Hacker CinemaNeed to Know
2010 · TV series · documentary · 60 min episodes · 4 seasons
Need to Know is an American public television news program produced by WNET, and broadcast weekly on all Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) affiliate-stations in the United States. It aired from May 2010 until June 2013. PBS stated that the show was intended to fill the public-affairs and "hard"/investigative news void left by both the one-hour Bill Moyers Journal, and the cancelled, half-hour NOW on PBS. Both departing shows had been long-running, highly rated, and critically acclaimed for their journalistic quality, and focus on issues that deeply impacted regular Americans' lives, yet went largely ignored by commercial TV news outlets. "NTK" branded itself the "TV and Web newsmagazine [that] gives you what you need to know." PBS had described the show as “a multi-platform current affairs news magazine, uniting broadcast and web in an innovative approach to news-gathering and reporting."
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>It should be a fundamental human right to perform math.
Why?
What if society could be destroyed by performing math? Should it still be a fundamental right? What if the entire universe could be destroyed by doing math?
This reminds me of a couple episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. In one ("Need to Know"), there's some secret; when person A tells person B the secret, person B goes insane (and then tries to tell others the secret). Should a verbally-communicated secret be illegal? In the other, a disgruntled college student figures out how to build a small fusion bomb, and uses it for terrorism and threatens to detonate much larger versions of the bomb. At the end, he's killed and takes his secret with him, but the implication is that the principles aren't really that difficult, and sooner or later some other angry person will figure out how to make such bombs and humanity will be doomed.
I recall watching a documentary that looked at internet access in various countries. The most interesting was the UK. Their approach is interesting and successful.
Basically, the government forced local loop unbundling, so that the phone companies were required to lease space in their equipment centers to competing ISPs at fair prices and give them access to local loops to offer DSL and other services.
Of course, the phone companies said this would be disastrous. Turns out it was not. A huge number of ISPs jumped in to compete in the DSL market, and the phone companies found they were making more money as landlords leasing out space for equipment than they had been making from running their own ISP business.
On the consumer side of things, there was a big increase in choice, with ISPs jumping in to offer everything from serious power user plans and low latency plans for gamers to cheap plans for people who just use email.
Amusingly, AT&T and Verizon from the US both wrote to British regulators when unbundling was under discussion and provided strong arguments in favor of it. However, when asked if the US should do something similar, they say it is bad for consumers.
Ahh...found the documentary. It was an episode of the PBS series "Need to Know". The journalist who did the segment on broadband also writes for Engadget, and that segment of "Need to Know" and a text version of the story is available at Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/28/why-is-european-broadband-faster-and-cheaper-blame-the-governme/