Meanwhile a westlake will explain which felony exactly is committed by a person unable to pass on years of experience in the span of months, without the benefit of a degree/training in education.

Authoritarians, of both the "left" and "right" wings, love to use government force

Agreed, look no farther than reactions to the war on drugs. A local government banning Big Gulps because it's bad for you is government overreach into areas of your life and people should have the personal responsibility not to overuse, but we need to spend billions of dollars at the federal level to prevent people with no personal responsibility from smoking a plant they grew in their own backyard because it's bad for you.

I know I do.

Yeah, I can imagine you sitting there after a car wreck, horribly mangled, holding onto consciousness just so you can make sure that they take you to the best hospital. Wait! Is this ambulance fully accredited and received at least an A rating from Consumer Reports? No? Well, I'll just wait here for one that is.

Actually my suggestion was to let people decide whether or not to let GOG try to change it since not all users trust apps to change the firewall, not all firewalls allow apps to change it, and so on. Maybe for maximum paranoia there could be a setting that hides the uPNP option completely so nobody accidentally checks it.

Invitations are absolutely an awesome feature, but you know what would blow my socks off? If the GOG launcher handled all the bullshit firewall crap.

I still get games where the authors have failed to bother to document the port(s) their server uses or where they think it's awesome to have the server start up on a random port from 1024 to 65534. Usually 30 pages deep in the game forum there's a thread where you find posts like "i forwarded UDP 19228 and the server showed up on the browser for 30 seconds but nobody could connect and I couldn't get it to show up again after a restart". If, along with all the other brilliant work GOG has done to get the games working in current versions of windows, GOG's launcher popped up a window like steams cdkey window that said

Hosting a multiplayer game requires these ports:
    TCP 12421, TCP 12422, UDP 20000-20400
  [x] Use uPNP to request forwarding these ports on my firewall
  [x] Do not show this again
    [ OK ] [ Cancel ]

I think my socks loosened a bit just thinking about it.

Good question. The main problem with all of these is proof. How do you determine intent of a dropped packet? Was it congestion, a hardware failure, or did the ISP have it in for that packet specifically? The guy screaming "I'm gonna kill you!" is the top suspect when someone turns up dead, but the cops still have to prove he did it.

When Comcast was using Sandvine Comcast denied, denied, denied that they were doing anything to degrade their users' internet experience. It took the EFF and a massive coordinated traffic logging effort to prove that Comcast was lying about intentionally disabling Lotus Notes (and BitTorrent) connections.

a costlier service

There is very little technical reason for a byte of amazon to cost more than a byte of wikipedia. Once those packets reach the backbone networks (a process that Amazon and Wikipedia both pay for through their ISPs) they're essentially identical, except in the fact that Amazon has more money and they have more to lose if something were to happen to that packet, and that would be a real shame.

The original plan was simply "neutrality". All bytes are equal. More bytes can cost more money, but those additional bytes are equal too.

And that's where it started falling apart. Bytes delivered by copper all cost the same, bytes delivered by fiber all cost the same, bytes delivered by avian carrier all cost the same. Bytes delivered wirelessly... well, they cost the same too but some major neutrality players were doing deals with telcos to provide some services free on phones. Which was more important to them, neutrality? Or getting wikipedia to the mobile masses with no data charges? Well, as long as the net was mostly neutral (except when it suited them) it's a good thing, right? But hypocrisy is the moral rot, and rot spreads quickly.

