The point isn't someone trying to take a train from Africa to the US. The point is someone going from Africa to Europe and then to the US. Do we know every country that every person landing in a US airport has been in for the past 21 days? Stopping all flights from the Ebola stricken areas might stop the direct passage of the disease, but it won't stop the spread entirely.
If we're willing to stop all travel and quarantine people for 21 days due to rare Ebola infections, what will we do for the much more common flu infections?
This is exactly why I think Netflix is the content owners' best weapon against piracy. Imagine if the content owners opened their vaults to Netflix. Even if the material was from 2 years ago on, you would have tons of content to watch on Netflix. You could have a progression: Movie in theater/show on TV, DVD release, Netflix release. Each step making the show/movie more available. Would people still pirate? Sure. Some people would pirate even if you gave them official DRM-less movie downloads for 10 cents each. Most people, however, would give up piracy and subscribe to Netflix.
Don't want to give Netflix all that power? Support competition to Netflix (e.g. Amazon Prime) as well. Give them the same library access to help them build their subscriber base.
Would all this content mean raised Netflix prices? Probably. But I'd gladly pay $20 a month for a version of Netflix that could stream everything 2 years old and older.
So your proposal is that anyone who travels out of the country and tries to return is quarantined for 21 days? And anyone from another country who tries to vacation in the US gets quarantined for 21 days?
There were 69.8million international arrivals in the US in 2013. (Source) So far we have a tiny number of Ebola cases from inbound travel. (I wouldn't count the two people specifically flown back to the US for treatment.) Imposing 21 day quarantines on 70 million people is nearly impossible, a gross overreaction to the actual threat, and would shatter the travel industry. Given that 1 in 9 US jobs depend on travel/tourism (same source as above), this could lead to high unemployment. Would you travel to a country on a vacation if it meant being shut in for 3 weeks? Chances are your vacation would be over before you were even allowed out of quarantine.
They removed seven people - after lengthy court battles. How many people did they add during that time, though? And what is the guarantee that these people won't "mysteriously" get re-added to the list six months from now? This list is compiled in secret using methods that are secret. It's contents are secret and there is no official method for getting off the list or even confirming that you are on the list.
It's almost like some people in power decided that the only way to prevent the terrorists from destroying our freedom was for them to destroy it first.
First of all, you'll never keep 100% of terrorists off of airplanes. Not without also keeping 100% of valid passengers off also. (The airlines wouldn't survive this level of "security.")
Secondly, the incidence of terrorists boarding US airplanes is extremely low. Most of the ones that make the news (shoe bomber, underwear bomber) boarded planes in other countries. Simple measures we already have in place stop would-be terrorists. Measures like pre-911 security, checking tickets before boarding, locking cabin doors, and not just quietly going along with terrorists. (Pre-911 a hijacking meant a stressful trip to Cuba but otherwise no danger if you kept quiet, post-911 a hijacking leads to a passenger revolt.) Does this make flying 100% terrorist-proof? No, but nothing is. The risk that the plane you are about to board will be a terrorist target is minimal, though. You have a greater risk of equipment malfunction.
Finally, the TSA has caught exactly zero terrorists. Yes, they stop people from bringing weapons on-board, but none of those people have been arrested of conspiring to blow up airplanes. By all means there should be some security before you board, but we could go back to pre-911 levels of pre-boarding security and still be just as safe as we are now.
So this isn't about letting Americans die. It's about not having some useless "security" that doesn't really do anything to protect against terrorists and only makes the lives of legitimate flyers difficult. Or that only lines the pockets of some company that manufacturers the security devices and has a "close relationship" with some influential Congressfolk.
And just one more point: Suppose we somehow lock down the airports so that we're blocking 100% of the terrorists. Terrorists could target sports stadiums, malls, trains, busy highways. etc. Are we going to need to have TSA-style checks every time we walk in the mall? Will we need to present papers showing that we aren't terrorists at random times every day to "protect" us from phantom terrorists hiding around every corner? Is doing otherwise (to use your words) letting "a bunch of Americans die and call it an accident"?
