An anonymous reader writes "Starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection, according to the Ministry of Transport and Communications. Finland is the world's first country to create laws guaranteeing broadband access. The Finnish people are also legally guaranteed a 100Mb broadband connection by the end of 2015."
Expensive may be relative but it doesn't constitute 'stuck'.
Right, just like that self-employed guy who can't afford $2200 a month for $5000 deductible health insurance for his family and his wife gets cancer and loses his home. He's not stuck. He could always rob a liquor store or sell one of his kids.
Your install has been scheduled for next month. Please accept our humble apologies. We are attempting to clear the backlog of new application as soon as possible.
In the meantime, we hope that the strippers we have sent over to your house will serve your needs until your broadband order is complete. Again, please acept our most sincere apologies.
That's one example. Although I personally think we should get the Government out of the "marriage" business altogether and have civil unions for all couples (hetro and homo). Let the priests dither over what "marriage" is and minimize the governmental involvement in a process which is basically nothing more than an agreement between two consenting adults.
Here I get 3mb cable with a 20gb monthly cap for $70 per month, and it's the fastest and highest value I can get for straight internet.
I could get 10mb with no cap from the same company for about $80 per month, but I would also have to buy a cable and phone service package. The total would be around $200 or so per month.
You've got it easy in NYC, and I know there are still some places in my state where you can't get better than dialup speeds, and if you can they are outrageous.
That might be soon enough. Seems global warming is doing it's job, as last winter and a few before that there was maybe couple of weeks with snow - long gone are the >-20c winter days.
Isn't this just an extension of the universal service obligations commonly associated with telephone, electricity etc.?
Having said that, I don't really see the need for 100 Mbps internet access for everyone - it's expensive to provide, and what very important services does it provide that 1 Mbps won't?
Not sure why you'd think I was trolling, I genuinely believe what I said.
The reasons for such service obligations are that it's becoming increasingly difficult to take part in normal life and society without that service, perhaps because so many important services and information sources are online. If entire areas are unable to access these, it will have a negative effect on the viability of that segment of society.
However, all of these that can be done with 1Mbps, except for the telecommuting that jhol13 mentions below, which I hadn't thought of.
As an American living in one of the oft talked about rural areas of America with access to only dial up (which gives me a whopping 28.8k connection due to signal quality), or over priced satellite, I am more than ready for something along this line to be adopted here. At a time when more and more information and services are being distributed over the Internet, it gives us rural people a big disadvantage. For example, I work rotating shifts in a factory and would like to go to college to get a degree eventually. Due to my shift work, a physical classroom is out of the question, admissions would laugh me right out if the campus, but an online program through a local and respected school could help me to get to that goal. An online college course is not an option when it takes >30 minutes to load a 10 second video or when you have to split a 50 mb download over 5 nights to get the data. I promise, if the shoe were on the other foot you'd understand where I'm coming from.
In my view, Internet access is more important and powerful than the postal and library services combined. Surely if the government provides those basic services through taxation, a basic Internet communications infrastructure should also.
What good is the right to a broadband connection if they don't have the right to an unfiltered connection? In case you didn't know, a filter maintained by Finnish police that's supposed to block child pornography also blocks other content, including a website critical of Finland's internet filter:
The filter isn't mandatory and as such not all ISPs use it(not that it makes it much better). For example my ISP(Saunalahti) doesn't use it. Though they often operate in Elisas network which does use the list so if your connection makes use of Elisas name servers you'll be on an filtered connection. To the credit of Saunalahti, all it took was one e-mail to them and I had instructions to use their name servers to avoid the filtering.
by Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday October 14, @07:10PM (#29751655)
There are many legal rights that you don't need to survive. One of them (in most western countries) is the right to vote. It is a legal right as soon as someone makes a law stating that it is. Simple as that.
"Yes you are free, free without a doubt. If you do not have the price of a meal you are free to go without." -- George Sawchuck (It's okay if you've never heard of him)
There's a difference between excessive meddling in a citizens life and providing for your citizens.
But until the libertarian dream is realized (at least as much wishful thinking as marxist socialism) I'll take public welfare over corporate welfare any day:)
There's a difference between excessive meddling in a citizens life and providing for your citizens.
Government doesn't provide for citizens. It forces some citizens to provide for others.
or you could say, government allows all citizens to provide for each other in an efficient and cost effective manner.
... but seriously, how is access to a broadband Internet connection a legal right?
America's Founding Fathers only saw necessary to enumerate the protective rights — they listed the things, the Government is not allowed to do to people. All of them believing in personal responsibility for the famous Pursuit of Happiness, they did not put anything remotely like Right to Shelter [nytimes.com] — a Government obligation to give citizens something other than freedom to mind their own business — into the Document they crafted.
Nor have they approved of Government's benevolence at taxpayer's expense: "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents..." -- said James Madison in reaction to Congress planning to offer Federal money to French refugees.
Finland may feel different — whatever strikes their fancy... From a Progressive's point of view, Finland is far ahead — while we are still debating "the right" to health care, they've declared the right to speedy Internet access. To the Founding Fathers point, that all rot: "When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe," — wrote Thomas Jefferson at about same time...
