Slashdot Mirror

Except they did work in 2013 and Japan also did it in 2010 with that technology like the US did even earlier in 2008 . You see, it is and has been easy to produce this result for more than a decade and actually for a much longer time with other weapons. Short, Medium, Intercontinental. All have been hit. But all used tracking to know exactly where they were in flight, and were launched from known locations, and targeted in advance from known positions.

To tame Google, they should simply threaten to popularize alternative App Stores to Google Play; after all Google has been barred from uninstalling alternative app stores. by those Europeans.

It will be quite a relief to see alternatives to Google Play along side it. If this were to happen in substantial numbers, Google will back down to everyone's benefit.

It does looks like Bloomberg's story isn't complete and relies on anonymous sources.

"Today’s bombshell Bloomberg story has the internet split: either the story is right, and reporters have uncovered one of the largest and jarring breaches of the U.S. tech industry by a foreign adversary or it’s not, and a lot of people screwed up." https://techcrunch.com/2018/10...

Links from the Techcrunch article:

"The October 8, 2018 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek incorrectly reports that Apple found “malicious chips” in servers on its network in 2015. As Apple has repeatedly explained to Bloomberg reporters and editors over the past 12 months, there is no truth to these claims." https://www.apple.com/newsroom...

"Steve Schmidt, Chief Information Security Officer at Amazon Web Services stated, "As we shared with Bloomberg BusinessWeek multiple times over the last couple months, at no time, past or present, have we ever found any issues relating to modified hardware or malicious chips in Supermicro motherboards in any Elemental or Amazon systems." https://www.prnewswire.com/new...

It's not really a First Amendment issue though.

Why can't you shout "fire" in a theatre?

Censorious trope two. Who says that you can't shout "fire" in a theater, especially when it's true?

The Pentagon Papers case did not allow for suppression of true information where the consequences of that speech were "dire." The Federal government agreed that this information was not within the scope of ITAR and that it could not prohibit publication. The judge in issuing this very injunction admitted that "Regulation under the AECA means that the files cannot be uploaded to the internet, but they can be emailed, mailed, securely transmitted, or otherwise published within the United States."

Note: personally I support DD here, I'm just refuting the argument that it's a simple 1st Amendment issue.

Then why are you attempting to justify the outrage here using exception-to-the-first-amendment arguments?

Why don't you take your faggot (gaping) ass to a Muslim bakery and tell them you demand they bake you a SSM wedding cake and sue THEM for refusing?

Because I live in a state where the mosques were vandalized and the legislature had a freakout over a utility sink. There are no legal grounds for me to do so, in fact, a judge disrupted a court proceeding over his ire over the Supreme court decision, by refusing to let two parties settle a divorce because of a feigned complaint about Obergefeld v. Hodges.

Maybe you live in a state where you would have legal grounds. So why don't you? Is it because the Muslim bakeries were happy to bake a cake, and if you tried to sue them for refusing, the Judge would ask why you committed perjury. Some of us remember your heavily edited video was falsified.

You are a deceitful, hypocritical, bloviating, shallow-minded, shit-spewing, garbage-flinging Right-wing buffoon.

Keep repeating yourself.

You mean this? AT&T Promised Lower Prices After Time Warner Merger -- It's Raising Them Instead. Is not that some sort of breach of agreement?

Technically, AT&T did lower prices. They now offer a streaming tv service called WatchTV that's $15 per month or free if you have an AT&T wireless unlimited plan. They didn't offer this prior to the merger.

This was a result of the merger.

How can you possibly believe that the huge debt they were saddled with was not the cause of their demise? The leveraged buyout stuck them with a HUGE annual interest payment. For the fiscal year ending Jan 2016 they had a net loss of $130 million dollars, which included $429 million in interest payments. For fiscal year ending Jan 2017 they had a net loss of $36 million dollars, which included $457m in interest payments. [1]

So tell me...what does a net loss of $130m turn into if you don't have $429m in interest payments? Or a $36m loss without $457m in interest payments? Of course, not the ENTIRE debt is from the leveraged buyout. Before the buyout their interest payments were only $130m/year [2]. But then after the buyout it rocketed up to $537m per year. They've been able to reduce the $537m over the years. If they didn't have to deal with the buyout debt, they wouldn't been able to do the same (even better, actually) reduction with their previous debt. So likely their interest payments would've been under $50m/year.

I find it hard to understand how the leveraged buyout could NOT be responsible for putting them in the position they are in.

[1] https://www.prnewswire.com/new...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/busi...

The average price of a new car is $36k, Model 3 starts at $35k. If selling to >50% of the market is not mainstream, well then the problem is you.

