title: Net neutrality

text: Net neutrality advocates have sponsored legislation claiming that authorizing incumbent network providers to override transport and application layer separation on the Internet would signal the decline of fundamental Internet standards and international consensus authority. Further, the legislation asserts that bit-shaping the transport of application data will undermine the transport layer's designed flexibility.


title: Net neutrality

text: Alok Bhardwaj, founder of Epic Privacy Browser, argues that any violations of network neutrality, realistically speaking, will not involve genuine investment but rather payoffs for unnecessary and dubious services. He believes that it is unlikely that new investments will be made to lay special networks for particular websites to reach end-users faster. Rather, he believes that non-net neutrality will involve leveraging the quality of service to extract remuneration from websites that want to avoid being slowed down. This theory was confirmed in 2014 when Netflix announced it was making payments to Comcast and Verizon to avoid throttling, slower Internet speeds for particular services or websites, by those ISPs. These payments were described by Netflix founder Reed Hastings as "an arbitrary tax" and "arbitrary interconnection tolls".


title: Net neutrality

text: Some advocates say network neutrality is needed in order to maintain the end-to-end principle. According to Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. McChesney, all content must be treated the same and must move at the same speed in order for net neutrality to be true. They say that it is this simple but brilliant end-to-end aspect that has allowed the Internet to act as a powerful force for economic and social good. Under this principle, a neutral network is a dumb network, merely passing packets regardless of the applications they support. This point of view was expressed by David S. Isenberg in his paper, "The Rise of the Stupid Network". He states that the vision of an intelligent network is being replaced by a new network philosophy and architecture in which the network is designed for always-on use, not intermittence and scarcity. Rather than intelligence being designed into the network itself, the intelligence would be pushed out to the end-users device; and the network would be designed simply to deliver bits without fancy network routing or smart number translation. The data would be in control, telling the network where it should be sent. End-user devices would then be allowed to behave flexibly, as bits would essentially be free and there would be no assumption that the data is of a single data rate or data type.


title: Net neutrality

text: Contrary to this idea, the research paper titled "End-to-end arguments in system design" by Saltzer, Reed, and Clark argues that network intelligence does not relieve end systems of the requirement to check inbound data for errors and to rate-limit the sender, nor for wholesale removal of intelligence from the network core.


title: Net neutrality

text: Opponents of net neutrality regulations include Internet service providers (ISPs), broadband and telecommunications companies, computer hardware manufacturers, economists, and notable technologists. Many of the major hardware and telecommunications companies specifically oppose the reclassification of broadband as a common carrier under Title II. Corporate opponents of this measure include Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Nokia, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Juniper, D-Link, Wintel, Alcatel-Lucent, Corning, Panasonic, Ericsson, Oracle, Akamai, and others. The US Telecom and Broadband Association, which represents a diverse array of small and large broadband providers, is also an opponent.


title: Net neutrality

text: Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist Gary Becker's paper titled, "Net Neutrality and Consumer Welfare", published by the "Journal of Competition Law & Economics", argues that claims by net neutrality proponents "do not provide a compelling rationale for regulation" because there is "significant and growing competition" among broadband access providers. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt states that, while Google views that similar data types should not be discriminated against, it is okay to discriminate across different data types—a position that both Google and Verizon generally agree on, according to Schmidt. According to the Journal, when President Barack Obama announced his support for strong net neutrality rules late in 2014, Schmidt told a top White House official the president was making a mistake. Google once strongly advocated net-neutrality–like rules prior to 2010, but their support for the rules has since diminished; the company however still remains "committed" to net neutrality.


title: Net neutrality

text: Individuals who oppose net neutrality rules include TCP/IP inventor Bob Kahn, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy, PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, "Grandfather of the Internet" David Farber, Internet pioneer David Clark, packet switching pioneer Louis Pouzin, MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, Nokia's CEO Rajeev Suri, VOIP pioneer Jeff Pulver, entrepreneur Mark Cuban and former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.


title: Net neutrality

text: Nobel Prize laureate economists who oppose net neutrality rules include Princeton economist Angus Deaton, Chicago economist Richard Thaler, MIT economist Bengt Holmström, and the late Chicago economist Gary Becker. Others include MIT economists David Autor, Amy Finkelstein, and Richard Schmalensee; Stanford economists Raj Chetty, Darrell Duffie, Caroline Hoxby, and Kenneth Judd; Harvard economist Alberto Alesina; Berkeley economists Alan Auerbach and Emmanuel Saez; and Yale economists William Nordhaus, Joseph Altonji and Pinelopi Goldberg.


title: Net neutrality

text: Several civil rights groups, such as the National Urban League, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow/PUSH, and League of United Latin American Citizens, also oppose Title II net neutrality regulations, who said that the call to regulate broadband Internet service as a utility would harm minority communities by stifling investment in underserved areas.


title: Net neutrality

text: The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, told "The Washington Post" that it has a "complicated relationship" with net neutrality. The organization partnered with telecommunications companies to provide free access to Wikipedia for people in developing countries, under a program called Wikipedia Zero, without requiring mobile data to access information. The concept is known as zero rating. Said Wikimedia Foundation officer Gayle Karen Young, "Partnering with telecom companies in the near term, it blurs the net neutrality line in those areas. It fulfills our overall mission, though, which is providing free knowledge."


title: Net neutrality

text: A number of other opponents created "Hands Off The Internet", a website created in 2006 to promote arguments against Internet regulation. Principal financial support for the website came from AT&T, and members included BellSouth, Alcatel, Cingular, and Citizens Against Government Waste.


title: Net neutrality

text: Robert Pepper, a senior managing director of global advanced technology policy, at Cisco Systems, and former FCC chief of policy development, says: "The supporters of net neutrality regulation believe that more rules are necessary. In their view, without greater regulation, service providers might parcel out bandwidth or services, creating a bifurcated world in which the wealthy enjoy first-class Internet access, while everyone else is left with slow connections and degraded content. That scenario, however, is a false paradigm. Such an all-or-nothing world doesn't exist today, nor will it exist in the future. Without additional regulation, service providers are likely to continue doing what they are doing. They will continue to offer a variety of broadband service plans at a variety of price points to suit every type of consumer". Computer scientist Bob Kahn has said net neutrality is a slogan that would freeze innovation in the core of the Internet.


title: Net neutrality

text: Farber has written and spoken strongly in favor of continued research and development on core Internet protocols. He joined academic colleagues Michael Katz, Christopher Yoo, and Gerald Faulhaber in an op-ed for "The Washington Post" strongly critical of network neutrality, essentially stating that while the Internet is in need of remodeling, congressional action aimed at protecting the best parts of the current Internet could interfere with efforts to build a replacement.


title: Net neutrality

text: According to a letter to FCC commissioners and key congressional leaders sent by 60 major ISP technology suppliers including IBM, Intel, Qualcomm, and Cisco, Title II regulation of the Internet "means that instead of billions of broadband investment driving other sectors of the economy forward, any reduction in this spending will stifle growth across the entire economy. This is not idle speculation or fear mongering...Title II is going to lead to a slowdown, if not a hold, in broadband build out, because if you don't know that you can recover on your investment, you won't make it." According to the "Wall Street Journal", in one of Google's few lobbying sessions with FCC officials, the company urged the agency to craft rules that encourage investment in broadband Internet networks—a position that mirrors the argument made by opponents of strong net neutrality rules, such as AT&T and Comcast. Opponents of net neutrality argue that prioritization of bandwidth is necessary for future innovation on the Internet. Telecommunications providers such as telephone and cable companies, and some technology companies that supply networking gear, argue telecom providers should have the ability to provide preferential treatment in the form of tiered services, for example by giving online companies willing to pay the ability to transfer their data packets faster than other Internet traffic. The added income from such services could be used to pay for the building of increased broadband access to more consumers.


title: Net neutrality

text: Opponents say that net neutrality would make it more difficult for Internet service providers (ISPs) and other network operators to recoup their investments in broadband networks. John Thorne, senior vice president and deputy general counsel of Verizon, a broadband and telecommunications company, has argued that they will have no incentive to make large investments to develop advanced fibre-optic networks if they are prohibited from charging higher preferred access fees to companies that wish to take advantage of the expanded capabilities of such networks. Thorne and other ISPs have accused Google and Skype of freeloading or free riding for using a network of lines and cables the phone company spent billions of dollars to build. Marc Andreessen states that "a pure net neutrality view is difficult to sustain if you also want to have continued investment in broadband networks. If you're a large telco right now, you spend on the order of $20 billion a year on capex [capital expenditure]. You need to know how you're going to get a return on that investment. If you have these pure net neutrality rules where you can never charge a company like Netflix anything, you're not ever going to get a return on continued network investment – which means you'll stop investing in the network. And I would not want to be sitting here 10 or 20 years from now with the same broadband speeds we're getting today."


title: Net neutrality

text: Proponents of net neutrality regulations say network operators have continued to under-invest in infrastructure. However, according to Copenhagen Economics, U.S. investment in telecom infrastructure is 50 percent higher than in the European Union. As a share of GDP, the United States' broadband investment rate per GDP trails only the UK and South Korea slightly, but exceeds Japan, Canada, Italy, Germany, and France sizably. On broadband speed, Akamai reported that the US trails only South Korea and Japan among its major trading partners, and trails only Japan in the G-7 in both average peak connection speed and percentage of the population connection at 10 Mbit/s or higher, but are substantially ahead of most of its other major trading partners.


title: Net neutrality

text: The White House reported in June 2013 that U.S. connection speeds are "the fastest compared to other countries with either a similar population or land mass". Akamai's report on "The State of the Internet" in the 2nd quarter of 2014 says "a total of 39 states saw 4K readiness rate more than double over the past year". In other words, as ZDNet reports, those states saw a "major" increase in the availability of the 15Mbit/s speed needed for 4K video. According to the Progressive Policy Institute and ITU data, the United States has the most affordable entry-level prices for fixed broadband in the OECD.


