Of course those starfish are themselves promoted by warmer water, so aside from the fact that large-scale problems often have multiple causes, in that particular case the cause you're trying to deny actually applies anyway (albeit less directly and almost certainly with less overall influence.)
I don't pretend it is "settled science"
Things that are 100% settled: - CO2 is a greenhouse gas. This is easily tested by building a greenhouse and comparing the temperatures over time under various atmospheric conditions. - We're pumping a boatload of it into the atmosphere. - The world average temperatures are going up at an alarming rate. - Some of the more obvious effects, such as the shrinking of the polar ice cap and the opening of the northwest passage.
Things that are less settled: - Whether the cause is human. I mean as noted above, CO2 is absolutely 100% known to be a greenhouse gas, and there's been no natural events in the past 100-200 years that would account for the warming. So its about 99% settled but not 100%. - Exactly how hot is "too hot." Models seem to estimates around 2 degrees C over current temperatures, but some have suggested maybe 6 degrees or more before we're completely screwed. Of course models are always restricted by both the limits of our knowledge and the limits of our computing power, so there's always the possibility (however small) that all of the models are completely wrong. - Exactly how long it will be before we're past the point of no return. Models show anywhere from already too late up to to the end of the century. Again with the disclaimer about the limits of models though. - Exactly how big an impact it will have on the planet. Most models show somewhere between fairly large ecological disaster up to converting our planet into Venus II. Very, very few models show low or no ecological damage. Model disclaimer again. - And of course, the less direct effects such as the coral reef problems that are only "probably" severely affected by rising temperatures rather than "definitely" affected.
To me there is no such thing as "settled science"
No, but there is science that's so incredibly close to settled that it makes no difference. My first example above regarding CO2 being a greenhouse gas. Yes its possible that every single experiment with greenhouses we've ever done has somehow been done wrong. And its slightly more plausible that the large-scale "greenhouse" of our atmosphere somehow compensates in a way that we can't even detect never mind compensate for.. but both of those possibilities are extremely low at this point, and even if one or both are wrong it will almost certainly be a small deviation to correct -- no more than a couple percent I'd hazard. Yes that technically means its not fully settled, but by the time you've done many independent experiments of many different types by many different people in many different countries and they all have the same conclusion well.. its probably not worth talking about the tiny potential deviation unless you're an actual climate scientist trying to tweak their models to be just a little more accurate.
Gravity in physics seems somewhat settled
No it doesn't. Not even close. Its well-known (at least among physics geeks) that our modern understanding of gravity and our modern understanding of quantum mechanics are fundamentally incompatible, meaning at least one (and most likely both) are incomplete at some (very, very, very tiny) level. Unfortunately that tiny level is something like 17 orders of magnitude smaller than what the LHC can probe, so we're not likely to get a conclusive theory any time soon. Our current collider designs will never ever be able to reach that power level (saw a video where Leonard Susskind did a napkin calculation and come up with a ring diameter approximately the size of earth's orbit around the sun, if we were going to stick with the circular bea
I'm pretty sure most real people having sex don't do things like get into awkward positions to ensure that their genitals are visible from a specific direction. Few of us get laid every time we call for a pizza either. Nor to we get a second take if we do or say something stupid during the act that ruins the scene.
Porn is to sex what Kill Bill is to sword fighting. It looks really awesome but its (usually) highly choreographed and not especially practical in the real world.
Just make all the stuff available as a fixed purchase. It can be high enough above the price of a loot box to justify its rarity.
Yes, you could still gamble with a loot box if you wanted.. but that would no longer be your only option (and in particular if you knew exactly what you wanted, you would also know exactly how much it would cost you.) I would imagine that should satisfy most people (well, not counting those that thing in-game purchases should be banned completely of course.. but it should satisfy anyone who's concerned primarily about the gambling aspect.)
