The long-term question is what that 80% is really worth. After all, if AIG's assets were solid, it wouldn't need a bailout. What happens if AIG is unable to sell off enough ancillary entities to raise the cash needed to pay back the loan? There's no way its liabilities will disappear. AIG insured a lot of mortgage-backed securities that are now worth much less than they once were. That's not going to change.
From the article it sounded like they want to patent the combination of an offshore data center with power from ocean waves. To me this doesn't sound all that innovative, so I'm puzzled why it would be patentable at all. Does this mean if I put a ship out to sea with giant searchlights and use wave power that I could patent that combination as well? Is each possible combination of something at sea that uses electrical power and generating that electricity by waves individually patentable?
I happened to look at ConvertXtoDVD the other day. While ffmpeg itself is licensed under the LGPL, ConvertXtoDVD also appears to use both libpostproc and libswscale which are both GPL. The ffmpeg licensing page states, "If those parts get used the GPL applies to all of FFmpeg."
I don't see any LICENSE.txt file nor any mention of the GPL or the LGPL in the version of the product I downloaded. Running strings against the binaries looking for things like "public" doesn't bring it up either.
If Roe v. Wade were overturned, it'd return the debate to the people of each state which is where it belongs. I just can't understand how people who believe in democracy and freedom (and "choice") can defend a decision like Roe v. Wade.
Because some rights inhere in the fact that you're a citizen of the United States as well as a citizen of the individual state in which you reside. You don't lose your freedom of speech rights when you move into a different state. Historically states have often tried to limit individual rights that were later decided to derive from the Federal Constitution. Limits on voting rights because of poll taxes and similar measures were among those removed in my lifetime, and I was happy to see them go.
I can understand arguments that contest the logic of Roe v. Wade (and prior rulings like Griswold v. Connecticut) by claiming that the right to privacy, and the abortion right that was judged to derive from it, don't have a basis in the Federal Constitution. That's not the argument you're making here, though.
The essence of decisions like Sony v Universal (the "Betamax" case) turns on the question of whether a device has "substantial non-infringing uses." Pencils and paper clearly qualify here; Grokster did not. Whether a device to make DVD copies has such uses is prima facie an open question.
The number of ridiculous postings like the above in any copyright discussion just shows how really uninformed most Slashdotters are about copyright law. Try reading a few of the major decisions like Betamax and Grokster, or discussions at places like the EFF and ChilingEffects, before posting on these matters. You'll sound a lot more intelligent if you do.
From the KDE 4.1 announcement page: "While KDE 4.1 aims at being the first release suitable for early adopting users..."
If you want to be an early adopter, you need to live with the consequences. I've run KDE for years and would never consider moving to KDE 4+ for a least another year or two.
China is the least of my concerns. How about the Justice Department or the Department of Homeland Security?
The Europeans might be pressuring Google to reduce its retention periods, but I suspect that Google heard the opposite point-of-view from the government here in the USA.
Frankly I think that none of Google's logs should carry identifying information. If they need to track IPs for some reason, put them in a separate database table that's unconnected to the contents of the search strings. Keeping this information much beyond a week or two seems unreasonable to me.
I take it the point of all this is to catch zero-day exploits?
How about a better approach like having the client AV software update its definitions more frequently like every hour? On my mail servers I update ClamAV hourly now. Of course that means McAfee would need sufficient server resources to handle those requests, but how much did they spend developing this intrusive approach? And how much traffic will it generate if it sends a hash of every ZIP downloaded by McAfee users every day?
Sorry, but I'll pass on the phone-home approaches. You give me the signatures, and I'll determine what to do with them on my end.
Actually Internet "access providers" are also covered by the DMCA under section 512(a) which governs "transitory communications (p. 8-9)." As for "net neutrality," the requirements of this section are pretty close to what most of us would consider neutral. To maintain its exemption from liability, the access provider must exert essentially no control over the content and cannot discriminate by sender or recipient.
What you consider "basic knowledge" about what constitutes a "service provider" and what the provisions of 17 USC 512 considers a "service provider" are not the same thing. YouTube is a "service provider" under 17 USC 512(c). You might want to look at pp. 9-10 of this document as well.
