Because knowing that the video was ripped by "cuckuniversal" using a US VPN via a TOR node somewhere on the planet would be extremely helpful. Sure they could ban the account and there would maybe be the odd rip that was made by an idiot who didn't protect themselves, but any serious ripping would be done by people who go to great lengths to ensure they can't be tracked with any ease.
Now if the decrypting step was done client side and somehow injected an additional watermark during that step that could try to pull identifying information from the end user's PC, that might catch a few at the start. But it wouldn't be long before people would just save the (encrypted) stream byte for byte, move it to a clean PC with a faked internet connection and play it back to the decoder that way and the cat-and-mouse game continues.
That wouldn't really work unless they could also convince the cell companies to shut down service in all of the towers within range of the university. Having to plug in a cat5 to cheat would be pretty blindingly obvious to the proctor.
Its not so much about slowing data as it is about prioritizing data. You, as a home user, would not have your connection slowed. You're already paying for a certain (maximum) speed and that won't change.
I, as a prospective new video site operator, also have a contract with my ISP that indicates maximum speeds and other such service level stuff.
The problem is in the middle. If there's nothing much going on between you and I, then great. I fire data out as fast as I can and you consume it as fast as you can, and the overall throughput is the lower of our two contracted speeds.
But if the new Orange is the New Black season just got released and all of your neighbors are currently watching Netflix at the same time to the point that the pipes start getting full.. well Netflix has paid extra for priority service so my packets get put in the back of the queue and your video now spends half its time buffering.
If we're on the same network this isn't really a problem. I'm already paying for the highest tier service available to me, and Netflix can't be paying any higher than that no matter how big they are, so if Verizon is prioritizing Netflix above me then we're going to have some words, possibly via our lawyers.
The real problem is if we're on different networks. Lets say I'm on Verizon and you're on Comcast. I have no relationship or contract with Comcast, so if they decide to prioritize Netflix over me, I don't really have any legal recourse. My only option in this point is to open up (and pay for) an entirely separate service agreement with Comcast, and one with Sprint, and one with T-Mobile, and so on and so on.
So you're paying for your internet access like always. I'm paying for my internet access like always. But now I also have to pay for at least one additional "prioritization" fee with a company I don't have any direct business with. (Maybe even several if you're on a regional ISP since I'd potentially have to pay off every peer along the path.)
The mobster meme "that's a nice packet you've got there, shame if something were to happen to it" is actually pretty apt. A third party that I otherwise have no reason to even talk to demanding money for the privilege of letting me stay in business.
Its probably an overly blunt choice of words, but you can hardly blame them for not putting time and money into a fight they no longer care about.
They have bigger fish to fry, like trying to negotiate their way out of geoblocking requirements and the ability to secure content in an age where every distributor on the planet is trying to make their own mini-Netflix (and then refusing to renew Netflix' licenses to their content) and the ones that aren't just flat out getting greedy and charging more and more to renew licenses just because Netflix has money rather than because the content is getting more valuable.
Keep in mind that the title II rules never actually came into effect. Netflix is already paying ISPs for faster service, so they already know exactly how bent over they'll be without net neutrality. Or at least can make a good guess at it (I mean there's always the chance that ISPs will dial it up to 11 once the specter of title II is guaranteed out of the picture, but its a fairly low chance.. especially in the short term when that would immediately show their hand and possibly cause lawmakers to re-reverse the decision while its still fresh in mind. A long, slow cucking that can sneak up on us is more what we should expect when NN rules are fully abolished.)
Here's something to ponder. What if Trump is actually brilliant?
What's the worlds biggest (perceived) problem today? Terrorism right? And what's a terrorists ultimate goal? Their goal isn't to kill people. That's a means to an end. Their goal is to be a constant threat and constantly in the front of everybody's mind.
Now consider the possibility that Trump is actually attacking them on this front. Ever since he got into office (hell, even while he was campaigning) he's had pretty much full coverage by every news outlet not just in the USA, but around the world -- whether conservatives praising him or liberals bashing him, they're all talking about him.
Think about the recent tragedy in Manchester. You remember that, right? It was only last week. Dozens of people killed and injured, including children, at a concert held by one of the biggest pop stars in the world at this time. And it got all of about one day on the front page before Trump was doing something else stupid and we all got plastered with videos of his goofy overaggressive handshake yet again.
I mean I don't really believe this is the case.. but it would be something incredible if it turns out that there's been method to his madness all along rather than just a narcissist following whatever random whim hits him.
The trick is that someone has to be willing to ride the legal system all the way up the chain to the Supreme Court. SCOTUS doesn't just arbitrarily pick targets. And its pretty unusual for "little guy" companies to hold their ground through all of the lower courts, settlement offers, etc.
Of course its not unheard of for two 800lb companies to get there (say, Apple v Samsung) but that's not quite the same scenario.. and from a public opinion perspective its often much harder to objectively choose sides as all companies have both positive and negative aspects in their history by the time they get to that scale.
The analogy isn't quite right anyway. It would be more like a third party company taking the old cartridges, replacing the actual blade (ie: the metal strips) and reselling the cartridge -- they don't need to replicate the attachment mechanism in that case, only the metal strip. I have no idea how plausible that would be to actually do, but it would more in line with this printer cartridge refilling judgement.
