Hitler was appointed Chancellor (as is/was the custom) by the president (Hindenburg) as a result of political pressure.
I'm not disagreeing with you that things like this camera system can and would be abused by someone, even it's not the authorities who originally have it installed, but please don't use blatantly incorrect facts to justify your arguments.
I guess the problem for me is that I'm surrounded by Beck fans who also identify themselves with the Tea Party. Beck may not be endorsed by the Tea Party, but he (as a guy who just orchestrated a DC rally with hundreds of thousands of attendees -- by his count) definitely lends the Tea Party his own endorsement, so it tends to confuse the issue.
I definitely have no problem with a Ron Paul-led Tea Party, which is how it started, as I understand it. I guess the real problem is just that the crazies and the extreme are usually the most vocal, to the detriment of all of the rest of us who are concerned, but too busy with our own lives to devote a large amount of time to politics.
No single group should ever presume to claim special ownership of the founding fathers or the Constitution they wrought with such skill and ingenuity. Those lofty figures, along with the seminal document they brought forth, form a sacred part of our common heritage as Americans. They should be used for the richness and diversity of their arguments, not tampered with for partisan purposes. The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl once famously asserted that history was an argument without an end. Our contentious founders, who could agree on little else, would certainly have agreed on that.
(I apologize for any typos in there... for some reason Chrome isn't letting me paste into the comment for on slashdot, so I had to type the whole thing out... anyone else having this problem?)
The problem is the discrepancy between what the Tea Party claims as its official beliefs (small government, less taxes) and what the Tea Party actually believes (Obama is a Socialist Marxist fascist dictator who worships Hitler and Allah and wants to take all the rich people's money away and give it to all the poor people and sell us all out to the world government).
I am in agreement with the stated goals of the Tea Party, but any group that has Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin as its unofficial spokespeople is not a group I would ever want to associate with. It makes it hard to know if I can take a story like the one reported in TFA seriously, since I heard Glenn Beck talking about it this morning on the radio. Given his reporting on other things (for example, the Fannie Mae outlet patent... Google that if you don't know what I'm talking about), it's obvious you can't trust anything he says. But if he reports on something that is genuinely scary, I'm now instantly predisposed to downplay its significance.
His fans will unquestioningly listen to everything he says, and his enemies will unquestioningly disagree with anything he says, which means that all of his lies and half-truths will be wrongly accepted by too many people, while the few things he gets right will be ignored by too many.
Can we have a Tea Party that isn't based on outrage and anger? A moderate Tea Party? People who don't like government spending, but who would also attend Jon Stewart's "Restoring Sanity" rally?
This would be true if (and only if) the whole point of Diaspora wasn't to improve the security of your data
Which would be a valid complaint if the "launch" wasn't an alpha, with security bugs admitted in the launch announcements. The whole point to doing an alpha release is to find bugs, and it's marked as alpha so that the people who use it know not to use it only as a preview and a way to find and report bugs, not to use it for anything important at all, much less critical.
Anyone who considers privacy important shouldn't be using an alpha product at all, or at least shouldn't use it to share information they wouldn't mind sharing with the whole world.
I'm not aware of any Blu-Ray movies that require you to have an internet connection to watch them, and I'm pretty sure there aren't any... In fact, some early Blu-Ray players (possibly some current ones, I don't really know for sure) didn't even have Ethernet or Wi-Fi, since it wasn't mandated by the Blu-Ray specifications like it was with HD-DVD.
That's not to say that Blu-Ray doesn't have some seriously crappy DRM headaches beyond what DVD had, but I'm pretty sure requiring an internet connection for the movie itself isn't one of them.
As I understand it, the real villain is satellite TV when it comes to compression. I don't have the HD cable subscription but I do get the ClearQAM channels, both directly on my TV and recorded through my Myth box, and those are all great on my 60" TV. But getting the HD subscription channels may be a different story, since there are so many more of those.
This is a total nitpick, and it's more of a complaint about general usage than what you specifically said, since it's basically the commonly accepted way to talk about it, but I can't stand referring to downloaded media as "digital".
Ever since audio cassette tapes and VHS died out, we've pretty much been a society of exclusively digital media. CDs and Laserdiscs were "pure digital" long before we could download songs and movies from the internet.
