Should a business be COMPELLED to accept customers in a non-discriminatory way?
Yes. There. We're done. You could have saved yourself a lot of time and effort constructing a list of straw man arguments.
Now if you want to go further, I'd start by disputing your phrase "COMPELLED to accept customers" No business is COMPELLED to accept customers. However, if a business wants to ACCEPT customers, they don't get to pick and choose based on the owner's biases.
Now I'm just going to skip to the end, because TLDR, it isn't worth picking apart all those individual points.
This law says they are not compelled, and if it is in error, it is likely erring on the side of safety. If there is a choice between freedom or compulsion, I'd go with freedom.
The side of safety? What the fuck? There used to be signs hung up in front of businesses that said *"No Dogs, No Negroes, No Mexicans" That is literally what you are advocating as "freedom." Because Jesus.
*If you were in other parts of the country, you'd see "Jews" instead of Mexicans
I don't really think that would help the military, since they'd be using their own towers with their own *encryption. The signals would still be stepping on each other, since they wouldn't be hooked into the same network of towers coordinating with each other.
*Though they've been flying around drones in war zones with unencrypted feeds
When they were deciding where to build the ITR, the choices were France and Japan. In the spirit of compromise, the ITR was built in France, but headed by someone from Japan.
This was no doubt the first of an endless series of political compromises necessary to get the project moving.
Of course, the F-35 can do close air support, but it does it no better than the A-10, despite costing far, far, more to build, operate, and maintain.
"No better"? Try "much worse" The F-35 is too fast, doesn't carry enough bullets, has less loiter time, and can't carry as many munitions.
There's also huge questions about the F-35's survivability in situations where its stealth means nothing (aka ground attack). This is a particularly critical issue since, as you pointed out, the F-35 is much more expensive.
It doesn't matter how much the USA wants to pivot towards China (and away from shitty a-typical wars), we're still using ground attack craft that were designed as a response to Vietnam because we don't have good replacements.
You are ignorant of the reality of why these private entities are able to thrive. It's *BECAUSE* they don't have to deliver every letter to every house and apartment in the country. They get to just do the high margin stuff.
The joke is on tranquilidad (1994300) . All those private parcel services use the USPS when they need to get a package out to the middle of nowhere. Without the USPS providing universal service, you couldn't send mail to large swaths of the country... unless you hired a courier.
They come into existence one of two ways (AFAIK): 1. State Governments that are desperate for cash will literally sell the road/bridge to a private company, who puts up tolls. 2. State Governments that are desperate for cash will sell the right to build a private toll road/bridge to a private company, always with guarantees that the State won't build another road/bridge within XY miles or something to that effect.
#2 almost always involves the State invoking eminent domain on behalf of private corporations.
They are degrading one service provider because of netflix, that is the very definition of selective
They are not degrading one service provider. They are just not increasing the bandwidth available to one service provider, which is not what people mean when they talk about Net Neutrality and "selective" If Comcast/Verizon/AT&T/TWC picked out Netflix traffic and throttled it, that would be the type of "selective" action we're discussing.
The problem isn't Netflix specifically, it's that the free peering agreements between Cogent and [everyone else] depend on equal amounts of traffic being exchanged. The only reason Netflix is involved is because they are the ones directly responsible for the significant imbalances in traffic flowing through the peering points.
There are other posts showing previous occasions where Cogent got into fights over peering. If it'll help you understand the situation better, just imagine that Netflix never existed and that Cogent still had an imbalance in the traffic going through their peering points.
That is no where near true, and shows you did not read the article.
I think you read the article, but didn't understand what was in front of you.
1. Netflix pays Cogent to be its ISP. 2. Cogent is a Tier 1 ISP, this means that they don't pay for transit or peering bandwidth. 3. Netflix traffic keeps increasing in leaps and bounds. 4. This is a problem for Cogent's peers, because they are receiving more (Netflix) traffic from Cogent than they are sending. 5. Because of 4, Comcast/Verizon/AT&T/TimeWarner have refused to increase peering bandwidth with Cogent unless they get paid for it. 6. Because of 5, all data through those peering points are subject to lag and dropped packets.
The degradation isn't selective, which is why the GP is correct that it isn't a Net Neutrality issue.
This is not different from a stupid christian priest who give his opinion about a a society matter, they only represent themeslves.
Some countries have state religions. The UAE is one of those countries. AFAIK, all the countries with state religions have a leading religious authority that issues opinions and interpretations on religious matters. Hence the "Fatwa committee under the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment"
It's no different than opinions issued under the auspices of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel or the Archbishop of Canterbury (head of the Church of England, under the Monarch). This should make for some light reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion#Current_state_religions
They probably understand that Amazon Coins are just gift cards though. I don't see the problem.