You can't really blame the companies either. Real journalism requires an investment of both time and money that sensationalist bullshit doesn't, and on top of that important stories aren't always amenable to clickbaity titles.
That means real journalism both costs more and generates less (advertising) revenue. Alternative sources have to be found if they intend to keep operating while retaining some modicum of journalistic integrity.
I mean in a sense you can blame the companies for not changing their business model to "unverified partisan rants" like Breitbart, but that doesn't really help us get real news and while it may be financially good for any particular news outlet, it would be a significant detriment to the world as a whole and really shouldn't be something we encourage.
The only other option is to convince people to be critical of what they read/hear/see but that has continually proven itself an impossible task. Most people are happy living in their comfort zone and really don't want to leave, especially if it takes extra effort to do so.
Unfortunately this puts us in a worst-of-both-worlds situation: Doing the best thing journalistically is somewhat mutually exclusive with doing the best thing financially.
I don't know if paywalling is the solution to this dilemma or not. I suspect it won't be, if for no other reason than because most people won't want to (or more likely just can't afford to) subscribe to more than one or two news services and end up in just a different kind of bubble. But at least they're trying to do something beyond just selling out and, at least for a little longer, the world can retain a few outlets that attempt to peddle real (and verified) news rather than just partisan rants.
So your idea that 'Linux in the enterprise runs Samba' needs a qualifier.
I keep forgetting that on Slashdot you always have to explicitly state the qualifier: "all generalizations have exceptions." In most settings that's just a given.
Greenhouse owners routinely crank greenhouse CO2 levels up to 1000 ppm or more
Difference being, those greenhouse owners also crank the CO2 back down again routinely. They don't just leave it at 1000 ppm the forever. Its kind of the difference between going to an oxygen bar (do they still have those?) and getting a quick boost vs immersing yourself in a pure oxygen tank until you die from oxidative stress. Maybe not an exact comparison but along the same lines.
Greenhouse owners also only do that for plant species they know can handle it. They don't just throw a bunch of stuff together randomly and then blindly crank the CO2 and hope it all works out. Some plants will handle it better than others (and presumably some flourish in those conditions or they wouldn't do it at all.)
the world will, really, very likely be a much better place at the 400 to 450 ppm CO2 we are likely to settle out at
Better for what? Certainly better than now for whatever evolves to handle 400ppm CO2 over the next few million years. Not so great for most of the life existing today that has evolved to handle 270ppm, including humans.
Basically that's the idea. Except the ice part. It would be stored as a compressed gas (which would be hot.) Because we haven't found any natural caverns with -80C temperatures yet.
It does indeed stimulate plant growth. The planet will almost certainly survive. Life will most likely survive in some form or another. What won't survive is life as we know it.
Evolution is slow. It will take life tens or hundreds of thousands of years to fully adapt to the new carbon reality. Unfortunately, the things that are unable to adapt will be going extinct on the scale of tens or hundreds of years. That's a significant gap between what we currently enjoy and we know supports humanity pretty good, to whatever the next time life flourishes will be.
The world has survived great extinction events before, and it will survive this one. But humanity may not, and our currently way of life definitely will not. Assuming we survive at all, we'd be limited in things like food choices to whatever we can manage to farm, and hope to hell that we don't get too many crop-destroying bugs or bacteria since we're really good at monocropping. One particularly bad bug could remove an entire food source from our lives in that sort of scenario. We may not be able to go outside without oxygen masks, depending on how high the CO2 concentrations get before things all go to hell. Large chunks of the planet will desertify (at least in the short term) as the rising temperatures outpaces plant evolution in the warmer latitudes, meaning we'll slowly get cramped closer and closer toward the poles as the middle latitudes become inhospitable. And so on.
Of course, none of this is going to happen quickly. We're talking hundreds of years before the full effects of what we're doing to the planet really hit home. The 2100 or 2050 or 2040 or whatever numbers you see aren't doomsday -- they're the (estimated) point where the problem becomes irreversible. It may be another 200-300 years after that before it significantly affects our lifestyle (ignoring localized events like Florida being increasingly bombarded by hurricanes as the ocean temperature rises.)
That said, there are some more immediate effects we can see even if they don't directly impact our way of life: The world's coral reefs are slowly bleaching out and dying off due to rising ocean temperatures. The noted issue with hurricanes in Florida and other states/countries along their typical advancement path. Historically unusual weather patterns in many parts of the world. The melting of the arctic ice and opening of the northwest passage. Probably plenty of other effects that individually are surprising and probably concerning, but taken together form a very alarming trend that we can use as a basis to make projections about future events.
Here's a fun experiment to show you why your argument is dumb:
1) Find a brick wall. 2) Slowly walk into it. 3) Now try running into it headlong.
You see how #2 was fine while #3 gave you brain damage? Yeah that's pretty much the same difference between historic carbon highs and today. Historically, it took hundreds of thousands of years to switch between carbon highs and carbon lows (and similar for temperatures, though carbon isn't the only factor there so the two aren't always 100% in sync.)
This time, instead of hundreds of thousands of years we're doing it in hundreds of years. That would be the equivalent of, instead of running at the wall for #3 you strap yourself to a rocket and fire yourself at the wall. You're well beyond brain damage and into the realm of vaporization at that point. That's basically what we're doing to our planet. But with carbon instead of bricks.
