Your view of reality is based on the notion that if you arent very comfortable then you arent a member of the middle class. Thats not how middle class is defined.

Neither extreme of the socio-economic strata. The middle class. The ones that continue to vote for themselves more government benefits and services than they pay for at the expense the rich, the poor, and when its neither of those then its at the expense of future adults... children and all the people that havent even been born yet.

You can't dream your way out of this. Follow the money. They are even adding foodstamps to the list of things required to appease them. At the expense of the rich and the poor. Thats the middle class.

For the most part, the middle class.

The middle class benefits from both the taxation of the rich and the taxation on the poor. This isn't because the middle class isnt calling most of the shots. They call most of the shots.

If you make the middle class angry then you will not survive reelection. The politicians vilify both the rich and the poor because thats the tune that satisfies their middle class electorate.

If the choice was to keep the license for the spectrum and pretend to need it, or magnanimously give up the license for no benefit, they would do the first not the second.

I dont understand why you willingly and intentionally refuse to understand this.

You start shooting politicians until the problem is solved.

Amazing how the anonymous simpletons neglect to deal with actual business economics but instead want to focus on some simplistic price model (that doesnt even include the basics .. supply, demand, and competition)

The idea that Apple would not in any way change its business practices if its profit margins change is laughably ludicrous. Only someone looking to justify their position with horseshit would ever believe otherwise. Picking theories first and then searched for shallow justifications is not rational. Stop doing it.

You seem to be missing the point that corporate taxes are already the exact "regressive" you are worried about. Businesses pass their expenses, such as taxes, along to their customers even when their customers are poor.

There are several differences. For instance those in the know can pretend that corporate taxes are not regressive taxes that effect poor people the most, while shallow slogan-chanting ignorant sheep have no clue that corporate taxes are regressive taxes that effect poor people the most.

End all indirect taxes, including corporate taxes.

If you dont like it, set up your own transit network and see how swell it is to increase your transit networks capacity in order to meet the needs of another transit networks profits.

I'm sure you are OK with being my networks transit bitch while I dominate the market with the lowest prices that I can offer because I get settlement free peering with a complete morons transit network.

On the internet, you cannot tell. You seem to be missing this key fact. If you make the receiver pay instead of the sender, I will set up a network tomorrow and send shit towards your network all day and night, and then when you refuse to pay the bill I send you I will file a lawsuit and send notice to your credit agencies. While you are busy deciding if its worth fighting me in court or not, I'll be speaking to the press telling them what a deadbeat you are for not paying your bandwidth bill.

Whats that? The way you imagine things requires honest actors? Yeah.. thats the point... thats why its not set up that way. its set up to that the sender pays so that it doesnt matter if they are honest or not.

ISP's have traditionally purchased transit. The idea that ISP's have commonly gotten settlement free peering is laughable because it is quite uncommon for an ISP to do any peering at all. The ISP's that do have peering agreements are tier 2 or tier 1, and there are only a few dozen of those each in the entire world. These so called ISP's are transit networks that happen to also be providers.

Transit networks have always had to be paid for asymmetric flow. Settlement free only lasts so long as the ratio to and fro isnt far from balanced.

Netflix's current ISP is Level 3. Back in the days when Cogent was Netflix's ISP, Level 3 ended their settlement free agreement, disconnected from Cogent, and demanded money because Cogent had a very imbalanced ratio with them. Now that Level 3 is Netflix's ISP, they pretend that ratios don't matter. Bullshit.

Most last mile providers are tier 3 networks and purchase transit. Thats not "settlement free."

Even Comcast which is tier 2 purchase their primary transit from Tata. They don't get a free ride because they can't do the transit.

Verizon is tier 1. They dont buy transit. They do transit. You dont get to dump many times as much data on another transit network as they dump on yours without consequences. You cannot argue around this because this is the way it is, the way its been, and the way it will continue to be. The burden is on the sender because thats the only way it makes sense to do it. The receiver shouldn't be paying because they may have neither requested nor want it. A lot of people bring up the idea that netflix users "requested" the data. The internet maintains no concept of "requested." Packets are pushed through the network, not pulled.

Netflix's old ISP was Cogent. Remember the issues between Cogent and Level3 back in 2005? Netflix's current ISP, Level 3, didnt want Cogent to get a free ride and shut down the interlinks, but now that Level3 is netflix's ISP they suddenly are all for free rides with everybody? Really?

There is the way you want things to work, and the way they actually work. There is good reason for the way things actually work.

No, the scandal here is that the asymmetric arrangement isnt presented honestly, like you didnt do right here.

Settlement free peering has never existed when one side sends significantly more traffic than the other side. Period. Its not something that happens. You can call it extortion if you want, never the less thats not how the business operates now or has ever operated in the past.

In this case the peering agreement need to be asymmetric (one side pays the other) because the bandwidth simply isnt even close to symmetric, but Level 3 (the ISP Netflix uses) does not want to pay the difference. Level 3 approached Netflix with a sweetheart deal, got their business, but now don't want to pay other backbones for the consequences of being Netflix's ISP.

Now given that Netflix itself is saving money because Level 3 isnt charging them a traditional price for the amount of bandwidth that they push, and Level 3 gets away with this by not paying other backbone providers a traditional price for such asymmetric peering, then it only seems natural that Neflix takes that money they are saving using their cheapskate ISP and uses some of it to route around the issues that choosing a cheapskate ISP has caused them.

Decisions have consequences.

I'd beg to differ. Most game AI is now scripted so that the high cost engine devs can go work on the next project while the low cost monkeys program the a.i, the interaction mechanics, and integrate content.

This is the recipe of an idiot that isnt capable of foreseeing the vast amounts of inefficiency that will happen when everyone begins to use whatever packet type has the highest priority, rather than what is the most efficient. Disguising packets as HTTP has already been suggested as the "solution" to bittorrent throttling.

I would say that the group is fairly burdened by the requirement. Burdens arent unfair just because you dont want to be burdened.

It really only requires 2 lenses, but in both a 4-lens (do such refractors exist? seems overly complicated) or 2 lens telescope the "cloaking" is only one direction and relies on the fact that the thing being "cloaked" is out of focus.

Anyone with a big aperture telescope can see this effect quick clearly without any fancy staging/setup at all. Simply look through the telescope at a distant object and then put your finger in front of the objective aperture. The only thing you will see is a very slight dimming as your finger passes in front of the aperture, and this includes the finger being right in the middle.