How would this affect municipal regulation of cable companies? What if their monopoly agreements with Comcast, et al, were suddenly seen as unenforceable due to this becoming the exclusive domain of the Federal government?
So many states have public utilities commissions that regulate utilities, it's hard to see the Feds being able to nullify this in court. I would have thought that other utilities would have tried long ago to wipe out local regulations if this was a viable legal theory.
I agree with you, I guess my comment was more directed at how the entrenched financial interests make it hard to create such a regulation.
It seems like if that had been a telcom regulation in the 1980s, none of the carriers would have complained because it would have been easy to implement and seen as a barrier to competition.
Teaching people to read, write and do math is a mostly solved problem.
The real problem seems to be teaching kids who are poor, have a parent in jail, a parent who is chemically dependent and with neither parent having much of an education to begin with.
A lot of education has been corrupted trying to educate those kids, plus all the behavior management problems when schools are loaded up with all poor kids with behavior problems.
In the 3rd scenario, even a VOIP line has a phone number assigned. No matter how many steps removed they are from the PSTN, at some point they are a customer of a provider that is VOIP on one side and PSTN on the other that gets them assigned a block of numbers.
What I'm thinking is that this is true for inbound routing, but as most call billing in the US is done in a calling-party basis I guess I could see where a VoIP provider may be using some kind of dynamic outbound call routing system that routes outbound calls to the cheapest provider at the time.
Binding low-cost VoIP providers to the same carrier that they use for inbound routing I'd wager would make them howl as I'm sure dumping outbound calls on the cheapest PSTN they get access to is all about profit and making sure "unlimited" calling doesn't run them out of business.
There are few if any reasons to allow a caller to spoof a number that they don't actually own.
This is the real problem, carriers willingly accept forged calling party information without verifying if the originating ANI owns the number block.
My less cynical rationale is that there is so much outsourcing in the call center business, and these places sell their service of looking and sounding as if the outsourced entity actually was the parent business, including sending caller ID for numbers actually owned by their client. Validating calling party information against inbound trunks makes this much more complicated -- if you outsource call center services, you basically have to supply outgoing telecom circuits to your vendor.
My cynical rationale is that the telecom business knows that telephone fraud is good business and if they did something that made it harder, there would be less of it overall business would go down.
And I'm sure the VoIP business is also built around a million and one "carriers" that have no direct access to actual telecom carriers, like the early days if ISPs when anyone with a T1 to someone could setup a modem bank and be an ISP even though the data had to go through 3 tiers of other ISPs just to actually get close to the actual Internet.
Even better, just be downright insulting of their class and ethnicity.
If you're just kind of insulting, they hang up on you. If you say something like "why do you filthy wogs live in cardboard boxes" or "that dot on your mom's forehead is so where I know to pee" they will stick around and engage you.
I've had these morons practically trying to keep me on the phone so they can keep raging at me. Once they start threatening you it's even more fun because you can just poke fun at how utterly powerless they are, which riles them even more.
I'd feel bad about all this, but these are people who are purposefully trying to steal from me. I have no sympathy for them.
What's funny is that most photos are more detailed and higher resolution than most videos. The video captures motion, but is usually lower (often much) lower pixel density, worse color quality, and often suffers from poor image stabilization.
This doesn't add up. I bought a phone from AT&T and once it was paid for, I went to AT&T and they walked me through the unlocking process.
I planned a trip to the UK and a friend mailed me an activated prepaid Asda SIM. When the pilot announced we were landing in 30 minutes, I ejected my AT&T SIM and inserted the Asda SIM.
Once we landed, I immediately had voice and data service on Asda's network.
The only carrier involvement was the unlocking process.
My most recent iPhone I bought unlocked from Apple directly. I don't even think I went to AT&T, I just moved my SIM to the new phone and it worked.