They don't hate our freedom. They want to protect our freedom. You just need to think of our freedom as a mint-in-box action figure. You wouldn't take it out and actually use it. No, you would lock it up securely in a vault to keep it in mint condition. So the only way to protect our freedom is to securely lock it away nobody can see it, touch it, and break it. Only by making sure nobody has access to our freedom can we protect our freedom!
(Sadly, I'm being sarcastic but there are people who wholeheartedly believe this to be true.)
I believe the European courts themselves appointed Google to head this task. They told Google to remove these requested references if they aren't in the "public interest." As far as I can see, there are four options:
1) Google removed everything. There is no filter and no attempts to curtail abuse of the system. If you request it removed, Google removes it, no questions asked. If this option were taken, the Google search index would rapidly become useless.
2) The European Court system handles each and every removal request and issues a ruling on each one. This would not only raise the cost of a removal request and the time required to approve/deny one, but it would seriously hamper court activities. The courts would get overloaded with requests.
3) You appoint a commission just for this purpose. Of course, said commission will likely grow highly political in nature and will be willing to approve requests from big campaign donors. "It's a shame that the story of my kid's DUI arrest keeps coming up in Google. If it were removed, I might see fit to donate a few million to your re-election campaign." In addition, a political party/movement in power might use it to suppress bad information about themselves and allow bad information about other parties/movements. ("Story about our corrupt party head? Removed. Leaked nude selfie of our rival's drunken underage daughter? Removal denied.")
4) Google is the arbitrator and can approve/deny as they see fit. If you disagree with them, you can either give up or take them to court. This is the current system. Is it perfect? Of course not, but if you accept the "right to be forgotten" as a necessity (which I don't but which the European court system said is one), then this is the best of all possible options.
Furthermore, how long until a company decides that Google should remove those bad reviews of their products because they are insulting to the company and cast the company in a bad light? Never mind that the product is garbage and possibly harmful... Those mentions of this fact online need to be suppressed!
My oldest son (11) seems to be constantly in a state of learning this lesson. He'll do something wrong, get a warning, do it again, and get a punishment. At that point, he'll rail about how unfair it is that he is punished and how we should give him one more chance - conveniently ignoring the one chance he got before.
Granted, my son is 11. At this age, they push boundaries and try to see what they can get away with and what is socially acceptable. One wonders what the excuse is for the grown men and women who seem to think that all of their past behaviors should just get forgotten because they want "just one more chance."
(NOTE: People should definitely have the chance for redemption. We shouldn't judge someone because of one small mistake they made 10 years ago if they turned their life around since then. However, if you've done something really bad or committed a crime repeatedly, you shouldn't get to "make everyone forget" and start fresh.)
This is the sticking point. For example, my name is pretty common. Suppose there was a news story about a Jason Levine who did something bad and searches on my name were showing this news item. Could I petition Google to "forget" my name? (We'll ignore, for the moment, that I don't live in Europe.) Could the criminal with the same name as me do the same? Could I petition Google to "forget" a hypothetical video of me walking into a light-pole while texting? Can a company request that all mentions of a product be removed if said product was a flop?
The courts, thankfully, didn't tell Google that they had to honor all removal requests. Had they done so, Google might have just saved everyone time and simply shut down their search engine as they would be forced to remove valid search results for inappropriate reasons. The removal requirements the courts gave were somewhat vague so Google is forced to use their corporate judgement as to what constitutes a valid "forget me" request and what is an attempted abuse of the system (and should be denied). If anything, I'm surprised that the rejection rate isn't higher than 58%. The ability to have "the Internet forget" the bad things you did would be very tempting for companies and criminals alike.
The mistake was to trust big companies like Snapchat and Apple when they said that the photos would be safe and only viewable by the people the creators selected. We are not that naive, but you have to appreciate that for most people they trust private companies to look after their private data every day, e.g. banks, health care providers, online shops, their employer etc.
