10-15%? Think more along the lines of 50%. You have to add ~15% in taxes but you don't just have to deal with SSI and taxes. You now also have to deal with accountants and lawyers to make sure everything is on the up-and-up, make sure your workplace conforms to OSHA and state standards, disability claims and benefits, vacation benefits and other employees to get coverage, FMLA, a variety of insurances to protect you from litigating employees, medical benefits...

Not saying that workers should go without all those benefits but for some that is a burden too heavy to carry if the competition doesn't follow the same rules.

They don't hijack it, the whois providers are themselves the hijackers. In case of your command line utility, it is possible your ISP simply provides their own whois (there is no requirement for whois to query the 'official' databases and it is trivial to put your own 'cache' in).

And the best thing is that most of these 'hijacked' domains are never paid for, ICANN allows for ~$0.25 (refundable) to 'reserve' a domain name. Eg. an ISP or web service may do this as a 'service' so you're sure to have it when you pay for it (with them). Then if you don't pay for it, the domain is set up for expire and goes on a feed where decisions are made (most likely an algorithm based on keywords and name lists) and then registrars are bombarded for seconds leading up to the expiration time by requests to register the domain in a similar 'reservation' fashion.

"That is correct, but you should be able to see that this is an unsustainable model. Let's say Netflix continues growing by leaps and bounds and absolutely dominates as the source of traffic on the Internet, even more so than it already does. L3 gets paid more and more by Netflix for their access bandwidth while Verizon gets absolutely nothing extra but is required to carry more and more load from L3."

The only reason that L3 would get paid more would be because Netflix was fully using their connection and getting their money's worth and needed to purchase additional bandwidth. Verizon would get paid more if either the number of customers increased OR their customers maxed out their bandwidth and needed faster connections. The reason Verizon would not get paid more is because Verizon is selling an oversubscribed service but likes to pretend that they are not.

So, what's really happening here is a mismatch between business models. When you buy a "business grade" Internet connection you pay more with the assumption that you are going to pump as much data down it 7x24 as you possibly can. You get what you contracted for.

When you purchase home internet connectivity, your price/bit/sec is considerably lower because it's on an oversubscribed network. However, the carrier will never say that, merely that your bandwidth isn't guaranteed. If you do try to use it 7x24 they'll try to find some way to wriggle out of the contract they made. And that's exactly what Verizon is doing here, by throttling the bandwidth from Netflix. Suppose all the traffic wasn't coming from Netflix. Would it make any difference? Not really, because as the L3 guy pointed out, the cost of the networknetwork hop is miniscule. Where it does cost is in the haul from the peering point to the house. So anything that increases the amount of traffic from the peering point to the house will cost Verizon money.

If someone were to come up with a peer-to-peer movie streaming service that ran entirely within Verizon's network but only on home connections they'd have a cow as well. What they really want is to be paid on a per-bit basis but that's not palatable in the consumer marketplace.

And when you order a product from Amazon and they pay FedEx to deliver it, FedEx doesn't give you another bill when they show up at your doorstep.

There are different payment models. Home Internet access has been sold for a long time as "x bits/sec" use as much or as little as you like. Internet traffic was traditionally bursty, without long sustained transmissions so ISPs got into the habit of oversubscribing their networks and holding onto as much of the money as they can.

Netflix pays their ISP (Level 3) quite a bit a of money to provide network access. And Verizon's customers (collectively) pay Verizon quite a bit of money to provide network access. The problem is that the way Internet access is priced it's in the ISP's best interest to discourage you from using the network while promising you more and charging you more.

Per packet pricing, charged to someone, would be one solution to this problem but it's not very popular with people who have gotten used to "all you can eat". I'd certainly hate having my Internet bills jump up and down on a monthly basis.

How is traffic ever going to be balanced between a last mile provider like Verizon and a backbone provider?

Historically, if my memory serves, ISPs paid backbones for access to the Internet, not the other way around. The cash flowed from ISPs to backbones because ISP customers paid for Internet access and then the ISP paid their upstream provider. Backbones didn't pay each other and set up peering arrangements because they realized it was pretty much a wash.

The way I see it, Verizon is trying to double dip. Their customers have paid them for bandwidth and a connection to other networks. Netflix has paid L3 for their internet connectivity and L3 has delivered up to the Verizon network. Verizon chooses to not provide adequate access even though their customers are the ones pulling the data from Netflix.

Level 3 doesn't pay Comcast for bandwidth. Why should they? Comcast customers have already paid Comcast for the links to their house and they're the ones pulling data from Level 3. Level 3's customers pay Level 3 to deliver to the edge of their network. As the Level 3 post points out, the cost for Verizon to add more bandwidth between the Level 3 network and the Verizon network is minimal.

You know you can already do all of that and plenty of people do it. The problem is that the cost to do so is prohibitive unless you make more than a few million a year and can pay your own set of accountant and lawyers.

So Russia?

There is a difference in the kind of crookedness. In China/India, you pay (local) government to stop meddling with your business; in the US you pay (local) government to meddle with your competitors' business.

They already are for tax and other purposes. This ruling basically says that if your company has any ties overseas, the oversees assets now fall under US jurisdiction.

How about cosmonauts? US-centric much!

Why bash Apple or big banks? Whatever these companies are doing is within a legal framework. If you don't like it change the legal framework. Every brand will attempt to protect their product lines and profits and will do whatever they can to do so.

Yeah, you know Google/Microsoft/Apple/Amazon also has Irish offices just to ship out it's US profits as to side-step US taxes and frustrate lawmakers. Big companies are always going to look for the cheapest ways to maximize profits and they'll have an army of lawyers and accountants making sure that whatever they do is entirely legal.

According to the article he didn't even die (yet) while in the Tesla. He was resuscitated and died of his injuries later.

If this smart watch can give me alerts, is waterproof to 10m and is more than just an expensive remote for my phone.

BT won't cut it, I want wifi at least so my phone can act as a base station and I can be hundreds of feet away.

It should also last more than a few hours. 5 days or so should be the minimum.