Posted on 01/01/2015 8:18:00 AM PST by lifeofgrace
As a New Year’s resolution, I thought I would look at making 2015 the Year of Neutrality. The idea of Net Neutrality is so absurd that it I thought we might apply it to everything. Here’s just a few I came up with.
Airline Seat Neutrality. Oh, you bought a business class seat? Great! You paid the airline to fund that seat and we’re very proud of you, but there’s a rule saying that the airline has to give the seat to whomever the government tells them. You get to sit in coach while some schmo is sitting in the business or first-class seat you paid for. Seats, after all, are a necessity, not a luxury, and everyone is entitled to one. This whole “pay for what you get” concept is so—bourgeois. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” after all, if you can afford to pay for a business class seat, you are certainly able to pay for your comrade who can’t afford to fly at all. Suck it up, buttercup. Neutrality rules.
Shape Neutrality. Why should triangles have less sides than squares or pentagons? Geometry is inherently biased toward higher-sided polygons, therefore we must only use circles, which have no sides at all. Use of squares or triangles will be regulated by fairness monitors, to be sure that for every three squares, there’s at least one icosagon. and for each six triangles, a tetracontakaihexagon (46 sides). We’ll tax all the vertices, and have special surtaxes on rhombuses, parallelograms, and trapezoids. In fact, there should be a rule requiring the United States to go non-Euclidian by the year 2025.
CPU Speed Neutrality. Bullying is such a scourge on our nation. This ensures no more slow computers being bullied by fast computers. Microsoft Office must load on the faster computers no more than 30% faster than the slowest computers, and video games will be taxed by the number of cycles they use to refresh their displays. Want to play Call of Duty or Halo? You can’t play faster than the guy with the Pentium IV down the street. Sorry. That would be inherently unfair. Dell or Alienware would only be able to charge 10% more for an Intel i7-4790K based CPU than for the i5 2 gigahertz systems.
To get technical: of course, this kills Moore’s Law.
Moore’s Law is a computing term which originated around 1970; the simplified version of this law states that processor speeds, or overall processing power for computers will double every two years.
You say Intel is in business to make money or something? That’s crazy talk.
Word Neutrality. We’re running out of words, and with more people on the Earth every day, this is becoming a global crisis. Women, on average, speak 20,000 words a day, and men, only 7,000 (fact!). Your daily word allotment would be no more than 7,500 words, guys, and you’d be taxed over that. Politicians would have to pay for the privilege of giving long speeches. Women would get 25,000 words before they have to pay.
Come to think of it, I like this idea, and I think we should all call our Congressmen and Senators to get the FCC to regulate Word Neutrality.
TV Neutrality. Why should The Big Bang Theory have more viewers than Mulaney? Why should Johnny Galecki be paid more than John Mulaney? TV is, after all, the most public of Things, and we should all have access to everything. Why should HBO be allowed to charge people to see The Wire or Game of Thrones. Why should we have to pay for Netflix to watch them online? It’s not right, and cable networks should be regulated in what they charge.
Why should cable and satellite providers be required to carry local TV stations, but not Fox News or ESPN? It’s outrageous! We need to storm the FCC headquarters (445 12th Street SW, Washington, DC, just off the L’Enfant Plaza metro stop) and let them know: Sunday Night Football must be free for all!
Sports Neutrality. The final frontier, and the most likely to incite riots, is sports. There’s absolutely no reason whatsoever that the New York Yankees should dominate baseball ever again. Or that the Denver Broncos should ever play in the Super Bowl again until the Cleveland Browns win one. The NFL is considering narrowing the goal posts for the Pro Bowl, and possibly for the entire season. I think it should take that one step further: only narrow the goal posts for the team who is favored to win. Even things up a bit. In baseball, the mound height should be adjustable during a game: better pitchers would sit lower, or have brighter stitches on the ball to help the hitters see. After all, we don’t want the Houston Astros to be in the cellar forever.
And professional hockey? Get rid of it. Just a waste of good ice and dental insurance. We should have more soccer and tennis. Much less violent sports. Want to go to a hockey game? Buy a ticket to Montréal or Winnipeg. Or pay a violent sports tax.
This is where anti-corporate, fairness-obsessed, socialized one-worlders want to take us: to a place where there are no winners and losers, and no innovation either. To a place where bandwidth is frozen at today’s levels, and no more connections may be made between Internet providers. To a place where you can access everything you want today, but never see another golden age of new products and services like the last twenty years.
They want to stand athwart history, and yell “Stop!”, and all in the name of “Neutrality”. This isn’t about preserving anything. It’s about grabbing power and making the world about them and their interests.
So I thought I'd ponder what would happen if 2015 was the Year of (Net) Neutrality where the government ensures we all have equal access to our time-sinkholes online.
“from each according to his ability to each according to his need” . same as obamacare and every government program. socialism doesn't work .
they plan to ruin and take over the Internet with net neutrality . amazing so many on here (maybe some democrat moles) have argued for net neutrality.
So let's have sports un-neutrality where the New York Yankees pay more to the umpires so their pitchers' strike zones are wider and batters' zones are narrower just like an ISP deciding that Amazon gets more bandwidth than Netflix because they paid more on top of your bill to access the bandwidth.
I don't like or trust the FCC's version of net neutrality, but I don't like ISPs picking and choosing which net sites get prioritization on bandwidth. The net has been a pull technology where I decide what I want as opposed to push technologies like newspapers, radio and TV where the media companies decide what I get to see. The ISPs who get paid to limit bandwidth to the payers competitors are trying to turn the net into another push technology.
The ISPs can limit my bandwidth based on the plan I pay for. They can decide to limit total throughput to make people who sit and watch movies all day to pay for their usage. But picking and chosing which sites I can visit at full speed is unacceptable.
< /rant off>
Ted Cruz fires back at Al Franken with net neutrality explainer
Cruz used a video that he uploaded to YouTube and social media that shows the senator explaining what net neutrality is and how it works.
“What happens when government starts regulating a service as a public utility? It calcifies everything. It freezes it in place,” Cruz says, in a clip from a speech he delivered Friday in Texas.
“Let’s give a simple contrast. The Telecommunications Act of 1934 was adopted to regulate these,” Cruz says holding up a landline phone. “To put regulations in place and what happened? It froze everything in place. This (Cruz puts his hand on the landline phone) is regulated by Title II. This (Cruz holds up a cell phone) is not.”
Why you should care about net neutrality
“Your smartphone, the Internet, the apps — all of this is outside of Title II,” Cruz continues. “The innovation is happening without having to go to government regulators and say, ‘Mother, may I?’ We want a whole lot more of this (Cruz holds up a cell phone) and a whole lot less of this (Cruz points at the landline phone).”
http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/17/politics/franken-net-neutrality/index.html
Video at link
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.