No, no it is not. This is a pretty blatant forgery - for a step-by-step walkthrough of what's obviously faked about it (including screenshots of the months-old Google Maps images and others that were used) please visit here.

Giving this any credence by saying the case "gets stranger" is like reading some 9/11 truther's article and saying that it makes the truth behind the attacks "more puzzling." It doesn't. It just shows that some people are either disconnected from the truth or (in this case) willing to actively fabricate things to obscure it.

Umm... if Russian is not "releasing" this, why is Russian state television showing this and claiming it is real?

DOES NOT COMPUTE... NOMAD ERROR? ERROR? ERROR? EXAMINE.

You seem to think that you understand the politics of Internet peering, but I don't think you actually do. Not trying to be a jerk, but if you haven't worked on this stuff at a large ISP this whole question seems far more black and white than it actually is.

The question of settlement-free peering vs. transit is almost as old as the Internet. Network A is bigger, and Network B is smaller (or Network A has significant in/out flows of traffic while Network B has largely unidirectional traffic). There are not many Network As out there and lots of Network Bs. Network A should not need to spend the money to put in direct links of whatever size to all the Network Bs out there. It makes sense to do so with other networks the size of Network A but not for private connections of whatever size Network B wants. So Network A says to Network B, "No free soup for you. Buy bandwidth from someone who does peer with me (or pays me to peer), or you can pay me to connect directly." If Network B is buying bandwidth from someone who doesn't have big enough connections to Network A (or doesn't want to pay for bigger connections) then there can be congestion.

This is not new. It is not unique to Netflix. It is very common, in fact, with anyone using Netflix's traditional cheap-ass bandwidth provider, Cogent. (I use cheap-ass not as a compliment to Cogent's low rates but as a descriptor of the quality of their peering and transit links.) You can make a reasonable argument that Netflix is unique and should be given a pass on paying for transit because of customers of the ISP wanting that data. But from the ISP's perspective that creates a slippery slope (because everybody's traffic is important to someone) and all the smaller networks will want the same exception... maybe even to the point of being willing to sue over it or stage a damaging publicity war over it like Netflix did. For the big ISPs, they feel the need to hold firm on this question to avoid that slippery slope.

It sucks that peering is inherently political, and besides that nobody likes Comcast. But please stop trying to make the Netflix peering thing sound like something more nefarious than it actually is.

I am not sure that you understand what "study" means in a modern scientific sense. If there are any of those showing the efficacy of homeopathy, please provide links - I am genuinely interested in seeing them (not snide, seriously).

Now I am not sure that you understand what homeopathy means. Read the linked Wiki page to understand (it involves ingesting ridiculously diluted chemicals to purportedly cure illnesses on the utterly unsubstantiated theories of "like cures like" and "water memory."

I think what you're referring to is naturopathy, which is a whole different kettle of fish. My wife is a big believer in naturopathy, and while I think some of it is touchy-feely new age quackery, there is no dispute that naturally occurring plants, herbs and other medicinal sources can be effective healing tools. So no argument there.

My personal $.02 is that many people who prefer naturopathic medicine and oppose GMOs - my wife among them - do so not from a scientific viewpoint but from a moral viewpoint. Many of us would much rather trust things that grow naturally than are made artificially. But while it may ultimately prove true that some GMOs are harmful, I strongly believe that we should come to that conclusion through scientific study, not because we "feel" that something lab-created is inferior to something made by human science.

Nature made the Black Plague, tobacco, lard and the Destroying Angel mushrooms, too. Just because it's natural doesn't necessarily make it better for you, or make man-created things bad.

A very fair point. All that I can say in response is that AT&T did all this advanced research and created these things in part because they were such a gigantic regulated monopoly, raking in so much cash, that they desperately needed to find things to spend money on that could be at least tangentially connected to their business.

To get a heavily regulated company to the point where they start innovating for the lulz of it, you have to have a pretty frickin' huge monopoly that generates reams of cash. The only modern analog I can think of is Microsoft Labs and all the cool stuff they have come up with over the past 20 years because Microsoft had more money than it knew what to do with. Other regulated companies that don't just print huge bundles of cash on a national or global basis - think Baby Bells, electric utilities, waste management companies - do not produce much in the way of innovation.

