It would be a free market for ISPs, just not a free market on wire providers (which, as I said, is impossible). In an ideal world, the government would demand that companies that own fiber sell the existing fiber to local governments at cost (eminent domain), but I have no confidence that such a policy would ever pass. The ability to keep the fiber and charge 10% over maintenance cost to slowly recover their expenses is at best a poor compromise, but it's what I think might actually be possible. But at least it would create a free market for the actual Internet service providers, even if the fixed baseline wire service portion of the cost would be slightly higher in areas that chose to not lay down a redundant fiber service.
My views are correct according to the Oxford English Dictionary and many others, and are also consistent with the way that the words are commonly used, both by civilians and by doctors, at least in the United States (and, I suspect, elsewhere). Language changes, and old definitions become wrong. It happens.
FYI, dermatological treatment is still considered "in vivo". So no, ignoring the sloppiness of my use of the word "consumed", my definition is not wrong in any meaningful sense, nor is my example; if you put pure chlorine bleach on your skin, you'll get severe chemical burns. Chlorine bleach cannot be used in vivo in any form. Hence, it is not medicine, hence it is not an antibiotic, but it is still antibacterial.
In short, you're wrong, period. This isn't a grey area. You are objectively wrong about the commonly accepted meaning of these words.
There is almost precisely the same amount of competition in the POTS/Voice-Over-Cable business as in the ISP business. (And yes, you really have to count voice-over-cable, as it replaces POTS for a high percentage of customers.) And the reason there is the same amount of competition (very little) is that it takes decades to recover the infrastructure cost, which means any incumbent (which has already paid for most of those costs) can easily undercut any new competitor until they go out of business, buy the upgraded infrastructure in a fire sale for pennies on the dollar, and then raise prices back up to higher than they were before the competition entered the market to make up the loss.
It is fundamentally infeasible to have any real competition in wire-line providers, and the only reason we even (sometimes) have two options is that cable TV and telephone were originally not competing with one another. Otherwise, we would have only one.
The agreed upon definition by pretty much everyone other than the ISPs is that net neutrality means making a reasonable best effort to never prioritize traffic based on its eventual destination out on the Internet. The speed of the traffic should be roughly the lesser of the speed that either end is paying for, and should not be throttled by ISP A because ISP B's customer isn't paying them out-of-band for access to ISP A's users, and should not be throttled by ISP B because ISP A's users aren't paying them extra money for access to ISP B's content providers. This definition is simple, straightforward, and achieves all of the goals of net neutrality advocates.
More importantly, this definition necessarily includes both explicit prioritization (through traffic shaping that penalizes a particular destination, such as Netflix) and de facto prioritization (through not buying enough bandwidth to Netflix's ISP, thus providing inadequate service for Netflix users, but conveniently having your own video-on-demand service that's inside your network, and thus unaffected by the inadequate outbound bandwidth).
All other definitions are deliberately flawed in ways that would harm consumers, and are straw men put forth by the ISP industry in a very deliberate and malicious effort to confuse users and government officials about what net neutrality is, thus making it easier to later convince them that net neutrality is somehow harmful to consumers.
The last time there was an actual free market on Internet Service was when you could connect to it with a 56k modem over your telephone line.
Want to have a free market again? Pass a federal law that overturns all state laws banning municipal broadband projects and creates an unfunded mandate requiring each state to run government-owned fiber to every home and business, freely leasing fiber access to any ISP that wants it. Provide an optional exemption for areas that already have commercial fiber if the existing commercial fiber providers agree to lease access to anyone who asks for no more than 10% above the actual average maintenance cost of the fiber.
Expecting a free market when the barrier to entry is so high (20–30 years to recoup your investment in fiber even if there are only two companies in a market) is naïve. There can only be one wire provider, realistically, unless you're in a major city with high population density. If that provider is not the government, there will almost never be competition.
They're wrong. Antibiotics are, according to the generally accepted definition, medicine. By definition, medicine is something that, when consumed, cures some illness. If you cannot consume it to kill bacteria in vivo, then it is not an antibiotic.
For example, chlorine bleach is an antibacterial agent. It is not an antibiotic. (If you drink it, you will die, but the bacteria will not.)