I fell that way too, but the younger generations seem to not care if it is in a terrible looking format that is fuzzy and messy.
I guess it depends on how young you're talking about, but anyone old enough to spend the money on a proper-sized TV is going to care. Anyone who cares about sports is going to care. Anyone who sits down in a dark room to actually watch a movie is going to care. Heck, even my wife, who pretty much hates technology for the sake of technology, recognized (back when we only had a 27" CRT) that it would be better to get a widescreen copy of "Pride and Prejudice" to replace her "fullscreen" copy. Then, the very night we bought our new large LCD TV, she was talking about buying the same movie on Blu-Ray.
I think the problem with "the kids today" is that they spend so much time consuming media on the go, and it's as much of an iPhone/iPod effect as it is a YouTube effect. But even the rascally youth of today, when they take the time to watch a movie they really care about, or a big game, they will appreciate getting the best experience that's available to them, as long as it's within their means (if they even care about what they can afford).
I'm repeating something I said above, but I think there are a couple of things that will keep Blu-Ray relevant:
1) People want to own a copy of their favorite shows. They don't want to "rent" them from iTunes or Amazon, or to depend on NetFlix or Hulu to always keep them available. I know that with progress in licensing agreements this will hopefully become less of a problem in the future, but for now, the progress is very slow. Also, not everyone wants to have an account with NetFlix, or with iTunes. Especially since iTunes only applies to people with Apple hardware, and Apple's living room hardware (AppleTV) has so far failed to take off in a meaningful way.
2) Streaming video quality is severely lacking. iTunes and NetFlix only serve up HD content in 720p resolution. Maybe it's just me, or my Blu-Ray player (Panasonic), but every time I try to watch an HD NetFlix stream, the initial bandwidth check shows a full-quality connection, but within 5 seconds, the video chokes, the player buffers, starts, playing and chokes again several times, then eventually continues on at a much lower quality level, but still with the HD resolution, which is compressed so badly it looks horrible, and it makes me wish I had the option to just use an SD stream for the same movie, since SD streams for other movies look much better.
Obviously the streaming quality issues will get better over time, since our internet speeds will continue to get better, but a large number of Americans don't have quality broadband service at all. For those people, streaming isn't even an option. Hopefully NetFlix continues to iron out its agreements with the movie studios, but even if they do there aren't really any alternatives to NetFlix for the same type of service, so hopefully they also get some competition in the streaming movie subscription world.
I'm sure that eventually streaming video will overtake Blu-Ray, but for the next several years at least, the disc format is far from dead and still has a bright future.
I just purchased my first HDTV and Blu-Ray player a couple of months ago, and I had always thought that Blu-Ray wouldn't stick around long. Now I feel differently. While streaming video à la NetFlix is convenient, the quality is just not there. There's no 5.1 audio from NetFlix, for example, and the video quality depends way too much on the quality of the internet connection. I have decent quality cable internet service, but my Blu-Ray player still chokes on HD NetFlix streams, leaving me with an HD resolution video that's compressed so badly that its quality pales in comparison to SD streams.
A lot of the USA has much worse internet service than I have. I know that things will continue to get better on that front, but I think it will be quite a while before streaming media has enough quality for enough people to make them want to abandon the security and reliability of physical media.
Also, The streaming model works fine for shows that you'll only care about watching once, or for discovering new shows that you wouldn't otherwise take the effort to buy/rent the disc for, but I think people are more inclined to buy movies that they really like. If you're a huge Napoleon Dynamite fan, or if your daughter loves a certain Disney princess movie, you're not going to want to pay $3 to "rent" the movie every time you want to see it (or see a part of it), and you don't want to depend on Netflix or Hulu, since their streaming catalogs are very limited, and some shows come and go.
As I understand it, the permits aren't normally granted until just before the event anyway, no matter how far in advance you start setting it up. By the time you've jumped through the other hoops, the actual permit is more of a formality. It was the same way for Beck's rally.
Just because he offers the "Glenn Beck University" to people who pony up to join his fan club doesn't mean he is a Dr. in any sense of the word.
Glenn Beck puts forward some good concepts, like truth, integrity, hard work, and believing in America. Unfortunately, he is also a liar and a hypocrite who uses most of the immoral smear tactics that he accuses his enemies of using.