EiA, who has never had a correct prediction, agrees with you. BTW, they have ALWAYS predicted that Fossil fuels will continue to grow except recently.
However, experts in the coal field of montana
Other Americans continue to point to coal rapid closing.
Here is the massive navajo plant that will most certainly close down. Note that this is America's single dirtiest plant going.
Nice article about the continuing closings of coal plants (assuming that Trump is not allowed to subsidize coal anymore than we currently do)

Finally, here is a partial list of coming US coal plants closures.

Fast food, like at Mac Donald's or KFC is not cheap.
Considering the dirt they use to make that food it is absurdly expensive, how do you think the companies make that absurd amount of profit from it?

https://www.prnewswire.com/new...

"I'm happy to call any company that produces nothing a patent troll"

Then you'd be wrong. The term is a pejorative broadly used by those who don't have any real understanding of the patent system, so they don't understand the difference between trolls and NPEs. Would you call UCal and MIT patent trolls?

http://www.prnewswire.com/news...

“My cabinet has been working very hard on trying to get it done, but ultimately, I think somebody said the other day, I am president, I am not king. I can't do these things just by myself. We have a system of government that requires the Congress to work with the executive branch to make it happen. I'm committed to making it happen, but I've gotta have some partners to do it,” Obama said.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.co...

That's was actually said by "Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta" BS-ing about maybetech in that "60 minutes" story back in 2009.

Thing is, light DOES penetrate our skulls... enough to influence our moods.

But if it would be possible to beam light through the skull, without damaging the tissue (which is something a few minutes in the sunlight will do) AND catch the light which bounces back...
Forget telepathy. That's X-ray vision. See into other peoples homes and bodies. Without a funny helmet. Or dangerous radiation.

According to those on Reddit, it is "DCIGroup.com". That web site, in turn, is under heavy DDoS attack and using Cloudflare to protect themselves. Some of the wording seems to come from CFIF.

> He campaigned on bringing back coal-producing jobs. ... The cost of coal compared to other energy-sources, combined with automation, may prevent him from doing so.

Let's put it this way. The Southern Company (big southeast utility company), just finished their first big "clean coal" plant in Mississippi. It's clean in the sense of having the latest scrubbing tech, and the CO2 it produces will be sent down a pipeline to be injected into Gulf Coast oil wells to pump out more oil, and sequester the CO2 underground. It cost *ten times* as much per kW of capacity as utility-scale solar farms in 2016, and solar farms don't need fuel to keep running.

That's why Georgia Power, one of the Southern Co's divisions, is building 2.5 GW of solar in the next few years ( http://www.prnewswire.com/news... ). The Utility's divisions (Georgia Power, Alabama Power, etc.) are divided that way because each state regulates them differently. They are also half-owner of the Vogtle nuclear plant on the GA/SC border, which is adding two new reactors with 2.2 GW capacity.

Coal is dying. Ten years ago it supplied half of the US's electricity. Now it's down to 30%. It's mainly being replaced by Natural Gas, wind, and solar. It just takes a while to replace half the nation's electric capacity. Trump got votes by telling coal-country voters he's bring back jobs, but it ain't happening. According to the Energy Department, ~15 GW of renewable power plants are scheduled to be added in 2017, and 4.7 GW of coal plants shut down. That just continues the trend of the last decade.

> I'm not sure outside the greens echo chamber

You're over 40 aren't you?

A LOT of these companies' target demographic are millenials.
They care about green a lot more than gen-Xers do.
And even if the companies are run by gen-Xers and boomers, it is the customers who drive a company's decisions (at least it does if there is real competition).
Green Generation: Millennials Say Sustainability Is a Shopping Priority
Deloitte Survey: Millennials Increasingly Driving Force Behind Electric Utility Transformation
Millennials Are Shaping the Future of Energy Efficiency
Get serious about converting to renewable energy, the under-35 generation says by an overwhelming margin

Firstly, Android is Linux. But in the sense meant here, no. Quote from elsewhere; "Future Nokia smartphones will utilise Google's Android operating system, currently deployed on 86% of the world's smartphones."

Bringing another OS into play in a market that is sewn up by two major players is pretty much guaranteed to fail, and I really don't see what a Linux phone would do for the average consumer. Do really think Nokia/HMD Global should waste millions of Euros in R&D to develop a Linux phone distribution just to satisfy a handful of nerds? Not a compelling business case, if you ask me.

No. It belongs to a company that Trump hired for marketing purposes.

