Reread my comment, I was responding to someone who likes M-D-Y because that's how he speaks: "event happened on May fifth, 2001"

I'm completely in agreement that it's stupid in written and datestamp formats and leading to confusion. I always use YYYY-MM-DD to avoid ambiguities.

My point was that the grandparent's argument only holds true for English. In many other common languages, the day comes first: "event happened on fifth of May", so the natural inclination of making written dates match speaking order doesn't apply.

Depends on the language. English lends itself to day followed by month, but the latin-derived languages tend to the opposite.

And Pixar still sells their software, Renderman, which is the leading 3D rendering engine in the movie industry.

Consider the scenario:

Product A has technical features X,Y,Z
Product B has technical features X and Y (not Z).... but it's OSS!

Most decision makers will then ask, what's OSS? And when you get into the weeds of explaining nuanced differences in licensing, they'll quickly decide that the features outweigh the license benefits.

So in other words, put Open Source on the table just like any other software. Don't try to differentiate it as "Open Source", because if you do, decisions makers and stakeholders will wonder why you're putting extra effort into justifying it.

Put it up with a support contract and necessary consultants just like any other piece of software and you'll get approval.

I personally know people who got audited because of contributions to the IRS watch list. And they love to claim that it was a coordinated political attack against the right wing.

It wasn't.

When "non profit" groups form that are closely aligned with or have explicit anti-government agendas (particularly against the IRS, tax code, and the claimed illegality of personal income tax) then it's a no brainer place to look for those skirting the law.

No one was intimidated, their tax reporting was just flagged for the extra-scrutiny pile.

Even for only neural simulation, this should be a no-brainer.

At $40,000 to perform the task of 9,000 PCs, you'd need the PCs to be $4.44 each in order to match the price to performance ratio of this board.

I imagine the kinds of computing networks being used for neural simulation research are well in excess of that $40,000 price tags, so why wait for mass-production to bring the price down further? There's value today. Unless of course something is horribly off in the reporting.

Congratulations, you've reinvented metered mail.

Anyone can get their own postal meter where they load it with prepaid funds and print out per-item postage labels with bulk pricing rates. These meters have scales built-in, provide options for picking different delivery rates, and most have feeders just like your printer so you drop in a stack of envelopes and let it go.

Far more efficient that sending someone to pick up stamps.

Would you be able to tell which one had the message and what the message is?

Which one had the message? Yes. Pattern detection would quickly pick out which file had a message. That's exactly the approach SETI uses.

Figuring out the message itself is a much more difficult problem; look at the research into the Voynich Manuscript to understand how this kind of thing would be tackled.

There are many other questions, specific to the situation at hand, but that general one is a good abstracted start that you can use to generate the questions that this community will thrive on.

But separate your answer from your question. Generally speaking the Slashdot users want to engage, and when you present something as a fully answered question akin to a thesis or whitepaper, it turns off this crowd. In that scenario you will only get contrarian responses at best.

Use the medium and the community for its strengths, rather than a comments section for an otherwise push-technology like the typical news website.

But again, consider your goals for the discussion, and structure your message to drive the kinds of responses you want. By this I mean the formatting, the voice the length, and the style rather than the content of your argument. In a technical analogy I'd point to the underlying SQL structure of a database query and response, rather than the specific field names requested (your argument) or data returned (responses).

That would have been a much better question.

My short hypothesis to this new question is that Netflix and Hulu are tied to a business model that requires focuses on ease of use. If you've used either of their apps, they are very simplistic, especially compared to an interface like iTunes which tries to do it all. Netflix and Hulu both focus on doing one thing in the digital distribution space, and doing it well.

In fact, it's quite telling that Apple, the undisputed king of focusing on user experience, has such a challenge in iTunes. Making a myriad of conflicting user scenarios straightforward and non-daunting is a very difficult task. Once are talking about offline storage, you open up your platform to be impacted by a lot of things that are outside your control. The most obvious ones being available space, library management, and available resource management. Imagine having to replicate all but the sharing functionality of DropBox, and do it within your simple media browsing and playback app. The result is going to be something akin to the monstrosity of iTunes.

If your question truly is "how much bandwidth is wasted", you didn't try to answer it. Instead you immediately veered off into a different argument about DRM = Streaming = BAD = Business Decisions.

If you want an answer, total up the estimates of YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu traffic and divide it by the estimated number of unique views (instead of repeat views).

Compare with the data rates of download-only services and make a case for whether or not instant availability is worth the sacrifice.

Do that, and this probably would have been the discussion you had hoped it to be.

1) The argument doesn't hold just because you swap the terms. Instead, the article should be titled "Why doesn't Netflix allow local caching of streamed content like Google Play?". Your entire argument is that there are business decisions at play, which has absolutely nothing to do with the technical delivery methods or hot-button issues like DRM and data caps. And the fact that this is driven by business decisions is the blatantly obvious answer that anyone in this community would give. So what is the value to the Slashdot community in your long post vs. an open-ended question?

2) I used Music because it's a clearer example of sequential changes in business models being driven by user behaviors rather than DRM or business decisions. Video digital distribution effectively happened later (bandwidth feasibility) and so the various models of distribution are being tested and offered simultaneously, and content providers are trying to learn from the Music example.

Your approach to this whole story makes it look like you're abusing your editorial privileges to pat yourself of the back for proving how smart you are. I'm sure this is unintentional, and you truly meant to inspire discussion. But the format and content of your message is insulting to your community who are here to engage, not to simply listen. (did you pay attention to the community vs. audience discussion in the beta shitshow?). John Katz has been mentioned elsewhere on this topic. As an editor he did the same thing back in the early 2000's, and the Slashdot community universally loathed him for it.

I said this elsewhere, but I'll repeat it here. If you ask us a question, let us answer it. Ask good questions, that are designed to draw out discussion, and we'll like you for it. Ask the obvious, and then proceed to give us the answer in sermon form before we get a word in edgewise, and you'll continue down the John Katz road.

Congratulations, you just said in 3 sentences what previously it took you 9 paragraphs and a misleading title to do.

You answered your own question, and pointed to several companies doing it in ways that are very public and which are well understood by the /. audience.

You didn't bring any new understanding, and you didn't prompt a meaningful discussion with an open-ended question. You simply ranted for 9 paragraphs about how Streaming and DRM collectively suck because you personally can't pre-download specific content from certain specific services.

Tips:
  Tailor your questions to your audience. If you know the answer already, the /. users probably already do as well. When that happens, rewrite your question to be open-ended!
  If your goal is to encourage discussion, ask the question, and then step back to let your audience answer it.
  Use the right terms, don't redefine them to mean something else just so it supports your argument.

Overall, you would have gotten a lot less flack if your post was:

What's the future of digital media delivery?
With recent focus on streaming media services, customers are caught in the battle between content producers and network provider data/bandwidth caps. Will more streaming services build in local caching like Spotify or Google Play? Will we see the end of DRM-protected content like iTunes? Will DRM become enshrined in cross-service standards like HTML proposals? Does anyone manage this problem well and make money at? Is the idea of personal content libraries dead? Is streaming a sustainable business model?

Everything you said in your original post would have been brought up and compared in the discussion threads and /.ers would be appreciative of the discussion instead of badmouthing your writing abilities and your non-argument.

DRM is a tool for ensuring copyright is respected.

In this case the parent is pretty clearly arguing copyright alone is insufficient because digital distribution has made supply and demand an ineffective tools for managing copyright.

DRM brings back the ability for publishers to use supply and demand economics by enforcing copyrights.