Probably not. Franchising authority extends only to television. Municipalities aren't permitted (under federal law) to leverage their authority over the television side to regulate the broadband side.
I suspect the best thing municipalities can do is to make it easy to build competing systems. Take the list of concessions that Google Fiber cities made in return for getting service and commit to doing that for any potential entrant. Adopt one-touch make ready rules, maintain city-owned ducts in good shape and make it easy to get permits. Lay dark fiber every time the city digs things up to put in sewers or roads. Even a little bit of competition can have significant effects. E.g. in the D.C. metro area Comcast has no data caps because it's in competition with Verizon, RCN, and Cox. At the state level, municipal networks can provide a backstop for places (e.g. rural Maryland) that can't support sufficient private competition.
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.
Google Fiber failed because being a telecom network operator means tying up billions in capital assets in your infrastructure and then only making 10% margins.
Google’s business model is built around low capex and 35% margins. It’s simply a terrible fit for the other side of the company. Exponential growth becomes logarithmic growth and drags down their financials if they scale out too far.
The opposite is true: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-kansas-city-.... Google got tons of concessions from Fiber cities that other providers don't get, such as free power and free use of public property. There was nothing special about Kansas City--cities were falling over themselves to offer Google concessions in return for getting Fiber.
That's laughable. If Google was to take a VZ, there would be no VZ. Same goes for Comcast, AT&T etc.
The reality is that Google has no interest in taking on carriers. There's nothing sexy is digging treches and hiring Fat Joe, who belches, farts in a workplace, drinks a litter of coke, votes Trump and goes to work at -4C to splice fiber. You won't get accolades. You would only get shit if fiber is out and Paris Hilton can't watch her Netflix.
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.
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.
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.
This is called an "audience". You can pretty much create an audience from anything.
You can build up a whole chain of audiences. For example, if you watch a video ad, you can then be targeted. If you, say, click a link as part of that audience, you can find yourself inside an even tighter targeted audience. At that point, you're considered hot. Before you know it, you could be buying a product. At which point, you're in another audience still, tempting you to buy again!
In fact, with this type of targeting, interest and demographic based targeting doesn't even come close. You can, however, target all the people, at each step in your funnel, who "look like" people who wanna buy (have the same interests, age, gender). These get fed back into the top of your targeting funnel and so it goes.
As for the UK GE, I'm not seeing this type of targeting so I think they may be stuck in the "old" interest-based model of FB advertising.
This looks like a hilarious accident of enabling scammers to target vulnerable people through the magic of gradient descent. Nobody would want to look like they're intentionally targeting multi-level marketing schemes to special education students, but if the students happen to "become part of an audience" and "people like your audience" happen to be special education students, then you get all the benefit of exploiting them with none of the terrible optics.
Ah yes - I remember the day I had an ad show up telling me that the very niche item I purchased in another state at a retail store was the subject of a class-action lawsuit...
edit: and it probably wasn't the class action you're thinking of :)
Well surely he company needs a list of its shareholders so it can fulfill its obligations to you like sending you notices for annual meetings, share splits etc.
True, but I feel like if they wanted to ensure their death, they could've just wiped them with the same rag after Kim was confirmed to be exposed. It seems they just let them go, so I guess they didn't care either one way or the other about their survival?
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?
You can see that they blasted into the rock to make the spillway.
However, the idea that erosion will undercut the emergency spillway and cause it fail implies that it's not built directly on the rock. This suggests that there could be more than 30' of draining.
If you look at the photos, some on Wikipedia, you can see the spillways are around a bend in the river from the main dam and pass over a high bedrock canyon wall.
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"?
Probably any self-driving vehicle should have a button you can push that amounts to consenting to "The car will now record that you initiated a manual override. You are now in full control. Anything you do is your responsibility." Insurers will throw a fit if you push this button but it's better than being stuck in a bad situation because your car can't figure out a way out of it.
Likewise, in most discussions of self-driving cars, it is noted that they probably won't work well in the snow. Someone (presumably not from a snowy area) will then say that the car will pull over and wait, as you shouldn't be driving in a snowstorm anyway. They never say what's supposed to happen next, with the highways full of people whose cars have stranded them. Are they all supposed to call for cabs? But wait, cabs have been replaced by self-driving cars...
I'm pretty sure they'll eventually figure out how to get self driving cars working in snow, or rain, with protocols on when to stop that match when humans should.
Also significant latency is imposed by the network architecture vs the choice of bearer, and by shared vs single user. My guess is that the main driver is actually to get a private channel with qos guarantees and as few retransmission hops and security bumps as possible.
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.
http://www.laweekly.com/news/what-went-wrong-at-porter-ranch... has a very clear diagram of what's happening. The inner casing of the well sprang a leak. The gas is blowing all the way back down the outer casing of the well, then exiting adjacent to the casing. So, while the leak is concentrated to an area directly adjacent to the well, it's not a matter of simply capping the pipe.
perhaps more acurately, it would motivate the budget holders... engineers work with the resources their company allocates. a large tax/fine would certainly help incentivise the right kind of response. although, the fine should be large enough to have prompted the correct behaviour in 1979!