Without seeing the logs, it's hard to comment. I've seen a lot of attempted debunkings that focus on part of the story, but not the whole story. For example:

...The Times hadn’t yet been in touch with the Trump campaign—Lichtblau spoke with the campaign a week later—but shortly after it reached out to Alfa, the Trump domain name in question seemed to suddenly stop working. ... The computer scientists believe there was one logical conclusion to be drawn: The Trump Organization shut down the server after Alfa was told that the Times might expose the connection. Weaver told me the Trump domain was “very sloppily removed.” Or as another of the researchers put it, it looked like “the knee was hit in Moscow, the leg kicked in New York.”

Four days later, on Sept. 27, the Trump Organization created a new host name, trump1.contact-client.com, which enabled communication to the very same server via a different route. When a new host name is created, the first communication with it is never random. To reach the server after the resetting of the host name, the sender of the first inbound mail has to first learn of the name somehow. It’s simply impossible to randomly reach a renamed server. “That party had to have some kind of outbound message through SMS, phone, or some noninternet channel they used to communicate [the new configuration],” Paul Vixie told me. The first attempt to look up the revised host name came from Alfa Bank. “If this was a public server, we would have seen other traces,” Vixie says. “The only look-ups came from this particular source.”

According to Vixie and others, the new host name may have represented an attempt to establish a new channel of communication. But media inquiries into the nature of Trump’s relationship with Alfa Bank, which suggested that their communications were being monitored, may have deterred the parties from using it. Soon after the New York Times began to ask questions, the traffic between the servers stopped cold.

My first instinct is to assume, given the context, that it's a spam server. But in addition to not making sense why a spam server would be so limited in its acceptance of inbound connections or make so few DNS lookups**, I'm scratching my head here trying to figure out why Alfa would make the first DNS lookup of the new DNS without prompting. But maybe in the logs there's something that could help explain it. Maybe there was prompting - perhaps the trump-email server sent first, and alfa was doing a reverse D.N.S. lookup on it? Or maybe it's on the same I.P. and for some reason Alfa had spent days sitting around doing reverse D.N.S. lookups of the I.P. based on their last mail receipt? Seems a bit weird, but maybe the logs could clear things up.

** Re: the "so few DNS lookups": this one's a bit odd. The Trump campaign said that the server hasn't been used since 2010. But it's still acting like it's sending and receiving mail, just to a small number of recipients, during business hours. So one immediately pictures some sort of automated feedback loop, but that doesn't jibe with the communication patterns. Not sure how to parse that one. My gut still says "just a spam server", but it is odd.

That's because it's nothing more than a clearinghouse for corporate PR flacks.

Anyone (and I mean that in an almost literal sense) can put a press release out on that site without editing if they become a member of the site. No, I'm honestly not kidding about that: http://www.prnewswire.com/solu...

Well, 2+ weeks of burning phones before recalling them isn't quite 'honest'.

Also, they did more than just burn up phones.

http://www.autoblog.com/2016/0...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/6-o...

And more batteries than what you state.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news...
"Incidents/Injuries: Samsung has received 92 reports of the batteries overheating in the U.S., including 26 reports of burns and 55 reports of property damage, including fires in cars and a garage."

Car model: VW Beetle
Car brand: Toyota Corolla

WTF? In both cases, there is a model (Beetle, Corolla) and brand (VW, Toyota).

And everyone always forgets about trucks. Ford had sold 28 million F150s as of eleven years ago.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news...
They sell a couple million per year. Probably well over 40 million by now, maybe close to 50.

I've always thought that restrictions on political donations was a violation of the 1st Amendment.

Yes, they are a violation. And it is why the democrats want to chip away at it, or repeal it entirely... The entire Bill of Rights will go down with it. Too many people think that's a good thing.

Captain Morgan fully supports it also

90% of news IS a press release. If you judge by that metric you may as well shut down slashdot.

No, you'd shut down PR Newswire. Editors and reporters may be incited to cover a story by PR people, but they are supposed to report the story rather than simply repeat the propaganda.

Roughly half the marketing departments at companies I've worked for have used half-baked surveys to gather statistics so the company name and the statistic get repeated in the industry over and over again.

This often happens like this: "At (industry conference) this year, let's pass out a survey asking whether or not someone has every heard of a coworker getting hacked by (whatever threat our product purports to mitigate). Survey goes out to already half-paranoid people walking by, and the entire marketing and sales department fills one out that says 'yes I have'. A week later a press release goes out that says "(company) surveyed (# of people) IT managers and other attendees at (conference) and found that (high percentage) had direct knowledge of a coworker getting hacked by (threat)." Very often this stuff gets picked up by the press, bloggers and even other competitors, and the essentially made-up stat gets repeated and repeated until some people even think its true.

