My ISP wouldn't be able to screw up my connection so badly that entire words get dropped.

Then why is EA shipping games for any platform at all?

Because of course they've avoided raising their rates out of the kindness of their hearts, but all of this new regulation is forcing them to do it against their will.

I keep hearing from free-market capitalists that prices would naturally trend towards whatever the market will bear. If that's true, then regulation would never increase prices. After all, if the sellers could get away with raising the price, they would have already done so.

You see, if we already Net Neutrality rules in place, your ISP wouldn't be able to screw up your connection so badly that your text isn't even making it through in the right order.

I don't really care about Uber personally, but it's a bit disingenuous to say that they provide no value at all. There is some non-zero value to the infrastructure for connecting customers with drivers that they maintain. I doubt it's worth $40 billion, but it's worth more than nothing.

Like your freedom to purchase a streaming movie subscription from Netflix?

Apparently not you, otherwise you would know that normal filibuster votes are 3/5, not 2/3.

There's a Linux version of ZFS. As far as I know, it works quite well, though I can't make any guarantees.

Nope, he can't be that guy. That guy had his pot stolen.

This is also known as the Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Economic Injustice.

It's also possible that the employer will settle relatively quickly. If an employer relies that heavily on such non-compete clauses, they certainly don't want to risk having a judicial precedent that nullifies that part of their contracts.

It started with a good idea: make it so that a person who makes a mistake running their business can't be sued into personal oblivion. If you remove that major risk factor, it will encourage (or more accurately, not heavily discourage) more people to start their own businesses. Eventually, though, corporations got big enough that they could use this merely to shield themselves from the consequences of any actions they take, so there's no risk at all to doing things that would likely destroy most small businesses.

This is why we can't have nice things.

You missed that episode of South Park, didn't you?

Not if they're adhering to the OSI networking model. HTTP is an Application protocol, while encryption is a Presentation layer function. There shouldn't be any dependencies between layers.

No, it's not just Slashdot. It's also whoever came up with this line (either VentureBeat or the company's marketing department):

for example, substituting in synonyms or reordering steps in a process, thereby generating tens of thousands of potentially patentable inventions.

First, substituting synonyms doesn't really work. Within a patent's claims, different words are presumed to have different meanings (i.e. if you meant the same thing in two places, you would have used the same word). So if you have one claim that says something is "big" and another claim that says something is "large", with the rest of the two claims being identical, you'll need to explain the difference between "big" and "large", or else one of the claims will be invalidated.

Second, the steps in a method patent are considered unordered, unless some language imposes an ordering, such as saying, "After X, doing Y". Simply reordering the steps in a method does not by itself create a different invention, so one of the two claims would be invalid.