title: Net neutrality

text: In Indonesia, there is a very high number of Internet connections that are subject to exclusive deals between the ISP and the building owner, and changing this dynamic could unlock much more consumer choices and higher speeds. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai and Federal Election Commission's Lee Goldman wrote in a Politico piece in February 2015, "Compare Europe, which has long had utility-style regulations, with the United States, which has embraced a light-touch regulatory model. Broadband speeds in the United States, both wired and wireless, are significantly faster than those in Europe. Broadband investment in the United States is several multiples that of Europe. And broadband's reach is much wider in the United States, despite its much lower population density."


title: Net neutrality

text: VOIP pioneer Jeff Pulver states that the uncertainty of the FCC imposing Title II, which experts said would create regulatory restrictions on using the Internet to transmit a voice call, was the "single greatest impediment to innovation" for a decade. According to Pulver, investors in the companies he helped found, like Vonage, held back investment because they feared the FCC could use Title II to prevent VOIP startups from bypassing telephone networks.


title: Net neutrality

text: A 2010 paper on net neutrality by Nobel Prize economist Gary Becker and his colleagues stated that "there is significant and growing competition among broadband access providers and that few significant competitive problems have been observed to date, suggesting that there is no compelling competitive rationale for such regulation". Becker and fellow economists Dennis Carlton and Hal Sidler found that "Between mid-2002 and mid-2008, the number of high-speed broadband access lines in the United States grew from 16 million to nearly 133 million, and the number of residential broadband lines grew from 14 million to nearly 80 million. Internet traffic roughly tripled between 2007 and 2009. At the same time, prices for broadband Internet access services have fallen sharply." The PPI reports that the profit margins of U.S. broadband providers are generally one-sixth to one-eighth of companies that use broadband (such as Apple or Google), contradicting the idea of monopolistic price-gouging by providers.


title: Net neutrality

text: When FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler redefined broadband from 4 Mbit/s to 25 Mbit/s (3.125 MB/s) or greater in January 2015, FCC commissioners Ajit Pai and Mike O'Reilly believed the redefinition was to set up the agency's intent to settle the net neutrality fight with new regulations. The commissioners argued that the stricter speed guidelines painted the broadband industry as less competitive, justifying the FCC's moves with Title II net neutrality regulations.


title: Net neutrality

text: A report by the Progressive Policy Institute in June 2014 argues that nearly every American can choose from at least 2-4 broadband Internet service providers, despite claims that there are only a "small number" of broadband providers. Citing research from the FCC, the Institute wrote that 90 percent of American households have access to at least one wired and one wireless broadband provider at speeds of at least 4 Mbit/s (500 kbyte/s) downstream and 1 Mbit/s (125 kbyte/s) upstream and that nearly 88 percent of Americans can choose from at least two wired providers of broadband disregarding speed (typically choosing between a cable and telco offering). Further, three of the four national wireless companies report that they offer 4G LTE to 250–300 million Americans, with the fourth (T-Mobile) sitting at 209 million and counting. Similarly, the FCC reported in June 2008 that 99.8% of ZIP codes in the United States had two or more providers of high-speed Internet lines available, and 94.6% of ZIP codes had four or more providers, as reported by University of Chicago economists Gary Becker, Dennis Carlton, and Hal Sider in a 2010 paper.


title: Net neutrality

text: FCC commissioner Ajit Pai states that the FCC completely brushes away the concerns of smaller competitors who are going to be subject to various taxes, such as state property taxes and general receipts taxes. As a result, according to Pai, that does nothing to create more competition within the market. According to Pai, the FCC's ruling to impose Title II regulations is opposed by the country's smallest private competitors and many municipal broadband providers. In his dissent, Pai noted that 142 wireless ISPs (WISPs) said that FCC's new "regulatory intrusion into our businesses ... would likely force us to raise prices, delay deployment expansion, or both". He also noted that 24 of the country's smallest ISPs, each with fewer than 1,000 residential broadband customers, wrote to the FCC stating that Title II "will badly strain our limited resources" because they "have no in-house attorneys and no budget line items for outside counsel". Further, another 43 municipal broadband providers told the FCC that Title II "will trigger consequences beyond the Commission's control and risk serious harm to our ability to fund and deploy broadband without bringing any concrete benefit for consumers or edge providers that the market is not already proving today without the aid of any additional regulation".


title: Net neutrality

text: According to a "Wired" magazine article by TechFreedom's Berin Szoka, Matthew Starr, and Jon Henke, local governments and public utilities impose the most significant barriers to entry for more cable broadband competition: "While popular arguments focus on supposed 'monopolists' such as big cable companies, it's government that's really to blame." The authors state that local governments and their public utilities charge ISPs far more than they actually cost and have the final say on whether an ISP can build a network. The public officials determine what requirements an ISP must meet to get approval for access to publicly owned "rights of way" (which lets them place their wires), thus reducing the number of potential competitors who can profitably deploy Internet services—such as AT&T's U-Verse, Google Fiber, and Verizon FiOS. Kickbacks may include municipal requirements for ISPs such as building out service where it is not demanded, donating equipment, and delivering free broadband to government buildings.


title: Net neutrality

text: According to a research article from MIS Quarterly, the authors stated their findings subvert some of the expectations of how ISPs and CPs act regarding net neutrality laws. The paper shows that even if an ISP is under restrictions, it still has the opportunity and the incentive to act as a gatekeeper over CPs by enforcing priority delivery of content.


title: Net neutrality

text: Those in favor of forms of non-neutral tiered Internet access argue that the Internet is already not a level playing field, and that large companies achieve a performance advantage over smaller competitors by providing more and better-quality servers and buying high-bandwidth services. Should scrapping of net neutrality regulations precipitate a price drop for lower levels of access, or access to only certain protocols, for instance, such would make Internet usage more adaptable to the needs of those individuals and corporations who specifically seek differentiated tiers of service. Network expert Richard Bennett has written, "A richly funded Web site, which delivers data faster than its competitors to the front porches of the Internet service providers, wants it delivered the rest of the way on an equal basis. This system, which Google calls broadband neutrality, actually preserves a more fundamental inequality."


title: Net neutrality

text: FCC commissioner Ajit Pai, who opposed the 2015 Title II reclassification of ISPs, says that the ruling allows new fees and taxes on broadband by subjecting them to telephone-style taxes under the Universal Service Fund. Net neutrality proponent Free Press writes, "the average potential increase in taxes and fees per household would be far less" than the estimate given by net neutrality opponents, and that if there were to be additional taxes, the tax figure may be around US$4 billion. Under favorable circumstances, "the increase would be exactly zero". Meanwhile, the Progressive Policy Institute claims that Title II could trigger taxes and fees up to $11 billion a year. Financial website "Nerd Wallet" did their own assessment and settled on a possible US$6.25 billion tax impact, estimating that the average American household may see their tax bill increase US$67 annually.


title: Net neutrality

text: According to PayPal founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel in 2011, "Net neutrality has not been necessary to date. I don't see any reason why it's suddenly become important, when the Internet has functioned quite well for the past 15 years without it. ... Government attempts to regulate technology have been extraordinarily counterproductive in the past." Max Levchin, the other co-founder of PayPal, echoed similar statements, telling CNBC, "The Internet is not broken, and it got here without government regulation and probably in part because of lack of government regulation."


title: Net neutrality

text: FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, who was one of the two commissioners who opposed the net neutrality proposal, criticized the FCC's ruling on Internet neutrality, stating that the perceived threats from ISPs to deceive consumers, degrade content, or disfavor the content that they dislike are non-existent: "The evidence of these continuing threats? There is none; it's all anecdote, hypothesis, and hysteria. A small ISP in North Carolina allegedly blocked VoIP calls a decade ago. Comcast capped BitTorrent traffic to ease upload congestion eight years ago. Apple introduced Facetime over Wi-Fi first, cellular networks later. "FCC Chairman Pai wants to switch ISP rules from proactive restrictions to after-the-fact litigation, which means a lot more leeway for ISPs that don’t particularly want to be treated as impartial utilities connecting people to the internet." (Atherton, 2017). Examples this picayune and stale aren't enough to tell a coherent story about net neutrality. The bogeyman never had it so easy." FCC Commissioner Mike O'Reilly, the other opposing commissioner, also claims that the ruling is a solution to a hypothetical problem, "Even after enduring three weeks of spin, it is hard for me to believe that the Commission is establishing an entire Title II/net neutrality regime to protect against hypothetical harms. There is not a shred of evidence that any aspect of this structure is necessary. The D.C. Circuit called the prior, scaled-down version a 'prophylactic' approach. I call it guilt by imagination." In a "Chicago Tribune" article, FCC Commissioner Pai and Joshua Wright of the Federal Trade Commission argue that "the Internet isn't broken, and we don't need the president's plan to 'fix' it. Quite the opposite. The Internet is an unparalleled success story. It is a free, open and thriving platform."


title: Net neutrality

text: Opponents argue that net neutrality regulations prevent service providers from providing more affordable Internet access to those who can't afford it. A concept known as "zero-rating", ISPs would be unable to provide Internet access for free or at a reduced cost to the poor under net neutrality rules. For example, low-income users who can't afford bandwidth-hogging Internet services such as video streams could be exempted from paying through subsidies or advertising. However, under the rules, ISPs would not be able to discriminate traffic, thus forcing low-income users to pay for high-bandwidth usage like other users.


