Why would it be illegal for them to make a browser that works well with their site? 90% of mobile apps are browsers configured to work with only one site. Are most mobile apps illegal?
You mentioned that a lot of people use Chrome, are you thinking of monopoly laws? A monopoly is when one company is the only company providing a product. That would be of Chrome was the only browser, if the user had no other choice.
In fact, according to your link Chrome has 41% market share. Other sources say less, but anyway that's nowhere near 100%. You can't use any browser other than Chrome? MOST people use some other browser.
Are you new here or do you legitimately not remember the IE browser tying issues? You don't need 100% market share to be a monopoly, you just need to be able to exercise price/feature/etc control without (realistic) chance of competition. "Google is making a change to its browser that favors its own sites and we all just have to deal with it because that's the way it is" is pretty much the definition of a technology monopoly.
> Pull up out front, get out, and have the car park itself
Why have the car park itself at the mall at all? Why not have it head home so someone else can use it while you shop? For that matter, I think car ownership itself will become much rarer, and membership in car collectives will be a much more common. Why spend $500 or more a month to have a car, plus insurance maintenance and gas, parking costs, etc, when a self driving car collective can give you a vehicle on demand right to your door that will take you to transit, shopping etc and cost a lot less?
Expect this to be brought up a lot by opponents: "They don't want self-driving cars, they want removal of self-owned cars and -- little-by-little -- eventually the wholesale banning of them (via legal/financial/liability regulations)"
Based on some of the comments I've seen, they might be right.
I'll feel a lot more confident about self-driving cars when they're being promoted by people who DON'T live in mega-urban areas like New York and San Francisco and don't have an underlying hatred of car culture to begin with.
An increasing number of jobs can be replaced by robots. Eventually everyone is out of work.
I sometimes lurk in a forum which has degenerated into a Tea Party session where they tell each other that the best thing to do is to save taxes by getting rid of most government jobs, I saw that the current target was the Department of Education a few days back.
What comes next? Butlerian Jihad? An army is a necessity because the excluded are going to revolt at some point.
To be fair, much of the original intent of the Tea Party was a reduction in *Federal* government size... it's a process argument about where certain layers of society should be governed from. Ironically, it's the progressives that want to centralize everything, on the grounds of efficiency, standardization, and soul-crushing nationwide conformity.
Tea Partiers want(ed) to abolish the US Department of Education because nothing about "running education" is mentioned in the Constitution. That doesn't mean state level DoE's are to be shuttered, or that local school boards should be abolished. In fact -- especially within the context of this story -- that will probably lead to *increased* overall employment, as some of the central functions will be duplicated in 50 different state-level agencies. That's a good thing in that regards, and it doesn't change the "jurisdictional load" sitting on top of the average American citizen, while actually allowing them to have more responsive government that caters better to their wishes.
... That's seriously the only reason I can think of why someone would think that putting technology into an oversight role over humanity is a good thing.
A generation raised on YouTube and Google algorithms and that doesn't seem to value freedom of expression or thought also doesn't understand why humans, process, and procedural protections are necessary. In turn, that makes things less efficient than they theoretically could be, but a technocratic Orwellian state as envisioned by dipshit solutionists will eventually come to the conclusion that life would be a lot more efficient if you just get rid of humans altogether.
I'm honestly a bit confused how people don't see this. Did they not see T2 growing up? Did they not watch any dystopian 70's sci-fi? Have they never heard of The Twilight Zone and its continual reminders about how hubris catches up with people? What is it?
This is such a mindboggling position for people to take. The entire concept of open source is about flexibility but people think it's fine to blindly force one option down everyone's throats, regardless of what they want. It's surreal to watch. We have 9,000 distributions but only One True Init, apparently.
So do your own. The entire concept of open source is flexibility, and absolutely nothing is stopping you. Distros making decisions inherently remove some flexibility for the sake of delivering a functional platform.
This is highly specious reasoning. systemd's developers' stated intent is to standardize (read: take over) all userspace initialization. They've accomplished (much of) this through a combination of embrace and extend, land grabs, intentionally breaking unapproved setups, tying functionality together unnecessarily or for highly trivial reasons, arm-wrestling other distributions with self-fulfilling prophecies, and generally being assholes. In fact, they've been doing many of the same things that Microsoft did in the late 90's with browser integration and which we all fought heavily against.
As a result of this, though, and partially as a specific result of their policy banning the packaging (and even OPTIONAL packaging) of initscripts at distro level in Fedora (the subject of this article), that it's become more and more difficult to revert out of it. Nothing may be *stopping* us (hence forks), but it's being intentionally made more and more difficult by a complete ass. Don't pee on my head and tell me it's raining.
So, Mr. "IT Worker", how do you enjoy waiting a minimum of 20 seconds (assuming 100% utilization, no other data flows competing for throughput, no congestion or signal degradation, and zero protocol overhead) to save a 10 MB Excel file to a SMB shared drive?
That was fairly common for remote access situations 5 years ago, and depending on where you lived, DSL even in major urban areas 10 years ago. I survived. Rural is always going to require higher investment for infrastructure. News flash: Road costs scale with length of the road that needs to be built.
How do you enjoy waiting a minimum of 350 seconds (again, assuming no overhead, etc.) to download a 175 MB Eclipse installation?
How is it waiting a day or more to download a major update package for Windows or Office or a distribution upgrade for your GNU/Linux distro (depending on what you use)?
Maybe if idiots stopped with the size creep, he wouldn't *have* to download a 175 MB Eclipse installation? Again, patches have happened in the past and we all managed to survive. Stop building shit that takes up 500 MB when 50MB is fine. Stop creating games that ship on a blu-ray disk and then require a 35GB update file on install.
So, at this point, we have: myself, for whose job a 10 Mbps connection is grossly inadequate; and *you*, for whose job a 4 Mbps connection is apparently adequate or even good. That's a small enough sample as to call either one of our accounts anecdotal.
