AT&T already has data caps. I was informed recently that I had exceeded mine, yet their site is such a pain to find it I had little idea how to assess my usage.

There is the issue of certain services being 'natural monopolies'. How many power companies do you want running power lines to your home in order to offer you power service? Network companies running fiber, cable, or coax to offer you the Internet? Water? Sewer?

See, when something requires the customer to receive not just the service but also build infrastructure through other people's property to deliver it to them, most people realize that allowing many companies to build that infrastructure is a disruptive pain. Since we don't have the core infrastructure built so that such cables can be laid without disrupting someone else's property, the trade-off has been a limited number of contenders in an area. You can argue whether that's right or not, or if there are better ways, but that is what the compromise was in order to allow for the service and yet not be a disruption.

Personally, I see local infrastructure like power lines, fiber, coax, cable, etc as just like roads. Who maintains your roads? Anyone that provides a service using those roads can do so without disruption, and the entity that owns them maintains them and permits access. They generally have no vested interest in extorting excess money out of the users of those roads, but do charge them for use. Other aspects of our infrastructure could be similarly maintained and we would solve the 'local monopoly' issue while minimizing disruption.

Netflix isn't a network carrier, provider of internet services, or anything else that involves routing or handling of network packets. They are a catalyst for a discussion on Internet monopolies because they came up with something Done Right. They have a successful business model in that they provide a service that a LOT of people enjoy and want to use. What stands in the way is the network and rent-seeking companies unwilling to improve infrastructure because it cuts into their profits. Netflix's involvement is incidental to this discussion, and it could've been any other product with such popularity. Skype, if video calling ever really took off. Facebook, if it comes up with Virtual Reality social networking. Video poker, with real video streams.

So, from this Netflix-instigated problem, we have these questions. Is it acceptable for Comcast to use it's monopoly position over its user base to provide preferential treatment to it's own video on demand services, the same services in direct competition to Netflix? Is it acceptable for composite local+transit ISPs to keep their peering interconnects at or near capacity to encourage content providers to co-locate services at said ISP, and then blame self-imposed network saturation as reason why? Is it acceptable that the expectation is that, once you get one kind of internet service, you are unlikely to get another improved service in anything under a decade?

I'm all for companies making a profit. I don't hold a grudge against them for doing it. What I hold a grudge against is said companies using their position not to provide the best possible service, but to extract the most profit possible for the least amount of work.

They aren't "dumping huge amounts of traffic onto them" for the purposes of routing through their backbone to some other carrier's user, though. They're dumping huge amounts of traffic onto Comcast's network because Comcast USERS are ASKING for it. You make it sound like Netflix is DDOSing Comcast, but it's frankly just providing a service that customers want to access. If you, as an last-mile or local ISP cannot handle that traffic, then it is either on you to improve your service to handle the traffic your users are requesting, throttle it down so that you have bandwidth for other purposes, or advertise "Cannot access Internet Video Services here" and ensure that your customers know where not to go if that is the service they're after.

If you can phrase your disgust in a way that doesn't involve misunderstanding how client-server traffic works, we might find understanding with your position. As it is, though, you totally misunderstand how data from Netflix finds its way onto the Internet, and why it goes where it goes.

Netflix isn't a network carrier, they are a content provider. That would seem to be problem #1 with your comments. Problem #2 is that content must be delivered to the requester, the end user. This idea that Netflix's CDN must pay to another carrier via peering trunks because the data is going to that other carrier's user doesn't seem much like a peering relationship. I mean, how can you be a peer with a local ISP? That Comcast built their own network backbone to run traffic along is nice and all that, but they're trying to be local ISP and a transit ISP at the same time. They've changed the look of the traditional model of Internet interconnects and are attempting to declare that everyone (customer and transit ISPs alike) must pay them to deliver content their own users are requesting. It is an abuse of these peering agreements, in my opinion.

This could have been accomplished by Zuckerburg having funded it himself, rather than Facebook the corporate entity doing it. By utilizing the face of the company instead, it implies a much more business- and profit-oriented reason instead of a personally-interested reason for investing.

If the 'found' DNS entry is not something that they were looking for, when the client hashes it and sends it to the Valve servers, it would be difficult to translate back into a DNS name. If Valve knows the hash of the specific DNS names they want to know about and your client sends them that then yes, they know. However, given a hash and the wealth of DNS names in the wild, it would be difficult to identify the specific DNS name using just that hash value. That is, after all, one of the primary points of using hash values in the first place.

If they chose to hash every DNS name ever and build a hash table of that, they MIGHT be able to know what sites you visit, but hash collisions and the sheer size of the input set make it difficult to obtain any useful information.

Personally, I'm on the fence whether what they're doing is abusive or not. However, it does appear as though they are trying to take steps to protect user privacy.

