The difference between fast lanes and throttling is, if you have paid for an advertised 10mbps internet connection and an ISP decides or is paid to serve traffic from sites/apps that compete with Amazon at 56k while leaving Amazon the full 10mbps, that's throttling. If you're paying for 10mbps connection and Amazon pays your ISP to allow traffic from their sites/apps to be fed to you at 50mbps, while their competitors and everyone else gets served at the advertised 10mbps, that's a fast-lane.

There's also a couple core 'fast-lane' scenarios.

One, a company could partner with an ISP, or an ISP could decide on their own to host servers locally on their network(s) to ensure optimum performance. This used to happen quite often in the early days of the internet when ISPs routinely hosted game, email and Usenet servers. Today it could be used for things like Netflix just as readily.
Another option is ISPs could simply exempt certain traffic from bandwidth caps.
While another is that certain traffic could be prioritized over other traffic. This could apply to everything from weather and traffic alerts to Disney's video service streams so that they aren't slowed by network congestion.

Thottling also has several potential implementations. There's the previous Amazon example I mentioned where companies essentially pay an ISP to sabotage the performance of their competitors, but there's also blanket throttling of things like bittorrent and Usenet traffic under the presumed mission of curbing piracy.

And would demonetize Youtube very quickly as Coca-Cola or Starbucks doesn't want to be seen as providing advertising revenue to someone extolling the virtue of ISIS. Better to not advertise on such a platform than risk customers gaining a false perception that your company promotes something that is socially abhorrent.

Not well. There's around 80,000 pedestrians injured in vehicle crashes each year. We as a society "adapt" with things like placing low speed limits, well defined crosswalks and a multitude of signals and signage in places with high pedestrian traffic. But our main method to adapt is to simply ignore how poorly we adapt and instead adopt an illusion of our own superiority.

Every piece of self driving car software I've ever seen demoed already has many, many systems in place to monitor and attempt to avoid pedestrians and are much, much more sophisticated than human adaptability is. A human driver can't usually track the position of dozens of pedestrians up and down and on both sides of a street to see if one of them suddenly veers off the sidewalk and into the street from between two parked cars, nor will they usually be talking to every driver on the street to share information about things they may not yet be able to see from their location but that could be hazardous in the near future.

I have this problem. I have jamessmith@gmail.com. Someone else with the same name signed up with jamessmth@gmail.com. But they, and everyone that e-mails them, do not always remember or know to omit the missing letter in the last name so I get flooded with his e-mail.

So far I've been dumped by 2 of his girlfriends, gotten notices of his signups for several gay dating sites, received numerous alerts that I've received money from his paypal and gotten numerous contracts, job offers, and order recipients. He's very lucky I'm not a dick as I could out him as gay, steal his paypal and do all kinds of mischief on other sites where he's signed up with my e-mail but still seems to utilize the sites even without being able to receive the e-mails.

Not quite true. Your gain is still his loss as, without per-show advertising revenue, whatever money is budgeted to make a show you like, isn't being budgeted to make a show he likes. Of course, there's no guarantee (or even likelihood) that if they didn't make the show you like, they'd make a show he likes. So it's still silly to complain about the shows they do make if they don't appeal to you.

Yes.

Yes again. The ADA applies to every online video hosted in, or distributed by an entity in the U.S.
Which means virtually every video hosting/streaming site, from Twitch to Brazzers, could be sued at any time for not providing closed captions on their videos.
The only thing holding such suits back is that the law is very vague as to whether the law applies to online videos so every suit is a crap shoot (well, that and there's no chance of a financial payoff if a suit is successful).

The DOJ issued a Advance Notice of Proposed Rule Making (ANPRM) where they intended to clarify how the rules apply to online videos. But it has been repeatedly delayed since 2010 and most people think they're just waiting for the market to clear it up for them by introducing affordable (or freely available) tech available to the general public that will provide accurate closed captions on the fly for any video to make it easier for businesses to comply by simply making use of such software to generate the captions automatically.

Prior to the existence of video games they made movies based on books, plays, radio shows, magazine articles, comics and comic strips, cartoons, toys as well sketches, tv shows, operas and basically every other type of media that has ever existed.

None of this is new. The first remake ever was 1904's The Great Train Robbery by director Siegmund Lubin which was a remake of 1903's The Great Train Robbery by director Edwin S. Porter. Reboots have been common as well. First, and probably most famously, is Godzilla which has been rebooted at least 20 times. Many of the movies that have become classics were themselves remakes of more poorly made movies. There were 10 other versions of The Wizard of OZ before the 1939 classic was made. 1964's A Fistful of Dollars was a nearly frame by frame remake (ripoff) of a 1961 japanese film, Yojimbo by Akira Kurosawa. The Maltese Falcon (1941) was a remake of a 1931 film which itself was based on the book.

Hollywood isn't cranking these movies out because they're out of ideas. Rehashing old stuff is a tried and true tradition they haven't had any reason to abandon. There's still lots of original adaptations being made and even some original IP being introduced, but just as it always has been, the times they actually hit on something better than the original or originally good is few and far between. We just now have the Internet to give us the ability to incessantly reboot and rehash complaints when they crank out something shitty.

If anyone thinks Canada, France, Germany an Britain don't already do the same things, they're delusional. Every country with any economic resources at all is spying on everyone they possibly can. It's just that the most powerful nations that proclaim to be in favor of democracy and freedom are scrutinized for hypocrisies and when discovered, have those hypocrisies exposed.

But you are stuck paying for them. Most people would prefer to not pay for things they don't want. Plus, all those smart bits often make TV performance terrible over that of a dumb box in things like channel switching unless you buy one of the really high end sets.

I do. And I'm much, much more likely to update now.


To linux.

Tons of companies sell technology that will allow a company to track the location of every RFID tag in a warehouse down to the inch.

Why couldn't a grocery store do the same? Stick on RFID on everything. Track where everything is every second, match it up to the register you were at when the items were bought, check the transaction record and match it video surveillance and from there they can easily match your name and customer info with every item you bought, looked at, hesitated in front, how you and wife seem to be getting along, how fat your kids are, and other things that some people find terrifying.
My view is, I don't give a fuck. Stopping them from using it for anything else is a fight for a different arena. It's not Safeway's fault they can't inform me of products I might actually want in the most efficient way possible without there being the risk someone else might take it and use the knowledge they have of me for fuckery.

I use the ads on Amazon all the time to find things I wouldn't have known to or thought to look for. Maybe I don't need a automatic dog walker right now, but it's good to have been informed it exists. Maybe a neighbor will ask where to find one. I can now tell her I saw it on Amazon.



JESUS! FUCKITY! FUCK! FUUUUUUUUUUUCK!
It's just not possible to agree with something a company like Amazon does without sounding like a fucking shill. I don't see how, but the evidence is conclusive. I have to be wrong.

Hmmmm. All I got was that BT is cranking up data collection on phone calls and found something good to do with it so it doesn't sound nerfarious.

Again, take a look at sites already under the new owners' umbrella. You'll quickly realize you should have added a "yet" to your comment.

This kind of thing is the only reason I still buy stuff from Newegg instead of Amazon. So, in a way, they are getting some financial compensation.