Yeah, i don't see how their supposed 'netflix is going to extort us' scare is supposed to work. Everything I remember about how the internet works pretty much invalidates the idea.

I think they're looking at how cable companies have to pay content providers to broadcast their content.

Disney, ESPN, CNN, etc all charge the cable company for their content. If the cable company doesn't pay, then their customers don't get the channels.

Will this happen with websites or Netflix? It doesn't seem possible, yet it's hard to know just where all this is going.

Consider facebook. What would happen if suddenly facebook demanded an ISP pay them for access by the ISP's customers? Who would the customers blame? Would they simply give up on facebook or would they hound their ISP to pay up?

there was no socialism in east-germany. there was none in east-europe. that was fascism with a tiny bit of communism-appearence thrown in. socialism is found in scandinavia, belgium, netherlands, france, and the former western-germany.

Most Western European countries are mixed economies, mostly capitalist, with some socialism, and a welfare state.

East Germany and the Soviet Union really bought into the idea of Socialism: the state owned everything. Private property was outlawed. You could go to jail for making a profit.

The East Germans were so committed to the idea that the state owned everything that they believed they had a right to build an enormous wall to keep the governments property (people) from escaping to the West.

Reminds me a little of some work done by Terje Mathisen, an expert assembly language programmer. Not exactly that same as the exploit, but probably interesting to a few slashdotters. I'll let him describe it:

"The most complicated code I have ever written is/was a piece of executable text, in order to be able to send binary data over very early text-only email systems:

"Minimum possible amount of self-modification (a single two-byte backwards branch), a first-level bootstrap that fits in two 64-byte lines including a Copyright notice and which survives the most common forms of reformatting, including replacing the CRLF line terminator by any zero, one or two byte sequence. This piece of code picks up the next few lines, combining pairs of characters into arbitrary byte values before flushing the prefetch cache by branching into the newly decoded second-level bootstrap. (Everything uses only the ~70 different ascii codes which are blessed by the MIME standard as never requiring encoding or escape sequences.)

"This second level consists of a _very_ compact BASE64 decode which takes the remainder of the input and re-generates the original binary which it can either execute in place or write to disk.

In all aspects of education, from primary school to university, the growing swarms of administrators soak up the budget. In some school systems, they vastly outnumber the actual teachers, have better pay, and yet contribute nothing to the operation of the schools.

Don't forget those in the construction industry. Like administrators, they contribute where it counts: in the voting booth where they help elect those that will continue to increase spending on that abstraction "education" rather than on actual educators.

There are other advantages to shrinking components. Higher clock rates become possible.

You'd think so, but the problem is global interconnect. Not gates. It was all the way back at the 250nm node when interconnect and gate delay were about the same.

At the 28nm node, wire delay is responsible for something like 80% of the time it takes for signals to work their way through a circuit.

And it some cases inverters are actually used to help signals propagate more quickly down long wires. In other words, long wires are so slow compared to gates that adding gates can speed things up!

We're already at the point where 22nm components are more expensive per transistor than those at 28nm.

Previous shrinks lowered the cost of each transistor. It doesn't look like it's going to happen after 28nm.

I believe many ISPs are actively sabotaging customer's connections to some of the internet's content

They don't have to. The protocols we use are more than capable of screwing with things.

Consider TCP: the protocol is BY DESIGN meant to exponentially increase the amount of data dumped on a link until it overloads and begins dropping packets. TCP then throttles for a little while and then soon goes back to bashing the network with packets until it breaks again.

Oh, it's a bad thing, depending on which way you look at it. For union busters this means you can finally sacrifice the weak and infirm on the altar of efficiency.

Wait. Are you talking about the children or the teachers?

Well, maybe.

Many of the worst and violent crimes are committed by men age 16-24.

Now look at this.

Notice that nice peak in the crime rate around 1992? Many of those crimes were committed by people born in the 60s -- a turbulent, uncertain time, and the 70s -- a rotten decade with a corrupt or weak presidents, increasing unemployment, inflation, and plenty of other rottenness.

I don't think it's too much of a stretch to believe that that sort of environment helps turn some children into violent criminals.

We have in some ways similar situation today. While some groups seem to be enjoying the recovery (baby-boomers, especially) many others are struggling. Young people -- those forming families right now -- have been left behind.

And I expect children being born into that world are having a tough time -- and in 16-24 years, we'll start to see the consequences.

Drivers depend on feedback from the car to help them make necessary adjustments.

If a curve isn't banked enough, the car shouldn't fool the driver into thinking that it is banked enough.

That feeling one gets when the car leans towards the outside of the curve is telling the driver to slow down!

Water like other materials expands when it gets warmer.

Just a nit-pick, but water's maximum density is actually at about 4C.

That means as it cools below 4C, it begins to expand again. If it didn't, ice wouldn't float!

And that little fact is almost entirely due to Congress' inability to think past pork and the next re election cycle.

So much of the budget is off-limits (social security and medicare) that the only areas left vulnerable to cutting are things like NASA.

The USA has locked itself into forced spending in some areas and it's squeezing other areas.

You probably live in a big city with actual choices. In my small town, I have ONE CHOICE for cable TV, and ONE CHOICE for internet, unless you count satellite or wireless options.

And why shouldn't we count satellite and wireless?

I use Fios for internet, TheDish for TV, and I have a cell phone tether plan when I want to use my laptop on the road.

I agree that satellite internet access is probably a mistake unless you have no choice, but a 4G access point or tethered cell phone is really impressive for something that's wireless.

I routinely got 10Mbps and sub 100ms ping times while staying on a horse farm in the middle of no where.

Explore your options and force providers to compete.