And anything that they want to be so rare that the price would look bad ($1000 for Luke Skywalker!) they could just turn into a low-chance random drop somewhere, outside of the loot box system. That is, adopt the cookie-cutter MMO model for those items. I'm not really sure how grinding for a rare drop is particularly better than grinding for loot boxes that have a chance to contain the same rare drop, but the main point is to dissociate it from any possibility of monetary loss ("gambling" with your time is apparently perfectly fine.)
Also, should a government anywhere make laws to restrict loot box systems.. what does that imply for things like Pokemon that has followed basically the same model with physical cards for 20+ years now. Or even hockey/sports cards that have been doing so for 100+?
Yeah pretty sure that would be classified as terrorism these days and you're not spending a couple nights in county for civil disobedience and property destruction -- you're disappeared to spend the rest of your days in Gitmo.
No, we're mostly only blaming Trump and related politics on the Russians. Maybe if Trump was more successful at well.. anything.. in office, we'd be more concerned on a wider scale but for now its closer to an orange joke than a red scare.
Show me the direct correlation and you might have a point. In particular, try to convince me that all those guns would have had any effect in stopping the totalitarian regime from taking over. It doesn't matter how many AKs you have in your basement when the government shows up with a bloody tank and flattens your house.
There are plenty of countries with gun laws that are still perfectly democratic. Arguably more-so than the US with your two-party system and the "left-wing" party is still fairly far right of what any other country would call center. And then throw on the electoral college who can, at least in theory, completely ignore the will of the people and elect whoever the hell they feel like into the White House. And to top even that, your presidents can effectively rule unilaterally via executive order and the last few have been doing so more and more. Sure SCOTUS can veto those executive orders but still, its potentially leading down a dangerous path since you're now relying on just two branches of government to balance each other out and the third being practically irrelevant. That's 1/3 of your checks and balances gone.
Yes, the law (well regulation) that Pai is trying to repeal.
And don't worry, they'll do it cleanly enough to avoid anti-trust legislation as well ("we prioritize anyone who pays us the $100,000 per month +data usage high speed fee! So its not anti-competitive! Yay capitalism!")
70% of Americans
So 3 in 10 are shit out of luck. That's not a brilliant start.
two or more choices
Yeah. One cable-based provider and one phone-based provider are the only two choices for a large number of people. And both are chomping at the bit to start screwing over the country as soon as possible. Hence this phrase from my prior post: "and both are doing the same damned things".
Again, why wouldn't they? They don't even need to be colluding.. its in both companies' interests to jack up rates and cut service as much as the regulations allow. As long as they both play the same game, there's no chance of real competition without a third party coming in to upset the game.. and of course the incumbents do everything in their power to prevent that from happening.
And entrenching a third option isn't sufficient. I mean its better, but after a bit of short-term shakeup, you'll just end up with three providers all stretching regulations as far as possible in order to minimize costs and increase profits. To have a really competitive environment, the system has to allow for the possibility of someone getting pissed off and thinking they could do a better job, and being able to actually attempt doing so. Without that possibility, you tend to end up with an old boys club no matter how many old boys are in it at any particular time.
No they can't walk into a senators office with a suitcase of cash anymore. But they can (and absolutely do) contribute massive amounts to PACs and SuperPACs which essentially amounts to the same thing in the end, but is perfectly legal.
"Oh this $1000 dinner isn't a bribe.. its a campaign contribution! I'm just exercising my company's right to free speech! Oh and by the way you have a cushy 6-figure job as VP of whatever the fuck you want waiting for you after you leave office if you play ball!"
Sure. If you want to limit the bandwidth yourself, I'm sure your ISP will happily save themselves the effort.
I used the word "punishment" for a reason. It would not be done to improve the quality of service on their end. And yes there would always be a sweet spot to get the maximum transfer rate for the minimum amount of punishment.. but the vast majority of people are not going to be setting up their own FreeBSD boxes never mind setting up useful QoS rules and really never mind being able to figure out where the sweet spot is -- especially if the ISP is regularly tweaking their system and thus moving the sweet spot.
Then you convince your small business ownership to change email providers. If you're successful then all is well. If you're unsuccessful.. that's not Google's fault.