My guess is that the vast majority of take-down requests are filed with no expectation that they'll ever generate a counter-notice. I doubt there's often a vast army of attorneys waiting to pounce on some teen-ager who posted an anime music video that uses part of a song owned by a JASRAC member. DMCA notices are cheap; litigation is not. Having to prove that the infringing work doesn't have at least a plausible fair-use defense might be prohibitively expensive. Obviously if the rightsholders choose to sue, you'll need an attorney. In most cases I'd say pulling the offending item makes more sense than a counter-notice, though in this particular case having to do with Scientology, or where political speech is involved, you'll want to file a notice, and you'll probably want an attorney involved from the outset. But I'd bet these types of cases are a very small subset of the types of DMCA notices that Google receives for YouTube videos.
Not every rightsholder has embarked upon the RIAA's "sue-the-bastards" strategy. Viacom didn't bring suit against individual YouTube members; they're suing Google.
So it's not really a fine line for YouTube to walk. They just do what they are legally required to, and anyone who doesn't like that and complains about YouTube is barking up the wrong tree - they should work to get the law changed instead.
I, for one, wouldn't want to see the law changed so that it would make ISPs like YouTube more responsible for copyright infringment than they are now. The only changes that might make the law more palatable would be penalities for abuse of the process as others have already mentioned. Applying the perjury standard in an even-handed way would be a good start.
I agree with you that the way issue gets framed here on Slashdot often makes it sound like YouTube or other ISPs are somehow intentionally stepping on the rights of uploaders. There are lots of things to dislike about the DMCA, but the take-down provisions are not high on my list. I've seen people complain here that their material was removed and act like they have no recourse. Not only do you have recourse, you don't even really need an attorney to protest a take-down notice.
I think part of the resistance to usage-based pricing comes from the ridiculous fees charged when users exceed their caps. I've seen figures like $1/GB when the initial service is something like $20/50GB.
I'd advocate a tiering model with a few different price/capacity choices. I bet if the lines between tiers were well-drawn, a large number of customers would see their costs fall, and few high-bandwidth users would start paying their fair share. I'd let customers have a one-month grace period, too, in case there was a unusual circumstance that led to higher bandwidth consumption. Tiering makes more sense to me than flat usage caps which do nothing to redistribute costs among users in different bandwidth classes. Cable television has used tiering for decades; why isn't this a reasonable approach to pricing Internet service?
Frankly I think the debate in this area, from both customers and ISPs, has gone from reasoned to ranting. It's not really that hard to build a pricing scheme that treats different classes of customers fairly based on their bandwidth usage patterns. The flat-rate model we have now subsidizes a few high-bandwidth customers from the revenues paid by the much larger number of low-volume users. While Slashdot may contain a very disproportionate share of the first type of user, most people fall into the second group. Perhaps it's worth thinking about what's fair to them as much as your own personal desires.
Just in case you're wondering, I buy business-class service from Verizon FiOS at $79/month for 20/5, so I don't have to worry about usage caps or content monitoring. Providers like Comcast offer business-class services at similar rates. If you want more bandwidth, or less monitoring of your usage, pay for it.
Actually most advertising has "prisoner dilemma" features about it.
As you say, the returns aren't often proportionate to the investment. The problem is that the elimination of advertising is generally thought to lead to a reduction in market share. So let's suppose you have two competitors who can each choose between the "advertise" and the "don't advertise" strategy. If both players choose not to advertise, they both save a lot of money and don't lose share to each other. The problem is that both parties have an incentive to "defect" and advertise to gain share from the other company. So the result is that both players advertise, but neither really sees great returns from the decision to do so, and on net both players are worse off.
The solution is to have a third party, like the government, intervene and ban advertising by both parties. Some people argue the tobacco industry accepted the ban on advertising its product on television for this reason.
I just tried watching a preview of "Eyes Wide Open" for a sample and, no, it won't run on Linux. The site complains about my version of Flash Player, but even after updating to version 9.0.124.0 from Adobe via yum, I get the same error. This is a free sample using Flash, not even the program itself.
Of course, the error says I have the wrong version of Flash, and not the wrong operating system. For people using EEE PCs and other new, Linux-based devices, they'll be spinning their wheels in puzzlement.
How about the mplayerplug-in for Firefox? Since it uses the mplayer engine, it supports just about any format you can throw at it. You'll need to install mplayer and the codec pack from the mplayer site, of course.
I prefer having the browser launch a standalone player myself.
As someone who watches quite a bit of Japanese animation, I have to say that the shift to 720p, H.264-encoded fansubs has really improved the visual experience. The line art is much crisper, and the colors and contrast more vivid. I'd take a look at recent shows like Dennou Coil, Ghost Hound, or Nijuu Mensou no Musume to see some excellent examples from three different production houses (Madhouse, Production I.G. and Telecom/Bones, respectively).
