Because when these guys fail to prove that the defendant's computer is the one they claim, any lawyer worth his or her degree will slap them with a defamation lawsuit.
I think that this is their 'clever' twist on exactly that problem. In their prior iteration, one of the things that they were slapped down for was their utterly crap 'computer forensics' procedure, which wasn't even close to adequate for identifying the actual party behind the alleged piracy.
So, making a virtue of that incompetence, their letter now says that, just to be extra sure and stuff, they'll be doing a more thorough investigation that just so happens to involve asking everyone you know "We think that person X downloaded 'Deviant Donkey Dicks V. 2'; but it might have been you. Do you think it was him?"
I can't believe that this wouldn't fall under the realm of 'trivially extortion'; but it's a cute little twist.
I think the western governments would be a bit more clever than that. They have the resources to develop their own home grown spying tools. They don't need an outside consultant, which is what this guy would have been. Otherwise you'd be hearing about this kind of stuff all the time.
Western governments employ a more than a few outside contractors for 'electronic operations'(and quite a few others for other purposes). They just aren't generally foolish enough to contact known, high-profile, security researchers with a history of publicity for sensitive work...
My suspicion(if only for die-space reasons, it isn't purely cosmetic that contemporary VRMs occupy a substantial amount of board space) is that is this a 'marketecture' summary of Intel moving some additional voltage adjustment and power gating functions on die, to support dynamic adjustment of power to the greater number of components(multiple CPU cores, possibly independently clocked, GPU, RAM controller, PCIe root, etc.); but we'll still see a bunch of chunky power silicon under serious heatsinks clustered around the CPU socket.
Given that much of the contemporary power savings are achieved by superior idling, rather than absolute gains in maximum power draw, Intel is either going to have to keep moving power regulation on die, or start dedicating even more pins to tiny voltages at nontrivial currents, with the associated resistive losses; but that won't necessarily change the fact that the circuitry that brings the 12v rail down to what the CPU wants is a pretty big chunk of board.
Is it normal for a contract between a carrier and an OEM to be structured such that unsold inventory would be sent back to the OEM?
Logistically, that seems like it would be pretty wasteful(especially since there presumably exists an 'Android-base-build' firmware that HTC put together before adding 'Home' on, so they could push that over the internet and convert the units in the field into perfectly servicable stock-Android handsets, in about the time it takes AT&T sales to sell an overpriced case and insurance plan), unless the contract is sufficiently one-sided that HTC was begging AT&T to offer shelf space and accepting all the downside risk in exchange for whatever margin they managed on sales...
Is HTC just too weak to get decent deals? Is it normal for the carrier to not outright buy the phone until they sell it? How does that channel work?
At least until the US market stops being so heavily driven by carrier marketing, 'subsidies', and 'exclusives', I expect the steady stream of locked down and stuffed-full-of-shit phones to continue, unfortunately... On the other side of the coin, the could-be-promising pacific-rim noname tablets don't tend to waste time or money on lockdown or NDAs or such; but you'll be lucky if you can buy the same hardware twice, and any documentation that exists is probably in Mandarin...
I am not to much of an android user, so I guess I dont understand how and application can not be removed...I thought android was supposed to be wide open, like Linux - so you are saying there is no way to delete an application if the Android equivalent of an add remove programs entry is not present?
Who would buy such a device?
Like Linux(because it mostly is, with some additional, mostly Apache-licensed, stuff on top) Android is 'Open' in the sense that you have the source for the GPLed components, and sooner or later get Google's source for the rest; but hardware vendors are under no obligation whatsoever to, say, have a bootloader that accepts firmware images that aren't cryptographically signed. Nontrivial binary blob drivers, for certain hardware components, are also quite likely.
How tivoized various Android devices are varies considerably. Some aren't locked down and enjoy excellent 3rd party support. Some are weakly locked down but have cracks and 3rd party images. Some either have very hostile bootloaders, or suffer from some mixture of driver issues or user apathy and have no meaningful support beyond the vendor's binary image.
I assume that the plan involves promising the investors serious enough to matter a cut of the spoils, and then just rolling over the rest of them...
