I think it's more fear that they'll break something.
I wonder if they had that same fear the first time they picked-up a hammer, a screwdriver, a knife, or a ball? Clearly not: children have no such fears. I think as people get older, if they are not vigilant to maintain everyday skills, they become afraid to experiment at all. So they stop learning.
You just spent 3 sentences telling people why anyone who argues differently from you is wrong, yet you provided not a single reason. The only fact you provided is easily disproven:
Right now, on newegg, im only seeing USB3.0 on highend multi-hundred-dollar motherboards, so it seems to be a wash in that regard.
Most certainly not! I see 29 USB 3.0 motherboards less than $100 at newegg.. The $500 HTPC I bought this year has 2 USB 3.0 ports, as does my 8 month old laptop. By next year even the low-end will have it because manufacturers will have unloaded their USB 2.0 chipset boards.
Folks, it is no coincidence that this information is released the day after The US decides to keep smallpox virus samples "just in case" it is needed. The signs tell that there is a strain of smallpox that produces zombies, and the US government is releasing the necessary information without inciting panic while working on an antidote. People will read this, laugh, but it puts them on alert. Now they notice that a coworker is acting a little strangely and trying to hug them while drooling. And does that look like a head wound?
I haven't seen a deployment like that since the mid 90's. Most places I knew of that did this were replacing them with FAT windows machines because they could do so much more with them and they had gotten so cheap. I just assumed web apps finally displaced that last holdouts to remote X windows usage.
I didn't mean that Bill Gates + Apple harmed the US, I meant that his damage exceeded the gain from all these great people.
This is why Osama is laughing from his grave
on
The Cost of US Security
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
All he wanted was to cripple us. And where he failed, we did it to ourselves. So ultimately, he won. When a suicide bomber walks into a populated area he knows he is going to die - he just hopes that he can take out at as many people as possible in the process.
Lets put these numbers into perspective: Osama Bin Laden's estimated damage: $3 trillion Bill Gates net worth: $56 billion Apple's market capitalization: $308 billion 2010 stimulus bill: $787 billion
So Bin laden and the resulting spiral of stupidity did more economic damage to the US than Bill Gates + Apple + the economic stimulus put together. From Bin Laden's perspective, our loss is his gain. That means he died the wealthiest most powerful human being on the planet. All because he fooled America into it's own economic death spiral. History will look back on this time as a time when America nearly destroyed itself.
This is like one flea taking down the entire dog because it scratched itself to death.
So if an illegal online pharmacy wants to buy a billboard ad on route I-95, does the advertising company verify that the pharmacy is breaking no US laws before allowing the ad? If they do not, are they liable because they profited? How about newspapers? Is every advertisement in the classifieds section operating 100% within the law?
No, that's missing the point. You have confused mediocrity with inexperience. You constructed an idealized developer who is a blank slate and can be taught anything and can grasp it. So they were never a mediocre developer, they were just a new developer. The mediocre developer cannot be taught those things. Yet managers think that adding process and training alleviates that problem.
Cisco IP phones are not designed to be secure out of the box. They periodically connect to an unsecured FTP site to download firmware and unencrypted password text files. They use DHCP to determine the FTP site and the phone directory. The phones accept remote commands that allow you to control them: push any button, dial calls, turn on/off the speakerphone, etc. Back in 2005 I worked in an office and we had fun telneting to each other's phones and making them quack or display funny messages or other such nonsense. The articles are light on details but it sounds like nothing has changed.
Simply put, squatting is limited to registering vreizon.com then putting up cell phone ads.
Right, that's exactly the situation I was talking about. I am confused because you said "That's not squatting" and I am trying to figure out what it was I said that is not squatting.
Good link: so was I. That court ruling states that domains names are intellectual property, not real property. The relevant difference here is that ICANN's rules forbid squatting, whereas squatting on real property is well-protected by the law.
As for the trademark thing, do not misunderstand what a registered trademark means. Trademarks are obtained and maintained by showing that you have been legitimately using that mark for some time. Just because you didn't officially apply for the trademark until after someone registered the domain, or that it wasn't granted until after the registration, does not in any way dilute the value of the trademark so it should not impact that URDP resolution. If the holder of the domain is squatting, then a real trademark should trump that every time.
If you want to direct your frustration at anyone
What frustration? I was asking a question about how the new process would handle squatters. It is a big deal for small businesses but I don't think the new rules will help them much.
I question this concept. Part of the issue is in how you define a mediocre programmer.