If you don't like Comcast and your small business is in an area where there are no competing ISPs, then all the convincing in the world won't make your small business change because they literally cannot do so. Its not a choice on their part, its a physical impossibility short of buying a new office in another jurisdiction and moving their whole operation.
Cloudflare has a distinct advantage here for doing these kind of guerrilla tactics -- they don't operate on the consumer's end, they operate as a middleman between the consumer and the content provider. And they do that for a surprisingly large portion of the internet (if you go back and find the articles about when they got hacked a while ago and find the list of sites that were potentially compromised by extension.. that is, at least a partial customer list.. its shocking how much this one company controls if they want to start messing with their own pipes and CDN systems..)
So while Cloudflare might not be able to slow down the entire internet for Pai's household or the FCC in general, they could at least in theory slow it down for a decent chunk of all websites, and there's a good chance at least a few of them would be things Pai or other FCC members would want to access periodically.
Of course because of their size and what they do, there is a chance that they themselves could possibly fall under existing regulations as a service provider. Meaning that making Pai an example of his own rules that won't be implemented for a month.. may get them in hot water under the old rules that are going away. Which would be ironic in a way but not so much an amusing way unfortunately as legal action would almost certainly be pursued to the fullest just out of spite and vengeance if there's any action available.
Because some of "their own customers" happen to be websites that Canadians use. If those websites get throttled, it affects everyone that uses them, globally.
Most of the major websites of course have Canadian CDNs, if not full servers being hosted in Canada and certainly those sites won't suffer. But of course those sites being the "major" ones aren't going to be the ones that face the worst impact of this decision.
And that's before we start talking about the possibility of say, geolocked upselling. Want your website visible in the US? $100/mo + $10/tb data. Want it visible in the US at high speed? $1500/mo + $50/tb data. Want it visible in Canada and Mexico? Add another $400/mo and an additional $20/tb "long distance" charges for any bits sent across the border. Want it available in Europe, Asia or South America? Add $5000/mo per region and an additional $100/tb "long distance" for any bits sent overseas.
And I'm sure there's a dozen schemes they'll come up with to screw their customers over in the sake of short-term profit, but for us end users what it will mean is that a) Everything in the US is more expensive, b) Most things hosted in the US will be unavailable outside of the US and similarly, c) Many things outside the US will be too expensive for average Americans.
Hopefully they wouldn't go that far, and even if they do its unlikely to happen right away as the backlash would be horrendous. That's the kind of scheme they phase in over a decade or two so that by the time its done, nobody remembers how things came to be that way.
He does. Frequently. That's his damned job. The fact that American news sources don't report on Canadian goings on doesn't imply nothing goes on in Canada.
Also, this is very related to Canada as we rely fairly heavily on US-based internet services. And its important for Canadians to know that we don't (currently) have any intention of following along in the US' foot steps on this issue, thus avoiding at least some level of uncertainty that may have cropped up should speculators start wondering about the intentions of the CRTC in light of the FCC fuckup.
And if you want to stretch it just a little bit, the comment could also be taken as a bit of a wink and a nudge to tech companies in the US that will be negatively impacted by the removal of net neutrality and suggesting that there's a perfectly safe home just a little further north should they be interested, which would benefit the Canadian economy.
Since at least the early 90s and probably much earlier. "RTFM" and similar asshat comments have been around as long as there's been public forums to ask questions.
The answer to this (actually the answer to all of it, really.. assuming net neutrality isn't enforced) is to slow down a user's traffic based on how much traffic they've already transferred. Adjust it every 30 seconds based on say a 2 minute window or something so that its somewhat responsive as people change their tasks throughout the day.
Basically an automated punishment system for people using "too much," driving them to turn off their bittorrents or other high-bandwidth applications at least during the times they want to be using their own connection (and even when those applications are left running, you're still slowing them down to whatever rate you consider sufficiently punishing without cutting them off completely.)
So for example if you're just browsing the internet, you get your full 200mbps or whatever, but if you're continually using 150+mpbs of that for a long enough period of time, you get throttled down to 50 and then to 20 and then to 10 or whatever. And then once you're no longer taking up a significant portion of that 10mpbs for 2 minutes, you would get pushed back to 20 then 50 then your full 200mbps.