It's not like it's news that these sorts of buyouts are the M&A equivalent of a chestburster in a pinstripe suit; but there isn't exactly a shortage of available capital that doesn't much care how the returns are generated, just so long as they are good...
It isn't that backups are 'hard'(though in complex situations they can be harder than they look), it's that people don't do them, or don't know that they were doing them wrong until it comes time to find out the hard way. They also forget passwords, get hit by trucks, and otherwise suffer from unexpected data loss.
My thesis is hardly that 'zOMG, all the bitcoins will disappear!!!'; but that there will be attrition over time, with greater attrition if they gain traction with the relatively clueless.
What is the actual 'real world' basis for this sudden notion that major 'real world' currencies can collapse any time? Yes, they can fluctuate a few percentages, that is very very very different than 60-70% loss of value recently for Bitcoin (or 90%+ the last time the price crashed).
The question I would ask is less 'can real world currencies collapse?'(yes occasionally one does, albeit generally one of the lower-tier ones); but 'do real-world currencies collapse outside of conditions where things are going all to shit across the board?'
Given how much fun it isn't, it's not as though you go through a round of hyperinflation just for giggles. It's not as though everybody wakes up one morning and says "I can see it so clearly now! My fiat currency is nothing but a political construct subject to the whims of politicians! It's all over!" and the currency's value against real assets suddenly dives for the floor. If the situation, as measured in actual economic activity, commodity availability, etc. goes to shit, the currency may well follow; but at that point your problem isn't that your currency is a paper lie; but that things have gone to shit, at least within the jurisdiction that minted the currency, if not more broadly.
Making the whole thing nothing more than an interesting academic exercise. Anyone who thinks bitcoin is the new gold or even frankly a replacement for ordinary money transactions is utterly deluded.
Yes and no: By design, 'the' bitcoin block chain will ever only have a limited number(20-odd million, I think...) of bitcoins associated with it. However, there is nothing mathemagical about this one, rather than the zillions of other possible ones.
If people were so inclined, any number of bitcoin-protocol chains could be run concurrently(subject only to computational constraints), each providing another chunk of the things. Of course, given how many of bitcoin's biggest fans are cyber-goldbug deflation enthusiasts(sometimes with nontrivial BTC reserves to provide financial as well as ideological motivation) I wouldn't be terribly surprised if an attempt to do that would be deeply unpopular, and that the value of non-canonical bitcoins would be nearly zero.
The situation is perhaps closest to what a fiat currency would look like if it were impossible for anyone(even the issuer) to counterfeit mint years and serial numbers: The supply of '1985 US dollars' or '$20 bills with serial numbers below XYZ' are fixed and slowly dwindling through attrition. Nothing prevents the creation of new bills each year, or printing bills with higher and higher serial numbers; but(in the case of bitcoins) there is nobody to say 'regardless of print year or serial, all of these things are equal', so the value of each printing, relative to other printings, and to other currencies and assets, is free to float.
It'd be messy(since nothing except total consensus would ever make bitcoins from different block chains totally fungible); but if people wanted there to be more of them, there could be more.
It seems pretty unsurprising that superior academic achievement in childhood would, on average, lead to somewhat better professional outcomes, at least within the "what part of 'middle class' does your salary put you in" band of professional wage labor.
I'd be curious to know what the data look like at the extremes of the distribution, though: "The data suggest, for example, that going up one reading level at age 7 was associated with a £5,000, or roughly $7,750, increase in income at age 42." So, people who earn, say £60,000 probably had better average performance at school age than the £50k or £40k tiers. What about the people who earn £600,000? There aren't even enough reading levels available to explain that. Is the relationship nonlinear(with each incremental increase in early performance carrying a greater incremental increase in outcome?), does correlation simply break down above(and possibly below) a certain adulthood salary band?
I imagine mod chips that block other cars from your lane will appear quickly enough, but the potential for carnage if one were programmed to give other cars information designed to mislead them into danger can't be ignored. How would one car authenticate what another is saying?
That seems like the really intractable problem here...