In fact, in the modern use of the terms, their answer is exactly backwards. Antibiotics are generally considered to be a subset of antibacterial agents. When we talk about substances that kill other microorganisms, we call them antifungals or antiparasitics, not antibiotics. We commonly say things like "antibiotics will make a yeast infection worse", which would be blatantly untrue if you included antifungals under antibiotics. I don't think I have ever (in my lifetime) heard someone call an antifungal or antiparasitic agent an antibiotic. It just isn't done. They're entirely different classes of medication that should not be confused (because doing so could be a life-threatening mistake).
And people don't typically use the word antibacterial when we talk about antibiotics because that term is too overloaded by other things that aren't medicinal. See also: bleach.
Very simple. Because the content provider is not that ISP's customer.
Allowing paid prioritization is essentially holding the entire Internet hostage in exchange for access to your end users. It isn't like taxing the fast lane for a car, but rather like taxing customers of UPS if they want their packages to not be thrown out of UPS trucks as soon as they enter the fast lane.
If an ISP wants to negotiate a better peering deal with Netflix's provider, that's fine. If that eventually results in Netflix's provider charging them higher Internet service fees, that's fine.
What's not fine is the ISP deciding that they can't negotiate a proper peering agreement, so they're going to start negotiating with other ISPs' customers directly. That fundamentally breaks the entire way that the Internet works, all as part of a greedy money grab that wouldn't even matter if the ISP were buying enough bandwidth for its needs in the first place.
It has to automatically update your web server configuration files because the maximum certificate validity period is too d**n short to manually update your server. (That was a show-stopper for me. I don't trust anybody modifying my insanely complex Apache config files, after several tools barfed horribly over the years.)
As a result of that flawed design decision, they also made the design decision to cut corners and run it as root by default. That was also a show-stopper for me, and should be for anyone who is serious about security.
The default behavior is fundamentally incompatible with key pinning (a recommended security practice) because it generates a new key every time it generates a new cert.
The security horrors get deeper and deeper the further you dig, hence the reason I steered clear of it for years. But when the last free TLS cert provider other than LetsEncrypt got the axe (StartSSL), I finally concluded that I'd just have to close my eyes and think of England.
I ended up creating a cron job that runs a pile of custom code wrapped around their manual updater (which bizarrely doesn't tell you the name of the cert file it just created—ick). It then updates a small crypto config file that gets imported from all the various parts of my main Apache config files. Nine months later, I'm still fixing integration issues, mostly stemming from permissions problems.
By contrast, I used StartSSL (one of the registrars that is getting the axe here) for half a decade with no real problems. It was easy. Once a year,
I requested a new cert. Five minutes later, I was done. It worked much better than LetsEncrypt, from my perspective.
I'm not saying the card receives super secret data, I'm saying it contains super secret data (put there when the card was issued), such as account specific keys and account information that cannot be read from the card without destroying it.
But that is completely irrelevant to the attack that I described, because it doesn't involve cloning the card, but rather relaying the transaction request to the actual, physically-present card in some other card reader somewhere else in the world (or, ideally, somewhere else in the local area).
Modern cards generate a cryptogram from several pieces of data, some of which the reader does not have access to, and some of which is unique to the transaction.
I'm fairly certain that what you're describing is fundamentally impossible. The card cannot get access to data that does not pass through the reader in some form, and if the data passes through the reader, it can be relayed to another reader and sent to a different card unmodified.
The relay attack I'm talking about is this:
Attacker compromises a bunch of random card readers at various stores.
Attacker gets a blank card and assigns a random set of keys.
Attacker reprograms the card readers to send a known, fake transaction to each card first, and if the response matches, it recognizes that it is the attacker's card.
Attacker carries the card and uses it at a compromised store.
The reader at that store recognizes the card and relays the request to another reader, which processes the transaction with a different card.
The reader also randomly sends a certain percentage of requests from other cards to another reader at random, to mask the attacker's identity.
I'm fairly certain that there's no type of crypto that could protect against such an attack one the current card design. There's really only one way to guarantee that a transaction is legit, and that is to put a screen on the card itself that shows what vendor requested the transaction and a button on the card to approve it. As long as the device that approves the transaction is connected to the Internet and is not under the direct control of the user, transactions cannot truly be secure against a compromised payment terminal.
No, not at all less likely. How many users know how many seconds it takes to perform a transaction? And what, precisely, prevents it from executing more than one simultaneously, on behalf of another card reader somewhere else?
Google and Facebook support net neutrality because it benefits Google and Facebook.
