing).
As a moderate who doesn't consistently vote for either party, I will say this though: the bizarre hysteria on the far-left has actually made me dislike Trump a little less than I did originally. I hate extremes on either side and I don't for a minute believe a majority of Democrats are like the "liberals" that get on the news these days, but man those people are completely unhinged lately.
So it's not so much that Trump has gotten any better, it's just that the alternative continues to look pretty bad, so it casts him in a better light. I think that's a big part of how he got elected in the first place.
Wait, what??
If I wanted to start an ISP that blocked any website that starts with the letter S, why should anyone have the right to tell me I can't do that? (this is not a rhetorical question - I'd really like to hear your answer)
I love reports like this. Some people are going to say that government regulation is the way to go and that people should cut back on consumption, etc. Maybe that's true to some extent, I dunno.
But really, I hope most people see this as a huge opportunity and that it lures creative entrepreneurs. That's how these problems are most effectively solved, and somebody is going to get absurdly rich off it, and I'm excited to see what they come up with. Don't bury it, don't send it to the sun, but find some way to make it useful again.
If you're asking if their competition is a file format, the answer is 'no'.