I don't read HuffPo or Media Matters, and I don't watch the Daily Show or the Colbert Report. I actually listen to Beck's radio show so that I know what appalling stuff he's saying. Occasionally I see parts of his TV show (although I really don't like having his face on display in my house), and I'm usually pretty shocked at what he gets away with saying.
I listened to his astonishment at what a racist Shirley Sherrod is, and how no human should treat people like she was treating those poor white farmers, then for two weeks after that, he and his buddies talked about how she should thank him for defending her, and how ungrateful she was, while he rode his high horse all over TV claiming that he "happens to believe that context matters".
Have you ever watched his show on Net Neutrality? He doesn't actually talk about Net Neutrality, he strings together a bunch of "Marxist" plots with little to no basis in reality, and says they're what Net Neutrality is all about.
A few weeks ago I was flipping through channels and saw him talk about a patent that Fannie Mae supposedly has for an outlet cover that can only be removed with a special tool, and how that's a part of the cap & trade agenda and this progressive administration wants to put them in your house. I literally felt dumber for having seen it, because it makes so little sense in the real world -- but that was part of how he provokes outrage: "Can you believe they're trying to do this?" Then, after doing further research, I found out that patent expired in 2007 and was never renewed. Also, it was developed by an in-house electrician based on work he had done to protect the computers in the offices of Fannie Mae. The patent makes no mention whatsoever of residential applications.
Your Doctor is a quack. Better get a second opinion (and not from someone educated by Glenn Beck University), before he gets you seriously sick. We'd probably all be better off with Bovine University.
Aside from Wii Play and Wii Sports Resort, we have only bought 2 games for our Wii within the past year. But my kids would play them all day long if we let them.
Just because the number of games being sold isn't huge doesn't mean that Wii's aren't getting used. It's just that there is a ton of absolute crap games, but there are still quite a few very good games.
That's a good point. I had a worse experience and waited longer at my longer Comcast office a few weeks ago than I did at the DMV when I renewed my driver's license. And when I paid a speeding ticket at the local courthouse, everything went perfectly smoothly with no wait at all.
Not only are there few choices for ISPs (the only non-wireless ISP in my area is the one that's known for throttling Bittorrent and VoIP traffic), but the question doesn't even make sense. Nobody is arguing that the government should be everyone's ISP, so the question is completely inappropriate and misleading to begin with.
The government's role in Net Neutrality is to require ISPs to not block or degrade access to specific content sources. It's just basic ground rules, not a pile of regulation akin to the tax code.
It's amazing how many different arguments people use against Net Neutrality, to the point where the arguments start to contradict each other:
* The Internet has never been neutral
* No ISP has ever violated Net Neutrality
* The government already has the authority to enforce Net Neutrality without new regulation
* The Internet will DIE if Net Neutrality is enforced!
and my favorite:
* Socialists/Communists/Maoists/Marxists/Nazis/Fascists are the ones who want to start Net Neutrality!
This article is just more of the same, poorly thought out reasons to argue against a good thing for the sake of political posturing.
It's a fair question, but really the point of Net Neutrality rules is to preserve the way it works now and prevent ISPs from being able to start discriminating against content sources* they don't like, content types* they don't like, or user's devices* they don't like.
* Provided these things are not illegal to begin with
There used to be an astroturf website called handsoff.org which opposed Net Neutrality. The last time I went there (it seems to be offline now), all of the headlines on the site seemed to royally contradict each other: "The internet has never been neutral", "The government already has enough authority to keep the internet neutral", "ISPs have never been non-neutral, and they won't in the future", "If Net Neutrality gets passed, the Internet will die!"
It's all so much grasping straws. They couldn't pick the strongest argument and build a coherent case around that, they had to throw everything out, even if it directly contradicted itself, and see what sticks. That's a good sign that you don't want to side with those people.
HAS Comcast said that? Or Verizon? Or Cox? Or Time Warner?
What, other than your paranoid fantasies makes you think that they would?
Why should we establish YET ANOTHER government bureaucracy with STILL MORE power over us to prevent your fantasies from becoming reality?
The CEO of AT&T said a few years ago that companies like Google were were getting a free ride by not paying them when AT&T's customers used Google, and that he intended to find a way to make Google pay for that (in spite of the fact that Google pays its own bills for internet access, and Google's AT&T customers are the ones paying AT&T to access Google). Comcast has caused issues with BitTorrent and (non-Comcast) VoIP.
