I hear the anger in your voice, I can only imagine at what drives that, but I think an understanding of how a business works is missing from your stance here.

"without bias" I think everyone can agree to, excepting the ISPs

"without throttles, and without caps" is a fever dream. The cost of providing service to meet such a bar would cause a rate shift that would drive us all off the net. You think a $19 per month user should expect petabit throughput and unlimited usage no matter what?

"if, you, a provider faces congestion issues, it's your own fucking fault for overselling your resources too much." This is exactly what you are demanding they do. Your yardstick of success is unattainable. If they improved their infrastructure by a factor of 10 they could still never meet your expectation.

I'm all for what Snowden did.

But Snowden hasn't been tried and convicted of anything yet. He did not put himself at the mercy of the justice system, That's where he lost the moral highground. If he were convicted and had served a few years, he could make a case for being pardoned. As it is, it's an ex-pat and has little claim to mercy.

...whatever data request i'm sending right now.

That'll do, ISP, that'll do.

I'm sorry to be the one to point it out, but you are wrong.

Someoen spends 50 hours on Peggle or Tetris and asks for a refund? I would agree that's a suspicious request.

But 50 hours is an arbitrary number. There are games for which 50 hours is a trivial drop in the bucket of the overall playtime value of the game. I'm sure you could fill a phone book with players of WoW that have a thousand plus hours in it. NMS was promising a universe so vast that it sets a far higher expectation of playtime where 50 hours is trivial.

What justifies "giving a game every change to live up to it's promise"? Seems to me that the people with 50 hours (which can be done in just a couple of days) have given the game every possible opportunity to shine and the game has failed. They were coming at this with expectations set by the developers of a universe so vast that they could spend thousands of hours in the game world. After 50 hours they have had enough and found the vast array of missing features and at that point are actually UNIQUELY QUALIFIED to call BS on the game and ask for a refund.

To me, the bottom line is that the developer failed to deliver what was promised. Users paid for what was promised. Therefore it's fraud and asking for a refund is the least that the developer be worried about.

Protester fanbois protest site that aggregates reviews, screaming "Stop saying it's bad".

Net effect: An even larger audience reading articles about the petition realize it's a bad movie and don't go.

Way go to! /tumbsup

It would probably be cheaper to AirBnB to just create and hand over a system to SF that automates the registration and payment process. For a tech company that would be trivial, compared to government bureaucracy. Offer SF a solution for online registration and payments and you can probably even get them to pay a small fee to have AirBnB administer the site for them. Happens all the time,.

Given the way business works (outsourcing, tax loopholes, abusive practices like non-competes" the thing to keep in mind is that companies will just find a way around this.

Manager 1: Fred's making 100k but we need to get rid of him. I don't want to pay Fred 50k next year to not work here.
Manager 2: Well, just demote him and drop his salary to minimum wage and wait for him to quit next month.
Manager 1: That's brilliant? Let's order another martini.

How to both have a little fun and show how over-inundated the ads are:

Go to your spouse's computer in say, July. Do a google search on Christmas decorations and click on 10 ads for Christmas stuff. Log off and walk away.

Your spouse will be flooded with Christmas ads for the rest of the month, on most sites that they visit.

I did this to my wife once as a joke and it was a good time. But it does show how deeply the tracking is inserted into everything.

I don't mind some tracking. I do mind others. I do not think that the answer is for everyone to refuse all ads entirely. We all consume too much content that is ad-supported to switch to "every site has a fee".

What we really need a an Adblock type package that had a dial on it.
Ranging from "No ads, ever" to "let it all through" with settings for allowing tracking cookies or not, which ad networks to allow or not, etc, And let the populace have a say in what level of ad-abuse they are willing to accept to access their favorite sites.

However Adblock allowing some ads just because the vendor paid them.. yeah, I'll uninstall adblock before i see that become the norm. The market will supply a competing product when it is needed.

Ahh, thanks for the additional details.

Rather than go after APK I'd like to see the moderation system actually expanded to influence posters.

Unlike some comments above, I do not want to see all posts. One of the core values of Slashdot is it's self moderating community. Don't take that away. I don't have time in my life to ferret out the good posts on every story. The self-moderation does a "better than most" job of controlling this and keeping the most valuable part of Slashdot (the intelligent comments) alive and well. This filter is valuable to people who love the site but who cannot live on the site.

What I'd rather see is that the moderation be expanded to apply a "starting score" to any posts. As an example, we all remember New York Country Lawyer. He has posted intelligent comments on issues that should earn him, from consistent community voting, a weighted "starts as a 5" post rating. Conversely, this same principal would start weighing down on the posts of APK such that they would fall outside of the filters for all.

Overall this expansion of self-governance could help steer the conversation to well thought out commentaries and questions instead of rants and abusive behavior.

Flat fee issue:

Do you really want to incentivize the government to have offshore workers by making them profit centers for the government itself? How is that an incentive to avoid destroying domestic jobs?

I'd think more like saying "H1B hires cost 3x the prevail wage for a job as determined by industry". Anyone not willing to pay up triple the cost can hire back the same folks they are firing now to save a buck. Anyone claiming this is not about companies saving a buck is being disingenuous. If there is truly not a single domestic worker able to fill the role, then paying extra for it should not be a problem. Looking at employment rates, and layoff/offshoring announcements I think these problems would fix itself pretty quickly given the right financial incentive.

I'm with you on that. While I've never followed any Pope's activities before, his humble nature and the points he chooses to focus on have elevated my opinion of the man to nearly a point of reverence. The head of the church with a reasonable position on just about every issue he takes on? Remarkable This is a guy that I believe is truly seeking whats best for us all and sees the world as it is. Now if only more of us can follow his lead and release the entrenchment that has dominated for far too long.

Is for someone with a legal background and an axe to grind to start a case where their personal information is deemed confidential and personal property just as all corporate identities claim that their information is confidential and their property.

When corporations want to be treated like people it's deemed ok, so time to turn the tables.

Given the general behavior of the company, I'd more likely believe the following scenario:

Guy signs up for the $250 guarantee.
AM employee signs onto a female account and messages guy, sets up a meet
AM employee of course never shows.
Guy demands a refund after 3 months.
AM responds "Our logs clearly show that you had a hookup."
Guy: She never showed up
AM: We have no proof of that. You may file a lawsuit against us if you wish.
Guy: Glances at the family portrait, hangs up the phone and pretends it never happened.

There's something I've never understood here.

if you have land for wind power, why would you not want solar spread around it in the safety zone of the tower? Same lines can carry all of the power. Lower real estate cost. Why is it that I only ever see or hear about a solar farm or a wind farm and never an energy farm?

Maybe someone here more familiar with the topic can help me out, or tell me that it's being done and just not talked about much.