Content availability on Netflix varies drastically in different regions due to licensing restrictions imposed by the publishers and rights holders for the movies and shows they have on their service. For example, if you access Netflix in America there is considerably more content available than if you access it from Canada, although there is some content available in Canada not available in America. It's a bit of a mess but it all works on Netflix's end by matching your IP address to a specific region rather than binding your account to a region. I suspect this method might be used due to legal concerns but may also be used to be fairer to users who legitimately travel between licensing regions. Using a VPN with an exit point in another region will of course bypass the system and allow you to access the content that region, which is what many folks are doing.

That's a bit disingenuous. Could they render at 320x240 and stretch to fill so the output resolution is still technically 1080p and still advertise "1080p" support?

I didn't say anything about trying harder. What I said was there is a reason minimum jobs pay minimum wage. I understand if that's all your capable of, and it's great that there is a place for people of lesser capability in the workforce. My main point was that minimum wage jobs pay minimum wage for reasons that are easy to understand.

If you have the skills and experience and responsibility of a teenager, or an illiterate foreign worker, or a disabled person, you should realize first and foremost that you aren't contributing to society as much as many others who don't make minimum wage. Cherry-picking examples of privileged people who might make more than minimum wage without making a fair contribution is simply a red herring. You and you alone don't contribute enough to society to earn the privilege of having a private residence. You don't contribute enough to eat out and afford luxury items. Nobody owes you those things.

I'll bite. The other side of this is that as an adult you probably shouldn't be working a minimum wage job. Minimum wage jobs can be done by and often ARE done by young teenagers, the illiterate, folks with severe disabilities, etc. Minimum wage jobs pay minimum wage because they require no skills, training, or responsibility. If you're an adult who desperately desires having their own apartment exclusively you need to contribute more to society than one of the aforementioned.

There's never been a better time to get into the cloud! Get all your data into your favorites service(s) just in time for your ISP to hold it hostage from your cloud service providers.

I wrote a project that was parsing text files that were several hundred megs in size, containing large numbers of floating point numbers in text in a reasonably complex structure. This all needed to be parsed and converted into simple data structures for processing. The initial version using STL streams for parsing and text manipulation was about 500 times slower than crawling bytes with switch statements and using standard C number parsing functions. 500.

He was then immediately arrested for perjury.

Sure. I'd agree with that.

What I wouldn't agree with however would be blood-seeking legislation that does not carefully factor in the disparity in the actions taken by computers and their owners. There's a reasonable debate to be had about responsibility and negligence, but proving beyond reasonable doubt that the attack was actually perpetrated by Mr. Roger B. Jones, with intent, is much harder than proving an attack originated from an IPv4 block assigned to his ISP, and possibly allocated by DHCP at that time to a modem currently registered an account owned by Mr. Roger B. Jones. My worry is that the courts probably won't care, and that's a dangerous path and I'd dare you to throw the first stone.

This sounds preferable to giving the government an interest free loan for the amount of my refund for the duration of up to a year, each and every year.

Well that's all semantics isn't it? The reality is that in many countries regulations prevent snooping of traffic to websites related to health or banking, so your company can write whatever policy it likes, it is still explicitly illegal activity.

Garbage collection creates a different class of problems, namely that the performance characteristics of your program become non-deterministic. This is a Big Deal for certain classes of applications such as video games and in particular HFT. Would you like to be the person explaining why the GC caused your program to stall at an inopportune time for 50ms and lost somebody a few million bucks?

Exactly! I plug my Internet cable into my Internet box and it's there on my screen. What's more to know?

If by 90% of today's games you mean 90% of today's facebook games, then yes, I suppose ;). But seriously, are games less technically demanding than they were 10 years ago? Yes. Are you really going to have that much fun trying to play actual modern 3D games on medium low detail settings, no AA, low resolution, at ~30 fps? You might, obviously a lot of people wouldn't, myself included.

Well, kind of... or not really... not in the traditional sense. I can't speak for AMD but in Nvidia architectures those 2000+ "cores" are clumped into very wide (32+) groups which all share a single instruction decoder and all the parts that go around that. Are they really individual "cores" if they all have to execute the exact the exact same instruction in lockstep?

By using arithmetic or range encoding.