One day his principal retired and a new principal was brought in, and the first thing he wanted to do was clean house of anyone and anything associated with the old guy.
Sadly, this isn't at all uncommon, particularly in states with at-will employment, like California.
If you want folks who are completely absorbed with covering their own hineys rather than teaching kids (which I think is exactly what a lot of the anti-tenure folks want) then sure, get rid of tenure.
True, but it's a bit worse than that. Tenure is a significant contributing factor to people actually choosing education as a profession. Even with tenure, it's hard to justify making (on average) barely half the median wage while working significantly longer hours. As it stands, with the exception of seriously dedicated teachers, the best and the brightest tend to choose careers in other fields. The result is a lot of mediocre teachers.
Removing tenure will only compound that problem, by making it even more difficult for someone to justify accepting such poor wages and long hours.
(For perspective, a K–12 teacher makes, on average, only about 6% more than a department manager at a Target store, and half what a store manager makes. That's just absurd.)
No, the basic purpose of tenure was to prevent large donors from dictating who could and could not teach at a university. These days, the main purpose of tenure, however, is to prevent administrators from saving money by firing all the experienced professors, hiring new adjunct instructors with no experience, and paying them dirt. Instead, they have to wait for professors to retire before they can replace them with adjunct instructors....
Tenure is no different in that regard than the seniority-based benefits that are common in the corporate world, such as extra days off for additional years of employment. They provide an incentive to stay, but they don't prevent you from leaving.
The reason teachers aren't more mobile, and the reason for the poor pay, is that there's no shortage of teachers, just a shortage of good ones.
And they use it for a few months before realizing it is terrible and dumping it. Been there, done that.
With GoDaddy, my static content was hosted on the same server as a bunch of @&^#@&$ WordPress and PHPBB instances, and every time somebody searched on those sites, it tied up a slot on the server for an extended period of time. Run enough of them in parallel, and suddenly you have 15+ second latency between when the connection is established and when the server begins serving data.
I pointed out the problem, providing detailed time stamps for dozens of such insane periods of poor performance over the course of one or two days. They said they couldn't find anything wrong. Then, I asked them to move me to a different server that had mostly static content and no scripts, but they said no, and I said, "Bye."
Of course, to be brutally honest, I was considering leaving before I even finished pushing the content *to* GoDaddy's servers. That hellish experience was caused entirely by GoDaddy's utterly incompetent system administration practices. Instead of setting up one server for shell access and a separate server to serve the actual content, as far as I can tell, they used a single server for both tasks. To prevent users from abusing CPU resources, they set a time limit on processes. That sort of policy makes sense on a web server, but on a shell server, it makes uploading your web tree almost impossible. I couldn't use rsync because it wouldn't begin sending data before the timeout, and I couldn't use tar because it can't be resumed. I couldn't use scp because there were single files that took longer to upload over my slow DSL connection than the (IIRC 30 second) timeout. I can't remember how I ended up solving the problem, but I think it involved using rsync on a single file at a time. (No, I will not use FTP....)
But even that wasn't enough hell for GoDaddy. No, they also decided to prevent people from abusing the server by connecting to it too many times in a short period of time, so whenever I uploaded short files, I would exceed that threshold and it would refuse the connection. And as long as I continued to try to connect, it would never succeed. So to get my files uploaded to the server, I had to write an unholy script that alternated between multiple source IP addresses, copying files one at a time using rsync over ssh.
Unfortunately, this level of incompetence seems to be typical of GoDaddy from all indications. You'd have to be nuts to buy stock in this company. Their entire business model depends on a steady stream of suckers, and there are enough sites out there with similar prices and better ratings, so that stream is drying up. Unless they can hire some competent customer support people and competent IT people, they have nowhere to go from here but down the drain.
We've known for decades about the effect that alcohol (one particular CNS depressant) has on brain development. It seems reasonable to assume that other CNS depressants would have the same effect to some degree, at least up to the point where brain cell division stops (several months after birth, IIRC).
So you're talking about a people getting a degree where the only career option is teaching others so they can seek the same degree?
Sort of, yes. The upper division courses tend to mostly benefit people in those majors/minors, and the lower division courses that are taken more broadly are frequently taught by adjunct instructors with only a master's degree, and tend to be taught by full professors only when they otherwise wouldn't have a full course load.