Suppose you train them in all the things you listed, and they grasp them all and can do them, then how is the programmer mediocre? Sounds like a top notch programmer to me! In my experience, the mediocre programmer is the person you train on these things and they just don't get it. Worse yet is that they think that they understand it - but then they go to do it they put things into the wrong layer, or didn't realize they could have used standard pattern X here, or thought they wrote good documentation but it is not helpful when you go back to it. Perhaps they wrote a unit test but it didn't cover the things it should. Or maybe it even reached 100% code coverage but still didn't test all the possible scenarios.
Try to use process to manage *that* person. Even worse, they may be getting top marks in their reviews because they are following all the steps while your most talented programmer who writes bug-free code is being passed over for raises.
Similar to real estate, domain names are property and operate under the concept of capitalism.
Domain names are IP not RP. Economically speaking, it is very different from real estate. Real estate is finite, expensive, and owned permanently unless transferred. Domain names are infinite, cheap, and are only available for rent.
It seems like almost every English dictionary word is registered as a domain right now. Any domain that expires is immediately snatched up by squatters. This is an unfortunate problem.
And even if you applied for a trademark after the fact, (theoretically) it holds no water in the UDRP process.
The UDRP process is almost exclusively based on trademarks. While I'm not aware of any specific cases, it seems unlikely that a trademark holder would be denied the right to a domain against a squatter who had no trademark at all.
I think corporations are reasonably well protected already. But what about the average person who just wants to register a domain that is taken by a squatter, without having to go through the time and expense of obtaining a trademark?
You can't switch to being a premium channel based on the promise that once you do so, you will offer good content. You need to offer good content, get people hooked, then go premium. As-is, I have no faith that any new series produced by SyFy would be decent. Their "original movies" are horrible with bad writing and cheap special effects. Once they offer something serious, then they could try to go premium. If they really want to do this, they need to go with a new name so that people don't associate it with SyFy.
I think your assumption about "The Slashdot audience" is wrong since Slashdot readers are notoriously anti-TV and very internet savvy. In addition, making basic channels into a premium channel is driving customers away from cable television. When I had Comcast, every other month I got a notice that some channel was being moved to the next level of service. I think I had 70 channels and it 60 of them were showing one show 12 hours a day. I had all day cooking, all day gardening, all day house hunters, all day America's Funniest Home Videos, all day Ghost Hunter, all day Spongebob, etc.
Looks like that thread was started by one of the new Sony troll accounts. Take a look at Kayla:
OtherOS since it gives you full access to the machine, no more being tied down by Sony. How the @#$@ are we tied down by Sony?
The account was registered just when PSN went down and they have posted nothing other than posts defending Sony. No other posts, no PS3 gamer tag. I bet there are others, but this one is the most obvious.
I didn't miss that part. It is just an oversimplification and I didn't have time to explain it all. So let me clarify...
Suppose we have the following game pipeline:
1. Gather input from devices and update the game state. 2. Render based on that input and send it to the display.
We have 2 CPU cores each dedicated to one step in the pipeline. In the above example, the lag is 2 frames. Suppose the game runs at 30fps, so that is 2/30th of a second or 0.067 seconds. So the reader says "aha! We should run at 60fps and cut the lag in half!" The problem with that is the console can't keep up with 60 fps. If the console hardware was fast enough to run at 60fps, then the console would have done this:
1. Gather input from devices and update the state variables based on time and user input and render based on that input and send it to the display.
Which results in 1/60 of a second lag. We cut the lag in half, without increasing the frame rate of the display. We can't cut it any further, but 1 frame of lag is usually not a problem. Gamers start complaining when you get 2, 4, and 8 frames of lag. That's ridiculous.
Since the console was not powerful enough to do it all in one step, it took advantage of multiple CPU cores and traded latency for frame rate. This is an inevitable consequence of us not being able to manufacture faster CPUs, and instead manufacturing multiple parallel CPUs instead.
So since the above scenario isn't possible, what does the console do? Well, it could run the game at 30fps anyway, gaining nothing. Or it could add another 2 cores, and run a modified pipeline like this:
1. Get input 2. Update the state variables based on time and user input. 3. Render based on that input. 4. Send that rendering to the display (buffer swap).
Aha! Now they are using parallel processing and can render at 60fps! But the lag is now 4 frames, or 4/60 of a second which is no better.