I've been lucky enough to work at ISPs with their office in space rented from the datacenter for about half of my career, meaning my desktop was basically on-net, a few firewalls away from our core routers. The first time I worked at a location where the office *wasn't* directly connected to the datacenter (20Mbps point-to-point link) was painful, but I survived. More to the point, there's relatively little sysadmin work that *requires* high local connectivity, because doing work on remote systems is an option. It's the spoiled folks that think that they need to download everything from github to their Mac, or don't know how to work over SSH, or think file transfers can't be performed directly, or don't use local http proxies, or local mirrors for ISOs for your org, etc, that don't get it.
The problem is that you can't really look at a population of people overall and just pull a number out of your ass and say "that number is enough for anyone!". When you do that, you are effectively limiting the professions and the types of work that person can pursue from that location. I'm sure I'm not the only one whose job requires a bit more than 4 Mbps, and I'm sure you're not the only one whose job could be accomplished with a 2800 baud modem. There has to be a balance somewhere, but I think it lies a good ways north of 4 Mbps.
Strongly disagree. Remember, you're talking about a *minimum* to qualify. 4Mbps is plenty for textual communication and sufficient for a lot more. This is supposed to be an analog (no pun intended) to the Universal Lifeline Telephone Service, which was about making sure that rural, poor, or remote locations were able to get working dialtone service at a minimum, not that everyone got all the fanciest features everyone could provide.
4Mbps is sufficient "dialtone" broadband internet access. Not great, sufficient.
Previously, the amount of information gleamable was limited by the need to have physical access to the court. Someone would have to go down to the courthouse, hall of records, or similar location, and physically look at things. Now, one button and the entire country is searchable.
Unfortunately, this ease of information access removes the grey area of "public, but requires time/effort to get and is not easily accessible," and as a result, it's a lot more black and white. The parallels with massive aggregation of data, Hack Once Break Everywhere security issues, and even physical access to an iPhone by the FBI being sufficient or insufficient to overcome local security options, are all similar technological areas where a dichotomy is coming into play.
I can't say I think this is a good thing. Grey areas are good. Humans are grey, and technical models of human society should have grey considerations as well.
Ehh, I've actually been rather pleasantly surprised at the quality of the Genius picks. I also do tend to rate music more (always have) rather than just using the fav button that's available nowadays. Perhaps that gives their recommendation engine a bit more to go on. There are several artists I've actually gone out and searched for more of specifically because it came in on a Genius playlist.
What kind of people are they appointing to SCOTUS these days? It seems that this bunch of legal illiterates doesn't even understand the meaning of jurisdiction.
A judge can't authorize the search or seizure of something that is outside of their jurisdiction, because they have no authority to grant it outside of their jurisdiction. Jurisdiction means area of legal authority. The court can't give the FBI legal authority to do something in a place where the court has no legal authority itself. It can't give something that it doesn't have.
If lack of jurisdiction were no barrier then the judges of North Korea or Iran would be able to authorize whatever they liked within the territory of the United States. Is SCOTUS OK with that?
You've answered your own question: The Supreme Court of North Korea (or whatever) can authorize all it wants to; it has no jurisdiction here.
What this ruling does is basically say that a judge doesn't need to *pre-determine* that it has jurisdiction for an anonymous warrant where the location is unknown. This solves a painful chicken-and-egg problem when you're trying to go after someone with a search warrant.
If it turns out they were outside the US, the warrant is unenforceable. If they were in the US but the court for some other reason doesn't have jurisdiction, the warrant is null and void (and search results can't be used as evidence in a criminal case).
In other words, this is a lot of huff and puff about not much of anything.
Bill Gates said this in 1990. We are no closer to "AI" than we were at that time. Google is an advertising company. Not good for much else than delivering ads.
Have to disagree with this. We're closer to AI now through simple sheer complexity. An individual neuron is simple; throw enough simulated neurons together (as in: "the cloud") and you'll get something emergent out of it no matter what.
Google is an advertising company, yes, but advertising is really just attempted control. People pay Google to attempt to steer them to products. Eventually, the "steering" is intelligent enough (connotation halfway intended) that the advertising is secondary to the information, and the information is secondary to the ability to control. (Imagine Google AdWords 3.0, where a "cheer yourself up" pill company advertises to people who seem to be depressed, and Google decides to re-rank the search results for your custom search to get you more depressed about the world, then shows you the ad.)
Google and Facebook together can sway an election. That's what Silicon Valley is now. AI is just the next step.
Did Cruz win the primary, or something? It's a little presumptuous, otherwise. Oh, sure, he's picking a potential VP to increase his nominability during the contested election, but why would he pick a boat-anchor like Carly "right-shoring" Fiorina? She's as much as, if not more than, a weasel as he is.
He doesn't need to, for two reasons:
1) Deciding on a prospective running mate gives a clearer idea of "what you'd get" by supporting his candidacy, 2) He's not running to win, he's running to draw.
He can't win the nomination outright, so at this point it's all about keeping Trump from getting over the top. Once the convention begins and the first ballot concludes, all bets are off.
If Trump doesn't get it on the first ballot, it'll probably be a dark horse that comes away with the nomination. (That is, not Cruz or Trump.)
At one point, common law parliamentary procedure... the basics for how deliberative assemblies, organizations, and basically any other sort of self-organizing collection of people of a Britannic heritage work was widely known. We also had basic civics, so people knew about things like federalism.
Nowadays, we don't have a great grasp of either. Anyone who thinks the system is "rigged" simply doesn't understand how the process works. First of all, it's a Republic, not a Democracy. Secondly, a political party -- or any other type of organization -- is free to write its own rules for how it conducts business, who's a voting member, or anything else. The DNC has "superdelegates;" the RNC doesn't. If you think superdelegates are a bad thing, maybe you should have your delegates say something. If you think superdelagates are awesome, maybe you should ask your delegates to add them in.
