If you're going to advertise (seriously, keep it to HN), would you mind at least telling us what is the difference from the P2P vpns which work perfectly fine, ie tinc and cjdns?
must provide open access to their last-mile networks
This is a good interim solution, but not a long term one, the trouble is aggregation. Incubent infrastructure is simply too old and t here's no incentive for them to upgrade it (especialy if they're forced to give it up to competition), so they'd end up overselling.
Most of the countries with developed broadband market went through this 10 years ago, now most of the market happens with a ISPs simply having their own last mile - which is roughly the time when data caps went away, as last mile bandwidth became ubiquitous.
Could wifi mesh networks eventually replace the assholes on the poles and put an end to the problems with digital communication media?
Monopolies are frequently granted on the grounds to serve rural areas, but the reality is that WISP works great and is most cost-effective as a last mile in the country. However In urban settlements, airwaves, especially the narrow free spectrum, don't have the bandwidth. You need "serious of tubes" in there if you're serious about bandwidth.
Current US cableco monopoly blocks this with regulatory capture, both rural and urban. There are are of course some anecdotes signaling cracks in that stalemate (google fiber, municipal fiber). The issue is that rest of the world did all this 15-20 years ago. Paradoxically often because they had incubent monopolies of their own blocking expansion of cheap dialup and DSL, while the US enjoyed relatively sane dialup and DSL market in the 90s - FTC, in spite of all its faults, did far better job back then than it does now.
Bottom line is that basically nobody in the world cares bout "net neutrality", it's purely political US fabrication born out of ignorance. ISPs can have "fast lanes" however they deem fit, and they overwhelmingly do as a routine matter of peering agreements. But if their peering is more shit than the next guy's, people simply switch ISPs, because majority of em have viable alternatives because the market isn't completely cornered.
Funny. Lots of families have lots of weirdos. But seriously, e-mail still works. You can always throw in a hyperlink to your non-mainstream-hosted blog or if you aren't the type to formulate long thoughts, microblog (pump.io?)
I see. I take it that if you don't like expensive comcast internet (or facebook, for that matter), you're free to use newspapers, television and meeting with people in person. Definitely less walled gardens there.
I don't believe stratification towards inferior solutions is necessarily the answer. Note that those alternatives need not be inferior in pure technical terms (gnu social is awesome), but with social networks, there's usually inferiority in terms of metcalfe's law.
What choices do you have to stay in touch with friends and family online? Honestly. Either you be the weird guy, or use facebook.
What choices do you have for fulltext search? Duckduckgo? Get real.
Compared to those monopolies (which are far more ingrained, because they have a true technological and first to market edge), AT&T and Comcast are fairly banal thing to fix as stuff they do, basically anyone can do with no complex know-how. Can happen either through competetive market (think ISPs in places like india or romania) which emerges with wild-west Laissez-faire approach, or *effectively* regulated state granted monopolies, which favors consumers (korea or even china).
Worst you can do is grant monopoly, and then not regulating it, which is pretty much what FCC is doing since Bell times. Just like break up of bell, the mission of FCC is to give de jure appearances, while making sure not to change anything about the de-facto state of affairs.
> transmitting and storing those ideas is.
> github and Sourceforge pay for their servers
> then we might be able to have a discussion about truly free information.
You mean cost of bandwidth, not cost of information as such. Typically, whoever makes-a-copy-pays-for-bandwidth are the rational schemes, not something ridiculously overpriced like a datacenter (those are expensive, though great for gatekeeping of artificial scarcity schemes).
The cost of making a copy of popular information is trivial - seeding 1:1 ratio, and your local disk storage. And because these are so trivial, people torrent stuff, to reach rational cost. It could be posited that trying to push artificial scarcity in age of near-free bandwidth is going contrary to this - a bit akin to appealing to Marxism - it's a great idea in theory, in practice market forces disagree.
I just find it amusing that inherent nature of information is pretty much marxist, and capitalism has a very tough time coping with that reality, just like marxism in the material world had a problem with capitalism inherent to markets.
> Its really hard to imagine what such a world would look like though or how humans would adapt to it, since none of us have ever seen such a thing
Free software.
> he digital world will always, at some level, be based upon real world computers built out of real world parts and sucking up real world energy to operate.)
