The actual issue is that Verizon was peering with the Neflix ISP (Cogent) with a 2Gbps link for ALL of their customers. The NOC where that link was located had plenty of capacity on the cogent side, but Verizon was refusing to upgrade it. Netflix even offered to buy them the router (we're talking only like $25K here) so that they could upgrade to a 10Gbps link, but Verizon flatly refused unless they were paid money. There was no internal congestion at all on Verizon's network that justified this. I'd say the issue was pretty clearly on Verizon's side there.

Having the government enforce neutrality is actually a very good thing. You read slashdot, so you must be at least a little bit technically inclined, so let me explain what prompted this. Net neutrality has been the default state of the internet since its beginning. How it works :

  - Someone runs a service on a computer and needs it accessible to the internet. This range from big (search engine, email) to tiny and personal (minecraft server, voice chat like teamspeak). They pay an ISP to connect their servers to the internet.
  - End users want access to the internet. They pay an ISP to connect their home to the internet.

ISPs would charge each according to their needs (link speed, usage, etc) Obviously, there's more than one ISP, so they connect to each others through high-capacity links. This is called peering.

At first, anybody could be an ISP because it used a phone line. You'd dial a number, connect to your ISP and then gain access to the internet. Competition during those days was fierce and customers were fought over. Then, higher speed were needed. Sending data through an encoded voice channel was not sufficient anymore, so cable and telephone companies started using the copper lines directly. This practically killed competition because, unlike with phone lines, ISPs didn't have to give access to their infrastructure to competitors. Obviously, you can't allow 30 different companies to dig under the streets and wire different cables to every house, so what you do is you allow only one or two, but you regulate it. This is called a natural monopoly.

Now, these companies are huge and they essentially have a captive customer base. Some customers may have a choice between two providers (mostly phone or cable), but that means that two companies will control any local market. What this means is that they can both raise prices, and as long as they charge mostly equivalent prices, they make much more profit than if they competed to bring price down. This is called an oligarchy.

These companies finally realized that they had even more power than they first thought. They said "Hey, we've got 30% of the whole country as customers on our own network, why not exploit this as a money source by cutting off access to them unless we get paid?". So now, service companies like Google, in addition to paying for their own internet access, have to pay the individual ISPs for access to their customers. These customers don't have any choice in the matter, because of our natural monopoly. Genius! That's what Comcast and Verizon tried to do companies like Netflix and Google (youtube).

This isn't how the internet is supposed to work and it's obvious that the telcos aren't adding any value by doing this. They are only abusing their monopolies as middle-men to extort money for services already paid for. This what what prompted this whole legislation.

It baffles me how little people seem to be aware of the issue. Every single person who knows how the internet works thinks this law was needed and the only dissenting views are simply preying on ignorance.

I have a SHIELD tablet I bought at release, and I use both the PC to tablet Gamestream and the online GRID streaming (nVidia sure like their caps).

Both work surprisingly well. I'll sometimes play XCOM on my tablet at work during lunch break and at first co-workers were asking how I got that to run on Android. My upload at home is only 10Mbps, but it's apparently more than enough for decent quality at 720p so I can play any Steam game at work.

For GRID, I've tested a few games, but the only game I played through the end was Darksiders 2. I was surprised that you can't really feel the lag, even for action titles. My main gripe with the service is the game selection. I'm a strategy / rpg junkie, but the only quality game that I really wanted to play on GRID is Witcher 2. However, I've already completed it 3 times on PC so it's not like I wanted to play it again. I've tested it though, and it works well.

All in all, I think the technology and infrastructure is getting ready for game streaming. I suspect that nVidia has a potential hit on their hands.

I must be the only one who liked Starship Troopers. I think I liked the movie more than the book. The movie was deliberately campy and I thought it made a few good social comments on propaganda and war. The book was much more serious, but I thought the whole political structure was highly implausible. I found the concept of forcing politicians to serve a few years in the military was interesting, however.

I'm really nitpicking here, but it really bugged me for some reason. That's not how static ip works. If your router is the one assigning an ip address to your TV, you're using DHCP no matter what. A static ip would be entered on the TV itself from the remote.

However, it's not like gethostbyname() is a rare call. I suspect that well over 99% of net-aware applications are still using it. This affects just about everything that's talking over the internet.

This "mandated" engine noise concept is so infuriating to me. We finally have the technology to remove both the air and noise pollution at the same time, but you want to add noise to an otherwise silent engine just because people aren't used to silent cars? People will just have to adapt to the fact that you can't trust your hearing to know if a car is coming or not anymore.

This reminds me of that ridiculous law that there had to be a person walking ahead of a car because unlike horses, cars can't react if something's in the way.

Also, it will make people accustomed to the pop-up by giving so many false positives. So much that, when it actually matters and they are sending information, they'll just ignore it because it comes up 10 times per day anyway.

The nVidia Shield has a SD slot, and rumor has it that it's the fastest selling Android tablet on the market (basically nVidia cannot keep up with the demand and every single tablet is sold before leaving the production chain).

At $300, it's also the best performing tablet on the market and, according to the Anandtech benchmark reviews I've seen, it even surpasses the unreleased Nexus 9 in tests. Let's hope this comes as a wake-up call to to the other players in the tablet market.

Disclaimer : I don't work for nVidia, I'm just an extremely satisfied Shield tablet owner.

Can someone explain to me why the images have such bad quality and resolution? Satellite images of the earth are good enough to spot someone sunbathing on a roof. I would think that the price of top-notch optics and sensors would pale compared to the cost of just making the trip to the moon, so why aren't the pictures as good quality as what we get from the earth-orbiting satellites?

There is a big difference in cooling a battery VS cooling an engine though. The heat generated by the battery cells has to spread somehow to the outer edges of the battery for it to be dissipated by a cooling system. In cars, the energy density of the battery is hugely important, so you can't just lace the cell areas with good heat conductors without making the battery less efficient. This means a trade-off between how fast you can charge the battery (heat build-up) and how much power the battery can hold.

Just wanted to say, King's Bounty : Dark Side is available from Steam. It's early access, but many people have played it from start to finish several times and it's mostly bug-free (at least any serious bug) at the moment. It's due to release next month if you'd rather not play the early access version.

I've played it for a few hours and I can say, it's already much better than Warriors of the North. It's reminding me a lot of Crossworlds, which is a good thing.

Net neutrality is about source of data, not about the type of data. It still allows for QoS for voice and other real-time data uses. All it says is that traffic must be treated exactly the same depending on the source/origin. So you aren't allowed for example, to slow netflix down but let hulu go through at full speed, etc.

One should not minimize the value of knowledge either. I'm a lot more scared of ignorant smart people than of ignorant idiots. You could argue the point that trivia isn't knowledge, but even then, some basic knowledge of culture, cinema, politics and sports make for better rounded people. Most of the cultural questions have to do with influential people and it's still worth knowing about them, if only to know how they influenced trends or some such.

Indeed. All three of them too!