"...what will it take for general acceptance to finally take hold?"

For me? A reasonable belief that the recording will not become part of a centralized surveillance database of sightings of me and my fellow citizens that can be datamined decades from now. The same thing I want for ATM cameras, license plate scanners, and all the other increaslingly pervasive permanent, personally identifiable record systems. Reasonable expectation of privacy isn't just about whether I am concealed from perception, it is also about the reasonable belief that where I have been and what I've been doing will generally be forgotten if I'm not famous and it isn't criminal behavior or otherwise significantly offensive.

In short, I will become accepting when I believe the device shows the same degree of civil discretion and temporal fade that I would expect from a random stranger who sees me walk out of a strip club or hydroponics store (neither of which are my personal pecadillo, but the best I could come up with). I do not have that belief currently about Google Glass. It's the same motive that causes me to limit my use of Facebook (six logins of less than fifteen minutes each last year -- I counted). Problem with Google Glass is I can't choose when you are going to sacrifice my privacy to your corporate overlord's time- and GPS- stamped photo surveillance database.

If you had to change your pricing every 10 minutes how would you ever advertise anything?

Hmm, how could that possibly work? Let's ask a Slashdot user...

Would restaurants have dynamic menus with pricing that changes throughout the meal?

Got it in one. Most of it anyway. With unstable currencies, prices are updated rapidly and include a margin for risk. So there's a transaction cost that adds friction to the transaction when performed using that currency. If you've ever visited a small second or third world economy, you'd see it in action. I went to Indonesia during Suharto's last year, prices were volatile, exchange rates were written in chalk and updated all day long. US Dollars and Rupiah were both accepted most places, despite the rapidly changing exchange rate.

Phrases like "absolutely needed" rarely hold in economics. Everything is about relative value. Most supply and demand curves have an intersection, even if it's moving around rapidly. With a wide enough spread, every trade has a market.

My response would be that Netflix and Cogent aren't just sending unsolicited traffic to Verizon. It's Verizon's customers who're requesting the traffic by asking to stream video from Netflix.

That is a really strong counterpoint. Still, though, handling Netflix's bulk traffic really is cheaper than parcelling out to all the individual customers. But then I guess Verizon should just be charging their customers more if providing the service they want is expensive. Verizon isn't going after Netflix because it is impossible to bill the customer fairly. Verizon is going after Netflix because Netflix has deep pockets and Verizon wants an additional revenue stream on the back of their limited competition market, regardless of whether it is how a theoretical perfectly efficient free market would solve it. [feigned shock]Why, they're not capitalist idealists at all, this is just a money making thing![/feigned shock]

Cogent has an agreement with Verizon to exchange traffic â" which works fine until the massive amount of traffic from Netflix makes it a lopsided arrangement. Verizon wants more money from Cogent, and one of their negotiating tactics is simply to stop upgrading their infrastructure so that service degrades.

I'm a pretty rabid net neutrality guy, and as a disclaimer I've never worked for ISPs or long haul providers so I may have my head up my ass. But in this case, I'm tending to fall on the Verizon side of the argument. Peering is supposed to be a two-way street, and if it isn't, the peering is subject to negotiation. It may not be fair for Cogent to take the relatively easy money from giant, centralized Netflix outbound data handling and leave Verizon doing the more costly work of parcelling that data out to millions of endpoints without giving Verizon a piece of the action.

The problem of Verizon having a non-competitive (or reduced competition) supply of consumers to negotiate with is still there, and the outcome ultimately will be Netflix paying more for their connectivity, but at least the payment is being coupled to the right transaction.

The Pew Research Center and the Social Media Research Foundation analyzed thousands of twitter conversations going back to 2010. ... 'These maps provide insights into people's behavior in a way that complements and expands on traditional research methods ... '

It's a cookbook. Society is a fuzzy programmable machine, and we are rapidly advancing the science of computer aided psychological operations (CAPO). Widespread use of centralized insecure comm systems makes the research work really easy. Lambs to the slaughter.

DavidHumus notes "Maybe the bigger question is why is CEO pay so entirely disconnected from company performance?"

My question, if we're considering how we as a society should respond, is how changes in CEO pay and tax rates correlate to changes in the long-run GDP growth rate. If we're paying more and getting more, I'm all for it. If we're paying more and getting less, I'm opposed. If we decrease the high income tax rate, and lower the highest income tax bracket, and GDP growth rate increases, it is the right decision for society. If we do that and the GDP growth rate stays the same or falls, we are wasting money.

The nice thing is that we have good records going back to 1917, and from about 1950 to present we have both a steady change in tax policy (reducing the top income tax rate and lowering the top income tax bracket) and no major external shocks to the economy other than the OPEC crisis and attendant massive increase in the price of energy in the early 1970s. We can actually come up with a pretty solid estimate of this simple question: Are we getting our money's worth?

It's really the same question a restaurant owner asks himself when deciding how much to pay a dishwasher -- if I pay less, will I still get sufficiently clean dishes? If I pay more, will the dishes be enough cleaner to justify the expense? As a society we need to apply the same standard at the top brackets: to pay as little as we can while still getting the GDP performance we desire. Paying more than that is wasting money. Paying less than that is leaving GDP growth on the table. That is what we as a society care about, when it comes to allocating GDP -- maximizing the ROI.