Realistically, information has only value for as long it remains secret. Information-theoretic scarcity exists only for as long till the first copy is auctioned off (or stolen) and published. After that, theres no scarcity for copies, and thus no value.
The question is, why the nature of information is ignored in digital world and we have this ridiculous intellectual property nonsense. Why do we have artificial notion that *copies* have value, but the act of creating original content, where the intrinsic value truly lies, is left largely unprotected?
Is it because some sort of "human nature", an irrational Nietzschean "will to power", just for the sake of it? Or is artificial scarcity in the digital realm just a cultural meme carried over from the physical world, in "you wouldn't download a car" sense?
Depends, is it really artificial? In terms of engineering, there's can be a good reason for the capacity to be capped when using either slightly recycled, or lower grade cells, to illustrate:
75kw battery pack can withstand 500 cycles, but if you charge it only to 80% (past that you must either slow-charge, or have really fancy chemistry), you can turn that into 800 cycles - and the battery is effectively 60kwh.
Now in this case you can indeed go over the 80% cap, but it will eat up battery life more rapidly if it were always used like that, hence why it makes sense to do that only in extraordinary situations.
Of course if they make the batteries all the same AND don't provide lifetime battery warranties, ie this is just software block, the company should be dragged through the mud for this indeed, as giving access to full charge is exactly zero cost for them.
Apple... just works. It makes calls and runs popular apps. And nothing else.
Funny how history repeats itself - Android is the new IBM PCs, while early iphone was the Apple II -
last apple open to tinkering, if in somewhat awkward fashion.
In short, Android displaced iPhone in the tinkerer market niche, and the decline of jailbreaking strongly correlates with android eating up Apple's market. The article, oddly, doesn't make any mention of this.
Programming gets easier with increasing abstraction, thus allowing the engineering portion to grow, but the haphazard, ever increasing abstraction also grows the attack surface - and you can't abstract vulnerabilities away as you can abstract away simple programming tasks. To find exploits in a system, you first need to *know* *most* the abstractions in and out in the first place.
Meaning abstraction makes security harder as there will be proportionally less people understanding the system compared to all participants in the system.
The gap will only widen under current arrangement.
It's a bit like keeping order in unruly country by keeping a lot of policemen around, which simply isn't sustainable. The sustainable thing to do is to reform the unruly culture. In this case, have rigorous enforcement of security in abstractions to avoid the widening gap. This is extremely costly, but the only way to avoid the security deficit runoff when facing physical shortage to cope otherwise.
But theater releases and TV broadcast? What's the point? Most companies from what I've seen want all the dollars right this second and to hell with the future. So why is this the one instance where they decide that absurdly long delays are useful? I just don't get it.
Netflix and anime licensors can afford to simulcast because they're for the mostly a hegemony, not immense, fragmented market.
Not so with generic TV, two things happen there:
1. You have hundreds of thousands businesses who air whatever they could afford for that given year and they can budget. And they simply couldn't afford the series once it got big, they didn't have syndication agreement when it was pre-boom and cheap etc.
2. Retardation on part of seller comparable to DVD regions. Suppose 1. didn't happen, the rights owner is outright *dick* who thought it would hurt their DVD sales in that area and whatnot.
I think this is syndication network complaining that content they buy is "outdated" because of hopelessly outdated market segmentation stratagems (NZ and AU getting especially short end of the stick).
Anyone relevant moved to simulcast, these people are dinosaurs.
The problem is real video has lots of noise it and things that look like noise don't compress well.
Depends on material. Anime/Cartoon animation is very little noise in and itself (its just outlines and color filled surfaces). You can also strip noise quite easily, but denoise filters are not perfect (they misidentify detail as noise a bit, too). No, noise in audio/video isn't the major problem. It's simply the sheer amount of information you have there even if you clear any noise you might have.
Video compression, afaik, is a time/space tradeoff problem.
Duh. Any compression is in general, but it's a more complex than that. For example, you can speed up compression by using very large dictionaries, so it becomes TMTO-in-TMTO (by using more memory at compression time, you reduce compression time).
