Seriously, how much language "innovation" do we need? The platform is huge and there's more than enough third-party libraries to satisfy any needs.

Well, if we could get a majority of people to start talking about risks and costs rationally it would be wonderful. As it is, you've got people criticizing solar plants because a few birds got fried. Never mind whatever problems the solar plant replaced. I think the risk/rewards on nuclear are acceptable but trying to get people to talk about nuclear in a rational way is difficult.

Facebook stock trades at 94x earnings. HP trades at 14x. Facebook stock is quite a bit more risky than HP stock because it has so much forward growth built into it already. Zuckerman treats Facebook stock like Monopoly money because it pretty much is.

I heard rumors from people working at Autonomy that they were shady long before the acquisition started. I kept hearing things like "If this were a US company the top management would be in jail" This kind of thing, where they were cooking the revenue numbers, involved a lot of people.

Yes, right on the money. This was Apotheker's deal to save the company and transform HP into a software company. He was doing everything he could to ramrod it through, I'm sure.

Interesting - apparently they were suing Deloitte and KPMG but have now dropped them from the lawsuit. It seems odd that they'd let the auditors off the hook.

HP is a multi-billion dollar corporation. In other words, they get to wear the big boy pants. Due diligence is part of the acquisition process and it's a breach of the HP board's fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to have gotten rooked so badly. I know people who worked at Autonomy prior to the acquisition and there were plenty of rumors going around about Autonomy's accounting shenanigans.

Lynch and Hussain may very well have committed fraud on HP. However, getting taken for $8B brings to mind the old saying about a fool and his money.

Yes - I still don't know what the point behind info is other than to be different than man.

The CO2 needs to be sequestered or you're just delaying the problem. So carbonating beverages and growing tomatoes with it is right out. Anything that doesn't put it back into long-term storage is not helping.

I wonder what standard of safety these carbon storage proposals are being held to? We've gone absolutely nuts on radioactive material storage but the reality is, even if the stuff gets out in 10,000 years it's going to create a fairly localized problem. Whereas if your CO2 storage springs a leak and dumps a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere that could have planet-wide repercussions.

Apple claims developers have made $15B since 2008. That's 6 years. If you divided it out equally, that $2.5B per year. In contrast, Adobe alone takes in $4B a year in revenues. Even if you assume that the market has grown substantially and 2013 developer payouts were half, that's still $7.5 billion.

The iOS marketplace is still a lot smaller than the general software marketplace in terms of revenue thanks to the ridiculously low prices Apple has pushed on app developers.

"That is correct, but you should be able to see that this is an unsustainable model. Let's say Netflix continues growing by leaps and bounds and absolutely dominates as the source of traffic on the Internet, even more so than it already does. L3 gets paid more and more by Netflix for their access bandwidth while Verizon gets absolutely nothing extra but is required to carry more and more load from L3."

The only reason that L3 would get paid more would be because Netflix was fully using their connection and getting their money's worth and needed to purchase additional bandwidth. Verizon would get paid more if either the number of customers increased OR their customers maxed out their bandwidth and needed faster connections. The reason Verizon would not get paid more is because Verizon is selling an oversubscribed service but likes to pretend that they are not.

So, what's really happening here is a mismatch between business models. When you buy a "business grade" Internet connection you pay more with the assumption that you are going to pump as much data down it 7x24 as you possibly can. You get what you contracted for.

When you purchase home internet connectivity, your price/bit/sec is considerably lower because it's on an oversubscribed network. However, the carrier will never say that, merely that your bandwidth isn't guaranteed. If you do try to use it 7x24 they'll try to find some way to wriggle out of the contract they made. And that's exactly what Verizon is doing here, by throttling the bandwidth from Netflix. Suppose all the traffic wasn't coming from Netflix. Would it make any difference? Not really, because as the L3 guy pointed out, the cost of the networknetwork hop is miniscule. Where it does cost is in the haul from the peering point to the house. So anything that increases the amount of traffic from the peering point to the house will cost Verizon money.

If someone were to come up with a peer-to-peer movie streaming service that ran entirely within Verizon's network but only on home connections they'd have a cow as well. What they really want is to be paid on a per-bit basis but that's not palatable in the consumer marketplace.

And when you order a product from Amazon and they pay FedEx to deliver it, FedEx doesn't give you another bill when they show up at your doorstep.

There are different payment models. Home Internet access has been sold for a long time as "x bits/sec" use as much or as little as you like. Internet traffic was traditionally bursty, without long sustained transmissions so ISPs got into the habit of oversubscribing their networks and holding onto as much of the money as they can.

Netflix pays their ISP (Level 3) quite a bit a of money to provide network access. And Verizon's customers (collectively) pay Verizon quite a bit of money to provide network access. The problem is that the way Internet access is priced it's in the ISP's best interest to discourage you from using the network while promising you more and charging you more.

Per packet pricing, charged to someone, would be one solution to this problem but it's not very popular with people who have gotten used to "all you can eat". I'd certainly hate having my Internet bills jump up and down on a monthly basis.

How is traffic ever going to be balanced between a last mile provider like Verizon and a backbone provider?

Historically, if my memory serves, ISPs paid backbones for access to the Internet, not the other way around. The cash flowed from ISPs to backbones because ISP customers paid for Internet access and then the ISP paid their upstream provider. Backbones didn't pay each other and set up peering arrangements because they realized it was pretty much a wash.

The way I see it, Verizon is trying to double dip. Their customers have paid them for bandwidth and a connection to other networks. Netflix has paid L3 for their internet connectivity and L3 has delivered up to the Verizon network. Verizon chooses to not provide adequate access even though their customers are the ones pulling the data from Netflix.

Level 3 doesn't pay Comcast for bandwidth. Why should they? Comcast customers have already paid Comcast for the links to their house and they're the ones pulling data from Level 3. Level 3's customers pay Level 3 to deliver to the edge of their network. As the Level 3 post points out, the cost for Verizon to add more bandwidth between the Level 3 network and the Verizon network is minimal.

You know, you can write hard to read code in C as well but most C doesn't turn as hard to read as most Perl.

Unreadable code is unmaintainable code. It may not be buggy but how do you know?