Rights are always an imposition on someone else. The right to free speech obliges others to tolerate offensive speech. The right to a fair trial obliges others to provide you with one. The right to bear arms (a popular one with people who advocate arguments such as yours) increases the risks of death from gunshot wounds for other people. The right to own property denies others the use of that property.
The question is whether the rights are worth the imposition.
US 31 million per million square kms. Finland 15 million per million square kms.
So there are less of them per square km!
-------
So there goes "We all live in the countryside" and "We're more spread out." Per person it's much easier to wire an American than a Fin.
I'll save the cost argument for someone else but 10x seems unlikely and the facts that were easy to check were exactly the opposite of what you claimed, so I don't have a high degree of confidence in the reliability of any claim you make.
I live in the countryside in Finland, about 350km north of Helsinki. I have 100/10Mbps fiber to the house, with no capacity limits. So do my "neighbours" (houses are typically separated by a few hundred meters along the road). The ISP has a monopoly, but was required by the municipality to provide a certain level of service in return for having access to its citizens and use of roads etc. to reach them. The ISP is a private company and appears to be profitable.
As far as I can see, the problems in the US are not really with population density or sparsity of population distribution. They would seem to be caused by local/state governments not balancing the interests of their citizens with the interests of ISPs. As a result, some ISPs are granted local monopolies without compensating conditions on quality of service. This allows them to avoid competition and maximize the squeeze on captive customers while providing a shoddy service by minimizing their investment in infrastructure. There are apparently some areas of the US with decent service, but in far too many places, it seems that the customers are being brutalized by the ISPs, while the authorities egg them on.
This news has been written quite loosely around the news sites - original article (in finnish) [www.hs.fi] states that ISP's must be capable of offering reasonably priced, atleast 1Mb broadband to every house. During this year Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority will state who those ISP's are that must be able to provide the services (probably the largest ones). So it's not free, like many seem to think - just reasonably priced (probably around 20-50e/month)
This part yet is not really that interesting since it's already pretty much common place.
However the law also states that the speed of the line must be atleast 75% of the said one during 24 hour measurement period. And what's more interesting is that by 2015 it will be 100mbit. Even though this is already available in the largest cities, it will mean major infrastructure development from the ISP's in other areas.
Oh and btw, no ISP in Finland has transfer limits or such crap. Not even mobile operators, who offer unlimited 5Mbit 3G for something like 30e/month.
Hopefully this also means that those three-strike laws wont be possible, since getting broadband access should be a legal right.
I'm not going to try reading Finnish, but I'm guessing this is like many other regulations that granted monopolies have to deal with in European countries. For example here in Norway to get digital TV broadcast rights they had to increase coverage to almost everyone, even if you decided to hide between two mountains. You don't pay the full cost of delivering electricity and phone lines to a remotely located home. Same with mobile broadband, to get the 3G license they had to commit to offering to some areas that couldn't get broadband, I know because it happened near a relative's cabin - there's a few residential houses there and they were setting up mobile broadband for regulation compliance, no way in hell that was profitable.
I know most Americans get mental anguish just thinking about it, but it's not so bad as it sounds. The businesses usually has some form of compensation agreement, or consider it part of paying the license fee except in labor not cash. It's basically the state subsidizing private build-out to areas that otherwise wouldn't get served. Of course that's a redistribution issue, but then you have to look at it along with every other tax, some hitting rural areas more than urban areas and vice versa. The whole angle of considering this some sort of legal right is a bit fishy though, yeah it's an economic requirement to provide service but there's still lots of reasons they can kick you off like non-payment, violating the terms of service or whatever. But it's still a pretty big step.
Those backward Finns. They don't realize that this makes them less free. I suppose they have health care for everyone over there and think it's a good thing. I bet people get free education through college in Finland, too. What a shame.
Thank god I live in a country where I'm free to lose my home if my wife or kid gets sick, just as our Founding Fathers intended. Now that's liberty. At least until that horrible President Hussein Osama forces us to have health insurance and we become a pitiful third-world country like Finland.
You can have my overpriced, traffic-shaped, capped DSL when you wrest it from my cold, dead hands.
Well, that's not entirely true. Europeans are voting for more right wing parties, but that's mostly the European population is shifting than anything else. I doubt many Europeans have a problem with the services they receive. What they have a problem with is the services all those foreigners(defined as anyone with a different skin colour) receive.
Europe is having a bit of a difficult time of it at the moment because of a mix of things. For one a few countries let their socialism go a bit too far, beyond reasonable services for everyone and reasonable workers rights into the usual inefficiency and over protection which destroyed most of the US automobile industry a few decades ago. For another, a lot of them suffer from the same problems the US has in that they don't actually make anything that anyone else wants anymore and they're not entirely sure what to do about it. The UK built its entire economy on exporting financial instruments and is currently pretty much screwed.
Whenever things get bad people start getting a bit xenophobic and despite claims about the cosmopolitan nature of Europe, they're as guilty of it as the rest of us.
I live in Australia and we have a fairly reasonable balance between the two(which might be why we've currently got the best performing western economy in the world). There's reasonable protections for workers, but for the most part, employers have rights too(there's a few issues here that need to be fixed, but the previous government instead of trying to fix the problems tried to absolutely dismantle workers rights and got kicked out so it's a bit of a sensitive subject at the moment). We've got excellent public health care, but if you don't want waiting lists or want private rooms or things like that you can pay for private health insurance(in fact if the government feels you should have private health insurance and you don't they'll tax you extra to encourage you to get it). Again it's not perfect, but it works pretty well.
