All you're doing is delinking from a search engine. If someone else comes along and builds a search engine and spiders your false accusation, then your right back in.

The rule is moronic, passed down by malicious halfwits.

The thing is, every company could do those things if they want to. Individuals could do so if they wanted to. It's no different than having a 1-800 number. You pay so that the person calling you doesn't. There's no neutrality violation there; if anything, it improves net neutrality by providing a reasonably priced mechanism for allowing other companies to be on equal footing with Comcast, who almost certainly does not charge their customers for the use of their own, in-house video-on-demand service. You might reasonably argue, however, that it does so only if the cost of said toll-free service is regulated.

Yeah, but nobody talking about net neutrality wants all packets to be equal. They want all destinations to be equal, i.e. they want traffic from Netflix to have roughly the same likelihood of reaching its destination as traffic from the cable company's VOD service.

Subsidizing traffic doesn't violate net neutrality, because it doesn't affect the delivery of data, only the cost to the end user. Even if the Internet were regulated in precisely the same way as telephone, subsidized traffic would still be allowed, because it is fundamentally no different than a 1-800 number or a collect call.

So using that as an excuse to argue against net neutrality represents a very fundamental misunderstanding about what net neutrality is about. It isn't about preventing content delivery companies from using the tools at their disposal to deliver content better and faster; it's primarily about preventing content delivery companies who also own last-mile infrastructure from having an unfair competitive advantage over content delivery companies that don't.

Every good law has counterpoints. Traffic signals prevent me from driving through the intersection even when there are no other cars there. Assault laws mean you can't punch someone who talks on their phone at the movies. The right to a trial means we can't just execute people we know are guilty.

One of the other examples I've been hearing lately is about Citizen's United. They say overturning it or passing contradictory legislation could hamper Steven Colbert, or limit the ACLU or EFF. Well, yes, it might. But that would be better, overall, than what we have now.

The goal is not to have laws that capture every nuance. Government is a blunt weapon that must operate in a non-discriminatory fashion. Special cases exist that show the friction in every law. The objective is not for every special case to be efficient, but for the law overall to be efficient.

Last mile providers colluding with incumbents to provide preferential access to consumers harms competition in content. Competition is good in the long run, even for the things we like that may appear to be harmed in the short run. There are natural limitations to competition on carriage, we should not extend those competition limitations to making discriminatory deals with content providers.

FWIW, if you have enough energy then synthetic gasoline can be manufactured. It's not the most efficient of processes, however. Using it for fuel would probably be unwise. (I think electric cars would work out better.) But you can also build lubricants.

Mind you, this process doesn't sound efficient enough to make the process practical.

Unfortunately, she wasn't a do nothing. A do nothing would have been a VAST improvement. I'm usually in favor of King Log over King Stork.

Because iOS and Android have no email and calendaring support whatsoever...

If Microsoft, with orders of a magnitude more cash available to burn is finding it almost impossible to break the Android-iOS duopoly, I'm thinking BB's chances of making a comeback sufficient to create a third player in the market are somewhat on the same order of a extrasolar comet flying into the solar system, slingshoting around Jupiter, hooking off Neptune, doing four orbits of the sun before being captured for three orbits by Saturn, being flung at Earth, breaking up under the Moon's gravitational pull and a one inch piece flying to earth severing John Chen's left testicle as he takes a leak.

BlackBerry is the Windows Phone of phones!

???

Our staff's Android and iOS devices all hook into Exchange and can use its address book, all via SSL connections. Maybe BB is a bit more feature rich, but having to run BES as an integrator between BB devices and an Exchange server is a resource-hungry pain in the ass. ActiveSync does the job well enough.

They're thinking "Hmmm, do we hand this mountain of cash we're still sitting on back to the shareholders and close up shop, or do we spend that cash frivolously on doomed loss leaders schemes and executive salaries?"

I think you can probably guess at the answer. But really, anyone still holding BB stock at this point is staking more of a religious position than a business one. Anyone with any interest in meaningfully profitable investment strategies dumped BB a long time ago.

The next stage, I'm presuming, is for BlackBerry to turn into SCO and start trying to extort license fees from Android manufacturers and Apple.

They have virtually no sales, but a huge amount of cash from their halcyon days. Rather than simply hand that money back to investors and close shop, they've decided that a "flush it all down the toilet" strategy is in order.

I get that they're trying to do the loss leader game, but if this is successful, BB will be out of pocket a heap load of cash with little immediate benefit. If it isn't successful, then the stunt demonstrates they're fate is to be a bit player with a niche in keyboard smartphones, and no hopes of ever taking on Android and iOS devices.

Tapes aren't really archival, either, unless you have several copies. I've done batch recapture off of DV after a few years, and swore when I found serious dropouts. That's relatively low density data compared with LTO (though admittedly with less redundancy and error correction). After that, I dug around and found a copy of the captured files on some old hard drives, which unlike the tape, were intact.

So basically, from what I've seen, nothing is truly archival unless you have multiple copies, and if you have multiple copies, just about everything is archival, so the difference between tape and hard drives is that tape drives require a large up-front investment in a drive in exchange for cheaper per-TB costs for the media and higher physical density (because you don't have redundant electronics going along for the ride). If the per-TB costs aren't less and the density isn't higher, then tape offers no real advantage over spinning disks, IMO, unless your data storage needs are so massive that you have automatic libraries, and even then, only if you can't find a company willing to build a hard-disk-based librarian robot.

At various times, it has been professional, and might be again sporadically, but mostly it's serious hobby.

For home users, it is not a useful identifier because it usually changes regularly. For government users and business users, it is a fairly robust identifier, because most of those folks have static IPs (or at least fixed IPs assigned by a DHCP server).

Of course, there's not a 1:1 mapping between user and IP. So it would be more accurate to describe it as familially identifying information.