The ISPs in my area (and my previous area) cut deals with the local municipalities for geographic monopolies. This was done to "keep competing service providers from repeatedly digging up the streets" which was somehow billed as better for the end-user. Uh huh. I have one ISP I can contract with - the cable company (I'm too far for DSL, and have obstructed line-of-sight for satellite.) My only other option is dial-up over POTS, which would only serve for basic email functions.

This is far from a competitive free-market situation for many of us.

Agreed. The ISPs should be considered "common carriers" and should have zero involvement with content.

Further, how the hell would an ISP know *anything* about whether my activities are licensed or not. I work with a community theater that licenses shows, scripts and music all the time. For the duration of the contract I have with Tams-Whitmark, MTI, or whoever, I have legal access to the materials, including editing/modifying for our venue's needs. Many of these changes will be circulated via email or file sharing services, though not publicly. That won't stop my ISP from being involved in the transaction. They're not party to the contract, I am not going to involve them in the contract, and I sure as hell am not going to seek their permission to carry out normal activities.

Good luck finding assembly language programmers for modern processors. Almost all have gone in the RISC direction, relying on the higer-level compilers to fill-in the gaps to make the environment more CISC-like. Example - a RISC CPU doesn't have an ADD instruction, but you can implement the function by negating one of the parameters and using SUB ... a C compiler will do this for you, and will remember to flip the polarity of the carry flag and any conditionals as appropriate. It makes assembly programming insanely complex, but it's invisible once your abstract up a layer to something like C.

The further you abstract away from native code, the harder it gets to write code that's cache- or other-resource-aware.

Any chance I could get a data sheet without a prohibitive NDA and the need to fork over one of my children?

(I suspect the answer is "no.")

In the US, police officers are sworn "officers of the court." Functionally, they are an extension of the court system. As such, their testimony may be admitted as evidence, where your common-citizen's testimony may not. That's usually the bias. Additionally, the courts tend to expect that their officers, being sworn, are operating to the rules and limitations imposed on them by the legal system. If that's not the case for the vast majority of situations, the legal system comes apart at the seams.

No, but you might care if you're a cruise missile moving at Mach 2 trying to hit a target aperture of 30m.

Nah, they had a shower allocation of 8-minutes per week (ref: below video at 2:33.) If you don't take a Hollywood shower, that'll get you reasonably clean every other day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf7IEVTDjng

Agreed. The lifetime+infinity coverage is insane. The big cartel artists want one side of the copyright contract - legal protection - but never want to honor the other side of the contract - releasing the work into the public domain at the end of the term.

10 years from creation for the initial term; no fee, but simple registration. Additional coverage on a per-year basis from 11-20, with an annual $100 registration fee. Demonstrate you're using the copyright, or release it.

Sounds like a berth on the Autotrain. Done that. Works pretty well.

I understand the lower threshold for Civil vs. Criminal, but your logic is flawed. If I'm on a bus, and someone in the back yells something slanderous about me, you seem to think the bus driver is culpable because he's in charge of the bus. Just because a situation is complicated doesn't mean the legal system can arbitrarily assign guilt for procedural convenience.

Your "most likely because you pay the bill" claim might have been valid back in the 90s when there was a single hard-wired computer/modem in a household, but not by today's standards.

That said, Malibu Media is very likely to come after me because my name is on the bill. But that's the nature of the shakedown the judge identified, and one of the primary reasons he denied their request.

The requested subpoena does not provide the information requested by the plaintiff Were I John Doe, accused of torrenting Malibu Media's sketchy porn, their IP address would simply identify the Netgear router behind my cable modem. There are three networks behind that - one wired, two wireless. As a matter of policy, I don't keep access logs, so you won't be able to discriminate between me, my wife, my brother, my brother-in-law, my friends, or any of a dozen or so individuals who I allow to access one of the networks.

The judge declined to be part of the shake-down fishing expedition.

Recently, SCOTUS handed down an opinion on the ACA that basically said "the actual words in the legislation don't matter ... it's all about the intent." The Court's official opinion was authored by Chief Justice Roberts. (Read Scalia's dissent starting at p.21... it's spot-on.)

In their opinion on gay marriage, Roberts issues a dissenting opinion with the following quote:

Under the Constitution, judges have power to say what the law is, not what it should be.

The internal inconsistencies of the SCOTUS are appalling.

If they managed to build a car that requires no welding, I'd say that's at least "disruptive" if not "revolutionary."

Coding on the metal seems to be a dying art these days. If resources are plentiful, it's likely faster to implement a solution in a higher-level abstracted method. (And if resoruces aren't plentiful, it's easier to tell your boss "the hardware can't handle it" and get the objective changed to something less agressive.)

The traditional mindset of "sort, then recycle" imposes a huge up-front cost - sorting is expensive regardless of where you insert it into the recycling process. If they just pulled the metals out then shredded the rest, Thermal Depolymerization would eat just about anything plastic or organic. Maryland's Easter Shore has a huge problem with chicken-shlt running into the Chesapeake. There's way more poop than the local farmers can spread onto their fields as fertilizer. Maryland needs to seed a TDP plant as part of it's initiatives to protect the Bay. Just simply trucking it out costs too much, but converting it into light-crude would change the economics.