Not true. Quite the opposite, in fact. Google and Facebook, like Netflix, are big enough that they can throw their considerable weight around (or, failing that, throw money at the problem) to get favorable access to last-mile access providers with minimal effort. No ISP (at least in the U.S.) would be crazy enough to significantly throttle any of them at this point, because their users would march with pitchforks.
If anything, net neutrality is actually slightly contrary to the financial interests of big companies like Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc., because net neutrality makes it easier for smaller content providers to get the same treatment as the big boys, and thus encourages competition.
No, Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc. support net neutrality because their employees overwhelmingly support net neutrality. If you try to read anything else into it, you'll be wrong.
No, seriously. Qualcomm's position is that every step in the production chain that includes their IP/hardware needs to be individually licensed. Because company X makes a board that includes Qualcomm's IP, and then sells that board to company Y who makes a phone from it and sells said phone, then both X and Y need to be licensed.
How is this not an open-and-shut case of patent exhaustion?
Netflix basically cut out almost all of their movie catalog and focuses predominantly on TV shows a couple of years ago. Why, you might ask? They ran the numbers and found that the overwhelming majority of their users preferred to watch episode after episode of a TV show.
Finding good movies is way too much work; I just want to be entertained and have a reasonable probability of enjoying what I'm about to watch. With a series, chances are, if you liked the last ten episodes, you'll like the next ten. With movies, there's (usually) no continuity, so you're basically just guessing based on the title and a short blurb written by people specifically trying to make the movie sound good. Thus, you have a decent chance of getting ten minutes in and asking, "Why am I even watching this?"
So assuming that the percentage of TV shows that appeal to a given person is similar to the percentage of movies that appeal to that person (which makes sense because mostly the same companies make them), then you have a choice between spending 10 minutes to watch the first part of a movie and decide if it is crap, knowing that you'll get 2 hours of enjoyment if it is good, or spend that same 10 minutes to watch the first part of the first episode of a series, knowing that you'll get 100 hours of enjoyment if it is good. It just doesn't make sense to watch movies when you look at the risk-reward unless the overwhelming majority of movies are really, really good... which they aren't.
That definitely matches my viewing habits, but if that reasoning doesn't fit your particular viewing habits—if you have a strong preference for movies—then the full HBO is probably a closer match for you. Either way, if you prefer movies, then you're statistically an outlier. HBO is leaving a lot of money on the table by forcing people to take a giant catalog of movies that the vast majority of people apparently don't want, as a precondition for getting the small chunk of original content that they do want.
I seriously doubt doing updates to the phones is a problem at all, I'll bet they push updates all the time. Satellites are routinely updated and I'm guessing is not a serious problem.
Why would you need to update the satellite? Typically, a satellite just relays traffic between a ground station and a particular device. It shouldn't need to understand the traffic, so all the encryption should be handled by the ground station on the other end of the satellite hop.
I tend to base my purchasing decisions on perceived value. Netflix gives me a huge catalog of movies and TV shows from dozens of companies, including itself, for nine bucks a month. This is almost double that for programming from a single company plus movies that probably mostly overlap with what I already get from Netflix.
The value proposition just isn't there. There are a couple of shows that I'd love to watch, but at those prices, I'll wait for them to all be cancelled, buy one month of service, binge watch them all, and cancel. If they offered their original programming by itself for three or four bucks a month, I'd be tempted to get the service on an ongoing basis and not bother. Thus, at least from my perspective, HBO is badly missing the sweet spot for subscription revenue, assuming they care about actually attracting any of the huge percentage of Internet users who already have an Amazon Prime or Netflix subscription.
Give us a $3-ish per month option that only covers HBO original programming, and you'll attract a lot more customers. Then run upsell promos on the home page for non-original content that they could be getting if they paid for the full service.
As an example: Netflix no longer displays a category for anime on my account because it has decided I don't like anime. Simply not true! I want that category back!
There's a page that lets you manually override those assumptions and specify your interest in particular categories and subcategories, though I think you have to do that via the website.
Okay, my bad. The commercial variety apparently do use plastic for the backs (and a plastic-based bonding agent, but then again, so does most window glass these days; that's kind of lost in the noise).
Either way, the comparison to wires is silly, because it would take as much effort to burn off the plastic back as to heat and separate it intact.