I, too, laughed out loud at the Matroska => Windows disinformation, along with the "AVI is not flawed" posting above. Then there's the "no one supports Matroska in hardware" meme.
1) You can play files in the Matroska container on any platform that mplayer supports, and that's quite a few. But like the poster above me, maybe I was hallucinating when I watched those files on my Fedora box. The xine engine also supports Matroska. Have a file in the Matroska container with H.264 encoding, soft subtitles, and multiple audio tracks that you want to watch in Windows? Just install the CCCP. VLC isn't a bad alternative either, though it's just now catching up to mplayer with support for ASS subtitles.
2) As for AVI, how well does it support multiple video tracks? Multiple audio tracks? Soft subtitles? Chapters? You may not care about features like these, but I assure you there are many people who do.
I suppose it's naive to think that any open format like Matroska can possibly compete against ones that come from Redmond and its partners in big media. A couple of years ago I might have agreed with that statement, but the arrival of hardware-based Matroska players tells me the format might stand a chance. Revulsion at DRM might play a role here, too.
We all know how badly competing against closed platforms from Redmond turned out for Linux.
Some solutions include better spam blocking. If those messages get blocked as spam, then the user never has a chance to react insecurely to them.
Relying on users to manage spam, or worse, spam with links to executables is fruitless.
Any effective solution to this problem requires that ISPs and mail providers do a better job of intercepting dangerous messages.
I notice I don't see as much spam from US desktops since many of the largest providers no longer allow their residential customers to connect to port 25 on remote machines. Sadly these policies don't seem to have yet made it to the IP networks in the developing world.
I routinely install filters on mail servers to block inbound messages with attached executable files or links to off-site executables. No won't be able to watch that "Britney n00d" video, but your computer won't become turned into a zombie either.
ISPs don't want to raise security concerns with their customers or inconvenience them in any way. That might make sense for the ISP, but it contributes to the overall insecurity of the network.
Perhaps that's because having a discount on the Council Tax for singles just encourages this kind of behavior. While many policies can have "unintended consequences," the consequences of policies like these are rather obvious and easy to anticipate.
Is this a different tax from that levied on the properties themselves? While I don't think taxing property is necessarily the best method of collecting revenues, taxing the units themselves regardless of occupancy levels seems a lot easier to enforce.
I lived in London in the early 1970s for a while when the IRA was bombing public buildings. I spent a considerable amount of time going in and out of Parliament doing my dissertation research and regularly had my bags inspected and so forth. All these measures seemed reasonable given the actual threat IRA bombings posed.
Yet I don't recall any political party at the time advocating anything like the extensive state surveillance apparatus that has been implemented in Britain over the past few years. Perhaps being back in the US I'm not as sensitive to the threat posed by al-Qaeda to the British public, but al-Qaeda doesn't seem substantially more dangerous than were the IRA in the 70's.
As a American with leftish tendencies, I find it sad to see the Labour party become the party of surveillance and represssion. It's hard to imagine the Tories would be much better. The LibDems typically stand up for personal privacy; are they the only political party now committed to the defense of individual rights in the UK today?
Or is this all a popular reaction to the fact that Britain has become even more multi-racial now than it was then? Is this really fundamentally a racist reaction?
Perhaps not, but I'd bet their projected return-on-investment for Boston doesn't justify pulling fiber until they can sell TV. Here in Newton, they just hung it on the poles as I'm sure they did in most suburban or ex-urban builds. I'm not up to date on the rules governing these services, but I suspect they can't cherry-pick neighborhoods within the City to rewire either. (Even if they could, that certainly wouldn't make for good politics when they later apply to the City for a CATV license.) If so, that makes Boston and similar cities an all-or-nothing proposition.
The whole strategy for FiOS rollouts seems to me to be based on cherry-picking areas with sufficient income levels, and relatively easy builds, to expect good returns.
Slashdot Mirror
They register names for $15/year and offer a POP3 service for another $10/year. I don't think they support IMAP, though.
See: http://www.directnic.com/help/faq/?question_id=517&topic_id=44
DirectNIC is located in New Orleans and survived Hurricane Katrina. I've used them as a registrar for perhaps a decade now. Great customer service.
I wouldn't let any of my business customers set up a GMail account. Businesses need more privacy for their messaging than Google offers.
The guys who ran these companies (and the complicit regulators) need to be on the hook for the consequences of their mismanagement.