I can see only two realistic ways to move forward: either accept that the people teaching our young people will usually not have their PhD or push the accreditation boards to set limits on the percentage of classes that can be taught by adjunct faculty. With that said, if a doctorate were easier to get, it might save some doctoral programs from collapsing for lack of sufficient students to justify the staffing costs. So there's definitely a benefit from making the duration of those programs a bit more sane.
It's called empty promises. The primary purpose of this merger is not nor will it ever be to take care of the poor. It merely serves to unhook the approval process that would create an internet oligarchy.
Cheap internet for anybody is the last thing that these guys want.
Yes, it's one hell of a bribe (let's call it what it is), and I hope the FCC can see the statistics through the trees to call them on their bullshit.
I wouldn't call it a bribe. More like a distraction. They're trying to make a fundamentally invalid association between price and the harm caused by monopolies. Price is only part of the picture. Monopolies also reduce choice, and that's every bit as damaging to the public as extortionate pricing.
When Comcast owns the last mile for Internet service exclusively or nearly exclusively, they can set any terms that they want—caps, content filtering requirements, bans on servers, port blocks, etc.—and consumers just have to live within their dictates. Don't like it? Find another provider. What? There are no other providers? Oops.
And given that Comcast and Time Warner Cable both have a long history of such behavior, anyone who believes that the combined company won't result in even more rapid reductions in quality of service is, IMO, delusional.
Personally, I blame the MySQL team for nightmares like phpBB and vBulletin. After all, mysql_query is still available in the language, despite being at fault for a staggering percentage of PHP application security flaws. The PHP folks have at least finally deprecated it in 5.5, and theoretically it will go away in the future, though at this point it is so ingrained that when they do, most folks will just reimplement it using a template-based query, but with no template fields, and we'll be in the same boat as we are now.
In an ideal world, that function/method should never have existed in MySQL to begin with. But even if we accept that it was unavoidable, the function/method should have been removed from MySQL a decade ago, because even way back then, it was obvious how flawed an API it is. Had they done so, it wouldn't have continued to exist in the PHP bindings, because it wouldn't still have been in the library.
The rest of the security problems with PHP are, as far as I can tell, pretty much comparable to any other language—improper quoting of content for use in various aspects of HTML output, cross-site scripting bugs, etc.
BTW, if you want a PHP bulletin board that's more sane, check out JaxBoards, and grab my fork where I rewrote every single database call to use template-based queries. It's a fairly clean design that separates the presentation from the core to a significant degree, and whose database code is fairly straightforward. If you spot any security bugs that I haven't already fixed in my branch, let me know.
Easy fix : If the sound and pressure wave of a gunshot issues from a vehicle the vehicle auto stops and locks up until the cops arrive. No more drive by shootings allowed.
So when there's an explosion and fire inside the vehicle, everybody dies. Yes, this sounds like a great idea....
Better to notify the police and provide GPS coordinates of the vehicle on an ongoing basis from that point on.
A good editor is like having a glass of a fine wine, evening out the rough edges. A bad editor is like drinking too much and having a big hangover the next day.
The key to good editing is pointing out errors while retaining the author's voice. Unfortunately, lots of editors go way too far and think that they need to rewrite everything the way he or she would have written it. This tends to result in misery all around.
A state can provide broader rights than the Constitution, but not fewer. This is subject to the Gunwall analysis. The state legislature therefore can expand patent power, but not restrict it as it would be removing a federal right.
That's an easily solved problem, though. The state doesn't have to weaken the patents. They just have to tax the ill-gotten earnings at a 100% rate.
Why should Netflix have to pay for this? Comcast gets all the benefits. Their customers still get the Internet service that they are paying for, but Comcast doesn't have to pay for trunk lines. Netflix gets no benefit from the arrangement whatsoever other than not getting screwed by Comcast deliberately failing to provision adequate bandwidth for their own customers.
IMO, this is racketeering at its finest, and is no different than smashing somebody's store window, then coming by the next day and offering to protect them from future incidents. "It would be a shame if the connection to your servers weren't fast enough, and if your customers started watching movies on our Comcast video-on-demand service instead. You wouldn't want that to happen, would you? Pay us enough money and we'll 'protect' you from that." It's illegal, it's unethical, and Comcast should be broken up for their blatant and egregious monopoly abuse.
I was more tolerant of this sort of behavior a decade ago when streaming video was in its infancy, and when the ISPs weren't cable companies that offered a competing service. Now, it crosses the line into clear antitrust violations, and the only way to fix it is to break up all of the large cable monopolies at the local level into separate wire providers, ISPs, and cable content providers.