There's some evidence that it plays a role in preventing insulin resistance. Studies are, however, somewhat confounded by the near impossibility of not getting enough of it in your diet.
Everything about this is baffling. What makes them think solar panels contain even trace amounts of plastic apart from the wiring (which you wouldn't replace when you replace the panels)?
AFAIK, all real-world solar panels are basically doped silicon covered with glass. The plastic-coated solar cells are exclusively used in cheap solar calculators and maybe the rolled panels they use on satellites. Plastic-covered panels likely wouldn't survive a year in direct sunlight, and that's not even considering the efficiency losses from rain pock-marking the surface.
This is basically the scientific version of "fake news".
Slashdot Mirror
It would be a free market for ISPs, just not a free market on wire providers (which, as I said, is impossible). In an ideal world, the government would demand that companies that own fiber sell the existing fiber to local governments at cost (eminent domain), but I have no confidence that such a policy would ever pass. The ability to keep the fiber and charge 10% over maintenance cost to slowly recover their expenses is at best a poor compromise, but it's what I think might actually be possible. But at least it would create a free market for the actual Internet service providers, even if the fixed baseline wire service portion of the cost would be slightly higher in areas that chose to not lay down a redundant fiber service.
My views are correct according to the Oxford English Dictionary and many others, and are also consistent with the way that the words are commonly used, both by civilians and by doctors, at least in the United States (and, I suspect, elsewhere). Language changes, and old definitions become wrong. It happens.
FYI, dermatological treatment is still considered "in vivo". So no, ignoring the sloppiness of my use of the word "consumed", my definition is not wrong in any meaningful sense, nor is my example; if you put pure chlorine bleach on your skin, you'll get severe chemical burns. Chlorine bleach cannot be used in vivo in any form. Hence, it is not medicine, hence it is not an antibiotic, but it is still antibacterial.
In short, you're wrong, period. This isn't a grey area. You are objectively wrong about the commonly accepted meaning of these words.
There is almost precisely the same amount of competition in the POTS/Voice-Over-Cable business as in the ISP business. (And yes, you really have to count voice-over-cable, as it replaces POTS for a high percentage of customers.) And the reason there is the same amount of competition (very little) is that it takes decades to recover the infrastructure cost, which means any incumbent (which has already paid for most of those costs) can easily undercut any new competitor until they go out of business, buy the upgraded infrastructure in a fire sale for pennies on the dollar, and then raise prices back up to higher than they were before the competition entered the market to make up the loss.
It is fundamentally infeasible to have any real competition in wire-line providers, and the only reason we even (sometimes) have two options is that cable TV and telephone were originally not competing with one another. Otherwise, we would have only one.
The agreed upon definition by pretty much everyone other than the ISPs is that net neutrality means making a reasonable best effort to never prioritize traffic based on its eventual destination out on the Internet. The speed of the traffic should be roughly the lesser of the speed that either end is paying for, and should not be throttled by ISP A because ISP B's customer isn't paying them out-of-band for access to ISP A's users, and should not be throttled by ISP B because ISP A's users aren't paying them extra money for access to ISP B's content providers. This definition is simple, straightforward, and achieves all of the goals of net neutrality advocates.
More importantly, this definition necessarily includes both explicit prioritization (through traffic shaping that penalizes a particular destination, such as Netflix) and de facto prioritization (through not buying enough bandwidth to Netflix's ISP, thus providing inadequate service for Netflix users, but conveniently having your own video-on-demand service that's inside your network, and thus unaffected by the inadequate outbound bandwidth).
All other definitions are deliberately flawed in ways that would harm consumers, and are straw men put forth by the ISP industry in a very deliberate and malicious effort to confuse users and government officials about what net neutrality is, thus making it easier to later convince them that net neutrality is somehow harmful to consumers.
The last time there was an actual free market on Internet Service was when you could connect to it with a 56k modem over your telephone line.
Want to have a free market again? Pass a federal law that overturns all state laws banning municipal broadband projects and creates an unfunded mandate requiring each state to run government-owned fiber to every home and business, freely leasing fiber access to any ISP that wants it. Provide an optional exemption for areas that already have commercial fiber if the existing commercial fiber providers agree to lease access to anyone who asks for no more than 10% above the actual average maintenance cost of the fiber.