I don't mean to minimize the challenges of getting wireless mesh networks between a dynamic population of moving targets; but that's the sort of problem that falls into 'problem is hard, good thing our engineers are smart'. It'll get worked out.
Coaxing optimal results out of swarms is similarly a problem that hasn't been fully explored(but we know that social insects are pretty good at it, and it's an active area of research).
Add malicious actors to the picture, though? It'll be as much fun as trying to keep a computer non-botted on the internet, in a world where your face gets shoved through the monitor with lethal force when you fail!
So the mining bot herds aren't running a miner that credits a pool account? They are actively trying to subvert the block chain?
I assume, given the difficulty of subverting the block chain(you'd need to have a botnet large enough to constitute more than half of the processing power across the entire network), that anybody mining on botnets is acting 'honestly' with respect to the bitcoin network, if not necessarily with respect to the people who own the computers being botted. Subverting the block chain would be a major coup, either if you wanted to destabilize the bitcoin scene or just cash out and burn the world behind you; but my understanding is that there is no 'partial credit' for such an attempt. Either you succeed, and control the block chain, or you fail, and get nothing. Pool mining, by contrast, has no real jackpot scenario; but offers partial credit in rather small increments.
Back when CPU mining was still the major mover, it was much more plausible(though also of interest to many fewer people) that somebody could steal enough CPU cycles to dominate the mining capacity. Once GPU mining hit, the value of computers without rather specific hardware configurations fell through the floor. FPGAs and ASICs upped the game further, and those are something that you are never going to find except on other people's bitcoin mining rigs(unlike GPUs with reasonable compute power, which aren't terribly common, compared to Intel Integrated; but are found in the wild among gamers and the like).
I'm pretty sure that Athens did a lot more of the heavy lifting on that side of things. They also had perks like 'culture' and 'occasionally not existing in a state of total war'; but their legal and political shenanigans are quite legendary.
I would be more than happy to be able to actually download movies from Netflix during non peak times to watch at some other time. This would allow spreading out the bandwidth over the course of a day instead of everyone streaming at peak times such as 7PM EST,CST,PST
Streaming services will continue to degrade our bandwidth unless we are given the ability to download movies\shows during off hours to watch later.
But that would disrupt the hilarious consensual hallucination among the 'content' people that 'streaming' isn't actually just a form of 'downloading' where you don't bother to write things to the disk! We can't have that!
It is absolutely necessary that 'streaming' and 'downloading' be fundamentally different, because, um, 'broadcasting' and 'selling VHS tapes' were fundamentally different! That's why! Also, if your video decoder was sold as a 'computer' and connects to an LCD panel that the salesman called a 'monitor', that's entirely different than if your video decoder is called a 'set top box' and is connected to an LCD panel called a 'TV'. Because, because, something.
Comparing TV networks to Netflix is like comparing an ancient Spartan soldier to a modern, fully armed, US Marine.
You give the TV guys far too much credit. Your hypothetical Spartan soldier would, of course, be doomed by inferior technology; but it is unlikely that he would resort to petulant litigation or pernicious lobbying.
Basically taking advantage of an infrastructure it doesn't pay for?
If anything(given that buildout is expensive, and keeping a run of either copper or fiber maintained and backhoe-free isn't free), Netflix is, in addition to paying its bandwidth bills just like everybody else, providing the rather valuable service of giving millions of customers a reason to buy more bandwidth.
Given the steady advances in cramming bits over lines, even shitty legacy copper, the more bandwidth your customers want to buy, the more bandwidth you get to sell per fixed-cost(rights of way, keeping the lights on at HQ, dudes in bucket trucks, etc.)
Essentially, the obvious problem with a naive attempt at 'digital currency' is double spending: Unless you have a central authority of some sort, that clears all transactions, how do you prevent me from taking Bitcoin #2435345345 and sending it to two or more people?
An 'honest' node is a node performing operations such that bitcoin's decentralized anti-double-spending mechanism is upheld. A 'dishonest' or 'attacking' node is one using its CPU power to undermine the hash chain.
