You don't need a formal declaration of war (i.e. to put the nation itself in a "state of war") to be engaged in a war, but I do agree that there is not a one-to-one correlation between military engagements and war. Saying we've been engaged in 13 wars with Congressional approval since 1945 is bit of an overstatement on halivar's part, since many of those were minor encounters in the grand scheme of things, but your seeming suggestion that none of those military engagements were also wars is a misstatement on your part. We may not have made a formal declaration of war against Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, or Afghanistan, but we were still engaged in the Vietnam War, Korean War, Iraq War, and the War in Afghanistan, all of which were done with Congressional approval.

Suggesting otherwise is just playing semantics and missing the point, since the OP's implication was that the President hasn't received Congressional approval since 1945 for these sorts of things, which is patently false.

Except that this fictional exchange you've created, in which Level 3 is extorting Verizon for more, is easily refuted by using either blog post. For instance, from Verizon:

Which is a nice way of saying, "Level 3 is refusing to negotiate rates for more capacity with us, so we've refused to give them more." Level 3's blog post also affirms that the issue is Verizon's refusal to act:

Even without the blog posts, it should be obvious your notion makes little business sense. Level 3 is in no business position to play hardball like you've suggested. If they sacrificed on performance as a ploy to double-dip (i.e. get both Netflix and a lower-tier ISP* like Verizon to pay), Netflix would simply take its traffic to a different Tier 1 ISP that doesn't play those sorts of games, since the double-dipping would be hurting their bottom line. Or, at the very least, they'd be calling out their own ISP, rather than calling out the customer's ISP.

On the other hand, as a lower-tier ISP, Verizon has a monopoly on its own end users: if you want to reach them, you MUST go through them. If Verizon tries to double-dip by getting money out of both the higher-tier ISP and its end users, the end users won't understand what's going on, and in many cases they lack any viable alternatives anyway. Meanwhile, the higher-tier ISP can't switch out for a different peer, since Verizon is the only way to get to those end users.

Besides which, it's not like Netflix's switch from Akamai to Level 3 took Verizon by surprise, as you suggest, since it happened way back in 2010 and has been working fine for most of that time. If there was a problem resulting from the switch, it would have come up before now. Which is to say, this isn't a "Wow! Level 3's traffic is suddenly skyrocketing and we can't keep up!" situation. Rather, it's almost certainly a, "Hey, that Comcast company had a good idea to try getting money out of both sides...let's see if we can do it too!" situation, given the timing of it all.

* A quick aside: I'm well aware that Verizon also maintains a Tier 1 network, but Tier 1 networks rarely connect directly to end users. That's what lower-tier networks do. Moreover, the defining characteristic of a Tier 1 network is that it enjoys free peering with other Tier 1 networks. As such, the Verizon network being discussed here is clearly not their Tier 1 network, but rather a lower-tier one they control (e.g. a Tier 2 or 3 network) that has direct access to their end customers.

By no means was I suggesting Amazon's actions absolve Apple of anything.

That said, you're only considering the one side of the market (i.e. whether they are abusing their near-monopoly), whereas I was addressing the other side of the market (i.e. whether they are abusing their near-monopsony). Just as it's illegal for a company to abuse their dominant position to force prices up since people lack alternative choices to purchase, so too is it illegal for a company to abuse their dominant position to force down the prices they're paying when their suppliers lack alternative choice to sell to. Negotiating is fine, but when you're essentially the only company buying, you have a legal responsibility to not abuse your position in those negotiations. The danger there is that they can keep forcing prices down to levels that are unsustainable for their suppliers.

Amazon does not seem to be abusing their near-monopoly, but they are almost certainly abusing their near-monopsony.

Setting aside Apple for the moment, there's nothing "theoretical" about Amazon engaging in actions of this sort. They've been doing it as long as Apple has, at least.

Using most favored nation clauses and the agency model, which is exactly what got Apple in trouble: http://www.selfpublishingrevie...
Leveraging their near-monopsony to try and gouge the publishers: http://www.teleread.com/ebooks...
Making hard-to-implement immediate demands when the publishers pushed back: http://www.thepassivevoice.com...
Delisting multiple publishers during re-negotiations: http://time.com/110412/amazon-...
Jacking shipping times from a few days to 3-5 weeks: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
The author's guild is outright accusing Amazon of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...

Spend 30 seconds Googling around. You'll be shocked at what all Amazon has already done when it comes to this industry, and it's only been getting worse in recent years. It's like looking inside the door at a sausage factory: you'd have wished you never looked.

He's partially correct. A large part of the issue was that they were accused of colluding in this regard. Another part, however, was that they combined Most Favored Nation clauses and the Agency Model for doing business. Neither of those latter two are considered illegal, in and of themselves, but together with the each other and the collusion that was alleged (e.g. there's a story about the execs from the publishers and Apple all getting together at a boathouse to talk), they were considered a form of price fixing. Effectively, the case made against them alleged that the publishers were being told, "You all get to control your own prices. All we demand is that you make sure we have the lowest price, or else that you jack up other's prices to match ours. Oh, and *nudge nudge* you're all making these decisions at the same time as each other."

Negotiating en masse isn't illegal, nor are MFN clauses or an agency model. But combining them all together, particularly if you suggest to the folks on the other side of the table that they work together for their mutual benefit? You run into some issues doing that.

The entire eBooks market was only making $3 billion in revenue in each of 2012 and 2013. And I think we'll all agree that the market of today is much larger than it was back in 2010, when Apple and the iPad entered the scene with their combination of an Agency Model and Most Favored Nation clauses, which were deemed to be anticompetitive when used together.

