In this case, it is my understanding that the patents are not for 'rectangular devices possessing a touchscreen on the front'; but for certain software features.
I have to wonder why Samsung doesn't flip the disable bit on the features Apple is suing about(for extra credit, in some manner that allows firmware modders to oh-so-deviously flip it back, if they want) so that they can start moving units without having to clear up any legal issues, and then push a firmware update once the legal wrangling is sorted out...
You can't do that with hardware-related patents, obviously; but I would think that the financial impact of an injunction that keeps you from shipping on time(especially given the percentage of the US phone market dictated largely by what phones carriers feel like flogging today, and the carriers' distinct dislike for delay: see also Microsoft Kin's horrible death) would be overwhelmingly greater than the financial impact of having to ship without a few bullet points for whatever crap skin you are slapping on top of your Android build, especially if you can turn those back on with an update once the lawyers clear.
Given that it was produced by BAE Systems, a company noted largely for their defense contract work(and, since their acquisition of Marconi, this includes extensive defense electronics and RF stuff), I strongly suspect that the punchline of this work (while they probably won't say no to sufficiently lucrative commercial licensing offers) is having a product offering that provides some degree of reliability for location-dependent military hardware and munitions even if GPS is jammed, knocked out, disabled by the Americans, etc.
For civilian applications, GPS(if necessary supplemented by cell tower data or Skyhook-style wifi information), depending on how far you are from civilization, works pretty well already. However, GPS signals are necessarily pretty faint and widely recognized as being of considerable strategic value. I assume that the GPS-dependent militaries of the first world all have somebody worrying full time about how far up shit creek they would be if all their fancy guidance stuff stopped working properly. If BAE has something that can sooth these...somewhat cost insensitive...customers' fears... Well, they might just have a very profitable little device on their hands...
The case of non-drivers may well be so, depending on the locality's tax structure and road funding; but the 'wealth transfer' from peak users to off-peak users is a phantom that only shows up if you ignore the fact that they are getting two different products. More or less tautologically, 'peak periods' are whatever times are most desirable for driving, so the people paying more are the people purchasing the better product and the people paying less are the ones unable or unwilling to buy anything other than the inferior product. If that amounts to 'wealth transfer', then so does virtually every pricing strategy on the market...
They are very much edge cases; but there is some speculation that(as with other messy immunological conditions) certain environmental causes may be capable of giving the immune system of individuals predisposed to vulnerability a nudge in the direction of attacking pancreatic cells. There is also at least one pest-control agent in moderately common use that is a targeted killer of pancreatic cells. I don't know whether chemically-induced destruction counts as Type I diabetes, though...
They aren't 'lifestyle' in the morally satisfactory "stop eating twinkies" sense of the word; but the function and dysfunction of the immune system can definitely have an environmental component, as well as a genetic one. Though, as you say, Type I diabetes is generally quite early onset, has a much weaker and murkier relationship than Type II to any obvious environmental factors, and certainly doesn't have the 'intermediate zone' of partial Insulin resistance that can be reversed by diet that Type II frequently does. Even if it isn't clear exactly why some are hit and others aren't, once the immune system starts terminating pancreatic cells, any further intervention is firmly in the medical camp, and in the research stages for anything aside from insulin supplementation.
The trick with market-based pricing of 'public' infrastructure(whether or not this is an argument against it is a matter of taste) is that it requires you to take a sharp, and not uncontroversial, stand on the purpose and meaning of 'public'...
There are really three-ish basic possible positions(though it is certainly possible to mix and match and hedge and squirm a bit at the cost of some complexity, and certain sorts of 'public' things fit more naturally into one category or another).
1. 'Public' in the sense that ownership is vested in some body that represents 'the people', but exploited under the usual conditions of profit maximization. This one crops up with mineral and other natural resources most frequently. The nominal owner is 'the people'; but the obvious expectation is that 'the people' will sell/lease/etc. the asset for the best possible price to some other entity and then rake in the cash.
2. 'Public' in the sense that ownership is vested in some body that represents 'the people', and that the property in question is, in some sense, 'for' the people as well as owned by them. National Parks are the most obvious example. They are 'owned' in approximately the same sense as above; but public opinion would likely be hostile if we simply sold them off and cut everybody a check. There is a sense, often poorly articulated; but reflected in generally low ticket prices, that 'the people' should have enjoyment of them, as well as ownership.
