When municipalities offer cable they roll out with a competitive package but often fall behind in technology over time because they are slow to upgrade and have no leverage with content providers. I imagine it would be the same for internet.
Why would they need leverage with content providers? I don't want content from my municipal, I want access to the content of my choosing. Let me deal with content providers on my own terms.
Sure. But how many 'municipal' providers are there in places where a lot of the HN activity lies (i.e. SF/Silicon Valley) in say Mountain View, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, Redwood City, Menlo Park, San Mateo, Cupertino, Los Altos etc?
It's a small patchwork all over the country.
Internet providers need to quit playing these shenanigans all the time.
What they do is they build public roads. You wouldn't allow a company to build a public road, and then go:
"Safeway trucks get a free pass, cause we have a deal with them; everyone else, $5 per vehicle. Except for you, Best Buy, you pay $25 - except Saturday and Sunday, when you may not pass at all."
I also see police on the roads, that prevent random lunatics from driving while tripping balls and ramming into my ass at 150 km/h during my morning commute. I think that's also a function of government.
Secondly, if you think the "no trucks over 3 tons" signs impinge on your "liberty", then go ahead and drive a 25 ton truck down that road, see what happens. I'm having this discussion about "liberty" versus common sense with my 3rd grade son all the time.
I certainly never said "no trucks over 3 tons" impinges anyone's liberty. I was implying that "no trucks over 3 tons" is equivalent to saying "no one is allowed to consume more than X amount of bandwidth" on my public pipe, which is exactly how the network providers are going to couch their arguments when trying to strangle Netflix.
There is probably a good technical reason as to why there is a 3 ton limit, i.e. the road (or bridge this road crosses) can't support >3 tons and will probably collapse under the weight of a heavier vehicle. There are also good safety reasons such as not wanting 25ton 18 wheelers using the road past your local primary school as a rat run. That's where your analogy fails.
Well a long time ago I would have been all for public roads, but alas do you really trust the Federal government to dictate what does go down the pipe and who is allowed?
Do you trust the Federal government to dictate what goes down the road and who is allowed to drive?
I recommend blind trust in nobody, as a rule. But with the government, at least there's the option of voting against the current office holders. Whereas when a Comcast-TimeWarner super-juggernaut takes over the whole market, what are my options? My lawyers versus theirs? Yeah, that would end up "well".
With the government, at election time, you have the option to vote between one corrupt asshole or the other. With corporations, you can just choose to not buy from them (therefore starving them of money).
So, in the case we're discussing here (and directly applicable to my own situation BTW, but that's anecdotal), people will have the "choice" between, let's see... Comcast-TimeWarner and... Comcast-TimeWarner. Great choice, I'll take seven!
Or I could choose to not buy, therefore starving myself of the resources they provide. That's even better!
So you really, really have to have Internet/cable, and they must give it to you cheaply and at high quality? If you're not even considering the option of walking away from them, you're giving them enormous leverage over you.
EDIT: This is the behavior of "rational economic actors", IMHO. If the benefit you get from the expensive Internet they offer is bigger than the cost, it's rational to take it. If it isn't, then it's rational to pass on it. If enough people do this, then the corporation realizes they get more customers by lowering prices (if they also act as "rational actors").
Many people really, in a practical sense, do have to have the Internet, and at reasonably high quality. Work and school being two common cases.
The 'rational actor' model is to economics what spherical cows [1] are to dairy farms. It is a simplifying assumption that is useful for certain general cases, but if you ever find yourself depending upon it in an argument, you're working at too shallow a level.
In this case, though, even if the rational-actor model were valid, you'd be wrong. In the case of monopolies and oligopolies, the rational-actor approach is to, basically, let yourself be screwed by the monopolist.
For example, in my case I'm in an area where I pay more money for worse broadband (ADSL) because I hate monopolists like Comcast. From an economics perspective, I'm an irrational actor, because I'm not optimizing for my own interests.
> Many people really, in a practical sense, do have to have the Internet, and at reasonably high quality. Work and school being two common cases.