In a properly functioning economy, Comcast would be forced to provide adequate service for Netflix. Therefore, arguably, Comcast should have to pay Netflix a premium for the cost of putting caching boxes on their network. Comcast gets the benefits of lowering their bandwidth bill while still providing their customers with a similar experience. Unfortunately, this does not occur in practice, for two reasons:
Comcast is a monopoly in most places that it serves, so customers don't have viable alternatives. That's the first thing that needs to be fixed.
Additionally, Comcast provides a competing service other than their Internet service, which means it is in their best interest to break Netflix while making their competing VOD service as reliable as possible. Combined with a monopoly, this is a recipe for abuse.
This conflict of interest between Comcast's ISP business and their cable business is fundamental and IMO cannot be fixed without breaking up Comcast into at least two separate corporations—one that provides their video on demand and cable services, and one that provides their Internet services. And because two corporations can't both own the lines, it should actually be broken up into three companies, one of which owns the lines and leases access to anyone who can pay. That one single breakup will fix nearly all of the network neutrality problems we're facing, and will result in much cheaper Internet service, too, as competitors gain leased access to those lines.
Of course, if you really want to improve things, mandate that the infrastructure company be operated as a pure nonprofit corporation.
Cost. Both in time, staff, AND duplication of equipment.
If done properly, such a box can be entirely automated, choosing what to cache based on recent local usage patterns, and evicting older items when the disk fills up, based on an LRU or LFU scheme. The device can phone home every so often to verify that it is working properly, and can include a copy of its cache list. The main servers can then verify that the device has phoned home recently, and can check for I/O errors on the disk (and other errors logged by the caching daemon). In the event of unexpected errors or deafening silence, the main servers can then switch the DNS for that ISP so that their customers are directed to the main servers instead, and raise an exception so that a human being can ship the ISP a new box.
Once you've built up such an automated setup, the incremental cost to add another ISP is minimal, particularly compared with spending hundreds or thousands of dollars every month for a dedicated trunk line.
Either way, when it comes to no-cost peering, what's actually important is not the traffic direction, but rather that both parties send approximately the same amount of traffic through the other one to another network—that is to say, that both parties get approximately the same benefit out of the link.
Incidentally, this is why traditional ISPs like Comcast pay the backbone ISPs to carry their traffic, rather than being allowed to peer at no charge. They are essentially a leaf node in the graph, which means they benefit greatly from connecting to an upstream ISP, because such connections enable their customers to connect to the Internet. However, they don't provide any benefit to the upstream ISP, because the upstream ISP can't usefully route any traffic through Comcast to other ISPs.
The general rule is that backbone ISPs peer amongst themselves, but don't usually peer with traditional customer ISPs. Customer ISPs in the same region often peer with one other, because they're on the same level and can benefit from faster connectivity with one another and from having additional redundancy in their upstream connections. However, that peering only remains free so long as they route similar amounts of traffic over each other's upstream links. If the balance gets too skewed, they'll depeer each other.
I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. I know we often talk about peering meaning an equal amount of traffic, but that's largely historical baggage. The direction of traffic is essentially arbitrary when it comes to the cost of setting up a network. If you know you're going to have asymmetric data flow, you just use more channels in one direction than the other. AFAIK, such configurations are possible over most network links.
More to the point, it really doesn't matter which side is pushing and which side is pulling. Both parties benefit from a better experience for their customers, which in this particular case are the exact same people. And although both companies have a vested interest in ensuring that the customer experience is good, if anything, Comcast has the most to lose if it isn't (assuming the particular customer has any choice in ISPs whatsoever), because statistically speaking, most users blame the ISP first.:-)
Either way, when it comes to no-cost peering, what's actually important is not the traffic direction, but rather that both parties send approximately the same amount of traffic through the other one to another network—that is to say, that both parties get approximately the same benefit out of the link. In this case, both of those numbers would presumably be zero, because all of the traffic Netflix would push into Comcast's network would be destined for Comcast's customers, and thus would go across Comcast's network no matter what. And every byte Comcast sent across the link would be destined for Netflix's servers.
By that standard, assuming they configured the network to allow routing only to one another rather than through one another, then the relationship between Netflix and Comcast should have been a peering relationship. Anything else is extortion by Comcast, pure and simple. And if they didn't configure it that way, Comcast should probably be paying for the peering, because it seems much more likely that Comcast would benefit from routing traffic over Netflix's fat pipes than that Netflix would benefit from routing traffic over Comcast's clogged pipes.:-)
"We are happy to inform you that as of this month, our IT infrastructure is 100% Animal Cruelty Free!"