I think this is the key point. Except for the odd hermit, we all put our trust in private companies at some point. Do you trust your bank to watch your money for you? Do you expect that your cable company won't allow workers to look up addresses of good houses to break into? (Lots of premium channels probably means high likelihood of good stuff to steal.) Do you trust your doctor's office not to "leak" your embarrassing diagnosis to the community?
For the most part, these private companies do live up to our expectations - at least the base minimum. There are the odd stories of abuses, but these tend to be the exception, not the rule. Someone with less technological knowledge than we have could easily think that the nude photo that their iPhone uploaded to the Apple Cloud was secured because Apple said it would only be sent to the person they chose it to be sent to. In reality, though, the security wasn't absolute.
To make a "breaking into a house" analogy, this isn't not locking your house, but buying a lock from Home Depot without knowing that this particular lock is easily bypassed by thieves.
Oh definitely. I absolutely don't subscribe to PETA's views. It's a shame really. I'm for the humane treatment of animals and hate seeing animals abused. However, PETA takes this reasonable position and then continues into Crazy Territory of "Any contact with humans is abuse." I grew up with dogs in our house. They were like members of the family and weren't abused at all. They led wonderful, full lives and were loved. If it weren't for various reasons (allergies, financial constraints, living space issues), I'd probably have a dog now also.
The "much diminished" wasn't referring to population levels of the fish, but the effect that the hormone had on human males. The average human male is much bigger than a fish so it should take a lot more of the hormone to have an effect. Even then, the effects might not be the same. The hormone's effect on fish and humans might vary wildly.
As for human males "behaving feminized", I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you referring to guys who actually express feelings, cook, and clean up around the house? If so, I'd call this progress and not "acting feminized." The days of a guy coming home, ordering his barefoot and pregnant wife to get him a beer, and demanding that she wait on him hand and foot are long gone. (Thank goodness.)
Sadly, they see that as consistent with their philosophy. In that putting those dogs in loving homes would be exposing the dogs to human contact for years versus a quick, one-time human contact that ensures that dog won't have to deal with humans ever again.
When people's beliefs get this twisted, there's no reasoning with them. Just back off slowly and keep a good distance from them.
Even if it had an effect on humans also, I would expect the effect to be much diminished compared to fish as your average human has much more body mass than your average fish.
There might also be a sort of "reverse correlation" between divorce and going to church. If you go to a church where divorce is frowned upon and you get a divorce, you might be less likely to go to church (and deal with the whispers of "X got divorced... how SCANDALOUS!"). Thus, when the survey hits, they'd find that more people who go to church are still married. It could easily be the attitude of the parishioners keeping divorced people out, not the church keeping people married.
The DMCA doesn't apply to other countries, but the US (really the media corporations who want draconian copyright laws and who have plenty of money to wave at politicians) is always trying to get other countries to adopt similar laws. So don't count on "I'm outside the US" to be the same as "I'm safe from the draconian US copyright laws."
I use this and Google has made it quite unobtrusive. I can authorize devices (computers, tablets, cell phones, etc) to access my Google Account. Each device needs to have a PIN code (sent to my cell phone via SMS) entered but after that initial setup it operates normally. The initial setup is a pain as you go from device to device and enter PIN codes, but the peace of mind knowing that RANDOM_HACKER can't get into your e-mail because he somehow got a hold of your username/password (despite your attempts to have a secure password) is worth it.
It's referring to Batman: The Animated Series. Which led to Superman: The Animated Series. Which led to Justice League. Which led to Justice League Unlimited. (And Batman Beyond and Static Shock in the mix somewhere.)
The second point still stands though. It's illegal to distribute tools to circumvent copy protection. Suppose I wrote a program that easily let users rip their DVDs/Blu-Rays to MKV/MP4 files. If I used it on my own files and never gave the program to someone else, I'd be fine. If I set up a website and started giving it away (or selling it), I'd find myself dragged into court as soon as my program got on the MPAA's radar.