Quit complaining; start making motions. Start running for office. Start attending county meetings for your political party. (News flash: That's what the Tea Partiers did, and that's how they began to get more control over the GOP party apparatus in 2009-2010.)
Although I'd normally snark this one to death, having flashing LEDs at a crossing for pedestrian control *as well as* for vehicle control isn't a bad idea, really. We have a couple of those here in San Diego on notoriously unsafe crossings, or areas where cars have a tendency to fail to notice the normal crosswalk signaling but they don't want to put a full traffic light in.
Those with failing eyesight or using guide-dogs might also benefit from this.
It's a horrible thing to *have* to put in, but as probably just one arrow in the quiver of options for making some specific intersection safer it's fine by me.
Getting folks in the Bay Area to realize that is still an unsolved problem. Maybe they have an AI team working on it.
In all seriousness, I saw this a lot when working within a monitoring team, and in consulting I've done for other orgs. Big Data is great for vast, multi-dimensional analysis of massive amounts of data, but it's not a substitute for domain knowledge about *WHAT* you're monitoring, critically thinking about what you're looking for and what types of failure modes might occur, and simple(r) heuristics for triggers.
Trend analysis is very useful as an adjunct, for example, but within a server monitoring context it's not a *substitute* for having hard limits on, say, CPU load, or HTTP response time, or memory usage.
Somehow, people managed to come to conclusions and make good decisions even before we had terabytes of raw data being sifted through by statistical algorithms to come up with a result.
To place it into a broader cultural context, I see this in parallel with "data fetishisation" where nothing at all can be possibly true unless Science. And Data. Hipster praying at the altar of data.gov as some sort of left-wing (or Millennial) shibboleth for smug certainty when the basics -- the entry-level, basic 101 class of domain knowledge for the field -- is being forgotten.
I'm all for bringing in new tech and new analytic techniques, but you can't look at it as a panacea for failing to understand what's going on in your domain on a philosophical level.
I think you've got the math backwards. Google has enough power right now, between browser control, Chrome push updates, certificate blocking, "malware blocking", Android telemetry, Android Web Service control, google.com, Google Ad Words, and 3rd party tracking, and the multiple-million server networks behind everything, to tip the election.
Anyone dumb enough to bring an Android device into a non-secure area could be spied on by their Google phone if Alphabet, Inc. really wanted to, which of course leads to the ability to pressure or even outright extort if it came down to it. And if you don't think self-important hipster solutionists obsessed with changing the world "for the greater good" might see the ends as justifying the means, you might not be familiar with what people at Uber did a while back, and also suggested as an operation:
The news follows another incident this week in which a senior executive at Uber made a grovelling apology after suggesting putting a team together to dig up dirt on journalists who criticise his company. Emil Michael, who made the remarks at a private dinner in Manhattan, said he had dreamed up an eight-man team who would find out about writers' personal lives and families so that Uber could discredit them.
Combined with Facebook employees thinking in any way, shape, or form, that "preventing Candidate XYZ from winning" is ethical, there's far more to fear from the Cloud than from DC at this point, and this is coming from a libertarian-ish, small (federal) government, Tea Party-ish, neo-federalist conservative.
What's funny is that the spam problem was solved years ago. Can't remember the last time a piece of spam hit my inbox. You need a new example.
Well, I'd put it more as:
(-) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
For the most part, and for most consumers, there now IS a centrally-controlling authority for email: Google. And if they're not using Gmail, they're using Yahoo Mail or Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com. Combined, they can basically dictate filtration rules for non-business US spam filtering. And for B2B spam filtering, there's a whollle lot of outsourcing that gets done to one of very few vendors. The meme writers (and all of us back in the day), didn't foresee that distributed (ISP-level or lower) email that you use Eudora, Entourage, Thinderbird, etc. would go away for most users.
It's worth noting that outside the US, and especially in developing areas, spam is still a pretty big problem, even moreso if you consider security/attack vectors as "spam"
Back in the day, every once in a while someone would propose some "this will solve everything" solution to the problem of spam, and we'd reply with the list of many reasons why it wouldn't work. I feel like we need to update the meme below for all of the technocratic solutions coming out of Silicon Valley nowadays by people who don't particularly live in the real world, and/or are millennials.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Now how about more of you merchants finally move forward with contactless payments?
That involves RFID and/or NFC, right? How does "add wireless stuff to it" make any system at all more secure over an overt and obvious physical interaction?
There are only three types of people I know who locally develop on Macs: 1) Devs developing a native Mac or iOS application 2) Devs who need to make substantive code changes (or test cycles) when they're off line 3) Devs who don't know how to log in to a remote server to do their development
For #1, you have my sympathies. #2 should go head to a bar, or spend time with the family instead of working after hours. #3 probably need to be hit with a clue-bat, which will hopefully dislodge that "devops" post-it note they've got attached to all their business cards.
The problem with you argument is why is places like LA or NY wired up the yazoo? They are not. Just those 2 cities alone are bigger than many countries that are better wired.
Once those are wired up THEN we can start talking about wiring up the suburbs and rural areas. We are not even doing that very well.
I don't know, but it sounds like a local problem.
I live in San Diego. We have two cable monopolies (Time Warner in north county and Cox Cable in the rest), plus the ILEC (PacBell originally, now AT&T of course), for high-speed wireline DSL. DSL speeds of up to 75Mbps are available in most of non-rural half of the county nowadays. Cable speeds range from 6Mbps all the way up to 300Mbps in most of the county, depending on your package.
In addition, there are small local WISPs, wired operators, and in-building companies serving rural communities and certain high-density areas where it makes sense. I live in Downtown San Diego now and have 500Mbps symmetric through one of those in-building specialists, with a 300Mbps/50Mbps backup through Cox Cable.