I mean I'm sure that would lead to a bit of an arms race as someone develops a bittorrent client that stops transmitting for 10 seconds every 2 minutes or whatever metric they need (so you get the full 200mbps for 90% of the time rather than 10mbps for 100% of the time or the like) but I suspect it would be a race that the ISPs would win by simply adding more granularity to the metrics.
Small ISPs will finally able to get off the ground as they will not have to spend big on proving they are following gov regulation.
That's hardly a huge cost anyway, so its kind of a non-issue. In fact all the packet inspecting and traffic shaping equipment needed to intentionally break net neutrality tends to be more expensive than the "dumber" equivalents.
The biggest cost is getting the right-of-ways and laying the fiber. The legal side can take years (and being injuncted every step of the way by the incumbents, making it take even longer) and then the cost of digging up the ground, laying the cables and reconstructing the street/pavement/whatever you dug up for hundreds or thousands of miles.. that adds up fast.
Cities can now build a network.
I'm not sure how this follows. It may be one less argument the incumbents can use to block publicly-built networks, but they've got plenty more up their sleeves. In fact I can't think of any of these cases where the deciding factor was NN implementation (though I'm sure I don't know of every such case.) Most of the ones I've seen is either based on the city having a pre-existing agreement from decades ago that explicitly gives the incumbent a monopoly, or an argument based on some vague Ayn Rand-style BS about the government encroaching on the rights of private corporations.
Now anyone can build any type of network within a framework of local laws.
If they have a few billion dollars to blow with maybe a return on investment over several decades at best while fighting continual legal battles against the established players.
Comcast is not going to throttle small web sites unless they enter into private deals
By what reasoning? All logic suggests that they'd benefit most from a) charging websites to be accessible and b) blocking (or slowing traffic enough that it may as well be) websites that compete against either their own media subsidiaries or their paid "partners."
Twitter, a vocal proponent of Net Neutrality, however, has no problem actively discriminating about who can use their platform.
If Twitter blocks you from their platform, you can no longer use Twitter. If Comcast blocks you from their network, you can no longer use any platform. There's a bit of a scale difference in play there.
Its called "rational thinking." Companies exist to make money. ISPs will make more money if they prioritize their own media subsidiaries over external traffic.
I'm sure Pai doesn't want ISPs to "block" content per se.. he's just completely uncaring if they do so. I mean if you don't like your ISP's network management practices you can always switch to a competitor.. right? Right? Oh except for the fact that there is no competitor in many jurisdictions and for those that do have "competition," its almost always just two options (cable or telephone company) and both are doing the same damned things for the same damned reason -- it makes them more money.
Name a use case for a gun that doesn't involve: a) Harming a person, b) Harming an animal, or c) Destroying a target.
A gun's only purpose is to do damage. It has zero other use cases once you abstract away the thing you're doing damage to. There are few other devices or tools in existence that can make that claim.
Of those three use cases, (b) is the only one with any validity as a productive use -- and even then, only if you're hunting for actual food rather than just because you like watching things die.
For suicides specifically.. as with other gun violence, the point isn't that these things would be stopped. The point is that they'd be less deadly when they occurred. That is, suicide attempts may remain constant (or even go up due to more possibility for second and third attempts..) but suicide rates would be lower.
Japan and other East Asian countries tend to be a bad comparison because they have other social reasons for their high suicide rates. Better to compare the US to the likes of Canada, Australia or Western Europe. Of course the gun nuts don't want to do that because comparing culturally similar countries tends to show the opposite of what they want to "prove."
Slashdot Mirror
Of course those starfish are themselves promoted by warmer water, so aside from the fact that large-scale problems often have multiple causes, in that particular case the cause you're trying to deny actually applies anyway (albeit less directly and almost certainly with less overall influence.)
I don't pretend it is "settled science"
Things that are 100% settled:
- CO2 is a greenhouse gas. This is easily tested by building a greenhouse and comparing the temperatures over time under various atmospheric conditions.