On the flip side, if I'm a user that wants to rip my legitimately purchased DVDs/Blu-Rays but can't program a ripper, I might have a hard time finding ripping programs that haven't been taken down by the MPAA.
The exception here is that said ripping programs could be developed by people in countries that don't care about US copyright laws (which the US seems to try to impose on the rest of the world at every turn) and hosted in similar locations. This only shows how stupid the "no distributing ripper" rule is, though.
In other places, local governments have tried setting up municipal broadband networks only to be tied up in court by the big ISPs. Many times, those big ISPs actually refused to serve those areas, but didn't want the competition should they one day decide to possibly serve the areas.
They should have had fabulous net connections. They gave a ton of money to Verizon to wire up the state only for Verizon to pocket the money, wire some profitable areas, and then declare that expensive wireless/cell phone access was good enough for the rest. When New Jersey's government should have said "That's not what you promised us", they caved and said "Sounds good to us."
In short, Verizon gets a ton of taxpayer money and doesn't need to do much, politicians get some lobbyist cash to "encourage" them not to pursue this matter, and taxpayers get slow Internet speeds. A win-win (for Verizon and politicians... not taxpayers).
Are you defining "Internet access" to include wireless, satellite, dial-up, or DSL? If so, you're including options that are much more expensive or rely on outdated technology.
If you are saying that you have 5 providers of wired, broadband Internet access in your small town, then congratulations. You're better off than most of us are. The vast majority of America has one or two wired broadband ISPs to choose from. I happen to only have one: Time Warner Cable.
Some Americans are even worse off and don't have any wired broadband ISP in their town. When they decide to get together and form a municipal broadband ISP, though, the big ISPs who have refused to wire them suddenly declare this "unfair competition" and tie them up in court cases. (Amazing how it is "unfair competition" if a municipality wants to serve an area a big ISP isn't serving, but Comcast and Time Warner say they don't compete because they serve different areas.)
Slashdot Mirror
The point isn't someone trying to take a train from Africa to the US. The point is someone going from Africa to Europe and then to the US. Do we know every country that every person landing in a US airport has been in for the past 21 days? Stopping all flights from the Ebola stricken areas might stop the direct passage of the disease, but it won't stop the spread entirely.
If we're willing to stop all travel and quarantine people for 21 days due to rare Ebola infections, what will we do for the much more common flu infections?
This is exactly why I think Netflix is the content owners' best weapon against piracy. Imagine if the content owners opened their vaults to Netflix. Even if the material was from 2 years ago on, you would have tons of content to watch on Netflix. You could have a progression: Movie in theater/show on TV, DVD release, Netflix release. Each step making the show/movie more available. Would people still pirate? Sure. Some people would pirate even if you gave them official DRM-less movie downloads for 10 cents each. Most people, however, would give up piracy and subscribe to Netflix.
Don't want to give Netflix all that power? Support competition to Netflix (e.g. Amazon Prime) as well. Give them the same library access to help them build their subscriber base.
Would all this content mean raised Netflix prices? Probably. But I'd gladly pay $20 a month for a version of Netflix that could stream everything 2 years old and older.
Turbines kill an insignificant number of birds by comparison with Windows .
We need to get rid of Windows . Who knew?
If Windows does that to birds, just think of what it's doing to the children!!!!! Microsoft should be tared and feathered for this!
Luckily, we have lots of feathers from the birds that the Windows have killed.
So your proposal is that anyone who travels out of the country and tries to return is quarantined for 21 days? And anyone from another country who tries to vacation in the US gets quarantined for 21 days?
There were 69.8million international arrivals in the US in 2013. (Source) So far we have a tiny number of Ebola cases from inbound travel. (I wouldn't count the two people specifically flown back to the US for treatment.) Imposing 21 day quarantines on 70 million people is nearly impossible, a gross overreaction to the actual threat, and would shatter the travel industry. Given that 1 in 9 US jobs depend on travel/tourism (same source as above), this could lead to high unemployment. Would you travel to a country on a vacation if it meant being shut in for 3 weeks? Chances are your vacation would be over before you were even allowed out of quarantine.
