Headline: Supernovae May Not Be Standard Candles; Is Dark Energy All Wrong?
Summary: Does this mean dark energy may not be real, or that it may just be slightly weaker than we previously thought?
Articles: It is slightly weaker than we previously thought. Not significantly though.

This is a really good fair question. I thought about this because in my reply to the article, I cited this same example.

So which private company paid which private company? In this case, Netflix paid Comcast. Isn't that... odd? Netflix paid Comcast even though Comcast did absolutely nothing?

So imagine if Comcast wasn't a monopoly. I can think of 3 possibilities: 1) Comcast would have upgraded their infrastructure. 2) Customers would have moved to another ISP who had more bandwidth. 3) Comcast would have paid Netflix to colocate their servers within Comcast's network, since it saves Comcast from having to upgrade their infrastructure.

Because Comcast is a monopoly, they profited from *not* upgrading their service. That's maddening! But that is what monopolies do: they profit from extorting other companies using their monpoly power, rather than profiting from providing a good product. So the net result is that Comcast customers don't have better bandwidth. So what happens when another content provider has bandwidth problems with Comcast customers? Perhaps the company will fold. Or perhaps they will do what Netflix did, continuing the ugliness.

Now here's a criticism of my argument: What did the FCC's network neutrality do to prevent this scenario? I'm not sure it actually helped. Can someone chime-in on that? What does the new regulation do for deals like this between ISPs and content providers? I'm not sure there is a solution here other than competition.

The article is full of colorful language about network neutrality advocates, but also some sound reasoning that is unfortunately based on technical misunderstandings or misinformation. Once you look past the mischaracterizations (it's a political piece, after all - you speak to your audience and insult everyone who disagrees with you before you even consider making a point!), it's actually not that bad. There are lots of items in it that I'd like to respond to, as if I could fix the author's misunderstandings, but I'll just pick a one:

That's what we want, but that isn't what is happening. The ISPs have little economic incentive to invest in infrastructure since they are mostly monopolies. That's why Comcast chose, instead of upgrading their bandwidth when customers started watching Netflix, to pressure Netflix into co-locating servers within Comcast's network. They only could do that because they are a monopoly. Comcast customers could not choose to switch to another provider, and Netflix cannot choose to route around Comcast.

This sounds like someone citing their ignorance on a topic as evidence that something didn't happen. In general, the authors need to recognize that:
- ISPs are tied to cable/telecom monopolies.
- ISPs can't pick different "business models" without impacting individuals' free speech.
- We learned these lessons from what came before the internet. :-) Clearly they never had to dial-up to Prodigy to see one "web site" and then use Compuserve to see another one, then dial AOL to email someone else.
- We've had real issues without Network Neutrality.

It will be interesting to see how "broken" the internet is in 10 years. Usually those predicting doom and gloom fade away. We shall see, eh?

Assuming you're aware that it requires an online server when you buy it.

I recently bought LEGO Batman 3 since I love the LEGO games and enjoyed the previous two Batman games in the series. None of them have ever had an online component. LEGO Batman 3 has no online multiplayer, it only has single player and split screen co-op.

Guess what? It requires an online connection to some server somewhere. This isn't mentioned in the Steam page anywhere. If you can't connect to the server, you can't play the game.

I hadn't thought to check if it required an Internet connection to play because why the fuck should it?!! (And if I had checked, I almost certainly wouldn't have found out about it because none of the reviews mention that fact.)

That's what I meant. Someone further up the comment chain said that is how OE works. First it connects with HTTP, then when "data is submitted" (I took that to mean a forms submission) it uses the OE.

So, in trying to understand the intent here:

We already have that capability, but as you say:

So that seems to confirm that yes, the purpose of this is to hide the cert warnings. Am I missing something?

Aside: I just learned about dh_anon, which actually does not even require a certificate. Interesting.

So long as they have to prove the infringement took place, then I have no problem with this. If someone commits copyright infringement, and the copyright holder can go to court and prove it, then the legal system is working. But does it seem likely that they will file 4,726 unique court cases? They will instead send extortion letters, or do a big massive case, or sue the ISPs to recover the money, or something like that.

So we created this mechanism just to hide the certificate prompt? It seems like it would be better just to put text on the form that says "Hey, I used a self-signed certificate so ignore the message you see when you click submit" then just submit the form to an HTTP URL as usual. Alternatively, we could standardize on an HTML meta-attribute or HTTP header attribute that tells the browser to ignore the cert. No special browser feature required.

Surely I am missing something here.

How is this better than I'm unclear HTTPS with a self-signed cert? It seems like a convoluted way to suppress a certificate prompt.

What benefit does that have over regular HTTPs? Why is this different from just having the submit URL be HTTPs? And wouldn't a security-aware user refuse to click submit when they saw the page wasn't encrypted?

Thanks for the explanation. I've been reading about this since I saw the Slashdot headline a few days ago and I'm just not getting it.

You read paper @ 6" away, but read a screen @ 24" away.