title: Net neutrality

text: The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, created Wikipedia Zero to provide Wikipedia free-of-charge on mobile phones to low-income users, especially those in developing countries. However, the practice violates net neutrality rules as traffic would have to be treated equally regardless of the users' ability to pay. In 2014, Chile banned the practice of Internet service providers giving users free access to websites like Wikipedia and Facebook, saying the practice violates net neutrality rules. In 2016, India banned Internet.org's Free Basics application, which provides users in less developed countries with free access to a variety of websites like Wikipedia, BBC, Dictionary.com, health sites, Facebook, ESPN, and weather reports—ruling that the initiative violated net neutrality.


title: Net neutrality

text: Net neutrality rules would prevent traffic from being allocated to the most needed users, according to Internet Pioneer David Farber. Because net neutrality regulations prevent a discrimination of traffic, networks would have to treat critical traffic equally with non-critical traffic. According to Farber, "When traffic surges beyond the ability of the network to carry it, something is going to be delayed. When choosing what gets delayed, it makes sense to allow a network to favor traffic from, say, a patient's heart monitor over traffic delivering a music download. It also makes sense to allow network operators to restrict traffic that is downright harmful, such as viruses, worms and spam."


title: Net neutrality

text: Tim Wu, though a proponent of network neutrality, claims that the current Internet is not neutral as its implementation of best effort generally favors file transfer and other non-time-sensitive traffic over real-time communications. Generally, a network which blocks some nodes or services for the customers of the network would normally be expected to be less useful to the customers than one that did not. Therefore, for a network to remain significantly non-neutral requires either that the customers not be concerned about the particular non-neutralities or the customers not have any meaningful choice of providers, otherwise they would presumably switch to another provider with fewer restrictions.


title: Net neutrality

text: While the network neutrality debate continues, network providers often enter into peering arrangements among themselves. These agreements often stipulate how certain information flows should be treated. In addition, network providers often implement various policies such as blocking of port 25 to prevent insecure systems from serving as spam relays, or other ports commonly used by decentralized music search applications implementing peer-to-peer networking models. They also present terms of service that often include rules about the use of certain applications as part of their contracts with users. Most consumer Internet providers implement policies like these. The MIT Mantid Port Blocking Measurement Project is a measurement effort to characterize Internet port blocking and potentially discriminatory practices. However, the effect of peering arrangements among network providers are only local to the peers that enter into the arrangements and cannot affect traffic flow outside their scope.


title: Net neutrality

text: Jon Peha from Carnegie Mellon University believes it is important to create policies that protect users from harmful traffic discrimination while allowing beneficial discrimination. Peha discusses the technologies that enable traffic discrimination, examples of different types of discrimination, and the potential impacts of regulation. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt aligns Google's views on data discrimination with Verizon's: "I want to be clear what we mean by Net neutrality: What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don't discriminate against one person's video in favor of another. But it's okay to discriminate across different types. So you could prioritize voice over video. And there is general agreement with Verizon and Google on that issue." Echoing similar comments by Schmidt, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist and "father of the Internet", Vint Cerf, says that "it's entirely possible that some applications needs far more latency, like games. Other applications need broadband streaming capability in order to deliver real-time video. Others don't really care as long as they can get the bits there, like e-mail or file transfers and things like that. But it should not be the case that the supplier of the access to the network mediates this on a competitive basis, but you may still have different kinds of service depending on what the requirements are for the different applications."


title: Net neutrality

text: Content caching is the process by which frequently accessed contents are temporarily stored in strategic network positions (e.g., in servers close to the end-users) to achieve several performance objectives. For example, caching is commonly used by ISPs to reduce network congestion and results in a superior quality of experience (QoE) perceived by the final users.


title: Net neutrality

text: Since the storage available in cache servers is limited, caching involves a process of selecting the contents worth storing. Several cache algorithms have been designed to perform this process which, in general, leads to storing the most popular contents. The cached contents are retrieved at a higher QoE (e.g., lower latency), and caching can be therefore considered a form of traffic differentiation. However, caching is not generally viewed as a form of discriminatory traffic differentiation. For example, the technical writer Adam Marcus states that "accessing content from edge servers may be a bit faster for users, but nobody is being discriminated against and most content on the Internet is not latency-sensitive". In line with this statement, caching is not regulated by legal frameworks that are favourable to Net Neutrality, such as the Open Internet Order issued by the FCC in 2015. Even more so, the legitimacy of caching has never been put in doubt by opponents of Net Neutrality. On the contrary, the complexity of caching operations (e.g., extensive information processing) has been successively regarded by the FCC as one of the technical reasons why ISPs should not be considered common carriers, which legitimates the abrogation of Net Neutrality rules. Under a Net Neutrality regime, prioritization of a class of traffic with respect to another one is allowed only if several requirements are met (e.g., objectively different QoS requirements). However, when it comes to caching, a selection of contents of the same class has to be performed (e.g., set of videos worth storing in cache servers). In the spirit of general deregulation with regard to caching, there is no rule that specifies how this process can be carried out in a non-discriminatory way. Nevertheless, the scientific literature considers the issue of caching as a potentially discriminatory process and provides possible guidelines to address it. For example, a non-discriminatory caching might be performed considering the popularity of contents, or with the aim of guaranteeing the same QoE to all the users, or, alternatively, to achieve some common welfare objectives.


title: Net neutrality

text: As far as CDNs are concerned, the relationship between caching and Net Neutrality is even more complex. In fact, CDNs are employed to allow scalable and highly-efficient content delivery rather than to grant access to the Internet. Consequently, differently from ISPs, CDNs are entitled to charge content providers for caching their content. Therefore, although this may be regarded as a form of paid traffic prioritization, CDNs are not subject to Net Neutrality regulations and are rarely included in the debate. Despite this, it is argued by some that the Internet ecosystem has changed to such an extent that all the players involved in the content delivery can distort competition and should be therefore also included in the discussion around Net Neutrality. Among those, the analyst Dan Rayburn suggested that "the Open Internet Order enacted by the FCC in 2015 was myopically focussed on ISPs".


title: Net neutrality

text: Internet routers forward packets according to the diverse peering and transport agreements that exist between network operators. Many networks using Internet protocols now employ quality of service (QoS), and Network Service Providers frequently enter into Service Level Agreements with each other embracing some sort of QoS. There is no single, uniform method of interconnecting networks using IP, and not all networks that use IP are part of the Internet. IPTV networks are isolated from the Internet and are therefore not covered by network neutrality agreements. The IP datagram includes a 3-bit wide Precedence field and a larger DiffServ Code Point (DSCP) that are used to request a level of service, consistent with the notion that protocols in a layered architecture offer service through Service Access Points. This field is sometimes ignored, especially if it requests a level of service outside the originating network's contract with the receiving network. It is commonly used in private networks, especially those including Wi-Fi networks where priority is enforced. While there are several ways of communicating service levels across Internet connections, such as SIP, RSVP, IEEE 802.11e, and MPLS, the most common scheme combines SIP and DSCP. Router manufacturers now sell routers that have logic enabling them to route traffic for various Classes of Service at "wire-speed".


title: Net neutrality

text: Quality of service is sometimes taken as a measurement through certain tools to test a user's connection quality, such as Network Diagnostic Tools (NDT) and services on speedtest.net. These tools are known to be used by National Regulatory Authorities (NRAs), who use these QoS measurements as a way of detecting Net Neutrality violations. However, there are very few examples of such measurements being used in any significant way by NRAs, or in network policy for that matter. Often, these tools are used not because they fail at recording the results they are meant to record, but because said measurements are inflexible and difficult to exploit for any significant purpose. According to Ioannis Koukoutsidis, the problems with the current tools used to measure QoS stem from a lack of a standard detection methodology, a need to be able to detect various methods in which an ISP might violate Net Neutrality, and the inability to test an average measurement for a specific population of users.


title: Net neutrality

text: With the emergence of multimedia, VoIP, IPTV, and other applications that benefit from low latency, various attempts to address the inability of some private networks to limit latency have arisen, including the proposition of offering tiered service levels that would shape Internet transmissions at the network layer based on application type. These efforts are ongoing and are starting to yield results as wholesale Internet transport providers begin to amend service agreements to include service levels.


title: Net neutrality

text: Advocates of net neutrality have proposed several methods to implement a net-neutral Internet that includes a notion of quality-of-service:


title: Net neutrality

text: Founder of Epic Privacy Browser, Alok Bhardwaj, has argued that net neutrality preservation through legislation is consistent with implementing quality of service protocols. He argues legislation should ban the charging of fees for any quality of service, which would both allow networks to implement quality of service as well as remove any incentive to abuse net neutrality ideas. He argues that since implementing quality of service does not require any additional costs versus a non-QoS network, there is no reason implementing quality of service should entail any additional fees. However, the core network hardware needed (with a large number of queues, etc.) and the cost of designing and maintaining a QoS network are both much higher than for a non-QoS network.


title: Net neutrality

text: There are also some discrepancies in how wireless networks affect the implementation of net neutrality policy, some of which are noted in the studies of Christopher Yoo. In one research article, he claimed that "...bad handoffs, local congestion, and the physics of wave propagation make wireless broadband networks significantly less reliable than fixed broadband networks."


title: Net neutrality

text: Broadband Internet access has most often been sold to users based on Excess Information Rate or maximum available bandwidth. If Internet service providers (ISPs) can provide varying levels of service to websites at various prices, this may be a way to manage the costs of unused capacity by selling surplus bandwidth (or "leverage price discrimination to recoup costs of 'consumer surplus). However, purchasers of connectivity on the basis of Committed Information Rate or guaranteed bandwidth capacity must expect the capacity they purchase in order to meet their communications requirements. Various studies have sought to provide network providers with the necessary formulas for adequately pricing such a tiered service for their customer base. But while network neutrality is primarily focused on protocol-based provisioning, most of the pricing models are based on bandwidth restrictions.


