Once you get to be too big to fail, you also become too big to jail. Banksters like Jamie Dimon would simply call the fed and ask it to call off this investigation or that probe. So it is beyond question lack of moral compass helps the big companies. It is when they are small people are debating about it.

These providers dish out individual streams! They seem to know what I might like and watch next!! Do they need Nielsen? That company's business model has gone kaput. The market has moved on.

I think it might be the creative aspect of it. The social climate of these conspiracy scenes seems to revolve around the idea that everyone will refrain from debunking each other's theories, even if they clash logically. So you get to invent your own take on the course of events and underlying motives of the different actors in the conspiracy and nobody gets to call you out on it.

When I was maybe 10 or 11 I used to enjoy fantasizing about secret tunnels and stuff run by ancient secret organizations, so I can kind of relate.

It helps to meddle with creative hobbies like visual art or music, or indeed creative writing if that's what you like.

This Amygdala

What difference does it make? Instead of pontificating without reading the press summary slashdotters would pontificate without reading the original article. The difference is like that joke about the $unfairly_maligned_ethnic berating his son, "You ran behind the bus all the way home to save the bus fare? Idiot! you could have run behind the taxi and saved taxi fare!"

Most pathologists, surgeons, medical students, anatomists, all of them never find the real amygdala. They find a conveniently and conspicuously presented fake amygdala and stop the search prematurely. All the while the real amygdala is hiding in the background, communicating with the fake amygdala using undetectable chemical signals.

There is only one recorded case of a human being playing possum, tricking a carrion bird into picking him up and then tickled the bird with its own feather when it was near a high way, thus making drop him. Then he hitch hiked back to civilization. I am proud to say he is an alumnus of my alma mater.

That is why you are posting anonymously to slash dot? Can't you at least use your three decade old dorm addresses as your handle so that you could claim, "they can find me if they dig deep enough:.

I am sure there are many bigger companies that do it. Sometimes using contractors of contractors to create deniability and to create sacrificial scape goats. I would be greatly surprised if this Uber honcho is the first one to think of smearing and trashing journalists who are critical of them. The bigger companies are older, wiser and they realize the liability involved if got caught. So they must be doing it lot more discreetly, spending way more money than necessary to insulate themselves from the actual actions.

Internet of Things: Yeah, but the industrial applications will be huge. Imagine a factory where each machine, or every subsystem in every machine, has a health status that updates in real time, based on sensor input (I imagine this is already in place in many factories). With a sufficiently advanced setup a lot of workers could probably be laid off.

Parallel Programming: Already in use by most of those who benefit from it.

3D printing: Already in use, but could have a lot of niche applications.

Web APIs: Massively in use already.

Embedded systems: Massively in use already. Whole classes of consumer-oriented embedded systems have come and gone, including mp3 players and feature phones.

What part of Microsoft in MCP you did not understand? There is no reasoning behind it. Other than, it looked like a great way to screw some competition way back when we could do it. The only other reasoning other than that is, "the newbie code monkey hacked it this way and his/her manager was too stupid to catch it code review. Now it is carved in stone".

In other words, the reasons are either malice or incompetence.

We have all gone through our freshman chemistry, where they first talk about ideal gas, and then say nah, it does not that work that way but there is a slightly better approximation called Perfect gas, and then finally let the cat out of the bag with the Real gas. Most people just muddle their way through that and never worry about it. Except for the aerospace majors who end up memorizing one plus gamma minus one by gamma times mach numbered squared whole raised to gamma minus one by gamma, something seared into memory so hard it would not go away even after twenty five years. Damn you Zucrow !

Same way the ideal gas situation of FCC doing its stuff and the invisible hand of the free market doing its stuff and presto you got fantastic internet speed at the low low price of 9.99$ a month. The real gas situation is, all these companies raking money hand over fist lobby the politicians, the FCC, create misinformation campaign and they continue to exploit their customer base. Pressure builds till some disruptive technology comes in, cherry picks the customers and they leave in droves.

One possibility: It could be cell phone companies stringing up fiber up to street corner pillar boxes, and do the last 100 yards over the air with WiFi or a femto-cell network or something. The only true advantage the cable/phone ISPs have is the actual wire to different parts of the home via cat5 cable. But most homes use a router and use WiFi anyway. Someone could run fiber up to street corner pillar boxes, install a WiFi router per customer and cherry pick lots of customers who don't need more than a few WiFi devices. Wireless in the loop is quite well known and is actually deployed in many parts of India and Africa. My old prof Ashok has been talking about it for a long time.

But there could be other such technologies that peel of some serious segments of the captive market of the cable giants. Cable giants too would not sit idle. They would be the first to spot the threat and possibly buy these companies, or adjust their prices in different markets to keep these dogs chomping at their heels just out of reach. Somehow or the other, where such technologies are viable prices would come down. Where it is not viable, the customers would be at the mercy of these corporations

FedEx and UPS are not serving 80% of the country (by area, probably 10% by population). But at least they get US Postal Service. But the current generation of ISPs are suing to make sure government does not provide an alternative even to the market they don't want to serve.

This thing that you're describing is called sleep paralysis. Sleep paralysis is a state where you are still dreaming, but you are also partially aware of your surroundings (mainly through hearing) and here is the scary part: you are strongly convinced that you are not dreaming and that you are in fact awake. This combination of dreaming while thinking that you are awake can make for some pretty strange and frightening experiences...

Sleep paralysis is often posed as an explanation for the widespread phenomenon of people experiencing nightly visits by evil entities such as witches and (in modern times) aliens.

They could put some sensors to detect electrical activity in the brain and record it during normal activity. If the temporal resolution of the recording is good, they might be able to sense the difference between processing of incoming stimuli and sending out response. Then when the alleged anesthetic is added, they could check to see if only the incoming signals are blocked, or the outgoing response is also blocked.

On the other hand these animals do not have long term memory, and they might never remember the terror like we do.

The first of those videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXgToM8cbBI) shows the smoke trail dispersing and becoming difficult to make out within about half a minute. The missile is launched at 1:20 into the video and the root of the trail is half gone at 1:50. I'd say there's maybe a 90-second window (at most) for anyone with an average smartphone camera who want to gather evidence of a launch with this missile system.

You also have to factor in that an unsuspecting civilian who is standing a couple of miles away will hear the launch about 10 seconds after it has happened and will most likely be confused by sound reflection and refraction against ground objects like houses and trees, which will make it difficult for them to locate the source of the sound quickly enough to get a good picture.