"Comcast was chosen by the public sector to provide a monopoly cable TV/Internet service in the area."

No, it was not. When exclusive cable franchises were legal, cable internet wasn't a thing, and the franchise was for the cable television service ONLY. More than two decades ago such exclusive franchises were made illegal by federal law, and any such agreements have long expired.

"If you don't like Comcast, your local government simply has to rescind its service monopoly, and either award the monopoly contract to a different company, or open it up to true market competition."

There are no service monopolies for cable so there is nothing to rescind. It is illegal for any local government to grant a "monopoly contract".

Please stop spreading this nonsense. I know you've been corrected more than once on this.

The US NPS is not collecting anything. They're trying to buy a commercial database from the social media company. The social media posts have already been collected, presumably under the jurisdiction and volition of any relevant laws, which GDPR is NOT, nor is the Canadian Constitution, nor is the Constitution of the State of Washington. Nothing in any of those documents prevents the collection and storage of publicly posted messages.

The US Navy is not collecting the tweets. Twitter, if that turns out to be the supplier, did. The US Navy is buying the database from Twitter. Not collecting. Not scraping off the net. Not "harvesting".

Second, the GDPR covers PERSONAL data. The RFQ explicitly excludes personal data from the purchase. If you have put personal data into your tweet, then that was YOUR choice and YOUR option, and your act in tweeting it to the public is an implicit agreement for them to see it.

Third, by POSTING the tweets publicly, each poster has given everyone the right to store their tweets. Otherwise, you're arguing the ridiculous position that I, as a twitter user, cannot store the tweets I have seen on my own computer, in a country that is well outside the limits of the EU and any GDPR. We saw this very same nonsense back in the good old Usenet days when people thought they could limit the distribution of publicly-posted articles by including a stupid copyright provision denying the right to do so. Absolutely insane.

There is no fucking treaty involved here. The US NPS is buying a commercial database, not creating one of their own. Nice try.

If there is one that applies, you would have responded to any of the other requests for info on what treaty you think is involved, but you have not. Stop spreading nonsense and chill out. The big bad US Navy isn't going to drop a bomb on your head because you tweeted something bad.

I see you'd rather knee-jerk react to "US Navy" instead of actually read what is going on, or you just can't suss it out even when it is pointed out to you.

The US Navy isn't gathering anything, and they aren't creating any database. They're buying an existing corporate collection. The responsibility for GDPR or the Canadian Constitution (which does not apply the the US Navy because it is the CANADIAN CONSTITUTION) falls upon the corporation already collecting the data.

I don't care if there are "record fines", because obviously the corporations are not being stopped in collecting the PUBLIC postings made by people using their systems. It's PUBLIC data. The people who tweeted it (if Twitter is the final provider) CHOSE to tweet publicly and agreed to whatever things Twitter had them agree to. There is no private data involved.

Cancel the nonsense about "there will be lawsuits". It's just ridiculous. You keep yammering about treaties as if that meant something. This isn't some new collection that needs special vetting, it's something that already exists. I would have thought that the required timeframe for the data (starting in 2016) might have been a big red clue that it wasn't anything new, but I guess some people would rather rant about the big bad government doing big bad things instead of paying attention to what was actually happening.

Utter nonsense. If this were true, why has the EU not taken Twitter or other social media company to court to sue them out of existence? Or Canada sued anyone over this?

Here's the facts that are being ignored in this manufactured broo ha ha:

1. The RFQ is for an existing database of social media texts that already exists and has been collected by an existing social media company. That may be Twitter, it may be someone else. In any case, the legal protection of any EU or Canadian laws will be the responsibility of the company, not the US NPS.
2. The database will be of publicly available comments. You posted it publicly, it is publicly available. It will not contain private data because the RFQ explicitly calls for that data to be excluded from what the company provides to NPS. We don't have to "trust the Navy" because the Navy isn't getting the data in the first place.
3. The NPS is the graduate school for the Navy, similar to the graduate school for UW or any other university. It's where select naval officers can go to do postgraduate study in any number of fields, like oceanography or computer science. It isn't the "Naval Intelligence Service" or ONI or OSS or CIA or anything like that. In that context, this data is not a study of how to target missiles onto objectionable people, it's a dataset to be used for social science studies into the uses of modern technology.

Let's drop the nonsense and look at what is actually happening. We don't need all this nonsensical paranoia based on twisted interpretations of who is doing what. In other words, no, the "US Navy" is not creating a database of anything, it's data that is going to be used in a graduate school research project.

Would anyone get their knickers in a knot if a UW graduate school just went out and bought the historical public tweets of the world? Of course not. Would anyone claim that UW was violating the Canadian constitution by doing so (even were the Canadian constitution applicable to what a US school did)? Of course not.