I'm not holding my breath.
The long-term question is what that 80% is really worth. After all, if AIG's assets were solid, it wouldn't need a bailout. What happens if AIG is unable to sell off enough ancillary entities to raise the cash needed to pay back the loan? There's no way its liabilities will disappear. AIG insured a lot of mortgage-backed securities that are now worth much less than they once were. That's not going to change.
What will the US taxpayers own then?
From the article it sounded like they want to patent the combination of an offshore data center with power from ocean waves. To me this doesn't sound all that innovative, so I'm puzzled why it would be patentable at all. Does this mean if I put a ship out to sea with giant searchlights and use wave power that I could patent that combination as well? Is each possible combination of something at sea that uses electrical power and generating that electricity by waves individually patentable?
You mean, like these?
http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/shame.html
I happened to look at ConvertXtoDVD the other day. While ffmpeg itself is licensed under the LGPL, ConvertXtoDVD also appears to use both libpostproc and libswscale which are both GPL. The ffmpeg licensing page states, "If those parts get used the GPL applies to all of FFmpeg."
I don't see any LICENSE.txt file nor any mention of the GPL or the LGPL in the version of the product I downloaded. Running strings against the binaries looking for things like "public" doesn't bring it up either.
If Roe v. Wade were overturned, it'd return the debate to the people of each state which is where it belongs. I just can't understand how people who believe in democracy and freedom (and "choice") can defend a decision like Roe v. Wade.
Because some rights inhere in the fact that you're a citizen of the United States as well as a citizen of the individual state in which you reside. You don't lose your freedom of speech rights when you move into a different state. Historically states have often tried to limit individual rights that were later decided to derive from the Federal Constitution. Limits on voting rights because of poll taxes and similar measures were among those removed in my lifetime, and I was happy to see them go.
I can understand arguments that contest the logic of Roe v. Wade (and prior rulings like Griswold v. Connecticut) by claiming that the right to privacy, and the abortion right that was judged to derive from it, don't have a basis in the Federal Constitution. That's not the argument you're making here, though.
The essence of decisions like Sony v Universal (the "Betamax" case) turns on the question of whether a device has "substantial non-infringing uses." Pencils and paper clearly qualify here; Grokster did not. Whether a device to make DVD copies has such uses is prima facie an open question.
The number of ridiculous postings like the above in any copyright discussion just shows how really uninformed most Slashdotters are about copyright law. Try reading a few of the major decisions like Betamax and Grokster, or discussions at places like the EFF and ChilingEffects, before posting on these matters. You'll sound a lot more intelligent if you do.
From the KDE 4.1 announcement page:
"While KDE 4.1 aims at being the first release suitable for early adopting users..."
If you want to be an early adopter, you need to live with the consequences. I've run KDE for years and would never consider moving to KDE 4+ for a least another year or two.
Also KDE != Linux.
Just don't try carrying it down a street in Boston.
China is the least of my concerns. How about the Justice Department or the Department of Homeland Security?
The Europeans might be pressuring Google to reduce its retention periods, but I suspect that Google heard the opposite point-of-view from the government here in the USA.
Frankly I think that none of Google's logs should carry identifying information. If they need to track IPs for some reason, put them in a separate database table that's unconnected to the contents of the search strings. Keeping this information much beyond a week or two seems unreasonable to me.
I take it the point of all this is to catch zero-day exploits?
How about a better approach like having the client AV software update its definitions more frequently like every hour? On my mail servers I update ClamAV hourly now. Of course that means McAfee would need sufficient server resources to handle those requests, but how much did they spend developing this intrusive approach? And how much traffic will it generate if it sends a hash of every ZIP downloaded by McAfee users every day?
Sorry, but I'll pass on the phone-home approaches. You give me the signatures, and I'll determine what to do with them on my end.
Actually Internet "access providers" are also covered by the DMCA under section 512(a) which governs "transitory communications (p. 8-9)." As for "net neutrality," the requirements of this section are pretty close to what most of us would consider neutral. To maintain its exemption from liability, the access provider must exert essentially no control over the content and cannot discriminate by sender or recipient.
What you consider "basic knowledge" about what constitutes a "service provider" and what the provisions of 17 USC 512 considers a "service provider" are not the same thing. YouTube is a "service provider" under 17 USC 512(c). You might want to look at pp. 9-10 of this document as well.
While I'd agree in general that having an attorney is a good idea in these cases, ChillingEffects offers a method for generating a counter-notice online.