Examples:
- http://www.tripwire.com/compan...
- http://www.prnewswire.com/news...
- https://www.voltage.com/breach...

Not anymore: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/dhi-group-inc-announces-the-sale-of-slashdot-media-300211026.html

"U.S. law requires that anyone seeking to influence American policy or public opinion on behalf of a foreign government must register with the Department of Justice"

Americans have been trying for decades to get Israel's lobby to register as a foreign agent.

Details of the sordid story are at
http://www.prnewswire.com/news...

BINGO! The West Texas plains were a boon to wind prospectors. Every energy company with any renewable aspirations bought/leased a patch of land and threw up a wind farm. Just one problem...nobody lives in West Texas. It's open range for hundreds of miles. The very conditions that made wind possible left a very real problem. All that electricity needed to get to Dallas but the power line to Dallas was at capacity. All those wind turbines producing electricity and nowhere to send it. Storage tech was prohibitively expensive (If electricity is selling for $0.09 kWh storing it at $0.10 kWh doesn't make financial sense.) so into the earth all that electricity went. So ERCOT set out to build more capacity around 2008. Those lines went live in 2013. Combine that with technology making CSP even cheaper and you've got the next gold rush on your hands.

Full disclosure, I work for Nextera Energy. Parent company of Lone Star Transmission who operates a stretch of those transmission lines.

Krebs is overloaded by train-wreck picnickers

Noel Biderman CEO of How Low Can We Go, trading as Avid Media.

Some of his demonstrably patent bullshit about their security.

"We have always had the confidentiality of our customers' information foremost in our minds, and have had stringent security measures in place".
Um, encryption - have you heard of it? And PCI - yeah, right, a bus protocol.

The "security" fail company - they would have done better employing CyCura® the "binary ex-situ bioremediation system".

I'm guessing they got confused and deployed this Cycura instead. Which'd explain why alarms didn't go off until after the successful attack. When their teeth started grinding.

Candidate for sociopath of the year award, Joel Eriksson, CTO, Cycura, we will continue to be a leader in the services we provide. "I have worked with leading companies around the world to secure their businesses. I have no doubt, based on the work I and my company are doing, Avid Life Media will continue to be a strong, secure business,".
Continue? Fail. To continue you need to start somewhere.
Secure? Fail.

Makes me wonder if he faked his widely promoted cracking of the Cicada.

This is the most interesting bit
Anyone else see similarities and strangely missing information?

His story.

He certainly he fucked up big time "protecting" his client, and he shouldn't have (because he does seem to have the ability to know how to secure a system).

Curiouser and curiouser. But not so curious I want to follow that rabbit down a hole.

I don't know the government subsidy/tax credit, what is the law in Texas regarding wind power? Is there any real subsidy? The site being built is the Shannon Wind Project.

Cats kill at least an order of magnitude more birds than windmills do. [implication: it's not worth worrying about wind turbines killing birds]

Almost every time bird-killing wind turbines are discussed, someone posts this non-argument.

Let's apply well-known Slashdot troll NatasRevol's logic to other things:
- Heart disease kills at least an order of magnitude more people than diabetes. [implication: it's not worth worrying about diabetes killing people]
- Windows runs on at least an order of magnitude more personal desktops than Linux. [implication: it's not worth being concerned about the Linux desktop experience]
- Slashdot user BarbaraHudson posts at least an order of magnitude more troll posts than NatasRevol. [implication: it's not worth being annoyed at NatasRevol shitposting]

And then there's this: how many eagles and other large threatened and endangered birds are cats killing?

Federal Court Rules Massive Wind Energy Project in Violation of Endangered Species Act

However, on "Expendables 3,"in the period of September through November 2014, per data collected by CEG-TEK International, an internet security firm: 0.3% percent of thieves on these five ISPs received a notice. By contrast, Charter Communications and Cox Communications (who are not part of the CAS) do forward notices to customers who infringe. The difference in results is substantial. On "Expendables 3" in the period of November 2014 through January 2015, per data collected by CEG-TEK : Cox and Charter ISPs posted a 25.47% decrease in infringements Copyright Alert System ISPs abetted a 4.54% increase in infringements.

So really it's not about the number of notices it's the fact the ISP's that composed the CAS aren't forwarding the letters.

Citation: http://www.prnewswire.com/news...

e.g. flow batteries:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news...

[DTS Neural Upmix is] marketed as a spatializing upmixer that can also decode Neural Surround (which is a third format not necessarily related to Neo:X).

No, there is no "Neural Surround" format as such. Neural Downmix uses phase encodings and the output is just an audio stream (can be analog, saved as a wave file, saved as DTS Master Audio, saved as MP3, etc.).

