Does NTIA have Constitutional authority to pass laws? Did they pass a law giving the FCC the authority to pass laws? If not, the ruling of the court is (obviously) correct.

The question before the court was a fourth grade civics quiz question:

True or false: the executive branch is empowered the make new laws.
True
False

The correct answer is "false".

Note again, this has nothing to do with whether any particular law labeled "net neutrality" might be good or bad. The court just ruled what everyone already knows - Congress makes new laws, not the FCC.

It occurs to me that logically, it's also possible that they do not actually believe it's bad for people to work together to effect change. It's possible that they are trying to mislead people, saying they believe that when they really don't. So the three possible options are:

1. They've chosen to do wrong, to do what they believe is evil.

2. They've utterly failed to think about what they actually believe.

3. They are trying to mislead people about what they actually believe.

I don't know which of the three is true about these people, but basic logic shows it must be one of the three.

What is it that Google tracks?

In a way, I see that point. On the other hand, pick one:

A) Banding together to exercise your free speech rights through an organization is something you should do.

B) Banding together to exercise your free speech rights through an organization is so bad that it should be illegal.

You can't believe both A and B. If you believe it's bad thing, in fact so bad that it's worth violating other people's first amendment rights over, yet you do it anyway, you've chosen to do evil. So they've either chosen to do evil, or they simply haven't thought things through. Their thinking process ends at their own four-word slogan.

You know, I noticed the missing comma the second after I hit submit, and, this being slashdot, I was absolutely sure someone would call me on it. Punctuation is the difference between saying, "Let's eat, grandma," and "Let's eat grandma!" just like capitalization is the difference between helping your Uncle Jack off a horse, and helping your uncle jack off a horse.

Obviously, you have no experience with Oracle or Microsoft products and do not know where Apple and Intel manufacture their devices.

I wouldn't even look to the court. The court merely read the law, which very plainly states that the FCC may not do what they tried to do. In essence, the law says:

The FCC must regulate common carriers according to a, b, and c.
The FCC may not regulate b or c in regard to anyone other than common carriers.

The FCC wanted to do B without C, so they claimed "ISPs are not common carriers, so we don't have to do C. ISPs are common carriers, so we're going to do B". That's ridiculous, you can't say they ARE common carriers and NOT common carriers at the same time. Therefore, the FCC can't make up net neutrality laws.

If and when we end up needing a net neutrality law, Congress will need to pass one. That should be pretty clear to anyone who has passed fourth grade civics, so I really don't see why the FCC tried to make up the law themselves in the first place. Any half-competent court would strike them down.

What the hell? They don't like that Citizens United said that free speech means people can cooperate together in the political process, through what's called a "super PAC". So their solution is to form a super PAC so they can cooperate in affecting the political process. They're trying to outlaw themselves.

I knew that that the people who got all excited about Citizen's United were dense, but I didn't realize they were THAT dense!

It was the lack of altruistic eyes scrutinizing it.

That was a secondary effect. People who might want to analyze code want to do a good job, and there's a lot of code worth analyzing.

To do that job there are tools that help with that analysis. OpenSSL's use of non-standard internal memory management routines makes it resistant to use of such analysis tools.

Is it impossible for a code auditor to keep everything in his head? No, but it's tough and error-prone. Some people have found OpenSSL bugs before, of course, but there are ways to make it easier for auditors to stand a fighting chance.

That's largely what the OpenBSD team is doing - ripping out all of that unneeded memory management crap, killing OS/2, VMS, and MacOS7 support code, etc. The payoff should be more people looking at it, but it sure wouldn't hurt for some companies that save millions by using OpenSSL to throw the team a few bones once in a while to make it more regular. Or hire their own internal folks to do the same, if that would work out better.

in other words, net neutrality would remain, but content providers could pay to BOOST the speed at which the internet provider customers received their content

Which only lasts until the next increment in consumer connection speed is rolled out. Then the companies that pay get to use it, but - SURPRISE! - nobody else does.

If this proposal had gone into effect before broadband became common you'd be hooked to on your, say, 5 Mbps DSL line, trying to watch videos at 56 kbps.

The problem here isn't differentiated services - which can be valuable to a lot of us. The problem is that here in the US we have effective ISP monopolies or duopolies in nearly every region.

The other part of the problem is that the net neutrality advocates have been fighting on the wrong battleground.

As you point out: The prblem isn't some packets getting preferences over others: Sometimes that makes things BETTER for users. The problem is companies using their ability to configure this to give their own (and affiliates') carried-by-ISPs services an advantage, or artificially DISadvatntge packets of other providers unless an extra toll is paid, to the disadvantage of their customers.

The FCC is not the place to fight that battle. The correct venues are the Department of Justice's Antitrust division (is giving content the ISP's affiliate provides an advantage over that of others an illegal "tying"?), the FTC (is penalizing others' packets a consumer fraud, providing something less than what is understood to be "internet service"?) and perhaps congress.

I don't see how this can reasonably be resolved short of breaking up media conglomerates to separate information transport from providing "content" and other information service beyond information transport. Allowing them to be combined into a single company is a recipie for conflict-of-interest, at the cost of the consumer.

Most web sites have no need for SSL/TLS. Therefore, 17% of web sites could mean ALL "secure" sites were affected. OpenSSL might have 90% market share in the sense that 90% of SSL connections use OpenSSL and that could still be 17% of web sites.

I guess you're not a programmer, and therefore don't know what a shallow bug is. Conveniently, the rest of the sentence you alluded to explains the term:

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow ... the fix will be obvious to someone."

If you have to dig deep into the code to figure out what's causing the problem and how to fix it, that's a deep bug. A bug that doesn't require digging is shallow. Heartbleed was fixed in minutes or hours after the symptom was noticed - a very shallow bug indeed. "The fix will be obvious to someone."

The presence or absence of bugs is an orthogonal question. That's closely correlated with the code review and testing process - how many people have to examine and sign off on the code before it's committed, and if there is a full suite of automated unit tests.

The proprietary code I write is only seen by me. Some GPL code I write also doesn't get proper peer review, but most of it is reviewed by at least three people, and often several others look at it and comment. For Moodle, for example, I post code I'm happy with. I post it with unit tests which test the possible inputs and verify that each function does its job. Then anyone interested in the topic looks at my code and comments, typically 2-4 people. I post revisions and after no-one has any complaints it enters official peer review. At that stage, a designated programmer familiar with that section of the code examines it, suggests changes, and eventually signs off on it when we're both satisfied that it's correct. Then it goes to the tester. After that, the integration team. Moodle doesn't get very many new bugs because of this quality control process. That's independent of how easily bugs are fixed, how shallow they are, depending on how many people are trying to fix the bug.

Well you've met one today: ME. I hang on to my Droid 4 just for this very reason. There is no lost screen real estate since it slides out from behind it and the keyboard is soldered directly to the motherboard (much to my dismay) so it doesn't really make the phone any thicker than it was already gonna be. Maybe a millimeter or 2 max. They are solid plastic keys with great feedback- not those shitty rubber ones from an 80s calculator that you're referring to. The only complaint (and it really isn't a complaint) is that after 3 years of heavy constant use, the keyboard lettering is flaking off and I can't really change them. The battery is also soldered in but it's still charging great after 3 years. I'll solder a new one in if I have to.

As far as sucky and cramped I must say "you're doing it wrong!" These keyboards are thumb keyboards. I think I actually type faster on them than a standard qwerty. YMMV of course but your opinion and mine are diametrically opposed. Swipe and screen keyboards are completely useless to me.