I think the parent poster's concern is legitimate -- this is easy and only involves a tiny card now. eSIM switching sounds way more complicated. I can't just pop into a shop and buy a prepaid SIM when I land unless there's some method of reprogramming my SIM on the phone with some code from a package and both the phone and the local network are smart enough to do this over the air without costing me a million dollars in roaming fees, finding a landline, using a laptop, etc.
My experience with carriers makes me believe they will do everything in their power to make this complicated and diffcult.
For better or for worse, success in life goes to the most successful and that generally means people who are the total package -- intelligence, charisma, attractiveness, social skills and a stable, self-regulated individual psychology.
Most everyone isn't the total package, they're only the partial package and only get the partial rewards that come with partial success. Unfortunately we've reached the point where people feel like they deserve the full rewards for only partial success.
I think some of the problem, though, is that our economic system has become so dominated by a winner-take-all mindset that we've kind of eliminated the idea of partial rewards for partial success. It's become either total success and total rewards, or no rewards at all. Partial success has become about the same outcome as total failure.
And I think we've built that unfortunate bias into our educational system and ultimately into our kids' psychology. I think we've created a society that generates anxiety and fear because we wind up punishing any failure and making that failure status permanent. Get behind in 8th grade? Now you're fucked. No AP classes in high school, no good college admission, no good degree, and a lifetime of economic and social marginalization.
I realize that this isn't completely true -- people can and do overcome problems, but the idea is so pervasive that I think we've put an entire generation into a permanent state of anxiety.
Humans will always find drugs appealing as long as we have a dopamine reward system, which I'd guess exists precisely because it aids in preserving the species -- rewarding reproduction, eating, etc.
The problem with humans is we've figured out how to trigger a dopamine response without the "necessary, species-preserving" actions but I guess it's part of the price you pay for cognitive self-awareness.
Technology innovation has kind of stopped being about simply making better products, not its about using it to drive product segmentation, long roll-outs of features which maximize an innovation's earning power and driving lock-in and all its derivative product sales.
USB seems to suffer particularly because while it is a standard, it's at the mercy of actual hardware vendors to go ahead and implement it and they run it through their profit maximizing models first, leading to weird, slow adoptions and selective feature enablements.
I don't know about the last 2-3 years, but until then they did not allow pairing mice, only keyboards.
My guess was that it was a strategic decision to bolster the developer focus on touch-enabled UIs and not devolve into a mouse-centric UI.
IMHO, they were overly strict about it and should have allowed mice pairing but forced developers who wanted a mouse to work in their app to use mouse APIs instead of just roughly translating clicks into screen taps globally. There is some direct 1-1 mouse/touch functionality mapping but there are some elements of touch that wouldn't translate well into mice actions, so I can see a little why they wouldn't just make mice a global substitute for touch.
All that being said, I think some of the use potential for iPads as laptop substitutes is lost without a mouse.
I think this is all reasonable, but I would add the emphasis and lack of mouse support in tablets, especially iPads (which had the broadest platform adoption) hurt the use cases of tablets.
I felt like there was a lot more I could have been doing with my iPad if I had a mouse that wasn't specifically limited by the screen or CPU. Editing larger text documents, light graphics stuff (ie, PowerPoint/Paint type, not Photoshop) was all super cumbersome with touch-screen only input.
I was excited about using it as an RDP platform, but holy shit the lack of a mouse made it totally limiting.
I mean there was other stuff that was limiting -- a lot of the software was either literally upscaled phone applications or applications that deliberately chose Fisher-Price level oversimplification.
But much of it was user-input driven, even with a BT keyboard paired. That got me useful text input (so long as I didn't have to edit much). But once you got beyond couchsurfing, it was more the lack of a mouse than software or CPU that seemed to be the culprit. I didn't want to make a high-end workstation out of it, just do productivity stuff beyond what touchscreen wasn't a total hindrance for.
I always wonder what would have happened if Apple had decided that a keyboard and more importantly a mouse was an acceptable iPad peripheral.