Maybe you should move here. We have better burritos anyway:)
There is a reason all of this is not wired up yet. It is because the last mile is not rented out. It is held hostage at negotiation time for more monopoly.
Full Disclosure: I've worked at several local ISPs here over there years.
That was entirely the point of CLECs and the CO-based DSL ecosystem. That basically entirely collapsed at the end of the dot-com era because -- guess what -- rolling trucks out to do initial setup is expensive. (I spent many a night doing internal DSL escalations to Bell Atlantic via Covad to get some customer up...) If you want to lease a line from the ILEC and start that whole party back up, you're more than welcome to. Perhaps the math would work out better now.
What I can tell you, though, is that running your OWN lines out to customers outside of a limited environment is expensive and really only makes sense if you're willing to go head-long into bankruptcy after you've laid down your zillions of dollars into what's still basically dark fiber. Hell, even Google is exercising more caution than is characteristic here.
The size of the country doesn't matter. You can have fiber internet access everywhere you have power lines.
The size of the country scales (more than linearly) with the amount of infrastructure. France has the largest power grid in Europe at 100K km of residential/low voltage lines, the US has 10x that in high voltage lines, and maybe around 400-500x that in low voltage lines. (No one really knows, but scaling with # of miles of paved roads is probably a decent approximation.)
The existing infrastructure proves the feasibility. The rest is just haggling over the price and who's going to pay for it.
The existing infrastructure was built over the last century.
Who's going to pay for it is the big thing. Frankly, I wouldn't have minded if the Trillion-dollar stimulus package in 2009 had gone to infrastructure like this. Upgrading our power, wire line (POTS), and cable system infrastructure is a massive capital undertaking but also has US national security purposes and civil defense applications. If you have money in your pocket you simply *have* to spend, you should always spend it on capital, not Op-Ex. Unfortunately, the teachers' unions and politically empowered Democrats complained and a lot of that money ended up going to state budget operations for education to prevent public sector cut-backs and to fund left-wing green initiatives. (Also, "construction projects primarily employ men and are therefore sexist".) Your tax dollars at work, poorly.
If you *don't* happen to have a dozen or two billion dollars in your back pocket, then justifying the expenditure is more difficult. Most locations have adequate broadband speed to the internet.
Having 8 Netflix streams in HD is not a civil right.
Which is a great excuse to whip out when big cities can get as good of a deal on broadband downtown as one can get in Korea, Japan or Switzerland. Until then claiming Manhattan's internet sucks because of Kansas is bullshit.
Manhattan's internet sucks because of Manhattan, New York County, or the State of New York, as far as this San Diegan 3000 miles away is concerned.
Along with different densities, there are also different regulations and municipal codes out there (which is how it should be -- local control is a Good Thing).
San Diego County (which is actually pretty huge -- covers half the state east-west and has a massive rural component) has two cable providers, DSL from PacBell, and then the various cell networks of varying degrees of coverage. Having previously worked at a CO-based DSL company here, I can safely say that the economics of rolling trucks directly just doesn't work. And replacing copper with fiber is expensive, which lends itself to industry cooperation in the creation of conduits. But when you think about it, that's exactly what we have already with poles and new undergrounding.
The only real tech game-changer is wireless, but even that depends on wireline eventually, so you end up with coordination and cooperation among the networks and the tower tech companies.
The point about rural Kansas is that a lot of people are prescribing some sort of mass, nationwide solution for internet in the US. Many times those folks don't appreciate the scale of a truly nationwide solution. Cities are laid out quite differently, have different urban/rural rations, etc. Frankly, each US state has its own problems and probably needs -- at most -- a statewide solution. I don't need to be involved in Kansas's conclusions any more than I do NYC's.
If you've never traveled across it (not flown across -- traveled across) or you've never been to the US at all and just know what LA looks like from the movies, do yourself a favor and take a look at a map first, and compare the scale to $your_country. The US is huge. And especially the western half of the country, where most areas with residents were built in the last 100 years, and most of the rest is completely open land.
"Internet access" for the downtown core of a major city, for the suburbs and residential areas outside of dense urban zones, for small towns, and for rural areas 3 miles from your nearest neighbor mean *vastly* different things. Infrastructure investment and wired vs wireless communications in some areas carry tradeoffs involving public safety, reliability, access, and available technology.
So before you comment, take that into account. Thanks.
Maybe it depends on your age or your country, but I asked my friends about it and there's only three of them who use Facebook and none use Twitter.
Speaking just about the US (internationally the numbers vary for lots of reasons).
Fifty-eight percent of the entire adult population have an account, a study released Friday found. Looking only at adults who use the Internet — 81% of all Americans — Facebook's numbers are much higher. Almost three-quarters of online adults used Facebook, the survey by the Pew Research Center found. link
You (and your group) are definitely an outlier. I can count on two hands the number of people I know (ages 15-60) who don't have a Facebook and have never had one (vs have disabled it or don't use it as much).
Twitter is less common, I'd agree, but for those "highly involved" in politics or who follow news heavily, I'd wager there are similar numbers there. For any sort of Breaking News, there's hardly any substitute.
It's one this for Facebook, Inc. to take a political position and back it with money or what-not.
It's another thing all together for Facebook as a service provider to treat their custumers differently based on their political views or to allow some political discourse but not other dscourse.
The latter usually backfires unless the "silenced" topics are almost universally reviled by your customers and prospective customers or at least that the censorship has nearly-universal customer support.
In other words, if Facebook treated pro-Trump content differently than pro-other-candidate material, it will bite them bad.
That's where monopoly positions, especially monopoly positions in mass communication, come into play. If there are little other options compared to the "ease" of staying (because everyone else is there) then you don't have any realistic leverage.