Having the government take care of every aspect of your life doesn't work. It never has and it probably never will. Having the government provide a safety net of basic services so that people who aren't Donald Trump get a second change is a very good thing. Getting basic infrastructure and services provided by an efficient central provider and available equally and fairly to everyone is good as well, not just for individuals, but for businesses small and large. Government infrastructure is the only reason that competing telephone companies and ISPs can exist, and the US is actually better at that at the moment than we are. Sometimes it's best to buy once instead of many times, and since the government is somewhat more beholden to its shareholders(everyone) than most corporations, it's not as bad having them as a single point of service.
Or, you can turn your life over to a government with the promises of all your needs being taken care of from cradle to grave. All you have to give them is... everything.
"Everything"? I live in Finland, were we are apparently taken care of by the state from cradle to grave. Have we given "everything" to the state? No. Sure, we pay taxes (last time I checked, USA has taxes as well). But I own my home, my car, I'm free to marry whoever I want... How exactly have I given "everything" to the state?
The problem, for admirers of this system such as yourself, anyway, is that Europe itself is starting to question such an arrangement. People are beginning to wonder why they can't have a good medical care system without massive government expenditures.
It's fashionable to bash the healthcare-system. But if I feel that the public health-care does not fit my needs, I'm free to use private services.
They're starting to wonder just why it's necessary to be paying so much in taxes.
We are? In fact, several polls in Finland say that people would be willing to pay more taxes for improved public services.
They're starting to wonder why starting a business has to be a bureaucratic nightmare.
It is? There's plenty of entrepreneurs over here. My mother was one. It does't seem that starting a business is a "bureaucratic nightmare". Anyone who wants to start a business can do so.
And they're starting to vote appropriately
The right-wing parties they are voting at the moment are more or less equivalent to Democrats in USA. Some of them would be left from Democrats.
You're confusing (or are perhaps unaware of) positive and negative "rights". The concept of freedom revolves around negative rights. Allow me to explain:
The right to freedom of speech. For one person to have freedom of speech requires that others refrain from violating it. For example, I can say what I wish, when I wish, and the only requirement imposed upon others is to refrain from stopping me and thus violating that right. The same obligations then extend from me to others. This is a negative right as it requires others to refrain from acting in violation of that right.
The right to broadband. For one person to have this right requires that someone else provide it. This is a positive right as it requires one person/group to act to provide for another (same applies to healthcare "rights", education "rights", etc).
The essential feature here is reciprocity. Negative rights naturally extend to everyone (if person A must refrain from violating the rights of person B, person B must refrain from violating the rights of person A. Otherwise you must assume that one person is "superior", i.e. has more rights, than another), while positive rights are one-sided (one person's "right" to healthcare imposes an obligation on someone else to provide it). The assumption of equality involves assuming that all have the same rights. Presuming that one person has more or different rights than another presupposes that those persons have different worth, and if you start making that assumption, the idea of natural, inalienable rights flies out the window in favor of arbitrary rights determined by an arbitrary group of people based on arbitrary standards. You can't have rights for some at the expense of others. In the case of broadband (or healthcare, or education, etc.), everyone has the same right to work to acquire the resources need to gain access to broadband (or healthcare, or education, etc.). Any other concept imposes positive rights, i.e. rights for some at the expense of others.
"Freedom to lose at life" to lose everything and sit cold and sick and hungry under a bridge scrounging for edible garbage while you die of a perfectly curable ailment. What's so great about that that makes it worth defending?
Let's analyze this based on what we've learned. You're implying that because he's hungry, this individual has been deprived of his right to food. If he has a right to food, then someone else has a duty to provide it, which means that the provider is a second-class citizen, a slave to anyone who can't provide for themselves. Because he's homeless, someone has violated his right to have a home. Same situation, the provider of the home is reduced to involuntary servitude (slavery), forced to utilize their skills and resources to provide for someone who can't/won't work to provide for themselves. Because he's sick and dying, he has been deprived of his right to medical care. This means that his doctor is his slave, and has to be forced to utilize his knowledge and resources to provide for him.
I'm not saying that if a doctor sees a sick or injured person that they shouldn't attempt to help them. I'm saying that he has no moral obligation to help them. I'm not saying that giving to a charity that helps provide shelter or job training to the homeless is immoral. I'm saying that requiring a person or group to provide for the homeless against their will is immoral.
You're confusing (or are perhaps unaware of) positive and negative "rights"...
No, I'm not the least bit confused. If anything it is you who are confused, or worse... you are deliberately presenting a false argument.
This means that his doctor is his slave, and has to be forced to utilize his knowledge and resources to provide for him.
The moment you break out the term "slave" you lose ALL credibility whatsoever. The doctor is not his slave in any rational sense. The doctor doesn't have to show up for work. The doctor doesn't even have to be a doctor. The doctor is not a slave. If he doesn't feel like caring for patients he can quit any time he likes.