title: Net neutrality

text: Many Economists have analyzed Net Neutrality to compare various hypothetical pricing models. For instance, economic professors Michael L. Katz and Benjamin E. Hermalin at the University of California Berkeley co-published a paper titled, "The Economics of Product-Line Restrictions with an Application to the Network Neutrality Debate" in 2007. In this paper, they compared the single-service economic equilibrium to the multi-service economic equilibriums under Net Neutrality.


title: Net neutrality

text: On 12 July 2017, an event called the Day of Action was held to advocate net neutrality in the United States in response to Ajit Pai's plans to remove government policies that upheld net neutrality. Several websites participated in this event, including ones such as Amazon, Netflix, Google, and several other just as well-known websites. The gathering was called "the largest online protest in history." Websites chose many different ways to convey their message. The founder of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, published a video defending FCC's rules. Reddit made a pop-up message that loads slowly to illustrate the effect of removing net neutrality. Other websites also put up some less obvious notifications, such as Amazon, which put up a hard-to-notice link, or Google, which put up a policy blog post as opposed to a more obvious message.


title: Net neutrality

text: A poll conducted by Mozilla showed strong support for net neutrality across US political parties. Out of the approximately 1,000 responses received by the poll, 76% of Americans, 81% of Democrats, and 73% of Republicans, support net neutrality. The poll also showed that 78% of Americans do not think that Trump's government can be trusted to protect access to the Internet. Net neutrality supporters had also made several comments on the FCC website opposing plans to remove net neutrality, especially after a segment by John Oliver regarding this topic was aired on his show "Last Week Tonight". He urged his viewers to comment on the FCC's website, and the flood of comments that were received crashed the FCC's website, with the resulting media coverage of the incident inadvertently helping it to reach greater audiences. However, in response, Ajit Pai selected one particular comment that specifically supported removal of net neutrality policies.


title: Net neutrality

text: At the end of August, the FCC released more than 13,000 pages of net neutrality complaints filed by consumers, one day before the deadline for the public to comment on Ajit Pai's proposal to remove net neutrality. It has been implied that the FCC ignored evidence against their proposal in order to remove the protection laws faster. It has also been noted that nowhere was it mentioned how FCC made any attempt to resolve the complaints made. Regardless, Ajit Pai's proposal has drawn more than 22 million comments, though a large amount was spam. However, there were 1.5 million personalized comments, 98.5% of them protesting Ajit Pai's plan.


title: Net neutrality

text: , fifty senators had endorsed a legislative measure to override the Federal Communications Commission's decision to deregulate the broadband industry. The Congressional Review Act paperwork was filed on 9 May 2018, which allowed the Senate to vote on the permanence of the new net neutrality rules proposed by the Federal Communications Commission. The vote passed and a resolution was approved to try to remove the FCC's new rules on net neutrality; however, officials doubted there was enough time to completely repeal the rules before the Open Internet Order officially expired on 11 June 2018. A September 2018 report from Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst found that U.S. telecom companies are indeed slowing Internet traffic to and from those two sites in particular along with other popular apps. In March 2019, congressional supporters of net neutrality introduced the Save the Internet Act in both the House and Senate, which if passed would reverse the FCC's 2017 repeal of net neutrality protections.


title: Net neutrality

text: A digital divide is referred to as the difference between those who have access to the internet and those using digital technologies based on urban against rural areas. In the U.S, government city tech leaders warned in 2017 that the FCC's repeal of net neutrality will widen the digital divide, negatively affect small businesses, and job opportunities for middle class and low-income citizens. The FCC reports on their website that Americans in rural areas reach only 65 percent, while in urban areas reach 97 percent of access to high-speed Internet. Public Knowledge has stated that this will have a larger impact on those living in rural areas without internet access. In developing countries like India that don't have reliable electricity or internet connections has only 9 percent of those living in rural areas that have internet access compared to 64 percent of those in urban areas that have access.


title: Hanya Yanagihara

text: Hanya Yanagihara (born 1974) is an American novelist, editor, and travel writer. She grew up in Hawaii. She is best known for her bestselling novel "A Little Life", which was shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize, and for being the editor-in-chief of "T Magazine".


title: Hanya Yanagihara

text: Hanya Yanagihara was born in 1974 in Los Angeles. Her father, hematologist/oncologist Ronald Yanagihara, is from Hawaii, and her mother was born in Seoul. Yanagihara is partly of Japanese descent through her father. As a child, Yanagihara moved frequently with her family, living in Hawaii, New York, Maryland, California and Texas. She attended Punahou High School in Hawaii. She attended Smith College and graduated in 1995.


title: Hanya Yanagihara

text: Yanagihara has said that her father introduced her as a girl to the work of Philip Roth and to "British writers of a certain age", such as Anita Brookner, Iris Murdoch, and Barbara Pym. Of Pym and Brookner, she says, "there is a suspicion of the craft that the male writers of their generation didn't have, a metaphysical reckoning of what is it actually doing for the world". She has said that "the contemporary writers I admire most are Hilary Mantel, Kazuo Ishiguro, and John Banville".


title: Hanya Yanagihara

text: After college, Yanagihara moved to New York and worked for several years as a publicist. She wrote and was an editor for "Condé Nast Traveler".


title: Hanya Yanagihara

text: Her first novel, "The People in the Trees", partly based on the real-life case of the virologist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, was praised as one of the best novels of 2013.


title: Hanya Yanagihara

text: Yanagihara's "A Little Life" was published in March 10th, 2015, and received widespread critical acclaim. The book was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize for fiction, the 2016 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2015 Kirkus Prize for fiction. Yanagihara was also selected as a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction. "A Little Life" defied the expectations of its editor, of Yanagihara's agent, and of the author herself, that it would not sell well.


title: Hanya Yanagihara

text: Yanagihara described writing the book at its best as "glorious as surfing; it felt like being carried aloft on something I couldn't conjure but was lucky enough to have caught, if for just a moment. At its worst, I felt I was somehow losing my ownership over the book. It felt, oddly, like being one of those people who adopt a tiger or lion when the cat's a baby and cuddly and manageable, and then watch in dismay and awe when it turns on them as an adult".


title: Hanya Yanagihara

text: In 2015, she left Condé Nast to become a deputy editor at "." She has said that after she published her best selling sophomore novel, people in the publishing industry were baffled by her decision to take a job at "T". Describing the publishing world as "a provincial community, more or less as snobby as the fashion industry", she said, "I'd get these underhanded comments like, 'oh, I never knew there were words [in "T Magazine"] worth reading'". Of working as an editor while writing fiction on the side, she says, "I've never done it any other way". In 2017, she became the editor-in-chief of "T".


title: Hanya Yanagihara

text: Yanagihara's third novel, "To Paradise", was published in January 11th, 2022, and reached number one on "The New York Times" best seller list.


title: Flemish

text: Flemish ("Vlaams") is a Low Franconian dialect cluster of the Dutch language. It is sometimes referred to as Flemish Dutch (), Belgian Dutch ( ), or Southern Dutch (). Flemish is native to Flanders, a historical region in northern Belgium; it is spoken by Flemings, the dominant ethnic group of the region. Outside of Flanders, it is also spoken to some extent in French Flanders and the Dutch Zeelandic Flanders.


title: Flemish

text: The term "Flemish" itself has become ambiguous. Nowadays, it is used in at least five ways, depending on the context. These include:


title: Flemish

text: MultiTree considers Flemish to include the four principal Dutch dialects in the Flemish region (Flanders): Brabantian, East Flemish, West Flemish and Limburgish as well as three other dialects. Glottolog considers Western Flemish to be a separate language, classified as a part of the Southwestern Dutch family together with the Zeelandic language. According to Glottolog, Western Flemish includes the dialects of French Flemish and West Flemish. Brabantian and East Flemish are classified as Dutch dialects, under the Central Southern Dutch dialect group. Ethnologue considers Limburgish and West Flemish to be separate (regional) languages.


title: Flemish

text: Dutch is the majority language in northern Belgium, being used in written language by three-fifths of the population of Belgium. It is one of the three national languages of Belgium, together with French and German, and is the only official language of the Flemish Region.


title: Flemish

text: The various Dutch dialects spoken in Belgium contain a number of lexical and a good amount of grammatical features that distinguish them from the standard Dutch. Basic Dutch words can have a completely different meaning in Flemish or imply different context. As in the Netherlands, the pronunciation of Standard Dutch is affected by the native dialect of the speaker.


title: Flemish

text: All Dutch dialect groups spoken in Belgium are spoken in adjacent areas of the Netherlands as well. East Flemish forms a continuum with both Brabantic and West Flemish. Standard Dutch is primarily based on the Hollandic dialect  (spoken in the Western provinces of the Netherlands) and to a lesser extent on Brabantian, which is the dominant dialect in Flanders, as well as in the south of the Netherlands.


title: Flemish

text: The supra-regional, semi-standardized colloquial form (mesolect) of Dutch spoken in Belgium uses the vocabulary and the sound inventory of the Brabantic dialects. It is often called an "in-between-language" or "intermediate language", intermediate between dialects and standard Dutch. Despite its name, Brabantian is the dominant contributor to the Flemish Dutch "tussentaal".


title: Flemish

text: It is a rather informal variety of speech, which occupies an intermediate position between vernacular dialects and the standard language. It incorporates phonetic, lexical and grammatical elements not part of the standard language but drawn from local dialects.


title: Flemish

text: It is a relatively new phenomenon that has been gaining popularity during the past decades. Some linguists note that it seems to be undergoing a process of (limited) standardisation or that it is evolving into a koiné variety.


title: Flemish

text: "Tussentaal" is slowly gaining popularity in Flanders because it is used a lot in television dramas and comedies. Often, middle-class characters in a television series will be speaking "tussentaal", lower-class characters use the dialect of the location where the show is set (such as Western Flanders), and upper-class characters will speak Standard Dutch. That has given "tussentaal" the status of normalcy in Flanders. It is slowly being accepted by the general population, but it has met with objections from writers and academics who argue that it dilutes the usage of Standard Dutch. "Tussentaal" is used in entertainment television but rarely in informative programmes (like the news), which normally use Flemish accents with standard Dutch vocabulary.