Work and school are economic investments with concrete returns; financially, you get more out of Internet access than you pay. If you didn't need Internet for either of these, and just used it for Netflix or World of Warcraft (or any kind of recreation), would you reconsider paying for it?
Sorry, I'm not interested in jumping through your theoretical hoops. As a non-Comcast user who does need the internet, that doesn't seem like an interesting game to me.
Then do the constituents of your city, county, state, and country a service and either stand for election, volunteer time for a candidate that's not an asshole, or donate money to the campaign of a candidate that's not an asshole so they get on the ballot. Otherwise you get what you deserve.
Keep in mind that in some cases the municipals are sued by the companies that can't be bothered to implement quality broadband for trying to implement quality broadband.
Makes me wonder if it'll have to get to the point that a municipality says fuck you to both the broadband provider suing them and the county/state courts that allow such nonsense to implement their broadband anyway.
This makes me wonder if a bank could operate with Bitcoins. Not everyone would withdraw the money at once and there would be a way of publicly verifying the degree that they're leveraged. If the bank wanted to lend out part or all of a person's money, it could require their approval such that both them and the bank get a percentage of the interest rate the borrower pays. So many questions.
If the government offered a legitimate and effective way for whistleblowers to expose wrongdoing and unconstitutional behavior, perhaps they could limit this type of damage from being done. As it stands, the release of this information could be considered collateral damage as result of their continued persecution of whistleblowers.
The people who are harmed by making this information public is not the U.S. government. Think it through. Who wins by knowing how the US government conducts targeted counterintelligence operations? That will be primarily terrorists, organized crime, and oppressive governments. So then who loses? That will naturally be victims of terrorism, organized crime, and oppressive governments. That is why I don't think it's responsible to go around publicizing every little detail about NSA/GCHQ CI techniques and technology.
You're assuming that these programs really are serving to curtail terrorist activities. In fact, that is very much in doubt.
Given that the net effect of these programs, so far as anyone in the government has been able to demonstrate, ranges from zero to trivially small, rendering these programs inoperative will have a zero or trivial positive effect for the terrorists.
I suspect that you're reply that the govt's inability to demonstrate the program's efficacy is because such a demonstration would necessarily reveal so much that the programs would be rendered ineffective in the process. Too damned bad. At some point we've got to touch base with the philosophical foundation on which the government is built. Ultimately, we are the masters, and the government operates only as we allow it to. Allowing the government to circumvent so many of the liberties which the Bill of Rights guarantees will be conserved for the people is to turn the design of our government on its head.
I don't think you're being very clear. The victims of terrorism generally don't have access to the information that these counterintelligence operations obtain. In other words, the victims are in the same place they were before they knew what the NSA was capable of. What I think you're saying is doublespeak. To paraphrase your argument, "Snowden is doing damage to our counterintelligence capabilities by releasing this information. Also, Snowden isn't doing any damage to the government." These statements contradict one another.
That's certainly a possibility. The contrary may prove to be true as well. For example, if I was a terrorist and I knew that the NSA was spying on all my phone communications, I may elect to not use a phone. This means that I'm not as effective at communicating with other terrorists which may reduce the effect I have. You may very well be right though. It's unclear to me.
There's another possibility. The NSA has blackmailed Obama into protecting their interests. If Obama makes substantial changes to the NSA and then is outed for something that the NSA would have known about, he may have been blackmailed.
If it takes approximately 10 minutes to confirm a transaction, it seems like you would be putting merchants at risk. Perhaps some sort of bitcoin insurance would mitigate this risk for a small monthly fee.
I'm curious about this too. Miners who maintain the blockchain will have to do more work for less bitcoins. If miners are earning less bitcoins, the value will have to continue increasing in order to encourage the miners to maintain the blockchain. At what point is this unsustainable?
On the legislative side, it seems that we need more transparency and the ability to curb abuses once detected. I don't really know what a working system that acts in this capacity would look like but I think it would include citizens as well as senators and congressmen. We don't really know what our government is doing and, although that might not have been an issue in the past, I feel that it's becoming an issue today as a result of everyone being spied on. If the government has nothing to fear, it has nothing to hide.