Most of the arguments I've heard against Net Neutrality are paranoid fantasies (the government is going to take over the Internet and censor everything!). The truth is, Net Neutrality is about a few basic ground rules (which make perfect sense given the government's involvement with the development of the internet), not about oppressive complicated regulation.
It's not about making sure that nobody gets ahead by building up their own resources, it's about making sure the ISPs can't give give some content providers preferential treatment (meaning they're not artificially slowed down) just because they paid the extortion money that others didn't, or just because they have special arrangements or partnerships.
I would think that Fox News & friends should be concerned about this, seeing as how Comcast just bought NBC (and thus, MSNBC). In my neighborhood, Comcast is the only option for non-wireless broadband, which means that without Net Neutrality they could potentially block or severely degrade my access to foxnews.com or glennbeck.com if they wanted to, and I wouldn't have any competitors to turn to or legal recourse. They've already been caught causing problems for BitTorrent traffic and (competitor's) VoIP traffic.
How about setting the precedent that the government can?
First it will be FCC's "Net neutrality", then it will be a mandatory proprietary iCHIP for parental controls in every ethernet adapter.
Based on what information? This sounds an awful lot like the "information" Glenn Beck is spewing. Just in case that is where you get your "facts," you should know that when Glenn Beck did his show about Net Neutrality, everything that he described as being part of Net Neutrality actually has nothing to do with it. He didn't cover what it actually is, he just listed a bunch of "Marxist" stuff and falsely claimed that that's what Net Neutrality is.
I guess he feels like he can get away with it because it's all stuff that supposedly could happen, if you take the least probable things Beck says at their most far-out extremes as absolute fact.
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I know Glenn Beck claims that Hitler was democratically elected, but it's not true.
Hitler was appointed Chancellor (as is/was the custom) by the president (Hindenburg) as a result of political pressure.
I'm not disagreeing with you that things like this camera system can and would be abused by someone, even it's not the authorities who originally have it installed, but please don't use blatantly incorrect facts to justify your arguments.
Do you agree with the parent of your post, or that parent's parent, that is to say, the grandparent (for you, but the great grandparent to me)?
We're all vulnerable to pedantic jerks, so let's all just start letting some crap slide.
I guess the problem for me is that I'm surrounded by Beck fans who also identify themselves with the Tea Party. Beck may not be endorsed by the Tea Party, but he (as a guy who just orchestrated a DC rally with hundreds of thousands of attendees -- by his count) definitely lends the Tea Party his own endorsement, so it tends to confuse the issue.
I definitely have no problem with a Ron Paul-led Tea Party, which is how it started, as I understand it. I guess the real problem is just that the crazies and the extreme are usually the most vocal, to the detriment of all of the rest of us who are concerned, but too busy with our own lives to devote a large amount of time to politics.
No single group should ever presume to claim special ownership of the founding fathers or the Constitution they wrought with such skill and ingenuity. Those lofty figures, along with the seminal document they brought forth, form a sacred part of our common heritage as Americans. They should be used for the richness and diversity of their arguments, not tampered with for partisan purposes. The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl once famously asserted that history was an argument without an end. Our contentious founders, who could agree on little else, would certainly have agreed on that.
(I apologize for any typos in there... for some reason Chrome isn't letting me paste into the comment for on slashdot, so I had to type the whole thing out... anyone else having this problem?)
The problem is the discrepancy between what the Tea Party claims as its official beliefs (small government, less taxes) and what the Tea Party actually believes (Obama is a Socialist Marxist fascist dictator who worships Hitler and Allah and wants to take all the rich people's money away and give it to all the poor people and sell us all out to the world government).
I am in agreement with the stated goals of the Tea Party, but any group that has Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin as its unofficial spokespeople is not a group I would ever want to associate with. It makes it hard to know if I can take a story like the one reported in TFA seriously, since I heard Glenn Beck talking about it this morning on the radio. Given his reporting on other things (for example, the Fannie Mae outlet patent... Google that if you don't know what I'm talking about), it's obvious you can't trust anything he says. But if he reports on something that is genuinely scary, I'm now instantly predisposed to downplay its significance.
