Maybe it's AT&T's network, or maybe my phone (BB10), but the videos often don't load quickly enough for me to notice them until it's too late. My only hint is that the browser gets strangely unresponsive, and then 5 seconds later it pops over to full screen nonsense.

I've been known to just kill the browser app outright when that happens, as it's quicker than trying to get the video player to quit.

I freely admit that some of the trouble may be phone specific. Still, auto-play videos suck.

There are a couple popular news sites that seem to have moved to HTML 5 videos that don't need a flash plugin. I don't know how to block their videos on my phone. Turning off flash doesn't help, since it isn't involved.

The browser does have a switch between 'mobile' mode, which gives me a turn-of-the-century web browsing experience (not what I want), and 'desktop' mode, which usually (but not always) much better.

Unfortunately, there isn't a way to determine a site is sleazy prior to clicking on a link.

Oh, and give me a way to say "Never play a video under any circumstances, unless I explicitly say 'play this video.'" KTHXBYE.

I'm not on Verizon, nor am I on an unlimited plan. Still, I seem to hit my bandwidth cap more regularly these days. What seems to kill my utilization these days are websites with auto-play videos that I can't kill simply by blocking Flash.

What's really annoying is that the videos load in the background, and on a few occasions, have started playing after I've already locked the display and set my phone down. I only notice them because my phone starts making noise (when I don't have it set to 'silent'). It kills my battery and eats the bits I paid for on the assumption I'd be using them for things I actually wanted.

I honestly don't have a problem with throttling actual abusers. But, modern website design seems to make "abusers" out of more of us than there otherwise would be.

For the unlimited crowd, perhaps there should be tiers there, also. How about two levels? The lower tier would be "no overage fees" unlimited, meaning you don't get random dings for going over arbitrary caps, but you might get throttled occasionally. Rather than a hard cap, there's a soft limit. The upper tier would be "no limits, no throttling," meaning you could stream all the video and download all the torrents you want, but you pay a significantly higher fee for it. I'd happily sign up for the former service just to avoid the fees associated with the occasional data-heavy month. Folks who want to treat their phone as a cable-less cable modem can pay a few bucks more to avoid the throttle.

I think the problem currently is that 95%+ fall into the first group, and the remaining 5% or fewer really need a different class of service. The current "unlimited" label doesn't really make a sufficient distinction between the two.

Of course, the cynical would point out that such a tiering system would open itself to a whole new brand of marketing abuse...

Well, VIM and a bunch of XTerms.

Also, there's a semantic looseness as well that bothers me. The proposed solution doesn't really require changing the speed of light in a vacuum. Rather, it points out that photons will undergo certain interactions which mean that light as a bulk phenomenon will appear to go slower than the maximum speed light can travel in a vacuum because of those other interactions.

When computing relativistic effects, such as Lorenz contractions, etc., the upper speed (not including all those interactions) still remains the limit, at least as I understand it.

"Hey Paolo! He broke the President!"

I remember many years ago reading an article (probably in Wired; these days, it'd be a blog post) where someone described walking around EPCOT Center while listening to this exact album. Sounds like quite a trip, really.

And then there's this article from several years ago that's also fitting. Apparently Disney was working on their version of the Holy-Grams too..

Firesign Theatre was definitely excellent stuff. "I'm Arty Choke, and we're just a joke. So it's back to the shadows again..."

Oy, is that how they're selling it? As if none of these features existed before Apple did it?

Swift code is transformed into optimized native code

As is any other language that passes through an optimizing compiler that outputs native code. They crowed about a 30% speedup above, which in my experience is sometimes achievable just by tweaking your compiler flags.