title: Flemish

text: A belgicism is a word or expression that occurs only in the Belgian variant of Dutch. Some are rarely used, others are used daily and are considered part of the Belgian-Dutch standard language. Many belgicisms are loanwords and words or expressions literally translated from French (also called gallicisms); others, in response, are actually remarkably purist, such as "droogzwierder" (a compound of Dutch "droog" "dry" and "zwierder" "spinner") meaning "spin dryer" (common standard Dutch: "centrifuge", a loanword from French), and "duimspijker" (a compound of Dutch "duim" "thumb" and "spijker" "nail") meaning "thumbtack" (common standard Dutch: "punaise", a loanword from French). Among the belgicisms, there are also many words that are considered obsolete, formal, or purist in standard Dutch. Moreover, many belgicisms have their origin in the Belgian official nomenclature. For example, "misdaad" "felony" is not a legal term in the Netherlands, but it is in Belgium.


title: Flemish

text: The English adjective "Flemish" (first attested as , ; compare , ), meaning "from Flanders", was probably borrowed from Old Frisian. The Old Dutch form is , which becomes , in Middle Dutch and in Modern Dutch.


title: Flemish

text: The word itself is derived from , an Ingvaeonic derivation from the Germanic word , meaning 'stream; current', (a cognate to English ("dialectal") and German ("dialectal")). The name was formed from a stem , with a suffix "-ðr-" attached.


title: The Treachery of Images

text: The Treachery of Images () is a 1929 painting by Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. It is also known as "This Is Not a Pipe" and "The Wind and the Song". Magritte painted it when he was 30 years old. It is on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.


title: The Treachery of Images

text: The painting shows an image of a pipe. Below it, Magritte painted, "", French for "This is not a pipe".


title: The Treachery of Images

text: The theme of pipes with the text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" is extended in "Les Mots et Les Images", "La Clé des Songes", "Ceci n'est pas une pipe (L'air et la chanson)", "The Tune and Also the Words", "Ceci n’est pas une pomme", and "Les Deux Mystères".


title: The Treachery of Images

text: The painting is sometimes given as an example of meta message conveyed by paralanguage, like Alfred Korzybski's "The word is not the thing" and "The map is not the territory", as well as Denis Diderot's "This is not a story".


title: The Treachery of Images

text: On December 15, 1929, Paul Éluard and André Breton published an essay about poetry in "La Révolution surréaliste" (The Surrealist Revolution) as a reaction to the publication by poet Paul Valéry "Notes sur la poésie" in "Les Nouvelles littéraires" of September 28, 1929. When Valéry wrote "Poetry is a survival", Breton and Éluard made fun of it and wrote "Poetry is a pipe", as a reference to Magritte's painting.


title: The Treachery of Images

text: In the same edition of "La Révolution surréaliste", Magritte published ""Les mots et les images"" (his founding text which illustrated where words play with images), his answer to the survey on love, and "Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt", a painting tableau surrounded by photos of sixteen surrealists with their eyes closed, including Magritte himself.


title: Schmigadoon!

text: Schmigadoon! is an American musical comedy television series created by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio, with all songs written by Paul, who also serves as showrunner. The series airs on Apple TV+ and premiered on July 16, 2021. The series has been renewed for a second season.


title: Schmigadoon!

text: Season 1 of "Schmigadoon!" was a parody of, and homage to, Golden Age musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. The series stars an ensemble cast led by Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key. It is directed by Barry Sonnenfeld, with choreography by Christopher Gattelli. Cinco Paul won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics in 2022 for "Corn Puddin'", a song that was featured in the pilot episode.


title: Schmigadoon!

text: In season 2, filmed in 2022, Josh and Melissa will find themselves in Schmicago, a world parodying 1960s and 1970s musicals.


title: Schmigadoon!

text: Cinco Paul had the idea for the show over 20 years ago, that it would be funny if two men, like the backpackers in "An American Werewolf In London", stumbled upon a musical, instead of a horror story. According to Paul, the concept only fully came into focus for him when it changed to "a couple who are stuck there until they can find true love". Paul has said that even though Schmigadoon's musical style, characters and satire are largely based on 1940s and 1950s musicals, the sets and costumes reflect 1910s America, like the setting in "The Music Man".


title: Schmigadoon!

text: Two New York doctors, Melissa and Josh, go on a backpacking trip in an attempt to patch up their failing relationship, only to find themselves still arguing. They get lost and soon discover a magical town called Schmigadoon, which is perpetually trapped in a Golden Age-style musical, and soon learn that they cannot leave the town until they find true love. The title and concept parody the 1947 musical "Brigadoon".


title: Schmigadoon!

text: It was announced in January 2020 that Cecily Strong was set to star in and produce the series, with a series order at Apple TV+ close to finalizing. In October, Keegan-Michael Key, Alan Cumming, Fred Armisen, Kristin Chenoweth, Aaron Tveit, Dove Cameron, Ariana DeBose, Jaime Camil, Jane Krakowski and Ann Harada were added to the cast.


title: Schmigadoon!

text: Barry Sonnenfeld directed the season and also executive produced. Besides starring, Cecily Strong served as producer, and Ken Daurio served as consulting producer and writer. Andrew Singer also executive produces with Lorne Michaels on behalf of Broadway Video. The musical numbers were choreographed by Christopher Gattelli. In addition to Paul and Daurio, Allison Silverman, Julie Klausner, Kate Gersten and Bowen Yang were writers on the show. The first season was written in the summer of 2019. The season consisted of six episodes, although it was originally planned to be eight episodes. Bo Welch serves as the series' production designer. Filming for season one began in Vancouver on October 13, 2020, and concluded on December 10, taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Schmigadoon!

text: The series has been renewed for a second season with all of the main cast returning, except for Armisen and Quiring-Nkindi; Tituss Burgess and Patrick Page will join the cast. By June 2022 filming of season two had begun, and it was completed in July 2022.


title: Schmigadoon!

text: Cinco Paul wrote all of the original songs for the series and also serves as showrunner. The underscore was composed by Christopher Willis. Soundtrack albums were released by Milan Records as each episode was released.


title: Schmigadoon!

text: A trailer for the series was released on June 25, 2021. The first two episodes aired on Apple TV+ on July 16, followed by one new episode each subsequent Friday until season 1 ended with episode 6 on August 13, 2021.


title: Schmigadoon!

text: On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, "Schmigadoon!" holds an approval rating of 88% based on 75 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, ""Schmigadoon!"s clever inside-theater jokes may not be for everyone, but there's no denying the joy of seeing this talented ensemble sing (and dance!) their hearts out." On Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, the series has a score of 73 out of 100 based on 34 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". In "The Boston Globe", Matthew Gilbert noted the show's "underlying affection for musical theater [though it] makes ruthless fun of the conventions of show tunes. ... There is plenty of snark afoot. But the songs are also wittily written, and catchy. The choreography is top-notch and well-shot. And the cast members ... have an infectious enthusiasm."


title: Schmigadoon!

text: Among other accolades, the series was nominated for four Emmy Awards, winning one. The soundtrack to Episode 1 was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media, and Chenoweth was nominated for a Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series. The series, its writers, Key, DeBose and Chenoweth were all nominated for Hollywood Critics Association TV Awards. The series was also nominted for the Saturn Award for Best Streaming Fantasy Television Series


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: A pole of inaccessibility with respect to a geographical criterion of inaccessibility marks a location that is the most challenging to reach according to that criterion. Often it refers to the most distant point from the coastline, implying a maximum degree of continentality or oceanity. In these cases, a pole of inaccessibility can be defined as the center of the largest circle that can be drawn within an area of interest without encountering a coast. Where a coast is imprecisely defined, the pole will be similarly imprecise.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: The Northern pole of inaccessibility, sometimes known as the Arctic pole, is located on the Arctic Ocean pack ice at a distance farthest from any land mass. The original position was wrongly believed to lie at 84°03′N 174°51′W. It is not clear who first defined this point but it may have been Sir Hubert Wilkins, who wished to traverse the Arctic Ocean by aircraft, in 1927. He was finally successful in 1928. In 1968 Sir Wally Herbert came very close to reaching what was then considered to be the position by dogsled but by his own account, "Across The Roof Of The World", did not make it due to the flow of sea ice. In 1986, an expedition of Soviet polar scientists led by Dmitry Shparo claimed to reach the original position by foot during a polar night.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: In 2005, explorer Jim McNeill asked scientists from National Snow and Ice Data Center and Scott Polar Research Institute to re-establish the position using modern GPS and satellite technology. This was published as a paper in the Polar Record, Cambridge University Press in 2013. McNeill launched his own, unsuccessful, attempt to reach the new position in 2006, whilst measuring the depth of sea-ice for NASA. In 2010 he and his Ice Warrior team were thwarted again by the poor condition of the sea ice.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: The new position lies at 85°48′N 176°9′W, 1,008 km (626 mi) from the three closest landmasses: It is 1008 km from the nearest land, on Henrietta Island in the De Long Islands, at Arctic Cape on Severnaya Zemlya, and on Ellesmere Island. It is over 200 km from the originally accepted position. Due to constant motion of the pack ice, no permanent structure can exist at this pole. As of February 2021, McNeill said that, as far as he could ascertain, no one had reached the new position of the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility - certainly not from the last landfall across the surface of the ocean and it remains an important scientific transect.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: The southern pole of inaccessibility is the point on the Antarctic continent most distant from the Southern Ocean. A variety of coordinate locations have been given for this pole. The discrepancies are due to the question of whether the "coast" is measured to the grounding line or to the edges of ice shelves, the difficulty of determining the location of the "solid" coastline, the movement of ice sheets and improvements in the accuracy of survey data over the years, as well as possible topographical errors.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: The pole of inaccessibility commonly refers to the site of the Soviet Union research station mentioned below, which was constructed at (though some sources give ). This lies from the South Pole, at an elevation of . Using different criteria, the Scott Polar Research Institute locates this pole at .