The ONLY actual forced imposition on anyone is the taxation used to fund these programs. And sure, you can wave your arms all you like about how your a "slave" in your own country because they make you participate in funding the maintenance of the military too, and the police, and the fire department, and water/sewage, and public schools, and highways, and so on... but I'm not having any of it.
I refuse to be drawn into a debate with any idiot who thinks even the basic trappings of society amount to slavery.
They aren't slavery any more than hiring a contractor to do your kitchen is slavery. The fact that he now has an obligation to you doesn't make him a slave. Participating in a society is a social contract, with obligations to maintain and improve that society. That's not slavery.
Its a hyperbolic misapplication of the word to the point of absurdity.
Most US welfare recipients get off welfare within 1 year.
But according to some, we have a huge "welfare state".
I'm telling you, there's something in the water here that's making 30 percent of Americans complete morons. Or maybe it's something being broadcast over the airwaves.
If I paste this into Firefox address bar, it works, but clicking the Slashfungarbulated link from this post's preview doesn't. Conclusion: Slashcode barfs on IDN. Bad Slashcode.
That's because you put an HTML entity in there instead of the real character. The real bug is that Slashcode can't handle true Unicode, which is pathetic. Proof: when I use the fake compose key on my keyboard, I get ä, which is valid unicode but garbage whatever-the-fuck-slashcode-uses.
Scratch that, it's not garbage in this particular incident. So your URL is http://anmälan.museum/ [anm]
WTF Slashcode?! I didn't &-encode that! You are broken!
But this doesn't work: ¥øü å ဠæØñ üß. It's supposed to say, in very weird lettering, "All your charmap are belong to us". AFAICT it is valid unicode, although I'm too stupid to find the yen sign in charmap (it's not under currency symbols, and I'm too lazy to look elsewhere). So apparently SOMEONE partially fixed UTF-8 support behind my back *looks around suspiciously* and then that SOMEONE failed to completely fix it.
I wonder if anyone will wonder how this post is relevant after reading it (oh god^H^H^H FSM, recursion).
(My) first post, from Finland. It doesn't seem that this connection is supposed to be FREE - just that some companies are obliged to provide such connections (at least 1 mbps, the local definition of "broadband") throughout the country. In other words, you would still have to pay for it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't seen any mention of there being no charge.
I can understand basic inalienable rights like food, shelter, clothing, and adequate healthcare. But a right to have internet access?
The way I see it is that if you take your list of inalienable rights and classify them as "human rights", you can classify health care, internet access, etc. as "societal rights" (those rights granted by the state for their citizens).
internet access being a right is an example of liberalism gone horribly wrong
Do you mean liberalism as defined by the various political parties and interest groups in the US, or Liberalism, generally? Either way, I don't think that term is useful or productive, especially when the context here is Finland.
In the US, the crowds shout "We insist on being free so don't dare try and give us any stuff", while in Europe, it's "Keep giving us free stuff or we'll bring you down!" Left-wing? Perhaps. But I suspect one side is getting a good deal, while the other... well, what's the state of broadband in the US?;-)
You can spin things any way you want, to make whoever you want look bad. The people who demand that the government not guarantee affordable health care understand that someone is going to have to pay for it, and would rather negotiate those payments on their own terms rather than trust the government to do it for them.
Then there are people like me, who believe that healthcare should be made available to people who are poor or have pre-existing conditions, but believe that the current plans will make things worse rather than better. I'm even willing to pay higher taxes to help cover these people, but the current plan doesn't explain how it will be paid for, among other problems.
So this new right is just yet another form of redistribution of the fruits of productive labor, and more Nanny Statism. Of course. And when you make getting the use of a dermatologist or an allergist a "right," this is exactly the sort of thing that comes next.
Meanwhile in America (Score:4, Informative)
Don't they always chant population density as to reason why many people are stuck with dial-up?
Re:Meanwhile in America (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the population in America is generally pretty dense, so we tend to lag behind the rest of the world.
Parent
Re:Meanwhile in America (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Hey-NY-Times-Broadband-Coverage-Gaps-Are-Not-Hooey-100382 [dslreports.com]
Unless you talking about expensive satellite.
Parent
Re:Meanwhile in America (Score:4, Insightful)
Satellite is a high-latency service up to 500 to 900ms one way.
The result is that it's slow/unusable for many types of applications, which can't handle a 1 second round-trip delay.
In other words, it's not "broadband".
You won't be comfortable trying to use VoIP over satellite, and streaming media won't work at all without a stout amount of pre-buffering.
Parent
Re:Meanwhile in America (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, just like that self-employed guy who can't afford $2200 a month for $5000 deductible health insurance for his family and his wife gets cancer and loses his home. He's not stuck. He could always rob a liquor store or sell one of his kids.
But he does have options ("sniff").
Parent
Wow. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Funny)
From: Finland Telecom Customer Service Manager
Dear Sir,
Your install has been scheduled for next month. Please accept our humble apologies. We are attempting to clear the backlog of new application as soon as possible.
In the meantime, we hope that the strippers we have sent over to your house will serve your needs until your broadband order is complete. Again, please acept our most sincere apologies.
Parent
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
They do if enough people get together and agree that they do. Such is called government.
Parent
Re:Wow. (Score:4, Insightful)
Way to change the subject there.
