When the Iranian jet was shot down the naval task group had declared a 100 mile restricted airspace zone over the naval group which was in international waters at the time. Even today that is SOP whenever a carrier or other naval assets are in international waters. They establish and enforce the no-fly zone in the air and on the surface. Prior to the Iranian plane being shot down Iranian military jets had attempted to violate the restricted airspace several times a day over the previous 7 days. When the commercial jet was shot down their flight plan was headed right into the restricted airspace. The Iranians knew about the air space restrictions and knowingly let the commercial jet fly into that area instead of routing the plane away from the danger. The plane in question would also not acknowledge any communication attempts by the navy to warn them off. And to top it off the plane had it's transponder turned off making it difficult to identify the plane. It almost feels like the Iranian actions were a setup to cause exactly what happened to secure a huge propaganda victory. The US acknowledged the shoot down immediately and did not try to hide or deny the incident. Instead the navy captain who ordered the plane to be shot down was exonerated and the US paid millions dollars to the Iranians in reparations. The circumstances of the Ukrainian shoot down are nothing like what happened in Iran.

Calling it "unlimited" isn't fraud. Calling it "unlimited" while imposing artificial limits is fraud.

Well, since it is my own business that I am running, a business that I started, I wonder how could I possibly "over promote" myself, but carry on.

Amount of total dollars in existance does nothing to increase total productivity (well, inflation does cause shift of capital and plenty of misallocation, so the more they print the less productive output is created, but that is beside the main point). Number of dollars is like number of units on a clock or a thermometer face. Sure, you can increase the number used to measure something, you can split anything you are measuring into smaller and smaller units. You can even pretend that the smaller units you are measuring something in have not changed because of that change (inflation) but it does not change the item you are measuring.

So printing a ton more of dollars, you are reducing the size of the unit (dollar) that you are measuring in, but what you are measuring did not change because of it. 100 dollars in existance becomes 10000 dollars in existance by printing (or virtual printing). This does not increase the economy, it only increases prices and shifts purchasing power from those who produced and saved to those who got their hands on the newly printed, counterfeit currency. Inflation is theft, redistribution from the productive and frugal to the unproductive and wasteful.

Real money is created by work, real money measures productive output. Fake money eliminates productivity by misalocating scarce resources, by stealing from the productive and subsidising the wasteful and useless.

This sickening content is peculiar to this conflict. The war in Syria does not trigger these kinds of comments.

The war in Syria doesn't involve a nuclear state casually bulldozing civilian houses, complete with civilians inside, all because a handful of pesky terrorists keep lobbing ineffective bombs into empty fields.

Israel's problem really boils down to a matter of proportion. Yes, they have an unenviable situation to deal with; but they have chosen to respond in a way that makes them look like monsters (to the point that even many Jewish Israelis consider their government's behavior nothing short of reprehensible). When you cook ants with a magnifying glass, no one blames the ants, even if one or two do manage to sting you.


As for the FP's hypothetical French forum moderator - You count as part of the problem. When people can freely say things such as what I wrote above, they can contribute to the discussion, sometimes even vent a bit, and move on. When, however, fairly peaceful discussion vanishes under some bullshit pretense of racism - People then feel the need to escalate the impact of their few words making it through to other eyes.

Heck, even the Supreme Court [supremecourt.gov] disagrees with you. But whatever, it's not like it is their job to interpret the constitution.

Believe it or not, the USSC does not have that as part of their job description - The constitution just sets it up as essentially the highest appellate court in the land. Not until John Marshall's tenure, and particularly starting with Marbury v. Madison, did they claim the power to overrule Congress in "interpreting" the legality of a law.

That said, I generally don't agree with sumdumass, but on this one, he has it nailed. We can reinterpret the applicability of the constitution to the modern world, and if necessary, amend it; But the words themselves must of necessity retain their original meaning even as the common use of those words may change. Anything else leads to exactly what the GP described - crackers and chocolate, to some degree.

To work in manufacturing today it still takes experience, workers must be trained. Productivity of workers is growing in countries where businesses are still manufacturing, mining, producing something.

In USA there are very few jobs in manufacturing. Where people are mining in the USA, the people's wages are higher. However in the service sector the productivity gains are achieved by automating and getting rid of employees. The gains go to those, who are actually productive.

Most importantly, what you are looking at when talking about "productivity gains" is government stats on gdp, these underestimate inflation by a large factor. What is growing is not productivity in most cases but nominal prices due to all the money that is pumped into the system by the Fed. Under these conditions the productivity is falling not growing. Productive people produce, unproductive people print, borrow and run trade deficits that cannt be offset even by pickup in oil mining and exports. USA is even importing coal from Russia today instead of mining enough for itself. 90% of seafood are imports. There is no productivity, the government killed it and turned the entire country into dependents. Independance day? What a joke.