3. 'Public' in the sense of being a necessary response to market failure. Utilities are the most obvious example. Unlike #1, 'the people' are both the owners and the customers, so profit is generally seen as a bad thing; but unlike #2, where appeals to intangibles like 'national heritage' are common, public opinion generally just wants the system to run not-for-profit; but as efficiently as reasonably possible.
If you adopt market-based pricing for roads, you are (though it is not polite to say so), adopting the theory that, if enough people cannot afford access to this 'public' feature, it will be more efficient, and more pleasant for the remainder who can. This isn't necessarily wrong; but it implies that you are essentially rejecting the notion that 'the people' have any right, beyond that of 'customer', to the enjoyment of a 'public' facility. This is pretty uncontroversial in something like a mineral deposit(Show of hands: would you rather have the right to grab your shovel and go get your share of the bauxite, or just sell the mineral rights to FooCorp and get your share of the proceeds?); but becomes a bit thornier when the 'public' asset is something more like a utility. Is a 'public' road a thing that 'the people' have the right to use, or is it something that 'the people' sell, by means of their representatives, to the subset of them that can afford the equilibrium price of access?
In my time on the MBTA, my informal observations have been as follows:
In dense core areas, usually covered by the subway portion of the MBTA system, you see a pretty fair proportion of suits and techies and whatnot. Certainly times and places where the urine-scented/vaguely menacing/talking to voices only they can hear can be found; but the pleasure of crawling through traffic and paying exorbitant rates for parking is not a luxury good. Subways aren't all fun, of course; but dense core areas are the places where the economics of mass transit are best and the freedom of the open road and the right to travel according to your own schedule are most frequently, and most transparently, the freedom to pay more in order to endure traffic and fight for parking spaces.
The 'Commuter Rail' segments also do what they say on the tin, and you certainly do see all the suburbanites who left their cars at the lot at one of the train stations and then rode in to participate in the dense core areas above.
Where things can get a trifle...downmarket... is in places where bus service operates across the same territory as moderate to low density suburban areas that are designed with car-owning residents in mind. This is where public transit's advantages are least evident, its vices most evident, relative to cars(not counting rural areas, of course, where mass transit is largely nonexistent, save for certain bus and rail routes between urban centers). If you are riding the bus through the suburbs, this might well be because you don't have a choice.
This research is on an animal model of Type I diabetes, which is generally not associated with 'lifestyle' causes(environmental causes are under some suspicion; but nothing like the causal clarity of Type II exists). By sheer verbal inprecision, 'diabetes' covers both types; but this research doesn't.
It's also worth noting that, while the stubborn spectre of 'free will' hangs around to cloud the issue, 'lifestyle' diseases have a nasty habit of cropping up under their preferred economic and social conditions almost as reliably, at a population level, as their biological cousins. In the case of obesity, the wealthy bits of the developed world led the charge; but it turns out that you can develop troublingly high levels on a surprisingly low GDP per capita. Diabetes research isn't exactly in the 'altruistic research on neglected-but-horrid tropical diseases of poor people' category; but it's not exactly in the 'hair loss and limp-dick-itis' camp either...
TFA has a couple of caveats worth noting(aside from the usual "'works in mice means' maybe a decade out for you, sickie"):
The research was on Type I diabetes, aimed at restoring insulin production, not Type II and reversing insulin resistance.
Also: "The studies were performed in diabetic mice that lacked a properly functioning immune system that would otherwise have rejected the cells. We now need to identify a suitable way of protecting the cells from immune attack so that the transplant can ultimately be performed in the absence of any immunosuppression". That could prove to be a big one, given the relationship between the Type I and patient's immune system destroying their own pancreatic cells, for reasons somewhat murky. If the patient's own immune system is already killing their own cells, I don't envy the research team that has to keep a transplanted cell population alive without cratering the immune system so hard that something else kills the patient...
Jokes aside, the issue is that leap seconds are not deterministic.
TAI, based on whatever flavor of atomic clock is currently the going standard, is markedly more regular than the observed time based on the movement of the earth(UT1). UTC ticks at the same rate as TAI; but is supposed to correspond to UT1, which ticks at an unpredictable rate. So, whenever UT1 and UTC drift too far apart(DUT1 approaches.9 seconds), UTC gets a leap second. The UTC tick rate is constant; but the leap-second days are 1 second longer.
Obviously, we should just abandon this UTC nonsense.