The best part of that is the presumption that it previously was not. This is the point at which you are forced to explain to your IT director that a squirrel cage is not, in fact, animal cruelty, but rather an essential safety system. It can only go downhill from there.
Not necessarily even all that uncertain. I could see somebody with sufficient resources attacking this by fluctuating the building power or using focused EMP tricks to reduce entropy, thus weakening the resulting crypto.
Sadly, no, ML doesn't currently fix the 30 minute limit, at least according to its user guide. When asked about it a few months back, the devs implied that it probably wasn't practical to patch out all the different places in Canon's firmware where that limit is enforced.
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Sadly, this isn't at all uncommon, particularly in states with at-will employment, like California.
True, but it's a bit worse than that. Tenure is a significant contributing factor to people actually choosing education as a profession. Even with tenure, it's hard to justify making (on average) barely half the median wage while working significantly longer hours. As it stands, with the exception of seriously dedicated teachers, the best and the brightest tend to choose careers in other fields. The result is a lot of mediocre teachers.
Removing tenure will only compound that problem, by making it even more difficult for someone to justify accepting such poor wages and long hours.
(For perspective, a K–12 teacher makes, on average, only about 6% more than a department manager at a Target store, and half what a store manager makes. That's just absurd.)
No, the basic purpose of tenure was to prevent large donors from dictating who could and could not teach at a university. These days, the main purpose of tenure, however, is to prevent administrators from saving money by firing all the experienced professors, hiring new adjunct instructors with no experience, and paying them dirt. Instead, they have to wait for professors to retire before they can replace them with adjunct instructors....
Because everyone in every other occupation got to where they were because of teachers.
Tenure is no different in that regard than the seniority-based benefits that are common in the corporate world, such as extra days off for additional years of employment. They provide an incentive to stay, but they don't prevent you from leaving.
The reason teachers aren't more mobile, and the reason for the poor pay, is that there's no shortage of teachers, just a shortage of good ones.
I suspect the GP meant their bottom-of-the-barrel hosting service, not their domain renewals.
And they use it for a few months before realizing it is terrible and dumping it. Been there, done that.
With GoDaddy, my static content was hosted on the same server as a bunch of @&^#@&$ WordPress and PHPBB instances, and every time somebody searched on those sites, it tied up a slot on the server for an extended period of time. Run enough of them in parallel, and suddenly you have 15+ second latency between when the connection is established and when the server begins serving data.
I pointed out the problem, providing detailed time stamps for dozens of such insane periods of poor performance over the course of one or two days. They said they couldn't find anything wrong. Then, I asked them to move me to a different server that had mostly static content and no scripts, but they said no, and I said, "Bye."
Of course, to be brutally honest, I was considering leaving before I even finished pushing the content *to* GoDaddy's servers. That hellish experience was caused entirely by GoDaddy's utterly incompetent system administration practices. Instead of setting up one server for shell access and a separate server to serve the actual content, as far as I can tell, they used a single server for both tasks. To prevent users from abusing CPU resources, they set a time limit on processes. That sort of policy makes sense on a web server, but on a shell server, it makes uploading your web tree almost impossible. I couldn't use rsync because it wouldn't begin sending data before the timeout, and I couldn't use tar because it can't be resumed. I couldn't use scp because there were single files that took longer to upload over my slow DSL connection than the (IIRC 30 second) timeout. I can't remember how I ended up solving the problem, but I think it involved using rsync on a single file at a time. (No, I will not use FTP....)
But even that wasn't enough hell for GoDaddy. No, they also decided to prevent people from abusing the server by connecting to it too many times in a short period of time, so whenever I uploaded short files, I would exceed that threshold and it would refuse the connection. And as long as I continued to try to connect, it would never succeed. So to get my files uploaded to the server, I had to write an unholy script that alternated between multiple source IP addresses, copying files one at a time using rsync over ssh.
Unfortunately, this level of incompetence seems to be typical of GoDaddy from all indications. You'd have to be nuts to buy stock in this company. Their entire business model depends on a steady stream of suckers, and there are enough sites out there with similar prices and better ratings, so that stream is drying up. Unless they can hire some competent customer support people and competent IT people, they have nowhere to go from here but down the drain.
We've known for decades about the effect that alcohol (one particular CNS depressant) has on brain development. It seems reasonable to assume that other CNS depressants would have the same effect to some degree, at least up to the point where brain cell division stops (several months after birth, IIRC).
