Everyone assumes that without neutrality regulations the big guys - chiefly Google and Amazon will get priority. But I would expect Comcast to put search out for bids. Whoever bid the most would be authorized to supply search services, and that might be Bing, or much worse. The loser wouldn't get private peering, and might even be subject to unfortunate drop outs. Google might think that Comcast wouldn't dare throttle their link, but Google would be mistaken. In these restricted choice situations the authorized supplier is typically a vendor specializing in situations where the buyer/user has no choice.

Is there a reason that the posters complaining that their edits were reverted never give the name of the WP article and the edit they proposed? I would think the best way to convince me that the reversion was incorrect would be to post the details. Otherwise it is just "he said" without the "she said" and no evidence at all. I have to say that I have made two edits, both correcting errors and both have been accepted. In one case I expected to be reverted, since the correct information was widely contradicted in low quality sources. I did have a cite to an official publication, however.

You can see details of Digital Research losing out to MS/DOS here:

http://www.digitalresearch.biz...

and it is clear that DR had plenty of "opportunity".

It is true that there are a lot of people that claim that since monopolists are successful and charge high prices for poor products, you can become successful by charging high prices for a poor product. That generally doesn't work for non-monopolists. On the other hand, the emphasis on Bill G's parents does ignore the fact that IBM offered the same opportunity to Digital Research, which turned them down. And IBM offered a word processor of its own - can't have more advantages than that - and it failed in the marketplace. It also offered an OS - what happened to that? Maybe it was higher quality than Windows, but it was 10 times as expensive and the only print driver it came with was for a single dot-matrix printer.

Well, you could take public domain software, modify it, and claim copyright on the modified version. It wouldn't prevent anyone from using the original, but it would annoy Stallman because you would not be required to "give back" anything. Could DoD host a GPL program on its website? Of course, I am sure they already do on the national laboratories websites.

There is a hilarious (and sad) commentary on website bloat at http://idlewords.com/talks/web... that shows truely outrageous examples of this sin.

Is the problem that MITRE has an inventory of unprocessed requests, or that MITRE is rejecting requests as duplicative or incorrect? That does make a difference in how one thinks about the problem. If the latter, perhaps those in favor of bypassing MITRE could provide convincing examples of incorrect rejections.

Aren't nearly all surge protectors made with 330 volt MOVs? Wikipedia has an article on surge protecters which includes this "A lower clamping voltage indicates better protection, but can sometimes result in a shorter life expectancy for the overall protective system. The lowest three levels of protection defined in the UL rating are 330 V, 400 V and 500 V. The standard let-through voltage for 120 V AC devices is 330 volts."

No one is obliged to accept their packets, and anyone is entitled to take Cisco's advice if they so choose.

The point isn't that they should obey Cisco, but that they should not want to host criminal activity, and if informed of it they should investigate and take action if warranted. Furthermore, it is in their interest to do so, since otherwise other networks will stop exchanging packets with them, and their non-criminal clients will be disadvantaged and leave. Of course, that assumes they have non-criminal clients.

daniel feenberg

Economists and doctors have been using the WABR concept for many years now. They call it judging results by "intention to treat". So if 100 people are offered a training program or medicine, and only 90 complete the course of "treatment", the base for the percentage successes is 100, not 90. This is a pretty important idea when judging any experimental treatment on humans who can decline after enrolling. It wasn't so much a problem when the treatment was fertilizer on a field.

There is a great misunderstanding in all these comments. The question isn't "How long does it take to change 3 lines of code", of course that only takes a few minutes. The question is: "How long does permission to change 3 lines of code take to wend its way through the agency from the Secretary to the contractor?" That typically takes weeks or months, but in this case was done quickly because no one between the Secretary and the coder thought to interfere. That is very unusual. Another question (not answered) is how long does it take for a request from the coder to the Secretary? Typically that would be "forever", which is why most things never get done. It would help if someone below the secretary were authorized to make a decision, but typically that isn't the case.

It would seem foolish to trade within milliseconds of 2pm without knowledge of the Fed decision, since the other party could be in DC and in legitimate possession of the information. So it is surprising that the criminal got a counterparty to accept the trade. This trick will probably only work once. There was a time when this sort of information was released after the close of markets.

No, the claim that intelligence agencies can read overwritten data is not true. See
http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/overwritten-data-gutmann.html

It isn't really a scandal until the cases of plagiarism are confirmed. I once tested some plagiarism software on published academic economics, and it produced many false positives, many of which required some knowledge to interpret. Notice that a grant application may seem to be a somewhat "safer" place to plagiarize, since only a few people will see the application. However, those few might well include the borrowed from author - the granting agency will be sending the proposal for review to many researchers who have written on the topic before..

I don't know if it is still true, but in years past the Florida AG had a reputation for ignoring scams where the victim was out of state.