Basically you would have a web video (or whatever) have frame N depend on the set of frames 0..N-1. Of course, if your not careful you start wasting bits to handle all the possible offsets. This would effectively take a lot of bandwidth to start up but less as time went on.
Actually very large lookback windows are used, in spite of the diminishing returns. With 64kb lookback (gzip), you get say 50% ratio, with 64MB lookback (lzma), you get 70% ratio and so on.
This level of compression translates to AI vision.
While retina and optic nerve run roughly at 8Mbits (retina already does a lot of pre-processing), visual cortex reduces this to 10kbit/s per eye and feeds it further into brain. Which is the same ballpark claimed by this kook.
It's obviously possible with *heavy* post processing to make very high representation of objects perceived. To replay, you need to hallucinate it back (akin to dreams). Problem is you need something as good as humans visual cortex, while modern ML vision is on the level of a fruit fly. Also, the fidelite would be... interesting to say the least, as the hallucinated playback would heavily reuse "stage props", just as human brain does.
[1] Anderson, C.H. et al. (2005) Directed visual attention and the dynamic control of information flow. In Neurobiology of Attention (Itti, L. et al., eds),
[2] Norretranders, T. (1998) The User Illusion, Viking
> Information theory stablishes what is really possible
Actually, information theory states the opposite. Determining entropy of unknown source is an intractable problem, and you can't generally state amount of entropy for piece of data unless you're certain it's a quantum pink noise beforehand, all we know that the better the compressor, the closer you get. That's why one time pads use truly random codebooks, not a PRNG (PRNG has very little entropy - that of PRNG seed).
While extremely important as an output filter, just an entropy encoder doesn't compression make.
It is merely time consuming to remove Denuvo (and VMProtect, for that matter) "correctly". That is, find all the jump targets and magic constants computed by VMized code, and patch those into the exe. But there's also a trivial route - emulate exactly what the VM code expects (mainly cpuid and bunch of direct windows syscalls), ie keep the exe untouched. The thing is, warez scene won't accept emu based emu cracks (there was even huge drama about things steamapi.dll shims).
There are currenly at least 3 emulators for denuvo (famously, 3DM crack for GTA was one, and the first nuked CPY crack releases were another). Emu works universally after one captures trace from a licensed copy, but it is pretty invasive to do efficiently (needs a kernel driver and VMX to emulate cpuids).
Just like in the days of securom, somebody may release their emu tool easy enough for average to use in the end, neutering the protection for a while, but for now, doing "proper" denuvo cracks is still reasonably easy (if daunting) to warrant going in that direction.
Aim of taxation is not just (to) collect revenues... but to increase salaries of teachers and police
Is related to robot tax in *any* way? Does he mean since there will be robots, police and teachers etc will be no longer necessary, thus government expenses will be vastly lower and ensuing gap in income tax will be a non-issue? Or police and teachers will be robots too, so it all cancels out? I just have grave difficulty connecting "we need teachers" (?) and "this is why we must not tax robots" in logically coherent manner.
This is because both titans use their customers as ammution, and netflix simply got more. If comcast depeers Netflix
No problem; They can profile their customers and roll the rate-limits out gradually in concert with other providers, concentrating on customers outside of DSL range first. MOST cable internet users don't have a reasonable alternative.
The problem with cat and mouse like this (and when titans clash) is that the effect of throttling netflix merely doesn't affect netflix. You have to throttle all - Google, Amazon and Microsoft ASes NetFlix routinely uses for fronting (they do that both defensively, mostly in US, and offensively, often in europe). Whereas land carriers would have to amass unfathomable cooperation between themselves to pull off the same effect.
Throttling netflix basically means making dozen of mainstream internet services unusuable at this point, because yes, netflix can afford it. People would resort to shitty DSL instead of cable, if AT&T jumped at the opportunity of comcast fucking shit up like this.
tl;dr: Content provider monopolies cooperate much better than last-mile monopolies, in practice.
Btw, posts above me talk about Sugarscape. One interesting thing about sugarscape is that no matter how complex the social rules, you always end up with pereto distribution (popularly known as rich get richer, poor stay the same at best, get poorer at worst).