I mostly liked my iPads (1 & 3) but over time felt hemmed in by the lack of a mouse. I had a keyboard case which made text input a lot better, but the lack of a mouse and the clumsy nature of screen touch made editing anything an impossible chore and even the promise of RDP to desktops unappealing for anything more than basic status checks or the most marginal of activities.
If Apple had allowed mice, would the iPad have gained more ground from PCs?
Who is capable of getting appointed to a high enough level White House job to participate in whatever "resistance" this is and "gets pressured into it by their folks"?
I think we're talking seasoned politicos in their 30s-40s-50s here, not 22 year olds who have to follow mom and dad's career advice.
On larger calls with a lot of fairly anonymous people we will play mute roulette.
You mash the mute button really fast a bunch of times without looking and then make some strange noise. The "loser" is the one who doesn't have the phone on mute.
I have to deal with building security systems sometimes and nearly always the RFID locks (which encompasses the RFID reader, secondary keypad if there is one, and electromechanical lock mechanism) aren't ethernet enabled.
The "locks" are hardwired to controllers which can be networked but are programmed by some software application which in turn places each keycard into whatever access groups its supposed to have. The controllers are then updated with add/deletes of card profiles. I see about half the controllers networked in these systems, and about half have some old laptop with a crossover or serial cable connected for programming.
The network can be completely down and the card access system works just fine, the only problem is you couldn't alter the controller database or access profiles (except with the ones with a dedicated PC).
I was literally at a facility Friday that was setup this way when it was built to manufacture fentanyl patches, so I'm assuming the DEA considered it secure. My customer took over the building and it had zero network, the old tenant literally programmed a dozen "master" keycards and left them to new ownership right before they yanked all the switches.
The main security control panel was in the computer room with a dedicated PC for card access management, but since the new owners only make soap and not fentanyl, they decided to network the card access PC so HR and facilities management could alter card profiles remotely. Obviously this is something of a security weakness, since you can ultimately hack accounts to get to the management PC and reprogram access card profiles, but you can't actually work the locks themselves as far as I can tell.
The bigger problem, IMHO, is that companies are cheap and look at the card access systems as a fixed system that needs no upgrading and no maintenance contract. The software is shitty with poor OS portability, the ancient management PC dies and nobody can reprogram cards for a couple of weeks until the vendor is tracked down, a maintenance agreement signed and a bunch of software updates installed.
Many larger subs are a shitpost idiocracy of noise, but the smaller ones can be pretty reasonable.
r/futurology is a terrible example of a subreddit. I think it might be a default subreddit, which means it gets a lot of random visits, and 99% of the posts there are pretty much fantasy clickbait. "Scientists discover way to use Earth's rotation to create free energy and world peace."
I will say that it is a harsh web site. When your're wrong on most subs, man, are you wrong.
My city's local subreddit is also dominated by a very narrow political/age spectrum where deviating from the party line will result in bans. I got banned for 30 days (only sub, ever) even though I had a positive karma of something like +5 for my history in the sub over hundreds of posts and comments.
Overall I mostly like reddit, but there are times where it's just too mean or too stupid. You have to put some effort into finding worthwhile subs and avoid most of the big ones.
I don't think local funding of police will change due to the distributed nature of the US political structure. Plus local funding == local control. Nobody wants a national police force accountable only to Congress or a giant Federal bureaucracy.
Too many police in cars or placed in a way isolating themselves themselves from the public. Their is too much police hunting down the bad guys, and not enough serve and protect where they are patrolling the streets talking to the people.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. But AFAIK, police labor budgets for the most part have already been normalized to absorb the savings that comes with the efficiencies associated with putting cops in cars and having them serve a much broader geographical area than any cop on foot could.
Bottom line, police forces have nowhere near the manpower necessary to go back to foot patrols and couldn't go back to foot patrols without a major funding increase. Most cities that need it the most (ie, more poor and minorities) have awful tax bases that can barely support their existing municipal services.