The problem is scale. We're produce enough CO2 to turn the entire planet into a greenhouse. Even if we freely supplied all of this captured CO2 to the actual greenhouses, it likely wouldn't add up to more than a fraction of a percent of what we generate.
Same thing with using it for making carbonated beverages or whatever.. sure that's a use for it but the scale difference is staggering.
Underground storage is really about the only option. Its probably a net carbon generator to try sending it into space with our current technology but even if its net negative the amount we could send up per launch is again tiny compared to the problem. There's not enough commercial need to handle it all by a large stretch, and there's nowhere in the (surface) environment you can dump it that won't cause problems of one sort of another.
Heck we're not even entirely sure that dumping it underground is safe. At the very least, if one of the reservoirs ruptures, we'll have a large and very localized burst of CO2 to deal with. That might not be great.
Of course they usually inject this stuff into old oil and gas wells so pretty far underground and not a large chance of rupturing. A bigger issue is seepage into surrounding rock and any water systems that might be down there. Luckily CO2 isn't terribly hazardous outside of its greenhouse effects so that's also probably not a huge deal. Its not super reactive so we don't have to worry too much about gas explosions.
Overall underground seems like a pretty good solution as long as we're even remotely careful to ensure that the reservoir is sealed (or close enough to sealed that the escape rate is insignificant.)
But there's always the chance that we've overlooked some hazard. Earthquakes come to mind as a possibility.. how big of a possibility I'm not qualified to answer. Hopefully close to zero but who knows -- especially if they end up injecting this stuff into some previously-unknown ancient fault line that hasn't been active for thousands of years or whatever.
Facebook and Amazon are asking for privacy? Like as in less spying? It must be fucking opposite day.
No, they're asking for privacy as in "we want all the data and nobody else should have it." With a touch of "we don't want to waste our time and money feeding our hard-earned data to the government."
This is hardly a new sentiment, and its one the government should understand well -- they've always wanted to know everything about you while letting you know as little as possible about them. Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc are all in a position where they actually do know pretty much everything about you.. but it cost them a lot to collect that information and they don't particular want to see that just being given up for free.
If the government came at them with $100mill/yr contracts rather than legislation, we would barely hear a whisper of this (until someone notices a few hundred million tagged for "mass surveillance" in the budget of course.. but it wouldn't be the companies in question making the stink.)
Probably. Requiring a warrant is done for the purposes of oversight. That is, at least two people have to agree that you need to be searched rather than one person deciding it unilaterally.
It just gives you (and everyone else) a bit of peace of mind in the guarantee that some jerk cop can't come ransack your house on a whim -- he has to talk to a judge first (who we presume to be wiser and more thoughtful when considering the justifying evidence presented.)
It doesn't change your guilt or innocence (or your presumption of such under the law) either way.
An absolute dollar value isn't something I can claim -- it would depend entirely on how long it takes for such a thing to happen (if ever) and what the economic conditions are going to be by then. Given the way the US is going under Trump, $1 might not even be reasonable in 8 years for most Americans since they'll be too busy paying for the tax breaks the rich are getting. Then again if in the extremely unlikely scenario where Trump's version of trickle down somehow works better than Reagan's did, maybe $4 or $5 will be reasonable in 8 years.
And if something like this doesn't happen for 20 years? Or if Trump actually gets impeached in the next few months? Who knows what will be reasonable 5 or 10 years from now.
So I stayed away from absolute values intentionally. But a decent relative definition might be along the lines of "cheap enough to allow 95-99%+ of Americans to use the service." Whether they'll be able to run a profit at that level is up for grabs of course, and that will be a big deciding factor in whether or not they'd consider such a plan (though in the short term at least, the main deciding factor is that USPS exists and is required to provide service at a price most people can afford, even if its not profitable and has to be subsidized by taxpayers.)
Not that I'll try to claim outright corruption is unheard of by any means, but usually this isn't so much a question of monopoly vs competition as it is a question of monopoly vs nothing at all.
That is, there were many instances (especially in rural areas) where the providers were claiming that they couldn't justify the investment if they had to face competition. Whether or not those claims were valid is anyone's guess, but valid or not they still weren't going to build out into those areas without a monopoly agreement.
So just like many of us face on a personal level these days, local governments were basically given the option of picking one of 2-3 equally bad options, or going without all together. And since everybody wants (and getting closer to needs by the day,) internet access, going without isn't really a plausible solution.
Fast forward 20 years and there's probably plenty of those areas where opening up to competition would now be plausible but remains blocked due to the old agreements either still being in force or just getting blindly renewed without much thought.
Uhh, no. I'm not sure if they ever did. And now its more popular to be a cable cutter. Netflix and chill yall.
Historically (as in, before you could stream or torrent essentially anything,) if you were the only one on your block to have cable then you would have likely been pretty popular. Similarly if everyone had cable but you were the only one with the premium channels, you'd be similarly popular. Especially among teenage boys (Skinimax what?)
But now that porn is one "Yes, I'm 18" click away whether you're lying or not, and things like Netflix (never mind bittorrent) exist and the such.. those popularity benefits are essentially gone.
There are really only a handful of reasons to keep cable at this point: - You're just stuck in your ways and don't want to change. I imagine there's still a lot of folk in this category, especially among the older generations. - You're into sports or Game of Thrones or something similar that's locked to your cable subscription and are too lazy or just unwilling to get your fix via less legitimate sources. - Your local ISP still sucks bad enough that streaming isn't viable and you're too impatient to wait for torrents. - You're one of the people who's ripping the stuff to put on the illegitimate streams and torrents in the first place. - Your cable company does packaging or such that brings the cost of cable more in line with the garbage you get on it.