  Apple's share of the market in 2010 was somewhere between 10% and 20%, depending on who you believe (most suggest it was 10%, but let's go with 20% for the sake of argument, since it'd mean they'd have made more money). So, if we use 2012's numbers (which, again, will be larger than 2010's actual numbers), their revenue would have only been $600 million at most during that time. I'll admit that I am not an accountant, so I may be misusing these numbers, but as I understand it, their 30% cut for the agency model would be taken out of the $600 million, meaning they'd receive roughly $180 million in a year.

To say the least, you'd have a hard time making the case that the $180 million they made was somehow $450 million or more greater than the amount they'd have made had they not engaged in anticompetitive practices. Though, if I recall correctly, treble damages were being pursued, so that may explain a large chunk of the discrepancy. Even so, it is highly doubtful Apple benefitted by anywhere even in the ballpark of the amount they are being fined.

Some jurisdictions do have Son of Sam laws that are designed to keep criminals from profiting from their criminal pursuits, but from the Wikipedia entry, it sounds like they may be of questionable constitutionality (and that the court has been willing to throw them out), depending on how they are phrased and enforced.

Ok, for the sake of argument, let's say that the union president misread Tesla's management and that they are, in fact, neutral towards the idea of unionization. What of it? A large piece of what I said was that the OP had completely glossed over unions fighting against Tesla outside of the factories, and I provided an example of a large and well-known one doing so. Even if the employee's union isn't fighting Tesla, the point still stands: trade unions are attacking Tesla.

You're (I believe inadvertently) painting an inaccurate picture when it comes to Tesla's stance towards unions. Even if they are neutral towards employee unions (more on that in a minute), NADA is still one of the largest unions in the automotive industry, and has made no bones about the fact that they are opposed to Tesla's business model. Unions have been attacking Tesla from the start and continue to do so even now. Factory employee unions may not be a part of the fray yet, but they're hardly the only type of trade union.

Moreover, on the topic of employee unions, Musk may say he's neutral, but Tesla's actions make it clear that it is hardly neutral. From another article (emphasis mine):

And, contrary to your claims regarding Uber, it has been facing issues from trade unions, namely taxi, limo, and other professional driver unions across the country that have been campaigning extremely hard to keep Uber out. I'll grant that they are almost entirely operating against Uber at the city and state level, but that pressure on the governments is originating from the unions. Without the unions campaigning, the city governments likely wouldn't be getting involved at all.

That said, I do agree with you that the summary grossly missteps by suggesting that the issue of state-level protectionist regulators has much of anything to do with the complaints of small-government folks.

It's not just a matter of what could go wrong. It's a matter of what has already gone wrong. They've traded the possibility that a vulnerability will be used to compromise the system for the certainty that the system will be compromised from the get-go. The whole point of securing a system such as this one is to ensure the credibility of the results, but security (regardless of the variety) can't add credibility to something that never had it to begin with.

He only claimed that they paid no attention to user experience, not that they're shoddy at engineering things. The examples you provided actually demonstrate that point.

For instance, I read a few years back about how Bezos had then-recently hired designers to redo the website since its design seems like an over-crowded holdover from the '90s, before disregarding their ideas entirely because he couldn't bear to be without all of the stuff that's currently packed in. Likewise, their software for the Kindle Fire line can do some really neat stuff, but everything I've heard and seen indicates that it's sub-par from an experience perspective (e.g. unresponsive/laggy UI, inconsistent app designs/flows, disregard for common and obvious use cases). As for AWS and logistics, what of them? Logistics is entirely internal, while AWS isn't aimed at end users at all.

They can and do make cool stuff that's well-engineered, but there's a big difference between good engineering and good design. I, and I believe the OP, are accusing them of lacking the latter when it comes to their consumer-facing endeavors. Pretty much everything about Amazon feels like a cheap commodity, which is fine when I want cheap cables from their Amazon Basics line that I'll plug in once and never touch again, but isn't so good when it's something I'm interacting with on a daily basis, such as their site.

Kernighan wasn't involved until much later, according to Ritchie's own history of the language. C was a direct successor to B, which was Thompson's brainchild, and he was directly involved in much of the development of C, though Ritchie was the lead on it.

People often assume it was Kernighan and Ritchie because they co-authored the seminal book on the language (the eponymous K&R white book), but that book didn't even get published until almost 6 years after C was already complete.

Teams of researchers from around the globe competed for the $1,000,000 Netflix Prize way back in 2009, that would be awarded to the team that managed to improve the algorithm by even 10%. It took them the better part of a year to accomplish it, and you seem to think that a lone programmer can just get in there and knock out a lot of low-hanging fruit to substantially improve things?

I don't deny that there's always room for improvement (such as the example you provided), but suggesting that it can all be fixed by "hiring a programmer" is a bit naive.

You do realize that IMDb is a type of wiki, right? The tags are user-submitted. They're good for some stuff, but probably not so useful for the sorts of things Netflix likely needs them for. Besides which, IMDb is owned by Amazon, so there's likely all sorts of legal issues in using its data for their service.

I love it too, but just because I love it, doesn't mean that I don't also think it's something that could have turned out really badly. The video clearly shows a number of near misses, and the last thing I want landing on a fireworks barge is a flaming, sparking machine that fell from the sky. Considering these fireworks were all directly over the barges, any near misses he had were also over them.

Even so, that doesn't temper the fact that the video is absolutely outstanding. I'm just glad it turned out okay.