"A cable TV company... whose sole purpose is to broadcast TV..."

Uhh, no. The cable TV company has many purposes. The initial purpose was to be a community antenna system -- which meant it served to carry the signals from broadcast stations to people who could not or did not want to install their own antennas. In those days, the broadcast stations were crying for a regulation called "must carry", which meant that a cable system MUST carry a broadcast station in their area. This was designed to remove the power to limit broadcasters reaching audiences. (If a cable system serving a large area chose not to carry your station, you lost viewership because cable customers are less likely to bother with antennas to get your station.) "Must carry" included a "at no cost to the cable company" clause, so any broadcaster invoking "must carry" could not be paid for the content.

Eventually, satellite-delivered services became the majority of cable TV programming. This is now a large part of the cable purpose.

To say that the sole purpose of cable TV is to broadcast TV is simply ridiculous. Cable TV has never been a broadcast service, and it has no "sole" purpose.

"having a 'broadcast TV fee' on top of it's existing fee"

You don't understand the purpose of the broadcast fee. It is not a fee for delivering cable programming to you. It is a fee that pays the broadcast stations that have chosen to opt out of the "must carry" rule and instead choose to charge the cable company for the privilege of carrying their content. It is a fee paid to the broadcast stations, passed along to the cable subscriber. The cable companies managed to get rules in place to make that fee visible to the consumer so they would know how much the local broadcasters are charging, instead of simply hiding it in the regular service fee.

It's politics. Whenever a broadcast station tries to up the fees or get contract language that the cable operator will not agree to, you will often see a crawl on that channel saying "Call station XYZ at (123) 456-7890 and tell them you want them to be carried on your Comcast service", or words like that. By putting the broadcast fees as a line item, people can see just how much they are being required to pay for "free" broadcast TV on the cable system, and induce them to side with the cable company in the contract battle.

That is absurd and utter nonsense. The PATIENT makes the final call. The doctor is not equipped to decide all issues regarding quality of life for anyone except himself. I've already given one example where the doctor's "final call" was a call to berate the patient for failure to follow instructions that the "doctor" hadn't even bothered to give to the patient, and another where the doctor's "final call" would be to issue a prescription for a drug that would have been the final call for a pilot.

The doctor has information about what drugs do what things, and what drugs shouldn't go together. That doesn't mean the patient shouldn't have the same information, and shouldn't be provided current information through outside means. Banning ads would not solve your issues with "self-prescription" or whatever, since self-prescription isn't legal already. You're trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

If your doctor has brainwashed you into accepting his word as final, then you need to find a new doctor. You're being set up to be just another cog in the medical machinery, getting the stock answers to the stock problems and doing the same thing every other cog does because it's easiest for the doctor to write a scrip and move on to the next patient. You're being trained to do what the doc says because it is simpler for him to prescribe the same thing to you that he did to the last ten people with the same problem, and it takes time to pay attention to what you need and want and what other options there are. Cookie-cutter medicine. HMOs love it.

Bad doctors want you to say what you are saying. Good doctors don't. I've come across enough of both in the last decade to be able to tell the difference, and to differentiate based solely on the "I have the final say" attitude. What's interesting is that the bad doctors I've had were all PAs under the control of one MD, so it's hard to tell if the attitude was pushed on them from the top or was part of their PA training. I'm betting that it is a little of both. The PA worked for that MD because that MD supported the "do what I say" attitude the PA was taught.

Consumers do not have the ability to self-prescribe prescription medications currently, and advertising has nothing at all to do with that. Banning ads won't prevent it, nor will allowing ads allow it. Claiming that there ought to be a ban on advertising of drugs because people shouldn't be able to self-prescribe is like calling for a ban on advertising of airlines because consumers shouldn't be allowed to fly airplanes filled with other people.

All that banning ads will do is keep information out of the hands of the consumer so they cannot as easily participate (or in many cases, know they need to participate) in the process of their own medical care. Does having that information mean that the consumer is going to run right out and buy whatever it is being advertised? Of course not, because they can't write the prescription, and the ad does nothing to change that. Does it mean the doctor is going to immediately write a prescription for whatever? Of course not. If he does, he's not doing his part in the process.

If that is what your doctor is telling you, then you need to find a new doctor IMMEDIATELY. You've been hoodwinked by a power-tripper, or someone who is scared that you'll find out he's not as current or all-powerful as he's pretending to be.

Every good doctor I've seen in the last decade has made it clear that I am an active participant in the process and what I need and want is an important part of the decision making process.I am not simply a robot showing up to be thumped and prodded and then swallow whatever pill he tells me to.

