Costs should be driven by the party responsible for the traffic being on the network. In the case of neflix traffic, that's _me_, the end recipient. And I've already ponied up to the cable company to cover their cost to transfer the bits to me. The cable co just wants to double dip.

I'm not against systemd. I'm just bummed that I have to leave Ubuntu to avoid it.

We don't like thinking it's inevitable yet. We like thinking that maybe the distros that we used to use and love can be convinced to stay the way we love them instead of growing apart.

The sum of energy being zero does not mean either particular component is zero. +apple can have scads of energy as long as -apple has negative scads, and transferring some +apple's energy to the wall does not change the total energy in the system. It does probably mean that -apple will catch up to and pass +apple, at which point the acceleration will be in the other direction but the exact behavior depends on relative speeds because that affects distances. (I'm ignoring the effect of gravitational interaction between the wall and -apple because the apples are going too fast to stay near it, and I'm ignoring -apple's impacts on +apple and the wall because someone above was saying that since negative matter isn't likely to have electrons it's not likely to have any trouble just sliding through.)

My way of remembering it is this: Dark matter is why large structures (galaxies) don't fly apart. Dark energy is why even larger structures (the universe) does.

I think this would put a hefty dent in the existing problem, but it brings up a new problem of what're they gonna do for a living during those 10 years? I haven't come up with a viable answer for that; all the income sources I can think of come down to: regulated industry - that's what we're trying to prevent; government (pension) - turns the job into a vacation factory (work for FCC for a year, get 10 off); nonregulated industry - best case, but depends on them having enough skills that aren't focused on how the regulated industry works. *shrug*

Why would they want to? Comcast can get a lot more done by throwing money at lobbying than by adding one more vote to the congressional race in whatever district they're incorporated in. Sure, I suppose if they were granted the right they'd have someone go cast that vote, but it's not important enough for them to actually work towards.

The important aspect is not so much that the companies are _former_ employers as that the companies are _future_ employers.

Unless I'm misreading it badly, he's not trying to justify the death penalty for carjacking; he's explaining why he wouldn't mourn for a carjacker. And I bet the typical just-robbed homeowner would agree.

So's your house and all your stuff. Doesn't stop people from feeling violated when their home gets robbed. People are not always strictly rational, and any successful society has to recognize that and deal with it.

sadly, the legal definition of good faith (as described at legal-disctionary.thefreedictionary.com) has no connection with due diligence; it's all about taking things at face value. If the automatic scanning program says it's a hit, that's enough for a good-faith belief, until enough bad hits are revealed to show that the scanner is not deserving of that faith. (Which also means that copyright holders have pretty much zero incentive to improve such scanners until forced to.)

The problem is that filing a take down notice only requires two assertions: that you own or are an agent for someone who owns the copyright being (allegedly) infringed, and that you have a good faith belief that there is infringement happening. The first is subject to perjury penalties, which (perhaps unintentionally) prevents prank takedowns from non-copyright-holders. The latter, however, is nearly impossible to disprove without a smoking-gun email, leaving anyone who really is a copyright holder free to scatter takedown requests like rice at a wedding.

It's STOL so it can work with smaller carriers, because the Marines insisted (they don't like being dependent on big Navy carriers for ground support flights, because sometimes they're not there). If it were just how many could fit on a regular carrier, they'd want them as small as possible instead of adding bulk and weight. And that would be fine except that adding the STOL equipment makes the plane bulkier (bad for stealth), heavier (bad for speed), and less maneuverable (barring vectored thrust tricks which sacrifice speed).

The Harrier was and is an engineering masterpiece, but it's still complicated to maintain, difficult to fly to its full potential, and neither stealth nor high speed were in its design goals. It's good at what it's meant to be, but it's not intended to be all things.

what's ironic is that one of China's more recent models appears to be based on the F-35 but without the attempt at VTOL hampering the other design goals and running up the cost.

Ick. Sounds like you got picked at random and the guy felt he had to go through all the motions he could think of. I think maybe I'll start taking that 'we will help if you get audited' offer from the online tax filing service :)