For anyone who actually wants to know as much as possible about the situation before they defend their position to the death Dr. Peering has a somewhat unbiased writeup about the arguments from both sides of the Netflix/Comcast debate.

My take is that the overselling of all-you-can-eat broadband will need to come to an end as Comcast (any ISP that employs the practice) simply cannot sustain an uncongested and reliable network as long as they rely on it. An unpopular idea but one that needs to be considered.

What's funny is this is an old blonde joke and it got modded interesting.

Why don't you read what someone at Level 3 has to say about the issue?

"Level 3 has 51 peers that are interconnected in 45 cities through over 1,360 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports"
"The average utilization across all those interconnected ports is 36 percent."
"A port that is on average utilised at 90 percent will be saturated, dropping packets, for several hours a day. We have congested ports saturated to those levels with 12 of our 51 peers. Six of those 12 have a single congested port, and we are both (Level 3 and our peer) in the process of making upgrades – this is business as usual and happens occasionally as traffic swings around the Internet as customers change providers."
"the remaining six peers with congestion on almost all of the interconnect ports between us. Congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity. They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfil the requests their customers make for content."
"Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in Europe."

Five major US ISP's all deliberately refusing to upgrade their interconnect. How many "major" ISP's do you know of in the US?

I recently saw a distraught young blonde lady weeping beside her car. "Do you need some help?" I asked.

She replied, "I knew I should have replaced the battery in this remote door unlocker. Now I can't get into my car. Do you think they (pointing to a distant convenience store) would have a battery for this?"

"Hmmm, I dunno. Do you have an alarm, too?" I asked.

"No, just this remote 'thingy,'" she answered, handing it and the car keys to me.

As I took the key and manually unlocked the door, I replied, "Why don't you drive over there and check about the batteries...it's a long walk."

They are footing the bill for the CDN themselves. What part of "it saves the ISP money to host the CDN" does not register? If other CDN services are paying then perhaps they are getting hoodwinked by the ISP's as well. I know AT&T (not the current rebranded SWB) tried to play this game in the 90's and got their hand slapped and a regulation forcing them to allow smaller ISP's access to their data farm.

Netflix has its own CDN! They are a large enough streaming provider it made sense to create their own CDN and they even made it open for other services. They're already peering on Google fiber and a host of non-US ISP's. It's only the big US ISP's that are refusing to play ball and insist Netflix pay extra for a service that would actually save them money in peering fees. Their only reason for doing this is to make their competing streaming offering more desirable.

ISP's have offered co-location to corporations for years. It's just now that a corporation (Netflix) is competing with another service the ISP in question sells they tell them no and jack up the price of entry. DRM would be on Netflix's server inside of the ISP's data farm just as secure as if it was in their own.

Electricity is one form of energy used to power desalinization but certainly not the only form. But you are correct in that the use of electricity to desalinate is not very efficient. A focused solar lens array much like the ones used in solar electric production would be more efficient AND the resulting steam could actually be used to produce electricity as a byproduct. Not enough to be considered an electric generation facility but something is better than nothing.

You took my ball!
No we didn't.
Yes you did!
No we didn't.
MOM!!!

The Mazda RX8 got up to 23 MPG.

As soon as this compile of Gentoo I started in 2010 finishes I'll tell you whether I have 'fond' memories of the experience.

You're telling me. I nearly failed the first semester of my C++ course in college because I couldn't stop using GoTo!

Not to be a Tamarian grammer nazi but it's "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"

You scratch our back (send your lobbyist to fight for the merger) and we'll scratch yours (sell you areas you don't currently server.)

That was for an AC band WiFi? The AC1750 is listed at Newegg for $95 right now