Yes, but that was part of the nonsense. Shaping specific traffic doesn't work well and is rarely used outside the "enterprise", let alone used abusively.

I don't know what problem the lobbying-twisted FCC's rules attempts to solve either. I know what problem net neutrality was supposed to solve.

In short, monolithic providers like Verizon double-bill. They bill you for your packets and then they bill the person you're communicating with for your packets too. It's not like the mail where only one side pays. Both sides have to pay or neither gets served. Naturally, the side who pays more gets to define the nature and shape of the service both side get. As the end-user consumer, that isn't you.

There is an exception: Verizon is part of a cartel of about 20 Internet providers who trade traffic without charging each other. If as a Verizon customer you want to talk to someone buying service from elsewhere in the cartel, Verizon will only charge you. This process is called "peering."

Like the rest of the cartel, Verizon engages in "closed" peering. This means that small businesses and anyone Verizon can bully is excluded and must bend to the double-billing. Here's where net neutrality was supposed to act: by requiring "open" peering where Verizon would trade packets with anyone once *one* of their customers had paid them to do so. No more double-billing.

China knows they can convert their exports into assembly kits and transship them anywhere in the world for assembly, attachment of a "made in somewhere else" label and subsequent export to the United States. We can't do that because we make _branded_ products and everybody knows which brands are American.

It wouldn't be science fiction if it wasn't doing something science can't (yet) do. But there's a plausibility to science fiction, without which it's just fantasy.

In the Tron universe, everything is normal except for super-capable computers and a magic digitizing laser. The moment you break those rules, impose the simulation on the outside universe, you destroy the suspension of disbelief. It's just bad storytelling.

Thanks for reminding me about another reason I disliked Legacy.

Light cycle's wall trail slicing a police car in half?

The light cycles existed and worked the way they did because it was an arcade game Flynn wrote.

"Not disintegrating, Alan -- digitizing. While the laser is dismantling the molecular structure of the object, the computer maps out a holographic model of it. The molecules themselves are suspended in the laser beam."

Flynn in the electronic world was the "holographic model," not the physical molecules.

The Ares trailer exhibits a Michael Bay level of loyalty to the canon: all hat and no cattle.

I was disappointed by the visuals in Legacy. The world inside a computer is _supposed_ to be all hard edges, as the original movie depicted. And the plot was just weak. And now Ares appears to be saying that well, the real world is just a simulation so we can project the Legacy computer world into it and break all the laws of physics. How hackneyed.

My prediction is that what we end up calling quantum computers will be incapable of running Shor's Algorithm. Like a real computer is different from a Turing Machine, real quantum computers will differ from the theoretical. But in this case, I predict they differ significantly enough to render Shor's Algorithm unusable.

The first demonstration of Shor's Algorithm running at scale will prove me wrong. It hasn't happened yet.

My prediction is that quantum computers, if they ever become useful, will be so different from what we expect them to be as to render all theories about their capabilities false. They won't break encryption or factor primes in polynomial time. Indeed, I predict the most useful outcome of quantum computers will be the discovery of errors in quantum theory, and the resulting reformulation of quantum physics theory to resolve those errors.

Everyone who wants to publish in China works hand in glove with the Chinese government. Unlike so many others, Facebook ultimately concluded that they couldn't meet the government's requirements without compromising their product and abandoned the effort.

Not quite. The argument was:

Musk has a pattern of doing things because of X. Instant action Y exhibits characteristics similar to those prior things. Therefore, absent good cause to believe otherwise he did Y because of X in this case too.

Okay, but get the contraposition right first. The contrapositve of "without verification" is "absent contradiction."

Does someone else's history of telling the truth mean that everything they say should be accepted as truth _absent contradiction_?

Yes. Yes, it does.

The whole point of fail fast is that not only don't they spend effort imagining failure modes, they don't hire the sorts of people who would delay the design pondering such things. It's rush rush rush and the testing will tell us where the problems are. Until it doesn't.