Look at this PDF. There are two columns: one shows different disk formats and how many bits per second each one needs; the other column has one thing in it, Neural Surround. This is because Neural Surround isn't a format as such.

http://www.dts.com/~/media/d5aad4e0d179439c8588ac3b61e37444/DTS_Broadcast_infosheet.pdf

See also this press release. A radio station was broadcasting in 5.1 using Neural Surround... broadcasting in ordinary stereo FM as well as HD radio. Anyone could listen in stereo, but those with Neural Upmix in their stereo receivers could hear 5.1 sound.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/wguc-fm-begins-51-broadcasting-with-neural-surroundtm-56267632.html

But this feature is sorta incidental, as literally nothing is mixed in Neural Surround.

I'm sorry but you are completely mistaken on this point. Let's look at the DTS web site again:

DTS Neural Surround DownMix technology reduces multichannel surround sound to a stereo mix that accurately represents the original intent of the content creator.

The DTS Neural Surround DownMix uses patented âoeActive Correctionâ technology. By analyzing the audio, the phase and intensity are rewritten, creating a pristine Lt/Rt stereo mix.

This process eliminates problems that traditionally occur in matrix surround downmix systems, such as comb filtering and spatial distortion. DTS Neural Surround DownMix creates a natural sounding stereo mix that is spatially true to the original multichannel localization.

http://www.dts.com/professionals/sound-technologies/audio-processing/dts-neural-surround.aspx#downmix

Note the phrase "pristing Lt/Rt stereo mix" and the concerns about comb filtering in the output mix. There is mixing going on here.

DTS Neural Downmix produces a stereo output stream which may be saved in any format. You can feed the result to DTS Neural Upmix, even as an analog waveform, and it will upmix using the encoded signals. There is no disk format for "DTS Neural Surround" as such.

My understand is that the height channels are encoded sum-and-difference with the main L-R channels, and a special decoder reads reads additional channel data to subtract out the height channels from the mains.

I think it is possible that there is some additional metadata embedded in the DTS Master Audio bitstream, because old DTS decoders do understand metadata tags and will ignore them. But there is no bitstream change from plain DTS 7.1 to DTS 11.1, and you can play the 11.1 stream on an old DVD player and you will get 7.1 out. (Just like you could play Dolby Surround on a stereo and get stereo out, if you didn't have the Dolby Surround decoder to upmix from stereo to surround.)

If you are still convinced that DTS 11.1 has additional discrete channels, please find a reference and show me. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but I think the DTS web page I referenced in the previous post backs me up.

By "actual format" I mean its a communications channel where the sender and recipient agree on what goes into the channel and what is supposed to come out.

Then I would say that DTS 11.1 is an actual format exactly the way Dolby Surround was an actual format. Both rely on specific, agreed-upon phase encodings

While we're at it, there is no such thing as the tooth fairy either.

Well, for an imaginary entity, it must be rich, because it is paying out a record amount of cash for those baby teeth...

Can you point out anywhere where Mars or the researchers have claimed that Mars chocolate has significant health benefits? No? Science funded by industry is still science as long as the results are repeatable as part of a valid study. If you can't actually show that the science is bogus, perhaps you should just shut the fuck up with your whining.

Not everything is a nefarious scheme.

Is this guy good enough for you:"Harold Schmitz, Ph.D., Group Research Manager, Mars, Incorporated" at an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium, February 2000

"We are very encouraged by the findings presented during this symposium," said Harold Schmitz, Ph.D., Group Research Manager, Mars, Incorporated. "The clinical study results, together with those of earlier in vitro research findings, are very promising, and suggest that additional research is needed to further assess the potential cardiovascular health benefits of chocolate."

Their press release the same day

This is where the whole "Chocolate may be good for you" craze started 15 years agi - studies funded by Mars Inc. and talked up by one or their own employees.

I purchased the first 7200rpm disk available to consumers nearly 20 years ago now. The WD Expert, 18gb if I recall.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news...
I've always hated the performance of disks, big enthusiast primarily because I knew it
was the biggest bottleneck by far.

Fast forward to today and I am utterly bamboozled why people continue to purchase the bastard things. I detest them. They run hotter, cost more, are slightly more likely to fail, are noisier and the performance difference is utterly negligible.
You need only look at any older SSD review, where they include 3x5400rpm disks, 4x7200rpm disks and 5 SSD's - the graph is difficult to read because even the fastest hard disk is vastly slower than the slowest SSD.