This was different in the days of Altavista vs Yahoo vs Google, and Friendster vs MySpace vs Facebook, but not any more. Google and FB (and Apple, at an OS level) essentially control your fortunes.
Just ask any business whose Google pagerank has been mysteriously obliterated and is no longer being returned as a result.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would it be illegal for them to make a browser that works well with their site? 90% of mobile apps are browsers configured to work with only one site. Are most mobile apps illegal?
You mentioned that a lot of people use Chrome, are you thinking of monopoly laws? A monopoly is when one company is the only company providing a product. That would be of Chrome was the only browser, if the user had no other choice.
In fact, according to your link Chrome has 41% market share. Other sources say less, but anyway that's nowhere near 100%. You can't use any browser other than Chrome? MOST people use some other browser.
Are you new here or do you legitimately not remember the IE browser tying issues? You don't need 100% market share to be a monopoly, you just need to be able to exercise price/feature/etc control without (realistic) chance of competition. "Google is making a change to its browser that favors its own sites and we all just have to deal with it because that's the way it is" is pretty much the definition of a technology monopoly.
IMO you're still only seeing the edges of this.
> Pull up out front, get out, and have the car park itself
Why have the car park itself at the mall at all? Why not have it head home so someone else can use it while you shop? For that matter, I think car ownership itself will become much rarer, and membership in car collectives will be a much more common. Why spend $500 or more a month to have a car, plus insurance maintenance and gas, parking costs, etc, when a self driving car collective can give you a vehicle on demand right to your door that will take you to transit, shopping etc and cost a lot less?
Expect this to be brought up a lot by opponents: "They don't want self-driving cars, they want removal of self-owned cars and -- little-by-little -- eventually the wholesale banning of them (via legal/financial/liability regulations)"
Based on some of the comments I've seen, they might be right.
I'll feel a lot more confident about self-driving cars when they're being promoted by people who DON'T live in mega-urban areas like New York and San Francisco and don't have an underlying hatred of car culture to begin with.
An increasing number of jobs can be replaced by robots.
Eventually everyone is out of work.
I sometimes lurk in a forum which has degenerated into a Tea Party session where they tell each other that the best thing to do is to save taxes by getting rid of most government jobs, I saw that the current target was the Department of Education a few days back.
What comes next? Butlerian Jihad? An army is a necessity because the excluded are going to revolt at some point.
To be fair, much of the original intent of the Tea Party was a reduction in *Federal* government size... it's a process argument about where certain layers of society should be governed from. Ironically, it's the progressives that want to centralize everything, on the grounds of efficiency, standardization, and soul-crushing nationwide conformity.
Tea Partiers want(ed) to abolish the US Department of Education because nothing about "running education" is mentioned in the Constitution. That doesn't mean state level DoE's are to be shuttered, or that local school boards should be abolished. In fact -- especially within the context of this story -- that will probably lead to *increased* overall employment, as some of the central functions will be duplicated in 50 different state-level agencies. That's a good thing in that regards, and it doesn't change the "jurisdictional load" sitting on top of the average American citizen, while actually allowing them to have more responsive government that caters better to their wishes.
... That's seriously the only reason I can think of why someone would think that putting technology into an oversight role over humanity is a good thing.
A generation raised on YouTube and Google algorithms and that doesn't seem to value freedom of expression or thought also doesn't understand why humans, process, and procedural protections are necessary. In turn, that makes things less efficient than they theoretically could be, but a technocratic Orwellian state as envisioned by dipshit solutionists will eventually come to the conclusion that life would be a lot more efficient if you just get rid of humans altogether.
I'm honestly a bit confused how people don't see this. Did they not see T2 growing up? Did they not watch any dystopian 70's sci-fi? Have they never heard of The Twilight Zone and its continual reminders about how hubris catches up with people? What is it?
So do your own. The entire concept of open source is flexibility, and absolutely nothing is stopping you. Distros making decisions inherently remove some flexibility for the sake of delivering a functional platform.
This is highly specious reasoning. systemd's developers' stated intent is to standardize (read: take over) all userspace initialization. They've accomplished (much of) this through a combination of embrace and extend, land grabs, intentionally breaking unapproved setups, tying functionality together unnecessarily or for highly trivial reasons, arm-wrestling other distributions with self-fulfilling prophecies, and generally being assholes. In fact, they've been doing many of the same things that Microsoft did in the late 90's with browser integration and which we all fought heavily against.
As a result of this, though, and partially as a specific result of their policy banning the packaging (and even OPTIONAL packaging) of initscripts at distro level in Fedora (the subject of this article), that it's become more and more difficult to revert out of it. Nothing may be *stopping* us (hence forks), but it's being intentionally made more and more difficult by a complete ass. Don't pee on my head and tell me it's raining.
So, Mr. "IT Worker", how do you enjoy waiting a minimum of 20 seconds (assuming 100% utilization, no other data flows competing for throughput, no congestion or signal degradation, and zero protocol overhead) to save a 10 MB Excel file to a SMB shared drive?
That was fairly common for remote access situations 5 years ago, and depending on where you lived, DSL even in major urban areas 10 years ago. I survived. Rural is always going to require higher investment for infrastructure. News flash: Road costs scale with length of the road that needs to be built.
How do you enjoy waiting a minimum of 350 seconds (again, assuming no overhead, etc.) to download a 175 MB Eclipse installation?
How is it waiting a day or more to download a major update package for Windows or Office or a distribution upgrade for your GNU/Linux distro (depending on what you use)?
Maybe if idiots stopped with the size creep, he wouldn't *have* to download a 175 MB Eclipse installation? Again, patches have happened in the past and we all managed to survive. Stop building shit that takes up 500 MB when 50MB is fine. Stop creating games that ship on a blu-ray disk and then require a 35GB update file on install.
So, at this point, we have: myself, for whose job a 10 Mbps connection is grossly inadequate; and *you*, for whose job a 4 Mbps connection is apparently adequate or even good. That's a small enough sample as to call either one of our accounts anecdotal.