Parent
Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's one example. Although I personally think we should get the Government out of the "marriage" business altogether and have civil unions for all couples (hetro and homo). Let the priests dither over what "marriage" is and minimize the governmental involvement in a process which is basically nothing more than an agreement between two consenting adults.
Parent
Lucky (Score:4, Interesting)
Lucky them.
Here in NYC, Time Warner just released a 50/5 Mb DOCSIS 3.0 plan... For a whopping cost of $99.95/month.
Re:Lucky (Score:5, Informative)
If that's supposed to be bad, I'm jealous.
Here I get 3mb cable with a 20gb monthly cap for $70 per month, and it's the fastest and highest value I can get for straight internet.
I could get 10mb with no cap from the same company for about $80 per month, but I would also have to buy a cable and phone service package. The total would be around $200 or so per month.
You've got it easy in NYC, and I know there are still some places in my state where you can't get better than dialup speeds, and if you can they are outrageous.
Parent
That's for me! But... (Score:5, Funny)
I'll wait to move there until they establish the right to winters that don't drop below zero.
Re:That's for me! But... (Score:5, Funny)
I'll wait to move there until they establish the right to winters that don't drop below zero.
Trust me, they never have fewer than zero winters per year.
-Taylor
Parent
Re:That's for me! But... (Score:4, Informative)
That might be soon enough. Seems global warming is doing it's job, as last winter and a few before that there was maybe couple of weeks with snow - long gone are the >-20c winter days.
Parent
Universal service obligations (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't this just an extension of the universal service obligations commonly associated with telephone, electricity etc.?
Having said that, I don't really see the need for 100 Mbps internet access for everyone - it's expensive to provide, and what very important services does it provide that 1 Mbps won't?
Re:Universal service obligations (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure why you'd think I was trolling, I genuinely believe what I said.
The reasons for such service obligations are that it's becoming increasingly difficult to take part in normal life and society without that service, perhaps because so many important services and information sources are online. If entire areas are unable to access these, it will have a negative effect on the viability of that segment of society.
However, all of these that can be done with 1Mbps, except for the telecommuting that jhol13 mentions below, which I hadn't thought of.
Parent
Where do we sign up in the US?! (Score:5, Insightful)
As basic as Postal and Library service (Score:5, Interesting)
In my view, Internet access is more important and powerful than the postal and library services combined. Surely if the government provides those basic services through taxation, a basic Internet communications infrastructure should also.
Right to a broadband connection, minus the content (Score:5, Informative)
What good is the right to a broadband connection if they don't have the right to an unfiltered connection? In case you didn't know, a filter maintained by Finnish police that's supposed to block child pornography also blocks other content, including a website critical of Finland's internet filter:
http://www.effi.org/blog/kai-2008-02-18.html [effi.org]
Re:Right to a broadband connection, minus the cont (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:I understand these modern times and all... (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many legal rights that you don't need to survive. One of them (in most western countries) is the right to vote. It is a legal right as soon as someone makes a law stating that it is. Simple as that.
Parent
Re:I understand these modern times and all... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much a nanny state.
"Yes you are free, free without a doubt. If you do not have the price of a meal you are free to go without." -- George Sawchuck (It's okay if you've never heard of him)
There's a difference between excessive meddling in a citizens life and providing for your citizens.
Parent
Re:I understand these modern times and all... (Score:5, Insightful)
Government doesn't provide for citizens. It forces some citizens to provide for others.
Parent
Re:I understand these modern times and all... (Score:5, Insightful)
But until the libertarian dream is realized (at least as much wishful thinking as marxist socialism) I'll take public welfare over corporate welfare any day :)
Parent
Re:I understand these modern times and all... (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a difference between excessive meddling in a citizens life and providing for your citizens. Government doesn't provide for citizens. It forces some citizens to provide for others.
or you could say, government allows all citizens to provide for each other in an efficient and cost effective manner.
Parent
Re:I understand these modern times and all... (Score:4, Interesting)
This allows the government to interact with the population online, without anybody having an excuse of no net access.
Parent
Re:I understand these modern times and all... (Score:4, Insightful)
America's Founding Fathers only saw necessary to enumerate the protective rights — they listed the things, the Government is not allowed to do to people. All of them believing in personal responsibility for the famous Pursuit of Happiness, they did not put anything remotely like Right to Shelter [nytimes.com] — a Government obligation to give citizens something other than freedom to mind their own business — into the Document they crafted.
Nor have they approved of Government's benevolence at taxpayer's expense: "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents..." -- said James Madison in reaction to Congress planning to offer Federal money to French refugees.
Finland may feel different — whatever strikes their fancy... From a Progressive's point of view, Finland is far ahead — while we are still debating "the right" to health care, they've declared the right to speedy Internet access. To the Founding Fathers point, that all rot: "When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe," — wrote Thomas Jefferson at about same time...
Parent
Re:Not a right (Score:5, Insightful)
Rights are always an imposition on someone else. The right to free speech obliges others to tolerate offensive speech. The right to a fair trial obliges others to provide you with one. The right to bear arms (a popular one with people who advocate arguments such as yours) increases the risks of death from gunshot wounds for other people. The right to own property denies others the use of that property.
The question is whether the rights are worth the imposition.
