Sorry, I've been in a coma for the last 6 years. Did I miss something?

No, Senator. We managed to pull off your reelection campaign without you using a cardboard cutout, and surprisingly, nobody noticed the difference. And almost nothing of importance happened on the Senate floor while you were out, so I think you're good. Oh, except for that pesky Affordable Care Act. If anybody asks, you abstained, but you would have voted against it..

1) Residential broadband networks were never engineered as video delivery systems. The advent of mainstream streaming video completely changed the engineering calculus for last mile networks. Over subscription ratios need to change to accommodate the higher peak hour bitrates; this takes time and costs money. Where should this money come from? Why should I pay the same for my connection as the household that's running three or four simultaneous HD streams during peak hours? My 95th percentile is less than 0.5mbit/s, yet I pay the same as my neighbor who regularly runs three HD streams at the same time. Hardly seems fair, does it?

This is why you should offer cheap broadband plans to the tiny percentage of people who are willing to put up with slow service.

The reason that cable companies shouldn't try to find ways to stick it to the top 5% is that those early adopters are the ones who make new, cool technology financially feasible. They drive the Internet forward, allowing interesting services to come into existence. Eventually, the use of those services filters down to more and more customers. If you penalize the folks whose bandwidth usage falls within the top 5%, the Internet as a whole will inevitably stagnate. More importantly, there will always be a top 5% to penalize, so even if those folks stop doing what they are doing, the cable companies will then penalize a different group of people, leading to progressively declining quality of service.

3) IPTV is inherently inefficient vis-a-vis point-to-multipoint delivery systems (i.e., cable, OTA, satellite)

And yet the VoD services from your cable company work the same way. The difference is that their service is not throttled, because it travels only between the cable company offices and your home, without traversing any of the saturated external links. And that is what Netflix has to compete with.

5) Netflix has a history of trying to offload their costs onto third parties, be they ISPs, Tier 1 networks, CDNs, etc.

They pay CDNs to make content available closer to their customers. That's not offloading costs; it is distributing the load to reduce the impact on the Tier 1 networks. Besides, they are paying their bandwidth bill. They pay for access to the Internet, and their ISP pays their upstream, and so on, eventually resulting in the Tier 1 networks getting paid. The other side of the connection is the responsibility of the person on the other end, which means the individual residential customers, who pay for their own access to the internet, whose ISPs pay their ISPs, and so on, up to the Tier 1 backbone providers.

What the cable companies are trying to do is force one end of the connection to pay for the entire connection from one end to the other, which is pure bulls**t in any sane universe. That's just not the way the Internet works. The cable companies are the ones who are trying to offload what should legitimately be their costs onto a third party (Netflix), solely because that third party provides a service that is popular among their end user customers.

Sorry, but there's really no grey area here; Netflix is clearly on the right side of this, and the cable companies are clearly on the wrong side.

But according to Wikitionary [wiktionary.org], "Ars" meant "burn" in ancient french.

And in Helvetica and Arial, burn = bum. It makes perfect sense, indeed. The British were just using an illegible font when they came up with their slang.

Without looking at the data, I'm speculating a lot with that suggestion, but I don't think you should dismiss the possibility of inverse causation out of hand.

There's a huge difference between two completely unrelated things being correlated and two different expressions of the same basic psychological urges being correlated. Internet explorer use and CO2 levels are only very distantly related in that both represent signs of a strong economy in a technological society. So odds are good that such a correlation is a fluke, or at best reflects a common cause (more money allowing people to buy more computers and cars).

By contrast, expressing violence in a game and expressing it in real life are similar activities in a lot of ways. If you see a strong reverse correlation there, the odds are reasonably good that you have causation, reverse causation, or a single common cause of both changes. Of course, this assumes a truly strong correlation, as opposed to just a crudely opposite trend, where only the changes in one direction are inversely correlated. And even with a strong correlation, I wouldn't call it solid evidence of inverse causation unless you could find similar inverse correlations at other levels of granularity (e.g. states, cities, and neighborhoods), from other countries, and so on. With that said, the hint that such inverse causation might exist would make it worth further study.

If, on the other hand, you just have a crude trend match (where one is trending upwards and the other is trending downwards, but they don't change directions at about the same time), then yeah, I'd agree that the inverse correlation is probably more like pirates on the high seas protecting against global warming....