I've been lucky enough to work at ISPs with their office in space rented from the datacenter for about half of my career, meaning my desktop was basically on-net, a few firewalls away from our core routers. The first time I worked at a location where the office *wasn't* directly connected to the datacenter (20Mbps point-to-point link) was painful, but I survived. More to the point, there's relatively little sysadmin work that *requires* high local connectivity, because doing work on remote systems is an option. It's the spoiled folks that think that they need to download everything from github to their Mac, or don't know how to work over SSH, or think file transfers can't be performed directly, or don't use local http proxies, or local mirrors for ISOs for your org, etc, that don't get it.
The problem is that you can't really look at a population of people overall and just pull a number out of your ass and say "that number is enough for anyone!". When you do that, you are effectively limiting the professions and the types of work that person can pursue from that location. I'm sure I'm not the only one whose job requires a bit more than 4 Mbps, and I'm sure you're not the only one whose job could be accomplished with a 2800 baud modem. There has to be a balance somewhere, but I think it lies a good ways north of 4 Mbps.
Strongly disagree. Remember, you're talking about a *minimum* to qualify. 4Mbps is plenty for textual communication and sufficient for a lot more. This is supposed to be an analog (no pun intended) to the Universal Lifeline Telephone Service, which was about making sure that rural, poor, or remote locations were able to get working dialtone service at a minimum, not that everyone got all the fanciest features everyone could provide.
4Mbps is sufficient "dialtone" broadband internet access. Not great, sufficient.
Previously, the amount of information gleamable was limited by the need to have physical access to the court. Someone would have to go down to the courthouse, hall of records, or similar location, and physically look at things. Now, one button and the entire country is searchable.
Unfortunately, this ease of information access removes the grey area of "public, but requires time/effort to get and is not easily accessible," and as a result, it's a lot more black and white. The parallels with massive aggregation of data, Hack Once Break Everywhere security issues, and even physical access to an iPhone by the FBI being sufficient or insufficient to overcome local security options, are all similar technological areas where a dichotomy is coming into play.
I can't say I think this is a good thing. Grey areas are good. Humans are grey, and technical models of human society should have grey considerations as well.
Ehh, I've actually been rather pleasantly surprised at the quality of the Genius picks. I also do tend to rate music more (always have) rather than just using the fav button that's available nowadays. Perhaps that gives their recommendation engine a bit more to go on. There are several artists I've actually gone out and searched for more of specifically because it came in on a Genius playlist.
What kind of people are they appointing to SCOTUS these days? It seems that this bunch of legal illiterates doesn't even understand the meaning of jurisdiction .
A judge can't authorize the search or seizure of something that is outside of their jurisdiction, because they have no authority to grant it outside of their jurisdiction. Jurisdiction means area of legal authority. The court can't give the FBI legal authority to do something in a place where the court has no legal authority itself. It can't give something that it doesn't have.
If lack of jurisdiction were no barrier then the judges of North Korea or Iran would be able to authorize whatever they liked within the territory of the United States. Is SCOTUS OK with that?
You've answered your own question: The Supreme Court of North Korea (or whatever) can authorize all it wants to; it has no jurisdiction here.
What this ruling does is basically say that a judge doesn't need to *pre-determine* that it has jurisdiction for an anonymous warrant where the location is unknown. This solves a painful chicken-and-egg problem when you're trying to go after someone with a search warrant.
If it turns out they were outside the US, the warrant is unenforceable. If they were in the US but the court for some other reason doesn't have jurisdiction, the warrant is null and void (and search results can't be used as evidence in a criminal case).
In other words, this is a lot of huff and puff about not much of anything.
Bill Gates said this in 1990. We are no closer to "AI" than we were at that time. Google is an advertising company. Not good for much else than delivering ads.
Have to disagree with this. We're closer to AI now through simple sheer complexity. An individual neuron is simple; throw enough simulated neurons together (as in: "the cloud") and you'll get something emergent out of it no matter what.
Google is an advertising company, yes, but advertising is really just attempted control. People pay Google to attempt to steer them to products. Eventually, the "steering" is intelligent enough (connotation halfway intended) that the advertising is secondary to the information, and the information is secondary to the ability to control. (Imagine Google AdWords 3.0, where a "cheer yourself up" pill company advertises to people who seem to be depressed, and Google decides to re-rank the search results for your custom search to get you more depressed about the world, then shows you the ad.)
Google and Facebook together can sway an election. That's what Silicon Valley is now. AI is just the next step.
Did Cruz win the primary, or something? It's a little presumptuous, otherwise. Oh, sure, he's picking a potential VP to increase his nominability during the contested election, but why would he pick a boat-anchor like Carly "right-shoring" Fiorina? She's as much as, if not more than, a weasel as he is.
He doesn't need to, for two reasons:
1) Deciding on a prospective running mate gives a clearer idea of "what you'd get" by supporting his candidacy,
2) He's not running to win, he's running to draw.
He can't win the nomination outright, so at this point it's all about keeping Trump from getting over the top. Once the convention begins and the first ballot concludes, all bets are off.
If Trump doesn't get it on the first ballot, it'll probably be a dark horse that comes away with the nomination. (That is, not Cruz or Trump.)
At one point, common law parliamentary procedure... the basics for how deliberative assemblies, organizations, and basically any other sort of self-organizing collection of people of a Britannic heritage work was widely known. We also had basic civics, so people knew about things like federalism.
Nowadays, we don't have a great grasp of either. Anyone who thinks the system is "rigged" simply doesn't understand how the process works. First of all, it's a Republic, not a Democracy. Secondly, a political party -- or any other type of organization -- is free to write its own rules for how it conducts business, who's a voting member, or anything else. The DNC has "superdelegates;" the RNC doesn't. If you think superdelegates are a bad thing, maybe you should have your delegates say something. If you think superdelagates are awesome, maybe you should ask your delegates to add them in.