None of those amounts to "because its worth having." Some of them are "because its better than nothing," but that's not quite the same sentiment. And we're starting to see the results. There's been several posters already claiming that internet+cable bundle is cheaper than internet alone. That means the cable companies are treating (basic) cable as a loss leader in the hopes that they can either upsell you to a higher package, or that at least you'll have it turned on enough to justify retaining their advertisers.
Sure, but how often do you have to do that? I guess if you're a big ebayer perhaps quite often but for the vast majority of the population their interaction with USPS amounts to "is there mail in my mailbox today?"
Of course when I call up and ask about your experience with USPS, you don't really think about the thousands of times mail was just in your mailbox -- you just pick it up and get on with your day. Instead, you think about the one crappy trip to the depot.
Heck even if you go to the depot frequently, you generally think of the one crappy trip instead of the many perfectly normal ones (unless you just have a crappy depot and all of your experiences are bad.. which is certainly not impossible and unfortunately little you can do about that short of buying a PO box in another district with a better depot and having to drive however far to get there and deal with shippers that refuse to deliver to PO boxes and so on.)
And bank statements and letters from your grandma and any number of other things that UPS and FedEx either don't bother with or charge insane rates to handle.
Yes, the volume of legitimate mail may well be dwarfed by the volume of junk mail, but until there's another viable alternative for sending such things the USPS is still fairly necessary.
Perhaps in a couple of generations when all the grandmas are genx / millenials and are happy to use email instead of writing, and all the banks have (maybe) caught up and those mail-in rebates you get can be punched in via the internet and so on.. perhaps then USPS can finally be left to die. But that's still a couple decades off at least (especially the grandmas -- we still have two or three generations of pre-internet elderly who are unwilling to learn how to do things digitally.)
In the meantime.. you can bet your bank is going to either start charging you a much more significant amount for your paper statements if they're forced to send them via FedEx.. and that $10 rebate coupon probably won't get sent in if it costs you $12 to mail it. Your grandma may be able to adapt and use Skype or something, but lots of them won't and will just suck it up and maybe send less letters to her friends and family.
Or of course FedEx could see an opportunity for letter delivery service and start charging reasonable rates for USPS-level delivery. Which of course would mean the spammers would just start sending things with FedEx cause lets face it, FedEx isn't going to say no to however many thousands of dollars the spammers pay to get their junk mail to your doorstep. They might not "need" the money to survive in the same way USPS does, but as a private company their goal is "profit over everything," so they still have an extremely strong incentive to take the deal.
Ahh I was looking for a zealot who didn't read far enough through the article and spouted off a stereotypical "just switch to Linux!" post. But this batch of mental gymnastics is a pretty close second.
And no, its nothing like that. The amount of Linux machines that have to interact with Windows (especially in commercial environments) significantly dwarfs the number of people who use WLS. Maybe that won't always be the case, but it certainly is for now, if for no other reason than because WLS is extremely new while Samba's been around for decades.
Sure you're technically correct that its not a problem for "all" Linux machines.. but its a problem for a large enough portion of them to warrant serious concern about the threat level. Especially since, as the pundits like to point out ad nauseum, Linux has a far greater share of the market in the server room than it does on the desktop and servers are where important data tends to be stored.
Worse than that, if Texas tried to impose stricter rules than the feds, Comcast and friends will just start routing everything through say Ardmore, Oklahoma in order to justify calling it interstate commerce. It may or may not get justified by SCOTUS but they'll have a good couple of years operating that way until the legal battles are sorted out. Its not like the courts could impose an injunction to have them shut off all internet service -- it would negatively impact far too many individuals and other businesses.
They wouldn't be open to copyright claims -- the DMCA's safe harbor provisions would still apply to them unless they started to selectively identify copyrighted material specifically. Inspecting to the level of what site your packet is destined for (or sourced from) likely wouldn't break them out of the safe harbor, and per-site filtering/limiting is the expected initial attack that ISPs will engage in once Title II is dropped.
I don't know if packet inspection would open them up to non-copyright charges of some sort. I'm sure their lawyers are all over that though and they wouldn't be pushing so hard to drop Title II if they didn't expect to be able to abuse their new freedom.
As others have said, this isn't a problem in and of itself. You get what you pay for -- at least between you and your ISPs local hub.
The problem is when your ISP starts setting all connections to Amazon to Basic tier (no matter what you paid for) unless Amazon also pays them. This is the "slow lane" vs "fast lane" concept. Basically no matter what you pay, its ultimately what each and every destination website pays in addition that determines the true speed you get.
As a less lawsuit-inducing but equally bad alternative, the ISP offers to Amazon the ability for their Basic subscribers to get Premium speeds when connecting to Amazon specifically (and retaining their paid for speed for all other sites.) This is the "fast lane" vs "super fast lane" idea.
Sure in the latter case, people who pay for Basic are getting a boost rather than people who pay for Premium getting a slap which makes it look better for customers, but at the end of the day the result is the same: Amazon can afford to pay those extra extortive fees but perhaps their smaller competitors can't, meaning that Amazon is being given an (even more) unfair competitive advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
Because knowing that the video was ripped by "cuckuniversal" using a US VPN via a TOR node somewhere on the planet would be extremely helpful. Sure they could ban the account and there would maybe be the odd rip that was made by an idiot who didn't protect themselves, but any serious ripping would be done by people who go to great lengths to ensure they can't be tracked with any ease.