So ultimately, frame rate is limited by CPU speed first and video frame rate second. Mandating that displays have higher frame rates won't do anything until the CPUs are fast enough to keep up. That won't happen until game console manufacturers and game developers see the need to do so. In the mean time, there are other sources of latency that aren't discussed in this post that are more important targets. Demand LCD panels that don't introduce extra latency. And don't use video upscalers that insert more lag. Don't use digital receivers that add another 30ms of lag or video-based motion capture that runs at even lower rates. Once you eliminate those kinds of things, then you can focus on video refresh rate.
The first article in the summary has some silly ideas on how to fix this:
What can we do reverse the onslaught of latency in all its forms?... First off, we can make LCD (or future OLED/QLED) monitors run at 120 or even 240 frames per second.
What?!?! 1) That is not possible and 2) That would not help. There are so many reasons for this I can't even list them all.
First, there isn't an LCD panel in existence that actually responds that fast. Those phony 240 hz screens don't actually change the pixels 240 times per second. We don't need faster displays to solve a software problem.
If the software provided a 1/60 second delay, that would be just fine. The issue is that we are not taking advantage of the refresh rates we have no - so increasing those rates doesn't help. Heck -- that's probably faster than the debouncing circuits in the controller!
Compensating for a longer pipeline by increasing clock speed doesn't help anyway, because to get the higher rate you need to increase the pipeline more...
Were you implying that Java or Visual Studio 2010 are sources of lag? You mentioned bufferbloat, a problem with video games, and a problem with Ubuntu. None of those involve Java or Visual Studio 2010 - although someone could edit or build code in those but the products don't add latency. So I don't think that is not what you meant.
Perhaps you personally experienced lag when using those applications. But Java isn't really an application, and nothing in Java intrinsically buffers things so I'm lost there. I assume VS2010 is slower than previous versions, and it uses WPF so that would be likely, but that still doesn't tie it to latency.
Could you reply and clarify what you meant? Or was this inserted by a Slashdot editor?
The problem is that AT&T is a regulated monopoly. If the only companies that offer the service are monopolies, and they all force you to sign a contract that denies your right to sue, then the government has effectively taken away your right to sue. They just did it indirectly. Ex: There are two phone carriers that operate in my area: AT&T and Verizon. If both of them have contracts that deny my right to sue, then my only option is to forego service. That isn't reasonable.
The feature may have been reasonably sane, but the outcry was justified. Apple didn't tell anyone it was there, kept it way longer than necessary, and was not clear about what it was used for. Had they been clear from the beginning it would not be an issue. But their response now is quite sensible.
The purpose of the encryption is to prevent a rogue app from mining that data.
1) So no one should encrypt private information if it is only kept on the device itself? So no need to encrypt your bank account files or password lists? No need to lock the doors to your house either. 2) This will not affect the battery life. Encryption is not that heavy.
has even experimented with injecting their own advertising into sites like Google
This is the most blatant example of why we need network neutrality. Telecom companies cannot inject ads into voice conversations. Shipping companies cannot modify parcels in transit. But somehow we think it is okay to modify a digital transmission in transport? And this is somehow controversial...?
I hope they actually implement this just so I get to see Google sue them when their advertisements don't get displayed. Then I can't wait until someone who has MediaCom as their ISP does a search for information about the lawsuit, and mysteriously gets no results....
It isn't my phone. Not according to the 50+ page EULA I agree to every time I install a 0.99 cent piece of software. Not according to AT&T who hides a fee in my service plan to cover the cost of the subsidy since I didn't pay full price for it. If it was my phone, then I could open it up, remove the SD card, insert it into my computer, delete the file, and modify the directory permissions so that the file could never be created again.
I can't do any of those things, and I probably agreed to a license that says I won't try them, won't reverse engineer it, and won't badmouth the company that did it. So... whose phone is it?
I agree with you to some degree: it is in my pocket and as long as the phone doesn't send the file to anyone it doesn't matter. But the file shouldn't be there in the first place, and Apple is acting very fishy so clearly something more is happening. We need to remain vigilant against this stuff.
My fear is that Comcast will see Netflix as a competitor and that a large number of Netflix customers go through Comcast for their broadband. Comcast has the lobbying power so I expect Comcast to start doing every dirty deed they can to make Netflix harder for customers to access.
In the mean time, Comcast is reducing the number of stations available. They keep moving stations from basic cable to digital cable to digital premium, etc. Then they try to sell you up to the next level of service.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's more fear that they'll break something.
