eck

IANAL but threat of filing a lawsuit and threat of reporting criminal activity to authorities are not equivalent.

I would really like to see a business case study of building out and operating an HFC network in a single average suburb, and how that varies with how cooperative the suburb is.

Could any of the economies of scale enjoyed by the huge/evil ISPs be recaptured by using some kind of franchise-model where the locals can own an ISP like they would a McDonalds?

I think towns might be more willing to make those concessions if at least some of the competitors were local small businesses rather than giant corporations like Google.

With respect, you don't know who my local government representative is or how effectively I can persuade him.

The question I asked was what policies, not how to persuade politicians to pass them.

Could a local government impose net neutrality rules as a condition for a franchise?

[edit] Or more practically, what general policy changes could a municipality make to maximize the availability of competitive free internet?

I doubt they'll ever throw anything out entirely. 2000ms latency and 75% packet loss is as good as blocked and the PR team can keep saying they don't block anything.

> e.g. Tor and P2P style.

You are always going to be able to encrypt your data in a way that their filters do not understand. The problem is that anything the filters do not understand will go to the low priority queue. Your Tor traffic will get treated just like Netflix traffic, in the event that Netflix chooses not to pay protection money.

Speaking of FB ad targeting in elections, I was recently surprised to learn that an advertiser can give FB a specific list of names of people they want to target.

I learned that because I own a handful of shares of Arconic, which is a company in the midst of a hostile takeover attempt. I was rather curious how FB figured that out... but both sides know my identity, and apparently whatever I agreed to when I opened a brokerage account included giving my identity to companies I invest in, and them giving it to activist investors, and the company/investors giving it to social networks.

My understanding is that in the US at least, it's common for both parties to attempt to maintain complete databases of all voters, so it's feasible for them to select individual ad targets themselves and just give FB the names.

It could have been an accident that they survived. In this case the assassins dying along with the victim is a feature, not a bug.

People have been saying that if the emergency spillway fails, it will release the top 30' (?) of the lake. What determines that height? Is there bedrock or something else expected to stop erosion 30' below the level of the emergency spillway or something?

The keyspace of SSNs is only 10^9. I don't think password hashing would help much.

That could actually be an interesting problem. It might sound like "in the event of a impact >Xg, stop, shut down, and wait for police/NTSB/etc to come investigate". But if, say, you hit a deer on a wilderness road in the winter, that behavior could lead to the passengers all dying of exposure.

Do self-driving cars have a button labeled "fuck your rules and DRIVE"?

It moves at that speed because the index of refraction of glass is about 1.5. In single-mode fiber the light doesn't really bounce off the walls.

From what I understand, the gas is not flowing out of a pipe at ground level; the leak is deep underground and it is diffusing into rock and coming up over a wide area. It's not clear that combustion could be sustained in that configuration. I have as much oil/gas industry experience as rube goldberg, but I suppose if they put a huge upside-down funnel over the area maybe they could collect it and light the top, but I have no idea whether the radius of that funnel would have to be 10m or 10km.

I feel a good solution would be to implement a carbon tax, and an unburnt methane tax at the greenhouse equivalent, and start charging the company the estimated leak. I imagine their engineers would become more motivated.

Yeah. I can't even imagine how much revenue YC must lose for each minute of news downtime.

Once again, someone has proposed that an ad supported company offer subscriptions for exactly its revenue-per-user, without seeming to realize that not all users are equally valuable to advertise to, and only the most valuable ones will opt out.