For years, the DSL at my house had been a pair of phone lines at 40 down, 6 up each (total: 80 down, 12 up). A few months ago, each line "mysteriously" increased to 53.xxx down, and 7.xxx up (total 106.xxx down and 15.xxx up). Just in time for this new update to broadband internet, my ISP snuck in under the wire for the down pipe.
There was no other reason to increase the down speed, so I suspect it was to be able to boast that it is broadband. If that is the case, though, I expect my upload will also sneak up a few mbps within the coming months.
Heh, I tried to find a ridiculous delivery method that wasn't already in place (drone deliver). Drones actually kind of make sense however, as swapping over to a as-the-crow-flies air travel for delivery in dense organized city streets works better than using gas-guzzlers that contend with all other road traffic. Drones being electric-powered are a plus, though swapping over to electric vans has lessened their deficit.
If you were to compare drone delivery to 5G, it'd be like claiming that same-day delivery of products just flat-out wouldn't be possible were it not for 10-mile range electric drones. The problems with that claim is that not only do we have same-day delivery right now, but drones for the in-town delivery doesn't negate the existing infrastructure we already have for inter-city transport, which drone delivery would still rely on.
What gets me the most about all these 5G claims, is that it's literally just the "last mile" delivery process. All ISPs still use fiber internet trunks for delivery of their 5G from one city/country to the next. 5G is simply one (of many) delivery choices for the last mile or so to the destination. Removing a router or two in a hospital and using a wireless cellular signal isn't going to reduce overall data latency enough to matter.
This is like coming up with a "revolutionary" package delivery service that uses micro-chipped dogs to deliver to people's houses. It still uses the USPS for getting packages to the city, but then you send out your dogs to the house and claim that this couldn't have been done without your chihuahuas.
I read the article, but it sounds like Facebook went above and beyond what they needed to do to avoid paying this tax. I thought I was up on the whole topic, but perhaps I was wrong.
I THOUGHT that what they wanted to tax was a separated "news" section of Facebook, that aggregated links to news from various other sites. In doing so, it was either an automated process or manually done via Facebook employees. Some work may have been done to take bylines or text of the first paragraph to generate a short synopsis of the article's content. This synopsis is what ticked off legacy news orgs, as Facebook was essentially "copying" the content of their articles, making it so that users on Facebook might not ever click through to the actual articles.
With Facebook news shut down, I thought that people's own personal "posts" (tweets) with a link to a news article should still work. It may not generate one of those link "cards", but a link is still a link, and the hyperlink should still be visible and clickable. If this latter part has been disabled, this is way too far a step for Facebook to take, since the taxed part ought to be the "summaries" that Facebook was making money off of by placing ads around.
But this article here today sounds like people's personal posts about wildfires with links to real news are disabled? Is the link not clickable (but still copy-able), or is it intentionally edited out of people's posts (such as a [LINK REMOVED] line where the link was)?
By their logic, they could remove every single show on their service every single week, and "re-introduce" the shows - to pull this idea out of nowhere - one episode at a time. They could - I don't know - put an episode on their show at a very specific time, for only that one time. Heck, do this for a hundred different shows, air one episode at a time at a specific time.
Maybe arrange them so shows of one kind of genre (sci-fi, history, drama, etc) don't show at the exact same time as another of the same genre to make sure people don't miss an episode they might like. You could use - for lack of a better word, I'll borrow an archaic term here - "channels" to explain how different the content in one series of episodes are from others. Give these so-called "channels" fancy names so people can explain which "channel" they like to a friend to get them interested.
While we're here, you have a captive audience that can ONLY watch something at a specific time and place, so you can sell advertising space IN THE MIDDLE of your show. Since you now have advertising revenue, you can reduce or eliminate your monthly costs entirely! Oh, why do that. You have the content, people must come to YOU! Increase the monthly cost!
Oh, but some people have jobs, and cannot watch a show at a specific time. Why not sell them little boxes (or rent to them at exorbitant prices), dedicated to showing your content and only your content? You can include hard drives in these boxes to allow them to TEMPORARILY save the video for later use, but put all kinds of restrictions on these so they cannot skip your precious commercials. Maybe charge them a fee to use this service, so your customers cannot skip your commercials (and the precious revenue).
Wow, with such a profitable and customer-friendly option such as this, I can't imagine how on-demand cheap online streaming companies will exist. There will be a total revolution in the system.