They removed seven people - after lengthy court battles. How many people did they add during that time, though? And what is the guarantee that these people won't "mysteriously" get re-added to the list six months from now? This list is compiled in secret using methods that are secret. It's contents are secret and there is no official method for getting off the list or even confirming that you are on the list.
It's almost like some people in power decided that the only way to prevent the terrorists from destroying our freedom was for them to destroy it first.
First of all, you'll never keep 100% of terrorists off of airplanes. Not without also keeping 100% of valid passengers off also. (The airlines wouldn't survive this level of "security.")
Secondly, the incidence of terrorists boarding US airplanes is extremely low. Most of the ones that make the news (shoe bomber, underwear bomber) boarded planes in other countries. Simple measures we already have in place stop would-be terrorists. Measures like pre-911 security, checking tickets before boarding, locking cabin doors, and not just quietly going along with terrorists. (Pre-911 a hijacking meant a stressful trip to Cuba but otherwise no danger if you kept quiet, post-911 a hijacking leads to a passenger revolt.) Does this make flying 100% terrorist-proof? No, but nothing is. The risk that the plane you are about to board will be a terrorist target is minimal, though. You have a greater risk of equipment malfunction.
Finally, the TSA has caught exactly zero terrorists. Yes, they stop people from bringing weapons on-board, but none of those people have been arrested of conspiring to blow up airplanes. By all means there should be some security before you board, but we could go back to pre-911 levels of pre-boarding security and still be just as safe as we are now.
So this isn't about letting Americans die. It's about not having some useless "security" that doesn't really do anything to protect against terrorists and only makes the lives of legitimate flyers difficult. Or that only lines the pockets of some company that manufacturers the security devices and has a "close relationship" with some influential Congressfolk.
And just one more point: Suppose we somehow lock down the airports so that we're blocking 100% of the terrorists. Terrorists could target sports stadiums, malls, trains, busy highways. etc. Are we going to need to have TSA-style checks every time we walk in the mall? Will we need to present papers showing that we aren't terrorists at random times every day to "protect" us from phantom terrorists hiding around every corner? Is doing otherwise (to use your words) letting "a bunch of Americans die and call it an accident"?
They don't hate our freedom. They want to protect our freedom. You just need to think of our freedom as a mint-in-box action figure. You wouldn't take it out and actually use it. No, you would lock it up securely in a vault to keep it in mint condition. So the only way to protect our freedom is to securely lock it away nobody can see it, touch it, and break it. Only by making sure nobody has access to our freedom can we protect our freedom!
(Sadly, I'm being sarcastic but there are people who wholeheartedly believe this to be true.)
I believe the European courts themselves appointed Google to head this task. They told Google to remove these requested references if they aren't in the "public interest." As far as I can see, there are four options:
1) Google removed everything. There is no filter and no attempts to curtail abuse of the system. If you request it removed, Google removes it, no questions asked. If this option were taken, the Google search index would rapidly become useless.
2) The European Court system handles each and every removal request and issues a ruling on each one. This would not only raise the cost of a removal request and the time required to approve/deny one, but it would seriously hamper court activities. The courts would get overloaded with requests.
3) You appoint a commission just for this purpose. Of course, said commission will likely grow highly political in nature and will be willing to approve requests from big campaign donors. "It's a shame that the story of my kid's DUI arrest keeps coming up in Google. If it were removed, I might see fit to donate a few million to your re-election campaign." In addition, a political party/movement in power might use it to suppress bad information about themselves and allow bad information about other parties/movements. ("Story about our corrupt party head? Removed. Leaked nude selfie of our rival's drunken underage daughter? Removal denied.")
4) Google is the arbitrator and can approve/deny as they see fit. If you disagree with them, you can either give up or take them to court. This is the current system. Is it perfect? Of course not, but if you accept the "right to be forgotten" as a necessity (which I don't but which the European court system said is one), then this is the best of all possible options.