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: Using recent datasets and cross-confirmation between the adaptive gridding and B9-Hillclimbing methods discussed below, Rees et al. (2021) identify two poles of inaccessibility for Antarctica: an "outer" pole defined by the edge of Antarctica's floating ice shelves and an "inner" pole defined by the grounding lines of these sheets. They find the Outer pole to be at , from the ocean, and the Inner pole to be at , from the grounding lines.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: The southern pole of inaccessibility is far more remote and difficult to reach than the geographic South Pole. On 14 December 1958, the 3rd Soviet Antarctic Expedition for International Geophysical Year research work, led by Yevgeny Tolstikov, established the temporary Pole of Inaccessibility Station ("Polyus Nedostupnosti") at . A second Russian team returned there in 1967. Today, a building still remains at this location, marked by a bust of Vladimir Lenin that faces towards Moscow, and protected as a historical site.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: On 11 December 2005, at 7:57 UTC, Ramón Hernando de Larramendi, Juan Manuel Viu, and Ignacio Oficialdegui, members of the Spanish Transantarctic Expedition, reached for the first time in history the southern pole of inaccessibility at , updated that year by the British Antarctic Survey. The team continued their journey towards the second southern pole of inaccessibility, the one that accounts for the ice shelves as well as the continental land, and they were the first expedition to reach it, on 14 December 2005, at . Both achievements took place within an ambitious pioneer crossing of the eastern Antarctic Plateau that started at Novolazarevskaya Station and ended at Progress Base after more than . This was the fastest polar journey ever achieved without mechanical aid, with an average rate of around per day and a maximum of per day, using kites as their power source.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: On 4 December 2006, Team N2i, consisting of Henry Cookson, Rupert Longsdon, Rory Sweet and Paul Landry, embarked on an expedition to be the first to reach the historic pole of inaccessibility location without direct mechanical assistance, using a combination of traditional man hauling and kite skiing. The team reached the old abandoned station on 19 January 2007, rediscovering the forgotten statue of Lenin left there by the Soviets some 48 years previously. The team found that only the bust on top of the building remained visible; the rest was buried under the snow. The explorers were picked up from the spot by a plane from Vostok base, flown to Progress Base and taken back to Cape Town on the "Akademik Fyodorov", a Russian polar research vessel.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: On 27 December 2011, Sebastian Copeland and partner Eric McNair-Laundry also reached the southern pole of inaccessibility. They were the first to do so without resupply or mechanical support, departing from Novolazarevskaya Station on their way to the South Pole to complete the first East/West crossing of Antarctica through both poles, over .


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: As mentioned above, due to improvements in technology and the position of the continental edge of Antarctica being debated, the exact position of the best estimate of the pole of inaccessibility may vary. However, for the convenience of sport expeditions, a fixed point is preferred, and the Soviet station has been used for this role. This has been recognized by "Guinness World Records" for Team N2i's expedition in 2006–2007.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: The oceanic pole of inaccessibility, also known as Point Nemo, is located at roughly and is the place in the ocean that is farthest from land. It represents the solution to the "longest swim" problem. This problem poses that there is one place in an ocean on earth where, if a person fell overboard while on a ship at sea, they would be at a point that is the longest distance to any land in any direction. It lies in the South Pacific Ocean, and is equally distant from the three closest land vertices which are each roughly away. Those vertices are Pandora, an islet that, along with others forms the Ducie Island Atoll, (part of the Pitcairn Islands) to the north; Motu Nui (part of the Easter Islands) to the northeast; and Maher Island (near the larger Siple Island, off the coast of Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica) to the south. The exact coordinates of Point Nemo depend on what the exact coordinates of these three islands are since the nature of the "longest swim" problem means that the ocean point is equally far from each.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: The area is so remote that—as with any location more than 400 kilometres (about 250 miles) from an inhabited area—sometimes the closest human beings are astronauts aboard the International Space Station when it passes overhead. Point Nemo was first discovered by survey engineer Hrvoje Lukatela in 1992. In 2022, Lukatela recalculated the coordinates of Point Nemo using Open Street Map data as well as Google Maps data in order to compare those results with the coordinates he first calculated using Digital Chart of the World data.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: The point and the areas around it have attracted literary and cultural attention. It is known as Point Nemo, a reference to Jules Verne's Captain Nemo from the novel "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea". This novel was a childhood favorite of Lukatela's so he named it after Captain Nemo.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: The general area plays a major role in the 1928 short story "The Call of Cthulhu" by H. P. Lovecraft, as holding the location of the fictional city of R'lyeh, although this story was written 66 years before the identification of Point Nemo. The area is nowadays known as a "spacecraft cemetery" because hundreds of decommissioned satellites, space stations, and other spacecraft have been made to fall there upon re-entering the atmosphere, to lessen the risk of hitting inhabited locations or maritime traffic. The International Space Station (ISS) is planned to crash into Point Nemo in 2031.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: Point Nemo is relatively lifeless; its location within the South Pacific Gyre blocks nutrients from reaching the area, and being so far from land it gets little nutrient run-off from coastal waters.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: To the west the region of the South Pacific Ocean is also the site of the geographic center of the water hemisphere, at near New Zealand's Bounty Islands. The geographic center of the Pacific Ocean lies further north-west where the Line Islands begin, west from Starbuck Island at .


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: The Eurasian pole of inaccessibility (EPIA) is located in northwestern China, near the Kazakhstan border. It is also the furthest possible point on land from the ocean, given that Eurasia (or even merely Asia alone) is the largest continent on Earth.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: Earlier calculations suggested that it is from the nearest coastline, located at , approximately north of the city of Ürümqi, in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China, in the Gurbantünggüt Desert. The nearest settlements to this location are Hoxtolgay Town at , about to the northwest, Xazgat Township () at , about to the west, and Suluk at , about to the east.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: However, the previous pole location disregards the Gulf of Ob as part of the oceans, and a 2007 study proposes two other locations as the ones farther from any ocean (within the uncertainty of coastline definition): EPIA1 and EPIA2 , located respectively at 2,510±10 km (1560±6 mi) and 2,514±7 km (1,562±4 mi) from the oceans. These points lie in a close triangle about the Dzungarian Gate, a significant historical gateway to migration between the East and West. EPIA2 is located near a settlement called "K̂as K̂îr Su" in a region named "K̂îzîlk̂um" (قىزىلقۇم) in the , Burultokay County.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: Elsewhere in Xinjiang, the location in the southwestern suburbs of Ürümqi (Ürümqi County) was designated by local geography experts as the "center point of Asia" in 1992, and a monument to this effect was erected there in the 1990s. The site is a local tourist attraction.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: Coincidentally, the continental and oceanic poles of inaccessibility have a similar radius; the Eurasian poles EPIA1 and EPIA2 are about closer to the ocean than the oceanic pole is to land.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: In Africa, the pole of inaccessibility is at , from the coast, near the town of Obo in the Central African Republic and close to the country's tripoint with South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: In North America, the continental pole of inaccessibility is on the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwest South Dakota about north of the town of Allen, from the nearest coastline at . The pole was marked in 2021 with a marker that represents the 7 Lakota Values and the four colors of the Lakota Medicine Wheel.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: In South America, the continental pole of inaccessibility is in Brazil at , near Arenápolis, Mato Grosso, from the nearest coastline. In 2017, the Turner Twins became the first adventurers to trek to the South American Pole of Inaccessibility.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: In Australia, the continental pole of inaccessibility is located either at or at , from the nearest coastline, approximately 161 km (100 miles) west-northwest of Alice Springs. The nearest town is Papunya, Northern Territory, about to the southwest of both locations.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: Poles are calculated with respect to a particular coastline dataset. Commonly used datasets are the Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Geography Database as well as OpenStreetMap planet dumps.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: Next, a distance function must be determined for calculating distances between coastlines and potential Poles. Some works tended to project data onto planes or perform spherical calculations; more recently, other works have used different algorithms and high-performance computing with ellipsoidal calculations.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: Finally, an optimization algorithm must be developed. Several works use an adaptive grid method. In this method, a grid of, e.g., 21×21 points is created. Each point's distance from the coastline is determined and the point farthest from the coast identified. The grid is then recentered on this point and shrunk by some factor. This process iterates until the grid becomes very small. Some authors claim this adaptive grid method is problematic as it is not guaranteed to find the farthest point from a coastline. A more recent method, B9-Hillclimbing, uses random-restart hill climbing, simulated annealing, and k-d trees to find the farthest points from coastlines. This Hillclimbing method has not demonstrated, however, how it is consistent with the foundational idea that a pole of inaccessibility must, by definition, have only three closest shoreline points.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: To date there has been no meta-study of the various works, and the algorithms and datasets they use, that compares their calculations of poles of inaccessibility to satellite determined calculations. Therefore no conclusion is possible at this time as to which methodology is more accurate in calculating a pole of inaccessibility.