"Nevertheless, in the specific circumstances of this case, the Court is inclined to actually take the file and throw it out the window, which is the only way to adequately express my bewilderment with the fact that Mr. Epstein was subjected to an arrest and a fulsome criminal prosecution. Alas, the courtrooms of the Montreal courthouse do not have windows."
Somehow the next sentence to follow that quote was not:
"Therefore, the court is announcing the solicitation of bids for contractors to install a window in our courthouse, so we can thus throw out this file as it so rightly deserves."
The solution is simple. Pass strong private data protection laws. THEN you can freely ban TikTok if they do not follow this law. If they follow the law, then it doesn't matter if it has "ties" to a government (foreign or not) hostile or not.
If it's bad for TikTok to do, it's bad for Facebook, or Twitter, or T-Mobile, or Disney, or Equifax/Experian/TransUnion, or INSERT_NAME_OF_COMPANY_HACKED_HERE to do.
One quick way to get something declared illegal that the cops abuse, is to use it yourself.
Eh, they'd likely just carve out a special exemption for "law enforcement" purposes and get on with making it illegal for everyone else.
Bring a radio, and blast out music from it at high volume. You can have any conversation that is quieter without worry of being overheard.
It has the added bonus of abusing what the cops do, making sure no recording of your conversation can legally be repeated to anyone else, or else they risk bringing down the full force of the Recording industry.
I still fail to see a difference between the right to record OTA broadcasts and the ability to download the video stream sent to your house by Youtube. On their claim is that it requires outside "help" in order to download the video sent by Youtube, the same could be said is required to record a broadcast signal.
Unless they seem to think that anyone and their grandma was more qualified to create their own VHS recorder and cassette tapes at home - WITHOUT technical construction manuals - than your average teen is able to click a button on their browser and read some text in HTML.
Trump: Politifact is a leftist lying biased political organization that hates me.
Trump's Lawyers: "CNN has been given the dreaded “Pants on Fire!” designation by PolitiFact..."
Also Trump: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?category=&ruling=pants-fire&speaker=donald-trump
IS Politifact a legitimate organization worthy of having a rating that is "dreaded" by news orgs, or is it a political hit-squad which can be ignored for bias?
I just assume that anyone who PAID for this content to be in my face is attempting to scam me. If their product isn't capable of succeeding based on mertis by competing among all others in a big list of products on a site like Amazon... Then I don't want to look at it. When I search for something, EVEN IF WHAT I WANT IS IN THE AD, I will scroll past the "sponsored item" post and view the actual original link.
While we're at it, I hate when people buy ads using the keywords of competitors products. I can't BELIEVE how many times I searched for an app on the iOS app store for a very specific app (Burger King), and had their competitors app show up first (McDonalds). Do these companies really think that when I type in the EXACT name of one company I am unsure of what I want and can be swayed into downloading a totally DIFFERENT app?
I suppose they are going to go after every musician as if their lyrics are 100% confessions of a true act? I suppose every dead sheriff in the country before 1973 can be blamed on Bob Marley, on Eric Clapton in 1974, and on Warren G from then until 1997. (Wikipedia fails me on other covers)
Heaven help you if you select this song to sing at Karaoke, then you can be arrested for any unsolved sheriff murder before that.
I think that if an ISP claims to serve an address in the broadband maps, then they must be responsible for paying for any "additional construction" it would take to ACTUALLY serve the address upon request of service, and are required to do so immediately. No "We'll get around to it after all our other work" excuses to delay it indefinitely. I bet our broadband maps would be updated really quickly after that.
If, however, they instead deleted all positive words about A and amplified all invented and contrived negative stories about A, they have accomplished the same evil act, but are protected from the consequences.
I would LOVE to have a TV that doesn't take longer to turn on than my Windows computer. With the large number of streaming capable devices, why would anyone use built-in TV services when they can get a device capable of downloading and customizing the installed apps.
We have a decade-old TV that is nice (turns on slowly though), and has a built-in youtube app. It hasn't worked for 8 of those years, because it can't be updated and youtube swiftly updated their APIs to break the app. But there it sits on our menu, taunting us.
Oh, and don't get me started on the cheap FireTV I bought, before discovering the reason it was cheap was because it slathers ads for amazon crap all over the home screen (that it launches into, rather than the HDMI input it was last left on).
