Do you really think that studios would let their movies stream peer-to-peer, which would involve being stored on home-user's computers encrypted with a known key (aka "effectively not encrypted")? Plus, ISPs are rolling out CGN which makes peer-to-peer very difficult, and most residential connections have very slow upload speeds. Finally, this would just be a way to work around the fact that Verizon is not giving its customers what the customers have paid for: high-speed internet access. When there is a bully, you don't just sneak around behind the bully's back and hope he won't notice you.

No, Netflix (and Youtube and some others large ones) don't buy CDN hosting; they offer it. They offer free CDN servers which large ISPs can put in their datacenters. Doesn't matter how much Netflix offered to pay, I doubt if any existing CDN could handle Netflix's traffic along with their other customers.

Many ISPs take advantage of this, but Verizon would rather degrade Netflix's products so they can push their own products.

The bandwidth disparity argument is bunk. I've love if Netflix or Level 3 would set up some data sinks in their network so I could use my FIOS to send them random data 24/7 and help even the disparity.

So... you're saying that Verizon should be paying me! I mean, they send me ALL THIS DATA (much of it sourced from Netflix), but I hardly send them anything. This makes me both a selfish person and someone who deserves a large monthly Verizon cheque.

Note that if Verizon doesn't want to pay a few grand for a few more 10GE ports and some short cables, they could pay even less and accept the caching servers that Netflix offers to all large ISPs; those cost just a few rack units and watts of power.

But Verizon would rather limit Netflix so that they can push their own video products.

Seems rather the opposite. We're very good at noticing when someone is looking at us (a leftover from being prey I suspect), but I always see people standing, holding their phone angled slightly (pointed nicely at any laptops at nearby tables). Add a fake game screen while the camera runs for extra stealth.

In related news,scientists have discovered a correlation between "thinks that signing up for experiments is fun" and "extrovert".

Yeah, not so much. Though based on news reports they're not not very good at it yet.

Depends. Who owns the C API?

Oh dear. This could be a problem for anyone who uses a C compiler. Who owns the original C APIs anyways? Dennis Ritchie maybe?

I wonder who owns the SQL APIs? Oracle may have a problem here...

Dunno; I used to have some really weak passwords on sites which I don't care about. Never as bad as "123456" but almost. I wish more sites used something like OpenID so I could centralize my authentication (and get 2-factor) and not have forgotten authentication info at dozens of sites on the web.

Now I use a password manager so I can use distinct non-trivial passwords on all sites. It's a reasonable workaround, but a federated authentication system would be better I think.

A few years ago, someone in my neighborhood (~4 miles away from a fairly large city) was arrested because they were shooting from their house at someone in their backyard (maybe someone taking a shortcut through their backyard? I don't remember the details but it was not a home invasion.)

A year later, my cat came home with a pellet in her liver. Despite expensive surgery, she died a painful two weeks later.

When you say "nobody is forcing one on you", I'm not sure how that's supposed to work.

They do. They're called "antilock brakes". They exist because many people don't know how to pump brakes, and if you slam on your brakes at speed then you lose all steering control, so the antilock brakes help save you from your own incompetence. They sometimes make the problem worse (stopping distance on dry pavement is sometimes longer), but on average they save a lot more lives than they endanger.

And when they started appearing in cars, most of those who thought they were competent drivers complained. Just like this.

The home invaders were unarmed, but they would have killed him anyways? Look, I know that criminals are not generally competent, but that's quite a pretzel of logic there.

Plus we have heavy regulation of automobiles and their safety features, so that road deaths are going down while miles driven continue to rise. Gun deaths are mostly consistent with number of people who own guns (both have been slowly dropping for a few decades).

They're gun nuts. Masculine insecurity is 90% of gun ownership. Why else would you want to wear your strap-on in public?

And you cannot stop selling guns to idiots, because the NRA opposes any background checks for any reason.

What is hilarious is that most of these "gun enthusiasts" were probably livid when the addresses of gun owners (from public records) were publicly posted in New England a few years ago.

I'm not anti-gun, but I'm anti-idiot. Limit handguns, mandate background checks and periodic training, and punish people who kill when they fear a deadly bag of skittles. Then you can own your very own phallic security blanket and I can be a bit more confident that you won't kill someone I care about because they wear a hoodie and have the wrong color skin.

Those companies don't want to replace drivers. Drivers buy cars, and if you can't "imagine yourself behind the wheel of this car" then it's harder to sell someone an overpriced hunk of metal just because it is styled a bit differently. Those companies just want to assist drivers (help them park or stay in in their lane), so their videos will be much less impressive.

Only google seems to want to replace drivers completely.