I wonder if they had that same fear the first time they picked-up a hammer, a screwdriver, a knife, or a ball? Clearly not: children have no such fears. I think as people get older, if they are not vigilant to maintain everyday skills, they become afraid to experiment at all. So they stop learning.
You just spent 3 sentences telling people why anyone who argues differently from you is wrong, yet you provided not a single reason. The only fact you provided is easily disproven:
Right now, on newegg, im only seeing USB3.0 on highend multi-hundred-dollar motherboards, so it seems to be a wash in that regard.
Most certainly not! I see 29 USB 3.0 motherboards less than $100 at newegg.. The $500 HTPC I bought this year has 2 USB 3.0 ports, as does my 8 month old laptop. By next year even the low-end will have it because manufacturers will have unloaded their USB 2.0 chipset boards.
Folks, it is no coincidence that this information is released the day after The US decides to keep smallpox virus samples "just in case" it is needed. The signs tell that there is a strain of smallpox that produces zombies, and the US government is releasing the necessary information without inciting panic while working on an antidote. People will read this, laugh, but it puts them on alert. Now they notice that a coworker is acting a little strangely and trying to hug them while drooling. And does that look like a head wound?
Be prepared.
What kind of customers use this configuration?
I haven't seen a deployment like that since the mid 90's. Most places I knew of that did this were replacing them with FAT windows machines because they could do so much more with them and they had gotten so cheap. I just assumed web apps finally displaced that last holdouts to remote X windows usage.
I didn't mean that Bill Gates + Apple harmed the US, I meant that his damage exceeded the gain from all these great people.
All he wanted was to cripple us. And where he failed, we did it to ourselves. So ultimately, he won. When a suicide bomber walks into a populated area he knows he is going to die - he just hopes that he can take out at as many people as possible in the process.
Lets put these numbers into perspective:
Osama Bin Laden's estimated damage: $3 trillion
Bill Gates net worth: $56 billion
Apple's market capitalization: $308 billion
2010 stimulus bill: $787 billion
So Bin laden and the resulting spiral of stupidity did more economic damage to the US than Bill Gates + Apple + the economic stimulus put together. From Bin Laden's perspective, our loss is his gain. That means he died the wealthiest most powerful human being on the planet. All because he fooled America into it's own economic death spiral. History will look back on this time as a time when America nearly destroyed itself.
This is like one flea taking down the entire dog because it scratched itself to death.
So if an illegal online pharmacy wants to buy a billboard ad on route I-95, does the advertising company verify that the pharmacy is breaking no US laws before allowing the ad? If they do not, are they liable because they profited? How about newspapers? Is every advertisement in the classifieds section operating 100% within the law?
Where is the line drawn here?
No, that's missing the point. You have confused mediocrity with inexperience. You constructed an idealized developer who is a blank slate and can be taught anything and can grasp it. So they were never a mediocre developer, they were just a new developer. The mediocre developer cannot be taught those things. Yet managers think that adding process and training alleviates that problem.
Cisco IP phones are not designed to be secure out of the box. They periodically connect to an unsecured FTP site to download firmware and unencrypted password text files. They use DHCP to determine the FTP site and the phone directory. The phones accept remote commands that allow you to control them: push any button, dial calls, turn on/off the speakerphone, etc. Back in 2005 I worked in an office and we had fun telneting to each other's phones and making them quack or display funny messages or other such nonsense. The articles are light on details but it sounds like nothing has changed.
Simply put, squatting is limited to registering vreizon.com then putting up cell phone ads.
Right, that's exactly the situation I was talking about. I am confused because you said "That's not squatting" and I am trying to figure out what it was I said that is not squatting.
I was speaking in terms of how the courts view domains: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-223597.html [cnet.com]
Good link: so was I. That court ruling states that domains names are intellectual property, not real property. The relevant difference here is that ICANN's rules forbid squatting, whereas squatting on real property is well-protected by the law.
As for the trademark thing, do not misunderstand what a registered trademark means. Trademarks are obtained and maintained by showing that you have been legitimately using that mark for some time. Just because you didn't officially apply for the trademark until after someone registered the domain, or that it wasn't granted until after the registration, does not in any way dilute the value of the trademark so it should not impact that URDP resolution. If the holder of the domain is squatting, then a real trademark should trump that every time.
If you want to direct your frustration at anyone
What frustration? I was asking a question about how the new process would handle squatters. It is a big deal for small businesses but I don't think the new rules will help them much.
I question this concept. Part of the issue is in how you define a mediocre programmer.