Personally, I have two horses in this race: in my personal life I'm an internet user, at work I develop web applications. I had my experience with value-subtracted ISPs years ago. Before Time Warner traded an agreement not to compete here with Comcast for an agreement from Comcast not to compete elsewhere, one of our customers had Time Warner Cable at their office. One day I get an angry call from them that we're down. I check the status of our servers and say "no, we're up" and they insist we're down and I ask them if we're down why are they the only customer calling me. They insist. I do a traceroute from the development server and everything looks fine to me. They continue to insist. I remote into their computer and sure enough, the application isn't loading. I open a ticket with our colocation facility to let them know that some routing is fucked up specifically between IPs A and B. It's closed: nothing wrong. I tell them to call their ISP. TWC insists its on our end. I roll my eyes and mirror their database on the development server and call it a day. Day 2: we're "down" again. Neither the main server nor the development server are reachable from that customer now. TWC insists its on our end. I set up a mirror on our mail server. Day 3: we're down again. We have a three-way call with TWC. TWC insists it's on our end. I tell them that every single one of our customers using DSL are having no problems at all and offer to pay the cancellation fee so our customer has internet that works. (By this time I had reviewed all of our server logs and discovered that they were literally our only user in the city coming from TWC, everyone else had DSL). Tier 2 support is on the phone in 15 seconds. Now, this is probably about a decade or so ago, so these are not the exact words used but I won't forget the general gist of it any time soon:

Tier2: We changed a setting in their router to allow them to access their "business application". Everything should be fine now
Qz: Thank you. For future reference if we have other customers on TWC what setting is this so we can make sure it's configured correctly and avoid this problem in the future?
Tier2: Oh, it's not a setting that the customer can change.

So, what is the intent of a setting that blocks access to an ISP user's commonly used websites?

by telling carriers that they can't charge more for premium levels of service

Close.

The original plan was to tell carriers that they can't make Vonage and Skype a premium level service (add the voip package for only $15/mo!) to prevent them from competing with their phone service (only $9.99!). Or make Netflix an unusable service to stop customers from cutting cable. Or make browsing Amazon difficult because Barnes & Noble paid them to. Or sell 90% of the bandwidth they sold to me to their "fast lane" partners, while the sites I actually want to see get the last 10% of the bandwidth I paid for.

Much like the Occupy Movement, nobody took control to keep the message on point and eventually the whole thing devolved into a flaming mess, helped along by the telcos themselves spouting bullshit about how network neutrality meant you couldn't pay more for faster internet.

is your definition of that due to your political positions or is it a moral absolute?

Actually, it's pretty easy to decide if something is a moral absolute or not: If it's OK for everyone to do it then you can, if it's not OK for everyone to do it, then you Kant.

Tell me, what's on the horizon tomorrow that I can't do with my 100Mbps connection

Download two linux cd images in a second?

Please direct your attention towards the front of the cabin as our flight attendants demonstrate the safety features of this craft.

In the event of pressure loss, an oxygen mask will drop from the overhead compartment. Please pull the mask to extend it completely and start the flow of oxygen, then place the mask over your nose and mouth and place the strap around your head to hold it in place. Put on your mask before helping children or others in need of assistance.

In the event of power loss, bicycle pedals will extend from the floor of the cabin. Please pedal as if our lives depended on it

in the real world everyone is expendable except for the CEO

And that's why when Steve Jobs died, he was entombed along with all of his employees to care for him in his next life.

Or maybe he, too, was replaced.

If you type your Google password into some other website with this feature enabled, it automatically turns it into asterisks like this: *******

What were you doing you could be replaced that easily?

What the hell are you doing that you can't? News flash for you: we replace our President every 4 to 8 years and the sun still rises the next day. If you can't be replaced tomorrow, then someone done fucked up.

My complex straight up stopped signing for packages. You have a job to pay your rent? Tough tits, pay up for FedEx Saturday (or buy from amazon and time it for USPS Sunday delivery) .

The comments on that article are pretty interesting, most of them supporting the professor are along the lines of "These students absolutely are unprofessional! Who expects to keep their job after calling their boss a fucking moron?!"

They seem to miss the point that as a management class, these students expect to BE the boss, and they expect that there will be no repercussions when they tell their employee that they're a fucking moron.

Furthermore, now that these people will pass and become managers, I wouldn't be surprised if one of these people texts an employee telling them he is firing her because she wouldn't sleep with him, then when he loses his lawsuit and his money he'll go around telling everyone how an ugly bitch ruined his life.