Not if netflix made it clear that the additional charge was due to comcast's extortion. Do you blame the store for the additional sales tax? No. So you shouldn't blame netflix for the comcast tax.

It's trivial. You just ask do a lookup on the source IP address on stream start. If that steam is initiated by a machine on comcast's network then you add the amount of streamed data to a running count for that user. At the end of the month divvy up the comcast extortion charge between all users that have streamed over comcast's network. If users start complaining just forward them to Comcast support.

netflix offered to set up a direct connection to comcast before at netflix's expense. but comcast declined, saying that netflix must pay.

this won't eat into their margins, it'll eat into their content budget, which directly affects me - a non-comcast customer. i'm pissed.

they offered to do that, and comcast declined.

... subsidized by those that steam netflix on NOT(comcast).

did you try sonic.net or other local providers? you might be able to get a decent DSL connection at a good price.

netflix should charge the comcast customers extra for every byte of data sent via a comcast connection.

actually, they should have paid, and then passed that charge directly on to comcast users as an additional 'comcast bandwidth guarantee' charge on their monthly netflix bill.

that way the rest of us don't have to pay for comcast's shitty policies.

I'm pissed about this. I'm a netflix subscriber, but not a comcast user, but presumably my netflix subscription is going to suffer because of this. or are netflix going to charge comcast subscribers more?

CTRL-O is your friend.

Only the most ignorant would be fooled like this. And for them, until they learn otherwise, the tools at least will make them productive. For everyone else, like I said, there's no illusion, only utility.

i'm not sure what you're talking about. for vs, at least, there's no illusion - you move controls around in the designer and the code changes. or, you change the code and the controls move on the designer. nothing is hidden. you want to write custom positioning code? go ahead. you want flow layout, there are controls that provide that (usable from code or within the designer).

crap tools are crap, yes. not all tools are crap, though.

red paint isn't going to stop the gammas from Ba137.

The ui builder in vs generates (and parses) code that you would have had to write anyway. It doesn't hide anything from you any more than photoshop hides the work of setting pixel values. Does having to calculate and type in coordinate values by hand make you a better programmer?