His fans will unquestioningly listen to everything he says, and his enemies will unquestioningly disagree with anything he says, which means that all of his lies and half-truths will be wrongly accepted by too many people, while the few things he gets right will be ignored by too many.
Can we have a Tea Party that isn't based on outrage and anger? A moderate Tea Party? People who don't like government spending, but who would also attend Jon Stewart's "Restoring Sanity" rally?
This would be true if (and only if) the whole point of Diaspora wasn't to improve the security of your data
Which would be a valid complaint if the "launch" wasn't an alpha, with security bugs admitted in the launch announcements. The whole point to doing an alpha release is to find bugs, and it's marked as alpha so that the people who use it know not to use it only as a preview and a way to find and report bugs, not to use it for anything important at all, much less critical.
Anyone who considers privacy important shouldn't be using an alpha product at all, or at least shouldn't use it to share information they wouldn't mind sharing with the whole world.
Actually, I read it as the new target is someone we should be giving Alzheimer's to.
As the top level parent said:
Steve Jobs' motto should be, "Compressed media, through earbuds, it's good enough."
And the next guy said:
No no, it should be "640kb per sec should be enough for anybody"....
Obviously these are all out of context, they're jokes.
I'm not aware of any Blu-Ray movies that require you to have an internet connection to watch them, and I'm pretty sure there aren't any... In fact, some early Blu-Ray players (possibly some current ones, I don't really know for sure) didn't even have Ethernet or Wi-Fi, since it wasn't mandated by the Blu-Ray specifications like it was with HD-DVD.
That's not to say that Blu-Ray doesn't have some seriously crappy DRM headaches beyond what DVD had, but I'm pretty sure requiring an internet connection for the movie itself isn't one of them.
As I understand it, the real villain is satellite TV when it comes to compression. I don't have the HD cable subscription but I do get the ClearQAM channels, both directly on my TV and recorded through my Myth box, and those are all great on my 60" TV. But getting the HD subscription channels may be a different story, since there are so many more of those.
That was Bill Gates's version.
This is a total nitpick, and it's more of a complaint about general usage than what you specifically said, since it's basically the commonly accepted way to talk about it, but I can't stand referring to downloaded media as "digital".
Ever since audio cassette tapes and VHS died out, we've pretty much been a society of exclusively digital media. CDs and Laserdiscs were "pure digital" long before we could download songs and movies from the internet.
I'm such a crotchety old man (at 32).
I fell that way too, but the younger generations seem to not care if it is in a terrible looking format that is fuzzy and messy.
I guess it depends on how young you're talking about, but anyone old enough to spend the money on a proper-sized TV is going to care. Anyone who cares about sports is going to care. Anyone who sits down in a dark room to actually watch a movie is going to care. Heck, even my wife, who pretty much hates technology for the sake of technology, recognized (back when we only had a 27" CRT) that it would be better to get a widescreen copy of "Pride and Prejudice" to replace her "fullscreen" copy. Then, the very night we bought our new large LCD TV, she was talking about buying the same movie on Blu-Ray.
I think the problem with "the kids today" is that they spend so much time consuming media on the go, and it's as much of an iPhone/iPod effect as it is a YouTube effect. But even the rascally youth of today, when they take the time to watch a movie they really care about, or a big game, they will appreciate getting the best experience that's available to them, as long as it's within their means (if they even care about what they can afford).
I'm repeating something I said above, but I think there are a couple of things that will keep Blu-Ray relevant:
1) People want to own a copy of their favorite shows. They don't want to "rent" them from iTunes or Amazon, or to depend on NetFlix or Hulu to always keep them available. I know that with progress in licensing agreements this will hopefully become less of a problem in the future, but for now, the progress is very slow. Also, not everyone wants to have an account with NetFlix, or with iTunes. Especially since iTunes only applies to people with Apple hardware, and Apple's living room hardware (AppleTV) has so far failed to take off in a meaningful way.
2) Streaming video quality is severely lacking. iTunes and NetFlix only serve up HD content in 720p resolution. Maybe it's just me, or my Blu-Ray player (Panasonic), but every time I try to watch an HD NetFlix stream, the initial bandwidth check shows a full-quality connection, but within 5 seconds, the video chokes, the player buffers, starts, playing and chokes again several times, then eventually continues on at a much lower quality level, but still with the HD resolution, which is compressed so badly it looks horrible, and it makes me wish I had the option to just use an SD stream for the same movie, since SD streams for other movies look much better.
