Federal appeals court strikes down net neutrality rules

[katmai]

OKAY, WHY DO YOU NEED ONE?!?!

[Ideologue]

I'd watch Scanners on it.

[CountDeMoney]

I dunno, re: wide-screens:  HD projectors have made leaps and bounds resolution-wise in recent years.  Pretty sure it's OttoVB that has one and swears by it.

[Ideologue]

My dad has an SD projector, but 480p it may be, it does throw a pretty fucking huge image on the wall.

[Ed Anger]

OKAY, WHY DO YOU NEED ONE?!?!

Did I say I was getting it?

[katmai]

OKAY, WHY DO YOU NEED ONE?!?!

Did I say I was getting it?

No, i was just being a usual Languishsta!

[Ed Anger]

OKAY, WHY DO YOU NEED ONE?!?!

Did I say I was getting it?

No, i was just being a usual Languishsta!

Don't be a retard. You are better than that.

[celedhring]

Unless you run an auditorium-sized screen, 4k is a novelty.

Maybe for now.  The fact that a 23" monitor has the same resolution as a 60" TV means that there are some resolution gains to be made for TVs, not to mention retina display monitors.

Not really, the eye just can't perceive such minute details in such screen sizes unless you're sticking your nose to the screen, which is not how you will watch TV.

This guy makes a very good write-up on the issue: http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33199_7-57566079-221/why-ultra-hd-4k-tvs-are-still-stupid/

The same guy did a write-up about all things that could improved in screened media besides pure resolution, which I thought was very spot-on.  His big ones were color (RGB is arguably insufficient) and motion blur (which is a huge, huge, huge problem, and something I notice even in the best-shot pictures, but if I am not mistaking it solving it would require new cinematographic methods as well as new displays).

Motion blur is WAD regarding film, it gives it that weird dream-like aura that films have. My aunt has a TV that purposedly reduces it and watching movies in it feels positively weird, more video-like. But that's probably because I'm not used to it. I never saw The Hobbit at 48 fps on that regard, how did that look?

But yeah, the problem with dealing with stuff like overhauling legacy standards like color systems is that it would be a titanic undertaking compared to just bumping up the resolution.

[jimmy olsen]

Fucking bullshit

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/05/network_neutrality_dinosaurs_like_time_warner_and_at_t_have_nothing_to_worry.html

Yes, Your Internet Is Getting Slower

Your provider likes it that way. And the government doesn't care.
By David Auerbach

The ongoing battle over broadband network neutrality is confusing, and the stakes for consumers and businesses are high. What's the worst that can happen if network neutrality doesn't prevail? Yes, you will pay more for worse service, but just how bad will it get? To answer that complicated question, there's one easy analogy available: the California energy crisis of 2000.
David Auerbach David Auerbach


In the late 1990s, the deregulation of the California utilities—which forced them to sell off their power supplies to independent electricity wholesalers—proved to be a disaster. The magic hand of the market was supposed to bring down energy fees for all. What happened instead was that "efficient markets" turned out to be nothing of the sort. In 2000, market manipulation, artificial scarcity created by shutting down power plants to reduce supply, and deliberately inferior service resulted in blackouts and brownouts, an 800 percent rise in energy prices, and lucrative profiteering by Enron. Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric went bankrupt, and the whole crisis cost somewhere upward of $40 billion.

Electricity wholesalers such as Enron are akin to Internet service providers such as Time Warner and Comcast in important ways. The electricity wholesalers had incentives to starve the energy market in order to extract greater fees from utilities and consumers. ISPs have similar incentives to manipulate their bandwidth in order to extract fees from websites (such as Netflix and YouTube), as well as not build out any infrastructure that would make bandwidth cheaper or make your Internet faster.

This is, in fact, what is already happening. Ars Technica reports that gigabit broadband could easily become a reality, but the ISPs have no interest in pursuing that path. Instead, ISPs like Time Warner repeatedly try to switch to capped bandwidth plans, despite widespread customer opposition to what is basically price gouging. In the face of actual competition, they wouldn't dare.