title: Pole of inaccessibility

text: Poles of Inaccessibility, as determined by some authors, are listed in the table below. This list is incomplete and may not capture all works done to date.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Resident Evil: Retribution is a 2012 action horror film written and directed by Paul W. S. Anderson. A sequel to "" (2010), it is the fifth installment in the "Resident Evil" film series, loosely based on the video game franchise of the same name. It is also the third to be written and directed by Anderson after the first film and . The film focuses on Alice (Milla Jovovich) captured by the Umbrella Corporation, forcing her to make her escape from an underwater facility in the Extreme North, used for testing the T-virus.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Written and directed by Anderson, "Retribution" was planned to be filmed back to back with the sixth installment, but Anderson decided to focus on the fifth film. Filming took place in Toronto, Ontario from mid-October to December 23, 2011. The film has many returning actors and characters, along with new characters from the video games not featured in the previous films, including Leon S. Kennedy, Ada Wong, and Barry Burton.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: The film was released in 2D, 3D and IMAX 3D to a box-office success, grossing over $240 million worldwide, and received generally negative reviews from critics, who criticized the characters, plot and acting, while praising the 3D, visual effects and fight choreography. The DVD and Blu-ray for the film was released on December 21, 2012, in the U.S. A sixth film, "", was released in 2016.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Alice and the riders on the Umbrella Corporation freighter "Arcadia" are attacked by a fleet of tiltrotors led by Alice's brainwashed former ally, Jill Valentine. Alice is captured during the attack while the fates of Chris Redfield, Claire Redfield, and K-Mart are left ambiguous. An Alice clone awakens in the suburbs, living with her husband, Todd, and her deaf daughter, Becky. Zombies attack, revealing the suburbia as Raccoon City during the . Alice and Becky drive away from the undead with the help of Rain Ocampo; as they escape, they are hit by a truck, knocking Rain unconscious. Alice hides Becky inside another house but is killed by a zombified Todd. Meanwhile, the captured Alice awakens in an underground facility and is interrogated by Jill. During a power failure, Alice escapes her cell, rearms, and finds herself in a simulation of Shibuya Square, Tokyo. Fighting her way against zombies, she enters a control room filled with dead Umbrella employees and encounters Ada Wong, one of Albert Wesker's top agents.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Wesker appears on a screen, explaining that both no longer serve Umbrella, and the power outage was staged by him. Wesker also reveals that the Red Queen, one of Alice's arch-enemies, was reactivated after the Hive incident and now controls Umbrella. He continues that the facility is underwater, formerly a Soviet naval outpost in Kamchatka, Russia, designed by Umbrella for manufacturing clones and creating simulated outbreaks to show the effect of the T-virus. Ada and Alice aim to rendezvous with a rescue crew organized by Wesker, which includes Leon S. Kennedy, Barry Burton, and Luther West, Alice's . Leon's team plants explosives near the entrance of the facility, which will detonate in two hours to ensure its destruction. The group plans to meet with Alice and Ada in the Raccoon City suburbia area. In a New York City simulation, Alice and Ada defeat two Executioners; Leon's team enters a Moscow simulation but is surrounded by a heavily armed Las Plagas undead horde.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: In the suburban setting, Alice and Ada encounter Becky, who mistakes Alice for her clone mother, and is instantly attached to her. They also find Jill and the clones of Alice's deceased allies: James "One" Shade, "evil" Rain Ocampo, and Carlos Oliveira, who are sent to capture them. During a shootout, Ada gives Alice her smart glasses and grappling hook so that she and Becky can find their way out, before Ada is separated. The two encounter the "good" clone of Rain in the Moscow simulation. Alice gives her a weapon to help keep Becky safe. She then rescues Leon's surviving crew from the barrage of Las Plagas zombies and a giant Licker. Once united, the group reaches the submarine pens in the facility exit, but are ambushed by Jill's team. During the ensuing fight, Becky is captured by the Licker, and "good" Rain is killed. Alice rescues Becky and kills the Licker. Barry sacrifices himself holding the Umbrella operatives off long enough to ensure the others' escape. The explosives at the entrance go off: Leon and Luther escape rapid flooding, while Alice and Becky survive through the ventilation system.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: On the surface, their snowmobile is knocked over by Jill's submarine. Jill and "evil" Rain confront the group, holding Ada as a hostage. During the ensuing fight, Alice is able to tear the mind-controlling scarab off Jill's chest, returning her to normal. Meanwhile Rain—now enhanced with superhuman strength and healing, thanks to the Las Plagas parasite—joins the fight, kills Luther, and knocks out Leon. Realizing she is too powerful to fight, Alice shoots the ice under Rain, who is dragged underwater by swimming zombies from the undersea installation. Alice, Jill, and the remaining survivors travel to Wesker's headquarters, a heavily barricaded and fortified White House, staffed by the remainders of the U.S. Armed Forces. Alice meets Wesker in the Oval Office, where he injects her with another strand of the T-virus, returning her superhuman abilities. On the roof, he explains that the Red Queen is trying to wipe out humanity, and all of the remaining uninfected humans are in the base. The U.S. Military and remaining Umbrella Corp. soldiers start defending the White House against enormous hordes of T-virus abominations.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: After the release of "", director Paul W. S. Anderson was in discussion with Screen Gems of filming the 5th and 6th film back to back. But Anderson later decided to just focus on "Resident Evil: Retribution". Anderson returned as writer and director, Glen McPherson serves as director of photography, Kevin Phipps as production designer, and Nick Powell as both a fight choreographer and second-unit director.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: When Ada and Alice encounter each other the first time they recreate a scene from the game "Resident Evil 4" in their brief fight. Another element they featured was the Las Plagas parasite. Las Plagas plays a part in the film and allows the undead to "run around, ride motorbikes, and shoot machine guns." An action scene inspired by "Resident Evil 5" where the characters are driving a Hummer while being chased by zombies is featured, but for the film the Hummer was changed to a Rolls Royce Phantom. The metal bug on Jill Valentine's chest can be seen in "Resident Evil 5".


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Aside from the video games, writing for the film was heavily influenced by science-fiction films. "I think "Inception" had a huge impact on everyone," says Bolt, "and I think "Westworld" is an important film to Paul. Everybody knows, because he talks about it enough, the "Alien" series, "Blade Runner", all these things are inspirations."


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Makeup effects supervisor Paul Jones stated that he wanted the makeup on the zombies to look realistic. He took inspiration from "Day of the Dead".


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: The film's fight sequences were influenced by Asian cinema. "We watched a lot of Thai movies this time around because of the movies (Powell) has done," says Anderson. "He did "The Last Samurai" as well. He has worked with a lot of Japanese stuntmen and he has worked with a lot of Hong Kong stuntmen. But we felt the area that hadn't been mined by western cinema much was that whole kind of high impact Thai style of fighting. So we just watched a lot of action sequences from a lot of Thai movies. There were moves and just a general feel that we thought we could infuse the movie with. You know, that kind of bone crunch where you really feel the impact. We tried to bring that into the movie, which is also good for 3D because obviously 3D makes it harder to sell those kind of fake phony punches because you see the distance between the fist and the face. So that kind of Thai style of fighting where you actually make contact is a lot stronger."


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Returning from the previous film are: Milla Jovovich as Alice, Sienna Guillory (Jill Valentine) and Boris Kodjoe (Luther West). Shawn Roberts (Albert Wesker) makes a cameo appearance. Colin Salmon who played James "One" Shade and Michelle Rodriguez who played Rain Ocampo in the first film return. Oded Fehr who portrayed Carlos Oliveira in the and also returns. There are two "versions" of Rain and Carlos; one being portrayed as "evil" and one as "good".


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: The characters, Ada Wong (played by Li Bingbing), Leon S. Kennedy (Johann Urb) and Barry Burton (Kevin Durand) appear in the film. Ali Larter (Claire Redfield), Wentworth Miller (Chris Redfield) and Spencer Locke (K-Mart) do not return and they are presumed to have died in the attack on Arcadia or held captive elsewhere by Umbrella. Also, a new character portrayed by Aryana Engineer has been added to the franchise cast.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Principal photography started on October 10 and wrapped on December 23, 2011, for a 55-day shoot. Filming locations included Toronto at Cinespace's Kipling studio facility, Times Square in New York City, Tokyo, and Red Square in Moscow. "Resident Evil: Retribution" is the second film in the series to be shot in 3D, the first being "Resident Evil: Afterlife". It was also filmed in 4K resolution. The Red Epic camera system was used, which producer Jeremy Bolt said is 50% smaller than the Sony F35 that was used for "Resident Evil: Afterlife".


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: On October 11, a platform collapsed during the second day of filming and injured 16 people on the set. According to Toronto police, ten people were taken to the hospital for emergency treatment. Injuries included bruises and broken bones. Emergency workers had a difficult time determining which injuries were real since the people were dressed in zombie costumes with fake blood.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: The streets of Red Square were cleared for a day and background filming was done in the Russian subway after it was cleared for five hours (although the subway station scene is actually the Lower Bay abandoned station of Toronto subway). Most of the streets were built into sets. The car chase scene was filmed in late November in Moscow.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Durand and Roberts wrapped filming in the first week of December and Li wrapped on December 14. A fight scene between Jill and Alice that involved over 200 moves began filming December 14 until the end of production.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: The music group Tomandandy, who performed the "Afterlife" score, returned to score "Resident Evil: Retribution". Anderson explained that the score for the film is a progression of "Afterlife"s, stating that he "wants to kind of mesh their more electronic stuff with an orchestra this time. It still has that cool Tomandandy feel, but it has a more epic scope to it." The official soundtrack was released on September 11, 2012, under Milan Records, which included Tomandandy's score for the film, as well as the film's end credits song "Hexes" produced by Bassnectar featuring Chino Moreno (of the Deftones) on vocals.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Singer Mika Nakashima sings the theme song for the Japanese version of the film, "Ashita Sekai ga Owarunara."


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: The first teaser trailer of the film was attached to "", an installment from "Resident Evil"'s rival film series, and released in January 2012, featuring product placement promoting Sony products such as the Xperia phone, the PlayStation Vita and the Tablet S, underscored by narration from Patrick Stewart, before transitioning into a post-apocalyptic Washington, D.C., with Alice standing on the roof of the White House, in similar fashion to the promotion for previous installments, and .


