MyLife.com already does this. You need to opt out of their sham site without ever giving them a single dollar.

Thinks that this is more important than funding higher education.

That sort of Javascript code usually says: "Well we were too lazy / too cheap to hire proper Ajax developers."

That could be the result of the fact that we gave the keys to the pipes to the same people who create content to push through those pipes. It's not difficult for them to decide that Netflix's traffic is a conflict of interest, and can be easily choked off.

Tell that to the higher-up execs who all seem to want the newest, shiniest iToy because they have the money to buy it, and then complain to IT people like me when it doesn't work.

Company CFO: "But I just got this brand new I Pad Thing and I wanted to use it here in the office because its so convenient and its much better than my desktop you geeks in IT gave me, look they have this er...'Application Store' thing I just buy software from, no more getting you guys to install crap."

Me: "Sir our network does not support iPads, we have a BES server though if you wanted to use your Blackberry or Playbook..."

CFO: "I DON'T CARE MAKE THIS WORK OKAY THANKS BYE"

Although I would call it more "extortion" than a "business opportunity"

Basically, Comcast said to Netflix, "We're gonna shake you down to allow you to put cache servers in our datacenters. If you don't like it, then we're just gonna throttle and DPI the shit out of you."

Sounds like Microsoft development in a nutshell.

Tell all of this to the guy who had his door kicked down and assault rifles put to his head after a wardriver used his open access point for distributing child porn.

Seems like it is becoming the next big buzzword for MBAs to throw around. "Yeah Bill, our new data and commerce center is leveraging the open source capabilities of the cloud to make sure our crowd sourced ROI brings back the best managed results we can get with today's scalability and reliability of "Echs Eight Six" platform development systems...at least that's what this whitepaper in front of me says."

They most certainly do.

I went to a Catholic elementary school in the mid 90s. Myself and a couple of friends had to serve several weeks of after school detention for playing Magic: The Gathering during lunchtime. An eight year old third grader was suspended for a day for having pokemon cards.

Just some food for thought: When was the last time you saw the drug cartels trying to make huge illicit profits off of beer? How about tobacco cigarettes?

Isn't this EXACTLY what we said would happen?

Firstly, the US is a republic, so what's the issue? Secondly, why the fuck is this in YRO, as this decision affects us online in absolutely no way whatsoever? Doesn't Slashdot have a politics tag?

Clever marketing that appeals to yuppies.

"Don't be left behind with slow stupid x86 Microsoft Office, upgrade to the new better more powerful Microsoft ARM Office today. It's newer so you know its better, and come on it has the word "Arm" in it, which means powerful, duh!"

See, but on your local hard disk, data loss happens because the disk fails.

In cloud storage, data loss happens because a disk fails, a disgruntled admin blows something up, the service gets blown up to make way for SUPER AWESOME CLOUD THING 2.0, the parent company goes under, the parent company decides it no longer wants to support hosting your data, or the parent company just plain doesn't like you because you broke rule number 3 section 4.5 subsection 361 of their Terms of Service valid for March 2, 2011.

Yeah, "much less likely."