I can't speak to the other fake flooding ideas, but I do recall hearing a story where the reporter was shocked to learn that many who sell compromised CC lists offer a refund for any CC numbers that don't work. Putting out a long list of free numbers might district a few newbies, but the people with the experience and the financial backing wouldn't have been distracted by such free lists of dubious origin.

Good on Mozilla for getting an influx of cash, but I'll be changing the search preferences of every Firefox I install on my and my coworkers systems. Yahoo's little "no more working from home" mess was cited by our CEO as a reason to halt the practice where I work. So Yahoo can go fsck itself with a broken broomstick.

OMG, self-deprecation on the web. Seriously, kudos. (I am not being sarcastic.)

You're very right that the way the law uses certain words and expressions—"terms of art"—can be very different from expected. "Weapons of mass destruction" for example. :)

Good link provided in above comment: http://www.treasury.gov/resour...

The quote "I like it because you get rewarded for your good behavior — like a dog does when it gets a treat" should be plenty to flag a really archaic approach to school that's going to work for some kids and poison the rest. The article mentions the criticism for the underlying theory as well. Teachers should be connecting with their kids. What's next? Food pellets for good behavior? Arf! Johnny's a good boy.

Thx for the informative digression. :-) On the airwaves in the States we have heard plenty of broadsides against "Africa," likewise against Muslims everywhere. It gets old.

Amazon recently announced it was getting into the advertisement business, and it beat out Google to acquire Twitch.

Pure speculation on my part, but I have to wonder if this is just Google's CEO trying to steal some of the spotlight away from Amazon?

Suddenly, Google is saying, "Oh yeah... delivery drones. We've been doing this for some time now." It smells like petty CEO bickering. (As cool as delivery drones are.)

I get the reason why manufacturers aren't producing slide out keyboards. Internationalization, easier to break, etc. That doesn't mean I like what's happening.

I'd like to see a flip phone that doubles as a wi-fi hotspot and then I'll just use a tablet for the things I wanted the "smart" part of the smartphone to do. (And it will look a lot less stupid than talking on a phablet that barely fits in anyone's hands who isn't 7 feet tall.)

Based on published information, we know that the NSA gets customer information by compelling companies to produce the records, or it taps the connections between their datacenters and it gets the data in transit). Apple didn't deny either -- neither one of those involve installing a backdoor or giving SERVER access.

I think you're on the right track. There really is nothing that Apple can say to convince foreign users that their data is safe.

Some additional nostalgia from 1997...

Escape from MicroSun (aka "Friday Afternoon") is a text adventure (written by a Sun Microsystems employee) where you play the part of a programmer for "MicroSun" and have to escape the office by 6pm for a date.

Well, we'll have to differ then. The free market is an ideal, but a self-executing free market is a rarity. No regulation (or no government) is a nice jingle but there will always be something. (Is anyone saying more regulation/govenrment for its own sake? No, but they can be nasty side effects.) It's the law itself. Even the criminal law is a form of regulation—especially unlikely to be banned—and yes amending, sometimes repealing, it can improve it. That said, I do sympathize with the libertarian perspective (versus dogma) and think the government can be seen as just another ... corporation. Which means, regulate with care, not never.

"Robber baron" just sounds cool. I don't think we have classic monopolies like oil and steel, but less the landscape is pretty messed up, and getting worse so with the repeal of Glass-Steagal and so on..... Just my 2 against $2 trillion.

And I suppose big business loves non-regulation, with the opportunities of monopoly. So win-win?

I'll agree that regulation risks just shifting wealth from one corporate interest to another. Also, that regulaiton introduces its own barriers to competition. But to condemn regulation per se is mindless. We got enough of the robber barons ages ago.

Now, back to my question.... which way will things tilt, and how much will the public interest matter.

Well said. I would be even more specific and say you don't want the carriers to discriminate or, god forbid, they'll redefine common carriers. ;-) I'm not sure most congresspeople understand the issue anywhere near as well as they understand who is for or against—politics.

Pretty damn well. You can't believe the difference things like lifting the bar to pre-existing conditions makes to families like ours. That they could have better job with this behemoth project, I don't doubt. That they would have done a better job if the other half Congress hadn't been obstuctionist jerks, I don't doubt either. Growing pains, not fault with the basic concept.

To drift back on topic: ditto for net neutrality. Sometimes we do better without the market carved into big corporate fiefdoms and fake competition.

It seems to me the lobbying forces on the part of the content providers, Netflix et al., would be pretty formidable—unless they think the price is worth it to suppress upstart competition. Which is it?

AMEN.

No, that is not ironic.