"Judging from the history of ASCAP licensing, they'll eventually just demand every website get a license whether they host content or not - "just in case." and take you to court if you don't comply."
Just like extra charges being added to media "just in case" they're used for unauthorized copying, content owners won't be satisfied with the blanket licenses and will continue to sue and prosecute sites that carry content.
More to the point, if I'm looking to view a Cubs game, even if I get distracted by the logo, I'm not going to be confused enough to check in at a Starwood hotel instead of buying tickets to the game.
I wasn't going to say anything though. If I picked on all the spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors I see in Techdirt articles (or indeed, many online publications), I wouldn't have time to torrent massive amounts of porn. Er, I mean watch movies on Netflix.
OK, according to this site, I've got coverage from nine providers. They count Sonic and AT&T twice each. I want to note parenthetically that while they are separate companies, Sonic is using AT&T's infrastructure. OTOH they're also talking about two different technologies, so it's arguable. (edit: Actually the AT&T thing is two different price points for the same service, but capped at different limits.)
Comcast: I don't know the actual speeds possible, but 200/10 might be reasonable. Last time I checked was years ago. (edit: see below.)
Sonic ADSL: 80/4. Nope, I'm getting 15/1 on a good day. (Times two. The two lines are similar.) My ISP doesn't artificially cap, so this is entirely due to my distance from whatever I'm distant from. It might be possible to get 80 down and 4 up if I lived somewhere else in this tract. Which I don't.
Sonic "other" 12/12: probably fiber, my ISP (Omsoft in Davis) started selling some fiber-based connection last year, and they're working through Sonic, QED. Unfortunately, it's not actually available at my house. I asked. Possibly it would be available if I lived somewhere else. Which I still don't.
AT&T ADSL: 18/0.768 is actually close to what I'm getting, though they like to artificially cap their speeds and raise their rates. I can't actually get 18 here, even though AT&T supposedly fixed the copper.
AT&T ADSL: 6/0.512 uh, see above. This would cost me about the same as I'm paying through Omsoft, only Omsoft gives me actual real customer support, and doesn't cap the rate.
Winters Broadband, LLC: This appears to be a fixed WiFi-based service whose entire coverage map seems to be at least 40 miles west of me (the other side of Davis). At a 2.5x cost difference for approximately the same service, though according to their web site, I could spend 4x and get 2x the speed. But I seriously doubt they actually service my area.
I just checked Comcast's site, they will actually sell me some pretty hot Internet for what I'm paying now. Too bad they refuse to include support at that price, and the price will go up every year. Still without support. They appear to be willing to sell me up to 2000Mbps, though they don't show the uplink rate. Whether it will actually work is a separate question, nor whether they'll have to perform what I would presume to be a very expensive upgrade of the lines coming into my home. Probably they can do the $50 option and maybe the $75 option.
Sometimes I'm tempted. Then I compare their sales force answering the tech lines after a bout of menu hell to Omsoft's single menu level and the willingness of their CEO to show up to my house to help with a tricky configuration -- which, as it turned out, a tech and I figured out over the phone -- and I think, screw it!
So those nine choices are actually two, arguably three. Four if you count satellite, but that ignores the latency issue, which sucks big rocks when you're trying to play games online. And Omsoft uses AT&T's lines, only it gives better support at lower cost. So, two. (Also, I don't believe Dish's uplink speed.)
This hasn't changed to any significant degree in 10 years. I think Comcast's speeds have gotten faster, that's all. So please, Pai, please tell me how things are awesome and improving every day, and how great the competition is. Because these are the choices I have in the capitol city of one of the two largest states in the contiguous US. If it's that crappy here, I can't imagine what it's like out in the sticks.
"What we're learning here is that NASA stands on the shoulders of giants and refines existing tech."
Which was then further built upon. This is how technology advances. And art. And philosophy. Science. Religion. Mathematics. Farming. ...Pretty much all of humanity.
