The p2p element seems reasonable but I suspect would be kind of thorny. Most people's broadband connections are asymmetric, with upload speeds only a fraction of download, so you'd have to limit total upload bandwidth to something small enough that it wouldn't prove obnoxious, either to performance or that would cause users to hit caps, especially the kind they didn't know they had.

And then there's the question of figuring out who has the content on my download list -- even though the streaming catalog is kind of finite, it may prove less efficient or reliable to grab content on my list from random sources whose connectivity to me is unreliable.

The other idea that I had that I thought might solve some of the content owner objections is a download that is a fractional download -- download only half the content, so that you still stream the other half but have the streamed content and the local content interwoven so you grab byte 1 from netflix, 2 from cache, 3 from netflix, etc, so that the local content was "incomplete" and thus didn't fit any strict definition of "local content".

Wow. Someone recommends my book (which is on-topic for the discussion). I thank them. And we're both marked trolls.

The critics are right. This site really has gone downhill.

Thank you, whoever you are! Free software and the threat of software patents and copyright law to our basic freedoms to create were very much on my mind when I wrote the novel. Very glad you enjoyed it!

Realtime streaming is a bandwidth pig, but if you had something with 128 GB of storage you could download content in the background at a much lower bandwidth rate. 128kbps, 12 hours a day for a week would give you 300 gigs of offline content.

Netflix could do this with your "My List" of titles and possibly interweave this with some predicted preference stuff and maybe catch a percentage of things you might watch while just browsing (er, vainly searching for something interesting).

At this point you could possibly be watching most of your stuff offline from cache without the need for real time streaming or bandwidth.

I think I've read Netflix say "we'll never do offline streaming" and its probably a licensing/rights issue, although maybe Netflix has some rationale for not doing it to, so that will keep it from happening.

Most STBs and smart TVs don't have storage, but it doesn't seem like adding some flash capability (internally at assembly, or via USB sticks by consumers) would be that expensive.

For this reason the sane way to implement IPv6 as to do DHCPv6-PD and assign either 0 or 1 IPv6 address on the link interface.

From reading the linked bug report/discussion, it seems the Android team are open to implementing DHCPv6-PD. Their objection is basically to the notion that a lazily run network might use DHCPv6 to try and ensure devices only get a single IP address, thus forcing app/OS developers and users to deal with the crappy flakyness of NAT all over again. They are worried about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, in other words.

So I think your position is not so incompatible with Google's. Though if/when they plan to support DHCPv6-PD I do not know.

DHCP v6 exists not to coddle or comfort admins used to a v4 world. DHCP v6 was added because v6 will /Never/ be adopted without it. Ever. Full stop. DHCP facilitates two-way communication prior to address assignment and lends flexibility to deployments that are now considered indispensable.

Having waded through the mega-thread with Lorenzo (who I've met by the way and he is a top class guy), this appears to be the nub of the dispute. It's some kind of immovable object/irresistible force situation.

The Android team build what is primarily a consumer product. When they make decisions, they think in terms of what is best for ordinary consumers. They also consider the needs of software developers. Therefore they highly prise qualities like "it just works" and "my apps don't break" and "I can tether without restriction". From this perspective as far as I can tell, Lorenzo's position is 100% correct. The founding vision of IPv6 was that you should always have as many addresses as you need for whatever purpose, and we should never need bizarre technical hacks to work around a lack of addresses ever again.

The network admins on that thread are building what they perceive as a 'take it or leave it' service, often, provided to a captive audience like a university campus or enterprise. Therefore they highly value qualities like "I can satisfy the legal department" and "I can use my existing hardware that only supports feature X" and "I can block tethering to my network to implement some security policy". They care relatively little about user or developer experience, as evidence by the number of comments on the thread of the form "If we can't get our way we'll just ban all Android devices" or "The device should tell the user that 464xlat is unavailable and let apps break" or "the device should tell the user that tethering is forbidden". They care little about application reliability or complexity as long as they can tick some boxes at the end of the day and satisfy various policies. From their perspective Android is just making their jobs harder and Lorenzo is therefore being mind-numbingly unreasonable.