My city, which is rich and well run in comparison to Baltimore doesn't even have the manpower levels to give "low crime" neighborhoods even cursory patrols in cars to stem the rising nuisance property crime we face.
Obviously we spend ridiculous amounts of money on police budgets, but if you want to repurpose that for beat cops you're talking a comprehensive bureaucratic overhaul of the whole system, something unlikely to ever happen. The only other solution is lobbying for major tax hikes to fund it, and I'd bet you nobody will agree to it for various reasons and even if you got more funding it'd get spent elsewhere.
Define professional -- I have a client with 2 graphic artists who run the Adobe suite, and both are using aging mid-range desktops running Windows 7.
Now, they're both 20-somethings at the entry level of graphic arts and the graphic arts they do is mostly internal communications for a private association that is perpetually behind the curve on all things IT. But I'm not convinced they're not more common use cases for Photoshop, et al.
Not everyone is directly in-line with the design business in terms of either working as a freelance designer or part of the workflow in advertising, publishing or design for mass public consumption. A lot of them are entry level or servicing an internal audience on a part-time basis and can be expected to be running mid-tier business desktops.
The only time you ever see high-end purpose-bought workstations for Adobe products seems to be either relatively successful freelancers or people working "in the biz" that are part of the media/design business. But even when I worked in advertising, there was shit hardware in some of the prepress area.
I will say that the parent poster is kind of right in pidgeonholing the nature of the Slashdot audience these days. I think it's an example of how the economy has changed and a lot of people are pursuing free/cheap solutions not because they're in love with FOSS or some other technology interest, but because they just don't have any disposable income. Any posts on cell phones seems to really exemplify this, people really aggressive about how little they spend on some outer-tier NVMO for an old or cheap Android with home-rolled firmware. I just don't know how people have the time and energy for that.
I uprate movies because of the investment of effort and downrate TV shows due to the lack of effort.
It reminds me of the phenomenon that began to occur as I got progressively larger portable media players.
Going to work/class, long bus ride, long walk -- I would be stuck with whatever 1-3 cassettes I could be bothered to bring with. Until I got a "walkman" that had music skip for tape, I often just listened to whatever was playing not even changing tapes unless it was obviously convenient (sitting on the bus, preparing to leave). I can't say I *loved* everything I listened to, but I didn't feel like a lesser song by an artist I liked was horrible.
Once I got into larger media players, unless I got immediate satisfaction I hit skip. I think some hour walks I hit skip often enough to be at song 50 by the time I got to my destination. It was like I didn't really like anything.
I also wonder with streaming video if the high level of poor quality in online libraries doesn't lead to an expectation of poor quality. You start out thinking that this might just suck and it's all confirmation bias from there.
eBooks are less expensive but eBooks aren't a new product, they're just a new package for the same product in the same market (books). The price doesn't go down because eBooks represent a production/distribution innovation by book publishers and distributors.
I also think the argument for near zero production cost for new copies of software is too oversimplified. Software that is sold/licensed involves a complex licensing system that requires tracking and monitoring of software licenses to prevent the end-user from exploiting free copies. These days it also seems to involve a persistent long-term effort to provide bug fixes and security updates for software that's already been produced.
I'd kind of lump licensing and patches as part of the production cost of software, even though it doesn't align with the reality that mechanically duplicating existing software is essentially free and it isn't a requirement for actually producing additional copies. But those non-production costs seem like part of the long-term life cycle of the product, and I'm guessing the fact that software vendors are capable of making a profit means that the economics of software shows that it's not so mysterious that vendors can't find a pricing model.
It's funny, because I've always preferred Intel motherboards (when they made them) and network cards over the competition because their parts always had good documentation and software support.
I mean, maybe in some big sense they've been a bad economic actor and this specter/meltdown thing seems a real mess they can't easily fix for parts in the field, but Intel always seems less worse than so many other big technology companies.