- We're pumping a boatload of it into the atmosphere.
- The world average temperatures are going up at an alarming rate.
- Some of the more obvious effects, such as the shrinking of the polar ice cap and the opening of the northwest passage.
Things that are less settled:
- Whether the cause is human. I mean as noted above, CO2 is absolutely 100% known to be a greenhouse gas, and there's been no natural events in the past 100-200 years that would account for the warming. So its about 99% settled but not 100%.
- Exactly how hot is "too hot." Models seem to estimates around 2 degrees C over current temperatures, but some have suggested maybe 6 degrees or more before we're completely screwed. Of course models are always restricted by both the limits of our knowledge and the limits of our computing power, so there's always the possibility (however small) that all of the models are completely wrong.
- Exactly how long it will be before we're past the point of no return. Models show anywhere from already too late up to to the end of the century. Again with the disclaimer about the limits of models though.
- Exactly how big an impact it will have on the planet. Most models show somewhere between fairly large ecological disaster up to converting our planet into Venus II. Very, very few models show low or no ecological damage. Model disclaimer again.
- And of course, the less direct effects such as the coral reef problems that are only "probably" severely affected by rising temperatures rather than "definitely" affected.
To me there is no such thing as "settled science"
No, but there is science that's so incredibly close to settled that it makes no difference. My first example above regarding CO2 being a greenhouse gas. Yes its possible that every single experiment with greenhouses we've ever done has somehow been done wrong. And its slightly more plausible that the large-scale "greenhouse" of our atmosphere somehow compensates in a way that we can't even detect never mind compensate for.. but both of those possibilities are extremely low at this point, and even if one or both are wrong it will almost certainly be a small deviation to correct -- no more than a couple percent I'd hazard. Yes that technically means its not fully settled, but by the time you've done many independent experiments of many different types by many different people in many different countries and they all have the same conclusion well.. its probably not worth talking about the tiny potential deviation unless you're an actual climate scientist trying to tweak their models to be just a little more accurate.
Gravity in physics seems somewhat settled
No it doesn't. Not even close. Its well-known (at least among physics geeks) that our modern understanding of gravity and our modern understanding of quantum mechanics are fundamentally incompatible, meaning at least one (and most likely both) are incomplete at some (very, very, very tiny) level. Unfortunately that tiny level is something like 17 orders of magnitude smaller than what the LHC can probe, so we're not likely to get a conclusive theory any time soon. Our current collider designs will never ever be able to reach that power level (saw a video where Leonard Susskind did a napkin calculation and come up with a ring diameter approximately the size of earth's orbit around the sun, if we were going to stick with the circular bea
I'm pretty sure most real people having sex don't do things like get into awkward positions to ensure that their genitals are visible from a specific direction. Few of us get laid every time we call for a pizza either. Nor to we get a second take if we do or say something stupid during the act that ruins the scene.
Porn is to sex what Kill Bill is to sword fighting. It looks really awesome but its (usually) highly choreographed and not especially practical in the real world.
Just make all the stuff available as a fixed purchase. It can be high enough above the price of a loot box to justify its rarity.
Yes, you could still gamble with a loot box if you wanted.. but that would no longer be your only option (and in particular if you knew exactly what you wanted, you would also know exactly how much it would cost you.) I would imagine that should satisfy most people (well, not counting those that thing in-game purchases should be banned completely of course.. but it should satisfy anyone who's concerned primarily about the gambling aspect.)
And anything that they want to be so rare that the price would look bad ($1000 for Luke Skywalker!) they could just turn into a low-chance random drop somewhere, outside of the loot box system. That is, adopt the cookie-cutter MMO model for those items. I'm not really sure how grinding for a rare drop is particularly better than grinding for loot boxes that have a chance to contain the same rare drop, but the main point is to dissociate it from any possibility of monetary loss ("gambling" with your time is apparently perfectly fine.)