My guess is that the vast majority of take-down requests are filed with no expectation that they'll ever generate a counter-notice. I doubt there's often a vast army of attorneys waiting to pounce on some teen-ager who posted an anime music video that uses part of a song owned by a JASRAC member. DMCA notices are cheap; litigation is not. Having to prove that the infringing work doesn't have at least a plausible fair-use defense might be prohibitively expensive. Obviously if the rightsholders choose to sue, you'll need an attorney. In most cases I'd say pulling the offending item makes more sense than a counter-notice, though in this particular case having to do with Scientology, or where political speech is involved, you'll want to file a notice, and you'll probably want an attorney involved from the outset. But I'd bet these types of cases are a very small subset of the types of DMCA notices that Google receives for YouTube videos.
Not every rightsholder has embarked upon the RIAA's "sue-the-bastards" strategy. Viacom didn't bring suit against individual YouTube members; they're suing Google.
So it's not really a fine line for YouTube to walk. They just do what they are legally required to, and anyone who doesn't like that and complains about YouTube is barking up the wrong tree - they should work to get the law changed instead.
I, for one, wouldn't want to see the law changed so that it would make ISPs like YouTube more responsible for copyright infringment than they are now. The only changes that might make the law more palatable would be penalities for abuse of the process as others have already mentioned. Applying the perjury standard in an even-handed way would be a good start.
I agree with you that the way issue gets framed here on Slashdot often makes it sound like YouTube or other ISPs are somehow intentionally stepping on the rights of uploaders. There are lots of things to dislike about the DMCA, but the take-down provisions are not high on my list. I've seen people complain here that their material was removed and act like they have no recourse. Not only do you have recourse, you don't even really need an attorney to protest a take-down notice.
I think part of the resistance to usage-based pricing comes from the ridiculous fees charged when users exceed their caps. I've seen figures like $1/GB when the initial service is something like $20/50GB.
I'd advocate a tiering model with a few different price/capacity choices. I bet if the lines between tiers were well-drawn, a large number of customers would see their costs fall, and few high-bandwidth users would start paying their fair share. I'd let customers have a one-month grace period, too, in case there was a unusual circumstance that led to higher bandwidth consumption. Tiering makes more sense to me than flat usage caps which do nothing to redistribute costs among users in different bandwidth classes. Cable television has used tiering for decades; why isn't this a reasonable approach to pricing Internet service?
Frankly I think the debate in this area, from both customers and ISPs, has gone from reasoned to ranting. It's not really that hard to build a pricing scheme that treats different classes of customers fairly based on their bandwidth usage patterns. The flat-rate model we have now subsidizes a few high-bandwidth customers from the revenues paid by the much larger number of low-volume users. While Slashdot may contain a very disproportionate share of the first type of user, most people fall into the second group. Perhaps it's worth thinking about what's fair to them as much as your own personal desires.
Just in case you're wondering, I buy business-class service from Verizon FiOS at $79/month for 20/5, so I don't have to worry about usage caps or content monitoring. Providers like Comcast offer business-class services at similar rates. If you want more bandwidth, or less monitoring of your usage, pay for it.
Actually most advertising has "prisoner dilemma" features about it.
As you say, the returns aren't often proportionate to the investment. The problem is that the elimination of advertising is generally thought to lead to a reduction in market share. So let's suppose you have two competitors who can each choose between the "advertise" and the "don't advertise" strategy. If both players choose not to advertise, they both save a lot of money and don't lose share to each other. The problem is that both parties have an incentive to "defect" and advertise to gain share from the other company. So the result is that both players advertise, but neither really sees great returns from the decision to do so, and on net both players are worse off.
The solution is to have a third party, like the government, intervene and ban advertising by both parties. Some people argue the tobacco industry accepted the ban on advertising its product on television for this reason.
I just tried watching a preview of "Eyes Wide Open" for a sample and, no, it won't run on Linux. The site complains about my version of Flash Player, but even after updating to version 9.0.124.0 from Adobe via yum, I get the same error. This is a free sample using Flash, not even the program itself.
Of course, the error says I have the wrong version of Flash, and not the wrong operating system. For people using EEE PCs and other new, Linux-based devices, they'll be spinning their wheels in puzzlement.
How about the mplayerplug-in for Firefox? Since it uses the mplayer engine, it supports just about any format you can throw at it. You'll need to install mplayer and the codec pack from the mplayer site, of course.