This situation is somewhat confused and hard to distill because there seem to be multiple different things being discussed on the same thread, e.g. DHCPv6 PD which is apparently unrelated to address allocation.

Now, frankly, having read and understood many of these comments, I find myself siding (weakly) with Lorenzo, and not just because I know him. As an Android user and an app developer, my priorities are more closely aligned with that of the Android team. I do not wish to experience apps breaking or "tethering denied" messages in future due to some lawyer buttcovering that was translated into a network setup with the absolute minimum of effort by a monopolist IT department. If that means I fall back to IPv4 for a while instead, well, so be it. If that means my phone cannot reach the small number of IPv6 only networks when connected to some random university campus, OK, I'll use my LTE connection. And then I'll complain to the IT office and tell them "just buy an iPhone" is not an acceptable answer, so they had better get on it and allow my device to grab as many devices as it wants without having to go through a DHCPv6 server. Just like my home and mobile ISPs do. And if that means they have to do more work to satisfy the next BSA audit - well, that's why they get paid the big bucks.

Jean-Michel Smith's science fiction novel _Autonomy_ would be a good summer read. It's about a small group of open source revolutionaries who work to transcend through their own singularity. Unfortunately they are hounded by government agencies and the UN, who want to destroy them without ever understanding what they are and what they offer the world. It's a clever novel that promotes a lot of open source values. http://www.amazon.com/Autonomy...

Thank you, whoever you are! Free software and the threat of software patents and copyright law to our basic freedoms to create were very much on my mind when I wrote the novel. Very glad you enjoyed it!

But it's naive in the extreme to believe that some kind of informal system of first come, first served meets squatter's rights would prevail when the players in question are large commercial entities.

The Internet as we knew it 15 years ago (or more..) is dead, as is the benevolent giant of Google. It's not run by geeks for geeks under some informal geek code of honor anymore. It's a commercial marketplace run by corporations for a profit.

And anyone with a clue and any exposure to Google would have to understand that their services and systems change as they see fit. If you rely on Google for anything, you'd better be, as the MBAs say, nimble and able to pivot when they change their minds. Their services come and go. Beta, labs, products, whatever, if it's not making ad revenue it's on life support and will disappear whenever they feel like it.

I think local donations is a great idea. So many local organizations are the ones actually executing hands-on help where the amount of useful work done per dollar is higher than larger organizations that have larger administrative overhead.

Why follow Microsoft's arbitrary release cycle if you don't have to?

The software they are using is just as functional now as the day it was installed (more so if you count bugfixes installed since) and the system integrations, testing and validation they have done are not inexpensive to repeat with a new operating system because Microsoft stopped supporting something, not because they had to -- but because they need to, to keep revenue flowing.

It's not hard to imagine complex installation scenarios where the cost/benefit of paying for extended security updates is better than replacing the OS, re-engineering third party solutions, fixing problems and so on.

I think your argument is more realistic for prosumers, small business, etc, where the main reintegration task is moving user profiles or replacing an old laser printer because drivers aren't provided for a new OS. Tracking MS release cycles in these environments ends up being easier to do, even if the rationale isn't that the users have/want/need new "features" but that the vendor yanks support after a period of time, even if the system still works as expected.

Which distro are you using that isn't already infected by systemd? I'm SO glad Gentoo still allows me to use OpenRC...

Me too! I use both funtoo and gentoo, at work and at home, but here's a pretty good sized list of options for those who like debian, arch, and other distributions:

http://without-systemd.org/wik...

If you're stuck with Red Hat, your choices have been pretty much taken from you, and you should probably be looking to change to something else, but otherwise you probably have the choice of using OpenRC or upstart, and someone has probably already figured out how for you.

Building the kernel now.

Very cook feature list, with arguably the best feature being that they managed to keep kdbus and more systemd nonsense from infecting the kernel code. I'm especially looking forward to trying out ext4 encryption on my laptop.

Even recent history is littered with examples of the biggest military machine on the planet (and it's cronies) having much more trouble with "inferior" forces than they should.