Parent
Re:Bastards! (Score:4, Funny)
Bastards! I still only have 215 kbit internet!
It's okay, I expect congress will pass similar legislation here in the US next year sometime.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHaha...
(cries)
Parent
Re:Bastards! (Score:5, Informative)
Facts please!
Urbanization:
US 82%
Finland 63%
So we're more concentrated in cities.
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People density per million square KMs
US 31 million per million square kms.
Finland 15 million per million square kms.
So there are less of them per square km!
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So there goes "We all live in the countryside" and "We're more spread out." Per person it's much easier to wire an American than a Fin.
I'll save the cost argument for someone else but 10x seems unlikely and the facts that were easy to check were exactly the opposite of what you claimed, so I don't have a high degree of confidence in the reliability of any claim you make.
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Re:Bastards! (Score:5, Informative)
the US is much more regionally diverse (read 'f'ing big and spread out) compared to EU countries so it's much more challenging
I thought this canard was long buried. Here's a reminder.
The population density of Finland (15.6/sq.km) is about half that of the USA (30/sq.km) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density [wikipedia.org]. The population density of Finland is lower than that in 44 of the 50 US states http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density [wikipedia.org]. Moreover, the population in Finland is quite dispersed, with very few large centers. Helsinki+Espoo+Vantaa combined just exceed 1 million, Tampere and Turku are each around 0.3 million when their outlying areas are included, Oulu and Jyvaskyla are each around 0.14 million, and Kuopio and Lahti are each around 0.1 million http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Finland_by_population [wikipedia.org].
I live in the countryside in Finland, about 350km north of Helsinki. I have 100/10Mbps fiber to the house, with no capacity limits. So do my "neighbours" (houses are typically separated by a few hundred meters along the road). The ISP has a monopoly, but was required by the municipality to provide a certain level of service in return for having access to its citizens and use of roads etc. to reach them. The ISP is a private company and appears to be profitable.
As far as I can see, the problems in the US are not really with population density or sparsity of population distribution. They would seem to be caused by local/state governments not balancing the interests of their citizens with the interests of ISPs. As a result, some ISPs are granted local monopolies without compensating conditions on quality of service. This allows them to avoid competition and maximize the squeeze on captive customers while providing a shoddy service by minimizing their investment in infrastructure. There are apparently some areas of the US with decent service, but in far too many places, it seems that the customers are being brutalized by the ISPs, while the authorities egg them on.
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Re:Bastards! (Score:5, Informative)
This news has been written quite loosely around the news sites - original article (in finnish) [www.hs.fi] states that ISP's must be capable of offering reasonably priced, atleast 1Mb broadband to every house. During this year Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority will state who those ISP's are that must be able to provide the services (probably the largest ones). So it's not free, like many seem to think - just reasonably priced (probably around 20-50e/month)
This part yet is not really that interesting since it's already pretty much common place.
However the law also states that the speed of the line must be atleast 75% of the said one during 24 hour measurement period. And what's more interesting is that by 2015 it will be 100mbit. Even though this is already available in the largest cities, it will mean major infrastructure development from the ISP's in other areas.
Oh and btw, no ISP in Finland has transfer limits or such crap. Not even mobile operators, who offer unlimited 5Mbit 3G for something like 30e/month.
Hopefully this also means that those three-strike laws wont be possible, since getting broadband access should be a legal right.
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Re:Bastards! (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not going to try reading Finnish, but I'm guessing this is like many other regulations that granted monopolies have to deal with in European countries. For example here in Norway to get digital TV broadcast rights they had to increase coverage to almost everyone, even if you decided to hide between two mountains. You don't pay the full cost of delivering electricity and phone lines to a remotely located home. Same with mobile broadband, to get the 3G license they had to commit to offering to some areas that couldn't get broadband, I know because it happened near a relative's cabin - there's a few residential houses there and they were setting up mobile broadband for regulation compliance, no way in hell that was profitable.
I know most Americans get mental anguish just thinking about it, but it's not so bad as it sounds. The businesses usually has some form of compensation agreement, or consider it part of paying the license fee except in labor not cash. It's basically the state subsidizing private build-out to areas that otherwise wouldn't get served. Of course that's a redistribution issue, but then you have to look at it along with every other tax, some hitting rural areas more than urban areas and vice versa. The whole angle of considering this some sort of legal right is a bit fishy though, yeah it's an economic requirement to provide service but there's still lots of reasons they can kick you off like non-payment, violating the terms of service or whatever. But it's still a pretty big step.
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Re:Bastards! (Score:5, Insightful)
Dear Citizen,
People feeding you are living in the middle of nowhere.
Just starves retards.
Best regards,
The comity of people living in the middle of nowhere.
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Re:Bastards! (Score:4, Interesting)
Hopefully this also means that those three-strike laws wont be possible, since getting broadband access should be a legal right.
Legal rights and privileges are often conditional on good behavior - and they can be forfeit.
Your "Right to Travel" isn't a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card.
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Re:Bastards! (Score:5, Funny)
Those backward Finns. They don't realize that this makes them less free. I suppose they have health care for everyone over there and think it's a good thing. I bet people get free education through college in Finland, too. What a shame.
