But aren't most retailers going to be upgrading in the near term anyway?

Yes, and Samsung obviously knows that. They probably have patents that can be used either offensively or defensively vs. Apple. Given the transition, now is the time for both companies to get their best deal.

Now there MAY be a FEW services where privatizing them are an issue. But we can discuss those on a case-by-case basis. For the bulk of them, why should the government even be involved?

There's an easy way to draw this line - economists speak of "public goods" - which has a special meaning in economics that's not what a layman might guess it would be, and that is goods that markets can never provide because the economics of producing them is incompatible with markets.

The trick, usually, is that most arguments for most things as "public goods" are missing essential insights or intellectual rigor.

But at least there's a framework for working at the problem.

Ponzi schemes. Investment scams. All the classic shit that's been around since the concept of currency itself was created.

So, it has nothing to do with Bitcoin then. Glad that you've proven that.

Oh, and Bernie Madoff. SEC. That is all.

I'm not sure what the argument will be

Same as for the current fiat currency - "we need to be able to print an unlimited amount of digital currency, but if anybody else does so it's counterfeiting, and your labor* is the collateral for paying back debts against creditors while we give away value to our politically connected friends. Because otherwise terrorists and child pornographers and Muslims."

A primary feature of the currently popular digital currencies is that the politicians can't manipulate it, and so the politicians will never propose one with those features - for the US, holding the world reserve currency is the source of a majority of its power vs. other nations, and it's how political favors are handed out at home (e.g. bankrupting the savings and loan system to benefit the 401(k) regime, driving money out of community savings and investment (stifling bank loans to new businesses, etc.) to benefit Wall Street and the big-box multinational political donors). The money gradient between concentrated and diffuse interests is what powers DC, and currency manipulation is what enables it.

* your labor, your children's labor, your grandchildren's labor, etc.

Elon doesn't have the goods. Get John Podesta drunk at a bar to find out.

He's realized that Apple's legal actions ultimately harm the tech environment of the school, putting the students' future competitiveness potentially at risk. Continuing to fund such activities betrays the students' educational interests.

What I have experienced is that SPDY (and therefor also HTTP/2) will only offer more speed if you are Google or are like Google.

This is so worn out it's even in the FAQ.

Multiplexing doesn't offer that much speed increase as some people would like you to believe.

It's good for every high-latency connection, like all the small sites have. I run a server on a VM on a generic Xeon box behind a DSL line, four hops from a backbone, for security and privacy reasons. It'll be great for my use case - I can't really compete with the big guys for responsiveness the way it is now.

Often, the content of a website is located on multiple systems (pictures, advertisements, etc), which still requires that the browser uses more than one connection, even with HTTP/2.

So, every one of those requests will be faster.

Also, HTTP/1 already allows a browser to send multiple requests without waiting for the response of the previous request. This is called request pipelining

Pipelining and multiplexing are different.

So, to me HTTP/2 adds a lot of complexity with almost no benefits in return.

So, don't add HTTP/2 support to your server - if nobody leaves then nobody wanted it. HTTP/1.1 will be supported for the next two decades.

Then why do we have HTTP/2? Well, because it's good for Google. They have all the content for their websites on their own servers.

Install Status4Evar - you'll see Google sites constantly jumping across all their domains, stalling on many of them.

Because IETF failed to come up with a HTTP/2 proposal, a commercial company (Google in this case) used that to take control. HTTP/2 is in fact a protocol by Google, for Google.

That just happens to help everybody else. Your critique of IETF's failure of leadership is quite valid, though. People have been hacking around HTTP/1.1's problems for the past 17 years and if Google hadn't done SPDY, we'd still be in that situation.

In my experience, you are far better off with smart caching. With that, you will be able to get far better speed-increase results than HTTP/2 will ever offer.

Agreed wholeheartedly! Nobody is arguing for not optimizing each layer of the stack. Proper caching can yield whole-number multipliers for responsiveness, not just mere percentages like HTTP/2!

In the last 20 years, a lot has changed. HTTP/1 worked fine for those years.

Read up on so many of the tricks browsers and servers (especially CDN ops) do to make HTTP/1.1 usable. These hacks are what inspired some of the SPDY changes, by people knee-deep in those hacks.

But for where the internet is headed, we need something new. Something completely new and not a HTTP/1 patch.

That would be great too. Do you have a proposal? Incremental approaches are usually easier to find acceptance for because they're more clearly understood and carry less risk of unexpected consequences.