We're entering the age now where even mid-to-basic level nerds have a NAS in the home. I'd wager a reasonable portion of people have SSD's in their main machines / laptops and some 'big dumb storage' in the rest of the house, be it USB storage or a NAS.
YET HOWEVER,.... when I went to buy new disks last year, in a new size range (5TB) do you think I could find the 5400's? Nope, the fucking 7200's were the first available. Infact this trend has gone on for a few years now. You used to get 5400's in the new size first, then when the tech slightly improved, they'd do the 7200rpm model. This no longer seems the case.
I actively DON'T want 7200rpm disks in my bloody NAS (which is now locked inside my kitchen cupboard, with a fan on it and ventilation door open to keep the damn noise low) My disks managed to hit 57c (134f) because I couldn't find god damn 5400rpm disks, hence the new fan install :/

7200's are pointless, it's like buying premium grease for the axle of your horse and cart.
If you want performance, SSD, if you want space? Big, dumb, slow, cool, quiet 5400rpm disk. If you want to piss away money, 7200rpm disk. Bastard things.
Really wish I didn't completely need to buy disks when I did, only 12 weeks after I got mine, the WD red and greens were out to buy :/
In conclusion, avoid Toshiba 7200rpm disks, they are not only hot, the bloody spindle motors are noisy to boot.

Good point, yes I got that press release from them after I'd filed the story:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news...
and here's the charter:
https://ello.co/downloads/ello...
Although as someone else pointed out, it looks like under Delaware law a 2/3 supermajority could vote to amend the charter, or to be bought out by another entity that doesn't have to honor the original charter.

Ugh. We're back to the same knee-jerk reactions and slanted clickbait stories. Shame on Slashdot.

This is not a one-sided story (very few stories in the real world are) as the summary attempts to show it. This isn't about wantonly deciding to screw over paying users, it's about a peering dispute. Of course Verizon has bandwidth to spare, that's not the problem. The issue is that they don't think of a much smaller ISP like Level3 as a peer, and don't want to give them settlement-free peering - they don't peer for free with lots of other ISPs for the same reason. Level3 offering to pay for the hardware is completely disingenuous, since that is a drop in the bucket of what paid transit costs as a monthly service. (By the way, Level3 played the role of Verizon to Cogent in the exact same kind of dispute a few years ago.) But clearly if Verizon cared about the experience of its end users it would find another solution that didn't involve free peering, like CDN installations to support Netflix. So they are being jerks as well.

So Verizon doesn't want to peer for free with Level3 even though it would help their customers; and Level3 wants to peer for free instead of paying like everybody else. This goes on all day every day in the ISP world. People only notice this particular instance because unfortunately users can see the negative effects directly. Long story short, there are no white hats in this story, only gray ones on both sides, both trying to spin public perception. Stories like this one on Slashdot do no favors to a reasonable understanding of the situation.

Sounds like what you really want are NVIDIA CUDA on CAPI: http://www.prnewswire.com/news...

... Only on Power8 from IBM.

Power 8 gives:
30% higher single-thread FPU performance compared to x86 at the same clock speed (based on SPECfp_rate2006)
50% higher single-thread integer performance compared to x86 at the same clock speed (based on SPECint_rate2006)

Plus the Power 8 clock speed will scale up to 25% higher for even more performance. Add in significantly more L3 cache, 8 threads/core (compared to 2/core for x86) and up to 12 cores/chip. IBM has a monster on their hands. It will never find it's way into a laptop, but for servers and HPC applications, it's game on.

Thanks, I am aware that Level(3) is not a mom-and-pop shop. But their market clout is still nothing compared to the largest consumer broadband ISPs and traditional Tier 1 networks, which in many cases globally are one and the same.

Think about it: the big guys have their own peering relationships that go around L3, and most L3 customers (unless they are mom-and-pops themselves) get transit from more than one provider. So let's say Webhost X buys transit from L3 and Sprint. $BIGISP already peers with both L3 and Sprint. So if the L3 relationship goes away, Webhost X will use Sprint for transit to $BIGISP. The only ones who really stand to lose are the companies who only get transit from L3. And if L3 has no peering with $BIGISP, they become far less valuable to their customers.

Level 3 does not have the leverage in the situation, the big ISPs do. Otherwise they wouldn't be complaining, they would be trying to force the ISPs to increase their peering capacities. I'm guessing this comes down to the same core issue as the recent Cogent hullaballoo... Tier 2 ISP wants more free peering, Tier 1/ISP wants them to buy transit. You may recall that Cogent and Level 3 had this same argument before - but in that case, it was L3 trying to get Cogent to pay up to increase the interconnection! Almost seems a bit karmic to me...