I prefer having the browser launch a standalone player myself.
As someone who watches quite a bit of Japanese animation, I have to say that the shift to 720p, H.264-encoded fansubs has really improved the visual experience. The line art is much crisper, and the colors and contrast more vivid. I'd take a look at recent shows like Dennou Coil, Ghost Hound, or Nijuu Mensou no Musume to see some excellent examples from three different production houses (Madhouse, Production I.G. and Telecom/Bones, respectively).
I, too, laughed out loud at the Matroska => Windows disinformation, along with the "AVI is not flawed" posting above. Then there's the "no one supports Matroska in hardware" meme.
1) You can play files in the Matroska container on any platform that mplayer supports, and that's quite a few. But like the poster above me, maybe I was hallucinating when I watched those files on my Fedora box. The xine engine also supports Matroska. Have a file in the Matroska container with H.264 encoding, soft subtitles, and multiple audio tracks that you want to watch in Windows? Just install the CCCP. VLC isn't a bad alternative either, though it's just now catching up to mplayer with support for ASS subtitles.
2) As for AVI, how well does it support multiple video tracks? Multiple audio tracks? Soft subtitles? Chapters? You may not care about features like these, but I assure you there are many people who do.
3) As for hardware devices, aside from the support for cell phones/PDAs already mentioned, you can play Matroska files on the popular Popcorn Hour set-top box and on the COWON A3 portable media player.
I suppose it's naive to think that any open format like Matroska can possibly compete against ones that come from Redmond and its partners in big media. A couple of years ago I might have agreed with that statement, but the arrival of hardware-based Matroska players tells me the format might stand a chance. Revulsion at DRM might play a role here, too.
We all know how badly competing against closed platforms from Redmond turned out for Linux.
Some solutions include better spam blocking. If those messages get blocked as spam, then the user never has a chance to react insecurely to them.
Relying on users to manage spam, or worse, spam with links to executables is fruitless.
Any effective solution to this problem requires that ISPs and mail providers do a better job of intercepting dangerous messages.
I notice I don't see as much spam from US desktops since many of the largest providers no longer allow their residential customers to connect to port 25 on remote machines. Sadly these policies don't seem to have yet made it to the IP networks in the developing world.
I routinely install filters on mail servers to block inbound messages with attached executable files or links to off-site executables. No won't be able to watch that "Britney n00d" video, but your computer won't become turned into a zombie either.
ISPs don't want to raise security concerns with their customers or inconvenience them in any way. That might make sense for the ISP, but it contributes to the overall insecurity of the network.
Perhaps that's because having a discount on the Council Tax for singles just encourages this kind of behavior. While many policies can have "unintended consequences," the consequences of policies like these are rather obvious and easy to anticipate.
Is this a different tax from that levied on the properties themselves? While I don't think taxing property is necessarily the best method of collecting revenues, taxing the units themselves regardless of occupancy levels seems a lot easier to enforce.
I lived in London in the early 1970s for a while when the IRA was bombing public buildings. I spent a considerable amount of time going in and out of Parliament doing my dissertation research and regularly had my bags inspected and so forth. All these measures seemed reasonable given the actual threat IRA bombings posed.
Yet I don't recall any political party at the time advocating anything like the extensive state surveillance apparatus that has been implemented in Britain over the past few years. Perhaps being back in the US I'm not as sensitive to the threat posed by al-Qaeda to the British public, but al-Qaeda doesn't seem substantially more dangerous than were the IRA in the 70's.
As a American with leftish tendencies, I find it sad to see the Labour party become the party of surveillance and represssion. It's hard to imagine the Tories would be much better. The LibDems typically stand up for personal privacy; are they the only political party now committed to the defense of individual rights in the UK today?
Or is this all a popular reaction to the fact that Britain has become even more multi-racial now than it was then? Is this really fundamentally a racist reaction?
Perhaps not, but I'd bet their projected return-on-investment for Boston doesn't justify pulling fiber until they can sell TV. Here in Newton, they just hung it on the poles as I'm sure they did in most suburban or ex-urban builds. I'm not up to date on the rules governing these services, but I suspect they can't cherry-pick neighborhoods within the City to rewire either. (Even if they could, that certainly wouldn't make for good politics when they later apply to the City for a CATV license.) If so, that makes Boston and similar cities an all-or-nothing proposition.
The whole strategy for FiOS rollouts seems to me to be based on cherry-picking areas with sufficient income levels, and relatively easy builds, to expect good returns.