If it can handle media-heavy social websites, then I think this would be a winner for my wife and others like her.

Open platform. They don't dictate how the phones get software. I'm sure they would prefer to let the market decide that bloatware is bad.

This. From the beginning, Google expressed its intention to spread around the Nexus partners so that several companies would get the experience and sales boost. They want a healthy, open platform with lots of innovation. This is how you beat Apple.

Of course this isn't true. They will still enjoy the same protections from the armed forces of the U.K. and other allies.

Accidents happen, dude. Who among us has not dropped our phone while trying to turn off the alarm in the morning? And if you want to ever sell it, you need the case to absorb normal wear-and-tear.

Can't Google just remove the links rather than pay? Wouldn't that hand them an near instant win over this law?

Websites by themselves aren't "illegal". Using those terms gives undue legitimacy to copyright maximalists. What is meant here by "illegal" is that they host content which may be infringing on copyright.

I can't see the video but in the summary he mentions using two old servers to do the job of one new server. I appreciate the recycling, but it sounds like he is talking processing or I/O equivalence, and usually it is power that is the dominating factor in data center effectiveness. Are two servers really cheaper than one when you factor in electricity, cooling, and rack space?

I posit that there really is a lot of overlap. I'd be willing to bet that the 80/20 rule applies at the border routers, with 80% of viewers accessing the same 20% of the content. Imagine the days/weeks when a new season of Orange Is The New Black is released, for example.

Yeah. Wouldn't be awesome of Netflix enabled a P2P client on the Verizon network? They should do it. The technology exists. It would be glorious.

You're just wrong. In fact, we now have proof (Snowden revelations) that things carried on at the NSA pretty much exactly like he said it would. I think you also underestimate how much compression can be applied to telephone conversations. They are, after all, mostly "dead air". In addition, speech is very predictable. The phone companies take advantage of this to fit many conversations over lines of surprisingly modest bandwidth. Since the NSA is directly connected at the backbone (their secret ATT closets are well documented), they don't even have to do the compression themselves. They can just log the packets.

I saw Mr. Binney speak at the HOPE conference in 2012. I remember a conversation with my parents where I relayed what I learned from him to them, and they thought I was buying into some conspiracy. When Snowden broke into the news, they asked me how I had known so far ahead of time.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion about Binney's whistle-blowing in the wake of the Snowden revelations. He has been sounding the alarm for many years now.

But I'm a white male. I have nothing Google wants. :(

On *nix I most use Vim. If I'm not using Python, I'm using C.

I contributed to the first round that raised $1 million, and I contributed to the ongoing second round that is trying (with less success) to raise $5 million.

Please contribute if you can. As Lawrence said in his TED talk: your favorite issue may be the more important thing to fix, but this has to be the FIRST thing we fix. There can be no meaningful reform as long as the big money has the only voice in politics.

I understand how silly it sounds. Fight money in politics by raising money? How could that ever work? But just remember that we have to get our foot in the door somehow. We need the same lobbyists to get through to the people who need to hear us.

Lawrence is a good guy, a smart person, and incredibly passionate about his cause. He's someone we can get behind. Please donate if you can. Remember they don't take your money unless they make their goal.

Net neutrality, patent reform, etc. They all start here