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Um... It may affect their right to work on strong encryption software?

Also, what's preventing them from becoming Americans further down the road if they chose?

We can only hope that that includes the US. :-)

Funny you should say this: on my way to Kobe I met a lovely couple, that told me with much passion about the nice places I should visit in the city. They also told me about the great views around the hotel (not in Kobe but in the countryside near the sea) where I would stay later on. They seemed so strangely enthusiastic and vivacious, very non-Japanese-like. At the end, the gentleman revealed that they are Korean who comes to visit often to Kobe, Osaka and sometimes Tokyo.

I doubt very much they would love Japan so much had the people there been assholish towards them.

Question: are you Korean, or are you just making assumptions about Japan?

Only Israelis are allowed to keep original citizenship, all others forswear loyalty to foreign "prince, power or potentate".

Now, WHY is that?

It's like prison, that way. You have to commit the crime again and be re-convicted, to be admitted back to the circle of convicts.

US History is the only relevant topic, concerning that failed state.

Incest is any kind of sexual activity with a close relative. What you describe is only a problem if such activity results in offspring. We've had contraception for a long time now, not to mention that not all sex is even potentially procreative in the first place.

Ah, but how does the traffic get from Netflix's ISP to your ISP?

Hint: The actual internet is more than the oft-imagined cloud on network diagrams. Network operators agree to interconnect with each other, for mutual benefit, and if such an agreement is unbalanced (because one party is handing off more traffic than the amount they're willing or able to deliver) one of the network operators will end up paying the other.

A simplified version, wherein we're both network operators, Case 1, equal traffic flow:

Shakrai: "I have 3 terabit/s of peak hour traffic that you can deliver for me."
suutar: "Perfect. I also have 3 terabit/s of peak hour traffic that I can't deliver but you can. Let's connect our networks."
Shakrai: "Sounds good."

Case 2, unbalanced traffic flow:

Shakrai: "I have 10 terabit/s of peak hour traffic that you can deliver for me."
suutar: "I only have 3 terabit/s to hand off to you. We're going to bill you for the difference, okay?"
Shakrai: "Sure."

That has been the paradigm on the internet for a very long time, because it's recognized that it costs money to get a packet from Point A to Point B. Networks pay for connections to other networks unless they can absorb a roughly equal amount of traffic. You can't dump terabits of traffic into someone's network without offering them something in return.

Netflix wants to blow up this longstanding model because bearing the full cost of delivering their packets eats into their bottom line. It doesn't kill their business model, the fact that they're profitable attests to that, but it sure seems to keep Mr. Hastings up late at night. If you actually drill down into this issue you'll find that they've hijacked the concept of network neutrality. There a ton of arguments to be made in favor of network neutrality but Netflix is not one of them.

The user's home directory (in Windows, that's %HOMEPATH%) is C:\Users\<username>. Documents is merely one of the subdirectories of that.

POTS is dying, largely because it's unable to respond to more nimble competitors that do not have to deal with a legacy regulatory environment. It's arguably already a niche product, one that will be completely dead in another decade or two at most.

And, incidentally, the law in question hasn't been amended since 1996. When the 33.6kbit/s modem was bleeding edge for consumer internet access. Do you remember those days? Because I do. 19 years later and I have the equivalent of a T3 in my pocket, which works almost anywhere in CONUS. Such a connection was unthinkable for consumer access in 1996.

You'll pardon my skepticism if I think that advancement would have occurred that rapidly if we had sought to apply outdated regulations drafted for Ma Bell to the internet.

Why should Comcast give Netflix free co-location services? It's not Comcast's responsibility to enable Netflix's business model. I have no lost love for Comcast, or Time Warner, or Verizon, it's just that I don't see Netflix as a White Knight here. They're throwing their weight around to try and get favorable treatment that is unavailable to would be upstarts. Frankly I think that's offensive to the spirit of what network neutrality is supposed to be about.

I do see some fundamental problems. One of them (conflict of interest, most ISPs are also in the video business) is discussed in the mainstream. The rest are far too nuanced for most people to understand. To pick one, as the internet has evolved there has been a blurring of the traditional line between end user internet service providers and providers of bulk IP transit services. ISPs like Comcast now run national data networks rival the Tier 1 providers in many respects. I don't think anybody anticipated this development, or the interface between large national ISPs and CDNs.

My fear here is twofold:

1. The FCC is attacking the wrong problems.
2. We're opening pandora's box and regulating something that has flourished without regulation.

I think it would be more beneficial for Uncle Sam to encourage competition in the ISP space than to regulate what ISPs can do. Do you think any of the killer apps we take for granted would have emerged in a highly regulated Ma Bell environment? Because those are some of the regulations that they're seeking to apply.

Not relinquishing a password on request *IS* a crime in certain jurisdictions.

... just like every assassin's phone.

True - Restoring is trivial once through customs. However, getting through customs once you've wiped information is problematic.