Also, should a government anywhere make laws to restrict loot box systems.. what does that imply for things like Pokemon that has followed basically the same model with physical cards for 20+ years now. Or even hockey/sports cards that have been doing so for 100+?
Yeah pretty sure that would be classified as terrorism these days and you're not spending a couple nights in county for civil disobedience and property destruction -- you're disappeared to spend the rest of your days in Gitmo.
Yep. Always best to ignore the will of anyone who doesn't live up to your arbitrary standards. Democracy in action!
Charlottesville was how long ago exactly? I'm pretty sure it happened after 1991 but maybe someone should fact check me on that..
No, we're mostly only blaming Trump and related politics on the Russians. Maybe if Trump was more successful at well.. anything.. in office, we'd be more concerned on a wider scale but for now its closer to an orange joke than a red scare.
Show me the direct correlation and you might have a point. In particular, try to convince me that all those guns would have had any effect in stopping the totalitarian regime from taking over. It doesn't matter how many AKs you have in your basement when the government shows up with a bloody tank and flattens your house.
There are plenty of countries with gun laws that are still perfectly democratic. Arguably more-so than the US with your two-party system and the "left-wing" party is still fairly far right of what any other country would call center. And then throw on the electoral college who can, at least in theory, completely ignore the will of the people and elect whoever the hell they feel like into the White House. And to top even that, your presidents can effectively rule unilaterally via executive order and the last few have been doing so more and more. Sure SCOTUS can veto those executive orders but still, its potentially leading down a dangerous path since you're now relying on just two branches of government to balance each other out and the third being practically irrelevant. That's 1/3 of your checks and balances gone.
They have something to do with each other. Just not the thing the GP wants to believe.
This is covered by existing law.
Yes, the law (well regulation) that Pai is trying to repeal.
And don't worry, they'll do it cleanly enough to avoid anti-trust legislation as well ("we prioritize anyone who pays us the $100,000 per month +data usage high speed fee! So its not anti-competitive! Yay capitalism!")
70% of Americans
So 3 in 10 are shit out of luck. That's not a brilliant start.
two or more choices
Yeah. One cable-based provider and one phone-based provider are the only two choices for a large number of people. And both are chomping at the bit to start screwing over the country as soon as possible. Hence this phrase from my prior post: "and both are doing the same damned things".
Again, why wouldn't they? They don't even need to be colluding.. its in both companies' interests to jack up rates and cut service as much as the regulations allow. As long as they both play the same game, there's no chance of real competition without a third party coming in to upset the game.. and of course the incumbents do everything in their power to prevent that from happening.
And entrenching a third option isn't sufficient. I mean its better, but after a bit of short-term shakeup, you'll just end up with three providers all stretching regulations as far as possible in order to minimize costs and increase profits. To have a really competitive environment, the system has to allow for the possibility of someone getting pissed off and thinking they could do a better job, and being able to actually attempt doing so. Without that possibility, you tend to end up with an old boys club no matter how many old boys are in it at any particular time.
No they can't walk into a senators office with a suitcase of cash anymore. But they can (and absolutely do) contribute massive amounts to PACs and SuperPACs which essentially amounts to the same thing in the end, but is perfectly legal.
"Oh this $1000 dinner isn't a bribe.. its a campaign contribution! I'm just exercising my company's right to free speech! Oh and by the way you have a cushy 6-figure job as VP of whatever the fuck you want waiting for you after you leave office if you play ball!"
Sure. If you want to limit the bandwidth yourself, I'm sure your ISP will happily save themselves the effort.
I used the word "punishment" for a reason. It would not be done to improve the quality of service on their end. And yes there would always be a sweet spot to get the maximum transfer rate for the minimum amount of punishment.. but the vast majority of people are not going to be setting up their own FreeBSD boxes never mind setting up useful QoS rules and really never mind being able to figure out where the sweet spot is -- especially if the ISP is regularly tweaking their system and thus moving the sweet spot.
unless your small-business email is run by them
Then you convince your small business ownership to change email providers. If you're successful then all is well. If you're unsuccessful.. that's not Google's fault.
