But if they were paper records, could Obama order a Microsoftie to get on a plane and go get them? Could they order Bill Gates to order his underling in Ireland to feed them into a fax machine to DOJ?

I guess I will have to start watching from torrents again

Is it even worth bothering at this point? I can't think of the last time South Park was really clever.

There's better stuff to watch on Netflix.

its total hosrseshit written by a guy that knows nothing of how enterprise networking operates.

heh - the guy is one of the leading experts on computer networking. I notice you don't even have a link to your CV on your user page. Wanna be specific?

They could change their business model tomorrow to one that wasn't crushing the ISP's infrastructure but they have time and again refused to do so.

You mean like offering settlement-free peering and free content caches to ISP's?

    https://www.netflix.com/openco...

C'mon, the ISP's don't want to charge customers for what they're using or let Netflix compete with their video on demand services, and the Tier-2 ISP's don't want to give Netflix settlement-free equal access when they're stuck between a bellicose ISP and Netflix (but are generally willing to give them a lower QoS quality).

Wait, do you work for Verizon?

Quick, do you vote "yes" or "no" on the Jabberwocky?

This is the most lucid summary I've seen of the current "debate". Quoting:

The things that bug me most about the net neutrality debate are:

0) The whole slow lane/fast lane conception is just wrong. Internet traffic looks nothing like vehicle traffic. On roads, you have only a few lanes to put cars in. On the internet, it's more like you break up the cars and trucks into atoms (packets), mix them all together, pour them through various choke points and reassemble them at their destination no matter in what order they arrive.

Traffic management at these levels IS needed, and managed at a e2e level by a TCP-friendly protocol (generally), and at a router level by queue management schemes like "Drop Tail". Massive improvements to drop tail, fixing what is known as "bufferbloat" with better "active queue management" (AQM) and packet scheduling schemes (FQ) such as codel, fq_codel, RED, and PIE are being considered by the IETF to better manage congestion, and the net result of these techniques is vastly reduced latency across the chokepoints, vastly improved levels of service for latency sensitive services (such as voice, gaming, and videoconferencing), with only the fattest flows losing some packets and thus slowing down - regardless of who is sending them. Politics doesn't enter into it. Any individual can make their own links better, as can any isp, and vendor.

Some links:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/dra...
https://datatracker.ietf.org/d...
http://tools.ietf.org/html/dra...
http://tools.ietf.org/html/dra...

Furthermore individual packets can be marked by the endpoints to indicate their relative needs. This is called QoS, and the primary technique is "diffserv".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

There are plenty of problems with diffserv in general, but they are very different from thinking about "fast or slow" lanes, which are rather difficult to implement compared to any of the techniques noted above. You have to have a database of every ip address you wish to manipulate accessed in real time, on every packet, in order to implement the lanes.

IF ONLY I could see in the typical network neutrality debater a sane understanding and discussion of simple AQM, packet scheduling, and QoS techniques, I would be extremely comforted in the idea that sane legislation would emerge. But I've been waiting 10 years for that to happen.

We have tested, and have deployed these algorithms to dramatic reductions in latency and increased throughput on consumer grade hardware, various isps and manufacturers have standardized on various versions, (docsis 3.1 is pie, free.fr uses fq_codel, as does streamboost, as do nearly all the open source routing projects such as openwrt)

I really wish those debating net neutrality actually try - or at least be aware of - these technical solutions to the congestion problems they seek to solve with legislation. I wouldn't mind at all legal mandates to have aqm on, by default. :)

It makes a huge difference, on all technologies available today:

https://www.bufferbloat.net/pr...

See also the bufferbloat mailing lists.

1) if we want true neutrality, restrictive rules by the ISPs regarding their customers hosting services of their own have to go - and nobody's been making THAT point, which irks me significantly. In an age where you have, say, gbit fiber to your business, it makes quite a lot of sense from a security and maintenence perspective
to be hosting your own data and servers on your own darn premise, not
elsewhere.

2) I didn't make any points about competitiveness either; that was robert's piece. I didn't like the original 1996 policy nor do I think title II is the answer.

For the record:

I oppose the time warner merger, and also oppose rules and regulations that prevent municipalities from running their own fiber and allowing providers to compete on top of it. In fact I strongly, strongly favor commonly owned infrastructure with services allowed to compete on top of those, a model that works well in europe and elsewhere.

I came very close to writing a letter to the FCC on that, but didn't.

I LIKED the world we had in the 90s with tens of thousands of ISPs competing
on top of universally agreed upon link technologies. I ran one of those ISPs. That world was pre both of those regulations, where the then monopoly was required to provide access that anyone could buy for a fair price.

