Microsoft Press Release converted into Slashdot story has been around here for over two decades....

This could lead to an era where your age on your registered account is used for censorship, rather than a parent getting the ability to leave TV-MA banned after a kid turns 18... remember kids, set a password you don't know and lock your TV on "receives everything" before your parent gets to take it out of the box.

Amazon lowers the market price on things without you noticing. They recently announced that they're getting a better deal on shipping wires and such, so they can lower the prices of wires at Amazon Prime, and that should result in Best Buy lowering their prices similarly because their $10 minimum wire cost is based on Amazon's price.

You might not feel like you're beating the market, but you're beating the past prices on a lot of things there.

I notice the ads on Slashdot in the the "AdChioces"/Google slots are recommending my local bank and other sites I've been exploring recently... that's more effective than the Web 1.0 sponsors.

Slashdot used to have tech companies in those slots, now it runs general interest or your interest ads.

My local grocery store once explained to me why they didn't use a discount card, they already recognized me as I walked through the door, and knew the receipt was mine because I was the only one going though three packages of Vanilla Oreos per week. See, when big stores exist in lightly populated areas, the manager knows who the good customers are. My father and I had a good idea what prices were going to lower two weeks ahead because we saw the sale prices at the printing and database companies we worked for, and were sure our store had the deepest discounts in the chain.

BTW, former next door neighbors... the two of you were on the cover of a magazine there the last time I visited that store... with a story that can't possibly be true!

That's so big it might as well be shipped on disk/flash drives instead of an undersea cable.

Canada and Mexico don't have good places to set up datacenters, there's a region of Texas known as Datacenter, TX which has fast bandwidth in all directions, including pointed toward Canada and Mexico.

The EU DropBox user hits the Irish server and nobody tells the USA server about it....

Seems like NSA is trying to snoop on international data that's being stored in the USA, which is why they're setting up EU versions of worldwide web services. If America wants to read international data, they need to do so only in times of need.

That's not government law giving them a monopoly, it's a physical law that's getting in the way. Too much Seattle population decided it was better to move than rewire the city, which is why they blew up the King Dome on a classic ESPN Classic broadcast.

Comcast has a lock on setting up a separate cable system in town, but let ma bell in by linking to the phone network. It's Big Cable v. Ma Bell v,.DBS... all three work, it's a triopoly because there's three.

There's DirecTV and Dish Network available in most places, and Comcast and Time Warner don't overlap, even in NYC where there's a line drawn between the two. FIOS is being offered where Verizon thinks it's possible, and AT&T U-Verse exists where it was set up.

You have to get this down to one before you can call it a monopoly.

A claim of civil disobedience doesn't lead to a not guilty verdict.

What source of randomness would you use for such a branch? In an era where there's too many rigged elections, how do you expect your randomness to be fair?

This is as old as the Roman Era governments... a democracy requires everybody to vote on everything, a republic selects representatives/senators to vote as an assembly.