Now if the decrypting step was done client side and somehow injected an additional watermark during that step that could try to pull identifying information from the end user's PC, that might catch a few at the start. But it wouldn't be long before people would just save the (encrypted) stream byte for byte, move it to a clean PC with a faked internet connection and play it back to the decoder that way and the cat-and-mouse game continues.
That wouldn't really work unless they could also convince the cell companies to shut down service in all of the towers within range of the university. Having to plug in a cat5 to cheat would be pretty blindingly obvious to the proctor.
Its not so much about slowing data as it is about prioritizing data. You, as a home user, would not have your connection slowed. You're already paying for a certain (maximum) speed and that won't change.
I, as a prospective new video site operator, also have a contract with my ISP that indicates maximum speeds and other such service level stuff.
The problem is in the middle. If there's nothing much going on between you and I, then great. I fire data out as fast as I can and you consume it as fast as you can, and the overall throughput is the lower of our two contracted speeds.
But if the new Orange is the New Black season just got released and all of your neighbors are currently watching Netflix at the same time to the point that the pipes start getting full.. well Netflix has paid extra for priority service so my packets get put in the back of the queue and your video now spends half its time buffering.
If we're on the same network this isn't really a problem. I'm already paying for the highest tier service available to me, and Netflix can't be paying any higher than that no matter how big they are, so if Verizon is prioritizing Netflix above me then we're going to have some words, possibly via our lawyers.
The real problem is if we're on different networks. Lets say I'm on Verizon and you're on Comcast. I have no relationship or contract with Comcast, so if they decide to prioritize Netflix over me, I don't really have any legal recourse. My only option in this point is to open up (and pay for) an entirely separate service agreement with Comcast, and one with Sprint, and one with T-Mobile, and so on and so on.
So you're paying for your internet access like always. I'm paying for my internet access like always. But now I also have to pay for at least one additional "prioritization" fee with a company I don't have any direct business with. (Maybe even several if you're on a regional ISP since I'd potentially have to pay off every peer along the path.)
The mobster meme "that's a nice packet you've got there, shame if something were to happen to it" is actually pretty apt. A third party that I otherwise have no reason to even talk to demanding money for the privilege of letting me stay in business.
Its probably an overly blunt choice of words, but you can hardly blame them for not putting time and money into a fight they no longer care about.
They have bigger fish to fry, like trying to negotiate their way out of geoblocking requirements and the ability to secure content in an age where every distributor on the planet is trying to make their own mini-Netflix (and then refusing to renew Netflix' licenses to their content) and the ones that aren't just flat out getting greedy and charging more and more to renew licenses just because Netflix has money rather than because the content is getting more valuable.
Keep in mind that the title II rules never actually came into effect. Netflix is already paying ISPs for faster service, so they already know exactly how bent over they'll be without net neutrality. Or at least can make a good guess at it (I mean there's always the chance that ISPs will dial it up to 11 once the specter of title II is guaranteed out of the picture, but its a fairly low chance.. especially in the short term when that would immediately show their hand and possibly cause lawmakers to re-reverse the decision while its still fresh in mind. A long, slow cucking that can sneak up on us is more what we should expect when NN rules are fully abolished.)
Here's something to ponder. What if Trump is actually brilliant?
What's the worlds biggest (perceived) problem today? Terrorism right? And what's a terrorists ultimate goal? Their goal isn't to kill people. That's a means to an end. Their goal is to be a constant threat and constantly in the front of everybody's mind.
Now consider the possibility that Trump is actually attacking them on this front. Ever since he got into office (hell, even while he was campaigning) he's had pretty much full coverage by every news outlet not just in the USA, but around the world -- whether conservatives praising him or liberals bashing him, they're all talking about him.
Think about the recent tragedy in Manchester. You remember that, right? It was only last week. Dozens of people killed and injured, including children, at a concert held by one of the biggest pop stars in the world at this time. And it got all of about one day on the front page before Trump was doing something else stupid and we all got plastered with videos of his goofy overaggressive handshake yet again.
I mean I don't really believe this is the case.. but it would be something incredible if it turns out that there's been method to his madness all along rather than just a narcissist following whatever random whim hits him.
The trick is that someone has to be willing to ride the legal system all the way up the chain to the Supreme Court. SCOTUS doesn't just arbitrarily pick targets. And its pretty unusual for "little guy" companies to hold their ground through all of the lower courts, settlement offers, etc.
Of course its not unheard of for two 800lb companies to get there (say, Apple v Samsung) but that's not quite the same scenario.. and from a public opinion perspective its often much harder to objectively choose sides as all companies have both positive and negative aspects in their history by the time they get to that scale.
The analogy isn't quite right anyway. It would be more like a third party company taking the old cartridges, replacing the actual blade (ie: the metal strips) and reselling the cartridge -- they don't need to replicate the attachment mechanism in that case, only the metal strip. I have no idea how plausible that would be to actually do, but it would more in line with this printer cartridge refilling judgement.
You can't really blame the companies either. Real journalism requires an investment of both time and money that sensationalist bullshit doesn't, and on top of that important stories aren't always amenable to clickbaity titles.