Unlimited bandwidth means no limits above the physical layer. Nobody is expecting a 10 Mbps dial-up service. or 4.4 Tbps 2G service. But if you sell a 10 Mbps service as "unlimited", putting speed/bandwidth caps on it is fraud.

Just because the market wants it and would pay for it doesn't mean it would be profitable.

They presume it won't be, so they don't try it. I worked for a cable company once. I ran the numbers. It worked to make money a la carte.

The problem was "everyone else is doing it the package way" so risk was avoided. It is profitable to provide channels a la carte. It's just confusing to the cable companies, if not the customers. But I imagine most customers wouldn't mind or get confused by "order the base package, and check all the optional channels you want". Also, Starz and others ran "free weekend" promotions every few years. The cable company could open everything up and let people see what the other choices are.

Of course, as the guy that oversaw the build of the delivery of content, and not the buying of content or marketing side, nobody listened. But the numbers were sound. Unless the people who said what they' pay for a la carte channels were lying.

The real reason it would never work is that consumers are dumb. Would you pay $30 for your favorite 30 channels, where you spend 99%+ of your watching time, when you could get 200 channels for $50? Sure, you've never watched 150 of them, and another 20 had a show on it that you watched that was on one of the remaining 30 channels, but is being re run. But you "need" 200+ channels.

False logic. You could have argued the same wrong point back when 90% of the population worked in food production. Industrial revolution, free market capitalism brought individual productivity up dramatically and thus allowed workers to work much less to produce much more, not just for themselves but for everybody else. Before government stepped in to destroy the free market capitalism by changing laws so that laws would not apply equally to different people, free market capitalism was working to reduce the length of the work week and to reduce work hours in a day. Without government intervention in the last 100 years, free market capitalism would have brought work week and work hours even lower. 3 day work week, 8 hour days while making enough to live middle class life? Free market was working towards that. Government destroyed that dynamic and stopped and reversed that trend.

Yes, now tell me which of my points is wrong.

Are they contractually banned from it? I said no. What do you say?

" The carriers suspect it would be a poor model," I said yes. What did you say?

So you are agreeing that they aren't banned from a la carte, but choose not to do it?

Got it. You win for the most disagreeable agreement of the day.

Or if you're into math, you invoke the pigeonhole principle

Though technically true, in fairness we need to differentiate between meaningful data and noise. Yes, a universal compressor doesn't care. Human users of compression algorithms, for the most part, do care.

So the limit of useful compression (Shannon aside) comes down to how well we can model the data. As a simple example, I can give you two 64 bit floats as parameters to a quadratic iterator, and you can fill your latest 6TB HDD with conventionally "incompressible" data as the output. If, however, you know the right model, you can recreate that data with a mere 16 bytes of input. Now extend that to more complex functions - Our entire understanding of "random" means nothing more than "more complex than we know how to model". As another example, the delay between decays in a sample of radioactive material - We currently consider that "random", but someday may discover that god doesn't play dice with the universe, and an entirely deterministic process underlies every blip on the ol' Geiger counter.


So while I agree with you technically, for the purposes of a TV show? Lighten up. :)

It is also possible the the VPN packets are transiting a different upstream peer from Verizon and bypassing the peering bottleneck at issue. Assuming that Verizon is performing inspection of packets and throttling only Netflix packets is quite a leap.

Failing to have peerage agreements in place to honor your downstream sales commitments is a form of throttling - Or, I would daresay, a form of outright fraud.

If I offer to sell you "unlimited" beers from my fridge for $50 a month, but I only resupply it at a rate of one six-pack per week, I have intentionally cheated you. That basic relationship doesn't magically change because of some hand-waving technobabble about peerage agreements and network congestion.

(Yes, I know those don't strictly count as technobabble, and what they really mean - But they effectively reduce to Verizon having zero interest in upgrading its infrastructure to support its commitments to their customers as long as the FCC and FTC will allow them to outright lie)

Or a month's unlimited data [three.co.uk] for $25. And interestingly (for this topic) a 3UK SIM can be used in a handful of countries without roaming charges - including the USA [three.co.uk] (but data's limited to 25 gigabytes per month and you're not allowed to tether.)

Holy crap... Can I sign up with them AS an American? Tethering aside, that beats my current plan by 5GB and $50.

No, the US doesn't need to regulate the greedy-four in charge of our cell networks - We clearly have the best products and services available at the best prices thanks to free market pressures.