The walled garden here means free access for the user - no data charges, no access charges.

The alternative is for a user to have to pay data charges and/or access charges - in other words, the status quo. In many places, data charges can be expensive - in many parts of Africa, you can buy airtime in 15 cent vouchers, which sort of indicates the level of disposable funds people have. Data charges can fairly rapidly wipe out 15 cents, so people generally dont bother and stick to cheaper SMS and voice services.

So if the user isn't paying the data charges, who picks up the bills? Someone has to...

So why the hate for Facebook et al doing this? Do people really expect them to pick up the tab for everyone just because?

Ok, so what is your argument about Uber flouting the laws in the UK, where anyone can get commercial passenger carrying insurance and then get a taxi cab license from the local council for less than £3,000 to operate from a taxi rank or a private hire license to operate point to point on prebooking jobs?

Is it perhaps because those drivers dont have to prove that they have taken out the commercial passenger carrying insurance, nor pay the license fees, and instead just sacrifice a smaller amount to Uber?

It just shows that when you remove undue barriers to entry, people will still cut corners in order to save that little bit more money, even when the fees are justifiable and fair. And that is why Uber is having the hard time they are.

Mrs or Ms is a personal choice for the woman, and should be respected - so if she is being referred to as Ms its usually because that is how she has requested to be known, or because a publication wants to play it safe when not knowing.

Apple didn't even have the courtesy to say they were discontinuing Safari on Windows, they just stopped releasing versions. So fuck them.

Seriously are we back in the 90's? Some of the most valuable things on earth only exist in the digital realm, see microsoft office and windows, google, and everything produced by the television and movie industries.

We get it. You have an enormous hard-on for Bitcoin.

Too bad I cannot use Bitcoin to pay my taxes, my mortgage, my children's school fees, my grocery bill, any gas station, the parking meter, or anything else that requires interaction with the physical realm around me.

The value of Bitcoin is what I can buy with it, which is very little beyond mail-order luxuries that, let's face it, are better ordered via and protected by my credit card.

We do not care whether you have some anrcho-capitalist obsession with Bitcoin. Counterfeiting does not affect us. Inflation and a central bank is not a concern when compared with a "currency" whos value fluctuates far more against real world goods than the US dollar has in decades, if not longer. Using Bitcoin to trade with the Chinese has the fundamental problem that nobody in the private sphere wants a public and de-anonymizable record of all curreny flows in international and intrastate trade -- it's a surveillance state's dream, but a citizen's and a business' nightmare.

Go troll somewhere else.

Troll somewhere else.

Good. Now we've gone from "they're all scum" to "some of them (possibly including Rand Paul") are good and trying but the Repubican machine and its operators will block them."

At this point we're mostly on the same page.

Ron Paul is clearly one of those good guys. And the Neocons controlling the R party machine (one of the four major factions) steamrollered him and his supporters (sometimes violently), and changed the rules to make it even harder for a grass roots uprising to displace them.

Two debates are going on right now. One is between working through the R party (is it salvagable?) or coming in with a "third" party - either an existing one or a new one (is that doable or do the big two have too much of a lock?)

The other is whether Rand is a sellout to the Neocons or if he's just more savvy than his dad and trying to look non-threatening to them in order to get the nomination. Andrew Napolitano, who knows him personally, says he knows him to be a genuine liberty advocate, and I trust A. N. on this subject.

Its not simply Atom, it uses the Monaco editor MS have been using on VS Online for some time, as well as Omnisharp and a few other things - Atom supplies the shell, and Chromium the runtime, but its much more than simply Atom.

If nobody knows how it works, how did the guy invent it?

LOTS of stuff gets invented without the inventor knowing HOW it works, underlying physics wise. All that's necessary is to notice THAT it works, work out some details of "if you do this much of this you get that much of that", and engineer a practical gadget.

As they say, most fundamental discoveries don't go "Eureka!", they go "That's odd ..."

this gem ... hidden in the article:

"... whether it is possible for a spacecraft traveling at conventional speeds to achieve effective superluminal speed by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it. ..."