Your honor, I wasn't evading arrest, I was attempting to maintain a 25 foot distance from the cop chasing me.
For years, the DSL at my house had been a pair of phone lines at 40 down, 6 up each (total: 80 down, 12 up). A few months ago, each line "mysteriously" increased to 53.xxx down, and 7.xxx up (total 106.xxx down and 15.xxx up). Just in time for this new update to broadband internet, my ISP snuck in under the wire for the down pipe. There was no other reason to increase the down speed, so I suspect it was to be able to boast that it is broadband. If that is the case, though, I expect my upload will also sneak up a few mbps within the coming months.
Heh, I tried to find a ridiculous delivery method that wasn't already in place (drone deliver). Drones actually kind of make sense however, as swapping over to a as-the-crow-flies air travel for delivery in dense organized city streets works better than using gas-guzzlers that contend with all other road traffic. Drones being electric-powered are a plus, though swapping over to electric vans has lessened their deficit. If you were to compare drone delivery to 5G, it'd be like claiming that same-day delivery of products just flat-out wouldn't be possible were it not for 10-mile range electric drones. The problems with that claim is that not only do we have same-day delivery right now, but drones for the in-town delivery doesn't negate the existing infrastructure we already have for inter-city transport, which drone delivery would still rely on.
What gets me the most about all these 5G claims, is that it's literally just the "last mile" delivery process. All ISPs still use fiber internet trunks for delivery of their 5G from one city/country to the next. 5G is simply one (of many) delivery choices for the last mile or so to the destination. Removing a router or two in a hospital and using a wireless cellular signal isn't going to reduce overall data latency enough to matter. This is like coming up with a "revolutionary" package delivery service that uses micro-chipped dogs to deliver to people's houses. It still uses the USPS for getting packages to the city, but then you send out your dogs to the house and claim that this couldn't have been done without your chihuahuas.
I read the article, but it sounds like Facebook went above and beyond what they needed to do to avoid paying this tax. I thought I was up on the whole topic, but perhaps I was wrong. I THOUGHT that what they wanted to tax was a separated "news" section of Facebook, that aggregated links to news from various other sites. In doing so, it was either an automated process or manually done via Facebook employees. Some work may have been done to take bylines or text of the first paragraph to generate a short synopsis of the article's content. This synopsis is what ticked off legacy news orgs, as Facebook was essentially "copying" the content of their articles, making it so that users on Facebook might not ever click through to the actual articles. With Facebook news shut down, I thought that people's own personal "posts" (tweets) with a link to a news article should still work. It may not generate one of those link "cards", but a link is still a link, and the hyperlink should still be visible and clickable. If this latter part has been disabled, this is way too far a step for Facebook to take, since the taxed part ought to be the "summaries" that Facebook was making money off of by placing ads around. But this article here today sounds like people's personal posts about wildfires with links to real news are disabled? Is the link not clickable (but still copy-able), or is it intentionally edited out of people's posts (such as a [LINK REMOVED] line where the link was)?
I am now going to call it the "Social Media Site Formerly Known as Twitter". We can send out "Social Media Posts Formerly Known as Tweets".
By their logic, they could remove every single show on their service every single week, and "re-introduce" the shows - to pull this idea out of nowhere - one episode at a time. They could - I don't know - put an episode on their show at a very specific time, for only that one time. Heck, do this for a hundred different shows, air one episode at a time at a specific time. Maybe arrange them so shows of one kind of genre (sci-fi, history, drama, etc) don't show at the exact same time as another of the same genre to make sure people don't miss an episode they might like. You could use - for lack of a better word, I'll borrow an archaic term here - "channels" to explain how different the content in one series of episodes are from others. Give these so-called "channels" fancy names so people can explain which "channel" they like to a friend to get them interested. While we're here, you have a captive audience that can ONLY watch something at a specific time and place, so you can sell advertising space IN THE MIDDLE of your show. Since you now have advertising revenue, you can reduce or eliminate your monthly costs entirely! Oh, why do that. You have the content, people must come to YOU! Increase the monthly cost! Oh, but some people have jobs, and cannot watch a show at a specific time. Why not sell them little boxes (or rent to them at exorbitant prices), dedicated to showing your content and only your content? You can include hard drives in these boxes to allow them to TEMPORARILY save the video for later use, but put all kinds of restrictions on these so they cannot skip your precious commercials. Maybe charge them a fee to use this service, so your customers cannot skip your commercials (and the precious revenue). Wow, with such a profitable and customer-friendly option such as this, I can't imagine how on-demand cheap online streaming companies will exist. There will be a total revolution in the system.
