Sure, someone is celebrating. But the baker isn't celebrating anything the wedding. they are only celebrating the money the get for doing the job. The baker is celebrating as much as mcdonalds celebrates that they helped me to celebrate my morning poop after feeding me breakfast.

This is basically what the law says. you can create a private club with private members and you can be as discriminatory or exclusive as you want.

If you have a business that serves the public then it must serve the public at large. this means a business that is registered to serve the public cannot discriminate against anyone in the public.

you want to be an asshole and just have a club with your friends that have the same set of panties twisted in the same style of knot in your pants. Have at it.
We can all point at you and laugh when we see you struggling to walk down the street with your mental burdens.

  If you are running a company in the public square that serves the public, then you need to grow up and treat every single individual equally.

Comcast has an obligation to their customer to supply them with the amount of bandwidth that the customer has paid for. Comcast doesnt get to choose what the customer uses that bandwidth for. They are only there to sell that bandwidth. If comcast is unable to supply the bandwidth to the customer that they are contractually required to do so, then they are in breach of contract. If they have oversold their bandwidth capacity then they are at fault.

As a customer, I get the bandwidth that i pay for. I don't care how many other people are using the internet or if they are all watching netflix.

breach of contract.

They don't get to turn around and charge netflix now so that netflix customers can get the bandwidth that they've already paid for.

The reality is the comcast wants the ability to throttle netflix because comcast is a media company and a direct competitor to netflix in that market. Then comcast can both keep customers on their non-online cable service plans as well as creating their own online content offerings and force customers to move to their services when the throttling of netflix and other competitors services are so degraded as to make them unusable.

Not really.
So My ISP has a contract with me that they can deliver stuff to me at a certain speed. If i am only paying for 14.4k then im going to get netflix at 14.4k regardless of what netflix is able to stream at. If my ISP starts to complain that everyone is using netflix and thus using up their entire pipe, then they have oversold their pipe and infrastructure because they have contracts with customers to be able to provide them a consistent bandwidth. They are never required to give you more than you paid for. They also cant charge you more directly or indirectly by arbitrarily making one web site arbitrarily slower until that website pays them a penalty/fee which they turn around and charge me. If I pay for 20Mb bandwidth, then I should be able to get 20Mb down on anything I want to get from the internet as lon gas the website in question is able to serve their content at that speed. If the ISP can't do that then they are guilty of a breach of contract. The contract with their customers. If the ISP can only guarantee less bandwidth to all their users, then they should only offer contracts for that data rate.

It gets more complicated that that sure. There are more people using the internet at certain times so at times the pipe will be more saturated than at other times. In the end, this is a risk that an ISP takes that they will always be able to provide the amount of bandwidth that that have promised at any time regardless of how many or how few people were using it or what website they are using.

Its like overselling tickets on an airplane because you don't think everyone is going to show up. If those people show up, you have to compensate them because you are not able to honor the contract that you signed with them.

Lol.. needed that laugh.
its not that the "evil" republicans are pushing it. it's that republicans finally gave up trying to fight it. Even then, i'm not sure its quite that black and white. My guess that as a compromise to get republicans on board, they made sure there were some pretty big loopholes for their corporate constituents included in the bill.
I guess we will just have to wait and see. The sweet sweet tasty democrats haven't been exactly perfect on net neutrality either. But they have been much better in terms of understanding the consequences of not having it. Maybe that's just because they generally have a distrust of large powerful corporations. Can't imagine why that is :p

wow, I haven't seen so many shills in one place in quite a while. the reason you are being called out isn't because of your position but because you conveniently leave out details which completely invalidate your arguments.

1. secret courts - yes, the original intention was to make sure there was probable cause before the court was to issue a warrant. In reality, even statements by the court indicate that it has been not much more than a rubber stamp. Less that one percent of requests for warrants have actually been denied. The court is not protecting any citizens. It is protecting the impression of process and procedures so that the government cannot be sued for breaking fourth amendment protections.

2. Spying on everyone. - yes, we all know that the NSA director perjured himself when he said that only metadata was being collected. Within weeks, the rest of us learned about prism which collects not only metadata but content itself. The fact that you leave this out means to me that you know your argument is flawed and that you are trying to discount and minimize facts and evidence that has already been publicly disseminated.

blah blah blah. more bullshit about things being legal that in fact were not legal until unconstitutional laws were instituted to make them less illegal. Lets not even get into the fact that when these laws were passed, the senate intelligence committee did not even know about prism and other programs which were meant to "collect all data".

As for phone record metadata, this is the type of information that government and investigators used to need a warrant to get and they needed to request it from the phone company. Now you are implying that a warrant isn't needed because it's public information and therefore there is no expectation of privacy. FUCK YOU! If there is a reason to suspect someone of a crime, then there is cause to get a warrant. If there isn't, then you have no claim to that or any other information.

