I like questions which appear to have an obvious answer but where the obvious answer is wrong, and masks a deeper and more interesting problem. The trouble with posing questions like that is that everybody starts shouting out the obvious "answer" and facepalming when you don't agree with them.

Of course these decisions are "business-driven decisions". Well, duh. That's the obvious answer, and it's not wrong, but it just raises more questions.

Here's the question with the non-obvious answer: Why have market forces, which are supposed to lead to approximately optimal outcomes, resulted in such a clearly non-optimal outcome in this case, with so much data plan bandwidth being wasted? In other words, if many users would like to have the option to cache content locally (so that they can watch it on the go without using up their data plan), and if it's legal for content providers to do that (e.g. Google Play), then why haven't competitive forces led to either Netflix or Hulu to offer that? Which assumption does not hold -- that users don't want to be able to watch movies on the go without using up too much data, or that market forces don't work effectively on the companies in question?

I meant "how much" as in "too much", not in an attempt to pin down a precise number. As in, if someone asks, "How many kids have gotten sick because of Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccine activism?", they're probably not looking for an exact number, just calling attention to the problem.

The new understanding is that there's not much awareness of discussion of how much bandwidth is wasted in this way. Can you point to a single article anywhere, prior to this one, pointing out how much data plan bandwidth is wasted every day by proprietary streaming that can't be cached locally?

Of course I'm going to provide an answer if I think I have one, not just pose the question and then stop. What would be the point of that? If people have other answers, or reasons why they think my answer is wrong, that's what the comments are for.

It seems you have two separate points here:
1) I was using "DRM" to include Netflix and Hulu streaming content in a way that is encrypted to make copying difficult, but you're saying that's an incorrect usage because the playback does not involve verifying any license rights. OK. Then call the article "How Much Data Plan Bandwidth Is Wasted By Proprietary Encrypted Streaming?" and the rest of the argument still holds.
2) You're saying that streaming is "here to stay", which is obviously true, but the examples that you cited are all music streaming services, where I think people prefer more spontaneity. For TV shows and movies, people more often have some idea in advance of what they're going to watch later, and they would be more likely to cache it on their devices to save on data plan usage, if that was an option.

Like I just said: I'm talking about when companies use streaming AND use DRM to prevent the users from saving the streams as a file.

The companies could ameliorate this by modifying their apps to allow local caching, OR by removing the DRM from the streams so that people could save the streams themselves.

Of course there are examples of companies that have done the former, I cited Google Play as an example.

Of course you're right that the policy of Hulu and Netflix is the real problem, but the problem is also that it's enforced via DRM which makes it impossible for third parties to write tools that could save the stream to your hard drive. Both the bad policy and the DRM have to exist at the same time for the problem to exist; removing either of those would solve the problem (although fixing their policy would be a better solution).

Hmm, why would it be more useful for music files? The usefulness of this feature is equal to the difference in convenience between caching the content, and streaming it. The larger the file, the greater the difference in convenience -- which, by that logic, would make it more "convenient" for movies than for music files.

I am talking about streaming which is DRMed in a manner that makes it impossible to save the contents as a file. (Normal streams are pretty easy to save as a file.) I probably should have said "DRMed streams" in the article title to make it clearer.

That sounds like it could be right, but Google Play must have made the same calculation at some point, and they went with the conclusion that it was worth it to support downloading and pinning. Every time I'm taking a plane trip, I get content from Google Play and nowhere else for exactly that reason.

OK yes, that's a more accurate way of putting it.

But that just makes it seem all the more pointless since other companies (e.g. Google Play) have implemented DRM schemes that *do* allow local savings, and it hasn't killed their business or caused the content providers to come after them.

Well iTunes does but many of the other popular ones do not (e.g. Hulu and Netflix), and those let you consume all the content you want for a monthly fee.

I did say in the article I was using DRM to refer to the DRM that's specifically used on streaming media to make it hard to save as a local file.

I like turtles!!!

That DRM system is crappier than most, but some other systems don't have those particular problems -- Google Play lets me pin a movie to my phone and watch it on a plane without phoning home to make sure I have permission to watch it.

Well when I refer to the "cost" of finding the next bug I'm referring to the estimated average cost, so that factors in the possibility of failure or going over budget or not being the first to find something.

Yes, the bounty program doesn't have to be quite as high as the black market value, because most people would prefer to deal with the software manufacturer than with the black market. Good point, I should have mentioned it.

But regarding this endless hair-splitting of the use of the word "infinite", for heaven's sake, I said in the article, and about ten times since, I don't mean literally infinite. What I mean is, suppose the amount of security bugs that can be found for $100K worth of effort is... "very large". That means there's no point in you, as a white hat, investing $100K worth of effort to find and fix one of those bugs, because if an attacker was going to spend $100K worth of effort to try and find a bug, and the number of such distinct bugs is enormous, then they're probably not going to find the exact same bug that you found, and therefore you haven't increased the attacker's estimated mean time to find a new exploit.

On the other hand, that doesn't change the fact that if a particular bug has been found and released in the wild, obviously you should still plug that one.

Make up your mind how you're going to spell my name...

Anyway, isn't the answer to your first question obviously that Slashdot has decided they want to be not a pure news aggregate, but a news aggregate that occasionally posts original content? When McDonalds put their first chicken burgers on their menu, did people go ballistic saying "What makes you think McDonalds, a beef hamburger joint, is the place to be selling chicken burgers?"

As for the second question, I think the articles meet a high threshold of reaching a counterintuitive or controversial conclusion while proceeding from premises and reasoning steps that individually are hard to argue against. If I just wrote articles that stated a controversial point of view without the supporting argument, I doubt Slashdot would publish them.