Yes, it does matter.

I cannot speak to Canadian regulations, but down in the US it would be very hard for one wireless carrier to "wipe out the competition", since the FCC auctions for wireless bandwidth were specifically set up so that there were two winners for each service area. It was a design goal that there be competition.

...

Cell phone service is hardly a monopoly in any sense of the word, neither is streaming video service. What it actually was was a company saying "I can provide this to you cheaper because of vertical integration". Vertical integration is how many companies cut costs, and it doesn't create a monopoly.

When you can get fiber-grade bandwidth and comparable monthly data volumes from wireless at a competitive price let me know. Otherwise, this is a red-herring because you're comparing apples (wireless) with oranges (wired broadband).

Sure the provider video services don't add to peering costs, but the video customers still use a large portion of the bandwidth on the provider's shared infrastructure, from the last mile to the provider's data centre. Those costs (capital financing for equipment and fiber deployment, operations, maintenance) are being disproportionately paid for by the other customers who don't get a sweetheart deal on bandwidth, and that will be the same in the USA as well.

Oh nonsense.

to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

Back here in the real world, this is how this sounds:

"Ben decided that someone was making changes to the codebase that had no technical purpose, which served solely to push someone's weird social agenda and desperation to modify the language to suit them, as well as to refer to anything which went otherwise as sexist. Since this is pointless, and since Ben has been in communities where this created unnecessary shitstorms, Ben rejected the PR in the hope of preventing a bunch of drama-driven developers from wasting a year complaining about unimportant things. When Isaac decided to merge the PR, Ben felt slighted: he had been given the authority to make these decisions, and Isaac decided to make a social point that Ben would get trampled no matter what."

That's all fine and good. One developer is being a neckbeard about not wanting to hear a cry of oppression in something that has nothing to do with social justice. The other developer is being a neckbeard about being all inclusive no matter the tone.

Then you get to the point that adults are angry about.

and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

That says "we value Ben so little that our disagreement over the nature of an unimportant, purely social justice related, non-technical PR would have caused us to fire him on the spot, instead of to have a discussion."

That's *ridiculous*. Employers have an obligation to their employees to create safety and stability. There is no legitimate cause on God's green earth for that to be a fireable offense. Joyent's management are PR-oriented children, and that you're standing up for them is an embarrassment to the 'movement' you're trying to rationalize.

I am a gay and trans ally.

But nobody should get anything sterner over something like that than a stern talking to. That's *obscene*.

Target and K-Mart understand consumers far better than you ever will. Target's the company that knows people are pregnant before they do themselves.

Despite that you disagree with this, your extremely superficial read is probably self serving.

It is very likely that protestor revenue loss simply outweighs game loss after the high sales launch. I expect that they know exactly what they're doing.

The worst thing I can think of in The Bible is the Great Flood.

If you think that's ten times worse than anything that happens in video games, I think you might need to play some more video games. That doesn't even cover Final Fantasy materia.

Sephiroth will straight up destroy Saturn like five separate times per fight while trying to kill you.

I agree, pretending that a company choosing to not sell an item in its stores is a form of censorship is likely to get you karma on Slashdot, despite being critically incorrect.

Hopefully nobody notices that they still sell Lifetime specials and so forth in their TV section.

Maybe Romper Stomper and Mad Max got through on local cultural relevance.

Yeah same here. The only bad thing I saw were the MRAPs which have already been in the local news. I can't imagine that there are enough situations where such a vehicle would be needed to justify the high maintenance costs. They are mostly used for show, as projections of power.

Other than that, it's a bunch of useful items. The larger police departments got explosive ordinance disposal robots, scopes, utility trucks, helicopter. The forest service got a bunch of night vision supplies. The department of corrections got a big ol power distributor. One of the more rural tribal departments got a road grader, some generators, welders, and even a field kitchen.

Good to see that tax payer funded equipment going to good use.

Voyager 2 made a pass at Uranus in early 1986. That's where we have most of our pictures of Uranus from.

He doesn't provide any evidence at all, just presents the current situation as some kind of natural state, which I doubt because I don't experience it as natural, but as a result of generations of propaganda. You might not notice this particular propaganda, because you grew up within without it ever being called so, but I do. I see U.S. movies, and I see movies produced in Europe, and sometimes I see movies produced in Asia. Only the U.S. movies have this strong accent on girls being princesses, on boys being rock musicians, and only in U.S. movies you will find the father "talking the talk" to his son about those mysterious women, and the mother warning the daughter about the boys only wanting sex. Only in U.S. movies I see those strong and unquestioned clichés how to be a man and how to be a woman. To me, they are a typical part of the U.S. culture. There is no evidence whatsoever that the dichotomy between boys and girls in topics to pursuit as a student is in some way a natural one, which cannot and will never be changed. I've seen the topics to pursuit change when the cultural environment changed. And this is more than "anecdotical" evidence, as it affects hundred of thousands of students. We actually had an experiment, and the experiment showed that within a few years, between 1989 and 1994, the ratio of males to females changed completely from a 50/50 ratio to a 50/1 ratio.