It has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism, or capitalism being honest or dishonest. My point was that(with the advent of extremely high performance specialized hardware) people who control botnets(that merely have CPU time, and maybe GPU time) are in an increasingly poor position to control more than a trivial slice of the computational capacity of the bitcoin network as a whole, which would prevent them from double-spending or other transaction-subverting attacks.
It's hard to say, from the data I have, whether this is some sort of 'equity' thing, or whether it's a strategic choice to gain access to a more talented student body than they would otherwise be able to attract. Consider the analogy of on the job training and applicant experience: Somebody who went to a crap high school is essentially an inexperienced 'hire'. Somebody who went to a good or excellent one has more relevant experience. Would a company ever consider hiring the less experienced one? Sure, if he were cheaper, or seemed smarter, or both, and they were willing to invest upfront to get what they expected to be a better employee. Would they ever consider hiring the more experienced one? Obviously, he's presumably closer to being up to speed, and his performance more predictable based on past experience.
University of Washington, per US News, is modestly selective, 58.4% of applicants admitted. Washington State is less selective, 82.5% acceptance. Few schools play in the single-digit-acceptance leagues; but neither figure, especially Washington State, is suggestive of a school that has its pick of whatever students it wants. Hard to say without more data; but it's certainly within the realm of plausible that they suspect the existence of students who are just plain sharper than some of the ones it currently has; but which it can access because competing schools aren't interested in doing the remedial work.
(Presumably, it also comes down to your position on the relative worth of preparation vs. raw talent. If you suspect much of high school of being dubiously useful babysitting, of only limited relevance to your curriculum, you are really only treating it as a signalling mechanism for talent. If you think it is of considerable use, then you are making a much greater sacrifice in taking on people whose high school years are shot.)
Slashdot Mirror
Officials are calling for calm amid reports that feathered serpent attacks are up 39% from historical baselines...
Because when these guys fail to prove that the defendant's computer is the one they claim, any lawyer worth his or her degree will slap them with a defamation lawsuit.
I think that this is their 'clever' twist on exactly that problem. In their prior iteration, one of the things that they were slapped down for was their utterly crap 'computer forensics' procedure, which wasn't even close to adequate for identifying the actual party behind the alleged piracy.
So, making a virtue of that incompetence, their letter now says that, just to be extra sure and stuff, they'll be doing a more thorough investigation that just so happens to involve asking everyone you know "We think that person X downloaded 'Deviant Donkey Dicks V. 2'; but it might have been you. Do you think it was him?"
I can't believe that this wouldn't fall under the realm of 'trivially extortion'; but it's a cute little twist.
Hopefully we'll manage to finish repatriating all that American oil they went and put their country on top of before that happens...
Do tell me more about how he could have fought to bring freedom to the suffering Saudi masses...
Was he supposed to take the job, then use his access to covertly haxx0r the mainframe and destroy the Master Control Computer?
I think the western governments would be a bit more clever than that. They have the resources to develop their own home grown spying tools. They don't need an outside consultant, which is what this guy would have been. Otherwise you'd be hearing about this kind of stuff all the time.
Western governments employ a more than a few outside contractors for 'electronic operations'(and quite a few others for other purposes). They just aren't generally foolish enough to contact known, high-profile, security researchers with a history of publicity for sensitive work...
My suspicion(if only for die-space reasons, it isn't purely cosmetic that contemporary VRMs occupy a substantial amount of board space) is that is this a 'marketecture' summary of Intel moving some additional voltage adjustment and power gating functions on die, to support dynamic adjustment of power to the greater number of components(multiple CPU cores, possibly independently clocked, GPU, RAM controller, PCIe root, etc.); but we'll still see a bunch of chunky power silicon under serious heatsinks clustered around the CPU socket.
Given that much of the contemporary power savings are achieved by superior idling, rather than absolute gains in maximum power draw, Intel is either going to have to keep moving power regulation on die, or start dedicating even more pins to tiny voltages at nontrivial currents, with the associated resistive losses; but that won't necessarily change the fact that the circuitry that brings the 12v rail down to what the CPU wants is a pretty big chunk of board.