You however forget the obvious counterpoint. People use these mediums to vent their natural violent tendencies, leaving them with less active natural violent tendencies in real life.

The study's researchers dismissed the inverse correlation they found, saying that they didn't believe violent video games could decrease violence, but their data did actually suggest it... which is pretty much what most folks on this board have been saying for years.

Twenty years ago, people were saying the same thing about Internet bulletin boards, talkers, and MUDs becoming interactive video experiences. They were wrong then, and they're just as wrong now. The core problem isn't a technological issue; it's a biological one.

Allow me to explain. When you have a dozen friends, videos are a great way to keep in touch. When each friend posts a couple minutes worth of video every day, you're spending thirty minutes per day watching the video clips, which is doable... barely. By the time your friend count crosses into triple digits, it becomes infeasible. At a couple hundred friends, if everyone posted a couple of minutes of video every day instead of their normal text-based status messages, the average person's news feed would be unmanageable unless you quit your job and did nothing but watch Facebook clips all day long.

Text is simply orders of magnitude faster than video when it comes to consuming, filtering, and processing information quickly. And it is not possible to change that reality, because humans are not biologically capable of processing audio and video at the same speed that they can skim blocks of text. I mean, ostensibly they could perfect speech recognition, and could provide a text-based summary of the clip, which you could skim, but then why would anyone watch the video clip?

No, I can't foresee a future in which people will use video on Facebook orders of magnitude more than they already do. It is just too inefficient to be an effective means of communication. People will continue to use video (with descriptions) when they want to show something cool, but they'll continue to mostly use text for actual broadcast-style communication, because it just works way too much better than any other form of communication.

Many of my younger friends (the ones who aren't in college yet) keep trying to get me to join Vine. I think they also use Twitter and Instagram. I couldn't say whether any one of those qualifies as the Facebook of that generation, though.

On the flip side, just about everybody I know who is college age is on Facebook, because they come in as freshmen and find that all the sophomores, juniors, and seniors are on Facebook. Rinse and repeat with each successive year.

And that's where I think TFA gets it wrong. Network Neutrality cannot be about prioritizing one kind of traffic over another. The ISP's already lack the incentive to add more bandwidth. Even though that bandwidth is what they are selling. Allowing them to prioritize traffic means that they will be more incentivized to NOT add more bandwidth.

That was the problem that Netflix had with Comcast. And once Netflix coughed up some money, Comcast instantly found more bandwidth.

The problem that Netflix had with Comcast is that Comcast's own video-on-demand service was unaffected by the lack of bandwidth. If it had been, they would have magically found the bandwidth a long time ago. There's nothing wrong with prioritizing traffic based on content, so long as it is done even-handedly.

But at its core, the real problem in that particular case (and, for that matter, in most cases) is not a lack of net neutrality, but rather with monopoly abuse by the established cable and telco cartels. Comcast should not be allowed to have a video-on-demand service that competes against Netflix unless it divests itself of its wire infrastructure monopoly, because there is no feasible way to regulate Comcast in such a way that they can't take advantage of their government-granted wire monopoly to gain an unfair advantage over Netflix and others.

What this means is that at its deepest, the problem is not net neutrality at all, but rather an incompetent federal government that has been hopelessly lax at antitrust regulation for decades, and that needs to get off its lazy @$$ and impose common carrier provisions for communications infrastructure providers so that they'll no longer be allowed to simultaneously be content providers. One tiny change to the Federal Communications Act, and all these problems would be solved. Instantly. And we wouldn't even need to explain net neutrality to a bunch of computer-illiterate legislators to do it!

Not the "HD" part, but the whole: "why do I have to wait for broadcast when I can just download whatever I want. Everything should be on-demand."

Indeed. I wrote about it as part of a college scholarship application about 20 years ago. And it was obvious even way back then, including the HD part. The only things that weren't obvious were what HD-quality video would actually mean resolution-wise (because the standards were still in development), what sort of compression would be used, and what sort of networking hardware would be capable of delivering the necessary bandwidth.

Even before eternal September, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that high-definition video-on-demand content would be delivered over the Internet, and that it would bring about the gradual demise of broadcast and cable TV. Anybody who didn't recognize that inevitability back when gopher and NNTP were still popular was either not paying attention to the Internet yet or suffered from a serious lack of vision (or both).

