Or it could be he would be accused of shameless plugging. :)

Hmmmm. This is pretty different from what I've read... but I'll have to look into it mor,e perhaps I've either been misled or misunderstood what I've read.

Everyone knows Denial isn't a state, it's a river.

They didn't pay for more bandwidth. You ALREADY paid for that bandwidth (say, 5mbit down). Comcast decided they didn't want to provide you 5mbit worth of Netflix, though, without Netflix ALSO paying, even though Netflix had already paid whoever they have as an ISP on their end.

This wasn't Netflix running out of bandwidth and having to increase their uplink speed, and it wasn't the consumer running out of bandwidth and having to pay to increase their download speed. This was Comcast deciding that Netflix was causing you (and your peers) to use too much of your already-paid for bandwidth. Comcast couldn't keep up with the consistent and simultaneous demand on what you supposedly had access to. So, instead, it throttled Netflix (which users saw as being Netflix's problem - hey, Netflix can't keep up!) and then charged Netflix to unthrottle (which users saw as Netflix "buying more bandwidth" so Netflix could keep up). In reality, it was Comcast that essentially oversold their bandwidth (you can have 5mbit down! oh, wait, nevermind, we can't supply all this bandwidth all at once; hey, a lot of it is being used by Netflix, maybe we could get them to pay more so it doesn't look like we were unprepared for demand on services we sold!)

This isn't unlike an airline overselling their flights. The difference is that when a flight fills up and customers who already paid for their tickets can't actually fit on the plane anymore, the airline doesn't start charging the destination more because the destination is using too much space on their plane. They give the customers who can't get on the plane at the very least a free transfer, and I think they get a free future lfight or something, too? Or a refund + flight? Something like that. In other words, the airliner realizes that part of overselling means that you have to deal with the consequences that occasionally come up with overselling... and "deal with" doesn't mean "charge someone else for your own lack of space that you sold as though you had more space than you actually did."

TL;DR: Comcast oversold their bandwidth and decided to make Netflix pay for it.

Is that really the case? I kept Vista up to date, but it never worked as well as Windows 7 on the same hardware. Even something as simple as file transferring was clunky on Vista, or hung, or was crazy slow. Boot times were different between Vista and 7...

I don't actually know about the internals of what changed, and I realize it was 6.0 to 6.1 (right? I think...), but it certainly seemed a lot different than a "rebranding."

Quite true. The wikipedia entry on marriage licenses is quite an interesting read... e.g., "For most of Western history, marriage was a private contract between two families. Until the 16th-century, Christian churches accepted the validity of a marriage on the basis of a couple’s declarations."

Regardless though... religion is a pretty personal and, ah, religious institution, right? And yet, government's for all of history have made it their business to make laws about it.

This is true, but in a democracy, is it a problem for a group of people to try to democratically change the country to be what they consider to be right and recognize what they think is the right explanation of who/what a marriage is between?

I actually think the government shouldn't be in the business of "marriage" licenses, because I don't think the government has anything to do with what marriage really IS. I can see how a government might recognize a marriage as being automatically a civil union, and I can see how those who value a traditional view of marriage would want the government to encourage that view, and I think it's okay for said supporters to try to democratically effect that change. But, myself, I think it should be separated. Government is a civil thing and thus should be in the business of making civil unions. Marriage is a religious thing and should be a religious thing.

If you want to not serve people who have divorced unbiblically... I see no reason why you can't not serve those people.

I thought those arguing in favor of homosexual marriage bring up that there are financial benefits TO getting married?

Anyways, the main point is this: maybe there are discrepencies (I agree, there are) and problems with the way people are refused service (refuse service to open homosexuals, not refuse service to college students who openly sleep around, or whatever). Ok, so we've established inconsistencies. So that means that, since the beliefs are inconsistent, or perhaps more generally, just don't make sense to someone else ... that you can simply say that those beliefs are therefore invalid and that individual can be forced to violate them?

Not forced to not violate other people's rights, but forced to violate your own beliefs. Forced, yes, to do something as simple as bake a cake for someone, take pictures at their wedding... or more non-simple things like officiate the wedding.

It wouldn't happen, but I can't imagine a minister of the Flying Spaghetti Monster thingy would particularly want to be forced to give Christian vows in a Christian ceremony to a Christian couple because somehow, the Christian couple has a "right" to THAT PERSON offciating their wedding. Because, you know, I have a right to make you do what I want you to do, even if you think it is wrong for you to do it?

Let's say I'm holding a pro-bombing rally. Let's say it's a pro-bomb-the-abortion-clinics rally (obviously, it's not explicitly that). And I want you to provide a meal for us. Should you be forced to do that, and not be able to say "No, I don't want to support bombing abortion clinics. I'm not going to provide food."

I'm a Christian, and I think someone should be able to refuse me service because you think my views are harmful. I don't think the government should be allowed to... but that's a different story... and yes, I do support separating legal and religious "marriage" things... i.e., you want to have a civil union for the legal benefits, fine. Pastors do religious ceremonies. Civil servants to civil ceremonies. I would view myself as "married" even if my state and/or country didn't think I was.

I'm pretty sure Windows 7 was not really just "rebranded Vista." Having used both Vista and Windows 7, it certainly seems like they fixed a whole lot of issues in Vista. Sure, it looks sorta similar more or less continued the Vista-esque GUI/frontend look and feel... but if we're just basing it on the frontend look and feel, then we may as well be comparing Windows to Gnome and KDE... :P

Even so, it looks like it's compatible with Chrome, Safari, FF, and IE... at least that seem to be what that wikipedia page indicates.

What? My wife uses Firefox and Chrome with outlook.com every day. What doesn't work properly, exactly?

Strange. We have been automating various installation package types on Windows for a while, now, usually with answer files... for test purposes.

This is interesting to me, I've never heard this. Are you saying that parted, as in the Linux partitioning tool, uses the Microsoft partition type GUID incorrectly... and that is what Windows is reading, and thus sees it as not being formatted correctly?

Aren't they trying to get users to use Office365 now, though? Subscriptoin based service and all that? So maybe interoperability with file formats is now to their benefit, just as making things like OneDrive or Outlook.com work better on multiple mobile device OSes.

I'm not a fan of the metro stuff and start screen on 8, though at least 8.1 half fixed metro apps by letting you close them. Windows 10 is supposed to run metro apps in a window on the desktop. But, all that said - I have to say that if I had a tablet, the new Start screen thing and metro apps ... would be totally fine. That seems to be what it was designed for. And being able to switch between those two contexts is even better (as 10 can do, I believe... manually, or based on screen size). I'm assuming it was the metro stuff that you meant was a dealbreaker. I've heard good things about it on Windows phones (I don't own own)

This comes from someone running RHEL on his work laptop, Windows 8.1 on his desktop, and Android on all his mobile/tablet devices. And I work with several versions of unix, linux, and windows for a living... I'm no Windows fanboy. :) But Windows 7 was good, Windows 8 was better aside from the badly implemented UI changes, 8.1 improved somewhat [I installed a third party start button modification thingy], and it looks like Windows 10 will actually be pretty good, from what I've seen [I have not actually run it]. It seems that Microsoft is trying to reinvent itself somewhat, moving to a make-money-with-services idea... more platform agnostic. Which is awesome; Google and Apple could use some competition, and Amazon could, too, in the cloud arena ... specifically, making things more widely compatible (seriously, why isn't there a google music roku app?).

Unintended? I doubt it. :)