I'm sure someone will stand up shortly and complain that this is somehow racist, sexist, or otherwise deleterious to the well-being of the pupils being schooled. Can't have kids learning about how money is made, handled, taxed, and invested. That would interfere with them being good little minions who simply do what they're told by their betters...i.e. those in government power.

Not entirely true. I remember reading an article years and years ago that Yahoo was only paying for half of their total bandwidth usage. At the time Yahoo was generating a lot of traffic. It helped Yahoo and the larger ISP's to bypass their expensive transit links, bypass the backbone, and connect eyeballs to content directly.

It is a little bit more complicated than this. Netflix uses Cogent. Cogent has pissed off other backbone providers over the years. Netflix is suffering with Verizon because of the relationship with Cogent. Netflix should see if Verizon would be interested in peering with them "directly".

I DO NOT want the government to have any say in this stuff. I would rather the market figure out the details. Yeah, there might be bumps along the road, but I would rather have that than the long arm of government regulation causing stagnation.

Cogent likes to think of themselves as a pure bandwidth company. No frills bandwidth for a great price. No content, no VoIP, nothing. They have colocation data centers, but that came when they purchased a company for their network.

I've been saying this for ages! Even mentioned this here on slashdot. Peering is peering. They are not degrading performance by configuration, they just let the link get congested. How do any of the proposed net neutrality laws address this issue? Answer is, they don't. To me that means that Net Neutrality laws are about something different than neutrality. More likely with government regulation, it becomes Net Control. With that, increased stiffing and limiting reaction to market dynamics, not improving it.

See, it's this kind of "we've got to do *something* now!" thinking that's so destructive to rational thought. If the proposed "fixes" for climate change were minor and otherwise insignificant then nobody would mind. But they are not. The proposed changes will be costly, both in terms of real money and in terms of people's quality of lives. If you want someone to make a drastic change in their lives, you need drastically good evidence. Thus far, you have *some* evidence, but that does not equate to proof.

First, is the planet getting warmer? On that I'd say there's general agreement, although it is not a 100% consensus.

Second, if it is getting warmer, is it caused in large part by human activity or is it part of some natural variation? This is the sticking point. If it's part of a natural variation in temperature -- and I will point out many such variations have happened in the past few million years, all without any input from humans -- then there is no need for us to radically alter our life to stop it because such actions will have no positive climatic effect while having a signficant negative effect on quality of life.

Third, if it is anthropogenic, what should we do about it? Curtainling greenhouse emissions is an obvious choice, but is it the best one? How severe are the predicted warming effects? The economic and socio-political upheavals from drastic policy changes might be worse than adapting to a changing climate. And how much confidence can we have in the predictions regardless of how severe (or not) they may be?

These are not minor issues. They deserve to be studied and debated *in depth* before drastic action is take, if for no other reason than to determine that we're taking the *most effective* action possible. This whole "the debate is settle and if you don't agree with us you're a denier" smacks of the same kind of thinking that gave us an Earth-centric cosmic model and burned "deniers" as heretics.

The exact causes of the Permian–Triassic extinction event you reference are not known. High CO2 are but one hypothesis, alongside many others, all of which have at least some supporting evidence. CO2 may be the favorite whipping boy these days but it is a blatant falsification on your part to claim CO2 was the sole driver of this particular extinction event. CO2 may have been the sole cause. It may have been a contributing cause. Or, in the case of something like a catastrophic impact, it may have had *absolutely nothing* to do with the event. I don't know the answer, but you most certainly don't either.

And your wrong decisions don't have similar impacts were they to be implemented as national policy? Of course they do! But you're naively assuming you're the only "right" person in this discussion. You've made up your mind and that's the end of it, despite plenty of evidence to show that there just *might* be other climate factors out there that could be just as -- or perhaps even more than -- contributory to what's going on with the climate. It's that kind of dogmatism that marks you as a zealot, and subsequently makes logical people tune you out.

And increased heat in the oceans can (and likely will) lead to increased cloud formation, which will alter the planet's albedo in the opposite direction. How much and how soon? Nobody knows. But the planet has been both warmer and cooler than it is now during it's long history. Each time it's damped out cycles of extreme warming and extreme cooling all by itself.