So, on balance, do you think you would get more innovation out of a hyper-behemoth regulated monopoly that had cash to spare, or would you rather have a bunch of non-regulated companies that had to compete to create new things?

Sorry, perhaps I should have been clearer that the divestiture was pursued by the Justice Department for those reasons. Companies may "split" but they don't pursue to "divest" themselves, but I thought that was implicit.

How do you regulate "forc[ing] them to do better?" Should the government have said "you need to come up with some new technology by year X that offers Y Mbps of broadband and offer it for $Z per month... or else?" even when that technology doesn't exist yet? Because while that sounds awesome it's not realistic. Even government mandates like MPG to car companies usually have targets to improve a certain percentage by an incremental target 15 or 20 years in the future, which is eons when it comes to the Internet.

I'm sorry if you disagree with my thesis, but I believe the evidence supports it strongly: regulation is generally synonymous with providing better customer service and avoiding pricing abuses. It is almost never synonymous with innovation and incentivizing new technologies or business models.

Umm, no. On a couple counts:

• Divestiture didn't have anything to do with attaching 3rd party devices to the phone network; you're thinking of the Carterfone decision from 1968, which was a full 16 years before AT&T was split up.
• AT&T was actually more heavily regulated before its divestiture, as a nationwide telecommunications monopoly. It was prevented from getting into whole lines of business (hence why it gave away UNIX because it couldn't sell it). The divestiture was pursued specifically to strip away the heavily regulated parts (the local telcos) from the largely unregulated parts (long distance, cable, etc.) See this book for more details. Under that regulation, think about the degree of innovation you got out of the Baby Bells... who were still pushing ISDN as "broadband" in the late '90s.
• The one piece of regulation that did actually manage to spur consumer-friendly innovation in telecom in recent memory was the 1996 Telecom Act, which actually reduced regulation in many areas (the "carrot" for telcos) while simultaneously increasing competition in others (the "stick"), such as forcing the Baby Bells to allow competitive access to their DSLAMs to provide DSL service, etc.

Regulation is very important in many industries, including telecommunications. But it is almost never synonymous with innovation.

Look, I think this is a stupid law, but it's not hard to see past your objections and see where the state is coming from.

It's not all that terribly hard to get a fake ID that will pass muster at a bar. (It's a different issue to get one that will pass muster at a TSA check, or passport application, for example.)

You accidentally let a 19-year-old in to drink with a fake ID, not a huge deal in terms of liability, right? You will probably get fined if he/she gets caught in a sting, worse if they get a DUI, but it's pretty understandable and unlikely to put your strip club out of business.

But let's say a 17-year-old has a good fake ID and gets a job stripping at your club. What is your liability if someone takes pictures and you are the source of "child porn?" What about if she is doing tricks on the side and, worse than abetting prostitution, you are abetting "child prostitution?" Repeat this same exercise for any number of potential legal violations.

It is in the interest of all the strip club owners that saying "this person is OK to be a person who shows their boobies for money" is in the hands of the state rather than the bartender or bouncer who interviewed her/him on their first day of work. (And also theoretically in the interest of anyone who goes to that club and wishes to film, proposition or otherwise engage them.) It sounds puritanical at first, but from a liability limitation perspective I think it is very defensible.

Just out of curiosity, what is your definition of "prudishness?"

Are we talking about the same Washington State that I live in? Because being the only (I believe) state in the US where you can both get a same-sex wedding and legally buy recreational (not medical) marijuana at a retail store does not scream "prudish" or "oppressive" to me.

Er, rich people did fund it, although it was in the form of taxes. Everyone else in the US and Soviet Union funded it too, because those governments shoveled nontrivial portions of their GDPs into the effort at the expense of using that money for things like reducing poverty, improving education or curing diseases.

