I think the idea is that you pay the ISP for a "Netflix booster", and then your Netflix traffic gets un-humped into the fast lane.

Is it just me, or does anyone else see the foolishness in one of the highest volume uses of the Internet also being one of the highest priority? That people are thinking of the huge transfers of pre-produced video as being something other than the dead last, lowest priority cheapest-per-byte traffic there is, is totally ridiculous.

The only things that should be "fast laned" (low latency) are VoIP, videoconferencing, interactive terminals, etc: most of which is either low-bandwidth or else niche. If "high priority" is what many peoples' connections are doing several hours per day, then our very sense of "priorities" is fucked up.

I can't say I'm a fan of the ISPs that Netflix is fighting with, but at the same time: Fuck Netflix. Netflix is a case study in how to do video technologically wrong and it seems like they're just totally ignoring common sense. Why shouldn't doing things like a luddite, be relatively expensive? (Really, having storage in your box is still considered prohibitively expensive? It sure wasn't expensive in 2000 with Tivo series 1. Things got worse since then?!?) If the pampered princess insists that her cake be delivered from the kitchen a bite at a time and the commoner just puts a whole slice on his plate and takes a bite at the table whenever he wants it, we expect the princess' servants to be rolling their eyes when she's not looking, embezzeling, etc.

When we have broken up the monopolies and our streets have conduits under them containing a dozen competing fibers, we can re-evaluate the tech from our position of abundance. Maybe video streaming won't be on-the-face-of-it-stupid, then. But that's the future, not today.

That's skirting around the issue - this wasn't a purchase, so it shouldn't have been distributed that way.

From what I was told, no. But a web belt does, and so does a rifle.

Neal Asher, Peter F Hamilton and James S. A. Corey (pen name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) - all do extremely good scifi series.

Really? I'd love to see scifi adventure stories written before 1730, when Colonel C. F. von Geissler introduced them into the German military... and thats not even the earliest use of rockets if you want to go as far back as the Chinese.

Interesting to see that version of history making the rounds - the pilgrims weren't kicked out of England for anything, they left because they felt they didn't have the freedom to oppress their group members under English law. So they went somewhere with no laws.

Hmm, a sort of environmental extortion racket? I like it, but somehow the Canadians don't strike me as quite the type to try it. Maybe I'm wrong about that. :)

Are you sure? Because while the relevant technologies will have no doubt advanced by 2025, the scale of the problem will be that much larger by that time as well. It's not obvious (to me anyway) how one would predict where the "sweet spot" would be, or if there even is going to be one -- it's entirely possible that the problems will continuously grow faster than the technology needed to solve them, so that it will never be cheaper or easier to combat climate change than it is today.

Er, why does it seem that?

Is it because any aliens that come here are going to want to take our resources? That seems unlikely, since any aliens capable of coming here would also be quite capable of gathering all the raw materials they need from other locations closer to wherever they came from -- avoiding interstellar freight costs is a huge incentive. (the exception might be "exotic" materials that can be found only on Earth, e.g. DNA, which might explain the cattle abductions -- but they only need samples of that since it's straightforward enough to duplicate as necessary)

Phooey. It only failed because they didn't use XML.

The standard IT solution for this problem is to encode the data as DNA and inject it into a few dozen cockroaches, which you then drive to the nearest KFC and set free.

If you ever need to restore from backup, just put some twinkies in a bowl outside your door, and some copies of your data will be available to you by morning.

Welcome to international rules of war. They're chock full of semi-absurdities like this. One of my favorite is the fact that the M2 .50 caliber machine gun is not classified as an anti-personnel weapon. That means you are not allowed to shoot people with it. You can, however, shoot it at any sort of military equipment, including any that may be carried or worn by an enemy soldier.

I say "semi-absurdities" because with all of these rules you can construct situations where they do make a difference and make war more "humane" (to the degree that makes sense). But you can also always construct common scenarios where they're absurd.

I addressed it squarely. Advertisers don't get information from Google, but don't complain (much) because Google is so effective at targeting. Apple, apparently, isn't, and so advertisers feel like they're not able to get adequate value.

You also completely ignored my point that if you want to know what advertisers see you can go look for yourself.