Sort of, yes. The upper division courses tend to mostly benefit people in those majors/minors, and the lower division courses that are taken more broadly are frequently taught by adjunct instructors with only a master's degree, and tend to be taught by full professors only when they otherwise wouldn't have a full course load.
I can see only two realistic ways to move forward: either accept that the people teaching our young people will usually not have their PhD or push the accreditation boards to set limits on the percentage of classes that can be taught by adjunct faculty. With that said, if a doctorate were easier to get, it might save some doctoral programs from collapsing for lack of sufficient students to justify the staffing costs. So there's definitely a benefit from making the duration of those programs a bit more sane.
I wouldn't call it a bribe. More like a distraction. They're trying to make a fundamentally invalid association between price and the harm caused by monopolies. Price is only part of the picture. Monopolies also reduce choice, and that's every bit as damaging to the public as extortionate pricing.
When Comcast owns the last mile for Internet service exclusively or nearly exclusively, they can set any terms that they want—caps, content filtering requirements, bans on servers, port blocks, etc.—and consumers just have to live within their dictates. Don't like it? Find another provider. What? There are no other providers? Oops.
And given that Comcast and Time Warner Cable both have a long history of such behavior, anyone who believes that the combined company won't result in even more rapid reductions in quality of service is, IMO, delusional.
Personally, I blame the MySQL team for nightmares like phpBB and vBulletin. After all, mysql_query is still available in the language, despite being at fault for a staggering percentage of PHP application security flaws. The PHP folks have at least finally deprecated it in 5.5, and theoretically it will go away in the future, though at this point it is so ingrained that when they do, most folks will just reimplement it using a template-based query, but with no template fields, and we'll be in the same boat as we are now.
In an ideal world, that function/method should never have existed in MySQL to begin with. But even if we accept that it was unavoidable, the function/method should have been removed from MySQL a decade ago, because even way back then, it was obvious how flawed an API it is. Had they done so, it wouldn't have continued to exist in the PHP bindings, because it wouldn't still have been in the library.
The rest of the security problems with PHP are, as far as I can tell, pretty much comparable to any other language—improper quoting of content for use in various aspects of HTML output, cross-site scripting bugs, etc.
BTW, if you want a PHP bulletin board that's more sane, check out JaxBoards, and grab my fork where I rewrote every single database call to use template-based queries. It's a fairly clean design that separates the presentation from the core to a significant degree, and whose database code is fairly straightforward. If you spot any security bugs that I haven't already fixed in my branch, let me know.
So when there's an explosion and fire inside the vehicle, everybody dies. Yes, this sounds like a great idea....
Better to notify the police and provide GPS coordinates of the vehicle on an ongoing basis from that point on.
A good editor is like having a glass of a fine wine, evening out the rough edges. A bad editor is like drinking too much and having a big hangover the next day.
The key to good editing is pointing out errors while retaining the author's voice. Unfortunately, lots of editors go way too far and think that they need to rewrite everything the way he or she would have written it. This tends to result in misery all around.
That's an easily solved problem, though. The state doesn't have to weaken the patents. They just have to tax the ill-gotten earnings at a 100% rate.
Why should Netflix have to pay for this? Comcast gets all the benefits. Their customers still get the Internet service that they are paying for, but Comcast doesn't have to pay for trunk lines. Netflix gets no benefit from the arrangement whatsoever other than not getting screwed by Comcast deliberately failing to provision adequate bandwidth for their own customers.
IMO, this is racketeering at its finest, and is no different than smashing somebody's store window, then coming by the next day and offering to protect them from future incidents. "It would be a shame if the connection to your servers weren't fast enough, and if your customers started watching movies on our Comcast video-on-demand service instead. You wouldn't want that to happen, would you? Pay us enough money and we'll 'protect' you from that." It's illegal, it's unethical, and Comcast should be broken up for their blatant and egregious monopoly abuse.
I was more tolerant of this sort of behavior a decade ago when streaming video was in its infancy, and when the ISPs weren't cable companies that offered a competing service. Now, it crosses the line into clear antitrust violations, and the only way to fix it is to break up all of the large cable monopolies at the local level into separate wire providers, ISPs, and cable content providers.