They're intentionally mooching off the lite/doge/bitcoin name recognition. Someone in marketing: People have heard about this coin stuff, so let's roll out something with "coin" in the name!
Federal prosecutors have filed a criminal complaint against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents about top-secret surveillance programs, and the United States has asked Hong Kong to detain him on a provisional arrest warrant, according to U.S. officials.
Snowden was charged with theft, âoeunauthorized communication of national defense informationâ and âoewillful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person,â according to the complaint. The last two charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.
The Snowden leaks started out with things the public actually needed to know. The NSA spying on Americans is a gross overstep of the organization's charter. Spying on friendly nation's leaders is an embarrassment. This, however, seems to me like them doing their job.
What's interesting is that the center piece of this/. summary was a throwaway paragraph at the end of a long article. It added nothing at all to the story.
It's curious how The Guardian and Glenn Greenwald aren't writing the stories that people complain about as disclosing too much. Instead it's the NY Times and Laura Poitras, Snowden's other confidant.
It seems like there are different agendas at play here and the NY Times is willing to disclose sources and methods where others are not.
Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.
Even the updates to/. Classic (D1/D2) have stripped away the detailed options we used to have to format/. to our personal preferences.
For example: I can no longer find the options for adjusting post length or the # of posts per page. The only thing I can still adjust is the size of the comment box. What's up with that?
But I am puzzled why, in this age of CSS, Slashdot needs to replace the classic look with a new design. Why not different style sheets? Show classic, new, and even other layouts, with the click of a link, whatever people prefer. Produce a half-dozen user-selectable layouts and make everyone happy.
Because the difference between the discussion systems is more than just a style sheet.
D1 (Classic) is old slashdot. It runs fine without javascript. D2 (Sorta Classic) is the current slashdot. It is essentially D1+ Ajax and is is weird without javascript. D3 (Beta) does not work without javascript. Their redirect to "Classic" is actually a redirect to D2.
I like D1 the best When I say "keep classic" I mean "keep D1"
This place indulges people that like to write, and people that don't mind lengthy posts.
Even the updates to/. Classic have been slowly stripping away the detailed options we used to have to format the website to our personal preferences.
For example: I can no longer find the options for adjusting post length or the # of posts per page. The only thing I can still adjust is the size of the comment box. What's up with that?
Am I supposed to go thread to thread in order to see which of my comments have been modded up or down? Is Beta some kind of clean sheet design that ignores everything that/. has ever done? Give me Classic or give me Death.
If a large population likes it the way it is, that is valid feedback. It means don't change.
It's possible that/.'s new overlords have thought of that and don't want the current population anymore. Maybe the format change is a way to push us luddites out. /And whose bright idea was it to strip almost all the Green out of beta?
This is the first design change that has actually made me consider leaving.
Classic is the only thing keeping me in the comments section. The fact that/devs decided to truncate long urls, even for classic Plain Old Text, should have tipped me off that my kind isn't wanted here anymore.
I wonder if civil RICO suits might be brought, as well. B-)
Good luck proving that you have standing to sue. The whole reason the DEA and other law enforcement agencies were doing this is because [CLASSIFIED] meant they [REDACTED].
The Feds staved off lawsuits by terrorism defendants for years with the same tactics.
The idea that 'sucking the oil out of the midwest' is harmful to the economics of the region or the country is incorrect. Cheap oil price is not the best way to benefit from this resource.
"not the best way to benefit" who? Because this is a zero sum game. For every extra penny the oil companies and refiners make, the average American will have to pay more to fill up their gas tank.
Let's be clear: What you're advocating is increased corporate profits and increased consumer prices.
Slashdot Mirror
Should a business be COMPELLED to accept customers in a non-discriminatory way?
Yes.
There. We're done.
You could have saved yourself a lot of time and effort constructing a list of straw man arguments.
Now if you want to go further, I'd start by disputing your phrase "COMPELLED to accept customers"
No business is COMPELLED to accept customers.
However, if a business wants to ACCEPT customers, they don't get to pick and choose based on the owner's biases.
Now I'm just going to skip to the end, because TLDR, it isn't worth picking apart all those individual points.
This law says they are not compelled, and if it is in error, it is likely erring on the side of safety. If there is a choice between freedom or compulsion, I'd go with freedom.
The side of safety? What the fuck?
There used to be signs hung up in front of businesses that said *"No Dogs, No Negroes, No Mexicans"
That is literally what you are advocating as "freedom."
