Yes, Bell and Rogers are evil bastards, but in the Netflix Canada case, it's the Canadian divisions of the major movie/television production companies that are the villians. Like: Sony Pictures Canada, NBCUniversal Canada, etc, etc. (And yes, Bell and Rogers are somewhat involved, but in their role as content owners, not as ISPs.)

From what I understand, these big multi-national companies are not particularly happy with Netflix US, but they're kind of stuck because they have existing agreements and Netflix US has too many subscribers to ignore.

But then when it came time for Netflix and the movie/TV production companies to negotiate contracts for Canadian distribution, the productions companies said, "hey, wait, here's our chance to really stick it to Netflix. the Canadian market isn't that big and Netflix doesn't have a big presence there yet."

So they offered much worse deals to Netflix that Netflix just couldn't afford; or refused to license the content under any terms.

Basically, the people who own the content copyrights are starving Netflix Canada in hopes that it dies.

This hearing wasn't really about Usage Based Billing as a concept.

As is pretty common in these sorts of things, the terms of debate g0t all twisted around by the participants as they try to put forward their various agendas.

The real question being addressed was: in what ways can the big telco companies force their wholesale customers (the independent ISPs) to adopt certain billing practices on their retail customers?

The fact that the question, this time, was about UBB was incidental to the basic point.

Basically, the big telcos HATE having to make their last mile infrastructure available at wholesale rates to independent ISPs. But the regulator (the CRTC) forces them to do it and won't budge on that basic point.

So, instead, the big telcos are trying to make it unprofitable to run an independent ISP and drive them all out of business (while still, technically, offering wholesale access to their networks).

The latest tactic is to try to force the independent ISPs to offer the same terms of service to their retail customers as the big telcos offer to their retail customers. The thinking being that if the prices, bandwidth, data caps, etc, etc, are all exactly the same between the big telcos and the independent ISPs, then most users won't bother seeking out the independent ISPs and will just stick with the big telcos for internet access (as the customers already have a relationship with the big telcos for telephone or television access).

But, the big telcos have to go through the regulator (CRTC) in order to execute this plan to destroy service differentiation because the terms of the wholesale market are heavily regulated. (If they weren't, then the big telcos would just drop wholesale alltogether.)

So, this whole thing isn't really about Usage Based Billing as a general concept. It's about the big telcos trying to force their particular UBB plans on the retail customers of independent ISPs; as opposed to allowing the independent ISPs to adopt their own UBB plans with details different from the big telcos.

I've always thought that the opponents of a particular piece of legislation should be the ones who get to name it, rather than the supporters.

Supporters always pick names that sound good but disguise the details.

But if you can get the "I Hate Puppies and Apple Pie" bill passed, then there's probably some good legislation in there.

I'll have to disagree with your assertion that code reviews have no place in a workplace with diligent, meticulous developers; for the following reasons.

1. There are limits to how much even a diligent, meticulous, skilled person can spot errors in their own work. Yes, quality regression testing can catch a lot of stuff. But you'll still catch a few bugs in code reviews, no matter how good your team is individually. Maybe we can argue about diminishing returns, but that's a different point.

2. Code reviews help to spread familiarity with the code among more people in the team. So that when another team member has to fix something in the code Joe wrote (because Joe is on vacation this week), there's a good chance that this isn't the first time he's ever seen the code.

3. Code reviews spread good practices and knowledge. Your team is unlikely to be all equally knowledgeable in all areas, so code reviews are a good place to spread ideas around.

So, even if you have good regression testing and your programmers are diligent testers themselves, I'd still suggest looking at what well done code reviews can do for you.

It's my understanding that the CC companies are moving towards what you are talking about (store transaction tokens, not CC details). But the CC companies are very reluctant to really push all the merchants to upgrade their systems.

The merchants, of course, don't want to spend any money updating their systems. And the CC companies can't afford to simply cut off large numbers of merchants that won't upgrade or comply to guidelines.

I'll have to disagree with you there. The Communist Party of China absolutely wants to retain political control over China.

The problem they face, which causes things like the Google situation, is that they in order to avoid large scale revolt, they need to maintain a high economic growth rate. And totalitarian economies aren't particularly good at getting economies to grow. So the Party is trying to have a sort-of free market economy while still denying the Chinese people political choice.

But having economic freedom but not political freedom naturally creates friction and strange situations. Like the Google one.
 

When a true random sampling of internet users shows 80%+ of those users using browsers with good HTML 5 support, then I'll start using HTML 5.

Until then, as an internet developer for a small business, it's still HTML 4. We don't have the money to do both and we have to go where the users are.

I'm tired of all these artist/journalist GGs. Let's get the job back to it's proper political patronage role. Forget about political correctness, the criteria should be: which old white guy raised the most money for the party in power.

The thing is, Google wasn't really making money in China. They failed to take much search market share from the incumbents (particularly Baidu) and their China operations were costly.

This has led many, myself included, to think that the whole free speech and hacking angle that Google is now adopting is just a smokescreen. It lets them save face and leave a market they've failed in while getting kudos from the internet community for standing up to censorship.

The primary evidence for this idea is that China has the same censorship and government hacking policies today as it did years ago when Google entered the China market, so why leave now? Because they've failed to meet market share and profit targets.

It's hard to get too excited about new web stuff because as a web developer, the answer to "when can I start using the new stuff in my sites" is always "when 90%+ of my visitors have browsers that support it."

And given the excruciatingly slow rates of: IE losing market share, MS implementing new technologies in IE, and users upgrading to newer versions of IE; the answer to that 90%+ question for HTML5 will be measured in years from now.

Note that the Torvalds article referenced is one year old (2 Oct 2008). The SSD space has, of course, changed a lot in the past year.

Well, it's sort of a moot question because we're moving towards drive-by-wire cars even if we keep the wheel and two pedals interface. Mechanical linkage between steering wheel and wheels will be gone in a decade or so.

Hey, Miguel, just to balance things out, how about you discuss a few Microsoft products/technologies/protocols that you think are utter crap, that you'd never touch with a 1000-foot pole, and that you think the Open Source community would be crazy create an open source implementation of.

In preparing your argument, you did cherry-pick your units a bit. For a counter example, explain to me how the ratio of yards in a mile is a useful, everyday ratio.

If the older systems consistently used ratios of 2, or 12, or 16, your argument would have some real merit. But the historical hodge-podge of ratios make comprehensive use of them very problematic.