When I was a child, a computer weighed thousands of pounds, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and took a room full of people and air conditioning to run. Today I carry one in my pocket, and it can beat the crap out one of those room-sized computers -- by several orders of magnitude -- without breaking a sweat. AND it can record videos, let me talk to people anywhere in the world, and connect me to unimaginable riches of information. All this happened because we constantly improve existing tech.
"One step at a time I can walk around the world. Watch me." - Lord Aral Vorkosigan
What's interesting to me is that (presumably) manually flagging the article as "acceptable" didn't cause the article to be skipped; apparently the automated censor simply checked the same article again the next day, found the same problem, and flagged it as Evil again. So, Google is playing whac-a-mole with ITSELF.
That's just bad programming. But I've come to expect that from Google.
Of course, it's possible that's not what happened. Maybe it found another reason to object to your article the second time. But we'll never know, because Google's automated censorship is as transparent as a vat of carbon black.
So, apparently, is their manual censorship.
But I've come to expect that from Google as well.
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."
On the post: Steven Spielberg Demands Netflix Get Off His Damn Lawn
Re: Re: old man yells at cloud
https://goo.gl/images/X5YtHm
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
"Judging from the history of ASCAP licensing, they'll eventually just demand every website get a license whether they host content or not - "just in case." and take you to court if you don't comply."
Just like extra charges being added to media "just in case" they're used for unauthorized copying, content owners won't be satisfied with the blanket licenses and will continue to sue and prosecute sites that carry content.
On the post: ICE Set Up A Fake College To Bust Immigrants For Trying To Legally Stay In The Country While They Earned Degrees
Brought to you by the same folks who prosecuted the Aereo case.
On the post: Pie Company Has A Rogue Twitter Impostor, But Decides To Be Totally Cool With It
On the post: Arizona The Latest To Explore Dumb Porn Filter Law, This Time To Help Fund Trump's Fence
So, like the idea of secure encryption with a backdoor, then.
On the post: Atlanta Prosecutor Sues DOJ For Blocking Investigation Of Incident Where Cops Shot A Man 59 Times
Response to: Anonymous Coward on Jan 5th, 2019 @ 2:54am
I do.
On the post: Atlanta Prosecutor Sues DOJ For Blocking Investigation Of Incident Where Cops Shot A Man 59 Times
Response to: Anonymous Coward on Jan 5th, 2019 @ 12:05pm
The world's smallest machine gun. I suspect they meant .40cal.
On the post: The Internet Giant's Dilemma: Preventing Suicide Is Good; Invading People's Private Lives... Not So Much
On the post: Slack Banning Random Iranian Ex-Pats Shows Why Making Tech Companies Police The Internet Is Crazy Stupid
Why can't it be both?
On the post: Cubs, Nationals Launch Another Trademark Opposition Over A 'W' Logo
Certified Moron in a Hurry here
On the post: Cubs, Nationals Launch Another Trademark Opposition Over A 'W' Logo
Re: The Nationals and Cubs could care less.
I wasn't going to say anything though. If I picked on all the spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors I see in Techdirt articles (or indeed, many online publications), I wouldn't have time to torrent massive amounts of porn. Er, I mean watch movies on Netflix.
On the post: Senators Continue To Point Out Our Broadband Maps Suck
Yeah I know, nobody's heard of it.
OK, according to this site, I've got coverage from nine providers. They count Sonic and AT&T twice each. I want to note parenthetically that while they are separate companies, Sonic is using AT&T's infrastructure. OTOH they're also talking about two different technologies, so it's arguable. (edit: Actually the AT&T thing is two different price points for the same service, but capped at different limits.)
Comcast: I don't know the actual speeds possible, but 200/10 might be reasonable. Last time I checked was years ago. (edit: see below.)
Sonic ADSL: 80/4. Nope, I'm getting 15/1 on a good day. (Times two. The two lines are similar.) My ISP doesn't artificially cap, so this is entirely due to my distance from whatever I'm distant from. It might be possible to get 80 down and 4 up if I lived somewhere else in this tract. Which I don't.
Sonic "other" 12/12: probably fiber, my ISP (Omsoft in Davis) started selling some fiber-based connection last year, and they're working through Sonic, QED. Unfortunately, it's not actually available at my house. I asked. Possibly it would be available if I lived somewhere else. Which I still don't.