Is it normal for a contract between a carrier and an OEM to be structured such that unsold inventory would be sent back to the OEM?
Logistically, that seems like it would be pretty wasteful(especially since there presumably exists an 'Android-base-build' firmware that HTC put together before adding 'Home' on, so they could push that over the internet and convert the units in the field into perfectly servicable stock-Android handsets, in about the time it takes AT&T sales to sell an overpriced case and insurance plan), unless the contract is sufficiently one-sided that HTC was begging AT&T to offer shelf space and accepting all the downside risk in exchange for whatever margin they managed on sales...
Is HTC just too weak to get decent deals? Is it normal for the carrier to not outright buy the phone until they sell it? How does that channel work?
At least until the US market stops being so heavily driven by carrier marketing, 'subsidies', and 'exclusives', I expect the steady stream of locked down and stuffed-full-of-shit phones to continue, unfortunately... On the other side of the coin, the could-be-promising pacific-rim noname tablets don't tend to waste time or money on lockdown or NDAs or such; but you'll be lucky if you can buy the same hardware twice, and any documentation that exists is probably in Mandarin...
I am not to much of an android user, so I guess I dont understand how and application can not be removed...I thought android was supposed to be wide open, like Linux - so you are saying there is no way to delete an application if the Android equivalent of an add remove programs entry is not present?
Who would buy such a device?
Like Linux(because it mostly is, with some additional, mostly Apache-licensed, stuff on top) Android is 'Open' in the sense that you have the source for the GPLed components, and sooner or later get Google's source for the rest; but hardware vendors are under no obligation whatsoever to, say, have a bootloader that accepts firmware images that aren't cryptographically signed. Nontrivial binary blob drivers, for certain hardware components, are also quite likely.
How tivoized various Android devices are varies considerably. Some aren't locked down and enjoy excellent 3rd party support. Some are weakly locked down but have cracks and 3rd party images. Some either have very hostile bootloaders, or suffer from some mixture of driver issues or user apathy and have no meaningful support beyond the vendor's binary image.
I assume that the plan involves promising the investors serious enough to matter a cut of the spoils, and then just rolling over the rest of them...
It's not like it's news that these sorts of buyouts are the M&A equivalent of a chestburster in a pinstripe suit; but there isn't exactly a shortage of available capital that doesn't much care how the returns are generated, just so long as they are good...
It isn't that backups are 'hard'(though in complex situations they can be harder than they look), it's that people don't do them, or don't know that they were doing them wrong until it comes time to find out the hard way. They also forget passwords, get hit by trucks, and otherwise suffer from unexpected data loss.
My thesis is hardly that 'zOMG, all the bitcoins will disappear!!!'; but that there will be attrition over time, with greater attrition if they gain traction with the relatively clueless.
What is the actual 'real world' basis for this sudden notion that major 'real world' currencies can collapse any time? Yes, they can fluctuate a few percentages, that is very very very different than 60-70% loss of value recently for Bitcoin (or 90%+ the last time the price crashed).
The question I would ask is less 'can real world currencies collapse?'(yes occasionally one does, albeit generally one of the lower-tier ones); but 'do real-world currencies collapse outside of conditions where things are going all to shit across the board?'
Given how much fun it isn't, it's not as though you go through a round of hyperinflation just for giggles. It's not as though everybody wakes up one morning and says "I can see it so clearly now! My fiat currency is nothing but a political construct subject to the whims of politicians! It's all over!" and the currency's value against real assets suddenly dives for the floor. If the situation, as measured in actual economic activity, commodity availability, etc. goes to shit, the currency may well follow; but at that point your problem isn't that your currency is a paper lie; but that things have gone to shit, at least within the jurisdiction that minted the currency, if not more broadly.
Making the whole thing nothing more than an interesting academic exercise. Anyone who thinks bitcoin is the new gold or even frankly a replacement for ordinary money transactions is utterly deluded.
Yes and no: By design, 'the' bitcoin block chain will ever only have a limited number(20-odd million, I think...) of bitcoins associated with it. However, there is nothing mathemagical about this one, rather than the zillions of other possible ones.