Quit complaining; start making motions. Start running for office. Start attending county meetings for your political party. (News flash: That's what the Tea Partiers did, and that's how they began to get more control over the GOP party apparatus in 2009-2010.)
Although I'd normally snark this one to death, having flashing LEDs at a crossing for pedestrian control *as well as* for vehicle control isn't a bad idea, really. We have a couple of those here in San Diego on notoriously unsafe crossings, or areas where cars have a tendency to fail to notice the normal crosswalk signaling but they don't want to put a full traffic light in.
Those with failing eyesight or using guide-dogs might also benefit from this.
It's a horrible thing to *have* to put in, but as probably just one arrow in the quiver of options for making some specific intersection safer it's fine by me.
Getting folks in the Bay Area to realize that is still an unsolved problem. Maybe they have an AI team working on it.
In all seriousness, I saw this a lot when working within a monitoring team, and in consulting I've done for other orgs. Big Data is great for vast, multi-dimensional analysis of massive amounts of data, but it's not a substitute for domain knowledge about *WHAT* you're monitoring, critically thinking about what you're looking for and what types of failure modes might occur, and simple(r) heuristics for triggers.
Trend analysis is very useful as an adjunct, for example, but within a server monitoring context it's not a *substitute* for having hard limits on, say, CPU load, or HTTP response time, or memory usage.
Somehow, people managed to come to conclusions and make good decisions even before we had terabytes of raw data being sifted through by statistical algorithms to come up with a result.
To place it into a broader cultural context, I see this in parallel with "data fetishisation" where nothing at all can be possibly true unless Science. And Data. Hipster praying at the altar of data.gov as some sort of left-wing (or Millennial) shibboleth for smug certainty when the basics -- the entry-level, basic 101 class of domain knowledge for the field -- is being forgotten.
I'm all for bringing in new tech and new analytic techniques, but you can't look at it as a panacea for failing to understand what's going on in your domain on a philosophical level.
I think you've got the math backwards. Google has enough power right now, between browser control, Chrome push updates, certificate blocking, "malware blocking", Android telemetry, Android Web Service control, google.com, Google Ad Words, and 3rd party tracking, and the multiple-million server networks behind everything, to tip the election.
Anyone dumb enough to bring an Android device into a non-secure area could be spied on by their Google phone if Alphabet, Inc. really wanted to, which of course leads to the ability to pressure or even outright extort if it came down to it. And if you don't think self-important hipster solutionists obsessed with changing the world "for the greater good" might see the ends as justifying the means, you might not be familiar with what people at Uber did a while back, and also suggested as an operation:
The news follows another incident this week in which a senior executive at Uber made a grovelling apology after suggesting putting a team together to dig up dirt on journalists who criticise his company.
Emil Michael, who made the remarks at a private dinner in Manhattan, said he had dreamed up an eight-man team who would find out about writers' personal lives and families so that Uber could discredit them.
Combined with Facebook employees thinking in any way, shape, or form, that "preventing Candidate XYZ from winning" is ethical, there's far more to fear from the Cloud than from DC at this point, and this is coming from a libertarian-ish, small (federal) government, Tea Party-ish, neo-federalist conservative.
What's funny is that the spam problem was solved years ago. Can't remember the last time a piece of spam hit my inbox. You need a new example.
Well, I'd put it more as:
(-) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
For the most part, and for most consumers, there now IS a centrally-controlling authority for email: Google. And if they're not using Gmail, they're using Yahoo Mail or Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com. Combined, they can basically dictate filtration rules for non-business US spam filtering. And for B2B spam filtering, there's a whollle lot of outsourcing that gets done to one of very few vendors. The meme writers (and all of us back in the day), didn't foresee that distributed (ISP-level or lower) email that you use Eudora, Entourage, Thinderbird, etc. would go away for most users.
It's worth noting that outside the US, and especially in developing areas, spam is still a pretty big problem, even moreso if you consider security/attack vectors as "spam"
Back in the day, every once in a while someone would propose some "this will solve everything" solution to the problem of spam, and we'd reply with the list of many reasons why it wouldn't work. I feel like we need to update the meme below for all of the technocratic solutions coming out of Silicon Valley nowadays by people who don't particularly live in the real world, and/or are millennials.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Now how about more of you merchants finally move forward with contactless payments?
That involves RFID and/or NFC, right? How does "add wireless stuff to it" make any system at all more secure over an overt and obvious physical interaction?
Are there any other kind?
*rimshot*
There are only three types of people I know who locally develop on Macs:
1) Devs developing a native Mac or iOS application
2) Devs who need to make substantive code changes (or test cycles) when they're off line
3) Devs who don't know how to log in to a remote server to do their development
For #1, you have my sympathies. #2 should go head to a bar, or spend time with the family instead of working after hours. #3 probably need to be hit with a clue-bat, which will hopefully dislodge that "devops" post-it note they've got attached to all their business cards.
The problem with you argument is why is places like LA or NY wired up the yazoo? They are not. Just those 2 cities alone are bigger than many countries that are better wired.
Once those are wired up THEN we can start talking about wiring up the suburbs and rural areas. We are not even doing that very well.
I don't know, but it sounds like a local problem.
I live in San Diego. We have two cable monopolies (Time Warner in north county and Cox Cable in the rest), plus the ILEC (PacBell originally, now AT&T of course), for high-speed wireline DSL. DSL speeds of up to 75Mbps are available in most of non-rural half of the county nowadays. Cable speeds range from 6Mbps all the way up to 300Mbps in most of the county, depending on your package.
In addition, there are small local WISPs, wired operators, and in-building companies serving rural communities and certain high-density areas where it makes sense. I live in Downtown San Diego now and have 500Mbps symmetric through one of those in-building specialists, with a 300Mbps/50Mbps backup through Cox Cable.