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: A viral website, UmbrellaCorporation.net, supposedly informed about Umbrella, reported that it was on a recruitment tour all over the world searching for "great minds to help them advance". On several occasions, a video of Alice (Milla Jovovich) appeared, telling the viewer not to trust Umbrella. At the same time, an actual mobile tour for the film was launched, travelling to Cancún, Barcelona, Poznań, Warsaw and Rome. Furthermore, a black, tinted SUV with the Umbrella Corporation symbol and name on its doors and license plate was seen in Atlanta in June.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: A second trailer premiered online on June 14, following a live Q&A with Milla Jovovich in New York City and was attached to prints of "That's My Boy".


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, Oded Fehr, Boris Kodjoe, Mika Nakashima and Paul W. S. Anderson appeared at the 2012 San Diego Comic-Con Convention on Friday, July 13. A discussion for the film took place, and never-before-seen footage debuted.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: On August 10, 2012, a group of 27 people dressed as zombies "invaded" the Shibuya shopping district and handed out leaflets to promote the film. The group marched across the crossing in front of the Shibuya Station and then moved on to Shibuya's underground shopping area "Shibuchika" and to the "Shibuya Cine Palace".


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: "Resident Evil: Retribution" was released worldwide on September 14, 2012, in 3D, IMAX 3D, and 2D. The MPAA's official rating for the film is R for "sequences of strong violence throughout". It was not screened in advance for critics.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: The film's world premiere took place in Tokyo, Japan (where the film was retitled "Biohazard V: Retribution") on September 3. Originally, a promotional stunt was planned that involved Jovovich pretending to come out with a gun and shoot "zombies" in the theater. In response to the Aurora shootings, Jovovich declined the stunt, commenting that "There's absolutely no way I'm doing anything violent in a movie theater." Jovovich, Anderson, and Nakashima appeared at the premiere for a red carpet event.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Li Bingbing did not appear at the premiere, raising speculation from reporters that her absence was a demonstration against the escalating dispute between China and Japan over the Senkaku Islands. Li's agent Ji Xiang explained that Li had been informed of the premiere two months before but she was too busy in Beijing to attend at that time. However, Ji did not deny that politics were involved, saying: "We are in line with our government – the Diaoyu Islands belong to China. Bingbing will be attending movie premieres held in other places across the world and she skipped the Tokyo leg only."


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: The film was released on December 21, 2012, on DVD, Blu-ray and Ultraviolet Digital Copy. It was released in the United Kingdom on DVD, Blu-ray and Ultraviolet Digital Copy on January 28, 2013. Pre-order for was available in November 2012 on Amazon.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: "Resident Evil: Retribution" opened at #1 in 3,012 theaters, beating out the 3-D re-release of "Finding Nemo". During its opening weekend, the film grossed $21,052,227 domestically (an average of $6,989 for each theater), which makes the film the second lowest domestic opening weekend in the series, with the lowest being the original "Resident Evil" ($17.7 million), though it sold the least tickets. The audience in the opening weekend was 64% male, and 55% were 25 years of age or older. Regular 3D showings accounted for 48% of ticket sales, while IMAX 3D contributed 14% and other large format showings contributed 4%. In its second weekend, the film dropped to fifth place behind newcomers "End of Watch", Jennifer Lawrence's "House at the End of the Street", and "Trouble with the Curve" with $6.7 million on the domestic charts. With a 68% decline from its previous weekend, this makes the worst domestic drop so far for a "Resident Evil" film. Its third weekend grossed $2.9 million, making a lighter 55% decrease and putting it into the number eight spot.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: "Resident Evil: Retribution" broke the series record for the highest worldwide opening with $49.6 million, beating out "Afterlife"'s opening of over $39 million. In its opening weekend, the film was strongest in Asia, where it had the best 2012 Hollywood debut so far in Japan ($11.2 million), Taiwan ($4.4 million) and Malaysia ($2 million). Its premiere in South Korea ($2 million) was underwhelming, where it underperformed to the local film "Masquerade" ($7.3 million). It performed well in Russia ($8.5 million) and Brazil ($3.1 million), but was disappointing in Australia ($1.5 million). The film retained the number one spot in its second weekend, grossing $30.5 million for a new foreign total of $103.8 million. Its top market was once again Japan, where it eased 27% to $6.3 million. Its new debuts included Germany ($3.6 million) and Mexico ($3.5 million). In its third weekend, the film dropped to the number two spot behind "Looper", making $21.1 million. It had its premiere in France ($2 million), Italy ($1.4 million), and the United Kingdom ($1.3 million). The film broke $200 million in its fourth weekend, notably due to its opening in Spain ($1.4 million).


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Worldwide, the film grossed $240 million, after the movie opened in China on 17 March. Although this does not match its predecessor's gross of $300 million, it still ranks as the second highest grossing in the series, the highest grossing foreign film in Japan in 2012 (7th overall), and the highest grossing Canadian film of 2012, and second of all time (behind "Afterlife").


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of based on reviews from critics, with an average rating of . The site's critical consensus reads, ""Resident Evil: Retribution" offers everything one might reasonably expect from the fifth installment in a heavily action-dependent franchise – which means very little beyond stylishly hollow CGI-enhanced set pieces." On Metacritic, the film received a weighted average score of 39 out of 100 based on reviews from 17 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". CinemaScore polls reported that the average grade moviegoers gave the film was a "C+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: Jim Vejvoda at IGN gave the film a 6 out of 10, saying, "Even with all of its dopey dialogue, wooden characters and 'been there, done that' elements, "Resident Evil: Retribution" is pretty amazing as far as entries in this series go. It certainly feels more like a video game and has a bit more emotion to it than some of the past "Resident Evil" sequels, but if you don't like this series then there's not much here to make you suddenly warm up to it." Clark Collis from "Entertainment Weekly" also gave the film a mostly positive review, stating that "writer-director W.S. Anderson's overseeing of the "Resident Evil" zombie franchise has proven to be both lunatically haphazard and dementedly enthusiastic."


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: In an interview with film critic Willow Maclay, Scout Tafoya at "RogerEbert.com" said ""Retribution" posits a sort of femininity simulator as the kind of test of the body’s fitness for the wider world, which to me is one of the most fascinating things I’ve seen in a big action movie", while Maclay makes a comparison to Mamoru Oshii's anime movie "Angel's Egg" "as a film about a life giving creature who is drawn in these hollow worlds she traverses", adding:


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: When "Retribution" outgrossed "Afterlife" Sony distribution's head, Rory Bruer, confirmed that there would be a sixth film. In an interview with "Forbes", producer Samuel Hadida stated that a sixth and seventh installment were planned and a reboot of the series was possible.


title: Resident Evil: Retribution

text: On June 16, 2014, Anderson said he was in the process of writing the final film, tentatively titled "Resident Evil: The Final Chapter" and stated that no dates had been set for the start of production or its release in theaters. On September 18, 2015, filming in South Africa began, with Roberts reprising his role as Wesker and Iain Glen who portrayed Sam Isaacs in the second and third film, returning as Sam's twin brother, Dr. Alexander Isaacs. Joining the cast were Ruby Rose as Abigail, Eoin Macken as Doc, William Levy as Christian, Fraser James as Michael and Rola as Cobalt. The film was released on January 27, 2017.


title: George Thorogood

text: George Lawrence Thorogood (born February 24, 1950) is an American musician, singer and songwriter from Wilmington, Delaware. His "high-energy boogie-blues" sound became a staple of 1980s rock radio, with hits like his original songs "Bad to the Bone" and "I Drink Alone". He has also helped to popularize older songs by American icons, such as "Move It on Over", "Who Do You Love?", and "House Rent Blues/One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer".


title: George Thorogood

text: With his band, the Delaware Destroyers, Thorogood has released over 20 albums, two of which have been certified Platinum and six have been certified Gold. He has sold 15 million records worldwide. Thorogood and his band continue to tour extensively and in 2014 the band celebrated their 40th anniversary of performing.


title: George Thorogood

text: Thorogood began his career as a solo acoustic performer in the style of Robert Johnson and Elmore James after being inspired in 1970 by a John P. Hammond concert. In 1973, he formed a band, the Delaware Destroyers, with high school friend and drummer Jeff Simon. With additional players, the Delaware Destroyers developed its sound, a mixture of Chicago blues and rock and roll. The band's first shows were in the Rathskeller bar at the University of Delaware and at Deer Park Tavern, both in Newark, Delaware. Eventually, the band's name was shortened to the Destroyers. During this time, Thorogood supplemented his income by working as a roadie for Hound Dog Taylor.


title: George Thorogood

text: Thorogood's demo "Better Than the Rest" was recorded in 1974, but was not released until 1979. His major recording debut came with the album "George Thorogood and the Destroyers," which was released in 1977. In 1978, Thorogood released his next album with the Destroyers titled "Move It on Over", which included a remake of Hank Williams's "Move It on Over". He followed those recordings in 1979 with "Please Set a Date" and a reworking of the Bo Diddley song "Who Do You Love", both released in 1979. The band's early success contributed to the rise of folk label Rounder Records.


title: George Thorogood

text: During the late 1970s, Thorogood and his band were based in Boston. He was friends with Jimmy Thackery of the Washington, D.C.-based blues band, The Nighthawks. While touring in the 1970s, the Destroyers and the Nighthawks were playing shows in Georgetown at venues across the street from each other. The Destroyers were engaged at the Cellar Door and the Nighthawks at Desperados. At midnight, while both bands played Elmore James's "Madison Blues" in the same key, Thorogood and Thackery left their clubs, met in the middle of M Street, exchanged guitar patch cords and went on to play with the opposite band in the other club. The connection with the Nighthawks was extended further when Nighthawks bass player Jan Zukowski supported Thorogood's set with Bo Diddley and Albert Collins at the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia, PA, on July 13, 1985.