Since the article and discussion is about providing high speed broadband access, then I assume the point of your statement is that because you have running water you should also have 1GB internet access?

The alternative is that a company who wants to do a marketing campaign with a prize has to spend hundreds or thousands of hours of legal time to research and comply with local laws in every country. In your scenario no company could afford to do a marketing campaign like this. Perhaps the local Google office (or name any other company) in your contry has run some sort of contest there? Shoud I be upset that I live in the US and can't win?

To have stockpiled this much explosive material in the house he lives in indicates that they guy is either insane or criminally dangerous. He is now likely facing life in prison so he has very little to live for. Only on slashdot would someone suggest letting the guy back in the house with all the explosives. What could possibly go wrong?

Mod parent up. All of these people posting that the government should clean it up rather than blow it up seem to be forgetting that a real, live person would have to do the clean up. I don't know what the risk factor is for detonating homemade explosives, but it is certainly not 0%. Multiply that non-zero number by a very large number of explosive devices and a real, live person is putting their life on the line.

1. Nobody called it oppression. I think this is just a dramatic word you added to try and draw attention to your post. 2. WTH does "being butchered" even mean? 3. People have been starving and going to jail for doing the right thing since the beginning of time. These are not easy problems to fix and they will likely continue for a long, long time. Sure, problems such as people starving and giong to jail are being worked on all the time. Do we make progress on those issues? Sure. Are there also setbacks? Of course. But are you suggesting that we drop everything and not try to fix any problem at all until those issues are completely resolved?

You do realize that the Live Gold service provides more than just Netflix and streaming media? The new things MS adds to the Live service is just bonus on top of an otherwise really good gaming service that you are paying $5/month for.

I also noticed that the other common factor is Netflix. In fact, I also noticed that Netflix wrote both applications, and would presumably be responsible for any bugs and patches. But I applaud your efforts to drag Microsoft into an unrelated issue.

Am I missing the irony pointed out a the end of the summary? An ex-employee donates some of his personal money to a cause he believes in, while Facebook (a company with a public image to maintain) decides not to take pro-cannabis ads. The two really don't have anything to do with each other, except both being about marijuana.

I am not blaming Republicans. I simply stated that both the summary and the article indicated that it was the Republican leader who didn't want to work on the bill, but the title implied that the Democrats dropped it. I was merely asking why. Jump to conclusions much?

Personally, I am very middle of the road and I don't have a "must be the GOP" bias. GOP does some things right and some things wrong, as do the Dems. But thank you for the additional information about the issue as it does help explain why the bill didn't move forward.

What's up with the title of this post? "Politics: House Democrats Shelve Net Neutrality" sure make it sound like the poster is trying to imply that Democrats were at fault for this bill failing. But the summary and TFA indicate that it was Republicans who blocked efforts to move this bill forward.

Perhaps RTFA would help....
"Ever since television caught on in the 1950s, the Federal Communication Commission has been getting complaints about blaring commercials"

Granted, that quote only tells you that yes, people do give a fuck about this issue. If you want better data, a quick 30 second internet search returns several links to .... "The telephone survey of 1,000 TV viewers, conducted for Harris Corporation (NYSE: HRS), showed that 89 percent are bothered by the often dramatic variation between regular TV programming and advertising volumes".

According to your logic, it would be ok for a site to serve up kiddie porn because nobody should dictate what the server returns when someone connects a browser to it.

If something is illegal, then it is illegal regardless of whether it is on a computer server or in a brick and mortar store.

5 Cameras actually. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee692114(Surface.10).aspx

It isn't the consipracy theory you make it out to be. A lot of public MS sites are designed and built by external design agencies, and not all of those agencies have Silverlight dev experience. A lot of MS teams will contract out to a design agency and not put a restriction on the technologies used on the website as long as that agency produces good work at a good price.

Remember that TCO isn't only hardware (server, UPS, cable). You also have to factor in software licenses, physical building, physical building security, network security, HVAC costs, etc. And these are just the easy to calculate costs.

You also have to think about other costs such as procurement (someone has to order the hardware from Dell, receive it at the shipping dock, unbox it, install the server OS on it, handle warranty repairs, etc), network administration, management overhead, load balancing, etc.

And then what about the 'costs' in terms of business opportunity lost when your service is not able to quickly scale to customer demand. There is a time lag between realizing you need more capacity to actually getting that capacity online.

Also what about the costs of having to build your datacenter scale to the max usage? If your site experiences heavy usage 9-5 M-F, but very little usage during evenings and weekends, then you still have to build your datacenter to that peak usage. With cloud computing you can scale it up and down daily depending on your needs.

Looking at the cost of moving a service to the "cloud" is a lot more than just looking at how much a server costs. It won't make sense for all businesses and scenarios, but the more you research it the more it seems to make sense. And noting your use of the term "small businesses", cloud computing really can pay off for a lot of scenarios. Small businesses usually don't have the budget to properly implement all of the functionality that cloud computing offers (security, network management, redundancy, fault domains, load balancing, scalability, etc) so, while a small business can get a cheap server up and running, it may not actually be cheaper in the long run.