Fancy rules can only slightly vary the skew of the curve, because winner-takes-all and win-lose point accumulation law is universal - as long you design the system as darwinist and competetive that is.
people will be incentivized to switch to their carrier's streaming service
No, people will be incentivized to seek less shitty carrier all that more and netflix will throw their weight as a counter.
This is because both titans use their customers as ammution, and netflix simply got more. If comcast depeers Netflix (and amazon, for that matter), too many people who *do* have a choice of ISP will switch away from comcast at this point making such a step extremely risk for comcast.
Let me repeat some grade school set theory:
The true signal is made of 2 4 6 components. Signal A is 1 2 3 4 6 and signal B is 2 3 4 5 6. The common "pirate" set you get by "substracting" is 2 3 4 6. The problem is, 3 now identifies you as a set union. This scheme is run on *hundreds of millions of bits*, and can easily identify unique copies and arbitrary combinations of copies to very high degree. Not only the result remains watermarked, but you can determine the precise set intersections.
You're not trying to average away the distortions, you're trying to find the union so you can jam the signal. I don't have to be able to decrypt your cell phone to jam the frequency band.
The opposite. Think of analog TV with very poor reception - despite *high amounts* of noise (which is what you argue with jamming), you can still make out the picture. This way, you can still read the watermark.
You have to realize these sort of setups are used to identify cinema the CAM rip was made in. Given the amount of signal, yet little bandwidth, it can deal with tremendenous amounts of noise.
Traitor tracing could be made legally binding. Considering the ridiculous lengths copyright monopolies go into, this could work pretty well.
then all a pirate needs is a couple of accounts to compare the streams and identify the watermark.
Heavy duty traitor tracing systems are far more sophisticated than that. Watermarks are low frequency and spread spectrum (both resolution and temporal). Meaning each receiver gets their own, dedicated encoded stream. The tracing system will simply identify *all* the accounts used to combine the signal. In layman terms, its like mixing signals of different frequency - you can separate those out again if you know what to look for, though in practice fancy number/coding theory methods are used for reasons below.
If you attempt to extract common component, from a small number of signals, you *still* can identify the sources from the supposedly "common" signal you get, because what you get actually isn't a baseline, you'll still include all the unique marks of all the accounts they had in common. This is possible because despite the low bandwidth, the steganographic bandwidth as a whole is fairly high (millions of bits per minute), and you need to interpose just few to get a match.
Fair, if cynic point. And people will swallow "UBI will be welfare for the rich! Outrageous! People who truly need help will not receive it! Having 1 bureaucrat per 20 people deciding who gets welfare and who not is the only fair way" - n their knee-jerk outrage - instead of thinking through more realistic consequences of UBI.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to advertise (seriously, keep it to HN), would you mind at least telling us what is the difference from the P2P vpns which work perfectly fine, ie tinc and cjdns?
This is a good interim solution, but not a long term one, the trouble is aggregation. Incubent infrastructure is simply too old and t here's no incentive for them to upgrade it (especialy if they're forced to give it up to competition), so they'd end up overselling.
Most of the countries with developed broadband market went through this 10 years ago, now most of the market happens with a ISPs simply having their own last mile - which is roughly the time when data caps went away, as last mile bandwidth became ubiquitous.
Don't cherry pick demographic.
Ask her to delete her snapchat and instagram.
Monopolies are frequently granted on the grounds to serve rural areas, but the reality is that WISP works great and is most cost-effective as a last mile in the country. However In urban settlements, airwaves, especially the narrow free spectrum, don't have the bandwidth. You need "serious of tubes" in there if you're serious about bandwidth.
Current US cableco monopoly blocks this with regulatory capture, both rural and urban. There are are of course some anecdotes signaling cracks in that stalemate (google fiber, municipal fiber). The issue is that rest of the world did all this 15-20 years ago. Paradoxically often because they had incubent monopolies of their own blocking expansion of cheap dialup and DSL, while the US enjoyed relatively sane dialup and DSL market in the 90s - FTC, in spite of all its faults, did far better job back then than it does now.
Bottom line is that basically nobody in the world cares bout "net neutrality", it's purely political US fabrication born out of ignorance. ISPs can have "fast lanes" however they deem fit, and they overwhelmingly do as a routine matter of peering agreements. But if their peering is more shit than the next guy's, people simply switch ISPs, because majority of em have viable alternatives because the market isn't completely cornered.