I'm sure Kim Jong-un is just quivering in his boots at this "strongly worded condemnation" by the UN. After all, the UN has such a strong record of following up such condemnations with action...

What's pathetic about this is such UN declarations just serve to reinforce what an absolute joke the whole organization is. The UN has no power whatsoever to do anything to North Korea and Dear Leader knows this.

Here's an idea: instead of spending all this money now to launch probes from Earth, why not spend it instead on building a base with launch infrastructure on the Moon? No atmosphere, no environment to worry about, lesser gravity well...the list of advantages is quite large. The only disadvantage is it would take a while to get going. But the same could be said for the space industry 50 years ago. So we could spend a lot of money on a lunar base now and get huge payoffs later, or keep spending almost as much on Earth-launched probes for the next several decades and advance the human presence in space not one whit.

NASA still hasn't figured this out. The public is not *interested* in these pure science missions, regardless of how beneficial they are to scientists and engineers. The public wants the glory, grandeur, and *adventure* of Apollo. And without public backing, NASA's budget gets whacked again and again and again. NASA needs to come up with things that capture the public's imagination like the glory days of the 1960's. Then they'll get the money and political clout to do big things. I'm sure most American's don't give two damns about a mission to Uranus or Neptune.

I will quit reading Slashdot if that stupid Beta shit is implemented. It's horrible. It fixes nothing. It is not an improvement in any way.

Why would it be illegal to have a saturated peering link? Are you saying that the government would control to whom and what the link speed for each peering link should be?

I'm not saying that the Verizon to AWS link is saturated for this reason. I'm just pointing out that Verizon could handle all traffic in a neutral way to the letter of the law and still have an issue with traffic going to AWS/Netflix. It would be the responsibility of Netflix and Verizon to work out a mutually beneficial agreement that would carry the traffic without congestion between their respective networks. That is exactly how this all works right now.

OP pointed out that the situation is more similar to the French Revolution than to the Kristallnacht/disenfranchisement of Jews in 30s Germany. I agree with you that most of the tech workers are scape-goats (I have been part of this very group in the past, for the record), but I agree with OP that the situation is closer to that in the French revolution:

(a) The targetted group holds considerable power and is connected to an apparatus that is seen with approval and benevolence `all the way up'
(b) The targetted group lives in a `bubble' that separates its concerns from those of the `lower' classes
(c) Targetting is driven by public disapproval, rather than by governmental machinations (sort of a fall-out of (a)).

Now, are the Googlers etc. to blame for the situation? Most of them aren't of course, they're just innocent participants `in the system' and can't be blamed for not wanting to not participate. But I'm confident that most of the French aristocracy had little intent of stomping on the common man either-- they just didn't deal with them much. Didn't do their necks much good, in the end.

So yes. This looks way more French revolution, `to the barricades, comrades! We shall throw off our shackles, and then guilloutine everyone who was or might have been sympathetic to these oppressors!' than Nazi `you really want to be there tonight to throw stones at the Jews, dude, or the Gauleiter will want to have a word with you, and you do remember that you have a wife and kids to feed, right?' Reichskristallnacht.

Except modulo the guilloutines. Please.

What *should* be scary but is being ignored by the larger public is how utilities are increasingly running "peak load" assets as if they were "base load" assets. To wit, combined-cycle turbine plants are not usually designed for continuous operation like this; they're designed to be brought online during peak load *only*. Base load assets like coal and nuclear carry the non-peak loads. The peak load assets are going to have much more intensive maintenance costs if they keep running them like this, leading to higher prices for consumers and the ugly potential for brownout/blackout when these peak load assets break down unexpectedly.

Disclosure: I'm a tech consultant working with TVA right now, and this info comes direct from people who run these assets. We *need* more base load assets like coal and nuclear, but government regulations are making that extremely difficult. Indeed, we're having to *shut down* coal plants due to new government regulations, further stressing an already-fragile national power infrastructure. Thank god we're *finally* building some new nuclear assets (TVA's Watts Bar Unit 2, and Georgia Power's Plant Vogtle Units 3 and 4) but we need to be doing this on a much larger scale to meet growing demands for power. Conservation will only take you so far; at some point -- a point I think we passed some years ago -- you must expand capacity to keep your system fault-tolerant.