Furthermore, how long until a company decides that Google should remove those bad reviews of their products because they are insulting to the company and cast the company in a bad light? Never mind that the product is garbage and possibly harmful... Those mentions of this fact online need to be suppressed!
My oldest son (11) seems to be constantly in a state of learning this lesson. He'll do something wrong, get a warning, do it again, and get a punishment. At that point, he'll rail about how unfair it is that he is punished and how we should give him one more chance - conveniently ignoring the one chance he got before.
Granted, my son is 11. At this age, they push boundaries and try to see what they can get away with and what is socially acceptable. One wonders what the excuse is for the grown men and women who seem to think that all of their past behaviors should just get forgotten because they want "just one more chance."
(NOTE: People should definitely have the chance for redemption. We shouldn't judge someone because of one small mistake they made 10 years ago if they turned their life around since then. However, if you've done something really bad or committed a crime repeatedly, you shouldn't get to "make everyone forget" and start fresh.)
"assuming the request itself is valid"
This is the sticking point. For example, my name is pretty common. Suppose there was a news story about a Jason Levine who did something bad and searches on my name were showing this news item. Could I petition Google to "forget" my name? (We'll ignore, for the moment, that I don't live in Europe.) Could the criminal with the same name as me do the same? Could I petition Google to "forget" a hypothetical video of me walking into a light-pole while texting? Can a company request that all mentions of a product be removed if said product was a flop?
The courts, thankfully, didn't tell Google that they had to honor all removal requests. Had they done so, Google might have just saved everyone time and simply shut down their search engine as they would be forced to remove valid search results for inappropriate reasons. The removal requirements the courts gave were somewhat vague so Google is forced to use their corporate judgement as to what constitutes a valid "forget me" request and what is an attempted abuse of the system (and should be denied). If anything, I'm surprised that the rejection rate isn't higher than 58%. The ability to have "the Internet forget" the bad things you did would be very tempting for companies and criminals alike.
I think this is the key point. Except for the odd hermit, we all put our trust in private companies at some point. Do you trust your bank to watch your money for you? Do you expect that your cable company won't allow workers to look up addresses of good houses to break into? (Lots of premium channels probably means high likelihood of good stuff to steal.) Do you trust your doctor's office not to "leak" your embarrassing diagnosis to the community?
For the most part, these private companies do live up to our expectations - at least the base minimum. There are the odd stories of abuses, but these tend to be the exception, not the rule. Someone with less technological knowledge than we have could easily think that the nude photo that their iPhone uploaded to the Apple Cloud was secured because Apple said it would only be sent to the person they chose it to be sent to. In reality, though, the security wasn't absolute.
To make a "breaking into a house" analogy, this isn't not locking your house, but buying a lock from Home Depot without knowing that this particular lock is easily bypassed by thieves.
Oh definitely. I absolutely don't subscribe to PETA's views. It's a shame really. I'm for the humane treatment of animals and hate seeing animals abused. However, PETA takes this reasonable position and then continues into Crazy Territory of "Any contact with humans is abuse." I grew up with dogs in our house. They were like members of the family and weren't abused at all. They led wonderful, full lives and were loved. If it weren't for various reasons (allergies, financial constraints, living space issues), I'd probably have a dog now also.
The "much diminished" wasn't referring to population levels of the fish, but the effect that the hormone had on human males. The average human male is much bigger than a fish so it should take a lot more of the hormone to have an effect. Even then, the effects might not be the same. The hormone's effect on fish and humans might vary wildly.
As for human males "behaving feminized", I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you referring to guys who actually express feelings, cook, and clean up around the house? If so, I'd call this progress and not "acting feminized." The days of a guy coming home, ordering his barefoot and pregnant wife to get him a beer, and demanding that she wait on him hand and foot are long gone. (Thank goodness.)
Sadly, they see that as consistent with their philosophy. In that putting those dogs in loving homes would be exposing the dogs to human contact for years versus a quick, one-time human contact that ensures that dog won't have to deal with humans ever again.
