I think the reason for this is they all want to become the defacto-standard, they are all very keen to create a developer community around their toolset. Personally I like the UE4 / PhysX sales model since you don't pay until you make money from it. I'm interested in playing with these engines as a hobby but have no interest in writing a commercial game, If I was serious about developing and selling games, the license fees for any of the popular engines would be a very minor concern, it's a great example of a capitalist "win-win".

Selling model content to use in these engines is where the money is for individual devs/artists, kind of like the people who sold shovels during the gold rush. IIRC UE4 has some sort of public marketplace where you can release/sell models you have created.

Wow. Give us what we want or we will fuck you even harder.

Are you in the habit of erecting obvious strawmen, or was this particular bit of off-target re-interpretation just special for me?

Although it does apply to this group -- they're telling the government, "give us what we want, or we'll try to hose some good science" So perhaps your post wasn't a strawman after all. Perhaps you're just confused as to who the culprit is in this situation.

Many schools ban bare-shoulder outfits, anyway.

That's like saying "many people try to force others into doing stupid things, so anything I want to try to force you into is good, right and holy."

Some dumb-ass school rule stands as absolutely no legitimate justification for pop-culture repression of personal and consensual choice.

All this particular interest group is doing by going against good science is making is less likely they'll get what they want.

The world goes the way the most powerful choose it shall go. So it has ever been, and likely will continue to go for the foreseeable future. Going against the good things the powerful do is just one more very efficient way to get them to consider your desires irrelevant -- a really poor way of trying to get the powerful to use said power in your favor.

These people are not "natives", either. They didn't evolve there. They're immigrants and descendants of immigrants. just like all of us on the US mainland, basically anywhere but (probably) Africa. Perhaps what you meant to say was "descendents of the earliest known settlers." Or perhaps "invaders" is more accurate.

Another thought along the lines of the powerful do what the powerful want to do... do you think the earliest of these folks took the time to see if the other local life forms wanted them and their changes on and around these islands? Did the fish want to be speared, for instance?

It's all a matter of perspective and power. These people seem to have neither.

Good question. The main problem with all of these is proof. How do you determine intent of a dropped packet? Was it congestion, a hardware failure, or did the ISP have it in for that packet specifically? The guy screaming "I'm gonna kill you!" is the top suspect when someone turns up dead, but the cops still have to prove he did it.

When Comcast was using Sandvine Comcast denied, denied, denied that they were doing anything to degrade their users' internet experience. It took the EFF and a massive coordinated traffic logging effort to prove that Comcast was lying about intentionally disabling Lotus Notes (and BitTorrent) connections.

a costlier service

There is very little technical reason for a byte of amazon to cost more than a byte of wikipedia. Once those packets reach the backbone networks (a process that Amazon and Wikipedia both pay for through their ISPs) they're essentially identical, except in the fact that Amazon has more money and they have more to lose if something were to happen to that packet, and that would be a real shame.

The original plan was simply "neutrality". All bytes are equal. More bytes can cost more money, but those additional bytes are equal too.

And that's where it started falling apart. Bytes delivered by copper all cost the same, bytes delivered by fiber all cost the same, bytes delivered by avian carrier all cost the same. Bytes delivered wirelessly... well, they cost the same too but some major neutrality players were doing deals with telcos to provide some services free on phones. Which was more important to them, neutrality? Or getting wikipedia to the mobile masses with no data charges? Well, as long as the net was mostly neutral (except when it suited them) it's a good thing, right? But hypocrisy is the moral rot, and rot spreads quickly.

Personally, I have two horses in this race: in my personal life I'm an internet user, at work I develop web applications. I had my experience with value-subtracted ISPs years ago. Before Time Warner traded an agreement not to compete here with Comcast for an agreement from Comcast not to compete elsewhere, one of our customers had Time Warner Cable at their office. One day I get an angry call from them that we're down. I check the status of our servers and say "no, we're up" and they insist we're down and I ask them if we're down why are they the only customer calling me. They insist. I do a traceroute from the development server and everything looks fine to me. They continue to insist. I remote into their computer and sure enough, the application isn't loading. I open a ticket with our colocation facility to let them know that some routing is fucked up specifically between IPs A and B. It's closed: nothing wrong. I tell them to call their ISP. TWC insists its on our end. I roll my eyes and mirror their database on the development server and call it a day. Day 2: we're "down" again. Neither the main server nor the development server are reachable from that customer now. TWC insists its on our end. I set up a mirror on our mail server. Day 3: we're down again. We have a three-way call with TWC. TWC insists it's on our end. I tell them that every single one of our customers using DSL are having no problems at all and offer to pay the cancellation fee so our customer has internet that works. (By this time I had reviewed all of our server logs and discovered that they were literally our only user in the city coming from TWC, everyone else had DSL). Tier 2 support is on the phone in 15 seconds. Now, this is probably about a decade or so ago, so these are not the exact words used but I won't forget the general gist of it any time soon:

Tier2: We changed a setting in their router to allow them to access their "business application". Everything should be fine now
Qz: Thank you. For future reference if we have other customers on TWC what setting is this so we can make sure it's configured correctly and avoid this problem in the future?
Tier2: Oh, it's not a setting that the customer can change.

So, what is the intent of a setting that blocks access to an ISP user's commonly used websites?

It's a radio transmitter in a can. It would take an even larger departure from known physics to make it go boom. We have a good deal of experience with radio transmitters in space.

OK, I will try to restate in my baby talk since I don't remember this correctly.

Given that you are accelerating, the appearance to you is that you are doing so linearly, and time dilation is happening to you. It could appear to you that you reach your destination in a very short time, much shorter than light would allow. To the outside observer, however, time passes at a different rate and you never achieve light speed.

I am having an equally hard time thinking of how Earth is more habitable than Mars while atomic bombs are going off or impactors are impacting. If you wait a while, sure it's more habitable than Mars. But for that moment, no.

I suspect the article is full of half-truths, for example, legal aid for nutjobs to sue the government is nothing new, nor are the funds limited to green groups.

If you think this then you misunderstood what I said. Last paper I wrote went through about a dozen different people.

However, if they received information, and not just the usual constructive criticism, then the person should be cited. Merely having males review the paper doesn't mean that a male viewpoint has been considered in said paper, which is what I was trying to get at.

by telling carriers that they can't charge more for premium levels of service

Close.

The original plan was to tell carriers that they can't make Vonage and Skype a premium level service (add the voip package for only $15/mo!) to prevent them from competing with their phone service (only $9.99!). Or make Netflix an unusable service to stop customers from cutting cable. Or make browsing Amazon difficult because Barnes & Noble paid them to. Or sell 90% of the bandwidth they sold to me to their "fast lane" partners, while the sites I actually want to see get the last 10% of the bandwidth I paid for.

Much like the Occupy Movement, nobody took control to keep the message on point and eventually the whole thing devolved into a flaming mess, helped along by the telcos themselves spouting bullshit about how network neutrality meant you couldn't pay more for faster internet.