I see. I take it that if you don't like expensive comcast internet (or facebook, for that matter), you're free to use newspapers, television and meeting with people in person. Definitely less walled gardens there.
I don't believe stratification towards inferior solutions is necessarily the answer. Note that those alternatives need not be inferior in pure technical terms (gnu social is awesome), but with social networks, there's usually inferiority in terms of metcalfe's law.
Apples and oranges.
What choices do you have to stay in touch with friends and family online? Honestly. Either you be the weird guy, or use facebook.
What choices do you have for fulltext search? Duckduckgo? Get real.
Compared to those monopolies (which are far more ingrained, because they have a true technological and first to market edge), AT&T and Comcast are fairly banal thing to fix as stuff they do, basically anyone can do with no complex know-how. Can happen either through competetive market (think ISPs in places like india or romania) which emerges with wild-west Laissez-faire approach, or *effectively* regulated state granted monopolies, which favors consumers (korea or even china).
Worst you can do is grant monopoly, and then not regulating it, which is pretty much what FCC is doing since Bell times. Just like break up of bell, the mission of FCC is to give de jure appearances, while making sure not to change anything about the de-facto state of affairs.
> transmitting and storing those ideas is. > github and Sourceforge pay for their servers > then we might be able to have a discussion about truly free information.
You mean cost of bandwidth, not cost of information as such. Typically, whoever makes-a-copy-pays-for-bandwidth are the rational schemes, not something ridiculously overpriced like a datacenter (those are expensive, though great for gatekeeping of artificial scarcity schemes).
The cost of making a copy of popular information is trivial - seeding 1:1 ratio, and your local disk storage. And because these are so trivial, people torrent stuff, to reach rational cost. It could be posited that trying to push artificial scarcity in age of near-free bandwidth is going contrary to this - a bit akin to appealing to Marxism - it's a great idea in theory, in practice market forces disagree.
I just find it amusing that inherent nature of information is pretty much marxist, and capitalism has a very tough time coping with that reality, just like marxism in the material world had a problem with capitalism inherent to markets.
> Its really hard to imagine what such a world would look like though or how humans would adapt to it, since none of us have ever seen such a thing
Free software.
> he digital world will always, at some level, be based upon real world computers built out of real world parts and sucking up real world energy to operate.)
Realistically, information has only value for as long it remains secret. Information-theoretic scarcity exists only for as long till the first copy is auctioned off (or stolen) and published. After that, theres no scarcity for copies, and thus no value.
The question is, why the nature of information is ignored in digital world and we have this ridiculous intellectual property nonsense. Why do we have artificial notion that *copies* have value, but the act of creating original content, where the intrinsic value truly lies, is left largely unprotected?
Is it because some sort of "human nature", an irrational Nietzschean "will to power", just for the sake of it? Or is artificial scarcity in the digital realm just a cultural meme carried over from the physical world, in "you wouldn't download a car" sense?
Depends, is it really artificial? In terms of engineering, there's can be a good reason for the capacity to be capped when using either slightly recycled, or lower grade cells, to illustrate:
75kw battery pack can withstand 500 cycles, but if you charge it only to 80% (past that you must either slow-charge, or have really fancy chemistry), you can turn that into 800 cycles - and the battery is effectively 60kwh.
Now in this case you can indeed go over the 80% cap, but it will eat up battery life more rapidly if it were always used like that, hence why it makes sense to do that only in extraordinary situations.
Of course if they make the batteries all the same AND don't provide lifetime battery warranties, ie this is just software block, the company should be dragged through the mud for this indeed, as giving access to full charge is exactly zero cost for them.
Apple ... just works. It makes calls and runs popular apps. And nothing else.
Funny how history repeats itself - Android is the new IBM PCs, while early iphone was the Apple II - last apple open to tinkering, if in somewhat awkward fashion.
In short, Android displaced iPhone in the tinkerer market niche, and the decline of jailbreaking strongly correlates with android eating up Apple's market. The article, oddly, doesn't make any mention of this.