Blah blah blah. About the NSA and breaking laws. Laws have been created to make what the NSA is doing "legal". That does not in any way mean that it is constitutional. These things are not at all equivalent to how things were in 1979 or even before the patriot act. You are disingenuous to imply that these things are even remotely equivalent. In 1979, the intelligence infrastructure was even remotely set up to monitor the activities of normal American citizens.

Blah blah blah. terrorists use the same networks and such. You know there was a time when the intelligence services needed to actually do real investigative work. They didn't just get to treat everyone like a criminal until one committed a crime.

Freedom isn't free. It's difficult and expensive. Attempting to take away peoples privacy and autonomy to make the jobs at the NSA easier doesn't make us more free. It makes us less free. Being free without the freedom part of it is actually not being free. Even if some government officials are lying to you about how much freedom you actually have.

I can think of at least a few "I told you so" that I owe to some friends who extolled the virtues of this made up currency.

"I have these really fancy beads here that are worth a lot. if you give me that thing you have that I need, ill give you these beads and I promise that the guy in that next village will agree with me that the beads are worth a lot. He may not want to change these beads for other types of currency but you can get whatever you want from him. I call these beads bit-coins.

its ok that these beads aren't made of gold or silver or anything that could otherwise be used to make anything.
its ok that the local government doesn't even really consider these valuable currency. Or that there are no laws to protect anyone who gets robbed of these beads."
see the difference?

To me, this is the same thing as the whole "privacy doesn't exist anymore" statement.
It is used as an excuse to make even more obtrusive and intrusive things and expecting that people will just accept them under the false premise that "privacy doesn't exist anymore". When Mark Zuckersnot first made this claim, it was less of a reality than it was a marketing ploy. If people accept that privacy doesn't exist, then they are more willing to give up more of it. Sure, with the natureof the internet and online communications as well as new technologies, the ability to retain privacy has taken different forms and in some ways has been reduced. One has to examine not only the everyday tools they use but also the ideas and technologies behind them as they all have potentially negative consequences now or in the future.

Not to the point. Just because someone thinks that some business model or business tactic is ok does not make it so. businesses owners and, in particular internet businesses are notoriously lacking in creativity. when one company sees that another company has jumped on the bandwagon for a specific technology, tracking cookies, off-shoring, etc, the rest of us really don't have much recourse unless we want to stop all the offending businesses. We are basically forced to accept these bad ideas. You don't have any idea how much shit I get even after so many years from friends because I don't buy into facebook and thus, do not use it. We could stop using the internet, but that's not really a viable solution. Instead, we have to find other ways to let those businesses know that those tactics are not acceptable while trying to survive in what really is an internet powered world. Just because the herd has bought into this marketing BS, those of us who are more thoughtful of our privacy should be be compelled to join the herd and their lack of forethought.

It started out with people just trying to make a little something on the side using a ads on their website.
Then it turned into a way to pay for your website. Then it was a way to make a living.
Then it was a way to better target customers on your website. Then it was a way to track metrics for your website usage.
Then it was a way to track uses across websites. Then it was a way to build a profile about users based on the ad click-through.
Then it was to build a personality profile. At the same time, it was used by malicious and non-malicious companies to infect your computer
with malware and trojans (read: Sony rootkit)

Ive never been a fan of any web advertising. From the very beginning I saw it as a bad business model. Nowadays, people are rebelling
many of the above uses of web advertising. Its not any businesses right to track me once I leave their website. I dont even like to be tracked while I am on their website.

If companies and advertisers went back to just serving small unobtrusive amounts of non-targetted, non-tracking advertisement, then I think more people would be OK with that. Even though I am not fond of it, I think that would be an acceptable cost. The problem is that they want more and more and the people they are taking it from is the user. The user doesn't have any say in what is an acceptable form of advertising.
People either accept it out of ignorance or apathy or they use tools to block out as much of the nonsense that these companies and advertisers try to push onto us. There are other ways to make money on the internet beyond using ad revenue. When people in droves tell you that what you are doing is bad, you shouldn't try to find a way to circumvent their ability to prevent you from doing those bad things. You should try to find a way that is more acceptable to more people.

LW-

Murder happens everyday. If someone murders you because they don't like who you are or what you say, then that is a hate crime.

We don't have to accept hate crimes where people are upset that we are expressing our legal rights. Nor should we.
People who would kill in this way are crazy and/or stupid. It doesn't matter if you find the legal right wrong or odious. If you cant handle the law in your country, then try to change it. Don't ignore it and take it out on someone who is following that law. If you can't then move to a place whose laws more closely represent your ideology.

Stop making excuses for these fuckwits. Instead, be more constructive and explain to the fuckwits that Freedom of speech not only helps the people they don't like, but also them. Then explain to them that killing someone for saying something you don't like is NEVER justified. If they still do it, then they are criminals and nothing more. Don't give these people a stage or justification for their behavior.