Accidents happen, dude. Who among us has not dropped our phone while trying to turn off the alarm in the morning? And if you want to ever sell it, you need the case to absorb normal wear-and-tear.

Can't Google just remove the links rather than pay? Wouldn't that hand them an near instant win over this law?

Websites by themselves aren't "illegal". Using those terms gives undue legitimacy to copyright maximalists. What is meant here by "illegal" is that they host content which may be infringing on copyright.

I can't see the video but in the summary he mentions using two old servers to do the job of one new server. I appreciate the recycling, but it sounds like he is talking processing or I/O equivalence, and usually it is power that is the dominating factor in data center effectiveness. Are two servers really cheaper than one when you factor in electricity, cooling, and rack space?

I posit that there really is a lot of overlap. I'd be willing to bet that the 80/20 rule applies at the border routers, with 80% of viewers accessing the same 20% of the content. Imagine the days/weeks when a new season of Orange Is The New Black is released, for example.

Yeah. Wouldn't be awesome of Netflix enabled a P2P client on the Verizon network? They should do it. The technology exists. It would be glorious.

You're just wrong. In fact, we now have proof (Snowden revelations) that things carried on at the NSA pretty much exactly like he said it would. I think you also underestimate how much compression can be applied to telephone conversations. They are, after all, mostly "dead air". In addition, speech is very predictable. The phone companies take advantage of this to fit many conversations over lines of surprisingly modest bandwidth. Since the NSA is directly connected at the backbone (their secret ATT closets are well documented), they don't even have to do the compression themselves. They can just log the packets.

I saw Mr. Binney speak at the HOPE conference in 2012. I remember a conversation with my parents where I relayed what I learned from him to them, and they thought I was buying into some conspiracy. When Snowden broke into the news, they asked me how I had known so far ahead of time.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion about Binney's whistle-blowing in the wake of the Snowden revelations. He has been sounding the alarm for many years now.

But I'm a white male. I have nothing Google wants. :(

On *nix I most use Vim. If I'm not using Python, I'm using C.

I contributed to the first round that raised $1 million, and I contributed to the ongoing second round that is trying (with less success) to raise $5 million.

Please contribute if you can. As Lawrence said in his TED talk: your favorite issue may be the more important thing to fix, but this has to be the FIRST thing we fix. There can be no meaningful reform as long as the big money has the only voice in politics.

I understand how silly it sounds. Fight money in politics by raising money? How could that ever work? But just remember that we have to get our foot in the door somehow. We need the same lobbyists to get through to the people who need to hear us.

Lawrence is a good guy, a smart person, and incredibly passionate about his cause. He's someone we can get behind. Please donate if you can. Remember they don't take your money unless they make their goal.

Net neutrality, patent reform, etc. They all start here

'cause that ain't what the cool kids are doin', man

I'm somewhat surprised that the company named names. I suppose the result of the investigation made it clear that his intention was only to cover his own ass, which must have tipped the scales.

Now if only we could get names of lawbreakers out of government agencies. I know it will be a cold day in Hell before that happens, but it would be nice

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.