I have a hard time taking any zombie apocalypse plot seriously because of the following reasons: http://www.cracked.com/article....

I did enjoy "Shaun of the Dead" and "Zombieland".

Correction, that should read "eminent domain"

It depends. I had a quote for a place I used to work for about $22,000 to run fiber out to our location in an outer suburb. The ISP eventually did a project where they ran fiber down the street, and it cost us only 9 grand to tap into it. It should have been a lot less, but they ended up having to bore underground for 1/8 of a mile to get the fiber into our facility. The local power company wanted to charge an unreasonable amount of money to attach to the poles on our own property.

Not necessarily. A local municipality could build out a fiber network, maintain just the last mile connections and the layer 2 switching infrastructure, and lease that infrastructure to one or more ISPs who would link to the Internet and provide TV and phone service. US cable and phone providers don't rent out their infrastructure to other ISPs like this, at least not for general consumers, so there is no private business for the local municipality to to compete with.

Another option is to break up the local cable and telco monopolies. Separate the local loop from the Internet, TV, and phone service providers and put everyone on an equal footing.

A third option is for the local governments to seize the cable plant and infrastructure under public domain laws and give the cable operators and telcos a big middle finger. Considering how bad the cable, phone, and Internet service is in my region, I can't see how it would get any worse under government control.

Seriously? If it was just about power to run servers Netfilx would have sent them 100 bucks a month and called it a day.

Netflix gives the caching servers away for free, and once it's in place the ISP saves money on transit charges with the tier 1 backbones, Netflix saves money on transit charges, Netflix customers get better service because the video is served locally, and non-Netfilx subscribers get better service because congestion on peering connections is reduced. It's a win - win - win - win situation.

But, Comcast wants its pound of flesh. Outside estimates, (the deal is not public information), are that Netflix is paying Comcast between 25 and 50 million per year for a peering agreement. That's a lot more than the cost of electricity.

Because the coming time warner / comcast behemoth will be the ISP for a huge portion of the us. I have seen estimates between 30% and 50% percent of US Internet subscribers. Being the gateway to the Internet for that many people, and frequently the only choice in an area for high-speed Internet access, they will have tremendous leverage in negotiations with video providers, like Netfilx and Hulu. TWC/Comcast will have the power to pick winners and losers, and have already started flexing their muscles.

This is not a discussion about delivering a service better, it's about the power large ISPs have as gatekeepers between companies and potential customers. I am a Netflix subscriber, and I only have a 1.5 Mb connection. Netflix works exceptionally well for me. My ISP is the local phone company. I have friends and acquaintances on Time Warner with 15 and 20 Mb connections for whom Netflix was unwatchable until after they signed the peering agreement with TWC.

Frankly, that sound like a eugenics argument. We have somewhere around 3 million births every year in the US. Our population will not shrink if a few thousand or tens of thousands more people die per year. However, the increased burden of illness could severely damage our economy and reduce everyone's well being. In addition, choosing vaccinations or not is not a matter of intelligence, but rather of ignorance. That is something that can not be cured by modern technology or by evolution.

It is my kid. I looked at all of the research I could on all of the vaccines on my daughter's schedule, and decided to get them all. In particular, I was hesitant about the chicken pox vaccination. Because seriously, who dies form chicken pox? Apparently, about 100 kids in the US per year, before immunization for the virus became widespread. As small as that rate is, the odds of her dying from chicken pox were greater than the odds of having a serious reaction to the vaccine.

The oral Polio vaccine comes to mind. It has a small but measurable chance of causing Polio and was banned for use in the US in 2000.

This is what modern westerners fail to understand. Without childhood immunizations we would be facing hundreds of thousands of childhood deaths each year in the US and Europe from preventable diseases. Our immunization programs have been so successful that modern parents don't know what it was like to loose siblings and classmates to measles or to see friends and relatives crippled by polio and have to be placed in an iron lung.

Yes, vaccines have problems. No, companies should not be sheltered from prosecution for producing dangerous medicines, but lets put everything in perspective. I'll gladly trade a few illnesses or deaths caused by vaccines for the mountain of dead caused by diseases.

http://www.unicef.org/immuniza...

Here is a rebuttal article http://scienceblogs.com/insole...

The proxy is most likely transparent. When a web browser attempts an HTTPS connection the firewall responds to the client as if it were the server and sends a self-signed public key. Then it makes a connection to the destination server in the client's stead. Firefox complained because corporate IT had not installed the firewall as a trusted CA, like they had when they installed Chrome and IE. Realistically, IE inherits its certs from Windows and certs can be installed via Active Directory.

This is an easy one.

User: "Hi, I'm getting an error message when I go to my bank site."

Tech Support: "Oh, that's normal. Just click here, check that box, and then OK. In the mean time, go to our Internet troubleshooter. It will make sure you never see this error again."

User: "Thanks! You've been exceptionally helpful and I'm going to send your supervisor a positive review!"

A computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself will form part of its operational matrix. And it shall be called... the Universe.

Limited? Perhaps they were, but they did provide for some thrilling television.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...