Many customers are already living with a virtual Internet brownout. Tier 1 Internet provider Level 3, which provides top-level "backbone" services that reach the entire world, has posted several scary updates on the state of affairs. General counsel Michael Mooney observes that the ISPs are playing a game of chicken by demanding content providers pay them before they build out any further infrastructure. "These ISPs break the Internet by refusing to increase the size of their networks unless their tolls are paid," Mooney said. Worse, they don't even use the capacity they have, artificially starving their customers and slowing down the Internet. (Which explains why Game of Thrones is always buffering on your HBO Go, for example.) Level 3 Vice President Mark Taylor provided evidence that five U.S. ISPs (and one European ISP) are refusing to upgrade their infrastructure despite their connection ports being saturated. In other words, these ISPs are intentionally letting their service degrade because they're cheap, like a city not fixing potholes in its roads.

If your Internet connection and streaming seem to have slowed down over the last year (as mine certainly has), Taylor has an answer: "permanent congestion" that has been in place for "well over a year," because your ISP "refuses to augment capacity." These ISPs, according to Taylor, "are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfill the requests their customers make for content." He provided a graph showing one Dallas ISP in constant saturation, effectively an Internet brownout for its customers.
140513_TECH_chart_utilization Dallas' Internet brownout: a week of ongoing bandwidth saturation and hundreds of millions of dropped and delayed packets for an unnamed Dallas ISP refusing to upgrade service.

Taylor did not identify the ISPs, but Time picked up on some clues, pointing to AT&T, Charter, CenturyLink, Time Warner Cable, and Comcast. (Time Warner and AT&T both serve Dallas, incidentally.) These titans exist in a market with very little competition, and it's only getting worse: Time Warner is set to merge with the equally giant Comcast to form a behemoth that would cover 40 percent of the broadband market and 30 percent of the cable market. If network neutrality is weakened, as the Federal Communications Commission has been trying to do, ISPs will now be able to slow down traffic on a case-by-case basis. As "Future Tense" writer Marvin Ammori put it, "Once the court voids the nondiscrimination rule, AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast will be able to deliver some sites and services more quickly and reliably than others for any reason. Whim. Envy. Ignorance. Competition. Vengeance. Whatever. Or, no reason at all."

Alongside the terrible level of customer satisfaction with broadband ISPs, these existing abuses by ISPs with near-monopoly power should have policymakers raring for action. Yet regulatory capture is clearly in place. The head of the FCC, Obama appointee Tom Wheeler, is a former lobbyist for the very cable companies and telecoms he purports to regulate. Wheeler has done nothing to address existing problems while seeking to loosen what regulations there are by allowing ISPs to give preferential treatment to content providers. ISPs will be able to privilege—or deprivilege—traffic purely arbitrarily, creating Internet "fast lanes" for content providers who pay up and "slow lanes" for those who don't ... or just for content providers they don't like. It's payola, basically, wherein YouTube and Netflix will have to pony up (as Netflix just did to Comcast) so that customers can get the speeds they're supposedly already entitled to.

[DGuller]

Every country gets the government it deserves.  It's a miracle our governance is as good as it is, with half the country brainwashed by crony capitalists into thinking that sabotaging government at every step is actually a good thing for them.

[The Minsky Moment]

That article makes no sense at multiple levels.
Aside from the bizarre analogy to the California energy deregulation of the 1990s, apparently so that it could throw the scare word "Enron" into the picture, it is trying to make an argument about the impact of departing from net neturality by talking about ISP behavior under net neutrality.

[Grey Fox]

It's a bad article.

Ending net neutrality will leave America behind in the future. Russia will have won.

[grumbler]

It's a bad article.

Ending net neutrality will leave America behind in the future. Russia will have won.

As long as we are permanently in the future when we get left behind, I can live with it.  Russia will have won by being left behind in the present, while the US is left behind in the future.

[derspiess]

OKAY, WHY DO YOU NEED ONE?!?!

Did I say I was getting it?

I got excited this morning reading about a Chinese company making a 49" 4K TV that will sell for $640.  Until I read the line buried at the end of the article that they won't be sold outside China

[DGuller]

It's a bad article.

Ending net neutrality will leave America behind in the future. Russia will have won.

As long as we are permanently in the future when we get left behind, I can live with it.  Russia will have won by being left behind in the present, while the US is left behind in the future.

Well, obviously.