Slashdot Mirror
How would this affect municipal regulation of cable companies? What if their monopoly agreements with Comcast, et al, were suddenly seen as unenforceable due to this becoming the exclusive domain of the Federal government?
So many states have public utilities commissions that regulate utilities, it's hard to see the Feds being able to nullify this in court. I would have thought that other utilities would have tried long ago to wipe out local regulations if this was a viable legal theory.
I agree with you, I guess my comment was more directed at how the entrenched financial interests make it hard to create such a regulation.
It seems like if that had been a telcom regulation in the 1980s, none of the carriers would have complained because it would have been easy to implement and seen as a barrier to competition.
Teaching people to read, write and do math is a mostly solved problem.
The real problem seems to be teaching kids who are poor, have a parent in jail, a parent who is chemically dependent and with neither parent having much of an education to begin with.
A lot of education has been corrupted trying to educate those kids, plus all the behavior management problems when schools are loaded up with all poor kids with behavior problems.
In the 3rd scenario, even a VOIP line has a phone number assigned. No matter how many steps removed they are from the PSTN, at some point they are a customer of a provider that is VOIP on one side and PSTN on the other that gets them assigned a block of numbers.
What I'm thinking is that this is true for inbound routing, but as most call billing in the US is done in a calling-party basis I guess I could see where a VoIP provider may be using some kind of dynamic outbound call routing system that routes outbound calls to the cheapest provider at the time.
Binding low-cost VoIP providers to the same carrier that they use for inbound routing I'd wager would make them howl as I'm sure dumping outbound calls on the cheapest PSTN they get access to is all about profit and making sure "unlimited" calling doesn't run them out of business.
There are few if any reasons to allow a caller to spoof a number that they don't actually own.
This is the real problem, carriers willingly accept forged calling party information without verifying if the originating ANI owns the number block.
My less cynical rationale is that there is so much outsourcing in the call center business, and these places sell their service of looking and sounding as if the outsourced entity actually was the parent business, including sending caller ID for numbers actually owned by their client. Validating calling party information against inbound trunks makes this much more complicated -- if you outsource call center services, you basically have to supply outgoing telecom circuits to your vendor.
My cynical rationale is that the telecom business knows that telephone fraud is good business and if they did something that made it harder, there would be less of it overall business would go down.
And I'm sure the VoIP business is also built around a million and one "carriers" that have no direct access to actual telecom carriers, like the early days if ISPs when anyone with a T1 to someone could setup a modem bank and be an ISP even though the data had to go through 3 tiers of other ISPs just to actually get close to the actual Internet.
Even better, just be downright insulting of their class and ethnicity.
If you're just kind of insulting, they hang up on you. If you say something like "why do you filthy wogs live in cardboard boxes" or "that dot on your mom's forehead is so where I know to pee" they will stick around and engage you.
I've had these morons practically trying to keep me on the phone so they can keep raging at me. Once they start threatening you it's even more fun because you can just poke fun at how utterly powerless they are, which riles them even more.
I'd feel bad about all this, but these are people who are purposefully trying to steal from me. I have no sympathy for them.
What's funny is that most photos are more detailed and higher resolution than most videos. The video captures motion, but is usually lower (often much) lower pixel density, worse color quality, and often suffers from poor image stabilization.
This doesn't add up. I bought a phone from AT&T and once it was paid for, I went to AT&T and they walked me through the unlocking process.
I planned a trip to the UK and a friend mailed me an activated prepaid Asda SIM. When the pilot announced we were landing in 30 minutes, I ejected my AT&T SIM and inserted the Asda SIM.
Once we landed, I immediately had voice and data service on Asda's network.
The only carrier involvement was the unlocking process.
My most recent iPhone I bought unlocked from Apple directly. I don't even think I went to AT&T, I just moved my SIM to the new phone and it worked.