Unfortunately, anybody with the power to simpy reject ICANN and make it stick also has the power(and, certainly in the case of ISPs, also the inclination) to be even worse...
In particular, ICANN has room for TLD fuckery, and seems to be making use of it lately; but ISPs are in the position to both engage in TLD fuckery and the overwhelmingly more serious business of controlling traffic for various rent-seeking or voice/cable TV legacy service preservation purposes.
Unfortunately, in their quest to make their own internet, with blackjack and hookers, they have in fact appear to have forgotten about the 'internet' part...
I knew that there was an explanation for the increasingly unnerving convergence in style between Verizon's "Droid" advertisements and the USAF's "The Reaper is Watching" recruitment materials...
OpenBSD did(does?) a similar thing with their install CDs, and they were largely under the even-less-restrictive-on-distributors BSD license. There was nothing stopping 3rd party packagers, and they acknowledged as much. Conveniently for them, though, their user base is both fairly loyal(and thus wanted to support the project) and fairly paranoid(and thus not entirely trusting of 3rd-party install packages)...
Unfortunately, 'Mark Zuckerberg', 'The Nation State', and 'Google' remain on the list of outstanding serious web vulnerabilities, leading some to wonder whether it would be necessary to introduce a system weighting the seriousness of vulnerabilities as well as merely enumerating them...
As best I can tell, from her post history, she is either one of the finest trolls of the early 21st century, or in urgent need of a psych referral, with smart money on the latter...
The problem is that a lot of people cheap out on their backup power. Generators and UPSes are expensive.
I wonder, in comparing the price/performance numbers on the invoices from Dell and the invoices from APC(hint, one of these has Moore's law at its back, the other... Doesn't.) what it would take in terms of hardware pricing and software system reliability design to make these backup power systems economically obsolete for most of the 'bulk' data-shoveling and HTTP cruft that keep the tubes humming...
Obviously, if your software doesn't allow any sort of elegant failover, or you paid a small fortune per core, redundant PSUs, UPSes, generators, and all the rest make perfect sense. If, however, your software can tolerate a hardware failure and the price of silicon and storage is plummeting and the price of electrical gear that is going to spend most of its life generating heat and maintenance bills isn't, it becomes interesting to consider the point at which the 'Eh, fuck it. Move the load to somewhere where the lights are still on until the utility guys figure it out.' theory of backup power becomes viable.
While the nimbostratus salesweasels are(obviously, these are salesweasels) lying, an incident where a datacenter gets taken down good and hard by weather won't do the in-house guys much good either... 'Cloud' or not, a datacenter(and probably a fair few smaller ones, and a veritable legion of various converted-broom-closet small business setups) was taken down by weather.
It certainly has become increasingly hard to hide that most of the 'cloud' providers do, er, rather less magic-distributed-reliability than their glossy brochure might insinuate. The decent ones generally make it possible; but they generally leave making it happen up to the customer. Anybody who expects 'cloud' to magically save them is naive or lying. However, that doesn't change the fact that it does make buying capacity in other regions, on short notice, convenient, so long as you can bully the vendor into admitting what you are actually buying.
However, the in-house approach is in largely the same boat, only more visibly. Anybody's in-house operation in that part of the electrical grid would also have been good and hosed without redundancy in some other region. Whether it is cheaper/easier to provide that redundancy via traditional means or by purchasing the requisite 'cloud' stuff is a different issue...
You are aware, of course, that knowingly disabling the filter in a household that contains under-18's is almost certainly neglect of a minor. Maybe even 'grooming' them for paedophile activities, if you have the correct mustache...
The point isn't to be hard to circumvent(in a technical sense), the point is to appease the moralists by bringing back some of the good, old-fashioned, inconvenience of getting your hands on the good stuff.
Sure, kids these days will reflexively click through anything that stands between them and their porn/warez/facebook/etc; but a reactionary's cold, bitter, circulatory core warms just a little bit at the thought that you will have to click the "Yes, I, an internet subscriber who knows that my ISP knows my name and where I live, do affirm that I wish to be recorded in the Database as desiring access to the vilest smut on the internet." button...
Sorry, I should have been a touch more specific: US telcos have certainly done their level best to extract rents from everybody who touches their lines, even when that touching has already been paid for once at agreed rates(everything from your modem fee, to the period of trying to make home router connection-sharing an extra-cost option, to the persistent demands that internet companies should pay for access to "their consumers"); but they've never really had any luck, and frequently not much interest, in trying to actually develop walled-garden services of their own, rather than merely throwing up tollbooths on the same copper they were comfortable using to route voice calls.