In a properly functioning economy, Comcast would be forced to provide adequate service for Netflix. Therefore, arguably, Comcast should have to pay Netflix a premium for the cost of putting caching boxes on their network. Comcast gets the benefits of lowering their bandwidth bill while still providing their customers with a similar experience. Unfortunately, this does not occur in practice, for two reasons:
This conflict of interest between Comcast's ISP business and their cable business is fundamental and IMO cannot be fixed without breaking up Comcast into at least two separate corporations—one that provides their video on demand and cable services, and one that provides their Internet services. And because two corporations can't both own the lines, it should actually be broken up into three companies, one of which owns the lines and leases access to anyone who can pay. That one single breakup will fix nearly all of the network neutrality problems we're facing, and will result in much cheaper Internet service, too, as competitors gain leased access to those lines.
Of course, if you really want to improve things, mandate that the infrastructure company be operated as a pure nonprofit corporation.
And this is the crux of the problem. Comcast is a huge monopoly ISP that ought to be treated just like Ma Bell, and for precisely the same reason.
If done properly, such a box can be entirely automated, choosing what to cache based on recent local usage patterns, and evicting older items when the disk fills up, based on an LRU or LFU scheme. The device can phone home every so often to verify that it is working properly, and can include a copy of its cache list. The main servers can then verify that the device has phoned home recently, and can check for I/O errors on the disk (and other errors logged by the caching daemon). In the event of unexpected errors or deafening silence, the main servers can then switch the DNS for that ISP so that their customers are directed to the main servers instead, and raise an exception so that a human being can ship the ISP a new box.
Once you've built up such an automated setup, the incremental cost to add another ISP is minimal, particularly compared with spending hundreds or thousands of dollars every month for a dedicated trunk line.
You do know that they renamed it in 2620 to put an end to that joke....
Why are you watching TV in the fridge?
Incidentally, this is why traditional ISPs like Comcast pay the backbone ISPs to carry their traffic, rather than being allowed to peer at no charge. They are essentially a leaf node in the graph, which means they benefit greatly from connecting to an upstream ISP, because such connections enable their customers to connect to the Internet. However, they don't provide any benefit to the upstream ISP, because the upstream ISP can't usefully route any traffic through Comcast to other ISPs.
The general rule is that backbone ISPs peer amongst themselves, but don't usually peer with traditional customer ISPs. Customer ISPs in the same region often peer with one other, because they're on the same level and can benefit from faster connectivity with one another and from having additional redundancy in their upstream connections. However, that peering only remains free so long as they route similar amounts of traffic over each other's upstream links. If the balance gets too skewed, they'll depeer each other.
I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. I know we often talk about peering meaning an equal amount of traffic, but that's largely historical baggage. The direction of traffic is essentially arbitrary when it comes to the cost of setting up a network. If you know you're going to have asymmetric data flow, you just use more channels in one direction than the other. AFAIK, such configurations are possible over most network links.
More to the point, it really doesn't matter which side is pushing and which side is pulling. Both parties benefit from a better experience for their customers, which in this particular case are the exact same people. And although both companies have a vested interest in ensuring that the customer experience is good, if anything, Comcast has the most to lose if it isn't (assuming the particular customer has any choice in ISPs whatsoever), because statistically speaking, most users blame the ISP first. :-)
Either way, when it comes to no-cost peering, what's actually important is not the traffic direction, but rather that both parties send approximately the same amount of traffic through the other one to another network—that is to say, that both parties get approximately the same benefit out of the link. In this case, both of those numbers would presumably be zero, because all of the traffic Netflix would push into Comcast's network would be destined for Comcast's customers, and thus would go across Comcast's network no matter what. And every byte Comcast sent across the link would be destined for Netflix's servers.
By that standard, assuming they configured the network to allow routing only to one another rather than through one another, then the relationship between Netflix and Comcast should have been a peering relationship. Anything else is extortion by Comcast, pure and simple. And if they didn't configure it that way, Comcast should probably be paying for the peering, because it seems much more likely that Comcast would benefit from routing traffic over Netflix's fat pipes than that Netflix would benefit from routing traffic over Comcast's clogged pipes. :-)
The best part of that is the presumption that it previously was not. This is the point at which you are forced to explain to your IT director that a squirrel cage is not, in fact, animal cruelty, but rather an essential safety system. It can only go downhill from there.
Considering that similar attacks have been done in the past, yes, I'm serious.
Not necessarily even all that uncertain. I could see somebody with sufficient resources attacking this by fluctuating the building power or using focused EMP tricks to reduce entropy, thus weakening the resulting crypto.
Sadly, no, ML doesn't currently fix the 30 minute limit, at least according to its user guide. When asked about it a few months back, the devs implied that it probably wasn't practical to patch out all the different places in Canon's firmware where that limit is enforced.