Here's another theory, from an MEP (Julia Reda, Pirate Party, DE) who thinks it's German publishers wanting to charge "ancillary copyright" licence fees for linking to their publications.

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.

Your fear, perhaps, not mine. You do not want to show fear around those guys. This is how I was able to get within 10 metres of a nest to get some photos of the hatchlings this past spring, while a guy passing by in a kayak much further away got attacked and dumped in the water (Daddy Swan buzzed him, and he panicked).

(Heh, I just had to add "hatchling" to my dictionary. Pretty funny when you know more than your spell-checker does.)

You won't find many open APs in China, since the official policy there is that all Internet users must be identifiable. Certainly not in cafés or what have you. Generally you have to register for username/password and receive it by email.

What I usually end up doing in such places is flirting with the girl behind the counter until she offers to let me use hers. Unless my wife is with me, of course. ;)

Swans are majestic and regal. They're also big enough to carry off your dog or even one of your kids. They therefore are worthy of our respect.

You talking about 110 GHz networking, or the prediction that the singularity would occur in January 2012?

Torrents, my good man. Torrents.

Awesome. Watched that series as a kid... then, 20 years later, I spent a few years working in radio and found out that WKRP was much closer to real life than most people knew.

Geese are more evil. But they're also prettier and aren't quite as tasty.

Dear me, you must have missed "THREEE-DEEE PRINTERS IN SPAAAAAAAAACE" that was posted... um, yesterday.

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.

But I... can... no longer... resist... the tide.

Very well. This article sucks. Most of Bennett's articles mostly suck.

Where do I pick up my bucket of tar and feathers?

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.