I think the parent poster's concern is legitimate -- this is easy and only involves a tiny card now. eSIM switching sounds way more complicated. I can't just pop into a shop and buy a prepaid SIM when I land unless there's some method of reprogramming my SIM on the phone with some code from a package and both the phone and the local network are smart enough to do this over the air without costing me a million dollars in roaming fees, finding a landline, using a laptop, etc.
My experience with carriers makes me believe they will do everything in their power to make this complicated and diffcult.
For better or for worse, success in life goes to the most successful and that generally means people who are the total package -- intelligence, charisma, attractiveness, social skills and a stable, self-regulated individual psychology.
Most everyone isn't the total package, they're only the partial package and only get the partial rewards that come with partial success. Unfortunately we've reached the point where people feel like they deserve the full rewards for only partial success.
I think some of the problem, though, is that our economic system has become so dominated by a winner-take-all mindset that we've kind of eliminated the idea of partial rewards for partial success. It's become either total success and total rewards, or no rewards at all. Partial success has become about the same outcome as total failure.
And I think we've built that unfortunate bias into our educational system and ultimately into our kids' psychology. I think we've created a society that generates anxiety and fear because we wind up punishing any failure and making that failure status permanent. Get behind in 8th grade? Now you're fucked. No AP classes in high school, no good college admission, no good degree, and a lifetime of economic and social marginalization.
I realize that this isn't completely true -- people can and do overcome problems, but the idea is so pervasive that I think we've put an entire generation into a permanent state of anxiety.
I used oxycodone for about a year and quitting was no big deal, so the addictive effect must be very mild.
Humans will always find drugs appealing as long as we have a dopamine reward system, which I'd guess exists precisely because it aids in preserving the species -- rewarding reproduction, eating, etc.
The problem with humans is we've figured out how to trigger a dopamine response without the "necessary, species-preserving" actions but I guess it's part of the price you pay for cognitive self-awareness.
Technology innovation has kind of stopped being about simply making better products, not its about using it to drive product segmentation, long roll-outs of features which maximize an innovation's earning power and driving lock-in and all its derivative product sales.
USB seems to suffer particularly because while it is a standard, it's at the mercy of actual hardware vendors to go ahead and implement it and they run it through their profit maximizing models first, leading to weird, slow adoptions and selective feature enablements.
I don't know about the last 2-3 years, but until then they did not allow pairing mice, only keyboards.
My guess was that it was a strategic decision to bolster the developer focus on touch-enabled UIs and not devolve into a mouse-centric UI.
IMHO, they were overly strict about it and should have allowed mice pairing but forced developers who wanted a mouse to work in their app to use mouse APIs instead of just roughly translating clicks into screen taps globally. There is some direct 1-1 mouse/touch functionality mapping but there are some elements of touch that wouldn't translate well into mice actions, so I can see a little why they wouldn't just make mice a global substitute for touch.
All that being said, I think some of the use potential for iPads as laptop substitutes is lost without a mouse.
I think this is all reasonable, but I would add the emphasis and lack of mouse support in tablets, especially iPads (which had the broadest platform adoption) hurt the use cases of tablets.
I felt like there was a lot more I could have been doing with my iPad if I had a mouse that wasn't specifically limited by the screen or CPU. Editing larger text documents, light graphics stuff (ie, PowerPoint/Paint type, not Photoshop) was all super cumbersome with touch-screen only input.
I was excited about using it as an RDP platform, but holy shit the lack of a mouse made it totally limiting.
I mean there was other stuff that was limiting -- a lot of the software was either literally upscaled phone applications or applications that deliberately chose Fisher-Price level oversimplification.
But much of it was user-input driven, even with a BT keyboard paired. That got me useful text input (so long as I didn't have to edit much). But once you got beyond couchsurfing, it was more the lack of a mouse than software or CPU that seemed to be the culprit. I didn't want to make a high-end workstation out of it, just do productivity stuff beyond what touchscreen wasn't a total hindrance for.
I always wonder what would have happened if Apple had decided that a keyboard and more importantly a mouse was an acceptable iPad peripheral.
