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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

I assume it is because there is a fixed fare to/from JFK so drivers have little incentive to start/stop the meter at the exact pickup/dropoff location.

> Also did you overlay it onto a map?

No. If taxis did not pick up or drop off people on some street, that street does not appear. For example there is an area downtown where there are streets but they have had security barriers since 9/11 thus no taxis.

> How did you get the angled effect if it's just a grid?

None of NYCs grids are exactly north/south/east/west aligned.

The process of making it was quite simple. I zeroed a 2d array of integers, then took all the pickup/dropoff points and incremented the nearest cell. The pixel values are based on the logarithm of the counts, since otherwise everything outside midtown would be pretty much black.

There are some artifacts, like the thin vertical line down the east river. I think that was because of how the data was rounded, i.e. the number of unique longitude values that map to a certain image column.

I wrote this myself with a few hundred lines of C++, though I'm sure there's GIS software out there that will do all this for you with a few clicks.

http://i.imgur.com/ov6K6mt.jpg

It's not ionizing radiation any more than wifi is. It's just a lot of concentrated non-ionizing radiation.

Natural uranium is ~1% U235; bombs need 90+% U235. So when you've enriched it from 1% to 2% it doesn't seem like you've made a lot of progress towards 90.

If instead of enriching U235 you think of it as eliminating U238, though, then you've done half of the work.