Followup sentence
The solution is simple. Pass strong private data protection laws. THEN you can freely ban TikTok if they do not follow this law. If they follow the law, then it doesn't matter if it has "ties" to a government (foreign or not) hostile or not. If it's bad for TikTok to do, it's bad for Facebook, or Twitter, or T-Mobile, or Disney, or Equifax/Experian/TransUnion, or INSERT_NAME_OF_COMPANY_HACKED_HERE to do.
One quick way to get something declared illegal that the cops abuse, is to use it yourself. Eh, they'd likely just carve out a special exemption for "law enforcement" purposes and get on with making it illegal for everyone else.
Bring a radio
Bring a radio, and blast out music from it at high volume. You can have any conversation that is quieter without worry of being overheard. It has the added bonus of abusing what the cops do, making sure no recording of your conversation can legally be repeated to anyone else, or else they risk bringing down the full force of the Recording industry.
I still fail to see a difference between the right to record OTA broadcasts and the ability to download the video stream sent to your house by Youtube. On their claim is that it requires outside "help" in order to download the video sent by Youtube, the same could be said is required to record a broadcast signal. Unless they seem to think that anyone and their grandma was more qualified to create their own VHS recorder and cassette tapes at home - WITHOUT technical construction manuals - than your average teen is able to click a button on their browser and read some text in HTML.
The "Dreaded Politifact rating?"
Trump: Politifact is a leftist lying biased political organization that hates me. Trump's Lawyers: "CNN has been given the dreaded “Pants on Fire!” designation by PolitiFact..." Also Trump: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?category=&ruling=pants-fire&speaker=donald-trump IS Politifact a legitimate organization worthy of having a rating that is "dreaded" by news orgs, or is it a political hit-squad which can be ignored for bias?
All ads are garbage
I just assume that anyone who PAID for this content to be in my face is attempting to scam me. If their product isn't capable of succeeding based on mertis by competing among all others in a big list of products on a site like Amazon... Then I don't want to look at it. When I search for something, EVEN IF WHAT I WANT IS IN THE AD, I will scroll past the "sponsored item" post and view the actual original link. While we're at it, I hate when people buy ads using the keywords of competitors products. I can't BELIEVE how many times I searched for an app on the iOS app store for a very specific app (Burger King), and had their competitors app show up first (McDonalds). Do these companies really think that when I type in the EXACT name of one company I am unsure of what I want and can be swayed into downloading a totally DIFFERENT app?
I shot the sherriff!
I suppose they are going to go after every musician as if their lyrics are 100% confessions of a true act? I suppose every dead sheriff in the country before 1973 can be blamed on Bob Marley, on Eric Clapton in 1974, and on Warren G from then until 1997. (Wikipedia fails me on other covers) Heaven help you if you select this song to sing at Karaoke, then you can be arrested for any unsolved sheriff murder before that.
Serving an address?
I think that if an ISP claims to serve an address in the broadband maps, then they must be responsible for paying for any "additional construction" it would take to ACTUALLY serve the address upon request of service, and are required to do so immediately. No "We'll get around to it after all our other work" excuses to delay it indefinitely. I bet our broadband maps would be updated really quickly after that.
These companies need to work to protect customer data as hard as they work to keep the CEO's personal cell phone number from their own customers.
Re:
Wow, when you are asking CHINA to censor more than they already are, something is wrong with your company.
I would LOVE to have a TV that doesn't take longer to turn on than my Windows computer. With the large number of streaming capable devices, why would anyone use built-in TV services when they can get a device capable of downloading and customizing the installed apps.
We have a decade-old TV that is nice (turns on slowly though), and has a built-in youtube app. It hasn't worked for 8 of those years, because it can't be updated and youtube swiftly updated their APIs to break the app. But there it sits on our menu, taunting us.
Oh, and don't get me started on the cheap FireTV I bought, before discovering the reason it was cheap was because it slathers ads for amazon crap all over the home screen (that it launches into, rather than the HDMI input it was last left on).