That means real journalism both costs more and generates less (advertising) revenue. Alternative sources have to be found if they intend to keep operating while retaining some modicum of journalistic integrity.
I mean in a sense you can blame the companies for not changing their business model to "unverified partisan rants" like Breitbart, but that doesn't really help us get real news and while it may be financially good for any particular news outlet, it would be a significant detriment to the world as a whole and really shouldn't be something we encourage.
The only other option is to convince people to be critical of what they read/hear/see but that has continually proven itself an impossible task. Most people are happy living in their comfort zone and really don't want to leave, especially if it takes extra effort to do so.
Unfortunately this puts us in a worst-of-both-worlds situation: Doing the best thing journalistically is somewhat mutually exclusive with doing the best thing financially.
I don't know if paywalling is the solution to this dilemma or not. I suspect it won't be, if for no other reason than because most people won't want to (or more likely just can't afford to) subscribe to more than one or two news services and end up in just a different kind of bubble. But at least they're trying to do something beyond just selling out and, at least for a little longer, the world can retain a few outlets that attempt to peddle real (and verified) news rather than just partisan rants.
So your idea that 'Linux in the enterprise runs Samba' needs a qualifier.
I keep forgetting that on Slashdot you always have to explicitly state the qualifier: "all generalizations have exceptions." In most settings that's just a given.
Greenhouse owners routinely crank greenhouse CO2 levels up to 1000 ppm or more
Difference being, those greenhouse owners also crank the CO2 back down again routinely. They don't just leave it at 1000 ppm the forever. Its kind of the difference between going to an oxygen bar (do they still have those?) and getting a quick boost vs immersing yourself in a pure oxygen tank until you die from oxidative stress. Maybe not an exact comparison but along the same lines.
Greenhouse owners also only do that for plant species they know can handle it. They don't just throw a bunch of stuff together randomly and then blindly crank the CO2 and hope it all works out. Some plants will handle it better than others (and presumably some flourish in those conditions or they wouldn't do it at all.)
the world will, really, very likely be a much better place at the 400 to 450 ppm CO2 we are likely to settle out at
Better for what? Certainly better than now for whatever evolves to handle 400ppm CO2 over the next few million years. Not so great for most of the life existing today that has evolved to handle 270ppm, including humans.
Basically that's the idea. Except the ice part. It would be stored as a compressed gas (which would be hot.) Because we haven't found any natural caverns with -80C temperatures yet.
It does indeed stimulate plant growth. The planet will almost certainly survive. Life will most likely survive in some form or another. What won't survive is life as we know it.
Evolution is slow. It will take life tens or hundreds of thousands of years to fully adapt to the new carbon reality. Unfortunately, the things that are unable to adapt will be going extinct on the scale of tens or hundreds of years. That's a significant gap between what we currently enjoy and we know supports humanity pretty good, to whatever the next time life flourishes will be.
The world has survived great extinction events before, and it will survive this one. But humanity may not, and our currently way of life definitely will not. Assuming we survive at all, we'd be limited in things like food choices to whatever we can manage to farm, and hope to hell that we don't get too many crop-destroying bugs or bacteria since we're really good at monocropping. One particularly bad bug could remove an entire food source from our lives in that sort of scenario. We may not be able to go outside without oxygen masks, depending on how high the CO2 concentrations get before things all go to hell. Large chunks of the planet will desertify (at least in the short term) as the rising temperatures outpaces plant evolution in the warmer latitudes, meaning we'll slowly get cramped closer and closer toward the poles as the middle latitudes become inhospitable. And so on.
Of course, none of this is going to happen quickly. We're talking hundreds of years before the full effects of what we're doing to the planet really hit home. The 2100 or 2050 or 2040 or whatever numbers you see aren't doomsday -- they're the (estimated) point where the problem becomes irreversible. It may be another 200-300 years after that before it significantly affects our lifestyle (ignoring localized events like Florida being increasingly bombarded by hurricanes as the ocean temperature rises.)
That said, there are some more immediate effects we can see even if they don't directly impact our way of life: The world's coral reefs are slowly bleaching out and dying off due to rising ocean temperatures. The noted issue with hurricanes in Florida and other states/countries along their typical advancement path. Historically unusual weather patterns in many parts of the world. The melting of the arctic ice and opening of the northwest passage. Probably plenty of other effects that individually are surprising and probably concerning, but taken together form a very alarming trend that we can use as a basis to make projections about future events.
Here's a fun experiment to show you why your argument is dumb:
1) Find a brick wall.
2) Slowly walk into it.
3) Now try running into it headlong.
You see how #2 was fine while #3 gave you brain damage? Yeah that's pretty much the same difference between historic carbon highs and today. Historically, it took hundreds of thousands of years to switch between carbon highs and carbon lows (and similar for temperatures, though carbon isn't the only factor there so the two aren't always 100% in sync.)
This time, instead of hundreds of thousands of years we're doing it in hundreds of years. That would be the equivalent of, instead of running at the wall for #3 you strap yourself to a rocket and fire yourself at the wall. You're well beyond brain damage and into the realm of vaporization at that point. That's basically what we're doing to our planet. But with carbon instead of bricks.
The problem is scale. We're produce enough CO2 to turn the entire planet into a greenhouse. Even if we freely supplied all of this captured CO2 to the actual greenhouses, it likely wouldn't add up to more than a fraction of a percent of what we generate.