If people were so inclined, any number of bitcoin-protocol chains could be run concurrently(subject only to computational constraints), each providing another chunk of the things. Of course, given how many of bitcoin's biggest fans are cyber-goldbug deflation enthusiasts(sometimes with nontrivial BTC reserves to provide financial as well as ideological motivation) I wouldn't be terribly surprised if an attempt to do that would be deeply unpopular, and that the value of non-canonical bitcoins would be nearly zero.
The situation is perhaps closest to what a fiat currency would look like if it were impossible for anyone(even the issuer) to counterfeit mint years and serial numbers: The supply of '1985 US dollars' or '$20 bills with serial numbers below XYZ' are fixed and slowly dwindling through attrition. Nothing prevents the creation of new bills each year, or printing bills with higher and higher serial numbers; but(in the case of bitcoins) there is nobody to say 'regardless of print year or serial, all of these things are equal', so the value of each printing, relative to other printings, and to other currencies and assets, is free to float.
It'd be messy(since nothing except total consensus would ever make bitcoins from different block chains totally fungible); but if people wanted there to be more of them, there could be more.
Bitcoins are not consumables. They can be reused infinitely. They do not "run out".
They are data, though, and we all know how good at keeping backups people are...
It seems pretty unsurprising that superior academic achievement in childhood would, on average, lead to somewhat better professional outcomes, at least within the "what part of 'middle class' does your salary put you in" band of professional wage labor.
I'd be curious to know what the data look like at the extremes of the distribution, though: "The data suggest, for example, that going up one reading level at age 7 was associated with a £5,000, or roughly $7,750, increase in income at age 42." So, people who earn, say £60,000 probably had better average performance at school age than the £50k or £40k tiers. What about the people who earn £600,000? There aren't even enough reading levels available to explain that. Is the relationship nonlinear(with each incremental increase in early performance carrying a greater incremental increase in outcome?), does correlation simply break down above(and possibly below) a certain adulthood salary band?
"If the purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world."
I imagine mod chips that block other cars from your lane will appear quickly enough, but the potential for carnage if one were programmed to give other cars information designed to mislead them into danger can't be ignored. How would one car authenticate what another is saying?
That seems like the really intractable problem here...
I don't mean to minimize the challenges of getting wireless mesh networks between a dynamic population of moving targets; but that's the sort of problem that falls into 'problem is hard, good thing our engineers are smart'. It'll get worked out.
Coaxing optimal results out of swarms is similarly a problem that hasn't been fully explored(but we know that social insects are pretty good at it, and it's an active area of research).
Add malicious actors to the picture, though? It'll be as much fun as trying to keep a computer non-botted on the internet, in a world where your face gets shoved through the monitor with lethal force when you fail!
So the mining bot herds aren't running a miner that credits a pool account? They are actively trying to subvert the block chain?
I assume, given the difficulty of subverting the block chain(you'd need to have a botnet large enough to constitute more than half of the processing power across the entire network), that anybody mining on botnets is acting 'honestly' with respect to the bitcoin network, if not necessarily with respect to the people who own the computers being botted. Subverting the block chain would be a major coup, either if you wanted to destabilize the bitcoin scene or just cash out and burn the world behind you; but my understanding is that there is no 'partial credit' for such an attempt. Either you succeed, and control the block chain, or you fail, and get nothing. Pool mining, by contrast, has no real jackpot scenario; but offers partial credit in rather small increments.
Back when CPU mining was still the major mover, it was much more plausible(though also of interest to many fewer people) that somebody could steal enough CPU cycles to dominate the mining capacity. Once GPU mining hit, the value of computers without rather specific hardware configurations fell through the floor. FPGAs and ASICs upped the game further, and those are something that you are never going to find except on other people's bitcoin mining rigs(unlike GPUs with reasonable compute power, which aren't terribly common, compared to Intel Integrated; but are found in the wild among gamers and the like).
I'm pretty sure that Athens did a lot more of the heavy lifting on that side of things. They also had perks like 'culture' and 'occasionally not existing in a state of total war'; but their legal and political shenanigans are quite legendary.