Suppose you train them in all the things you listed, and they grasp them all and can do them, then how is the programmer mediocre? Sounds like a top notch programmer to me! In my experience, the mediocre programmer is the person you train on these things and they just don't get it. Worse yet is that they think that they understand it - but then they go to do it they put things into the wrong layer, or didn't realize they could have used standard pattern X here, or thought they wrote good documentation but it is not helpful when you go back to it. Perhaps they wrote a unit test but it didn't cover the things it should. Or maybe it even reached 100% code coverage but still didn't test all the possible scenarios.
Try to use process to manage *that* person. Even worse, they may be getting top marks in their reviews because they are following all the steps while your most talented programmer who writes bug-free code is being passed over for raises.
That's not squatting.
What isn't squatting?
Similar to real estate, domain names are property and operate under the concept of capitalism.
Domain names are IP not RP. Economically speaking, it is very different from real estate. Real estate is finite, expensive, and owned permanently unless transferred. Domain names are infinite, cheap, and are only available for rent.
It seems like almost every English dictionary word is registered as a domain right now. Any domain that expires is immediately snatched up by squatters. This is an unfortunate problem.
And even if you applied for a trademark after the fact, (theoretically) it holds no water in the UDRP process.
The UDRP process is almost exclusively based on trademarks. While I'm not aware of any specific cases, it seems unlikely that a trademark holder would be denied the right to a domain against a squatter who had no trademark at all.
I think corporations are reasonably well protected already. But what about the average person who just wants to register a domain that is taken by a squatter, without having to go through the time and expense of obtaining a trademark?
You can't switch to being a premium channel based on the promise that once you do so, you will offer good content. You need to offer good content, get people hooked, then go premium. As-is, I have no faith that any new series produced by SyFy would be decent. Their "original movies" are horrible with bad writing and cheap special effects. Once they offer something serious, then they could try to go premium. If they really want to do this, they need to go with a new name so that people don't associate it with SyFy.
I think your assumption about "The Slashdot audience" is wrong since Slashdot readers are notoriously anti-TV and very internet savvy. In addition, making basic channels into a premium channel is driving customers away from cable television. When I had Comcast, every other month I got a notice that some channel was being moved to the next level of service. I think I had 70 channels and it 60 of them were showing one show 12 hours a day. I had all day cooking, all day gardening, all day house hunters, all day America's Funniest Home Videos, all day Ghost Hunter, all day Spongebob, etc.
Looks like that thread was started by one of the new Sony troll accounts. Take a look at Kayla:
OtherOS since it gives you full access to the machine, no more being tied down by Sony.
How the @#$@ are we tied down by Sony?
The account was registered just when PSN went down and they have posted nothing other than posts defending Sony. No other posts, no PS3 gamer tag. I bet there are others, but this one is the most obvious.
I didn't miss that part. It is just an oversimplification and I didn't have time to explain it all. So let me clarify...
Suppose we have the following game pipeline:
1. Gather input from devices and update the game state.
2. Render based on that input and send it to the display.
We have 2 CPU cores each dedicated to one step in the pipeline. In the above example, the lag is 2 frames. Suppose the game runs at 30fps, so that is 2/30th of a second or 0.067 seconds. So the reader says "aha! We should run at 60fps and cut the lag in half!" The problem with that is the console can't keep up with 60 fps. If the console hardware was fast enough to run at 60fps, then the console would have done this:
1. Gather input from devices and update the state variables based on time and user input and render based on that input and send it to the display.
Which results in 1/60 of a second lag. We cut the lag in half, without increasing the frame rate of the display. We can't cut it any further, but 1 frame of lag is usually not a problem. Gamers start complaining when you get 2, 4, and 8 frames of lag. That's ridiculous.
Since the console was not powerful enough to do it all in one step, it took advantage of multiple CPU cores and traded latency for frame rate. This is an inevitable consequence of us not being able to manufacture faster CPUs, and instead manufacturing multiple parallel CPUs instead.
So since the above scenario isn't possible, what does the console do? Well, it could run the game at 30fps anyway, gaining nothing. Or it could add another 2 cores, and run a modified pipeline like this:
1. Get input
2. Update the state variables based on time and user input.
3. Render based on that input.
4. Send that rendering to the display (buffer swap).
Aha! Now they are using parallel processing and can render at 60fps! But the lag is now 4 frames, or 4/60 of a second which is no better.