That said, I expected fiber to the curb by 2005 or so, and I'm still waiting. I guess I didn't realize just how hard the entrenched monopoly interests would fight to preserve a doomed business model. But I digress.

This. Unfortunately, politicians and news media seem to lack the technical understanding to grasp this concept, as simple as it might seem to you or me, so here's a simple breakdown of what network neutrality is and is not, expressed using car analogies, for the technologically clueless:

The Internet is like a series of highways, interconnected. Your ISP is like a car dealer that sells you a vehicle that you can drive on those highways.

Under network neutrality, you can get in your car and drive somewhere, and your car gets roughly the same priority as every other car. However, if an ambulance comes, you still have to pull over to the side of the road, because the ambulance (a real-time video stream) getting to the heart attack victim (a video player) a few seconds sooner is more important than you getting to Wal-Mart (a web page) a few minutes sooner. Similarly, if you're driving a truck (bulk data), you might be delayed occasionally to make room for passenger cars.

With network neutrality, different roads have different speed limits (bandwidth). And automobile dealers (ISPs) can charge you more money for cars that can go faster, to take maximum advantage of those speed limits on distant roads.

With network neutrality, however, if your car dealer's owner also owns a grocery store, he or she cannot install a limiter that limits your car to 35 MPH when driving to a competing grocery store unless it also limits your car when driving to his or her own grocery store. Similarly, he or she cannot install a rocket engine that gives your car a speed boost when driving to his or her grocery store without designing it to also give the same boost when driving to other local grocery stores.

You do realize just how trivial it is today to generate lists of people and their addresses that are not likely to vote?

That's completely and utterly irrelevant. If you're even bringing up that issue, it means you completely misread what I said, which was that the people on the list are all legitimate voters, not the people voting under those names.

In fact, the very next paragraph began with "So assuming you live in one of the 33 states that require some form of ID...". If you couldn't read past the first paragraph before jumping to an invalid conclusion about what I said, I see little need to read past your first sentence to determine that you're wrong.

With that said, on the issue of voter ID laws, those are mostly unnecessary. Why? Because you only have to be wrong once, and then you're absolutely screwed, as in a felony conviction with a multi-year jail sentence. Nobody in his or her right mind would try to pull off a conspiracy of that sort, particularly given how likely it is that you'd get caught. After all, there would be witnesses to any such crime who could likely identify you, and you'd probably be on at least one security camera near the polling place, which means if you were wrong about that person not voting, your mug shot would end up on the evening news with a high degree of probability.

But again, I made perfectly clear in the original post that I don't have any objection to them making that airtight by assigning photo IDs for voting. (Such a system should, however, be entirely separate from drivers' licenses so that the database can be readily accessed by poll workers to look up voters by name and address if they forget to bring their cards.)

Article I, section 8.10 of the Constitution: "To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offenses against the Law of Nations" meaning that once you leave coastal waters you are explicitly under Federal jurisdiction.

Arguably, it says that the federal government is allowed to prosecute international law violations and serious offenses like felonies and piracy, but not penny-ante fishing regulations.

“What kind of a mad prosecutor would try to send him up for 20 years?” Justice Scalia asked.

Well, there are plenty of examples he can ask that question. Many other victims of mad prosecutors weren't so lucky, like Aaron Swartz.

And unfortunately, the fact that the chief justices don't seem to be aware that this is happening with alarming regularity is a big part of the reason that their decisions lately have seemed to side with just the sorts of mad prosecutors that do such things, with equally alarming regularity.

I do not believe that inventing the stupidest possible interpretation of a law and enforcing it with vigor is a very good approach.

I actually think perhaps we should. If enough Congresspeople got nailed for Sarbox violations every time they said something potentially libelous in their political speeches and then threw out a printed copy of those speeches, they would either start to improve upon the utterly excremental quality of legislation that they currently write and pass with regularity or end up in jail, making room for people with a little common sense to fill their seats. Either way, IMO, it's a win-win.

And if you can make it past that part, some of SJ's best ad lib followed just moments thereafter. His slide remote died, and he went into an anecdote about Woz and a TV jammer.