The various BBSes and pre-internet service providers were largely unaffiliated with the telephone guys, and even the(much later) attempts by cell carriers to build captive marketplaces(despite controlling the handset, the software it ran, having an existing billing infrastructure, and controlling the customer's access to 3rd-party competitors) were pitiful failures.
Had Ma Bell snapped up Compuserve, or cloned it, we might have had a much more Minitel like situation well into the present...
While it isn't a terribly big surprise that, in France, the subsidization happened to be a directly state matter, one should really keep in mind the broader context:
Minitel was, to no small degree, integrated into the telco infrastructure of the day(not just 'placed on top of it, because it has to be on top of something', like the ad-hoc BBSes or the eventual internet. And, unfortunately, telco(especially, but not exclusively, wireline telco) is one of the worst industries in the contemporary world when it comes to severely dubious state support. Whether it be the overtly state-owned and schlerotic monopoly telco companies, or the 'regulated'(ha, ha, ha) oligopoly-with-regionally-monopolistic-characteristics that passes for a 'free market' in telecommunications services, telcos worldwide historically(and frequently to the present day) are up to their bloody eyeballs in the worst sorts of state tie-ins, whether honestly labelled as such or not.
Had some of the 'future of the telephone' stuff that Bell was always making videos about in the 60's ever actually been executed, it likely would have been in exactly the same place.
Really, that's the thing that makes the internet more interesting: Not because it developed in a situation of more enlightened telcom policy(it basically didn't); but because Ma Bell was too caught up in her own line-switched rentseeking circlejerk to notice it before it had grown substantially...
Citizen, citizen, nothing whatsoever has happened to the concept of jurisdiction. In fact, we value this legal principle so highly that we've been carefully collecting as many samples as possible, from as many areas of the world as possible, in order to better appreciate its value...
Slashdot Mirror
In this case, it is my understanding that the patents are not for 'rectangular devices possessing a touchscreen on the front'; but for certain software features.
I have to wonder why Samsung doesn't flip the disable bit on the features Apple is suing about(for extra credit, in some manner that allows firmware modders to oh-so-deviously flip it back, if they want) so that they can start moving units without having to clear up any legal issues, and then push a firmware update once the legal wrangling is sorted out...
You can't do that with hardware-related patents, obviously; but I would think that the financial impact of an injunction that keeps you from shipping on time(especially given the percentage of the US phone market dictated largely by what phones carriers feel like flogging today, and the carriers' distinct dislike for delay: see also Microsoft Kin's horrible death) would be overwhelmingly greater than the financial impact of having to ship without a few bullet points for whatever crap skin you are slapping on top of your Android build, especially if you can turn those back on with an update once the lawyers clear.
Given that it was produced by BAE Systems, a company noted largely for their defense contract work(and, since their acquisition of Marconi, this includes extensive defense electronics and RF stuff), I strongly suspect that the punchline of this work (while they probably won't say no to sufficiently lucrative commercial licensing offers) is having a product offering that provides some degree of reliability for location-dependent military hardware and munitions even if GPS is jammed, knocked out, disabled by the Americans, etc.
For civilian applications, GPS(if necessary supplemented by cell tower data or Skyhook-style wifi information), depending on how far you are from civilization, works pretty well already. However, GPS signals are necessarily pretty faint and widely recognized as being of considerable strategic value. I assume that the GPS-dependent militaries of the first world all have somebody worrying full time about how far up shit creek they would be if all their fancy guidance stuff stopped working properly. If BAE has something that can sooth these...somewhat cost insensitive...customers' fears... Well, they might just have a very profitable little device on their hands...
The case of non-drivers may well be so, depending on the locality's tax structure and road funding; but the 'wealth transfer' from peak users to off-peak users is a phantom that only shows up if you ignore the fact that they are getting two different products. More or less tautologically, 'peak periods' are whatever times are most desirable for driving, so the people paying more are the people purchasing the better product and the people paying less are the ones unable or unwilling to buy anything other than the inferior product. If that amounts to 'wealth transfer', then so does virtually every pricing strategy on the market...
