because you don't know if the subnets are out of its control or not. If you have small-china-isp that is peered with BIG_ISP_A and BIG_ISP_B, and for some reason BIG_ISP_A has no route to BIG_ISP_B, the network is set up in such a way so that it will failover to its only path, which is BIG_ISP_A -> SMALL_CHINA_ISP ->BIG_ISP_B. this is part of the overall network fault tolerance strategy. - sean (previous voting member of seattle IX)

This is actually pretty common among larger carriers, to trust network updates. One of the common BGP peering mistakes that used to be quite frequent is that small , multi-homed ISP's would misconfigure BGP from , say, uunet and sprint, and suddenly they would be routing uunet's traffic to sprint (oops). It's sort of how the network 'works', at a fundamental level, and it works really well if everybody basically trusts their peers and knows what they're doing.

This is sort of the nature of BGP, at least when you are in the habit of trusting BGP peers. Methinks the large carriers should probably be in the habit of filtering BGP updates from chinese carriers, at least until they can pass "peering 101"

One of the most disturbing things in this story is that the school deemed "inappropriate behavior" of the student. I have read the legal briefs and a number of other sources and have not been able to determine what this is. What on earth could a school say about MY child that would be considered inappropriate behaviour? Drinking? No, sorry, covered by privacy rights. The only thing I can think of would be inappropriate use of school equipment. The inappropriateness of anything in the home would be determined by the parent.

Honestly, I wasn't either, but generally speaking, at least in north america, intelligence and income are linearly correlated. It breaks down a little towards the upper end of the income scale.

You should check out 'Outliers', the data are pretty interesting.

If malcolm gladwell's data is to be believed, the efficacy of extended schooling has everything to do with social class. It turns out that the upper end of the income scale actually do things with their kids during the summer increases their performance, because they're doing things like going to camp or participating in other enriching activities. The kids that don't have these opportunities by and large regress, intellectually speaking, over the summer break.

I would think that if anything is done in the US to extend schooling opportunities, it should keep this in mind. While a chicago south-sider is likely to get a lot of benefit from going to summer school, my child is likely not, because he engages in these sorts of activities, and I would not want it mandatory to pull him out of them.

I used to work for an online vido media distribution company, and I suspect that this has very little to do with apple policies, and everything to do with the copyright holder. While small video distributors will often grant all-inclusive licenses, large distributors (sony, disney, a&e, probably anyone you've ever heard of) distribute rights on a per-region basis. These formulas have been developed by the large media distributors in this country over the last 100 years in order to maximize revenue. Having spoken to sony on the matter, it is unlikely that any online distributor of their media, for example, will not be bound by region restrictions. To the gentleman that commented that the CD store did not enforce this same model: This is true, but when you move into DVD's it isn't. This revenue model by the big distributors was specifically what lead to region encoding in the DVD standard. (Yes, I know there are multi-region DVD's.) In short, this is probably not apple's fault, and pretty much every online distributor of major studio content will have to abide by it, unless the revenue models of the content producers shift dramatically. Going to another platform, or another distributor, is unlikely to change this situation fundamentally.