So ultimately, frame rate is limited by CPU speed first and video frame rate second. Mandating that displays have higher frame rates won't do anything until the CPUs are fast enough to keep up. That won't happen until game console manufacturers and game developers see the need to do so. In the mean time, there are other sources of latency that aren't discussed in this post that are more important targets. Demand LCD panels that don't introduce extra latency. And don't use video upscalers that insert more lag. Don't use digital receivers that add another 30ms of lag or video-based motion capture that runs at even lower rates. Once you eliminate those kinds of things, then you can focus on video refresh rate.
The first article in the summary has some silly ideas on how to fix this:
What can we do reverse the onslaught of latency in all its forms? ... First off, we can make LCD (or future OLED/QLED) monitors run at 120 or even 240 frames per second.
What?!?! 1) That is not possible and 2) That would not help. There are so many reasons for this I can't even list them all.
First, there isn't an LCD panel in existence that actually responds that fast. Those phony 240 hz screens don't actually change the pixels 240 times per second. We don't need faster displays to solve a software problem.
If the software provided a 1/60 second delay, that would be just fine. The issue is that we are not taking advantage of the refresh rates we have no - so increasing those rates doesn't help. Heck -- that's probably faster than the debouncing circuits in the controller!
Compensating for a longer pipeline by increasing clock speed doesn't help anyway, because to get the higher rate you need to increase the pipeline more...
Anyone.... what? What are you trying to say?
Were you implying that Java or Visual Studio 2010 are sources of lag? You mentioned bufferbloat, a problem with video games, and a problem with Ubuntu. None of those involve Java or Visual Studio 2010 - although someone could edit or build code in those but the products don't add latency. So I don't think that is not what you meant.
Perhaps you personally experienced lag when using those applications. But Java isn't really an application, and nothing in Java intrinsically buffers things so I'm lost there. I assume VS2010 is slower than previous versions, and it uses WPF so that would be likely, but that still doesn't tie it to latency.
Could you reply and clarify what you meant? Or was this inserted by a Slashdot editor?
The problem is that AT&T is a regulated monopoly. If the only companies that offer the service are monopolies, and they all force you to sign a contract that denies your right to sue, then the government has effectively taken away your right to sue. They just did it indirectly. Ex: There are two phone carriers that operate in my area: AT&T and Verizon. If both of them have contracts that deny my right to sue, then my only option is to forego service. That isn't reasonable.
Maybe DD-WRT or OpenWRT support this?
The feature may have been reasonably sane, but the outcry was justified. Apple didn't tell anyone it was there, kept it way longer than necessary, and was not clear about what it was used for. Had they been clear from the beginning it would not be an issue. But their response now is quite sensible.
The purpose of the encryption is to prevent a rogue app from mining that data.
1) So no one should encrypt private information if it is only kept on the device itself? So no need to encrypt your bank account files or password lists? No need to lock the doors to your house either.
2) This will not affect the battery life. Encryption is not that heavy.
has even experimented with injecting their own advertising into sites like Google
This is the most blatant example of why we need network neutrality. Telecom companies cannot inject ads into voice conversations. Shipping companies cannot modify parcels in transit. But somehow we think it is okay to modify a digital transmission in transport? And this is somehow controversial...?
I hope they actually implement this just so I get to see Google sue them when their advertisements don't get displayed. Then I can't wait until someone who has MediaCom as their ISP does a search for information about the lawsuit, and mysteriously gets no results....
...but its your phone so where is the problem.
ding! ding! THAT is the problem.
It isn't my phone. Not according to the 50+ page EULA I agree to every time I install a 0.99 cent piece of software. Not according to AT&T who hides a fee in my service plan to cover the cost of the subsidy since I didn't pay full price for it. If it was my phone, then I could open it up, remove the SD card, insert it into my computer, delete the file, and modify the directory permissions so that the file could never be created again.
I can't do any of those things, and I probably agreed to a license that says I won't try them, won't reverse engineer it, and won't badmouth the company that did it. So... whose phone is it?
I agree with you to some degree: it is in my pocket and as long as the phone doesn't send the file to anyone it doesn't matter. But the file shouldn't be there in the first place, and Apple is acting very fishy so clearly something more is happening. We need to remain vigilant against this stuff.
My fear is that Comcast will see Netflix as a competitor and that a large number of Netflix customers go through Comcast for their broadband. Comcast has the lobbying power so I expect Comcast to start doing every dirty deed they can to make Netflix harder for customers to access.
In the mean time, Comcast is reducing the number of stations available. They keep moving stations from basic cable to digital cable to digital premium, etc. Then they try to sell you up to the next level of service.