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Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

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Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any metric that treats the US as one single data point instead of 50 should be taken with a grain of salt. Denmark has 6 million residents, Minnesota has 5.7 million. You can't compare an entire continental nation, whose 50 states all set their own 50 different health, education and public spending policies, against e.g. Sweden or Spain. That's a bad comparison.

Why do we judge other geographically large and politically divided nations like Canada, Russia or China in aggregate but the USA gets special treatment that conveniently provides an excuse for facing the reality that America is not actually a very good place to live unless you are very wealthy?

Because we don't and we shouldn't? Don't defend bad practice in discussing the US by inventing bad practice that people you just made up are using to discuss Canada, Russia, and China.

> provides an excuse for facing the reality that America is not actually a very good place to live unless you are very wealthy?

You are literally insisting here that aggregate data conceals differences between groups of people. The end of your sentence angrily argues against the beginning of your sentence.

edit: the reason we need to disaggregate is because we need to talk about Mississippi. We need to talk about black America. We need to talk about Chicagoland separately from downstate Illinois. We need to talk about black Chicago separately from white Chicago. Aggregation helps us avoid things.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before Netflix was a thing, I sometimes tried to have conversations with people about "gee, it's a bit annoying that my only options to watch a movie is to buy an expensive dvd that I will watch once, or to pirate it" and the most common response was complete befuddlement, they simply could not comprehend that someone might not want to pirate things if they could, they could not comprehend that besides being illegal…

> Now that you can just pay 10-20 euro for a streaming service, The nice thing about piracy is that you can find what you want immediately. You don't have to go to an aggregator site to find out where it's available, and then log on to the streaming platform site to find that the aggregator site is lagging the real availability, or find that certain content isn't available in your country, or that the content is avai…

I strongly believe the fact that media companies struggle to accept payments worldwide and region-lock their content when you do pay is why their services ultimately suck for customers.

Eg. for my HBO GO subscription provided by my cable operator to continue working, I had to disable load balancing/failover between my other ISP for HBO addresses at home or it'd just stop working when it detects I've been switched to a different network. And then you travel and can't access it anymore either. It is completely bonkers.

As a sibling comment said, Netflix won (at that point) because they made service easy and converted a bunch of customers over.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#333
One of the issues is that you can't watch what you want on one paid for service.

I would happily watch my football team play on the telly if I could watch all the games for a reasonable price. However, you can't pay to watch all the games from a single service and you generally have to sign up for a prolonged period or pay significantly more than I'm willing to pay to watch the game if I've got the time.

The reality is that the value that the media companies place on watching a game on telly is significantly higher than the value I get from watching a game. I understand that others place a higher value on being able to watch a match or any other sport. I don't.

Paying hundreds of euro or pounds per season to attend a match is one thing. I accept that paying for police stewards and ambulances cost a lot of money. Paying the same to watch some games across multiple companies is of no interest to me.

Let me watch all my teams games for a tenth the cost of a season ticket and I'll probably pay.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#334

At what point does spanish internet become too unreliable? There was a thread the other day about someone's CI jobs failing due too this.

I am pretty sure Telefónica will tell people they can just switch to their own services.

Telefonica has a business branch that offer some services similar to cloudflares ones like CDN, DDOS Protection, etc...There is a huge conflict of interest here to use copyright law to make cloudflare and other competitors customer's life as crappy and unusable as they can.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we judge other geographically large and politically divided nations like Canada, Russia or China in aggregate but the USA gets special treatment that conveniently provides an excuse for facing the reality that America is not actually a very good place to live unless you are very wealthy?

Because we don't and we shouldn't? Don't defend bad practice in discussing the US by inventing bad practice that people you just made up are using to discuss Canada, Russia, and China. > provides an excuse for facing the reality that America is not actually a very good place to live unless you are very wealthy? You are literally insisting here that aggregate data conceals differences between groups of people. The end…

Edit: lol never mind, not going to bother arguing with Americans

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#336
post #315
post #9

This is incredibly stupid, but don't laugh at Spaniards: your (and my) lawmakers are equally likely to enact similarly stupid laws. It's mind-boggling how stupid the world can be sometimes.

Not lawmakers in this case, but judges having no understanding of what they're ruling on.

Last year a judge almost blocked all of telegram for everyone :( also because of a complaint of some large telco. Luckily they realised the extreme impact of this decision and reverted it.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the voters don't vote on issues, and there are no consequences for breaking campaign promises. and direct democracy is le bad, of course (since Brexit).

Direct Democracy is bad because even if people were capable of doing the hard work to actually decide on coherent trade-offs, for which there is precious little evidence, they do not have time which means we should hire a few people to do that hard work, and that's what an Indirect Democracy is.

I think direct democracy is bad for a couple of reasons (some are probably rephrased versions of another reason):

* not everyone can be an expert on everything;

* people can't know what they're not sufficiently knowledgeable about;

* people would like to vote (if it was quick and easy) for anything they have even the slightest opinion on;

* people could be manipulated much easier than an expert or than an educated representative influenced by experts would;

* people value their voice and opinion and themselves too much;

* only a minority of people would vote on lots of things, skewing the results; a majority would vote on just a few issues;

* education fucking sucks everywhere - people don't have enough information about different topics, they don't know how to get said info, how to analyze it or how to filter trash or spam;

* people passionate enough about something will vote on it much more than people not passionate enough about it - with the caveat that someone can be passionate "for X" but not that passionate "against X" - which can lead to the phrasing of the question deciding who will vote;

* it would be easier to bribe someone to vote on something they don't care about (or don't realize they care about) - you wouldn't vote for a new supreme leader but might vote for a specific change in laws about metallurgical unions (gave it as an example as I know nothing about the topic so I "don't care" about it).

If people were educated, had critical thinking, knew how to spot manipulation, weren't greedy and were able to think about abstract things, direct democracy might work. But people aren't, don't, don't, aren't and aren't.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#338
post #6

Wtf? Just the other day I had chat about how stupid this is: they're blocking cloudflare to stop pirates! So half the internet goes down, but pirates just.. Don't use cloudflare anymore.. Or use a proxy... Or use tor... These policies cause nothing but collateral damage, and now apparently they've decided to cause some more of it! Good job Spain.

> Wtf? Just the other day I had chat about how stupid this is: they're blocking cloudflare to stop pirates!

Correction: they use the pirate excuse to make life of clients choosing competitors (like cloudflare) impossible. There is an overlap between some Cloudflare and Telefónica services.

Re: Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times

#340
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, people's reasons for piracy are a pretty even mix of all these issues (service problems, principles, and cost) I'd certainly pirate less if I could afford it, but even if I could, I'd still pirate a lot of stuff because I don't want to worry about what streaming service it's on this week, or because I don't want to contribute to monopolization of some industry. And sure, I'd still pirate some things…

What are these "valid arguments for piracy" you refer to? Content isn't food, shelter, or clothing. It's a "nice to have" in one's life. It's literally entertainment.

They wrote them out.

And digital media is similarly fungible, and media companies owning copyright can produce a single copy at insignificant cost — and illegal copies are usually produced at no cost to them too.

If you would rather not consume content than pay with time and money being asked of you, there is no real loss to anyone if you consume an illegal copy.

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