The First Amendment protects us from prosecution by the government. It doesn't protect us from civil matters with private companies. This Pérez guy should know that.

The first thing I thought of when I saw this post was "import this" in Python, which prints out the Zen of Python:
"""
Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!
"""

Which is definitely relevant. Oh well.

There are obviously huge numbers of poor and destitute that have no access to luxuries like mobile phones. Wealthier people are walking around with multiple mobile subscriptions. Either by work/personal accounts, or accounts for tablets and modems, or whatever. So I wonder how far past 100% they will be able to go? 150%? 200 even? It's a good time to be Samsung. Also hard to believe that HTC and Nokia are in so much trouble. Even a small part of 7 billion is a lot of business.

Interesting caption to use as the summary.

Most people don't even have that choice. As sad as it is, Google Fiber is practically our last light of hope illuminating the shadow cast by ATT, Verizon, and Comcast.

Nice shill post but your assumptions aren't correct. ISPs can and do support massive streaming to large portions of their customers. They simply want to avoid paying for infrastructure upgrades while at the same time milking both ends of the wire for all the money they can.

Would you give up Netflix to protect Comcast's bottom line? How about innovators like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google? Without Net Neutrality, they wouldn't exist. Go back to using AOL and Compuserve, see how much you like networks with no competition, fool.

...they can bend it all they want.

Tom Wheeler is a crotchety old sleazebag who has been bought and paid for by Big Telecom. Unfortunately he's probably also foolish enough to think he's doing right by the American public. That's the most dangerous kind.

RIP Internet

At least not yet. Still unknown as to when it is going on sale, I believe. Also you will not be able to buy one from Verizon in the US. Not sure about other carriers but I sorta doubt it. Cool to see a phone ship with Cyanogenmod, though.

Dear Mr. Whedon,

Please justify the $5 cost to rent your film. I can rent your latest superhero blockbuster over the weekend for $2 from Redbox. I can own Louis CK's latest show forever for $5. Why is your content so much more expensive?

Thanks,
a fan

As an engineer that could have been affected by these shenanigans, I hope that each of these companies gets spanked and spanked hard. A message needs to be sent that abusing their talented, non-union labor force will have stinging consequences.

In a system where your rewards are based on the look of powerpoint presentations that are delivered to directors, you end up spending all your time optimizing the data on the slides. The same principle is applied all over the place, in almost every human endeavor. Using the wrong measure of progress means we waste time and effort. It also has a side effect of making everyone miserable, like the guy in this story. See health care, prison system, etc.

By the way, this isn't a problem unique to the government. His gripes sound very similar to my reality. I work in a large aerospace company.

"We've had only a few major redesigns since 1997; we think it's time for another. "

Why? This is precisely why everyone is so mad. You have a site that (mostly) works. You should get feedback from the users about THAT interface and look at new techonologies, then identify specific issues that you want to improve. Then, improve those things but keep everything that is good. This is a basic business process. Know exactly what your goals are before you start. Redesigning for the sake of redesigning is a waste of time. To put it another way, don't fix what ain't broke.

s/quite/quote/

I still count IBM. I believe that quite was, "Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they're all gone."

IBM is still around. Maybe they sold their business, but the company is still around and the business they sold to Lenovo is still going strong.
Likewise for HP, Dell, hell even Atari are still around. Sure their businesses have changed, but so did Apple's. Mac has far less mindshare than iPhone and iTunes these days.

Wow, a Slashdot posting about Linus that doesn't include swearing, name-calling, or flame-baiting. Today is a good day.