You're 53 years old, posting as AC, and feel the need to announce that you're a transsexual and dare anyone to have a problem with you? FWIW, I don't think it's the world that has a problem with you--it seems like you have a problem with the world.

MS had an after-tax income of over 21 billion dollars in 2013. No idea where you're coming up with a $32B loss. Ballmer was a horrible CEO, but the biggest problem was that MS continued to make money--LOTS of money--while he was destroying the company's value, which made him look absolutely great on paper.

That actually answers something I was wondering about the other day. My company was looking at a facility in Houston and it's in a brand new industrial park that is literally across the street from some of multi-million dollar homes I was amazed that the homeowners didn't manage to kill the project, and now I understand why they couldn't.

FWIW, I think zoning is like any other form of government intervention: a necessary evil. Some is absolutely required, a little more is ok, and it's only when those in power have an axe to grind, or engage in mission creep that the problems start. I'd honestly hate to live somewhere without at least rudimentary zoning, lest someone come along and build a sewage treatment next door, or put in heavy industry across the street from your $5M house like the example above.

Prion diseases?

I disagree quite strongly with the above--text based interfaces really don't become unusable until you hit absurd latency (>2500ms). ssh/telnet are quite usable at >1000ms latency, and even high packet loss isn't really a huge concern. Even working over 110bps links, where one could actually type faster than the line rate wasn't a real problem until you filled up the buffer (I can't give you examples of what latency was like under those conditions, because I never measured it, but you've got 200ms or so built in RTT for a single byte from the bit rate alone)

The constitution, as written, is a whitelist of things the government is allowed to do. The bill of rights is a list of examples of things it is not allowed to do. This suggestion that there are exceptions has no basis in the text of either one. I'll never understand how some people can read, "congress shall make no law," "shall not be infringed," "no person shall be deprived of life liberty or property without due process of law," and other similar statements and come up with "this isn't absolute."

I wouldn't blame the submitter too quickly. I've had submissions accepted, and had my summary ripped completely out in favor of just a blurb from the article, so it's quite possible the editor did it in this case.

So apparently you CAN catch more (fruit) flies with vinegar than with honey?

Wait, what? Are you seriously suggesting that it's not a coverup because the coverup didn't start until people started asking questions?

I went to a catholic elementary school, and one of my 6th grade teachers was a nun named Sister Catherine-Joseph who taught two subjects: religion and science. Despite the obvious setup for failure, she taught both rigorously, and well. I HATED that woman with a passion, but she was, absolutely, a superior educator who would have smacked the shit out of someone with a ruler for daring to suggest that, "We all believe in Jesus, *wink wink*" was either suitable coverage or a valid refutation of evolution.

Good science fiction is (almost) ALWAYS about people, and how they react in an environment that is altered by a technology, or an event, or some other external influence that simply wasn't imaginable until our understanding of the universe progressed (the science part of the fiction). While there are some examples that differ from this, if you take a look through your favorite stories, they almost all conform to this pattern.

In this case, it's an exploration of what happens to someone who is in orbit during an event that leads to Kessler Syndrome. I'm not saying the film deserved to win, but I think complaining that "this isn't science fiction" is decidedly unwarranted.

The problem with your position is that L3's own data shows the port at over 100% utilization. They're not being throttled, they're trying to shove ten pounds of shit into a five pound bag.

Like I said, you can point fingers at whoever the peer is for letting the situation fester, but L3's own data suggests this was passive aggressive rather than active malice.

Are you seriously suggesting that congested ports -> Netflix pays for their own direct interconnects -> uncongested ports somehow proves that Netflix was being throttled? Because, frankly, it suggests the opposite to me (i.e. moving lots of traffic to a different interconnect freed up capacity on the original). Your own link shows the general congestion: see this graph.

You can, quite easily, make the argument that Comcast (or Verizon, or whoever the peer in question is) let that situation fester until it resulted in their "winning" a new customer (Netflix) from level3, but certainly not that their traffic was being treated differently from anyone else's.

That doesn't sound like breaking the laws of physics: making the car lighter will make it faster, as well as (assuming you avoid exotic materials) making it cheaper.

You might believe that, but practice is a bit different. My parents were married for six years, then (civilly) divorced. Two years later, they remarried each other (I have no comment on how smart my parents are) or, in the Catholic view, "renewed their vows." This marriage lasted another two years or so before they separated for good (the divorce followed along a couple of years later).

Fast forward a decade and a half, and my father (who in the interim married a second wife and had a second divorce) wants to marry a devout Catholic who refuses to marry outside of the Church. My father was able to obtain an annulment despite the opposition of my mother, her family, and my father's entire family (my grandmother (dad's mom) felt strongly enough about it to write letters to an archbishop and a cardinal). The archdiocese of Oakland saw no reason not to grant the annulment, and did so.

While I do wish my father domestic happiness, the result here is completely absurd, and goes to show that if you send enough money the church's way, morality is flexible.