AT&T ADSL: 18/0.768 is actually close to what I'm getting, though they like to artificially cap their speeds and raise their rates. I can't actually get 18 here, even though AT&T supposedly fixed the copper.
AT&T ADSL: 6/0.512 uh, see above. This would cost me about the same as I'm paying through Omsoft, only Omsoft gives me actual real customer support, and doesn't cap the rate.
Dishnet, ViaSat, VSAT: Hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah hah!
Winters Broadband, LLC: This appears to be a fixed WiFi-based service whose entire coverage map seems to be at least 40 miles west of me (the other side of Davis). At a 2.5x cost difference for approximately the same service, though according to their web site, I could spend 4x and get 2x the speed. But I seriously doubt they actually service my area.
I just checked Comcast's site, they will actually sell me some pretty hot Internet for what I'm paying now. Too bad they refuse to include support at that price, and the price will go up every year. Still without support. They appear to be willing to sell me up to 2000Mbps, though they don't show the uplink rate. Whether it will actually work is a separate question, nor whether they'll have to perform what I would presume to be a very expensive upgrade of the lines coming into my home. Probably they can do the $50 option and maybe the $75 option.
Sometimes I'm tempted. Then I compare their sales force answering the tech lines after a bout of menu hell to Omsoft's single menu level and the willingness of their CEO to show up to my house to help with a tricky configuration -- which, as it turned out, a tech and I figured out over the phone -- and I think, screw it!
So those nine choices are actually two, arguably three. Four if you count satellite, but that ignores the latency issue, which sucks big rocks when you're trying to play games online. And Omsoft uses AT&T's lines, only it gives better support at lower cost. So, two. (Also, I don't believe Dish's uplink speed.)
This hasn't changed to any significant degree in 10 years. I think Comcast's speeds have gotten faster, that's all. So please, Pai, please tell me how things are awesome and improving every day, and how great the competition is. Because these are the choices I have in the capitol city of one of the two largest states in the contiguous US. If it's that crappy here, I can't imagine what it's like out in the sticks.
On the post: We Interrupt All The Hating On Technology To Remind Everyone We Just Landed On Mars
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: We Interrupt All The Hating On Technology To Remind Everyone We Just Landed On Mars
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The only country
Which was then further built upon. This is how technology advances. And art. And philosophy. Science. Religion. Mathematics. Farming. ...Pretty much all of humanity.
When I was a child, a computer weighed thousands of pounds, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and took a room full of people and air conditioning to run. Today I carry one in my pocket, and it can beat the crap out one of those room-sized computers -- by several orders of magnitude -- without breaking a sweat. AND it can record videos, let me talk to people anywhere in the world, and connect me to unimaginable riches of information. All this happened because we constantly improve existing tech.
"One step at a time I can walk around the world. Watch me." - Lord Aral Vorkosigan
On the post: UK Hosts Theatrical Facebook Hearings On 'Fake News'... Undermined By Creating Fake News Itself
Facebook did the same. How come 9 countries get off the hook but Facebook doesn't?
Smells of hypocrisy to me.
On the post: Red Hat Hysteria: Aren't We Past The Point Of Being Surprised That 'Free' Is A Part Of The Business Model?
On the post: Florida Appeals Court Says Producing Passwords Is Testimonial And Protected By The Fifth Amendment
On the post: Florida Appeals Court Says Producing Passwords Is Testimonial And Protected By The Fifth Amendment
Re: Re:
On the post: Chinese Hardware That Fueled Massive DYN BotNet Attack Still Poorly Secured Pieces Of Shit
On the post: Google Says Our Article On The Difficulty Of Good Content Moderation Is... Dangerous
That's just bad programming. But I've come to expect that from Google.
Of course, it's possible that's not what happened. Maybe it found another reason to object to your article the second time. But we'll never know, because Google's automated censorship is as transparent as a vat of carbon black.
So, apparently, is their manual censorship.
But I've come to expect that from Google as well.
"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."
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