I have a few issues with such a sentiment:

From the article Valve's policy is "was not under any obligation to repair, replace or provide a refund for a game where the consumer had not contacted and attempted to resolve the problem with the computer game developer". Whereas the assertion by ACCC states "It is a breach of the Australian Consumer Law for businesses to state that they do not give refunds under any circumstances, including for gifts and during sale".

I don't see a real issue here, Valve are essentially saying you at least need to make contact with the developer of the game first and attempt to get your issue rectified before they will step in (the "had not contacted and attempted to resolve the problem with the computer game developer" part), maybe I'm speaking a different english than Australia (or words mean different things over there) but this seems quite reasonable. If I buy something from a third party via either amazon / ebay and have an issue with it I'm pretty much required to at least speak to the supplier (through their messaging system so there is a record) before amazon / ebay get involved.

Also most of the "broken" games on steam have a common tag, "Early Access". I'm guessing if this lawsuit goes through the entire section will get locked off to Australia. Which brings up a interesting question, how well does Australian law and crowd funding get along?

While I doubt it is unique to 3d printing (I could be wrong though) but the simple pour into mould methods won't work without taking into account the relative densities of the metals involved (depending on how long they take to cool they may separate out anyway).

The real benefit I can see here would be from the ability to control how fast you move from one material to another which seems to be one of the major benefits (having the gentle transition of the alloy removes the transition point and the matching weak point).

What may be unique is the control that 3d printing offers, I'm sure someone can create http://www.3ders.org/images/bu... without using 3d printing but I'm also sure its not a quick / easy process.

Given the pushback from the supreme court and lack of fuck given by congress this is actually one of the few ways the FCC can actually enforce net neutrality (or in this case force the ISPs to say up front they are not neutral, which assuming an educated public should result in lost business to the non-net neutral ISPs).

Sorry that scenario doesn't fly:

http://www.cidr-report.org/cgi...

Netflix has peerings with:
        AS2828 XO-AS15 - XO Communications,US (Tier 1)
        AS55095 AS-NFLXCORP - Netflix Inc,US
        AS3257 TINET-BACKBONE Tinet SpA,DE (Tier 1)
        AS4436 AS-GTT-4436 - nLayer Communications, Inc.,US
        AS3356 LEVEL3 - Level 3 Communications, Inc.,US (Tier 1)
        AS16397 ALOG SOLUCOES DE TECNOLOGIA EM INFORMATICA S.A.,BR
        AS26592 ALOG SOLUCOES DE TECNOLOGIA EM INFORMATICA S.A.,BR (Tier 2 - Has large footprint in latin america).
        AS1299 TELIANET TeliaSonera International Carrier,SE (Tier 2 - Apparently the largest fiber providers in Europe).
        AS174 COGENT-174 - Cogent Communications,US (Tier 1)

So no this isn't a case of exclusive peering, Level 3 being such a large provider just happens to be the best connection between Verizon and Netflix.

Secondly, that whole thing of 'Level3 to Verizon: "Ok, that will be $X"' has no bearing on a peering agreement, the statement would have been more like "The link between us is congested, want to upgrade the link?" each side upgrades their switch (if neccesary) and they connect the cable / fiber (given that they are in the same location we are talking about a multimode fiber patch at the high end).

I can think of a simple counter to this statement, RSA (or any other major encryption scheme) are published algorithms whose security is decided by the strength of the keys used.

Given the GP's algorithm I see numerous points where I can choose my own keys / base passwords / padding words. These are defenses to stuff like rainbow tables and word lists and should deny an attacker any benefit over raw brute-forcing of the password (from say a hash).

For those sites which require frequent password changes and don't allow repeating passwords something as simple as tacking on a series of digits in order like "012" then "345", "678", "901", "234", etc. will make brute-forcing a password significantly more difficult (if you notice the sequence doesn't repeat immediately when you loop back around, there are 10 combinations so it has increased the difficulty by an order of magnitude). You can easily change this to other keys on the keyboard or leters of the alphabet etc to increase security without altering the algorithm itself (just like RSA the size of the keyspace dictates the security).

After dismantling one of my phones after a broken screen, higher pixel densities can probably be used to increase the resolution of projectors as well (most I come across don't pass 1024x768, the few that do are extremely expensive).