They are very much edge cases; but there is some speculation that(as with other messy immunological conditions) certain environmental causes may be capable of giving the immune system of individuals predisposed to vulnerability a nudge in the direction of attacking pancreatic cells. There is also at least one pest-control agent in moderately common use that is a targeted killer of pancreatic cells. I don't know whether chemically-induced destruction counts as Type I diabetes, though...
They aren't 'lifestyle' in the morally satisfactory "stop eating twinkies" sense of the word; but the function and dysfunction of the immune system can definitely have an environmental component, as well as a genetic one. Though, as you say, Type I diabetes is generally quite early onset, has a much weaker and murkier relationship than Type II to any obvious environmental factors, and certainly doesn't have the 'intermediate zone' of partial Insulin resistance that can be reversed by diet that Type II frequently does. Even if it isn't clear exactly why some are hit and others aren't, once the immune system starts terminating pancreatic cells, any further intervention is firmly in the medical camp, and in the research stages for anything aside from insulin supplementation.
The trick with market-based pricing of 'public' infrastructure(whether or not this is an argument against it is a matter of taste) is that it requires you to take a sharp, and not uncontroversial, stand on the purpose and meaning of 'public'...
There are really three-ish basic possible positions(though it is certainly possible to mix and match and hedge and squirm a bit at the cost of some complexity, and certain sorts of 'public' things fit more naturally into one category or another).
1. 'Public' in the sense that ownership is vested in some body that represents 'the people', but exploited under the usual conditions of profit maximization. This one crops up with mineral and other natural resources most frequently. The nominal owner is 'the people'; but the obvious expectation is that 'the people' will sell/lease/etc. the asset for the best possible price to some other entity and then rake in the cash.
2. 'Public' in the sense that ownership is vested in some body that represents 'the people', and that the property in question is, in some sense, 'for' the people as well as owned by them. National Parks are the most obvious example. They are 'owned' in approximately the same sense as above; but public opinion would likely be hostile if we simply sold them off and cut everybody a check. There is a sense, often poorly articulated; but reflected in generally low ticket prices, that 'the people' should have enjoyment of them, as well as ownership.
3. 'Public' in the sense of being a necessary response to market failure. Utilities are the most obvious example. Unlike #1, 'the people' are both the owners and the customers, so profit is generally seen as a bad thing; but unlike #2, where appeals to intangibles like 'national heritage' are common, public opinion generally just wants the system to run not-for-profit; but as efficiently as reasonably possible.
If you adopt market-based pricing for roads, you are (though it is not polite to say so), adopting the theory that, if enough people cannot afford access to this 'public' feature, it will be more efficient, and more pleasant for the remainder who can. This isn't necessarily wrong; but it implies that you are essentially rejecting the notion that 'the people' have any right, beyond that of 'customer', to the enjoyment of a 'public' facility. This is pretty uncontroversial in something like a mineral deposit(Show of hands: would you rather have the right to grab your shovel and go get your share of the bauxite, or just sell the mineral rights to FooCorp and get your share of the proceeds?); but becomes a bit thornier when the 'public' asset is something more like a utility. Is a 'public' road a thing that 'the people' have the right to use, or is it something that 'the people' sell, by means of their representatives, to the subset of them that can afford the equilibrium price of access?
Depends on the location.
In my time on the MBTA, my informal observations have been as follows:
In dense core areas, usually covered by the subway portion of the MBTA system, you see a pretty fair proportion of suits and techies and whatnot. Certainly times and places where the urine-scented/vaguely menacing/talking to voices only they can hear can be found; but the pleasure of crawling through traffic and paying exorbitant rates for parking is not a luxury good. Subways aren't all fun, of course; but dense core areas are the places where the economics of mass transit are best and the freedom of the open road and the right to travel according to your own schedule are most frequently, and most transparently, the freedom to pay more in order to endure traffic and fight for parking spaces.
The 'Commuter Rail' segments also do what they say on the tin, and you certainly do see all the suburbanites who left their cars at the lot at one of the train stations and then rode in to participate in the dense core areas above.
Where things can get a trifle...downmarket... is in places where bus service operates across the same territory as moderate to low density suburban areas that are designed with car-owning residents in mind. This is where public transit's advantages are least evident, its vices most evident, relative to cars(not counting rural areas, of course, where mass transit is largely nonexistent, save for certain bus and rail routes between urban centers). If you are riding the bus through the suburbs, this might well be because you don't have a choice.
Novel Immunodeficient Mouse/Human. Their rat colleagues get most of the press, unfairly.