If you don't like Comcast and your small business is in an area where there are no competing ISPs, then all the convincing in the world won't make your small business change because they literally cannot do so. Its not a choice on their part, its a physical impossibility short of buying a new office in another jurisdiction and moving their whole operation.
Cloudflare has a distinct advantage here for doing these kind of guerrilla tactics -- they don't operate on the consumer's end, they operate as a middleman between the consumer and the content provider. And they do that for a surprisingly large portion of the internet (if you go back and find the articles about when they got hacked a while ago and find the list of sites that were potentially compromised by extension.. that is, at least a partial customer list.. its shocking how much this one company controls if they want to start messing with their own pipes and CDN systems..)
So while Cloudflare might not be able to slow down the entire internet for Pai's household or the FCC in general, they could at least in theory slow it down for a decent chunk of all websites, and there's a good chance at least a few of them would be things Pai or other FCC members would want to access periodically.
Of course because of their size and what they do, there is a chance that they themselves could possibly fall under existing regulations as a service provider. Meaning that making Pai an example of his own rules that won't be implemented for a month.. may get them in hot water under the old rules that are going away. Which would be ironic in a way but not so much an amusing way unfortunately as legal action would almost certainly be pursued to the fullest just out of spite and vengeance if there's any action available.
Because some of "their own customers" happen to be websites that Canadians use. If those websites get throttled, it affects everyone that uses them, globally.
Most of the major websites of course have Canadian CDNs, if not full servers being hosted in Canada and certainly those sites won't suffer. But of course those sites being the "major" ones aren't going to be the ones that face the worst impact of this decision.
And that's before we start talking about the possibility of say, geolocked upselling. Want your website visible in the US? $100/mo + $10/tb data. Want it visible in the US at high speed? $1500/mo + $50/tb data. Want it visible in Canada and Mexico? Add another $400/mo and an additional $20/tb "long distance" charges for any bits sent across the border. Want it available in Europe, Asia or South America? Add $5000/mo per region and an additional $100/tb "long distance" for any bits sent overseas.
And I'm sure there's a dozen schemes they'll come up with to screw their customers over in the sake of short-term profit, but for us end users what it will mean is that a) Everything in the US is more expensive, b) Most things hosted in the US will be unavailable outside of the US and similarly, c) Many things outside the US will be too expensive for average Americans.
Hopefully they wouldn't go that far, and even if they do its unlikely to happen right away as the backlash would be horrendous. That's the kind of scheme they phase in over a decade or two so that by the time its done, nobody remembers how things came to be that way.
He does. Frequently. That's his damned job. The fact that American news sources don't report on Canadian goings on doesn't imply nothing goes on in Canada.
Also, this is very related to Canada as we rely fairly heavily on US-based internet services. And its important for Canadians to know that we don't (currently) have any intention of following along in the US' foot steps on this issue, thus avoiding at least some level of uncertainty that may have cropped up should speculators start wondering about the intentions of the CRTC in light of the FCC fuckup.
And if you want to stretch it just a little bit, the comment could also be taken as a bit of a wink and a nudge to tech companies in the US that will be negatively impacted by the removal of net neutrality and suggesting that there's a perfectly safe home just a little further north should they be interested, which would benefit the Canadian economy.
Not really. A large portion of the left are aware that Hillary was corrupt too.
The difference is that Hillary didn't get elected. Her corruption means jack squat all at this point.
Since at least the early 90s and probably much earlier. "RTFM" and similar asshat comments have been around as long as there's been public forums to ask questions.
The answer to this (actually the answer to all of it, really.. assuming net neutrality isn't enforced) is to slow down a user's traffic based on how much traffic they've already transferred. Adjust it every 30 seconds based on say a 2 minute window or something so that its somewhat responsive as people change their tasks throughout the day.
Basically an automated punishment system for people using "too much," driving them to turn off their bittorrents or other high-bandwidth applications at least during the times they want to be using their own connection (and even when those applications are left running, you're still slowing them down to whatever rate you consider sufficiently punishing without cutting them off completely.)
