Yeah -- let's eke out every last bit of strategic oil in US territory! And let's cram it into a bunch of stupid SUVs!! Because That's How America Uses Oil!!!

And let's do this all in the next decade or two, guaranteeing the current generation of oil billionaires a semi-permanent place in history, as the last such. They can get started on their even more gated communities, and wall their future families in thoroughly.

I guess my general point is that unless the US (and similar countries) take the high road on neutrality issues, they're going to find it difficult to make political progress vis-a-vis the internet, because of the slippery slopes involved.

Yeah, you can get around the GFC, but doing so splits into two cases: Wanting to get information that you shouldn't be able to get, and wanting to get information that is only useful when transferred in a timely and usable manner. Gmail performance in China just sucks. OK, thinks me, I'll punch an SSH tunnel through to the imap server and pull it that way. Result? Works perfectly, but very slow. I can't say for sure, but I think that the GFC's approach to tunnel "issue" is simply to dramatically slow down certain kinds of traffic (like SSH), and especially traffic it does not recognize (or does, and wants to impair). There's little doubt in my mind that repeated use of SSH from a given endpoint will gather special attention, once enough red flags arise.

In the mean time, "just make it suck" allows "acceptable" traffic through, sort of. China's censors aren't stupid. The information and political ecosphere is massive; within a country the size of China it can only be approached on a probabilistic basis. Changing the "convenience factor" for information turns the dials on the probability model and generates certain political effects, when observed at scale.

It was news to me ('cause I'm foolishly optimistic) that any site that uses Facebook-backed content delivery, or twitter, or youtube, is simply not visible in China.

If packet-level neutrality is properly implemented globally, my SSH tunnel runs fast. Packet-level neutrality generalizes a solution to the issues of political and private impairment of the net. "Don't mess with the packets", and you have a internet freedom. Of course, that's I-want-a-pony, 'cause there are bad actors out there. It seems we'll be stuck with filtering, at a minimum.

This is refreshed evidence of the ability of the internet to influence politics and history, of course. Discussions of net neutrality aren't often rooted in socio-political terms; actions like these demonstrate the need for neutrality. If there's a very concrete, very specific definition of what the internet is and what the internet isn't, the rest of the internet can take actions against entities and networks that "aren't the internet".

The political dimension of the net neutrality comes into play here. When laws and policy in the US are cemented in place that allow private and government entities to arbitrarily discriminate against traffic, it becomes very difficult for the internet as a whole to maintain any kind of defense. China, Russia, and numerous other countries around the world want anything BUT a neutral internet. It's hard for the US, for example, to argue for neutrality in other countries along political dimensions, while caving to corporate, anti-competitive interests internally.

Crappy thought formation here -- sorry for that. The essence is that unless the US takes the high road on neutrality, it will become less and less ubiquitous in the future, as more and more countries follow the downward spiral of fragmentation.

I am visiting China right now, and I can tell you that internet access here is just plain WEIRD. Imagine an internet in the US with a thousand provider firewalls and packet paywalls everywhere, twisting in the winds of contracts between provider and highest bidder. The Great Firewall of China? How would you like to be dealing with the Shitty Firewall of Comcast-St.Louis, instead? And then the wall after that?

Don't think that he needs to be charged. The equivalent of an arrest warrant needs to have been issued, and published appropriately. At that point due process is available, and should be utilized by the arrestee.

All hail Mr. Zero-Sum, Energy Constant Universal the Third. Never do anything! Consequences!!

Isn't it the case that due process is only available for people who submit themselves to it? Due process has _always_ been available to this guy, if he wanted it. All he had to do was turn himself in. He's been on the run from the law, and that's a different situation. I don't see why this is complicated at all, as long as there's been an active indictment against him, or whatever is necessary to effect a legal arrest.

All I know is that they could prick some holes in those big electric pipes, let the 'lectricity out and create a ton of steam bubbles. This will turn the entire coast of Japan into a giant steam bath, achieving all goals simultaneously: Eliminate winter, increase tourism from Scandinavian countries, pirate ships coming out of cool misty effects, and the Japanese can relax for a change.