This research is on an animal model of Type I diabetes, which is generally not associated with 'lifestyle' causes(environmental causes are under some suspicion; but nothing like the causal clarity of Type II exists). By sheer verbal inprecision, 'diabetes' covers both types; but this research doesn't.
It's also worth noting that, while the stubborn spectre of 'free will' hangs around to cloud the issue, 'lifestyle' diseases have a nasty habit of cropping up under their preferred economic and social conditions almost as reliably, at a population level, as their biological cousins. In the case of obesity, the wealthy bits of the developed world led the charge; but it turns out that you can develop troublingly high levels on a surprisingly low GDP per capita. Diabetes research isn't exactly in the 'altruistic research on neglected-but-horrid tropical diseases of poor people' category; but it's not exactly in the 'hair loss and limp-dick-itis' camp either...
TFA has a couple of caveats worth noting(aside from the usual "'works in mice means' maybe a decade out for you, sickie"):
The research was on Type I diabetes, aimed at restoring insulin production, not Type II and reversing insulin resistance.
Also: "The studies were performed in diabetic mice that lacked a properly functioning immune system that would otherwise have rejected the cells. We now need to identify a suitable way of protecting the cells from immune attack so that the transplant can ultimately be performed in the absence of any immunosuppression". That could prove to be a big one, given the relationship between the Type I and patient's immune system destroying their own pancreatic cells, for reasons somewhat murky. If the patient's own immune system is already killing their own cells, I don't envy the research team that has to keep a transplanted cell population alive without cratering the immune system so hard that something else kills the patient...
Jokes aside, the issue is that leap seconds are not deterministic.
.9 seconds), UTC gets a leap second. The UTC tick rate is constant; but the leap-second days are 1 second longer.
TAI, based on whatever flavor of atomic clock is currently the going standard, is markedly more regular than the observed time based on the movement of the earth(UT1). UTC ticks at the same rate as TAI; but is supposed to correspond to UT1, which ticks at an unpredictable rate. So, whenever UT1 and UTC drift too far apart(DUT1 approaches
Obviously, we should just abandon this UTC nonsense.
Unfortunately, anybody with the power to simpy reject ICANN and make it stick also has the power(and, certainly in the case of ISPs, also the inclination) to be even worse...
In particular, ICANN has room for TLD fuckery, and seems to be making use of it lately; but ISPs are in the position to both engage in TLD fuckery and the overwhelmingly more serious business of controlling traffic for various rent-seeking or voice/cable TV legacy service preservation purposes.
TLDs are a penny-ante sideshow by comparison.
Unfortunately, in their quest to make their own internet, with blackjack and hookers, they have in fact appear to have forgotten about the 'internet' part...
I knew that there was an explanation for the increasingly unnerving convergence in style between Verizon's "Droid" advertisements and the USAF's "The Reaper is Watching" recruitment materials...
OpenBSD did(does?) a similar thing with their install CDs, and they were largely under the even-less-restrictive-on-distributors BSD license. There was nothing stopping 3rd party packagers, and they acknowledged as much. Conveniently for them, though, their user base is both fairly loyal(and thus wanted to support the project) and fairly paranoid(and thus not entirely trusting of 3rd-party install packages)...
Unfortunately, 'Mark Zuckerberg', 'The Nation State', and 'Google' remain on the list of outstanding serious web vulnerabilities, leading some to wonder whether it would be necessary to introduce a system weighting the seriousness of vulnerabilities as well as merely enumerating them...
Every one of your proposals sounds like pretty much the exact opposite of what you would put the guy with the iPad experience in charge of...
As best I can tell, from her post history, she is either one of the finest trolls of the early 21st century, or in urgent need of a psych referral, with smart money on the latter...
The problem is that a lot of people cheap out on their backup power. Generators and UPSes are expensive.
I wonder, in comparing the price/performance numbers on the invoices from Dell and the invoices from APC(hint, one of these has Moore's law at its back, the other... Doesn't.) what it would take in terms of hardware pricing and software system reliability design to make these backup power systems economically obsolete for most of the 'bulk' data-shoveling and HTTP cruft that keep the tubes humming...
