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Comment Re:Not in Germany (Score 1) 130

Now 5 years have passed where I resigned from my job and from then on depend on germans wellfare system.

I wasn't hired anymore. No one want's my knowledge and no one wants to hire a "foreigner" (my parents are migrants).

Too bad it is so hard to immigrate to the USA! We are all migrants here.

Comment The details (Score 2) 65

Based on this post, it looks like the BBC radio audio stream is encoded at a constant rate of 320 kbps using AAC-LC, delivered in the MPEG DASH container, and implemented in HTML5 using Media Source Extensions (MSE).

It is not clear to me if the BBC radio audio is being carried in MPEG DASH as MPEG-4 file format fragments or as an MPEG-2 Transport Stream, but I would suspect for audio-only it is MPEG-4 file format fragments.

Comment Re:Well damn (Score 1) 379

How does ensuring that corporations don't prioritize Internet traffic (and unfairly disenfranchise startups and direct competitors) get the government more involved in your life?

Because there is no way to prove traffic prioritization and this will simply benefit the incumbent providers who have better government connections, while providing zero consumer benefit. Competition will be hampered, not improved.

Comment Finally the government has full control of the Net (Score 0) 379

Well "net neutrality" nuts, you finally have eroded all of the efforts we pushed in the 1990's to keep government hands off of the Internet.

There many other ways this could have been avoided (such as requiring municipalities to grant franchise rights to new last-mile ISP entrants, for instance), but now the Federal government is in charge.

Lest people in other countries think you are immune, you should well know that the US Federal government will basically put its rules on the entire planet.

I hope you will be happy with the results!

Comment Re:Lawrence Lessig on this (Score 2) 495

Regardless of who owned the local loop or who sold service on it, US local loop lengths are longer than most other countries (regardless of population density).

I believe the long local loops relates to a massive central office "centralization" in the US when digital switching came along. Why exactly this centralization did not happen in Europe (and Australia) is not clear to me, it might have involved timing of DSS deployment versus the timing of DSL practicality.

The result is that the US has fewer COs, and longer local loops. Worked fine for voice, not so well for DSL.

Comment LTE Multicast (Score 2) 98

I believe "Bell Mobile TV" was a unicast IP service, but we know that Verizon and AT&T are planning roll-outs of LTE Multicast in the US, which is a very different beast.

Would it still be against "net neutrality" to allow carriers to serve up specially priced content on LTE Multicast, or would they have to make LTE Multicast available to all content providers equally? And how does one actually do that (given that the Internet, in general, has failed miserably at getting "general access" multicast routing to work)?

Comment Greece's problem is lack of ecumenic freedom (Score 3, Informative) 328

Don't be mislead by the debt problem. If Greece had economic growth, it would not have a debt problem.

Greece rankes "mostly unfree" on the Index of Economic Freedom:

Greece's economic freedom score is 54.0, making its economy the 130th freest in the 2015 Index. Its score has declined by 1.7 points since last year due to a substantial deterioration in the control of government spending and smaller declines in business freedom, labor freedom, and fiscal freedom. Greece is ranked 40th out of 43 countries in the Europe region, and its overall score is below the world and regional averages...the rule of law remains problematic, with property rights weakly enforced, tax evasion on the rise, and corruption pervasive. Despite efforts to create a more business-friendly regulatory environment, the labor market remains rigid and slow to adjust to market realities...The overall pace of regulatory reform lags behind other countries. With no minimum capital required, launching a business takes five procedures and 13 days. However, completing licensing requirements still takes about four months on average...

By the way, regarding "austerity", Greece's public expenditures equal 58.5 percent of domestic output. That does not sound very austere to me.

Comment Re:Just Require an IQ Test (Score 1) 673

Considering recent studies show that cancer is more likely to be caused by genetics than smoking

Can you link to these "recent studies"?

And if so, why did lung cancer rates fall by 12% in the last 30 years in the US, does that mean we are evolving immunity?

Or perhaps it lines up with reflect changes in the nation's smoking habits - smoking less, especially by men.

Comment Re:Bull pucky (Score 1) 200

This is a direct recipe for increasing income inequality, and you have to be a dishonest psychopath to think that's a good ida.

You will have to show the evidence that higher tax rates on individuals with higher incomes are effective at changing income shares.

In case you didn't notice, EU countries also have rising Gini coefficients as well as the US, despite different tax policies (though the US doesn't have the same level of unemployment).

Higher returns to people with more skills is a function of increasing technology and global economic growth, and will continue regardless of the tax rates.

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