And every BAD doctor I've been to in the past decade has told me exactly the opposite. I had the "pleasure" of a PA yelling at me over the phone that she was the one who knew best about what I needed to do and that if I did exactly what she told me to do that my life would be a hundred percent better. Yes, that's what she told me, and guess what? She lied. That's the same PA who informed me of one set of test results by having a medical equipment company salesman call me to find out when he could deliver the stuff the PA had prescribed. "Yeah, you got a bad case of X", the salesman told me.

The "consumer" is called a "patient", and the patient is part of the process. Telling them they have no business being involved is just patently insane.

You truly are a fool. The patient should have final say over every medical decision concerning his body, including which prescriptions are used. The drug that the doctor tells you to take today may have any number of side effects, varying from the merely annoying to the fatally serious. It is the patient's DUTY to report those, even if they are only potential effects,. and a patient's DUTY to say "no" if there are issues that the doctor doesn't consider.

My first statin (cholesterol) caused a minor cough. I said I was willing to put up with it, the doctor wasn't, but wouldn't have known to change anything unless I spoke up. I am much happier without a permanent cough, and I'm more likely to take the drug without it.

Then I got prescribed a maintenance dose antibiotic. One of the side effects could be tendon damage. When I saw the specialist, I made an off-hand comment about this potential and she changed the prescription immediately. My actions to avoid that potential side effect were interfering with things I needed to be doing for other conditions.

But even when the decisions aren't side-effect based, the patient still has the right and the responsibility to manage his care. My glucose numbers put me at the bottom end of diabetic. The immediate response of most doctors is to start handing out prescriptions. The alternate path is to manage the problem through diet and exercise. If I had no say in the matter I would be on at least two permanent drug treadmills for the rest of my life instead of a real treadmill, and I'd kiss all hope of flying again goodbye. If I fail at the alternate treatment, at least I've given it a shot, but it's my decision.

From a practical standpoint, ignoring all other ethical or moral issues, telling someone that they have no choice in what prescriptions they will get and what pills they will take is a poor way of getting patient compliance. I know, just from my own experience, if I didn't understand and accept the three I'm currently on today, I'd be very unlikely to spend the amount of time dealing with them.

Drug advertisements aren't aimed at the doctors. They're aimed at people who may already be dealing with a problem using a different medication and, well, it just isn't working quite as well as it should, or having to take it four times a day isn't as convenient as once, or whatever, and they can ask the doctor about changing. Or to let people know that there is a medical option for some problem they are having but haven't bothered getting a doctor to deal with because they thought there was nothing that would help -- because maybe ten years ago when they started having those symptoms there wasn't -- and that they should talk to a doctor again. Or just to educate the run of the mill person who hasn't recognized the symptoms as something worth asking a doctor about that they ought to.

Louis CK is SELLING his product, not handing it out for free.

He's also not banking any of the money to produce another show, so he's going to have to rely on someone else planning to make money off his next show, which they would not have made any this time if he was handing it out for free. So he won't hand it out for free next time, either.

I'll also point out that his opinion of how much money is "enough" applies only to himself, and it wouldn't be enough if he wasn't planning on having others pay to take a chance on his next show. Backing which he hasn't tried lining up, much less actually done so, so we don't know if anyone is going to back his next show without some guarantee of getting paid back.

I.e., we don't know if it worked for Louis CK because he hasn't gone a full cycle yet. And even if he does, one person being successful at something isn't proof the idea is good. I mean, Bernie Madoff was pretty successful at what he did, until he got caught.

From whom? Where does the money come to pay someone in advance if the product they are making is handed out for free? Do you want your music to follow the current smartphone app model, where you get ads inserted into the music at random points?

Because the fashion industry uses trademarks. People selling copies of Gucci bags aren't prosecuted for selling copies, they are prosecuted for selling copies that claim to be from Gucci.

Yeah, as if that part of the planet sprang into existence in 1947 owned by whomever it was and those awful Jews just walked in and took over.

Ummm, wait. An awful lot of people who are defending the UN and UNESCO here seem to be forgetting that Israel was created by the UN in 1948. And that the land was occupied by the Jews for many centuries prior to the existence of the UN, them being thrown out during the years following about 0 BCE. That the Muslims didn't come in until 620 or so, so they are relative newcomers to the property. That almost as soon as the UN created the place, the neighbors decided to try to wipe them off the map.

Of course, you can discount this Zionist propaganda fluff piece.

The only truth of the matter is, that part of the world has been through so many changes of hands and has so much religious significance to so many people that there will never be peace there. It is simply impossible for two sides to come to terms, especially when one of them has made it clear their only acceptable solution is to remove not only the country but the people from the earth.