I mostly liked my iPads (1 & 3) but over time felt hemmed in by the lack of a mouse. I had a keyboard case which made text input a lot better, but the lack of a mouse and the clumsy nature of screen touch made editing anything an impossible chore and even the promise of RDP to desktops unappealing for anything more than basic status checks or the most marginal of activities.
If Apple had allowed mice, would the iPad have gained more ground from PCs?
Who is capable of getting appointed to a high enough level White House job to participate in whatever "resistance" this is and "gets pressured into it by their folks"?
I think we're talking seasoned politicos in their 30s-40s-50s here, not 22 year olds who have to follow mom and dad's career advice.
On larger calls with a lot of fairly anonymous people we will play mute roulette.
You mash the mute button really fast a bunch of times without looking and then make some strange noise. The "loser" is the one who doesn't have the phone on mute.
I have to deal with building security systems sometimes and nearly always the RFID locks (which encompasses the RFID reader, secondary keypad if there is one, and electromechanical lock mechanism) aren't ethernet enabled.
The "locks" are hardwired to controllers which can be networked but are programmed by some software application which in turn places each keycard into whatever access groups its supposed to have. The controllers are then updated with add/deletes of card profiles. I see about half the controllers networked in these systems, and about half have some old laptop with a crossover or serial cable connected for programming.
The network can be completely down and the card access system works just fine, the only problem is you couldn't alter the controller database or access profiles (except with the ones with a dedicated PC).
I was literally at a facility Friday that was setup this way when it was built to manufacture fentanyl patches, so I'm assuming the DEA considered it secure. My customer took over the building and it had zero network, the old tenant literally programmed a dozen "master" keycards and left them to new ownership right before they yanked all the switches.
The main security control panel was in the computer room with a dedicated PC for card access management, but since the new owners only make soap and not fentanyl, they decided to network the card access PC so HR and facilities management could alter card profiles remotely. Obviously this is something of a security weakness, since you can ultimately hack accounts to get to the management PC and reprogram access card profiles, but you can't actually work the locks themselves as far as I can tell.
The bigger problem, IMHO, is that companies are cheap and look at the card access systems as a fixed system that needs no upgrading and no maintenance contract. The software is shitty with poor OS portability, the ancient management PC dies and nobody can reprogram cards for a couple of weeks until the vendor is tracked down, a maintenance agreement signed and a bunch of software updates installed.
Many larger subs are a shitpost idiocracy of noise, but the smaller ones can be pretty reasonable.
r/futurology is a terrible example of a subreddit. I think it might be a default subreddit, which means it gets a lot of random visits, and 99% of the posts there are pretty much fantasy clickbait. "Scientists discover way to use Earth's rotation to create free energy and world peace."
I will say that it is a harsh web site. When your're wrong on most subs, man, are you wrong.
My city's local subreddit is also dominated by a very narrow political/age spectrum where deviating from the party line will result in bans. I got banned for 30 days (only sub, ever) even though I had a positive karma of something like +5 for my history in the sub over hundreds of posts and comments.
Overall I mostly like reddit, but there are times where it's just too mean or too stupid. You have to put some effort into finding worthwhile subs and avoid most of the big ones.
I don't think local funding of police will change due to the distributed nature of the US political structure. Plus local funding == local control. Nobody wants a national police force accountable only to Congress or a giant Federal bureaucracy.
Too many police in cars or placed in a way isolating themselves themselves from the public. Their is too much police hunting down the bad guys, and not enough serve and protect where they are patrolling the streets talking to the people.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. But AFAIK, police labor budgets for the most part have already been normalized to absorb the savings that comes with the efficiencies associated with putting cops in cars and having them serve a much broader geographical area than any cop on foot could.
Bottom line, police forces have nowhere near the manpower necessary to go back to foot patrols and couldn't go back to foot patrols without a major funding increase. Most cities that need it the most (ie, more poor and minorities) have awful tax bases that can barely support their existing municipal services.