I don't know about being primarily procedural -- my guess is that it's procedural in the same sense that the reconstruction of a JPEG is a procedural function, based on the composition of transforms. Maybe they've come up with a way of cleanly compressing point fields with a multi-dimensional, hierarchical wavelet set, or something like it. Rendering is then sort of probabilistic, with the caveat that you need to retain frame-to-frame stability. They (breathlessly) repeat the limit on the density of the data they have created. If it was procedural that lower limit wouldn't be there.

When you read AirBNB's current (as of 2:40pm 7/31/2011) FAQ, it's seriously frowned-upon for a host to use the "contact information" they are given to actually make a decision to NOT rent to someone. Step 5 is accept or deny request, at which point you have no information. Step 6 is AirBNB collects the payment. Step 7 sends the real contact info. Step 8 describes when payment will be released. And that's the end of their public process.

There's no step 9 -- what to do if you are unhappy with the details you received. At the end of the FAQ we find "We take host cancellations very seriously, because they pose a huge problem to guests' travel plans and they hurt the reliability of our website. When a host cancels, their ranking in search results is negatively affected." That means AirBNB is going to penalize you, as a host, if you elect not to accept a guest based on the contact information you have received.

Seems to me that AirBNB is going to have to come up with a policy for the "early period", during which time a member is considered "new". A new member should probably have a mandatory security deposit requirement, and any such reservation request should be flagged as a new member request.

I probably forgot to hit submit on my previously-written response to your note. I intended no disrespect to you or Apache's process. I'm just expressing the general frustration that Java programmers everywhere must feel at the prospect of having a broken JDK7 out there, when it seems like it was preventable. Of course, the devil is in the details, as always. Could the bug have been identified earlier? Was the bug exhibited by a failure of an automated test suite within the Apache project, or did it manifest only during exploratory testing?

The real question facing the Java community is understanding what parts of the process can be improved to avoid something like this happening again in the future.

Another way of looking at this is to realize that the pre-release versions of Java 7 have been out there for a long, long time, and nobody from these Apache projects felt like testing their (rather important) open source projects against it, so they could have found and reported the bug earlier.

It seems to me that fault lies in both directions here.

A more correct rewrite of the bug teaser would be, "Don't use Java 7 for anything if you are incapable of passing an extra command line argument to it".

Note that the patent has nothing to do with mobile devices. It's just a very general "recognize a pattern in data" patent. Seems to me that any syntax-aware programming editor from before 1996 would be prior art.

What you (and most others here) seem to have missed is that Dropbox generally has absolutely no idea what your content is. Everything is encrypted. How exactly are they distributing your "copyrighted material" when it can't be decrypted?

In rare cases (specifically those required to cooperate with law enforcement) Dropbox has indicated that they could decrypt. I expect they will do this as rarely as possible, as it opens up questions they'd likely rather leave closed.

If Dropbox does geographically distributed services, they need to be able to replicate your content to other servers. To do that, they need your permission to copy it. You are providing them permission to copy opaque blocks of data, not replicate your tunes around the world. You want to share a link to a file? Dropbox needs your permission to be able to publish your opaque blocks of data on that URL (and decrypt it for use, in such a case).

I'm not sure how you would plan on profiting from blocks of close-to-random data. Maybe you want to sell close-to-random numbers? Profit!

Think, people.

I'm with you until your dumb-ass comment about liberals. Really. Why don't conservatives with less-than-perfect sentence construction skills realize that there are good taxes and bad taxes, and that not all taxes affect the economy in the same way?

It's worth noting that, according to the most recent IRS income statistics, those in the top 0.1% or so have been making do with quite a bit more since the Bush-era top tax rate cuts.

1 - A retail store doesn't ask about exemptions, and neither should an internet business. It's the individual's responsibility.
2. Irrelevant, and up to the individual. Just like a retail store.
3. Combo box for state -> tax rate. Wow, that was hard.
4. You have a point here, and the states should unify through a clearing house that makes it very easy for the business to pay the tax. Credit card companies should offer state tax payments as a service to their business clients. Virtually all of these transactions are credit-card based, anyway.