151–160 of 286 posts
Signed up for yesterday, had to pay $5 comcast tax for HBO go (HBO = $15, them "letting" me use HBO go - $5). This system is bull shit.
Are they really double dipping with their customers? Which ISP does _not_ do this? I'm moving to Boston. I want to pay an ISP $X and download at X speed - they shouldn't care what I use it for.
Here comes the proverbial "Consumer Choice": Which primary Internet package would you like: Google Plus, Microsoft Office with XBox Live, Facebook, or Yahoo? Do you need any specialty cloud services: Amazon, Dropbox, Spotify? Would you like full access to uncertified internet sites for an additional $15/mo?
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What would it take to get someone who cares about the greater good (not an industry crony) appointed to these key roles?
Money. There are 100 senators. 34 or so come up for election every two years. Each election is won, 75 - 90% of the time, by the candidate who spends the most. The most expensive campaigns spend about $20M; the tenth most expensive campaign spends about $5M. The margin between D and R in the Senate is 8. Form a SuperPAC and fund it with about $75M. Ensure the election of a crop of senators who know what the key issue…
Source? Tell that to Meg Whitman.
The biggest problem I have with the argument about limiting the amount of money that can be spent in elections is that it essentially implies that the electorate is uneducated and easily swayed. So shouldn't the solution be a more informed (however you want to do accomplish that) electorate?
we can trust Google Fiber to be net neutral... right?
It's so frustrating to me that this is all based around the stupid legal assumption that we have to stream everything. God forbid your user should download something to watch later, to prevent having to redownload every time you watch it. And then during peak Netflix hours, I just can't use the internet reliably. If anyone knows any source for Libre video works, that I can download and watch with complete freedom, pl…
Honestly the assumption that we want to stream everything is a really good assumption. People are lazy and setting up a proper storage is tricky and costs money. This means 99.9% of people don't want to do it. Yes being in the .1% it would be nice if we were catered to but that's life.
It's really more for the providers and cintent owners: keeps customers tethered and paying for the privilege of suckling from server teats whenever they consume content.
Because, really, storage could be made just as easy for consumers as streaming if providers had the will.
Instead, it's "put everything in the cloud, then pay us over and over again to access it".
Signed up for yesterday, had to pay $5 comcast tax for HBO go (HBO = $15, them "letting" me use HBO go - $5). This system is bull shit.
You have a choice. You can always NOT pay the HBO "tax" and pirate it like the rest of us.
This isn't an endorsement of the status quo for consumers, but I do think that publishers such as HBO have the right to sell their content in whatever way makes them the most money - they're running a business after all.
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People don't like waiting for downloads, news at 11
Streaming is downloading. Your computer couldn't play it if it wasn't on your computer. The argument worth making here is that content on Netflix is generally watched once, or rarely. It would be trivial to not delete streamed data if that was a good solution to a problem.
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You could run, but how to get the funding to be an actual contender?
Oh, c'mon, that's just an excuse. In fact, it's the same excuse people use to avoid entrepreneurship. Money helps you run a campaign, just like it helps you run a business. But sometimes the scrappy, bootstrapped startup still beats the big entrenched enterprise. That's why we're on HN, right?
But, that didn't happen, and for reasons very similar to the subject: entrenched interests use their money to continue advancing their own agenda through the media, other corporate gatekeepers, and regulatory capture.
It will soon take $1B to run for the presidency, and about as much to pay ISPs in order to launch a competitive streaming company.
So, you might just have it backwards: the current rules have to change in order to allow for a viable bootstrapped candidate. This, instead of such a candidate miraculously making her way to success, then changing the rules.
In the coming decades our current golden age of internet innovation will be looked back in wonder.
Yes. It'll be like looking back on the long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_automobile_man... -- the early 20th century was a hotbed of innovation and technical progress, being carried out by hundreds of independent groups on a small scale. Then, the industry consolidated around a few gigantic players, and technical innovation ground to a halt for decades.
Physics won't stop Moore's law. Industry consolidation, slowing innovation, and a lack of demand will. I would not be terribly surprised if we never see computers more than 2X as fast/powerful as today's, since without corresponding software and networking innovation to drive demand why would they be built? That's a tad shy if what would be required for strong AI, "mind uploading," or any of that stuff.