Define "trouble"? Recent history is littered with examples of the US military immediately and utterly crushing the armies and rebel groups in any country they invade. The rabble that remain and try to resist occupation cannot inflict any conventional military damage, which is why they resort of extreme tactics like suicide bombings. Tactics that don't work, but between soldiers, drones, warplanes, and NSA surveillance they have no better ideas that might work.

Likewise, the chances of any US citizens successfully engaging in armed resistance against the US government is zero. Here's what would happen:

1) If you decide to take your gun and resist oppression alone you will be gunned down within minutes or seconds, reported in the press as having mental health problems and everyone will have forgotten your name within a couple of days

2) If you try to find other like minding people and raise a resistance group the FBI and/or NSA will learn of your plot before it happens, and you will be arrested before you have any chance to make real progress with your plan. You will be charged with domestic extremism, terrorism, or some variant thereof, and disappear for the rest of your adult life into a Supermax.

In no situation does having a gun allow you to resist even very petty government corruption or abuse. You simply stand no chance at all, you will always lose. The only way to seriously change a government is through the ballot box, which is why every country except the USA doesn't pretend an armed populace has anything to do with freedom.

Thankyou for your polite reply.

I am sure that if one were to carefully analyze the situation, some of the deaths caused by the police are due to the fact that Americans are more likely to be armed. But I do not believe that is the exclusive or even majority cause of so much violence by our police.

Why not, though? In the UK virtually all police are unarmed. It's very hard to get shot by the police due to a misunderstanding or otherwise. In the USA all police are armed and there has been a steady stream of stories, videos and even civil unrest triggered by on-the-spot police executions.

Those things aren't happening because someone might be carrying a gun.

Then why are they happening and why do the statistics suggest levels of police violence in the USA are wildly different to otherwise very similar countries?

I know ownership of weapons in America is a highly contentious topic so I fully expect to get modded down aggressively for this post. I want to try out the argument anyway. Please humour me.

Let us imagine two different countries: Macroland and Microland. The governments of the two countries are mostly similar, with two notable exceptions.

The government of Macroland punishes resistance to its rule heavily. It jails approximately 0.7% of its population. Its enforcement troops kill about 60 of its own people each month.

The government of Microland is dramatically less aggressive. It jails only 0.1% of its population, but more importantly, it virtually never kills its own citizens no matter what they did or how strongly they resist the government's rule. It took Microland about a quarter of a century to kill as many people as Macroland did in just one month.

Which country has the most oppressed people? Microland or Macroland?

I think most reasonable people would say that the citizens of the country that kills them the most often are the most heavily oppressed. After all, what's the basic power that lies behind abusive government oppression? What's the basic mechanism governments use to remove people's freedoms? It's violence. The country that dishes out the most against its own people would seem to be the most oppressive.

You have, of course, already figured out that the statistics given above are real. Macroland is the USA. Microland is (just for comparison) the United Kingdom.

Americans have the US Constitution and it is a mighty document. The Constitution has always been a vital part of protecting the freedoms of ordinary Americans from overreach by government. Yet the Constitution is flawed in one terribly dramatic way. By allowing and even encouraging a heavily armed society, it fails to strike any blows for freedom - as police have always had and always will have better access to top grade weaponry and armour. The chances of ordinary US citizens successfully mounting an armed uprising against the government is zero. And yet it simultaneously gives those same police a cast iron excuse for arming themselves to the teeth, as they are expected to enforce the law against an exceptionally dangerous population.

The result is that whilst Americans and British people have very little differences in their levels of freedom, they have enormous differences in their chances of being executed by their own governments ..... or by random mental patients.

I am British and I would like to see the UK adopt a US-style constitution. But not if it included a copy of the second amendment. Real data from today's world seems to suggest it makes no real difference to freedom but does make the world a vastly more dangerous place.

Smaller carry-ons would reduce their utility for many people, resulting in more mandatory checked back and more mandatory checked bag fees. The flight attendants would like it because there would be less boarding chaos with morons who fuck up the overhead bins. And the luggage industry would have a field day.

Really, if you stop and think about this it's a miracle they're not backing it, because if they did everybody but the consumer makes money off the deal.