I am glad gfiber exists to put a scare into certain monopolists, but even then I'd be tons happier if municipalities treated basic wired connectivity as we do roads and not as we do telephone poles.

It is one of my hopes that one day wireless technologies would
become sufficiently robust to break the last wire monopolies once and
for all.

I don't see home depot as servicing the target market for these products. On a story I heard this morning, it seems like people think they can go home and print gaskets or a screw. Maybe, if you can find the file online or have a caliper a a disign progam you can, but why would you spend the money? I suppose you could print a custom handle for a door or a faucet, if you wanted a plastic handle, but people pay good money for metal parts. I suppose you could coat it in metal, and it would be as good as the low end products.

I think that 3D printers have a market and will get to the point where they will be Sold in Stores My concern with Home Depot is their ability to market them positively. Sure, $4K is low enough that many people will but it and take it home and try to use it. But if Home Depot is trying to push 3D printers to just anyone, many of them are going to get returned because they can't print washers. And the reviews are going to be bad, and 3D printing technology is going to be pushed back 5 years.

"As we have stated before, Apple has never worked with any government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services."

We already know that Apple does key escrow of iMessage. Their security guidance documentation is very straightforward except it dances around the iMessage key escrow section like the cha-cha just came on the turntable, and then goes back to normal. Warrant canary much?

Apple could have created that all on their own, perhaps for noble purposes (being the benign dictator of their realm while the peansants enjoy good encryption so long as the soverign remains benign) and then were ordered to hand over their master keys.

I'm assuming Chinese news is as accurate as ours here in the US.

This was mentioned briefly on Science Friday last week. Also that some Staples are going to have them for "service bureau" printing.

It's a neat idea and a potential reniassance for service bureaus - I haven't needed to go to one since 44-meg Syquest carts were in vogue.

Eventually we'll all have high-strength 3D printers at home, but that's got to be at least a decade off.

Right now they are frantically searching for a second Kuiper Belt target within the range of the nuclear generator lifetime (+5 years?). But they have not found one yet. They would hope to set the course shortly after leaving Pluto.

Apparently, it has been released in Germany, at least the DVD: http://akas.imdb.com/title/tt0...

I've seen the movie and I've read other works by Niemi. Be careful with the spelling, it's Vittula, where "vittu" means "cunt", and the -la is a suffix for making it a toponym. OTOH, "vitulla" means "on top of a cunt" or "by using a cunt". Also, the original place is called Vittulajänkä, where "jänkä" is a kind of Northern wetland.

The language aspect is interesting, because it takes place in an area of Sweden where they speak Meänkieli, a dialect of Finnish. Swedish authorities consider it a separate language, for the purposes of preserving the special minority status, thus making an interesting case of the language vs. dialect problem.

I don't doubt that Swedish is spoken/understood near the Swedish border on our side, but that probably happens in every border zone around the world. The real Swedish-speaking areas, where many people don't speak Finnish, are found at the coast.

Some of the the mind blowing chapters consider an infinite universe in space and time. Our local area could exactly repeat on the average of 10^150 light years, Brian calculates. And there could many more variants than exact repeats.

Imagine an infinite number of exct copies of yourself, each sparated by immense distances. Image even more variants of yourslef, living slightly to greatly different lives.

A revolution, however warranted, would lead to an unimaginable amount of freezing and starvation within the first two winters

Why, would the failing government interdict traffic? That wouldn't be the revolution causing freezing or starvation.

Without being in favor of the death penalty it sounds like it may well have a silver lining in this case.

No, the murder of two people does not have a silver lining, especially mentally ill people.

Why didn't they sell these kids to adoption agencies? The kids would have been better off. Is there some law that prevents the sale of children to adoption agencies such that they turned to slavers instead?

If people really care about global warming and economic activity, they should read the latest IPCC report. It says that the best way to avoid warming is economic development. If the economy freezes in place (something a high carbon tax could do) then the warming will be about 4C by the end of the century. If the economy in all the "third world" countries develops into something like first-world conditions by the continued march of progress, then the warming will be closer to 1C.

Anything that stands in the way of that development is going to contribute to the warming. Removing these tariffs is a good thing, but to get maximum environmental benefit they need to get rid of the rest.

I know, Overton's Window and all.

I remmeber US Star Wars detractors said the system would be considered a failure if it allowed a single nuclear missile to strike the US. On the other hand supporters said it would be a success if it created uncertainty in the attacker and was partially succesful. Well, seeing Iron Dome in action after a couple couple battles now, it seems to be pyschologically beneficial to the Israeli population. This is whether you belive it has been 25% or 90% successful in knocking out rockets. Then I would say the "hal-full" side has won the debate.