Obviously the streaming quality issues will get better over time, since our internet speeds will continue to get better, but a large number of Americans don't have quality broadband service at all. For those people, streaming isn't even an option. Hopefully NetFlix continues to iron out its agreements with the movie studios, but even if they do there aren't really any alternatives to NetFlix for the same type of service, so hopefully they also get some competition in the streaming movie subscription world.
I'm sure that eventually streaming video will overtake Blu-Ray, but for the next several years at least, the disc format is far from dead and still has a bright future.
I just purchased my first HDTV and Blu-Ray player a couple of months ago, and I had always thought that Blu-Ray wouldn't stick around long. Now I feel differently. While streaming video à la NetFlix is convenient, the quality is just not there. There's no 5.1 audio from NetFlix, for example, and the video quality depends way too much on the quality of the internet connection. I have decent quality cable internet service, but my Blu-Ray player still chokes on HD NetFlix streams, leaving me with an HD resolution video that's compressed so badly that its quality pales in comparison to SD streams.
A lot of the USA has much worse internet service than I have. I know that things will continue to get better on that front, but I think it will be quite a while before streaming media has enough quality for enough people to make them want to abandon the security and reliability of physical media.
Also, The streaming model works fine for shows that you'll only care about watching once, or for discovering new shows that you wouldn't otherwise take the effort to buy/rent the disc for, but I think people are more inclined to buy movies that they really like. If you're a huge Napoleon Dynamite fan, or if your daughter loves a certain Disney princess movie, you're not going to want to pay $3 to "rent" the movie every time you want to see it (or see a part of it), and you don't want to depend on Netflix or Hulu, since their streaming catalogs are very limited, and some shows come and go.
As I understand it, the permits aren't normally granted until just before the event anyway, no matter how far in advance you start setting it up. By the time you've jumped through the other hoops, the actual permit is more of a formality. It was the same way for Beck's rally.
Just because he offers the "Glenn Beck University" to people who pony up to join his fan club doesn't mean he is a Dr. in any sense of the word.
Glenn Beck puts forward some good concepts, like truth, integrity, hard work, and believing in America. Unfortunately, he is also a liar and a hypocrite who uses most of the immoral smear tactics that he accuses his enemies of using.
I don't read HuffPo or Media Matters, and I don't watch the Daily Show or the Colbert Report. I actually listen to Beck's radio show so that I know what appalling stuff he's saying. Occasionally I see parts of his TV show (although I really don't like having his face on display in my house), and I'm usually pretty shocked at what he gets away with saying.
I listened to his astonishment at what a racist Shirley Sherrod is, and how no human should treat people like she was treating those poor white farmers, then for two weeks after that, he and his buddies talked about how she should thank him for defending her, and how ungrateful she was, while he rode his high horse all over TV claiming that he "happens to believe that context matters".
Have you ever watched his show on Net Neutrality? He doesn't actually talk about Net Neutrality, he strings together a bunch of "Marxist" plots with little to no basis in reality, and says they're what Net Neutrality is all about.
A few weeks ago I was flipping through channels and saw him talk about a patent that Fannie Mae supposedly has for an outlet cover that can only be removed with a special tool, and how that's a part of the cap & trade agenda and this progressive administration wants to put them in your house. I literally felt dumber for having seen it, because it makes so little sense in the real world -- but that was part of how he provokes outrage: "Can you believe they're trying to do this?" Then, after doing further research, I found out that patent expired in 2007 and was never renewed. Also, it was developed by an in-house electrician based on work he had done to protect the computers in the offices of Fannie Mae. The patent makes no mention whatsoever of residential applications.
Your Doctor is a quack. Better get a second opinion (and not from someone educated by Glenn Beck University), before he gets you seriously sick. We'd probably all be better off with Bovine University.
Apple isn't any more interested in allowing Java than Flash on the iPhone, so this won't help there.
Aside from Wii Play and Wii Sports Resort, we have only bought 2 games for our Wii within the past year. But my kids would play them all day long if we let them.
Just because the number of games being sold isn't huge doesn't mean that Wii's aren't getting used. It's just that there is a ton of absolute crap games, but there are still quite a few very good games.