Expecting a free market when the barrier to entry is so high (20–30 years to recoup your investment in fiber even if there are only two companies in a market) is naïve. There can only be one wire provider, realistically, unless you're in a major city with high population density. If that provider is not the government, there will almost never be competition.
They're wrong. Antibiotics are, according to the generally accepted definition, medicine. By definition, medicine is something that, when consumed, cures some illness. If you cannot consume it to kill bacteria in vivo, then it is not an antibiotic.
For example, chlorine bleach is an antibacterial agent. It is not an antibiotic. (If you drink it, you will die, but the bacteria will not.)
In fact, in the modern use of the terms, their answer is exactly backwards. Antibiotics are generally considered to be a subset of antibacterial agents. When we talk about substances that kill other microorganisms, we call them antifungals or antiparasitics, not antibiotics. We commonly say things like "antibiotics will make a yeast infection worse", which would be blatantly untrue if you included antifungals under antibiotics. I don't think I have ever (in my lifetime) heard someone call an antifungal or antiparasitic agent an antibiotic. It just isn't done. They're entirely different classes of medication that should not be confused (because doing so could be a life-threatening mistake).
And people don't typically use the word antibacterial when we talk about antibiotics because that term is too overloaded by other things that aren't medicinal. See also: bleach.
Very simple. Because the content provider is not that ISP's customer.
Allowing paid prioritization is essentially holding the entire Internet hostage in exchange for access to your end users. It isn't like taxing the fast lane for a car, but rather like taxing customers of UPS if they want their packages to not be thrown out of UPS trucks as soon as they enter the fast lane.
If an ISP wants to negotiate a better peering deal with Netflix's provider, that's fine. If that eventually results in Netflix's provider charging them higher Internet service fees, that's fine.
What's not fine is the ISP deciding that they can't negotiate a proper peering agreement, so they're going to start negotiating with other ISPs' customers directly. That fundamentally breaks the entire way that the Internet works, all as part of a greedy money grab that wouldn't even matter if the ISP were buying enough bandwidth for its needs in the first place.
If your plumber is doing that in your kitchen sink, you have much bigger problems than what the plumber calls the pipe.
Actually, certbot is the nightmare I was referring to.
I use Let's Encrypt, too. HATE it.
The security horrors get deeper and deeper the further you dig, hence the reason I steered clear of it for years. But when the last free TLS cert provider other than LetsEncrypt got the axe (StartSSL), I finally concluded that I'd just have to close my eyes and think of England.
I ended up creating a cron job that runs a pile of custom code wrapped around their manual updater (which bizarrely doesn't tell you the name of the cert file it just created—ick). It then updates a small crypto config file that gets imported from all the various parts of my main Apache config files. Nine months later, I'm still fixing integration issues, mostly stemming from permissions problems.
By contrast, I used StartSSL (one of the registrars that is getting the axe here) for half a decade with no real problems. It was easy. Once a year, I requested a new cert. Five minutes later, I was done. It worked much better than LetsEncrypt, from my perspective.
But that is completely irrelevant to the attack that I described, because it doesn't involve cloning the card, but rather relaying the transaction request to the actual, physically-present card in some other card reader somewhere else in the world (or, ideally, somewhere else in the local area).
I'm fairly certain that what you're describing is fundamentally impossible. The card cannot get access to data that does not pass through the reader in some form, and if the data passes through the reader, it can be relayed to another reader and sent to a different card unmodified.
The relay attack I'm talking about is this:
I'm fairly certain that there's no type of crypto that could protect against such an attack one the current card design. There's really only one way to guarantee that a transaction is legit, and that is to put a screen on the card itself that shows what vendor requested the transaction and a button on the card to approve it. As long as the device that approves the transaction is connected to the Internet and is not under the direct control of the user, transactions cannot truly be secure against a compromised payment terminal.
No, not at all less likely. How many users know how many seconds it takes to perform a transaction? And what, precisely, prevents it from executing more than one simultaneously, on behalf of another card reader somewhere else?
Not true. Quite the opposite, in fact. Google and Facebook, like Netflix, are big enough that they can throw their considerable weight around (or, failing that, throw money at the problem) to get favorable access to last-mile access providers with minimal effort. No ISP (at least in the U.S.) would be crazy enough to significantly throttle any of them at this point, because their users would march with pitchforks.
If anything, net neutrality is actually slightly contrary to the financial interests of big companies like Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc., because net neutrality makes it easier for smaller content providers to get the same treatment as the big boys, and thus encourages competition.
No, Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc. support net neutrality because their employees overwhelmingly support net neutrality. If you try to read anything else into it, you'll be wrong.
How is this not an open-and-shut case of patent exhaustion?
Netflix basically cut out almost all of their movie catalog and focuses predominantly on TV shows a couple of years ago. Why, you might ask? They ran the numbers and found that the overwhelming majority of their users preferred to watch episode after episode of a TV show.
Finding good movies is way too much work; I just want to be entertained and have a reasonable probability of enjoying what I'm about to watch. With a series, chances are, if you liked the last ten episodes, you'll like the next ten. With movies, there's (usually) no continuity, so you're basically just guessing based on the title and a short blurb written by people specifically trying to make the movie sound good. Thus, you have a decent chance of getting ten minutes in and asking, "Why am I even watching this?"
So assuming that the percentage of TV shows that appeal to a given person is similar to the percentage of movies that appeal to that person (which makes sense because mostly the same companies make them), then you have a choice between spending 10 minutes to watch the first part of a movie and decide if it is crap, knowing that you'll get 2 hours of enjoyment if it is good, or spend that same 10 minutes to watch the first part of the first episode of a series, knowing that you'll get 100 hours of enjoyment if it is good. It just doesn't make sense to watch movies when you look at the risk-reward unless the overwhelming majority of movies are really, really good... which they aren't.
That definitely matches my viewing habits, but if that reasoning doesn't fit your particular viewing habits—if you have a strong preference for movies—then the full HBO is probably a closer match for you. Either way, if you prefer movies, then you're statistically an outlier. HBO is leaving a lot of money on the table by forcing people to take a giant catalog of movies that the vast majority of people apparently don't want, as a precondition for getting the small chunk of original content that they do want.
Why would you need to update the satellite? Typically, a satellite just relays traffic between a ground station and a particular device. It shouldn't need to understand the traffic, so all the encryption should be handled by the ground station on the other end of the satellite hop.
I tend to base my purchasing decisions on perceived value. Netflix gives me a huge catalog of movies and TV shows from dozens of companies, including itself, for nine bucks a month. This is almost double that for programming from a single company plus movies that probably mostly overlap with what I already get from Netflix.
The value proposition just isn't there. There are a couple of shows that I'd love to watch, but at those prices, I'll wait for them to all be cancelled, buy one month of service, binge watch them all, and cancel. If they offered their original programming by itself for three or four bucks a month, I'd be tempted to get the service on an ongoing basis and not bother. Thus, at least from my perspective, HBO is badly missing the sweet spot for subscription revenue, assuming they care about actually attracting any of the huge percentage of Internet users who already have an Amazon Prime or Netflix subscription.
Give us a $3-ish per month option that only covers HBO original programming, and you'll attract a lot more customers. Then run upsell promos on the home page for non-original content that they could be getting if they paid for the full service.
There's a page that lets you manually override those assumptions and specify your interest in particular categories and subcategories, though I think you have to do that via the website.
Okay, my bad. The commercial variety apparently do use plastic for the backs (and a plastic-based bonding agent, but then again, so does most window glass these days; that's kind of lost in the noise).
Either way, the comparison to wires is silly, because it would take as much effort to burn off the plastic back as to heat and separate it intact.
There's some evidence that it plays a role in preventing insulin resistance. Studies are, however, somewhat confounded by the near impossibility of not getting enough of it in your diet.
Everything about this is baffling. What makes them think solar panels contain even trace amounts of plastic apart from the wiring (which you wouldn't replace when you replace the panels)?
AFAIK, all real-world solar panels are basically doped silicon covered with glass. The plastic-coated solar cells are exclusively used in cheap solar calculators and maybe the rolled panels they use on satellites. Plastic-covered panels likely wouldn't survive a year in direct sunlight, and that's not even considering the efficiency losses from rain pock-marking the surface.
This is basically the scientific version of "fake news".
For many of us, the weekend is the time when we do all the non-job work that we couldn't get done during the week—laundry, home repairs, personal projects, correcting people on the Internet, etc.
Chromium != hexavalent chromium. Chromium 3 is a required mineral. Chromium 6 causes stomach cancer even in fairly small quantities.
Yeah, but it's that or up to 23 ppb of hexavalent chromium from the local groundwater. Yay, industrial pollution.