Because Jesus.
*If you were in other parts of the country, you'd see "Jews" instead of Mexicans
I don't really think that would help the military, since they'd be using their own towers with their own *encryption.
The signals would still be stepping on each other, since they wouldn't be hooked into the same network of towers coordinating with each other.
*Though they've been flying around drones in war zones with unencrypted feeds
When they were deciding where to build the ITR, the choices were France and Japan.
In the spirit of compromise, the ITR was built in France, but headed by someone from Japan.
This was no doubt the first of an endless series of political compromises necessary to get the project moving.
Of course, the F-35 can do close air support, but it does it no better than the A-10, despite costing far, far, more to build, operate, and maintain.
"No better"? Try "much worse"
The F-35 is too fast, doesn't carry enough bullets, has less loiter time, and can't carry as many munitions.
There's also huge questions about the F-35's survivability in situations where its stealth means nothing (aka ground attack).
This is a particularly critical issue since, as you pointed out, the F-35 is much more expensive.
It doesn't matter how much the USA wants to pivot towards China (and away from shitty a-typical wars),
we're still using ground attack craft that were designed as a response to Vietnam because we don't have good replacements.
if the kill command requires a password that was created by the user of the device
So you create the password upon first use and then.... you promptly forget it.
Now what?
You are ignorant of the reality of why these private entities are able to thrive. It's *BECAUSE* they don't have to deliver every letter to every house and apartment in the country. They get to just do the high margin stuff.
The joke is on tranquilidad (1994300) .
All those private parcel services use the USPS when they need to get a package out to the middle of nowhere.
Without the USPS providing universal service, you couldn't send mail to large swaths of the country... unless you hired a courier.
Do you pay to drive from one end of a WalMart parking lot to the other? It's private. Why aren't there any tolls?
You should read about private toll roads/bridges.
They come into existence one of two ways (AFAIK):
1. State Governments that are desperate for cash will literally sell the road/bridge to a private company, who puts up tolls.
2. State Governments that are desperate for cash will sell the right to build a private toll road/bridge to a private company,
always with guarantees that the State won't build another road/bridge within XY miles or something to that effect.
#2 almost always involves the State invoking eminent domain on behalf of private corporations.
They are degrading one service provider because of netflix, that is the very definition of selective
They are not degrading one service provider.
They are just not increasing the bandwidth available to one service provider, which is not what people mean when they talk about Net Neutrality and "selective"
If Comcast/Verizon/AT&T/TWC picked out Netflix traffic and throttled it, that would be the type of "selective" action we're discussing.
The problem isn't Netflix specifically, it's that the free peering agreements between Cogent and [everyone else] depend on equal amounts of traffic being exchanged.
The only reason Netflix is involved is because they are the ones directly responsible for the significant imbalances in traffic flowing through the peering points.
There are other posts showing previous occasions where Cogent got into fights over peering.
If it'll help you understand the situation better, just imagine that Netflix never existed and that Cogent still had an imbalance in the traffic going through their peering points.
That is no where near true, and shows you did not read the article.
I think you read the article, but didn't understand what was in front of you.
1. Netflix pays Cogent to be its ISP.
2. Cogent is a Tier 1 ISP, this means that they don't pay for transit or peering bandwidth.
3. Netflix traffic keeps increasing in leaps and bounds.
4. This is a problem for Cogent's peers, because they are receiving more (Netflix) traffic from Cogent than they are sending.
5. Because of 4, Comcast/Verizon/AT&T/TimeWarner have refused to increase peering bandwidth with Cogent unless they get paid for it.
6. Because of 5, all data through those peering points are subject to lag and dropped packets.
The degradation isn't selective, which is why the GP is correct that it isn't a Net Neutrality issue.
This is not different from a stupid christian priest who give his opinion about a a society matter, they only represent themeslves.
Some countries have state religions. The UAE is one of those countries.
AFAIK, all the countries with state religions have a leading religious authority that issues opinions and interpretations on religious matters.
Hence the "Fatwa committee under the General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment"
It's no different than opinions issued under the auspices of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel or the Archbishop of Canterbury (head of the Church of England, under the Monarch).
This should make for some light reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_religion#Current_state_religions
They probably understand that Amazon Coins are just gift cards though. I don't see the problem.
They're intentionally mooching off the lite/doge/bitcoin name recognition.
Someone in marketing: People have heard about this coin stuff, so let's roll out something with "coin" in the name!
Keep your beta.
Just don't take away my Classic.
D1 for life.
there's probably been a warrant issued too,
No probably about it.