Same thing with using it for making carbonated beverages or whatever.. sure that's a use for it but the scale difference is staggering.
Underground storage is really about the only option. Its probably a net carbon generator to try sending it into space with our current technology but even if its net negative the amount we could send up per launch is again tiny compared to the problem. There's not enough commercial need to handle it all by a large stretch, and there's nowhere in the (surface) environment you can dump it that won't cause problems of one sort of another.
Heck we're not even entirely sure that dumping it underground is safe. At the very least, if one of the reservoirs ruptures, we'll have a large and very localized burst of CO2 to deal with. That might not be great.
Of course they usually inject this stuff into old oil and gas wells so pretty far underground and not a large chance of rupturing. A bigger issue is seepage into surrounding rock and any water systems that might be down there. Luckily CO2 isn't terribly hazardous outside of its greenhouse effects so that's also probably not a huge deal. Its not super reactive so we don't have to worry too much about gas explosions.
Overall underground seems like a pretty good solution as long as we're even remotely careful to ensure that the reservoir is sealed (or close enough to sealed that the escape rate is insignificant.)
But there's always the chance that we've overlooked some hazard. Earthquakes come to mind as a possibility.. how big of a possibility I'm not qualified to answer. Hopefully close to zero but who knows -- especially if they end up injecting this stuff into some previously-unknown ancient fault line that hasn't been active for thousands of years or whatever.
Facebook and Amazon are asking for privacy? Like as in less spying? It must be fucking opposite day.
No, they're asking for privacy as in "we want all the data and nobody else should have it." With a touch of "we don't want to waste our time and money feeding our hard-earned data to the government."
This is hardly a new sentiment, and its one the government should understand well -- they've always wanted to know everything about you while letting you know as little as possible about them. Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc are all in a position where they actually do know pretty much everything about you.. but it cost them a lot to collect that information and they don't particular want to see that just being given up for free.
If the government came at them with $100mill/yr contracts rather than legislation, we would barely hear a whisper of this (until someone notices a few hundred million tagged for "mass surveillance" in the budget of course.. but it wouldn't be the companies in question making the stink.)
Probably. Requiring a warrant is done for the purposes of oversight. That is, at least two people have to agree that you need to be searched rather than one person deciding it unilaterally.
It just gives you (and everyone else) a bit of peace of mind in the guarantee that some jerk cop can't come ransack your house on a whim -- he has to talk to a judge first (who we presume to be wiser and more thoughtful when considering the justifying evidence presented.)
It doesn't change your guilt or innocence (or your presumption of such under the law) either way.
Well, what's a "reasonable rate"?
An absolute dollar value isn't something I can claim -- it would depend entirely on how long it takes for such a thing to happen (if ever) and what the economic conditions are going to be by then. Given the way the US is going under Trump, $1 might not even be reasonable in 8 years for most Americans since they'll be too busy paying for the tax breaks the rich are getting. Then again if in the extremely unlikely scenario where Trump's version of trickle down somehow works better than Reagan's did, maybe $4 or $5 will be reasonable in 8 years.
And if something like this doesn't happen for 20 years? Or if Trump actually gets impeached in the next few months? Who knows what will be reasonable 5 or 10 years from now.
So I stayed away from absolute values intentionally. But a decent relative definition might be along the lines of "cheap enough to allow 95-99%+ of Americans to use the service." Whether they'll be able to run a profit at that level is up for grabs of course, and that will be a big deciding factor in whether or not they'd consider such a plan (though in the short term at least, the main deciding factor is that USPS exists and is required to provide service at a price most people can afford, even if its not profitable and has to be subsidized by taxpayers.)
Not that I'll try to claim outright corruption is unheard of by any means, but usually this isn't so much a question of monopoly vs competition as it is a question of monopoly vs nothing at all.
That is, there were many instances (especially in rural areas) where the providers were claiming that they couldn't justify the investment if they had to face competition. Whether or not those claims were valid is anyone's guess, but valid or not they still weren't going to build out into those areas without a monopoly agreement.
So just like many of us face on a personal level these days, local governments were basically given the option of picking one of 2-3 equally bad options, or going without all together. And since everybody wants (and getting closer to needs by the day,) internet access, going without isn't really a plausible solution.
Fast forward 20 years and there's probably plenty of those areas where opening up to competition would now be plausible but remains blocked due to the old agreements either still being in force or just getting blindly renewed without much thought.
Uhh, no. I'm not sure if they ever did. And now its more popular to be a cable cutter. Netflix and chill yall.
Historically (as in, before you could stream or torrent essentially anything,) if you were the only one on your block to have cable then you would have likely been pretty popular. Similarly if everyone had cable but you were the only one with the premium channels, you'd be similarly popular. Especially among teenage boys (Skinimax what?)
But now that porn is one "Yes, I'm 18" click away whether you're lying or not, and things like Netflix (never mind bittorrent) exist and the such.. those popularity benefits are essentially gone.
There are really only a handful of reasons to keep cable at this point:
- You're just stuck in your ways and don't want to change. I imagine there's still a lot of folk in this category, especially among the older generations.
- You're into sports or Game of Thrones or something similar that's locked to your cable subscription and are too lazy or just unwilling to get your fix via less legitimate sources.