Today, you have private companies spending their money on this effort instead, to the potential detriment of basically nobody but their own shareholders who voluntarily chose to take a risk on that investment. How can that possibly be a bad thing?

You know, the commercial aviation industry post-WWII was seen as nothing but a luxury for the "one percenters" of that day. Over time you evolved a deregulated airline market in the US that provided flight options for el cheapo travelers, first-class jet-setters and everyone in between. Maybe space flight will get there too but it doesn't do so without that first phase of being a toy for those entitled rich snobs who "just don't have the patience to take the train like the rest of us."

...as long as "anywhere" and "anytime" includes "that I have brought my appointment book with me." How often do you actually carry your appointment book with you?

Additionally, how do other people know when you're free for meetings? In our (very very large) company, everyone's schedules are visible in Exchange so people can tell when you are available and try to schedule a meeting at a time that's convenient to everyone. How does having an offline calendar work for you in that regard?

You're correct. The wavelength of Ka-band frequencies (26-40 GHz) happens to line up nicely with the size of a raindrop in flight. That leads to more atmospheric signal attenuation, but isn't necessarily a deal-breaker; it just means you need a bigger dish to receive it and a more powerful transmitter for the return channel. (The new generation of high-speed satellite Internet services all use Ka band, despite the "rain fade" issues, because the higher frequency enables higher data rates.) In the past, the satellite industry tended to rely on lower frequency bands (such as Ku and C) to save costs on dish/transmitter size because of this concern.

For a cellular service where you're looking laterally at a tower instead of straight up into the sky, the weather issue should be less of a big deal. However, you should note that any frequency that high up will have a very very hard time penetrating indoors through anything thicker than a single-pane window. So expect that this will be used for fixed home Internet applications where a receiver can be permanently mounted outdoors or near a window, rather than traditional cellphone usage that can happen anywhere you go indoors or outdoors.

"Detroit" is only nominally the home of the auto industry, and is maintained by Ford and GM as a brand of sorts to evoke classic American cars.

Other than executive offices, all the big auto manufacturing plants are situated - and nearly all the workers live - well outside the city itself, in the suburbs where (other than being impacted by Detroit's implosion and the overall Great Recession decline) things are pretty good.

So when you hear someone say "Detroit is fighting Tesla," thats not the case. Detroit couldn't fight Pawnee, Indiana and win two out of three. What they really actually mean is "Detroit" the brand/region, i.e. the corporations that employ hundreds of thousands of Michigan voters - and the suppliers/subcontractors/vendors to those companies, who probably employ as many if not more Michigan residents. So don't take Detroit's colossal f***up as any indication that the power of Ford/GM, its ecosystem and perhaps most importantly the UAW as being diminished in any way.

Not so much. It's not collusion, it's a cost/feature tradeoff. First, Qualcomm makes chipsets that support every carrier under the sun, so it has nothing to do with them. When a handset OEM goes to design their phone, they specify which carriers to support. Throwing bands at the wall to see what sticks is not a popular approach because each additional band you add has a cost in money (from Qualcomm for engineering and testing) and space (the radio filters themselves are physical). Usually Qualcomm will sell you a chipset that has X number of "slots" available for different frequencies to support, and you have to pick them. The more slots you want, the higher the BOM cost to you of the chipset, where even a few $ per unit can be a big deal in a competitive market.

On top of that, a device manufacturer will also spend millions of dollars to test and certify their their device with each carrier (as well as porting and testing the carrier's own unique "deck" of preloaded bloatw.... er, apps), and invest lots of engineering time. You don't want to support every carrier under the sun unless you really think they are going to bring you meaningful sales volumes to justify the time and resource expense.

That may be technically true, but it's not the way that the wireless business works. There's no such thing in the big-time cellular world as "it kinda sorta works on our network, so what the heck, why not?" Carriers don't want to take the chance of a bad performing device making a customer think the network sucks and cancel their contract as a result. Device makers don't want devices returned because they "sorta work." Neither wants the customer service hassle associated with it. So for both carriers and device makers, there is a powerful incentive to make sure a device works solidly on a particular carrier or they won't support it.