Thank god I live in a country where I'm free to lose my home if my wife or kid gets sick, just as our Founding Fathers intended. Now that's liberty. At least until that horrible President Hussein Osama forces us to have health insurance and we become a pitiful third-world country like Finland.
You can have my overpriced, traffic-shaped, capped DSL when you wrest it from my cold, dead hands.
Oh, and God Bless America.
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Re:You're actually right (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, that's not entirely true. Europeans are voting for more right wing parties, but that's mostly the European population is shifting than anything else. I doubt many Europeans have a problem with the services they receive. What they have a problem with is the services all those foreigners(defined as anyone with a different skin colour) receive.
Europe is having a bit of a difficult time of it at the moment because of a mix of things. For one a few countries let their socialism go a bit too far, beyond reasonable services for everyone and reasonable workers rights into the usual inefficiency and over protection which destroyed most of the US automobile industry a few decades ago. For another, a lot of them suffer from the same problems the US has in that they don't actually make anything that anyone else wants anymore and they're not entirely sure what to do about it. The UK built its entire economy on exporting financial instruments and is currently pretty much screwed.
Whenever things get bad people start getting a bit xenophobic and despite claims about the cosmopolitan nature of Europe, they're as guilty of it as the rest of us.
I live in Australia and we have a fairly reasonable balance between the two(which might be why we've currently got the best performing western economy in the world). There's reasonable protections for workers, but for the most part, employers have rights too(there's a few issues here that need to be fixed, but the previous government instead of trying to fix the problems tried to absolutely dismantle workers rights and got kicked out so it's a bit of a sensitive subject at the moment). We've got excellent public health care, but if you don't want waiting lists or want private rooms or things like that you can pay for private health insurance(in fact if the government feels you should have private health insurance and you don't they'll tax you extra to encourage you to get it). Again it's not perfect, but it works pretty well.
Having the government take care of every aspect of your life doesn't work. It never has and it probably never will. Having the government provide a safety net of basic services so that people who aren't Donald Trump get a second change is a very good thing. Getting basic infrastructure and services provided by an efficient central provider and available equally and fairly to everyone is good as well, not just for individuals, but for businesses small and large. Government infrastructure is the only reason that competing telephone companies and ISPs can exist, and the US is actually better at that at the moment than we are. Sometimes it's best to buy once instead of many times, and since the government is somewhat more beholden to its shareholders(everyone) than most corporations, it's not as bad having them as a single point of service.
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Re:You're actually right (Score:5, Informative)
Or, you can turn your life over to a government with the promises of all your needs being taken care of from cradle to grave. All you have to give them is... everything.
"Everything"? I live in Finland, were we are apparently taken care of by the state from cradle to grave. Have we given "everything" to the state? No. Sure, we pay taxes (last time I checked, USA has taxes as well). But I own my home, my car, I'm free to marry whoever I want... How exactly have I given "everything" to the state?
The problem, for admirers of this system such as yourself, anyway, is that Europe itself is starting to question such an arrangement. People are beginning to wonder why they can't have a good medical care system without massive government expenditures.
It's fashionable to bash the healthcare-system. But if I feel that the public health-care does not fit my needs, I'm free to use private services.
They're starting to wonder just why it's necessary to be paying so much in taxes.
We are? In fact, several polls in Finland say that people would be willing to pay more taxes for improved public services.
They're starting to wonder why starting a business has to be a bureaucratic nightmare.
It is? There's plenty of entrepreneurs over here. My mother was one. It does't seem that starting a business is a "bureaucratic nightmare". Anyone who wants to start a business can do so.
And they're starting to vote appropriately
The right-wing parties they are voting at the moment are more or less equivalent to Democrats in USA. Some of them would be left from Democrats.
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Re:You're actually right (Score:5, Insightful)
The right to freedom of speech. For one person to have freedom of speech requires that others refrain from violating it. For example, I can say what I wish, when I wish, and the only requirement imposed upon others is to refrain from stopping me and thus violating that right. The same obligations then extend from me to others. This is a negative right as it requires others to refrain from acting in violation of that right.
The right to broadband. For one person to have this right requires that someone else provide it. This is a positive right as it requires one person/group to act to provide for another (same applies to healthcare "rights", education "rights", etc).
The essential feature here is reciprocity. Negative rights naturally extend to everyone (if person A must refrain from violating the rights of person B, person B must refrain from violating the rights of person A. Otherwise you must assume that one person is "superior", i.e. has more rights, than another), while positive rights are one-sided (one person's "right" to healthcare imposes an obligation on someone else to provide it). The assumption of equality involves assuming that all have the same rights. Presuming that one person has more or different rights than another presupposes that those persons have different worth, and if you start making that assumption, the idea of natural, inalienable rights flies out the window in favor of arbitrary rights determined by an arbitrary group of people based on arbitrary standards. You can't have rights for some at the expense of others. In the case of broadband (or healthcare, or education, etc.), everyone has the same right to work to acquire the resources need to gain access to broadband (or healthcare, or education, etc.). Any other concept imposes positive rights, i.e. rights for some at the expense of others.
