Wow alternet, there's a name I haven't heard in a while. Maybe they just never upgraded their T1 line.

Is there a lot more activity somewhere else in his nervous system? Perhaps we distribute the processing load as we learn the moves. IIRC I've read a couple of papers that suggest that more processing than we realize takes place in our retinas when we do object recognition. I'd guess if you measured the brain activity of someone who's been driving for a couple of decades while they're driving, you'll find a lot less brain activity than someone who's just started. Maybe that's why the newbie has so much trouble with it -- it's an activity that requires a lot of reflexive movement and the newbie hasn't learned those yet. I've noticed that when I get in a car where the controls are a bit different, my eyes don't know where to go to gather the information that I need right now and I actually have to think about it. Could be a symptom of that...

That is true perhaps.

However, this is all entirely Verizon's fault. They are the entity in this arrangement that has actively encouraged assymetric use of the net by offering assymeteric service. It's really rich to see ISPs complain that they are getting too much traffic all in one direction then that's how they f*cking design their service.

Verizon is selling massive downloads. So is every other consumer ISP.

To be slightly more accurate and less cynical, because their customers asked for one, and because there were no particular rules or guidelines laying out what to do with such requests thus no reason to refuse. Sure, any given CA could refuse on principle, in which case that customer would go to a competitor. That's why the CA system is regulated by browser/OS makers - to keep standards high in the presence of competitive market forces that would otherwise optimise for convenience.

Routing traffic via the VPN changes the path the traffic flows over, possibly avoiding routes that are saturated and (who knows) pending upgrade.

It's tempting to imagine the internet as a giant blob of fungible bandwidth, but in reality it's just a big mess of cables some of which are higher capacity than others. Assuming malice is fun, but there isn't enough data here to say one way or another.

He did say small company. which makes it fairly plausible. Many pay a lot for Outlook/Office and use it only for email, meeting scheduling and simple documents/spreadsheets because it's the de facto corporate standard.

Now we're getting somewhere.

Rural and many suburban people would be OK as long as they boil the water somehow, but what about people in NYC? Surely you don't think they can drink from the Hudson?!?

Who are these people, that would give a damn about this change?

You don't need an intermediary not-you authority for this job. And in fact, using one can only possibly decrease the security, in the best case scenario. Even the worst most incompetent company in the world, would make a better CA for its internal servers, than the best, most trustworthy public CA.

That is exactly how congress works. Except the average IQ of congress is around 85.

> Why bother compressing?

Uses much less space and yields you something small enough to fit on a phone while still being useful for a 60 inch TV or 120 inch projector. Besides, most playback devices don't handle MPEG2 very well. They're all expecting h264.

DVD is a really outdated format and benefits greatly from transcoding.

I'm not convinced people in mud huts were numerous enough or destructive enough to manage the megafauna extinctions. A lot of this hysterical screaming about how we're destroying the planet seems a lot like hubris.

On certain level, the idea that we have that much power pleases the egos of some people.

In other words, it's fucked up market math. The same screwy math that claims adding $0.05 cost to a bill of materials will magically increase the retail price by $5.

0.7% profit may or may not be worthwhile, but it is not a loss. They can run forever on that.