You... can't... don't... should... not... be.
I would be more than happy to be able to actually download movies from Netflix during non peak times to watch at some other time. This would allow spreading out the bandwidth over the course of a day instead of everyone streaming at peak times such as 7PM EST,CST,PST
Streaming services will continue to degrade our bandwidth unless we are given the ability to download movies\shows during off hours to watch later.
But that would disrupt the hilarious consensual hallucination among the 'content' people that 'streaming' isn't actually just a form of 'downloading' where you don't bother to write things to the disk! We can't have that!
It is absolutely necessary that 'streaming' and 'downloading' be fundamentally different, because, um, 'broadcasting' and 'selling VHS tapes' were fundamentally different! That's why! Also, if your video decoder was sold as a 'computer' and connects to an LCD panel that the salesman called a 'monitor', that's entirely different than if your video decoder is called a 'set top box' and is connected to an LCD panel called a 'TV'. Because, because, something.
Comparing TV networks to Netflix is like comparing an ancient Spartan soldier to a modern, fully armed, US Marine.
You give the TV guys far too much credit. Your hypothetical Spartan soldier would, of course, be doomed by inferior technology; but it is unlikely that he would resort to petulant litigation or pernicious lobbying.
Basically taking advantage of an infrastructure it doesn't pay for?
If anything(given that buildout is expensive, and keeping a run of either copper or fiber maintained and backhoe-free isn't free), Netflix is, in addition to paying its bandwidth bills just like everybody else, providing the rather valuable service of giving millions of customers a reason to buy more bandwidth.
Given the steady advances in cramming bits over lines, even shitty legacy copper, the more bandwidth your customers want to buy, the more bandwidth you get to sell per fixed-cost(rights of way, keeping the lights on at HQ, dudes in bucket trucks, etc.)
"Honest" in the sense of the paper outlining bitcoin's design.
Essentially, the obvious problem with a naive attempt at 'digital currency' is double spending: Unless you have a central authority of some sort, that clears all transactions, how do you prevent me from taking Bitcoin #2435345345 and sending it to two or more people?
An 'honest' node is a node performing operations such that bitcoin's decentralized anti-double-spending mechanism is upheld. A 'dishonest' or 'attacking' node is one using its CPU power to undermine the hash chain.
It has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism, or capitalism being honest or dishonest. My point was that(with the advent of extremely high performance specialized hardware) people who control botnets(that merely have CPU time, and maybe GPU time) are in an increasingly poor position to control more than a trivial slice of the computational capacity of the bitcoin network as a whole, which would prevent them from double-spending or other transaction-subverting attacks.
It's hard to say, from the data I have, whether this is some sort of 'equity' thing, or whether it's a strategic choice to gain access to a more talented student body than they would otherwise be able to attract. Consider the analogy of on the job training and applicant experience: Somebody who went to a crap high school is essentially an inexperienced 'hire'. Somebody who went to a good or excellent one has more relevant experience. Would a company ever consider hiring the less experienced one? Sure, if he were cheaper, or seemed smarter, or both, and they were willing to invest upfront to get what they expected to be a better employee. Would they ever consider hiring the more experienced one? Obviously, he's presumably closer to being up to speed, and his performance more predictable based on past experience.
University of Washington, per US News, is modestly selective, 58.4% of applicants admitted. Washington State is less selective, 82.5% acceptance. Few schools play in the single-digit-acceptance leagues; but neither figure, especially Washington State, is suggestive of a school that has its pick of whatever students it wants. Hard to say without more data; but it's certainly within the realm of plausible that they suspect the existence of students who are just plain sharper than some of the ones it currently has; but which it can access because competing schools aren't interested in doing the remedial work.
(Presumably, it also comes down to your position on the relative worth of preparation vs. raw talent. If you suspect much of high school of being dubiously useful babysitting, of only limited relevance to your curriculum, you are really only treating it as a signalling mechanism for talent. If you think it is of considerable use, then you are making a much greater sacrifice in taking on people whose high school years are shot.)