Maybe you should move here. We have better burritos anyway :)
There is a reason all of this is not wired up yet. It is because the last mile is not rented out. It is held hostage at negotiation time for more monopoly.
Full Disclosure: I've worked at several local ISPs here over there years.
That was entirely the point of CLECs and the CO-based DSL ecosystem. That basically entirely collapsed at the end of the dot-com era because -- guess what -- rolling trucks out to do initial setup is expensive. (I spent many a night doing internal DSL escalations to Bell Atlantic via Covad to get some customer up...) If you want to lease a line from the ILEC and start that whole party back up, you're more than welcome to. Perhaps the math would work out better now.
What I can tell you, though, is that running your OWN lines out to customers outside of a limited environment is expensive and really only makes sense if you're willing to go head-long into bankruptcy after you've laid down your zillions of dollars into what's still basically dark fiber. Hell, even Google is exercising more caution than is characteristic here.
The size of the country doesn't matter. You can have fiber internet access everywhere you have power lines.
The size of the country scales (more than linearly) with the amount of infrastructure. France has the largest power grid in Europe at 100K km of residential/low voltage lines, the US has 10x that in high voltage lines, and maybe around 400-500x that in low voltage lines. (No one really knows, but scaling with # of miles of paved roads is probably a decent approximation.)
The existing infrastructure proves the feasibility. The rest is just haggling over the price and who's going to pay for it.
The existing infrastructure was built over the last century.
Who's going to pay for it is the big thing. Frankly, I wouldn't have minded if the Trillion-dollar stimulus package in 2009 had gone to infrastructure like this. Upgrading our power, wire line (POTS), and cable system infrastructure is a massive capital undertaking but also has US national security purposes and civil defense applications. If you have money in your pocket you simply *have* to spend, you should always spend it on capital, not Op-Ex. Unfortunately, the teachers' unions and politically empowered Democrats complained and a lot of that money ended up going to state budget operations for education to prevent public sector cut-backs and to fund left-wing green initiatives. (Also, "construction projects primarily employ men and are therefore sexist".) Your tax dollars at work, poorly.
If you *don't* happen to have a dozen or two billion dollars in your back pocket, then justifying the expenditure is more difficult. Most locations have adequate broadband speed to the internet.
Having 8 Netflix streams in HD is not a civil right.
Which is a great excuse to whip out when big cities can get as good of a deal on broadband downtown as one can get in Korea, Japan or Switzerland. Until then claiming Manhattan's internet sucks because of Kansas is bullshit.
Manhattan's internet sucks because of Manhattan, New York County, or the State of New York, as far as this San Diegan 3000 miles away is concerned.
Along with different densities, there are also different regulations and municipal codes out there (which is how it should be -- local control is a Good Thing).
San Diego County (which is actually pretty huge -- covers half the state east-west and has a massive rural component) has two cable providers, DSL from PacBell, and then the various cell networks of varying degrees of coverage. Having previously worked at a CO-based DSL company here, I can safely say that the economics of rolling trucks directly just doesn't work. And replacing copper with fiber is expensive, which lends itself to industry cooperation in the creation of conduits. But when you think about it, that's exactly what we have already with poles and new undergrounding.
The only real tech game-changer is wireless, but even that depends on wireline eventually, so you end up with coordination and cooperation among the networks and the tower tech companies.
The point about rural Kansas is that a lot of people are prescribing some sort of mass, nationwide solution for internet in the US. Many times those folks don't appreciate the scale of a truly nationwide solution. Cities are laid out quite differently, have different urban/rural rations, etc. Frankly, each US state has its own problems and probably needs -- at most -- a statewide solution. I don't need to be involved in Kansas's conclusions any more than I do NYC's.
If you've never traveled across it (not flown across -- traveled across) or you've never been to the US at all and just know what LA looks like from the movies, do yourself a favor and take a look at a map first, and compare the scale to $your_country. The US is huge. And especially the western half of the country, where most areas with residents were built in the last 100 years, and most of the rest is completely open land.
"Internet access" for the downtown core of a major city, for the suburbs and residential areas outside of dense urban zones, for small towns, and for rural areas 3 miles from your nearest neighbor mean *vastly* different things. Infrastructure investment and wired vs wireless communications in some areas carry tradeoffs involving public safety, reliability, access, and available technology.
So before you comment, take that into account. Thanks.
Maybe it depends on your age or your country, but I asked my friends about it and there's only three of them who use Facebook and none use Twitter.
Speaking just about the US (internationally the numbers vary for lots of reasons).
You (and your group) are definitely an outlier. I can count on two hands the number of people I know (ages 15-60) who don't have a Facebook and have never had one (vs have disabled it or don't use it as much).
Twitter is less common, I'd agree, but for those "highly involved" in politics or who follow news heavily, I'd wager there are similar numbers there. For any sort of Breaking News, there's hardly any substitute.
It's one this for Facebook, Inc. to take a political position and back it with money or what-not.
It's another thing all together for Facebook as a service provider to treat their custumers differently based on their political views or to allow some political discourse but not other dscourse.
The latter usually backfires unless the "silenced" topics are almost universally reviled by your customers and prospective customers or at least that the censorship has nearly-universal customer support.
In other words, if Facebook treated pro-Trump content differently than pro-other-candidate material, it will bite them bad.
That's where monopoly positions, especially monopoly positions in mass communication, come into play. If there are little other options compared to the "ease" of staying (because everyone else is there) then you don't have any realistic leverage.
This was different in the days of Altavista vs Yahoo vs Google, and Friendster vs MySpace vs Facebook, but not any more. Google and FB (and Apple, at an OS level) essentially control your fortunes.
Just ask any business whose Google pagerank has been mysteriously obliterated and is no longer being returned as a result.