The third world can't pull itself up by it's own bootstraps, or won't? What made the US an immediate 'first world' nation? Was it born that way, fully industrialized and ready to go, or did it have to get going on it's own? Who helped the US to become first world, if it wasn't immediate?

The idea that somehow it takes a first world nation to give everything to a third world nation and that they can't industrialize on their own is arrogance at its finest. It isn't an easy process, sure, but it can be done if there's a will to do it. It is far easier to get it from people that have already done it, but the benefits are better if you do it yourself. Hell, we've probably had more than a few 'first world' nations that have fallen back into 'third world' status. Rome comes to mind. I'm sure they were 'first world' in their time, and they fell into disarray for a while. So, it seems like we've been able to reinvent the wheel a few times. I'm sure even if we left the third world alone, they could eventually figure it out.

You have obviously never indulged in flights of fancy or other thought experiments that are fun to explore but not fun to live. To take this stupid analogy further, let's explore...

Playing World of Warcraft is rehearsal for killing the hordes of orcs.

Playing Payday 2 is rehearsal for robbing banks and shooting cops.

Playing Left 4 Dead 2 is rehearsal for the next Zombie Apocalypse, because you know it's coming.

My child had a princess party once. Surely, she's royalty, or soon to be married into it.

Get a grip, man. Sometimes playing a game is just a game. Crimes need to be based on real actions and real intentions rather than what one would indulge in for a game. Too many games would be unacceptable real world behavior, and yet we have them because it's fun to play them when there are no lasting penalties for those kinds of actions.

I have a different take on this matter. What exactly does a CEO do that provides so much more value to a company than an engineering team or assembly line laboring away at designing products? Sure, a CEO has a place and can be very instrumental in the effectiveness of the company, but then so too can a brilliant engineer or a factory foreman that can design the next Big Thing or improve efficiency because they know their work that well? Where are the brilliant engineers making CEO pay? Or the factory foremen? And don't think for a second that a CEO is so unique as to be irreplaceable. When a CEO is replaced, shockingly a company keeps running unless he is so bad as to drive the company into the ground. Being unable to attract good talented engineers or having your assembly line strike because of bad treatment can cripple a company just as badly as a bad CEO.

So, the lesson I'd like to give is that every level of a company, be it designers or sales or factory or CEO, has a place in a corporate team and no one entity is less crucial than the other. The only problem is that the CEO disproportionately earns that much more than everyone else. It is about time that the people that labor to make the products or to do the work, that serve as the face of the company moreso than the CEO does, share in the fruit of their efforts.

They probably meant 'natural' as in 'direct imaging', instead of post-capture image processing to correct artifacts.

There, fixed that for you. Seriously, isn't it obvious that even secret data gathering techniques are known by SOMEONE, and if there is a spy truly worth their salt, they'd know about it, or simply take precautions that are less than traceable (throw-away numbers, random dead drops, encoded classified ad messages, etc). That you go out and claim 'We have to trust the administrator' flies in the face of all the known abuses we've had within the US, within recent memory, and within organizations still in existence today (Hoover and the FBI, Nixon, McCarthy, and so on). Trust, but Verify. Secrets are great for specifics, but not for the fact they're doing it nor for the law on which they base their actions. We cannot live within the bounds of secret laws and still claim freedom.

To be honest, Nixon shouldn't have just 'lost his job' over that scandal, he should have been impeached and in jail. If they crow about how punishments are a deterrent to bad behavior, that the punishment for a blatantly illegal scandal and abuse of power by the president is losing your job and getting to go back to doing anything else you want sure seems harsh to me. Not.

While your ideas are interesting, the point I was making is that wealth need not be THE defining criteria for success. Other elements such as dominance in a market and ability to deliver what your customers want every time can be a measure of success as well. In some cases, this can actually be seen in the current marketplace. The point you quote is well visualized in a news article by ABC concerning companies that do NOT treat their employees like slaves, yet still somehow turn out successful.

However, just because there are some examples of companies that do right by their employees, there are many more examples of those that do not. In those cases, there tends to be a huge disparity between the pay at the top and the pay of the workers earning that money. Among the employees of those companies, only those at the top, those that have money or skill or power, really get to set the levels of compensation and define who gets to be greedy, which is kind of the point I was making. If someone at the bottom attempted that, they'd be kicked out in a heartbeat for someone else willing to slave away for a pittance.

It isn't just that tax avoidance has lost favor. It's that most people have come to the realization (I think) that big money interests work with legislators, whether obviously or covertly, to see to it such loopholes and 'special perks' exist in the first place. It's like playing poker and stacking the deck in your favor every time. It isn't hard to see how that puts the corporations on the 'wrong side' and how it comes off as unfair in most people's minds.

If the perception was that big money does not have a hand in the creation of laws and receives the same "bad treatment" everyone else does, then I imagine you'd see tax avoidance come back into favor.