Even if you call the situation before a non-natural one, there is not a single reason to consider the situation afterwards in any way more natural.

I've grown up in an environment with not so much focus on "girlish" and "boyish" toys, and -- ta da! -- we didn't have this extreme separation of genders. Still today, when I see especially U.S. TV series aimed at children and adolescents, I often have an urge to switch off the TV because the settings seem to be so completely off reality and so loaden with cliché. There are some dogmata deeply ingrained in the plots, which are never questioned, and which play their own role as if they were real objects. Adolescent girls dream of marriage and boys want sex. It's a recurring theme everywhere in U.S. TV and so totally off anything I experienced myself. But I've yet to see the plot where this dogma is actually challenged. Maths and computers are a boy thing. In East Germany, computer science was a topic which had about 50/50 students. After 1989, the female student numbers fell dramatically. But at the mid level of the universities, all those women which started their academical career before 1989, still were present.

So contrary to you, I strongly believe based on the evidence around me, that the U.S. way of predetermining the roles of girls and boys in life in the U.S. culture and especially in toys and stories aimed at children plays a very important role in the roles they actually play in their later life. And it could be different, but in the current environment, where the actual buyers of those toys and story books are already predetermined by their own childhood, there is no business case in challenging the settings. Getting girls interested in being princesses works because the parents (and other grown up relatives) of the girls have the final say what they want their daughters to be interested in, and when they will agree that their daughter is so cute.

I've seen my own daughter playing with toy cars and toy trains as a very little child, because that were the toys her older brother played with. But then a family with two girls of her age moved into the neighborhood, and they had all the pink toys and castles and white play horses, and my daughter played with them and gradually wanted their own princess dolls and horses (she even started a collection of them), but this was several years ago, and now my daughter is in junior highschool. She chosed Robotics as her voluntary topic, she saved money to buy herself a PS4, and she's playing Second Son all the time - turning into a computer nerd like her father and much more than her older brother.

No, I expected the telecom company to simply start treating the data fairly. And several of the mobile companies did just that.

I bet the people who used to have unlimited streaming of telecom-provided feeds are just all warm and fuzzy that they now have a cap.

Well, since the traditional behaviour of telecoms is that, once they've eliminated the competition, they raise their prices and rent-seek, if the telecoms had been allowed to wipe out the competition then those "unlimited" plans would have suddenly become a lot more expensive. And that is a very real risk because content is licensed per country, so that as, let's say, Netflix's user base dwindled, it would lose economies of scale in licensing content to its Canadian customer base and have a harder time providing a competitive catalog. The Canadian Netflix already has a significantly smaller selection than the US service because the Canadian audience is smaller, limiting its licence purchasing power.

To also address your point about the users of the unlimited service being sad, their unlimited service was effectively a (substantial) discount, subsidised by every other user of the same common infrastructure. That was in effect very much a parallel to abusing monopoly power in market to obtain monopoly power in another, although the monopoly power actually was monopoly in one segment (cable vs. ADSL) of the consumer data services market.

It provides an incentive to the mobile companies to raise their caps.

So your answer should have been "Yes, I expect the companies to lift their caps." What good is incentive to do so if you don't expect them to do so in return? And how does this help the former unlimited-data user who was consuming only telecom streams -- he's still wound up with a cap, and he's now going to have to worry about paying extra.

Yep, he's lost the (ephermeral) benefits that he was obtaining at the expense of every other user of the common infrastructure, and which he would have paid for in higher subscription fees as soon as the telco was satisfied their service was sufficently dominant to present high barriers to entry for any potential competitors. Because they've proved over and over again that that is exactly the kind of market they like - one where they can command margins that you wouldn't get in a competitive market.

It may have no impact, but at least all services are on an equal playing field.

Why shouldn't services that cost less to provide cost less to the consumer, even if it's just a little bit less? All services are not equal cost.

Because the service cost difference in entertainment media is negligible. What the telcos were doing was subsidising the bandwidth cost of their media content users and spreading the cost to all their other users, who often didn't have alternative ISP choices.

Would you care to enlighten us with an example of a popular real-world language that has not had problems with backwards compatiblity?

Spoke with a friend in NJ, and apparently they used to get on the order of $700 an SREC! Highest I've ever seen was $180? something like that. And as part of the estimate for ROI when I had my 7.2kw array installed, they modeled SRECs as falling off completely in the next year or so (*I'd have to dig that document out... and that sounds like effort).

Well based on the current interface, it will differentiate itself by making articles a series of disconnected statements, with no editing for flow at all. This makes it easier to link back to the original source of each statement, but kills any sort of readability like the worst of the inverse pyramid writing style rising again after its near death.