"When you've only got one provider, who makes the rules? The provider makes the rules."

When you've got a hundred providers, who makes the rules? The provider. I suspect Mr Wheeler is being disingenuous here. He wants to be the one to make the rules. Central rule making by government has never been shown to be a way to encourage "more providers" of a service. If anything it has the opposite effect. Mostly this comes through the increase regulations' cost to startups. More intense regulatory burdens, from administrative to functional, nearly always benefit the larger companies. This works against a desire to increase options and competition. Plus, from a regulatory commission standpoint, the fewer, and larger, players you have the better it is for you because that means more lobbying.

"the question becomes, will giant companies be able to exploit their monopoly position?"

Monopoly abuses is not part of your job, Mr. Wheeler. We already have laws for that, and a means to enforce them. If your concern is abuse of monopoly, talk to the FTC. The Federal Trade Commission is responsible for dealing with that, not the Federal Communications Commission.

"Who is going to stand up for consumers? Who is going to stand up for innovation? And who is going to stand up for the most important network for determining our future in the 21st century?"

Not the FCC. The FCC can't stand for innovation, it moves too slow and enshrines technological choices into law/regs which are too slow to be corrected, and the penalties of them are applied nationally rather than locally. The FTC has the role of "standing up for consumers", not the FCC. The "most important network of our future" is still people, so the FCC would be stretching very heavily to even attempt to "stand up" for that.

Basically, if he wants to feel like he is standing up for consumers, he needs to transfer to the FTC.
 

The last bastion is the human reading it. Let not poor typography or color choices excuse not taking caution to read the whole thing before announcing. There were several failure points here, not just one. If we are going to rightly lay some fault at the accountant for not handing out the right card envelope due to being not paying proper attention, then Faye also rightly deserves some for not paying proper attention. Perfect typography won't prevent someone from reading part of the text and ignoring the rest.

Succinct summaries of new (but proven) technologies & techniques. For me it's less about how to learn, and more about what to learn. Having an idea of what new technologies & techniques have been developed (and/or are becoming popular), what problems they solve for me, what trade-offs are involved, and what alternatives exist, helps to direct my learning. In other words a trade or hobbyist magazine that focuses on focuses on technology in the 'early majority' area of the adoption curve, across programming disciplines.

Alternatively we need a legal precedent that a false claim of ownership of Copyright in a work is tort (e.g. trespass to chattels) as the real owner is deprived of the use/benefits of the work; moreover if the claim was made dishonestly (the claimant knew it to be false) then the claim should be tantamount to theft. Such a precedent could potentially be established in any common law jurisdiction.

That is you choosing your service provider and access level (dialup, dsl, cable, etc.), which is not a net neutrality issue. At a push it could be interpreted as protocol-specific traffic priority which is a grey area (some people consider it a net neutrality issue, others don't).

Non-neutral behaviour can only occur when two service providers interact, like so: you want to ship a parcel to Bob, but there is no courier that does door-to-door service in both your area and Bob's area. So you ship the parcel with your courier, and pay for a particular service level (overnight door-to-door). Your courier delivers the parcel to Bob's courier (and pays Bob's courier according to some inter-courier agreement), who delivers the parcel to Bob's door. Neutral behaviour occurs when Bob's courier delivers the parcel like any other they handle, even if they can't meet the service level you asked for from your courier. Non-neutral behaviour occurs when Bob's courier delays the parcel delivery because they received it from another courier rather than directly from the sender.

Notice that both Bob and you are screwed by the behaviour of Bob's courier.

The Wired article misses this by focusing on how - if you are a large company - you can send through more than one courier, selecting the one most convenient for the intended recipient. This obviously makes delivery faster because it cuts out one leg of the parcel's journey; and it would make delivery faster with or without neutrality requirements. The article ignores the actual problem of non-neutral behaviour where the parcel is actively delayed (over and above the natural journey time) by one of the couriers in order to force the sender to deal directly with them rather than having the option of sending via another courier (and accepting the naturally longer journey time).

The big weakness of this analogy is that in the real world you can readily choose between one of several courier on a per-parcel basis, but few individuals or small companies can choose between ISPs on a per-connection basis.

This. Wikipedia has a Comparison of consumer brain–computer interfaces that covers devices from Emotiv, Neurosky and others.

Searching for Emotiv, Neurosky or "BCI" (brain-computer interface) plus keywords like "disabled" or "ALS" or "locked" produces a couple of results on improving communication with limited physical control, e.g. this and this. I'm sure there are plenty of others.

Another approach is software like Dasher, which turns gestures from various sources (including eye tracking) into text. There appears to have been some work to integrate Dasher and BCI.

But to get there we need to move from crowdfunding-as-advance-purchase (which is how most Kickstarter campaigns are set up) to crowdfunding-as-investing.

findstr has POSIX basic regular expression support (almost) and has been available since Windows 2000.

You are in the category "I agree with you". I think DRM will prevent fair use of materials as well as prevent them from falling into the Public Domain at the end of the limited Copyright period, and there needs to be recognition of these problems right now in order to protect society's interests. A straightforward solution is to make technological protection an alternative to Copyright protection - you can chose either one, but not both.

Breaking content in a standard way, which can then be unbroken in a standard way (likely to be cross platform and supported by your browser); as opposed to only being unbroken by a dodgy Windows-only rootkit supplied by the content distributor.

Indeed. Encrypted Media Extensions, W3C First Public Working Draft 10 May 2013:

That rationale (as I've heard it explained) is that media (video/audio) content distributors are going to implement DRM, so the Hobson's choice is between giving them a standard interface (HTML EME) or having every distributor create their own proprietary media player (probably platform-specific with embedded rootkit).

If you believe that all media should be gratis, or you believe that all media should be open and consumers should be trusted to pay for non-gratis media absent any technological protection, then you will view EME as a bad thing.

If you believe that Copyright should be able to exist on media and that authors and/or distributors should be able to charge for the video/audio, and you believe that technological protection measures may have some impact to reduce non-paid use of such media, and you believe that it is in the interest of consumers to have standards for these sort of things, then you may view EME as a good thing.

Sounds more specifically like Role Based Access Control (RBAC). You can define RBAC with a Subject (identity-based access control with roles) or without a subject. In the latter case authentication is tied to authorising a role, rather than authenticating a subject who has (or can authorise) a role.

Certainly seems like a more promising idea than pupil dilation. Wikipedia has a comparison of BCI hardware.

More generally we need a consumer bill of rights for digital goods. When the copyright on these goods expires they must enter the public domain; the assumption that they do is part of the justification for granting a copyright monopoly. DRM prevents goods from entering the public domain. A consumer bill of rights should require that either (i) digital goods protected by copyright are free from DRM (conversely you can choose to use DRM but you lose the benefit of copyright protection); or (ii) any person or organisation that employs DRM to protect copyrighted digital goods must provide the digital good(s), DRM design specifications, source code and keys to a designated government office that will verify that the provided keys/source/tools can unlock the DRM and then hold everything in escrow for the term of the copyright. There would of course be an administrative fee associated with (ii), and if the fee is not paid then the information under escrow is released into the public domain.

At a glance the patent seems to be for a very specific approach to measuring pulse oximetry. The approach seems near identical to US patent 5737439 Anti-fraud biometric scanner that accurately detects blood flow. In any event the basic technique for using pulse oximetry for liveness testing is described in Sandstrom, "Liveness Detection in Fingerprint Recognition Systems", 2004 and Hill & Stoneham, "Practical applications of pulse oximetry", 2000. The use of two IR absorption measurements is not novel (see patent 5737439).