They've been playing at that for a while. It would allegedly work by creating a condition of cosmic expansion behind the craft and its converse in front of it, so the spacecraft is in a bubble where it's running slower than lightspeed (i.e. stopped) but the cosmic expansion and contraction regions behind and ahead of it each total to the opposite sides retreating or advancing faster than light (which is allowable).

I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to fall out of this - or anything. Effective superluminal translates to "Sending messaages into the past." and "Violating causality." if you pick your reference frames correctly. So I expect flies to appear in this ointment at some point: Like something broken about what happens at the sides, needing big-bang energy levels (and not being able to transfer them between the front and back so they're free), or not being able to set up the condition in front because the agency making it happen must involve actual superluminal signal propagation.

Nevertheless, an "electric motor" that works by pushing against virtual particle-antiparticle pairs (or the total mass of the matter in the universe, or of an inverse-square weighting-by-distance of it so it's mostly the local stuff, or dark matter, or the neutrino background, or whatever), instead of ejected exhaust, is just DANDY! Let's see if they can make it work for real at human-palpable, nontrivial, efficiencies and power levels.

Who said they are getting to walk away with just an apology? Their statement includes:

“As part of a settlement agreement with the major record companies, we have agreed to cease operations immediately, wipe clean all of the record companies’ copyrighted works and hand over ownership of the website, our mobile apps and intellectual property, including our patents and copyrights.”

Note the "as part of a settlement agreement ..." part - which indicates that shutting down operations isn't the end of it for them.

And if everyone does that, the cheap rate goes away - its only there because there is excess capacity at that time, and its not worth taking more generators off line during the middle of the night consumption troughs because it takes them time to come back up for the wake-up peaks. Thats the reason the cheap rate exists (we call it Economy 7 in the UK).

So if everyone avails themselves of the cheap electricity in the middle of the night to store for use during the day, the excess capacity vanishes and instead we get an actual load needing to be catered for in additional capacity. So the cheap rate would be discontinued due to changes in consumption habits.

Psychology, sociology and other social sciences have always been given special treatment precisely because its difficult in some cases to get two independent groups together to rerun an experiment in the first place - and if you try and reproduce an experiment done in the 1950s today, are the results due to poor scientific method in the original experiment, or because the evidence gathered was misinterpreted, or because society has changed which means the results have changed?

When the rubber meets the road, people like Rand Paul are not actually in favor of downsizing the government. They just want to eliminate restrictions on business and aid to the poor.

You have the liberty movement confused with their arch enimies the neocons.

A) The rules are already there and need no new legislation. They just need willpower in the agencies involved.

B) Though not as idealistic as his father, Rand has substantial libertarian leanings - and is a major figure in the Liberty Movement. As such his main goals are to downsize the government and free the people

Downsizing the government means you DON'T add new restrictions to "fix" every new manifestation of a political issue. Doing that keeps the government growing. Instead you:
  1) Oppose ANY INCREASE in the government's power and limitations on what people can do.
  2) Look for ways to "solve" problems by REMOVING government power and meddling where possible, or just use the EXISTING powers in the ways they were intended when a "solve by downsizing" isn't feasible.

In theory, the FCC shouldn't need to regulate the internet at all, but because other government has created a wholly fucked up system, I agree that it's necessary at this point for them to step in.

If any branch of government should step into this, it's the FTC and the Justice Department, not the FCC.

Network Neutrality conflates two issues: Traffic management and anticompetitive behavior. Some packets SHOULD be treated differently than others, in order to make diverse services "play well together". (Example: Streaming vs. File Download.)

The problem arises when an ISP uses the tools to penalize the competition to its own company's and partners' services, extort extra fees, and otherwise engage in non-technical nastiness through technical means.

The proper regulatory regimes are antitrust and consumer fraud. These are the province of the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, not the FCC.

The FCC is using this as a power-grab on the Internet, in direct contravention of Congress' authorization. THAT is what Rand Paul is opposing.