Thanks!

Who is Verizon not fucking over? I'm not even their customer and I feel like I need some lube, just from hearing about these things. I would never, ever buy any service from Verizon. Every business they're in, they seem to take pleasure in punishing their customers just for using what they tried to purchase.

It's bad enough dealing with Comcast, but thankfully I don't rely on them for all of my services (despite their best efforts) and Sprint treats me pretty well for cell service.

Surely you're not talking about Netflix? If you're an ISP, Netflix will peer with you for free at 8 major POPs. They will even give you caching servers to put at your border. If one service is consuming 75% of your transit, someone probably does have a busted model but it isn't Netflix.

To some extent I'm sure it's still happening. As a Comcast subscriber I have access to an online streaming service called "WatchESPN" that lets me watch various ESPN channels on my computers or phones, as long as I'm on my Comcast internet connection. I don't use it, but I guarantee you that part of my monthly fee is paying for it, just like I don't watch any of the ESPN TV channels but I know a big chunk of my monthly cable TV fee goes straight to them. Of course ESPN also offers ESPN3.com which requires an additional monthly subscription on its own.

There used to be a chart with a nice breakdown of how much the average cable subscriber's bill goes to each of the content providers. ESPN was by far the biggest chunk, Disney/ABC took a good portion, etc. I'd love to see a recent breakdown if anyone has one.

Wow, I hadn't thought about that in years! Got another laugh at its expense, thanks for the reminder. Big Rigs Over the Road Racing.

Serious question: why isn't Venezuela trading tankers of oil for tankers of fresh water? Doesn't have to be 1:1 of course. Surely there are nations that can provide excess water in return for cheap oil, at least for the time being.

Your post contains words that are known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

I haven't run into that anywhere, but I do know about a nice new trend I'm seeing in Tennessee. A lot of intersections are now getting right-turn arrows. Just after the light in your direction of travel turns red, and the opposing lanes get their green left-turn arrows as normal, a new green right-turn arrow lights up for you at the same time. Really helps to alleviate congestion.

So are you Steve Barkley?

FAA has historically taken this approach towards regulation and they catch flak for doing it that way, too. Many of the FARs exist because someone died doing XYZ in or with an aircraft, so they made a new rule that says you can't do XYZ in or with an aircraft.

RC aircraft have been a hobby for many years and most enthusiasts stick to a stringent set of (voluntary) safety rules developed by the Academy of Model Aeronautics. Now that "drones" have become popular, widely available, and relatively cheap, thousands of people are playing around with them and they aren't the responsible hobbyist type. You can get a camera capable quadcopter for under $100, they even sell one model at Wal-Mart. Many of the folks buying these couldn't care less about a voluntary code of safety, and I'm on the FAA's side here, there need to be rules with teeth to back them up.

Putting anything in the air for commercial purposes has always been heavily regulated and I for one don't see that as a problem.

Last I heard, a big part of Yelp's business model was to cold-call your business offering to hide those abysmal reviews for a small extortion^Wservice fee. I guess this company didn't play ball. It doesn't surprise me that a restaurant which has been hijacked on Google Maps is also suffering from a bunch of negative reviews on Yelp, someone is clearly targeting the business.

I don't want my DVM keeping any license holders' information. The draft is supposed to make veterans, not veterinarians!

Yeah, if waking up one day to find that most of your business has been handed over to another company is what passes for "notification" these days.

I hope Microsoft paid them handsomely.

Double bonus points, Jon died in 1998; if they can get to him, maybe we can sue Walt Disney and Sonny Bono for fucking up our copyright situation so badly.