I got a minerals "kit" in the early 80's an there's a little piece of uranium in there. Oh, no, small enough to eat - somehow we never thought about eating the rocks in the science kit - must've been all those helium nuclei crowding out our oxygen.

The Prisoners' Dilemma is a two-person example of a market failure - a term from economics which basically means that one actor can benefit from doing a thing that is bad for the group. Friedman's go-to example is people burning coal to heat their homes in 18th century London. Each homeowner _correctly_ calculated that coal was their personal best option, but it wasn't the best option for everybody, in aggregate. People who block intersections to avoid waiting for the next green are a more modern example - they save a little bit of time and make everything worse for everybody else.

The follow-up insight is that in natural systems, when rules result in a market failure, the rules slowly wind up changing to eliminate that scenario because those scenarios aren't good for the group (which is needed for reproduction/continuance) and (in the case of evolution) are selected against or (in the case of economics) are driven out of the economy.

Iterative plays resulting in extortion aren't going to be good for the group either and would tend to be eliminated. To be fair, we suffer broadly from the impact of psychopaths and they're only 5% of our population, so even if trends are good, local mischief isn't out of the question.

Spite often benefits the group over time - the individual sacrifices a little bit to increase the group benefit (which should be returned to him in aggregate as a non-zero-sum game). It can also benefit the individual by trading one thing of value for another in order to alter an adversary's value equation (like the legendary nuns who cut off their noses to avoid being raped by the marauders). Sometimes the costs are quite high but it's always a lesser-value for greater-value trade (as far as the individual values those things).

You see what happened by allowing competition? They got two competing gigabit services. Uh, oh - unintended consequences.

Most good governments maintain and regulate the monopoly and reassure us that nobody needs or wants gigabit. Gigabit is too much for people - they could get hurt with that much data. Only people who are doing bad things need that much data.

And now one of them offers a bad deal. This will just create customer confusion - who can be expected to understand that spying on you is a bad thing? No typical consumer will be able to rationally weigh the pros and cons.

Hopefully the State steps in, returns Kansas City to a safe monopoly, and gets those reckless data rates back under control while imposing net neutrality rules to forbid unsafe traffic management practices (like the risky so-called 'settlement-free peering' scheme) and hopefully sets some allowable content rules.

Market forces are dangerous, and this just shows that, once again.

How are they planning on delivering that? Through injecting ads in your traffic, email spam or letterbox spam? They don't have an ad network like Google.

Easy - run the AdBlock filter set against a proxy (e.g. squid filter) and replace the web site's ads with their own.

I mean, that would be less scummy than what they're advertising.

...that it didn't melt down. We get it, MD, you don't like nuclear power.

He probably lives in the Northeast where everybody is doing what they can to bring on some global warming.

Failing to find what the theories predict is still an advancement in knowledge.

Failing to find what a theory predicts largely excludes it (assuming the experiment isn't faulty), and is a good result and useful science. Whether or not science reporters can grok that is a job for the PR department (LHC has a good one - c.f. Particle Fever).

The Supersymmetry folks did not expect to find a Higgs boson at 127GeV. ATLAS did find what looks like a Higgs boson at 127GeV.

If there were a guarantee that this particle is the Higgs, then there wouldn't be a need to continue upwards to test Supersymmetry. But it's not guaranteed - so not finding supersymmetric pairs at the higher energies will firmly rule out the Supersymmetry model (reassigning physicists to other models) and increase the confidence that the discovered particle is the Higgs.

Treat it like geometry. Everybody needs a semester of it, for exposure to an essential concept in logic/applied math, but anything beyond that should be elective. There's nobody who can't do basic programming who can pass geometry, but not everybody is cut out for it as a career nor enjoys it.

I wound up taking an extra year of trig in high school, but the most I've ever used it for is roof framing (actually the most approachable book on the subject I've encountered on trig is Roof Framing by Marshall Gross). But I took two years of Computers (mandatory for the nerd center I enrolled in) and use it every day. You never know what you'll pursue but it's certainly not going to be something you've never been exposed to.

If somebody winds up in accounting or some other ancillary field, they'll need the basics but not much more than that. Same goes for C&C programming, etc. - you don't need to go for a CS field to need some basic programming knowledge. But if you're going into cosmetology or horseshoeing you probably don't need any of it - fighting division-of-labor is a very poor economic premise.