Programming gets easier with increasing abstraction, thus allowing the engineering portion to grow, but the haphazard, ever increasing abstraction also grows the attack surface - and you can't abstract vulnerabilities away as you can abstract away simple programming tasks. To find exploits in a system, you first need to *know* *most* the abstractions in and out in the first place.
Meaning abstraction makes security harder as there will be proportionally less people understanding the system compared to all participants in the system.
The gap will only widen under current arrangement.
It's a bit like keeping order in unruly country by keeping a lot of policemen around, which simply isn't sustainable. The sustainable thing to do is to reform the unruly culture. In this case, have rigorous enforcement of security in abstractions to avoid the widening gap. This is extremely costly, but the only way to avoid the security deficit runoff when facing physical shortage to cope otherwise.
But theater releases and TV broadcast? What's the point? Most companies from what I've seen want all the dollars right this second and to hell with the future. So why is this the one instance where they decide that absurdly long delays are useful? I just don't get it.
Netflix and anime licensors can afford to simulcast because they're for the mostly a hegemony, not immense, fragmented market.
Not so with generic TV, two things happen there:
2. Retardation on part of seller comparable to DVD regions. Suppose 1. didn't happen, the rights owner is outright *dick* who thought it would hurt their DVD sales in that area and whatnot.
Simulcast.
I think this is syndication network complaining that content they buy is "outdated" because of hopelessly outdated market segmentation stratagems (NZ and AU getting especially short end of the stick).
Anyone relevant moved to simulcast, these people are dinosaurs.
The problem is real video has lots of noise it and things that look like noise don't compress well.
Depends on material. Anime/Cartoon animation is very little noise in and itself (its just outlines and color filled surfaces). You can also strip noise quite easily, but denoise filters are not perfect (they misidentify detail as noise a bit, too). No, noise in audio/video isn't the major problem. It's simply the sheer amount of information you have there even if you clear any noise you might have.
Video compression, afaik, is a time/space tradeoff problem.
Duh. Any compression is in general, but it's a more complex than that. For example, you can speed up compression by using very large dictionaries, so it becomes TMTO-in-TMTO (by using more memory at compression time, you reduce compression time).
Basically you would have a web video (or whatever) have frame N depend on the set of frames 0..N-1. Of course, if your not careful you start wasting bits to handle all the possible offsets. This would effectively take a lot of bandwidth to start up but less as time went on.
Actually very large lookback windows are used, in spite of the diminishing returns. With 64kb lookback (gzip), you get say 50% ratio, with 64MB lookback (lzma), you get 70% ratio and so on.
This level of compression translates to AI vision.
... interesting to say the least, as the hallucinated playback would heavily reuse "stage props", just as human brain does.
While retina and optic nerve run roughly at 8Mbits (retina already does a lot of pre-processing), visual cortex reduces this to 10kbit/s per eye and feeds it further into brain. Which is the same ballpark claimed by this kook.
It's obviously possible with *heavy* post processing to make very high representation of objects perceived. To replay, you need to hallucinate it back (akin to dreams). Problem is you need something as good as humans visual cortex, while modern ML vision is on the level of a fruit fly. Also, the fidelite would be
[1] Anderson, C.H. et al. (2005) Directed visual attention and the dynamic control of information flow. In Neurobiology of Attention (Itti, L. et al., eds),
[2] Norretranders, T. (1998) The User Illusion, Viking
> Information theory stablishes what is really possible
Actually, information theory states the opposite. Determining entropy of unknown source is an intractable problem, and you can't generally state amount of entropy for piece of data unless you're certain it's a quantum pink noise beforehand, all we know that the better the compressor, the closer you get. That's why one time pads use truly random codebooks, not a PRNG (PRNG has very little entropy - that of PRNG seed).
While extremely important as an output filter, just an entropy encoder doesn't compression make.
It is merely time consuming to remove Denuvo (and VMProtect, for that matter) "correctly". That is, find all the jump targets and magic constants computed by VMized code, and patch those into the exe. But there's also a trivial route - emulate exactly what the VM code expects (mainly cpuid and bunch of direct windows syscalls), ie keep the exe untouched. The thing is, warez scene won't accept emu based emu cracks (there was even huge drama about things steamapi.dll shims).