That's a good point. I had a worse experience and waited longer at my longer Comcast office a few weeks ago than I did at the DMV when I renewed my driver's license. And when I paid a speeding ticket at the local courthouse, everything went perfectly smoothly with no wait at all.
Not only are there few choices for ISPs (the only non-wireless ISP in my area is the one that's known for throttling Bittorrent and VoIP traffic), but the question doesn't even make sense. Nobody is arguing that the government should be everyone's ISP, so the question is completely inappropriate and misleading to begin with.
The government's role in Net Neutrality is to require ISPs to not block or degrade access to specific content sources. It's just basic ground rules, not a pile of regulation akin to the tax code.
It's amazing how many different arguments people use against Net Neutrality, to the point where the arguments start to contradict each other: * The Internet has never been neutral
* No ISP has ever violated Net Neutrality
* The government already has the authority to enforce Net Neutrality without new regulation
* The Internet will DIE if Net Neutrality is enforced!
and my favorite:
* Socialists/Communists/Maoists/Marxists/Nazis/Fascists are the ones who want to start Net Neutrality!
This article is just more of the same, poorly thought out reasons to argue against a good thing for the sake of political posturing.
It's a fair question, but really the point of Net Neutrality rules is to preserve the way it works now and prevent ISPs from being able to start discriminating against content sources* they don't like, content types* they don't like, or user's devices* they don't like.
* Provided these things are not illegal to begin with
There used to be an astroturf website called handsoff.org which opposed Net Neutrality. The last time I went there (it seems to be offline now), all of the headlines on the site seemed to royally contradict each other: "The internet has never been neutral", "The government already has enough authority to keep the internet neutral", "ISPs have never been non-neutral, and they won't in the future", "If Net Neutrality gets passed, the Internet will die!"
It's all so much grasping straws. They couldn't pick the strongest argument and build a coherent case around that, they had to throw everything out, even if it directly contradicted itself, and see what sticks. That's a good sign that you don't want to side with those people.
HAS Comcast said that? Or Verizon? Or Cox? Or Time Warner? What, other than your paranoid fantasies makes you think that they would? Why should we establish YET ANOTHER government bureaucracy with STILL MORE power over us to prevent your fantasies from becoming reality?
The CEO of AT&T said a few years ago that companies like Google were were getting a free ride by not paying them when AT&T's customers used Google, and that he intended to find a way to make Google pay for that (in spite of the fact that Google pays its own bills for internet access, and Google's AT&T customers are the ones paying AT&T to access Google). Comcast has caused issues with BitTorrent and (non-Comcast) VoIP.
Most of the arguments I've heard against Net Neutrality are paranoid fantasies (the government is going to take over the Internet and censor everything!). The truth is, Net Neutrality is about a few basic ground rules (which make perfect sense given the government's involvement with the development of the internet), not about oppressive complicated regulation.
It's not about making sure that nobody gets ahead by building up their own resources, it's about making sure the ISPs can't give give some content providers preferential treatment (meaning they're not artificially slowed down) just because they paid the extortion money that others didn't, or just because they have special arrangements or partnerships.
I would think that Fox News & friends should be concerned about this, seeing as how Comcast just bought NBC (and thus, MSNBC). In my neighborhood, Comcast is the only option for non-wireless broadband, which means that without Net Neutrality they could potentially block or severely degrade my access to foxnews.com or glennbeck.com if they wanted to, and I wouldn't have any competitors to turn to or legal recourse. They've already been caught causing problems for BitTorrent traffic and (competitor's) VoIP traffic.
How about setting the precedent that the government can?
First it will be FCC's "Net neutrality", then it will be a mandatory proprietary iCHIP for parental controls in every ethernet adapter.
Based on what information? This sounds an awful lot like the "information" Glenn Beck is spewing. Just in case that is where you get your "facts," you should know that when Glenn Beck did his show about Net Neutrality, everything that he described as being part of Net Neutrality actually has nothing to do with it. He didn't cover what it actually is, he just listed a bunch of "Marxist" stuff and falsely claimed that that's what Net Neutrality is.
I guess he feels like he can get away with it because it's all stuff that supposedly could happen, if you take the least probable things Beck says at their most far-out extremes as absolute fact.