This has been studied extensively as well. While specific chemistries have their own pollution issues, most EV batteries are made in Japan, Korea and the U.S., with relatively strong pollution controls. There is general agreement that the manufacturing impact is relatively small compared to the operating costs of both electric and gasoline cars.

It's easy to be skeptical of electric vehicles until you realize just how bad even the best gasoline cars are. All those tailpipe emissions are making you and the people around you sick. All the money you spend on gas goes back to the oil companies, and you know how they treat the environment... Not mention all the motor oil, frequent maintenance and potential breakdowns, and subconscious stress induced by the constant engine noise in a gas car. Whereas EVs are perfectly silent, never smell like gas or exhaust, have no routine mechanical maintenance and far fewer parts to break. And powering it with grid electricity costs between 1/3 and 1/5 of what a 35mpg car costs in gas, coming from power plants which are under constant pressure to improve their emissions. Or just put solar panels on your house and be carbon neutral.

NetFlix using a Tier 3 provider would resell AT&T, who would charge the Tier 3 provider for bandwidth, which would essentially charge NetFlix for bandwidth

Kinda sorta. Here's the problem which makes the situation a little more nuanced than it appears at first. Think of this more like one of those occasional disputes you see where "DirecTV stops carrying ESPN because ESPN jacked up their rates" or something like that. One side wants to pay less, the other side wants to charge more, and it's tough to easily pick out who the good guys and bad guys are in that kind of situation.

Netflix buys most of their bandwidth from Cogent. Cogent has historically been the Wal-Mart of bandwidth - they sell dirt cheap but scrimp on quality to do it. The Tier 1 ISPs have said to Cogent, in effect, "you are not our peer. You will buy bandwidth from us rather than getting it for free," and Cogent doesn't want to pay. That constrains the bandwidth between Cogent and the Tier 1s (which Cogent is definitely not).

Netflix has only gotten involved because, as Cogent's #1 customer, they are feeling the pinch of Cogent's bandwidth crunch. Remember, Cogent is no stranger to peering disputes. The Tier 1s have said to Netflix, in essence, "we aren't upgrading our bandwidth to Cogent for free, and if you want your customers to have better performance you can connect to us directly instead of going through Cogent. Oh, and by the way, you're a content provider (albeit a huge one) and not our ISP peer so don't expect to get it for free, either."

It may sound like a Net Neutrality issue, but settlement-free peering vs. purchased transit has been a contentious issue since the mid-'90s if not before, and it has always been sorted out among the ISPs rather than being regulated by the government. Peering and its market dynamics have always been one of the most sensitive topics among ISPs, but it has almost always been dealt with inside the industry without exposing its gory details to the public - just like how you rarely hear about those "cableco vs. content network" disputes even though those negotiations are always going on... you only hear about it when the crap really hits the fan.

It's a perpetual issue that pits the Tier 1s vs. the Tier 2/3s, and always will be: the smaller ISPs want free peering of course, and the bigger ones don't want to give it away. The Tier 1s argue that they have to pay for a much larger network infrastructure than the Tier 2/3s so they are in effect subsidizing the networks of the smaller ISPs if they peer for free; the Tier 2/3s argue that they shouldn't have to pay to connect to other networks when the end result is (theoretically) better service for everyone.

It is a dangerous and very slippery slope to cast peering as a "Net Neutrality" issue because it invites the government to stick its nose into a topic that the world's ISPs have quietly managed among themselves for many years. "Settlement-free peering for all" sounds good at first blush but creates a dangerous precedent potentially for content providers to be considered as networks. What if CNN.com decides it doesn't want to pay for bandwidth anymore and wants all the ISPs to peer with it as a network for free? What happens when bobshardwarestoreintuscaloosa.com makes the same request? Where do you draw the line? Why should any business pay for transit bandwidth when it is providing content that users want to see? You could theoretically see the whole cost of the Internet flip onto the consumer ISPs if you follow the model to its furthest conclusion.

Another side note - it's not entirely true that "subscribers pay for their Internet, and content providers pay for their hosting." Larger ISPs factor in the revenue of paid transit to their business model - and they *always* have, since the earliest days of the commercial Internet - so that is in effect

I'm so skeptical I'll even debunk your joke. The mainstream statistic you'll see quoted everywhere is that true celiac disease hits 1 in 133 people. The number of gluten free food shoppers is a multiple of that, because that doesn't count people with milder gluten intolerance; households where everyone eats GF because of one member; and the recent GF fad shoppers. The household ripple alone is so huge, even Betty Crocker runs around selling to this market because they believe "28 percent of consumers seek out gluten-free foods". And all that was going on before GF became mainstream as a dieting fad.

Meanwhile, diabetes hits 8.3% of the population and there isn't nearly as much of a ripple to household members.