So for example if you're just browsing the internet, you get your full 200mbps or whatever, but if you're continually using 150+mpbs of that for a long enough period of time, you get throttled down to 50 and then to 20 and then to 10 or whatever. And then once you're no longer taking up a significant portion of that 10mpbs for 2 minutes, you would get pushed back to 20 then 50 then your full 200mbps.
I mean I'm sure that would lead to a bit of an arms race as someone develops a bittorrent client that stops transmitting for 10 seconds every 2 minutes or whatever metric they need (so you get the full 200mbps for 90% of the time rather than 10mbps for 100% of the time or the like) but I suspect it would be a race that the ISPs would win by simply adding more granularity to the metrics.
Small ISPs will finally able to get off the ground as they will not have to spend big on proving they are following gov regulation.
That's hardly a huge cost anyway, so its kind of a non-issue. In fact all the packet inspecting and traffic shaping equipment needed to intentionally break net neutrality tends to be more expensive than the "dumber" equivalents.
The biggest cost is getting the right-of-ways and laying the fiber. The legal side can take years (and being injuncted every step of the way by the incumbents, making it take even longer) and then the cost of digging up the ground, laying the cables and reconstructing the street/pavement/whatever you dug up for hundreds or thousands of miles.. that adds up fast.
Cities can now build a network.
I'm not sure how this follows. It may be one less argument the incumbents can use to block publicly-built networks, but they've got plenty more up their sleeves. In fact I can't think of any of these cases where the deciding factor was NN implementation (though I'm sure I don't know of every such case.) Most of the ones I've seen is either based on the city having a pre-existing agreement from decades ago that explicitly gives the incumbent a monopoly, or an argument based on some vague Ayn Rand-style BS about the government encroaching on the rights of private corporations.
Now anyone can build any type of network within a framework of local laws.
If they have a few billion dollars to blow with maybe a return on investment over several decades at best while fighting continual legal battles against the established players.
Comcast is not going to throttle small web sites unless they enter into private deals
By what reasoning? All logic suggests that they'd benefit most from a) charging websites to be accessible and b) blocking (or slowing traffic enough that it may as well be) websites that compete against either their own media subsidiaries or their paid "partners."
Twitter, a vocal proponent of Net Neutrality, however, has no problem actively discriminating about who can use their platform.
If Twitter blocks you from their platform, you can no longer use Twitter. If Comcast blocks you from their network, you can no longer use any platform. There's a bit of a scale difference in play there.
Wow. Diamondmagic just wrote this heartfelt, technically accurate and yet completely understandable and reasonable argument for net neutrality!
But then again, Verizon paid me $100,000. Guess we know which way I'm voting.
Its called "rational thinking." Companies exist to make money. ISPs will make more money if they prioritize their own media subsidiaries over external traffic.
I'm sure Pai doesn't want ISPs to "block" content per se.. he's just completely uncaring if they do so. I mean if you don't like your ISP's network management practices you can always switch to a competitor.. right? Right? Oh except for the fact that there is no competitor in many jurisdictions and for those that do have "competition," its almost always just two options (cable or telephone company) and both are doing the same damned things for the same damned reason -- it makes them more money.
Name a use case for a gun that doesn't involve:
a) Harming a person,
b) Harming an animal, or
c) Destroying a target.
A gun's only purpose is to do damage. It has zero other use cases once you abstract away the thing you're doing damage to. There are few other devices or tools in existence that can make that claim.
Of those three use cases, (b) is the only one with any validity as a productive use -- and even then, only if you're hunting for actual food rather than just because you like watching things die.
For suicides specifically.. as with other gun violence, the point isn't that these things would be stopped. The point is that they'd be less deadly when they occurred. That is, suicide attempts may remain constant (or even go up due to more possibility for second and third attempts..) but suicide rates would be lower.
Japan and other East Asian countries tend to be a bad comparison because they have other social reasons for their high suicide rates. Better to compare the US to the likes of Canada, Australia or Western Europe. Of course the gun nuts don't want to do that because comparing culturally similar countries tends to show the opposite of what they want to "prove."