But if they were paper records, could Obama order a Microsoftie to get on a plane and go get them? Could they order Bill Gates to order his underling in Ireland to feed them into a fax machine to DOJ?

I guess I will have to start watching from torrents again

Is it even worth bothering at this point? I can't think of the last time South Park was really clever.

There's better stuff to watch on Netflix.

its total hosrseshit written by a guy that knows nothing of how enterprise networking operates.

heh - the guy is one of the leading experts on computer networking. I notice you don't even have a link to your CV on your user page. Wanna be specific?

They could change their business model tomorrow to one that wasn't crushing the ISP's infrastructure but they have time and again refused to do so.

You mean like offering settlement-free peering and free content caches to ISP's?

    https://www.netflix.com/openco...

C'mon, the ISP's don't want to charge customers for what they're using or let Netflix compete with their video on demand services, and the Tier-2 ISP's don't want to give Netflix settlement-free equal access when they're stuck between a bellicose ISP and Netflix (but are generally willing to give them a lower QoS quality).

Wait, do you work for Verizon?

Quick, do you vote "yes" or "no" on the Jabberwocky?

This is the most lucid summary I've seen of the current "debate". Quoting:

The things that bug me most about the net neutrality debate are:

0) The whole slow lane/fast lane conception is just wrong. Internet traffic looks nothing like vehicle traffic. On roads, you have only a few lanes to put cars in. On the internet, it's more like you break up the cars and trucks into atoms (packets), mix them all together, pour them through various choke points and reassemble them at their destination no matter in what order they arrive.

Traffic management at these levels IS needed, and managed at a e2e level by a TCP-friendly protocol (generally), and at a router level by queue management schemes like "Drop Tail". Massive improvements to drop tail, fixing what is known as "bufferbloat" with better "active queue management" (AQM) and packet scheduling schemes (FQ) such as codel, fq_codel, RED, and PIE are being considered by the IETF to better manage congestion, and the net result of these techniques is vastly reduced latency across the chokepoints, vastly improved levels of service for latency sensitive services (such as voice, gaming, and videoconferencing), with only the fattest flows losing some packets and thus slowing down - regardless of who is sending them. Politics doesn't enter into it. Any individual can make their own links better, as can any isp, and vendor.

Some links:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/dra...
https://datatracker.ietf.org/d...
http://tools.ietf.org/html/dra...
http://tools.ietf.org/html/dra...

Furthermore individual packets can be marked by the endpoints to indicate their relative needs. This is called QoS, and the primary technique is "diffserv".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

There are plenty of problems with diffserv in general, but they are very different from thinking about "fast or slow" lanes, which are rather difficult to implement compared to any of the techniques noted above. You have to have a database of every ip address you wish to manipulate accessed in real time, on every packet, in order to implement the lanes.

IF ONLY I could see in the typical network neutrality debater a sane understanding and discussion of simple AQM, packet scheduling, and QoS techniques, I would be extremely comforted in the idea that sane legislation would emerge. But I've been waiting 10 years for that to happen.

We have tested, and have deployed these algorithms to dramatic reductions in latency and increased throughput on consumer grade hardware, various isps and manufacturers have standardized on various versions, (docsis 3.1 is pie, free.fr uses fq_codel, as does streamboost, as do nearly all the open source routing projects such as openwrt)

I really wish those debating net neutrality actually try - or at least be aware of - these technical solutions to the congestion problems they seek to solve with legislation. I wouldn't mind at all legal mandates to have aqm on, by default. :)

It makes a huge difference, on all technologies available today:

https://www.bufferbloat.net/pr...

See also the bufferbloat mailing lists.

1) if we want true neutrality, restrictive rules by the ISPs regarding their customers hosting services of their own have to go - and nobody's been making THAT point, which irks me significantly. In an age where you have, say, gbit fiber to your business, it makes quite a lot of sense from a security and maintenence perspective
to be hosting your own data and servers on your own darn premise, not
elsewhere.

2) I didn't make any points about competitiveness either; that was robert's piece. I didn't like the original 1996 policy nor do I think title II is the answer.

For the record:

I oppose the time warner merger, and also oppose rules and regulations that prevent municipalities from running their own fiber and allowing providers to compete on top of it. In fact I strongly, strongly favor commonly owned infrastructure with services allowed to compete on top of those, a model that works well in europe and elsewhere.