Obviously, if your software doesn't allow any sort of elegant failover, or you paid a small fortune per core, redundant PSUs, UPSes, generators, and all the rest make perfect sense. If, however, your software can tolerate a hardware failure and the price of silicon and storage is plummeting and the price of electrical gear that is going to spend most of its life generating heat and maintenance bills isn't, it becomes interesting to consider the point at which the 'Eh, fuck it. Move the load to somewhere where the lights are still on until the utility guys figure it out.' theory of backup power becomes viable.
While the nimbostratus salesweasels are(obviously, these are salesweasels) lying, an incident where a datacenter gets taken down good and hard by weather won't do the in-house guys much good either... 'Cloud' or not, a datacenter(and probably a fair few smaller ones, and a veritable legion of various converted-broom-closet small business setups) was taken down by weather.
It certainly has become increasingly hard to hide that most of the 'cloud' providers do, er, rather less magic-distributed-reliability than their glossy brochure might insinuate. The decent ones generally make it possible; but they generally leave making it happen up to the customer. Anybody who expects 'cloud' to magically save them is naive or lying. However, that doesn't change the fact that it does make buying capacity in other regions, on short notice, convenient, so long as you can bully the vendor into admitting what you are actually buying.
However, the in-house approach is in largely the same boat, only more visibly. Anybody's in-house operation in that part of the electrical grid would also have been good and hosed without redundancy in some other region. Whether it is cheaper/easier to provide that redundancy via traditional means or by purchasing the requisite 'cloud' stuff is a different issue...
You are aware, of course, that knowingly disabling the filter in a household that contains under-18's is almost certainly neglect of a minor. Maybe even 'grooming' them for paedophile activities, if you have the correct mustache...
The point isn't to be hard to circumvent(in a technical sense), the point is to appease the moralists by bringing back some of the good, old-fashioned, inconvenience of getting your hands on the good stuff.
Sure, kids these days will reflexively click through anything that stands between them and their porn/warez/facebook/etc; but a reactionary's cold, bitter, circulatory core warms just a little bit at the thought that you will have to click the "Yes, I, an internet subscriber who knows that my ISP knows my name and where I live, do affirm that I wish to be recorded in the Database as desiring access to the vilest smut on the internet." button...
Sorry, I should have been a touch more specific: US telcos have certainly done their level best to extract rents from everybody who touches their lines, even when that touching has already been paid for once at agreed rates(everything from your modem fee, to the period of trying to make home router connection-sharing an extra-cost option, to the persistent demands that internet companies should pay for access to "their consumers"); but they've never really had any luck, and frequently not much interest, in trying to actually develop walled-garden services of their own, rather than merely throwing up tollbooths on the same copper they were comfortable using to route voice calls.
The various BBSes and pre-internet service providers were largely unaffiliated with the telephone guys, and even the(much later) attempts by cell carriers to build captive marketplaces(despite controlling the handset, the software it ran, having an existing billing infrastructure, and controlling the customer's access to 3rd-party competitors) were pitiful failures.
Had Ma Bell snapped up Compuserve, or cloned it, we might have had a much more Minitel like situation well into the present...
Not to worry, between the ITMS and your cell carrier, anything and everything should be packaged, sorted, and monetized once again...
While it isn't a terribly big surprise that, in France, the subsidization happened to be a directly state matter, one should really keep in mind the broader context:
Minitel was, to no small degree, integrated into the telco infrastructure of the day(not just 'placed on top of it, because it has to be on top of something', like the ad-hoc BBSes or the eventual internet. And, unfortunately, telco(especially, but not exclusively, wireline telco) is one of the worst industries in the contemporary world when it comes to severely dubious state support. Whether it be the overtly state-owned and schlerotic monopoly telco companies, or the 'regulated'(ha, ha, ha) oligopoly-with-regionally-monopolistic-characteristics that passes for a 'free market' in telecommunications services, telcos worldwide historically(and frequently to the present day) are up to their bloody eyeballs in the worst sorts of state tie-ins, whether honestly labelled as such or not.
Had some of the 'future of the telephone' stuff that Bell was always making videos about in the 60's ever actually been executed, it likely would have been in exactly the same place.
Really, that's the thing that makes the internet more interesting: Not because it developed in a situation of more enlightened telcom policy(it basically didn't); but because Ma Bell was too caught up in her own line-switched rentseeking circlejerk to notice it before it had grown substantially...
Citizen, citizen, nothing whatsoever has happened to the concept of jurisdiction. In fact, we value this legal principle so highly that we've been carefully collecting as many samples as possible, from as many areas of the world as possible, in order to better appreciate its value...