I'm concluding this after finding 3 layers in my phone's display, the digitizer then the screen and finally a backlight. I've been tempted to dismantle other screen of this type and get a 5W LED behind it to build my own projector, biggest problem was how to drive the display from something other than a phone.

In a pre-release phase, what other demand with there be? No consumers should be able to get it at that point. If Microsoft / Sony send a pre-release XBox / PS4 to some dev shop that is creating games for it they wouldn't be sending a single unit (how the hell would you test multiplayer?), also if the specs of the hardware change they have to send the updated hardware (where I believe the cost is covered by MS / Sony).

This isn't some large corporation which can absorb such costs, and they don't need the NDAs so you get to own the hardware and as they say at https://support.oculusvr.com/h... if you get a dev kit you are not automatically entitled to the newer versions.

If a one-per-customer is being enforced by requiring separate credit cards / e-mail / paypal addresses / street addresses you may need some external help.

Given the scalpers markup may not be that much per unit, they may need to get a certain number of units sold to validate investing both the cash and effort.

Simple reason its a problem, they only have a certain number of of the units (these are dev kits not consumer units). These units are probably not being sold with a high profit margin.

They want these units to get to people who will either provide apps for it (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ) or developer level feedback for bugs / improvements. When you are trying to get developers onboard with your platform and having scalpers doesn't help as it only increases the cost to develop for your platform.

Oculus isn't unique with this problem, I remember not getting a raspberry pi from the first batch yet finding it at 3-4 times the price on eBay (I had to wait a couple months for the next batch). Sadly, the same thing is going on with the beaglebone black atm.

While I would be inclined to agree with you, the fact that the exceptions pointed out by GP already exist seems to indicate regulatory / congress capture has already happened.

Providing information to the public may not work in this case.

As much as I agree with your statements (and would love to see them implemented), is that what the law says?

Until the law is updated to allow the ISPs to apply common sense to the decision your utopian vision will remain just that.

I don't believe you dealt with the GPs point, from what I'm reading in your post you have covered a normal ISP and (definition assumed from the GPs post) Tier 1 hosting (you put your own box in a cage at ISPs site).

If you buy a shared hosting account the ISP is hosting the content on their machines and based on your statement is not eligible for the protections you describe.

What legal argument do you have against google in this case?

Google is not the one abusing the EU law here, the tons of takedown submitters are.

I take issue with the spokesman's comment "not a good judgement", last I checked Google is not in the business of making judgements (and I'm happy they aren't), that is the job of a Judge. Prior to the ruling that started this whole mess, if google got a court order for a link or group of links to be taken down based on whatever law it was taken down. The EU is effectively trying to push the cost of enforcing this law onto google.

I'm not following you here, how is the robot defaming anyone? It did not write the article on said person.

I also don't agree this has anything to do with automation, if say wikipedia had a page that listed the CEOs of Merrill Lynch (and say included their most notable achievements / scandals) and this guy invoked his right to be forgotten there would be a gaping hole in that list (they didn't have a CEO from year X to Y?). If they put down something else and someone came across the scandal would anyone care that the right to be forgoten was invoked or would they just say that wikipedia is inaccurate?

I'd object to it even more than with automation because someone spent quite a bit of time researching and fact checking that data which is now wasted.

Remembering (early 2000s) my comp sci classes (and to a lesser degree higher math) I was pretty heavily outnumbered (compared to my classmates back then I'm black), the few girls in class had it even worse. As soon as I went to one of my electives (even something science like Bio or Chem) the makeup changed, e.g. enter the arts department and I was once again outnumbered but then again so were the white dudes (mostly women with a decent mix but still dominated by white chicks).

While I have no issues with diversity (I stand to benefit), I fail to see how facebook and family can do much about this other than they are currently doing (the various competions or http://tech.slashdot.org/story...). They could just hire the applicable minorities and have them stand around just to make up numbers, but I don't think that helps anyone.

I guess in their defense these companies should post the matching numbers of the diversity of the applicants, problem is that is near impossible due to not everyone gets called in for an interview and it would most definitely get called racist to require your resume to include your skin color (sex can probably be guessed with a high degree of accuracy).