I read articles that said Google spent $500M advertising the MotoX.

How about the Federal Trade Commission auditors? Do you believe them? Because Google is operating under a 20 year consent decree which includes regular audits of compliance with their published privacy policy.

Google doesn't give, sell or otherwise provide user data to advertisers.

I know some of the engineers working on this, and what you say is not true. Google does offer (and provides and pays for) caching servers for ISPs who want them, but they actually don't do much to help achieve HD verified status, because Google is so heavily peered with everyone that that is almost never the bottleneck. This is all about getting ISPs to fix the last mile.

The US murder rate was 9X the UK murder rate when the UK banned guns. Since then, the gap has narrowed, not widened. If gun control were the answer, shouldn't it have gone the other direction, with guns becoming less available in the UK and remaining essentially unchanged (if not increasing) in the US?

The US murder rate was 9X the UK's before the UK banned guns. It's not the guns, it's the culture.

Yeah, that's what this report is: measuring how consistently an ISP can deliver HD bandwidth.

What got better was YouTube. They've switched to an approach that dynamically adjusts playback quality based on bandwidth available. However, that's only a band-aid over the real problem, which is lousy ISPs that don't consistently deliver what they promise. What YouTube really wants is ISPs that can always deliver HD streams with low latency.

This initiative is clearly focused on enabling consumers to demand better from their ISPs.

Indeed.

But only because of the principle of justification. If you read the criminal code of a state, you'll find that the statutes covering murder and manslaughter don't make any allowances for such situations, but there is a separate statute that defines justification as a general concept that overrides all of the rest of the criminal code. Often there's also a statute that specifically addresses justification in the context of use of deadly force, but that's just to clarify the corner cases, and not all criminal codes bother with it.

If you can't see that, then we probably have nothing to talk about.

You're presuming he had the option of picking and choosing what to reveal. He didn't. He took a mass of data and then had to decide what to do with it. He had no way of knowing that what he took wouldn't be discovered, so he had to act quickly to get out of the reach of the government. I mean, he could have just thrown himself on the government's mercy, but he was already proving that the government had been habitually violating the law, so that would have been stupid. So he didn't have time to go through the data himself before fleeing.

In escaping, though, it would also have been very unwise for him to retain possession of the data, particularly since he didn't want to simply hand it all over to the Chinese (not being a traitor). So, he took what I think was his only sensible course: He delivered the entire body of data to a reputable journalist -- one beyond the easy reach of government influence -- and then fled.

And, actually the Guardian has been responsible with their revelations. Although they published information about legal activities by the NSA which arguably didn't need to be published, they were careful not to reveal too much about methods and not to endanger any human assets.

So at the end of the day stuff was revealed that didn't need to be, but it was a relatively minor cost compared to the value obtained by revealing what we needed to know. I wrote more about that tradeoff in this post.

They will if their rating is HD Verified. If they're not doing so well... not so much. And if your area has multiple providers (unfortunately not as common as it should be) you can click on the "compare providers" to see if there's someone who can do better for you.

Google's clear motive here is to push the ISPs to provide consistently high bandwidth, so that YouTube works better.

Only if his revelation was unjustified.

If someone breaks into your house and is about to shoot your child, but you shoot them first, and they die, you have committed murder (or at least manslaughter). But the law includes a general provision that lets you off the hook: justification. If you committed your crime in order to prevent a greater crime, the law does not hold you accountable.

The principle of justification is a general one, which can and does override absolutely any other statute.

The NSA was clearly perpetrating a greater crime upon the American people than Snowden did by revealing their crime.

Of course the school district has no control. I was talking about a much larger and farther-reaching societal dysfunction. Schools just have to work with what they have.

I thought the bundling argument was weak at best (and that what the DoJ really needed to go after MS for was the OEM agreements), but even if we grant their validity I don't see the parallel here. There's no way Chrome has anything like a monopoly share of the browser market, among other issues.

Still no actual arguments.

Or else get the younger generation accustomed to the idea that they're going to have to start small and gradually build up. That's the traditional pattern, but high mobility and greater wealth has convinced us that everyone should be able to buy a nice home in their 20s or 30s. The traditional pattern also led to much smaller homes, because people generally became able to trade up about the time their kids were leaving and they no longer needed the space.

Posting to undo accidental negative mod. Was going for "insightful", hit "redundant".