I came very close to writing a letter to the FCC on that, but didn't.

I LIKED the world we had in the 90s with tens of thousands of ISPs competing
on top of universally agreed upon link technologies. I ran one of those ISPs. That world was pre both of those regulations, where the then monopoly was required to provide access that anyone could buy for a fair price.

I am glad gfiber exists to put a scare into certain monopolists, but even then I'd be tons happier if municipalities treated basic wired connectivity as we do roads and not as we do telephone poles.

It is one of my hopes that one day wireless technologies would
become sufficiently robust to break the last wire monopolies once and
for all.

"As we have stated before, Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services."

We already know that Apple does key escrow of iMessage. Their security guidance documentation is very straightforward except it dances around the iMessage key escrow section like the cha-cha just came on the turntable, and then goes back to normal. Warrant canary much?

Apple could have created that all on their own, perhaps for noble purposes (being the benign dictator of their realm while the peansants enjoy good encryption so long as the soverign remains benign) and then were ordered to hand over their master keys.

I'm assuming Chinese news is as accurate as ours here in the US.

This was mentioned briefly on Science Friday last week. Also that some Staples are going to have them for "service bureau" printing.

It's a neat idea and a potential reniassance for service bureaus - I haven't needed to go to one since 44-meg Syquest carts were in vogue.

Eventually we'll all have high-strength 3D printers at home, but that's got to be at least a decade off.

A revolution, however warranted, would lead to an unimaginable amount of freezing and starvation within the first two winters

Why, would the failing government interdict traffic? That wouldn't be the revolution causing freezing or starvation.

Without being in favor of the death penalty it sounds like it may well have a silver lining in this case.

No, the murder of two people does not have a silver lining, especially mentally ill people.

Why didn't they sell these kids to adoption agencies? The kids would have been better off. Is there some law that prevents the sale of children to adoption agencies such that they turned to slavers instead?

If people really care about global warming and economic activity, they should read the latest IPCC report. It says that the best way to avoid warming is economic development. If the economy freezes in place (something a high carbon tax could do) then the warming will be about 4C by the end of the century. If the economy in all the "third world" countries develops into something like first-world conditions by the continued march of progress, then the warming will be closer to 1C.

Anything that stands in the way of that development is going to contribute to the warming. Removing these tariffs is a good thing, but to get maximum environmental benefit they need to get rid of the rest.

I know, Overton's Window and all.

only available in CO and WA.

I'll have to see if my Bundt pan boils water quickly. Or hammer an iron rod on an old pot.

There are real industrial design reasons to have a round watch on your arm. The ease of drawing to a rectangular display buffer do not outweigh them.

Any marginal blocks mapped out before you encrypt will remain unencrypted and may be available to a determined attacker. Same goes for hard drives, and SATA secure erase is not provably trustworthy. Always encrypt your storage before you put any data on it. If you do not trust your hardware AES to not be backdoored then use software crypto.

Almost like this plan except now with more bacony goodness!

Dupe.

I know its a fun conspiracy theory and all but I don't think the double standard is deliberate, even if it does exist.

The only real double standard is that the government is rapidly advancing its UAV technology while keeping private industry from doing so. Notice how Greenpeace floated a blimp over the NSA data center? Good for publicity but not the most efficient way to gather the photos they did.

Amazon shouldn't be calling them drones, though - drones kill Pakistani children, aerobots save puppies.

They better act fast if they want to skirt the law with yeast, while there's still a law to break.

It's still a good idea if you want pure chemicals - yeast can produce chemicals faster (to both grow and purify) than plants. Companies like the one Gov. Johnson is heading up would probably be very interested as a supply source for their refined products.

The trick is medicinal cannabis has something like 250 active compounds. A few years ago everybody assumed that it was only THC that did anything (marinol, for instance). Now they know that CBD is the most active medicinally and Johnson is now talking about CBG as well. There's still more unknown about the others than there is known, so focusing on just a couple pure chemicals might miss out on benefits. Human bodies do a lot of signalling with various cannabinoids and here's this one plant that happens to also grow most of them. It should be a biotech bonanza, except for the crapitalistic reasons politicians try to keep it off the market.

But, um, yeah, get high on THC beer if you want. It would actually probably be a net-benefit for society since people will be satisfied with being less drunk. As a user of the road monopoly, I'd strongly support THC beer on the market.