My city, which is rich and well run in comparison to Baltimore doesn't even have the manpower levels to give "low crime" neighborhoods even cursory patrols in cars to stem the rising nuisance property crime we face.
Obviously we spend ridiculous amounts of money on police budgets, but if you want to repurpose that for beat cops you're talking a comprehensive bureaucratic overhaul of the whole system, something unlikely to ever happen. The only other solution is lobbying for major tax hikes to fund it, and I'd bet you nobody will agree to it for various reasons and even if you got more funding it'd get spent elsewhere.
Define professional -- I have a client with 2 graphic artists who run the Adobe suite, and both are using aging mid-range desktops running Windows 7.
Now, they're both 20-somethings at the entry level of graphic arts and the graphic arts they do is mostly internal communications for a private association that is perpetually behind the curve on all things IT. But I'm not convinced they're not more common use cases for Photoshop, et al.
Not everyone is directly in-line with the design business in terms of either working as a freelance designer or part of the workflow in advertising, publishing or design for mass public consumption. A lot of them are entry level or servicing an internal audience on a part-time basis and can be expected to be running mid-tier business desktops.
The only time you ever see high-end purpose-bought workstations for Adobe products seems to be either relatively successful freelancers or people working "in the biz" that are part of the media/design business. But even when I worked in advertising, there was shit hardware in some of the prepress area.
I will say that the parent poster is kind of right in pidgeonholing the nature of the Slashdot audience these days. I think it's an example of how the economy has changed and a lot of people are pursuing free/cheap solutions not because they're in love with FOSS or some other technology interest, but because they just don't have any disposable income. Any posts on cell phones seems to really exemplify this, people really aggressive about how little they spend on some outer-tier NVMO for an old or cheap Android with home-rolled firmware. I just don't know how people have the time and energy for that.
I uprate movies because of the investment of effort and downrate TV shows due to the lack of effort.
It reminds me of the phenomenon that began to occur as I got progressively larger portable media players.
Going to work/class, long bus ride, long walk -- I would be stuck with whatever 1-3 cassettes I could be bothered to bring with. Until I got a "walkman" that had music skip for tape, I often just listened to whatever was playing not even changing tapes unless it was obviously convenient (sitting on the bus, preparing to leave). I can't say I *loved* everything I listened to, but I didn't feel like a lesser song by an artist I liked was horrible.
Once I got into larger media players, unless I got immediate satisfaction I hit skip. I think some hour walks I hit skip often enough to be at song 50 by the time I got to my destination. It was like I didn't really like anything.
I also wonder with streaming video if the high level of poor quality in online libraries doesn't lead to an expectation of poor quality. You start out thinking that this might just suck and it's all confirmation bias from there.
eBooks are less expensive but eBooks aren't a new product, they're just a new package for the same product in the same market (books). The price doesn't go down because eBooks represent a production/distribution innovation by book publishers and distributors.
I also think the argument for near zero production cost for new copies of software is too oversimplified. Software that is sold/licensed involves a complex licensing system that requires tracking and monitoring of software licenses to prevent the end-user from exploiting free copies. These days it also seems to involve a persistent long-term effort to provide bug fixes and security updates for software that's already been produced.
I'd kind of lump licensing and patches as part of the production cost of software, even though it doesn't align with the reality that mechanically duplicating existing software is essentially free and it isn't a requirement for actually producing additional copies. But those non-production costs seem like part of the long-term life cycle of the product, and I'm guessing the fact that software vendors are capable of making a profit means that the economics of software shows that it's not so mysterious that vendors can't find a pricing model.
It's funny, because I've always preferred Intel motherboards (when they made them) and network cards over the competition because their parts always had good documentation and software support.
I mean, maybe in some big sense they've been a bad economic actor and this specter/meltdown thing seems a real mess they can't easily fix for parts in the field, but Intel always seems less worse than so many other big technology companies.