The statement reads to me a lot like saber rattling. He basically says, "Remain neutral voluntarily, and don't challenge this next round of rules, or I will make you common carriers." That seems like an interesting approach. Mostly it kicks the can down the road, which is unfortunate since the cable and telco lobbies won't stop trying, but it does seem like it'll get the job done for now at least.

The last bullet point caught my attention:

6. Enhance competition. The Commission will look for opportunities to enhance Internet access competition. One obvious candidate for close examination was raised in Judge Silberman's separate opinion, namely legal restrictions on the ability of cities and towns to offer broadband services to consumers in their communities.

So is he saying, "Cut the crap with local ordinances prohibiting competition"? If so, big props to him. There are natural barriers to having sufficient competition for an efficient free market even under ideal conditions, but at least removing the fiat barriers would be nice.

Also: Beta is not an efficient interface for the primary authors of Slashdot's traffic generating content. Lean, static, and dense must remain a comment UI option or a big chunk of your content will disappear.

Just to be clear. You can pay UPS for priority shipping. They have several tiers of guarantees regarding transit time (standard, 2nd day, overnight, etc.) with different prices.

That's prioritization on a per-package basis, which ties the price difference to the individual shipment, not the sender or recipient.

What exactly would be wrong with ISPs having a "cheap but we'll throttle you first when load is high", and "expensive and unthrottled " tiers of service?

Nothing, if it is on the individual transaction. That's not what they've been talking about, though. They are talking about competing entities paying to be generally prioritized over their competitors.

It's more like an anti-theft service that when it thinks the laptop may have been stolen, it then turns on the camera to see who is using the laptop.

That would be me choosing to enlist my private sensors in a service that is specific to the use of those sensors. Two significant differences in this case: In the narrow sense, the user has not given informed consent to the use of his private sensors. In the broader sense, our society has not had a frank discussion about requiring access to a person's private sensors as a condition of the sale of an urelated product.

The app is comparing DNS records with a client-side database of cheat sites, and if it finds a match sending it to Valve's servers for verification & ban-hammer. It's not sending every site you visit, unless the only sites you visit were via DNS records used by cheat developers.

Compare: We record images using your laptop's webcam, but we only look at them if our software algorithm thinks the images show you doing something that violates our ToS.

Sure, we put a camera in your bathroom, but it's OK, we don't look at the footage.

Killing Net Neutrality Could Be Good For You

Killing shipping neutrality would enable Amazon to pay UPS for prioritized shipping, which could result in more Christmas packages arriving on time.

But the maximum societal value of carriage networks comes from their operators being common carriers; from all who need package transport, large and small, being able to ship the same size package for the same price and knowing that it will receive equal priority as the incumbents. It is a test that has been run on real economies, worldwide, over and over again. We already know the answer that maximizes long-run GDP growth. (as an aside, the most beneficial outcome also involves less competition than we would want for pure market-based optimization, because having enough independent carriage networks to overcome discriminatory profit-seeking would require a cost ineffective level of capital investment in competing networks)

Also, beta sucks. I am not the audience, I am one of the authors. If you kill the authors, you will kill your content. Ask yourself this question, Dice: Do you have the writing chops to compete with Ars Technica on their turf? Has any article on SlashBI generated the same traffic as a mediocre comment thread on Slashdot? Don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Make the right business decision.

Have a good week off, Slashdot -- see you next Monday.

displayed on a nerd=site where all negative comments about the quality of the site are hidden away as -1 or off topic

Don't look now, but your negative comment about the quality of this site is currently modded as +4 Interesting.

Ah-Ha! But that only proves the point! You see, they intentionally allowed your comment to be modded up so they can point to it and say, "See, we didn't mod that one into oblivion!" Tricksy Hobbitses!

Oh yeah, and, Fuck Beta.

Most of the unnecessary parts of code are there for clarity, to make the code less cryptic. Most of the cryptic stuff is cryptic because it has been condensed. Consider iterating with a counter:

for $i in ( 1..100 )

That's about as concise as it can possibly be, and still get the job done. Most languages get a little more verbose, to add specificity and clarity:

for ( int i = 1; i <= 100; i++ )

That specifies the type of the holder (int), that it should use include i=100 as the final iteration, and it explicitly states that i should be increased by 1 each time through. That's just a tiny example, but that is how most code is. It is as simple as possible, without becoming too noise-like, but no simpler. Some langauges, like PERL, even embrace becoming noise-like in their concision.

As for doing it with pictures instead of text, we try that every five or ten years. GUI IDEs, MDA, Rational Rose, UML, etc (there's some overlap there, but you get the picture).

I suspect the core problem is that code is a perfect model of a machine that solves a problem. The model necessarily must be at least as complex as the solution it represents. That could be done in pictures or with text glyphs. Why are text glyphs more successful? I'm guessing it is because we are a verbal kind of animal. Our brains are better adapted to doing precise IO and storage of complex notions with text than with pictures. It's also faster to enter complex and precise notions with the 40 or 50 handy binary switches on a keyboard than with the fuzzy analog mouse. But at this point I'm just spitballing, so on to another topic:

Fuck beta. I am not the audience, I am one of the authors of this site. I am Slashdot. This is a debate community. I will leave if it becomes some bullshit IT News 'zine. And I don't think Dice has the chops to beat the existing competitors in that space.