Chinese push it to the extreme though (disclaimer, my wife is chinese, and her family fit exactly the description above, and they freely admit it...my wife was born here and was kind of a rebel, thus why she broke the line and ended up with a white guy).

The length they'll go to avoid all "foreigners", even when they're in the middle of big cities, big schools, etc...All big companies have a "Chinese" mailing list that a ton of them subscribe to, eat together, go out together, only deal with doctors/contractors/etc who are chinese, etc. Its crazy.

Anthem is citing "company policy" that prohibits third party access to its network

I guess the hackers didn't read--or failed to abide by--that policy. Kind of like "gun-free zone" which only deters the law-abiding.

What has that to do with the topic?

Traditional gas turbine plants where the most expensive plants. Modern combined gas turbine + boiler plants are the most effective ones.

What do you want to say with your numbers?

Hint: visit a nuclear plant :)
Ignorant, plain, simple!
Actually: idiot!

That's not what I'm talking about, because it lacks the "distribution" part. What I'm talking about is what level of detachment is necessary to say that these bits of software depend on each other, but they're not derivative of each other. And thus the GPL wouldn't apply, even if you distribute them together.

Ah, but how does the traffic get from Netflix's ISP to your ISP?

Hint: The actual internet is more than the oft-imagined cloud on network diagrams. Network operators agree to interconnect with each other, for mutual benefit, and if such an agreement is unbalanced (because one party is handing off more traffic than the amount they're willing or able to deliver) one of the network operators will end up paying the other.

A simplified version, wherein we're both network operators, Case 1, equal traffic flow:

Shakrai: "I have 3 terabit/s of peak hour traffic that you can deliver for me."
suutar: "Perfect. I also have 3 terabit/s of peak hour traffic that I can't deliver but you can. Let's connect our networks."
Shakrai: "Sounds good."

Case 2, unbalanced traffic flow:

Shakrai: "I have 10 terabit/s of peak hour traffic that you can deliver for me."
suutar: "I only have 3 terabit/s to hand off to you. We're going to bill you for the difference, okay?"
Shakrai: "Sure."

That has been the paradigm on the internet for a very long time, because it's recognized that it costs money to get a packet from Point A to Point B. Networks pay for connections to other networks unless they can absorb a roughly equal amount of traffic. You can't dump terabits of traffic into someone's network without offering them something in return.

Netflix wants to blow up this longstanding model because bearing the full cost of delivering their packets eats into their bottom line. It doesn't kill their business model, the fact that they're profitable attests to that, but it sure seems to keep Mr. Hastings up late at night. If you actually drill down into this issue you'll find that they've hijacked the concept of network neutrality. There a ton of arguments to be made in favor of network neutrality but Netflix is not one of them.

Haven't you heard that NFC is now the hip, cool thing? That is so last year.

POTS is dying, largely because it's unable to respond to more nimble competitors that do not have to deal with a legacy regulatory environment. It's arguably already a niche product, one that will be completely dead in another decade or two at most.

And, incidentally, the law in question hasn't been amended since 1996. When the 33.6kbit/s modem was bleeding edge for consumer internet access. Do you remember those days? Because I do. 19 years later and I have the equivalent of a T3 in my pocket, which works almost anywhere in CONUS. Such a connection was unthinkable for consumer access in 1996.

You'll pardon my skepticism if I think that advancement would have occurred that rapidly if we had sought to apply outdated regulations drafted for Ma Bell to the internet.

Why should Comcast give Netflix free co-location services? It's not Comcast's responsibility to enable Netflix's business model. I have no lost love for Comcast, or Time Warner, or Verizon, it's just that I don't see Netflix as a White Knight here. They're throwing their weight around to try and get favorable treatment that is unavailable to would be upstarts. Frankly I think that's offensive to the spirit of what network neutrality is supposed to be about.

I do see some fundamental problems. One of them (conflict of interest, most ISPs are also in the video business) is discussed in the mainstream. The rest are far too nuanced for most people to understand. To pick one, as the internet has evolved there has been a blurring of the traditional line between end user internet service providers and providers of bulk IP transit services. ISPs like Comcast now run national data networks rival the Tier 1 providers in many respects. I don't think anybody anticipated this development, or the interface between large national ISPs and CDNs.

My fear here is twofold:

1. The FCC is attacking the wrong problems.
2. We're opening pandora's box and regulating something that has flourished without regulation.

I think it would be more beneficial for Uncle Sam to encourage competition in the ISP space than to regulate what ISPs can do. Do you think any of the killer apps we take for granted would have emerged in a highly regulated Ma Bell environment? Because those are some of the regulations that they're seeking to apply.

There isn't an ISP in the world that promises you any specific amount of bandwidth beyond their network, even for business class connections with SLAs and a 1:1 contention ratio. Any ISP that made such a promise would be lying to you, because they can't control the actions of those networks that they interconnect with. You might do well to learn what the internet actually is; it's a collection of networks that are interconnected. Each network is operated by different people, who can only control their own actions, not those of the partner networks they're interconnected with.

If Netflix wants to reach Comcast's customers they have two choices:

1. Buy transit from someone that has sufficient peering capacity with Comcast to hand off Netflix's anticipated peak hour traffic load.
2. Buy connectivity directly from Comcast.

They've selected Option #2, presumably because it was cheaper than Option #1. What Netflix actually desires is Option #3:

3. Comcast installs Netflix's caching boxes ("Open Connect") free of charge, without remuneration for rack space, physical security, or even electricity, never mind the bandwidth that they consume within the Comcast network and at Comcast's peering points with other providers.

There are a ton of arguments for network neturality that I can get behind, but "My Netflix is slow!" is not one of them. This is one billionaire (Hastings) arguing with other billionaires (Verizon, Comcast, et. al) about who should pay for the other man's business model.

The Democratic nutjobs are minor back-benchers. The Republican nutjobs chair committees. Both the House and Senate environmental committees are chaired by people who have publicly said that climate change is a hoax by scientists (Bridenstine and Inhofe).

On this subject I am; any and all argument against the FCC's action is immediately given the same treatment by moderators as a GNAA post.

It's nothing at all like that. I merely question the wisdom of applying a law that was originally written before WW2 to the internet. If you believe there's a problem it would be far better to lobby your Congressman to address it through the Congressional power to regulate interstate commerce. The proponents of this action will argue that Congress is generally useless (at least we agree on something) but I've never been a big fan of "the ends justify the means" as an argument.