When people's beliefs get this twisted, there's no reasoning with them. Just back off slowly and keep a good distance from them.
Even if it had an effect on humans also, I would expect the effect to be much diminished compared to fish as your average human has much more body mass than your average fish.
There might also be a sort of "reverse correlation" between divorce and going to church. If you go to a church where divorce is frowned upon and you get a divorce, you might be less likely to go to church (and deal with the whispers of "X got divorced... how SCANDALOUS!"). Thus, when the survey hits, they'd find that more people who go to church are still married. It could easily be the attitude of the parishioners keeping divorced people out, not the church keeping people married.
The DMCA doesn't apply to other countries, but the US (really the media corporations who want draconian copyright laws and who have plenty of money to wave at politicians) is always trying to get other countries to adopt similar laws. So don't count on "I'm outside the US" to be the same as "I'm safe from the draconian US copyright laws."
I use this and Google has made it quite unobtrusive. I can authorize devices (computers, tablets, cell phones, etc) to access my Google Account. Each device needs to have a PIN code (sent to my cell phone via SMS) entered but after that initial setup it operates normally. The initial setup is a pain as you go from device to device and enter PIN codes, but the peace of mind knowing that RANDOM_HACKER can't get into your e-mail because he somehow got a hold of your username/password (despite your attempts to have a secure password) is worth it.
It's referring to Batman: The Animated Series. Which led to Superman: The Animated Series. Which led to Justice League. Which led to Justice League Unlimited. (And Batman Beyond and Static Shock in the mix somewhere.)
The second point still stands though. It's illegal to distribute tools to circumvent copy protection. Suppose I wrote a program that easily let users rip their DVDs/Blu-Rays to MKV/MP4 files. If I used it on my own files and never gave the program to someone else, I'd be fine. If I set up a website and started giving it away (or selling it), I'd find myself dragged into court as soon as my program got on the MPAA's radar.
On the flip side, if I'm a user that wants to rip my legitimately purchased DVDs/Blu-Rays but can't program a ripper, I might have a hard time finding ripping programs that haven't been taken down by the MPAA.
The exception here is that said ripping programs could be developed by people in countries that don't care about US copyright laws (which the US seems to try to impose on the rest of the world at every turn) and hosted in similar locations. This only shows how stupid the "no distributing ripper" rule is, though.
In other places, local governments have tried setting up municipal broadband networks only to be tied up in court by the big ISPs. Many times, those big ISPs actually refused to serve those areas, but didn't want the competition should they one day decide to possibly serve the areas.
The invisible hand of the market is at work in the US. It's just giving US Internet users the invisible middle finger.
They should have had fabulous net connections. They gave a ton of money to Verizon to wire up the state only for Verizon to pocket the money, wire some profitable areas, and then declare that expensive wireless/cell phone access was good enough for the rest. When New Jersey's government should have said "That's not what you promised us", they caved and said "Sounds good to us."
In short, Verizon gets a ton of taxpayer money and doesn't need to do much, politicians get some lobbyist cash to "encourage" them not to pursue this matter, and taxpayers get slow Internet speeds. A win-win (for Verizon and politicians... not taxpayers).
Are you defining "Internet access" to include wireless, satellite, dial-up, or DSL? If so, you're including options that are much more expensive or rely on outdated technology.
If you are saying that you have 5 providers of wired, broadband Internet access in your small town, then congratulations. You're better off than most of us are. The vast majority of America has one or two wired broadband ISPs to choose from. I happen to only have one: Time Warner Cable.
Some Americans are even worse off and don't have any wired broadband ISP in their town. When they decide to get together and form a municipal broadband ISP, though, the big ISPs who have refused to wire them suddenly declare this "unfair competition" and tie them up in court cases. (Amazing how it is "unfair competition" if a municipality wants to serve an area a big ISP isn't serving, but Comcast and Time Warner say they don't compete because they serve different areas.)