There are currenly at least 3 emulators for denuvo (famously, 3DM crack for GTA was one, and the first nuked CPY crack releases were another). Emu works universally after one captures trace from a licensed copy, but it is pretty invasive to do efficiently (needs a kernel driver and VMX to emulate cpuids).
Just like in the days of securom, somebody may release their emu tool easy enough for average to use in the end, neutering the protection for a while, but for now, doing "proper" denuvo cracks is still reasonably easy (if daunting) to warrant going in that direction.
Is related to robot tax in *any* way? Does he mean since there will be robots, police and teachers etc will be no longer necessary, thus government expenses will be vastly lower and ensuing gap in income tax will be a non-issue? Or police and teachers will be robots too, so it all cancels out? I just have grave difficulty connecting "we need teachers" (?) and "this is why we must not tax robots" in logically coherent manner.
This is because both titans use their customers as ammution, and netflix simply got more. If comcast depeers Netflix
No problem; They can profile their customers and roll the rate-limits out gradually in concert with other providers, concentrating on customers outside of DSL range first. MOST cable internet users don't have a reasonable alternative.
The problem with cat and mouse like this (and when titans clash) is that the effect of throttling netflix merely doesn't affect netflix. You have to throttle all - Google, Amazon and Microsoft ASes NetFlix routinely uses for fronting (they do that both defensively, mostly in US, and offensively, often in europe). Whereas land carriers would have to amass unfathomable cooperation between themselves to pull off the same effect.
Throttling netflix basically means making dozen of mainstream internet services unusuable at this point, because yes, netflix can afford it. People would resort to shitty DSL instead of cable, if AT&T jumped at the opportunity of comcast fucking shit up like this.
tl;dr: Content provider monopolies cooperate much better than last-mile monopolies, in practice.
Btw, posts above me talk about Sugarscape. One interesting thing about sugarscape is that no matter how complex the social rules, you always end up with pereto distribution (popularly known as rich get richer, poor stay the same at best, get poorer at worst).
Fancy rules can only slightly vary the skew of the curve, because winner-takes-all and win-lose point accumulation law is universal - as long you design the system as darwinist and competetive that is.
No, people will be incentivized to seek less shitty carrier all that more and netflix will throw their weight as a counter.
This is because both titans use their customers as ammution, and netflix simply got more. If comcast depeers Netflix (and amazon, for that matter), too many people who *do* have a choice of ISP will switch away from comcast at this point making such a step extremely risk for comcast.
Let me repeat some grade school set theory:
The true signal is made of 2 4 6 components. Signal A is 1 2 3 4 6 and signal B is 2 3 4 5 6. The common "pirate" set you get by "substracting" is 2 3 4 6. The problem is, 3 now identifies you as a set union. This scheme is run on *hundreds of millions of bits*, and can easily identify unique copies and arbitrary combinations of copies to very high degree. Not only the result remains watermarked, but you can determine the precise set intersections.
The opposite. Think of analog TV with very poor reception - despite *high amounts* of noise (which is what you argue with jamming), you can still make out the picture. This way, you can still read the watermark.
You have to realize these sort of setups are used to identify cinema the CAM rip was made in. Given the amount of signal, yet little bandwidth, it can deal with tremendenous amounts of noise.
Heavy duty traitor tracing systems are far more sophisticated than that. Watermarks are low frequency and spread spectrum (both resolution and temporal). Meaning each receiver gets their own, dedicated encoded stream. The tracing system will simply identify *all* the accounts used to combine the signal. In layman terms, its like mixing signals of different frequency - you can separate those out again if you know what to look for, though in practice fancy number/coding theory methods are used for reasons below.
If you attempt to extract common component, from a small number of signals, you *still* can identify the sources from the supposedly "common" signal you get, because what you get actually isn't a baseline, you'll still include all the unique marks of all the accounts they had in common. This is possible because despite the low bandwidth, the steganographic bandwidth as a whole is fairly high (millions of bits per minute), and you need to interpose just few to get a match.
Fair, if cynic point. And people will swallow "UBI will be welfare for the rich! Outrageous! People who truly need help will not receive it! Having 1 bureaucrat per 20 people deciding who gets welfare and who not is the only fair way" - n their knee-jerk outrage - instead of thinking through more realistic consequences of UBI.