- Your local ISP still sucks bad enough that streaming isn't viable and you're too impatient to wait for torrents.
- You're one of the people who's ripping the stuff to put on the illegitimate streams and torrents in the first place.
- Your cable company does packaging or such that brings the cost of cable more in line with the garbage you get on it.
None of those amounts to "because its worth having." Some of them are "because its better than nothing," but that's not quite the same sentiment. And we're starting to see the results. There's been several posters already claiming that internet+cable bundle is cheaper than internet alone. That means the cable companies are treating (basic) cable as a loss leader in the hopes that they can either upsell you to a higher package, or that at least you'll have it turned on enough to justify retaining their advertisers.
Sure, but how often do you have to do that? I guess if you're a big ebayer perhaps quite often but for the vast majority of the population their interaction with USPS amounts to "is there mail in my mailbox today?"
Of course when I call up and ask about your experience with USPS, you don't really think about the thousands of times mail was just in your mailbox -- you just pick it up and get on with your day. Instead, you think about the one crappy trip to the depot.
Heck even if you go to the depot frequently, you generally think of the one crappy trip instead of the many perfectly normal ones (unless you just have a crappy depot and all of your experiences are bad.. which is certainly not impossible and unfortunately little you can do about that short of buying a PO box in another district with a better depot and having to drive however far to get there and deal with shippers that refuse to deliver to PO boxes and so on.)
And bank statements and letters from your grandma and any number of other things that UPS and FedEx either don't bother with or charge insane rates to handle.
Yes, the volume of legitimate mail may well be dwarfed by the volume of junk mail, but until there's another viable alternative for sending such things the USPS is still fairly necessary.
Perhaps in a couple of generations when all the grandmas are genx / millenials and are happy to use email instead of writing, and all the banks have (maybe) caught up and those mail-in rebates you get can be punched in via the internet and so on.. perhaps then USPS can finally be left to die. But that's still a couple decades off at least (especially the grandmas -- we still have two or three generations of pre-internet elderly who are unwilling to learn how to do things digitally.)
In the meantime.. you can bet your bank is going to either start charging you a much more significant amount for your paper statements if they're forced to send them via FedEx.. and that $10 rebate coupon probably won't get sent in if it costs you $12 to mail it. Your grandma may be able to adapt and use Skype or something, but lots of them won't and will just suck it up and maybe send less letters to her friends and family.
Or of course FedEx could see an opportunity for letter delivery service and start charging reasonable rates for USPS-level delivery. Which of course would mean the spammers would just start sending things with FedEx cause lets face it, FedEx isn't going to say no to however many thousands of dollars the spammers pay to get their junk mail to your doorstep. They might not "need" the money to survive in the same way USPS does, but as a private company their goal is "profit over everything," so they still have an extremely strong incentive to take the deal.
Ahh I was looking for a zealot who didn't read far enough through the article and spouted off a stereotypical "just switch to Linux!" post. But this batch of mental gymnastics is a pretty close second.
And no, its nothing like that. The amount of Linux machines that have to interact with Windows (especially in commercial environments) significantly dwarfs the number of people who use WLS. Maybe that won't always be the case, but it certainly is for now, if for no other reason than because WLS is extremely new while Samba's been around for decades.
Sure you're technically correct that its not a problem for "all" Linux machines.. but its a problem for a large enough portion of them to warrant serious concern about the threat level. Especially since, as the pundits like to point out ad nauseum, Linux has a far greater share of the market in the server room than it does on the desktop and servers are where important data tends to be stored.
Worse than that, if Texas tried to impose stricter rules than the feds, Comcast and friends will just start routing everything through say Ardmore, Oklahoma in order to justify calling it interstate commerce. It may or may not get justified by SCOTUS but they'll have a good couple of years operating that way until the legal battles are sorted out. Its not like the courts could impose an injunction to have them shut off all internet service -- it would negatively impact far too many individuals and other businesses.
They wouldn't be open to copyright claims -- the DMCA's safe harbor provisions would still apply to them unless they started to selectively identify copyrighted material specifically. Inspecting to the level of what site your packet is destined for (or sourced from) likely wouldn't break them out of the safe harbor, and per-site filtering/limiting is the expected initial attack that ISPs will engage in once Title II is dropped.
I don't know if packet inspection would open them up to non-copyright charges of some sort. I'm sure their lawyers are all over that though and they wouldn't be pushing so hard to drop Title II if they didn't expect to be able to abuse their new freedom.
As others have said, this isn't a problem in and of itself. You get what you pay for -- at least between you and your ISPs local hub.
The problem is when your ISP starts setting all connections to Amazon to Basic tier (no matter what you paid for) unless Amazon also pays them. This is the "slow lane" vs "fast lane" concept. Basically no matter what you pay, its ultimately what each and every destination website pays in addition that determines the true speed you get.
As a less lawsuit-inducing but equally bad alternative, the ISP offers to Amazon the ability for their Basic subscribers to get Premium speeds when connecting to Amazon specifically (and retaining their paid for speed for all other sites.) This is the "fast lane" vs "super fast lane" idea.
Sure in the latter case, people who pay for Basic are getting a boost rather than people who pay for Premium getting a slap which makes it look better for customers, but at the end of the day the result is the same: Amazon can afford to pay those extra extortive fees but perhaps their smaller competitors can't, meaning that Amazon is being given an (even more) unfair competitive advantage.