Netflix is having all these problems because they use Cogent, the cut-rate morons of the transit world...

This has happened hundreds of times, long before they carried Netflix streaming video:

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

https://secure.dslreports.com/...

https://secure.dslreports.com/...

https://secure.dslreports.com/...

http://www.complaints.com/2008...

http://publicpolicy.verizon.co...

http://www.prnewswire.com/news...

http://www.fiercetelecom.com/s...

https://www.datacenterknowledg...

etc., etc.

I'm not part of the vocal crowd, but I do support the efforts. Let me explain clearly and concisely on what's going on.

1. You are considered "audience"; /. is useful mainly because of the discussion threads (ie. user contribution), yet the management consider you "audience", even if you are actually the reason of the site's traffic.
2. In 2013 the site failed to increase on ad-revenue. And there is no evidence it will increase in the future. Hence Dice decided to slash the site's budget from several millions to zero. (source: http://www.prnewswire.com/news... "Recent Developments" chapter).
3. Hence, in layman's terma, Dice has (most probably) decided to kill the site.
4. Since there is no budget, you will (most probably) not see the Classic functionality implemented in Beta (comment and moderation system, which is the heart of the community, which is the heart of the site)
5. Hence, Dice's "reaching out to the audience" at this point is pretty useless, as they might as well listen, but they will do nothing about it.
6. Hence, this site is already dead. The community wants to migrate to better shores and there are several ideas as to how/where. Not calling them out by name, because I don't want to be slanted.
7. At this point, I don't think the Slashcott will be of any effect, but it's worth trying; you never know.
Bonus Point. Since the heart of the site is user-generated content, an aspect of the boycott is stopping the regular flow of comments. Can't argue with that.

Hope this helps.

The problem is, most slashdot contributors I don't think click on the ads. So frankly as a community, you're not that valuable.

There is some truth to this. Slashdot users are probably less likely to click on ads than the average person. We are probably more aware of advertising tactics, and may thus avoid being influenced (to the extent one can). Slashdot users are probably more likely than most people to use ad-blockers. On the other hand, Slashdot users occupy a huge number of key decision-making posts in all the major tech companies. Even 'lowly' employees can have a huge impact on what their employer spends money on. I would also note that an ad is not necessarily a failure if no one clicks on it. One of the main purposes of advertising is awareness and branding. If you see ads for a given company on Slashdot, you will subconsciously become aware of them, making it more likely that you will consider them when making your next purchase. No clicking required.

I fully admit that it is difficult to quantify the 'value added' of advertising to the unique Slashdot community. I would hope that Dice has made this case to their ad partners; I guess it wasn't enough?

And what's wrong with that? They have ongoing costs in terms of servers, IT support, and the moderators. Word is for the most part the Slashdot revenue stream has been shrinking for Dice, which means they'd be bleeding money.

Actually it's not clear to me that's the case. The things I've read indicate that revenue coming from Slashdot is decreasing with time. But this isn't the same thing as saying that Slashdot doesn't generate enough revenue to pay for operating Slashdot. From what I can gather, Slashdot is a net money-maker... it's just not making enough money, and the owners want to make more. (If someone has better info, please share!)

The beta feedback discussion for the last couple days has been literate and well thought out, but there has been no public response of any kind. Not even a half-hearted "we hear you and we'll see what we can do about making classic available in perpetuity, but no promises."

And with the revelation of Dice's view of the slashdot finances projections, and the heavy handed mass downmodding it's hard to see what reason the users have to retain any faith in the editors or their superiors.

... advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot.

Note that this isn't saying that Slashdot's ad revenue isn't enough to pay for operating Slashdot; merely saying that the ad revenue is falling with time. They are no doubt desperate to increase profits. It's actually quite possible that Slashdot's ad revenue is undervalued (because it isn't taking into account that many Slashdot users hold key positions where they influence what tech is purchased by companies, friends come to them for tech advice, etc.). But overall the idea that they can increase ad revenue by revamping the entire site is a bad gamble: the community will disappear in a flash, and ad revenue will drop to zero.

Ultimately, Dice management appears willing to take the gamble. It is one they will most likely lose, and we will lose Slashdot in the process. But they won't care much, since Slashdot as-is just isn't pulling in that much money. It's a sad reality that even a community as big and stable as Slashdot (generating constant ad revenue) is still too small/niche to satisfy their money-lost. Our last hope may lie in efforts to build a new site that we can migrate to (e.g. AltSlashdot.org).

seems to have already been shown last fall: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/smi-eye-tracking-creates-thrill-in-survival-horror-game-223107871.html