This was the first hit on google
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-charges-snowden-with-espionage/2013/06/21/507497d8-dab1-11e2-a016-92547bf094cc_story.html
2013/06/21
Federal prosecutors have filed a criminal complaint against Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of documents about top-secret surveillance programs, and the United States has asked Hong Kong to detain him on a provisional arrest warrant, according to U.S. officials.
Snowden was charged with theft, âoeunauthorized communication of national defense informationâ and âoewillful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person,â according to the complaint. The last two charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act.
The Snowden leaks started out with things the public actually needed to know. The NSA spying on Americans is a gross overstep of the organization's charter. Spying on friendly nation's leaders is an embarrassment. This, however, seems to me like them doing their job.
Here's the actual article being quoted from
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/us/eavesdropping-ensnared-american-law-firm.html
What's interesting is that the center piece of this /. summary was a throwaway paragraph at the end of a long article.
It added nothing at all to the story.
It's curious how The Guardian and Glenn Greenwald aren't writing the stories that people complain about as disclosing too much.
Instead it's the NY Times and Laura Poitras, Snowden's other confidant.
It seems like there are different agendas at play here and the NY Times is willing to disclose sources and methods where others are not.
http://www.diceholdingsinc.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=211152&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1896508
Feb. 4, 2014
Recent Developments
Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.
Be seeing you.
Even the updates to /. Classic (D1/D2) have stripped away the detailed options we used to have to format /. to our personal preferences.
For example: I can no longer find the options for adjusting post length or the # of posts per page.
The only thing I can still adjust is the size of the comment box. What's up with that?
Am I nuts? Check it out yourself.
https://slashdot.org/prefs.pl
But I am puzzled why, in this age of CSS, Slashdot needs to replace the classic look with a new design. Why not different style sheets? Show classic, new, and even other layouts, with the click of a link, whatever people prefer. Produce a half-dozen user-selectable layouts and make everyone happy.
Because the difference between the discussion systems is more than just a style sheet.
D1 (Classic) is old slashdot. It runs fine without javascript.
D2 (Sorta Classic) is the current slashdot. It is essentially D1+ Ajax and is is weird without javascript.
D3 (Beta) does not work without javascript. Their redirect to "Classic" is actually a redirect to D2.
I like D1 the best
When I say "keep classic" I mean "keep D1"
This place indulges people that like to write, and people that don't mind lengthy posts.
Even the updates to /. Classic have been slowly stripping away the detailed options we used to have to format the website to our personal preferences.
For example: I can no longer find the options for adjusting post length or the # of posts per page.
The only thing I can still adjust is the size of the comment box. What's up with that?
Am I nuts? Check it out yourself.
https://slashdot.org/prefs.pl
A long time ago, Slashdot hid all the links to http://slashdot.org/~TubeSteak/comments (even from the classic users)
Beta just transparently gives you the http://slashdot.org/~TubeSteak/ version even if you include "comments" in the link.
Am I supposed to go thread to thread in order to see which of my comments have been modded up or down? /. has ever done?
Is Beta some kind of clean sheet design that ignores everything that
Give me Classic or give me Death.
You must have some weird kind of Stockholm Syndrome to be linking the official thread as beta.slashdot.org
Just say no to beta: http://slashdot.org/~slashdotblog/journal/634763
/and no to shortened urls: http://slashdot.org/~slashdotb...
You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.
I will still thank you for your effort, because it shows you care.
If a large population likes it the way it is, that is valid feedback. It means don't change.
It's possible that /.'s new overlords have thought of that and don't want the current population anymore.
Maybe the format change is a way to push us luddites out.
/And whose bright idea was it to strip almost all the Green out of beta?
This is the first design change that has actually made me consider leaving.
Classic is the only thing keeping me in the comments section. /devs decided to truncate long urls, even for classic Plain Old Text, should have tipped me off that my kind isn't wanted here anymore.
The fact that
I wonder if civil RICO suits might be brought, as well. B-)
Good luck proving that you have standing to sue.
The whole reason the DEA and other law enforcement agencies were doing this is because [CLASSIFIED] meant they [REDACTED].
The Feds staved off lawsuits by terrorism defendants for years with the same tactics.
The idea that 'sucking the oil out of the midwest' is harmful to the economics of the region or the country is incorrect. Cheap oil price is not the best way to benefit from this resource.
"not the best way to benefit" who?
Because this is a zero sum game.
For every extra penny the oil companies and refiners make, the average American will have to pay more to fill up their gas tank.
Let's be clear: What you're advocating is increased corporate profits and increased consumer prices.