Let's analyze this based on what we've learned. You're implying that because he's hungry, this individual has been deprived of his right to food. If he has a right to food, then someone else has a duty to provide it, which means that the provider is a second-class citizen, a slave to anyone who can't provide for themselves. Because he's homeless, someone has violated his right to have a home. Same situation, the provider of the home is reduced to involuntary servitude (slavery), forced to utilize their skills and resources to provide for someone who can't/won't work to provide for themselves. Because he's sick and dying, he has been deprived of his right to medical care. This means that his doctor is his slave, and has to be forced to utilize his knowledge and resources to provide for him.
I'm not saying that if a doctor sees a sick or injured person that they shouldn't attempt to help them. I'm saying that he has no moral obligation to help them. I'm not saying that giving to a charity that helps provide shelter or job training to the homeless is immoral. I'm saying that requiring a person or group to provide for the homeless against their will is immoral.
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Re:You're actually right (Score:5, Insightful)
You're confusing (or are perhaps unaware of) positive and negative "rights"...
No, I'm not the least bit confused. If anything it is you who are confused, or worse... you are deliberately presenting a false argument.
This means that his doctor is his slave, and has to be forced to utilize his knowledge and resources to provide for him.
The moment you break out the term "slave" you lose ALL credibility whatsoever. The doctor is not his slave in any rational sense.
The doctor doesn't have to show up for work. The doctor doesn't even have to be a doctor. The doctor is not a slave. If he doesn't feel like caring for patients he can quit any time he likes.
The ONLY actual forced imposition on anyone is the taxation used to fund these programs. And sure, you can wave your arms all you like about how your a "slave" in your own country because they make you participate in funding the maintenance of the military too, and the police, and the fire department, and water/sewage, and public schools, and highways, and so on... but I'm not having any of it.
I refuse to be drawn into a debate with any idiot who thinks even the basic trappings of society amount to slavery.
They aren't slavery any more than hiring a contractor to do your kitchen is slavery. The fact that he now has an obligation to you doesn't make him a slave. Participating in a society is a social contract, with obligations to maintain and improve that society. That's not slavery.
Its a hyperbolic misapplication of the word to the point of absurdity.
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Re:You're actually right (Score:5, Insightful)
Most US welfare recipients get off welfare within 1 year.
But according to some, we have a huge "welfare state".
I'm telling you, there's something in the water here that's making 30 percent of Americans complete morons. Or maybe it's something being broadcast over the airwaves.
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Re:Bastards! (Score:5, Funny)
How about IDN URLs? Example: http://anmälan.museum/ [anm]
If I paste this into Firefox address bar, it works, but clicking the Slashfungarbulated link from this post's preview doesn't.
Conclusion: Slashcode barfs on IDN. Bad Slashcode.
That's because you put an HTML entity in there instead of the real character. The real bug is that Slashcode can't handle true Unicode, which is pathetic. Proof: when I use the fake compose key on my keyboard, I get ä, which is valid unicode but garbage whatever-the-fuck-slashcode-uses.
Scratch that, it's not garbage in this particular incident. So your URL is http://anmälan.museum/ [anm]
WTF Slashcode?! I didn't &-encode that! You are broken!
But this doesn't work: ¥øü å ဠæØñ üß. It's supposed to say, in very weird lettering, "All your charmap are belong to us". AFAICT it is valid unicode, although I'm too stupid to find the yen sign in charmap (it's not under currency symbols, and I'm too lazy to look elsewhere). So apparently SOMEONE partially fixed UTF-8 support behind my back *looks around suspiciously* and then that SOMEONE failed to completely fix it.
I wonder if anyone will wonder how this post is relevant after reading it (oh god^H^H^H FSM, recursion).
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Re:This is crazy (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:This is crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
I can understand basic inalienable rights like food, shelter, clothing, and adequate healthcare. But a right to have internet access?
The way I see it is that if you take your list of inalienable rights and classify them as "human rights", you can classify health care, internet access, etc. as "societal rights" (those rights granted by the state for their citizens).
internet access being a right is an example of liberalism gone horribly wrong
Do you mean liberalism as defined by the various political parties and interest groups in the US, or Liberalism, generally? Either way, I don't think that term is useful or productive, especially when the context here is Finland.
In the US, the crowds shout "We insist on being free so don't dare try and give us any stuff", while in Europe, it's "Keep giving us free stuff or we'll bring you down!" Left-wing? Perhaps. But I suspect one side is getting a good deal, while the other ... well, what's the state of broadband in the US? ;-)
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Re:This is crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been pretty amazing over the last few months watching Americans demand that the government NOT guarantee them affordable health care.
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Re:This is crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
Then there are people like me, who believe that healthcare should be made available to people who are poor or have pre-existing conditions, but believe that the current plans will make things worse rather than better. I'm even willing to pay higher taxes to help cover these people, but the current plan doesn't explain how it will be paid for, among other problems.
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Re:Right? (Score:5, Informative)
So this new right is just yet another form of redistribution of the fruits of productive labor, and more Nanny Statism. Of course. And when you make getting the use of a dermatologist or an allergist a "right," this is exactly the sort of thing that comes next.
Here in Europe we like that kind of thing, YMMV.
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Re:Great! But... (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course. But neither one of them are free.
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Re:Lapland? (Score:5, Informative)
"about 2,000 (households) in far-flung corners of the country" wouldn't be included.
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