While this seems like it can be completely explained by "obvious fanservice," there's actually some interesting history here as well. I don't remember full details (never mind a link:P) but it amounts to panties being a much larger fetish among Japanese men than we (as westerners) would expect, due to the history of how panties were introduced to the country.
Basically, because the Japanese were fairly immodest by western standards -- mixed bathing and all that good stuff -- when we started introducing our values into their country we brought with us both (western-style) modesty -- ie: hide your reproductive bits -- and also panties at around the same time. So the Japanese went through a period where you could go to the bath and see fully naked women basically whenever you wanted, but panties were kept hidden and therefore became the forbidden land while in the west, panties were introduced primarily to be an extra barrier against a woman exposing her naughty bits accidentally.
Of course these days mixed bathing is pretty rare (though not completely gone) and girls in Japan tend to be just as self-conscious of their nakedness as we are, but the history still bears its mark both in art and even in life (that's a large part of why used panties vending machines were a thing until the Japanese government had to specifically ban them.. I mean sure some westerners have a fetish for dirty underwear but nobody here would ever dream of setting up a vending machine to sell such things -- the market simply isn't large enough or concentrated enough to bother.)
Another "interesting" thing to watch is the length of girls' stockings. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... if you want to get an idea of how much time and energy the Japanese put into what we would consider relatively benign crap, simply because of the way they meshed western modesty and other western ideals into their culture over the past few centuries.
For the same reason the future has aliens and hoverboards and alcoholic robots -- the artist thinks its cool. Especially in soft sci-fi where they don't have to (and usually don't bother to) justify their choices.
It seems to me that there's a difference between: "I'm not going to support my competitor's products" and "I don't want a random third party fucking up my business."
If Google was complaining about net neutrality while simultaneously blocking their services from Comcast customers (as a competitor to its Fiber brand) then they would be hypocritical. Fighting with your competitor in an unrelated market is not. At least not by any definition I've ever heard.
Of course words don't mean anything anymore in our current political environment, so who cares how they're used as long as it sounds scary. Covfefe!
Yes, that's rather the point. If you want to retain your large bandwidth usage then pay extra. Except instead of the current system of paying extra for straight up more bits, you now get to pay an extra $1 for Call of Duty and an extra $4 for Youtube and extra $5 for Netflix and so on and so on. Bittorrent would be just flat out dead since there's no one site you could pay extra for (being as its distributed by design.) Windows Update probably wouldn't be extra for you (Microsoft would be covering it.) Linux updates wouldn't be on the list of available per-site upgrades so you're just stuck downloading those at 10mbps. Don't like it? Go to the competition. Who does the exact same thing. Enjoy!
but since the NN laws never went into place
While that's true, the major ISPs for the most part didn't start really digging into the whole being evil(er) side of things because they were wanting to avoid having to undo it all once the rules actually hit. Basically they were (mostly) running as if the rules were already in place. Anyone who believes they will continue operating like that once the threat of regulation is entirely eliminated is living in some Ayn Rand pipe dream that has no basis in reality. Companies operate in their own interest. That's rarely in line with the public interest.
as technology continues to improve, so will minimum service specs.
Yes, and they want to make sure you (and Google and Netflix and everybody else) pay through the teeth for every single new technology that you want to take advantage of, above and beyond the raw bandwidth fees.
Oh? And which candidate was that in 2016? Do you think Hillary was less corrupt? She would have been less blatant about it, but most federal-level democrats aren't exactly known for keeping their wallets closed either and there just isn't a (useful) third option.
There are uncorrupted (so far) people running for congress in 2018. There's the odd uncorrupted person in congress right now. But not enough of them do much against the overwhelming majority of those that are corrupted.
And I know its difficult to remain uncorrupted. If Exxon Mobile came up offering me more money than I'd otherwise ever see in my entire life, I'm not sure I'd have the balls to say no either. The only way to even approach the problem is to dissociate funding from policy. Cap private donations and kill the whole "SuperPAC" concept that gets around those caps. Provide a basic level of public funding for candidates (would need some oversight I'm aware to stop every dipshit in the county "campaigning" just to get the payout, and whoever does the oversight is another potential place for corruption to sneak in but the point is to allow for candidates that aren't either individually wealthy or already deep in the pockets of some large corporation right from day zero.)
Sure that would bring back more under-the-table bribery but at least that's really illegal and can be stopped when its caught out, unlike the relatively transparent "campaign contribution" bribery we have now that basically means you no longer have any say in what your representatives do if you aren't a multi-millionaire.
And yes there's the whole justice democrat movement going on right now, and I hope they gain success. But it remains to be seen how many of them are able to stay as uncorruptable as they claim once the checks are being waved in front of their faces.
1) OK we could do that, though it would likely have to be nuclear as we don't have any other technology that can bring that level of power online for any extended period of time, especially when refueling is not really simple.
2) I'm sure this would spur lots of innovation, seeing as it would require redefining a lot of what we know about physics.
3) We could do this, though you need a fairly large radius in order to be effective while not spinning people so fast that they get sick. Nobody wants to live in a tilt-a-whirl. We're talking the scale of hundreds of meters or into the kilometer diameter range.
4) We pretty much have this one, though again it needs to be fairly large, especially for food production.
5) We have lots of these already. None of them are especially fast but of course with no friction to slow you down, you can just keep on accelerating until your power source gives out.
I would also throw in a descent and ascent module
You might be able to manage descent with enough parachutes and whatnot to reduce the engine requirements, but ascent is directly contradictory with the size requirements needed for #3 and #4. If we were to build such a thing, it would have to be built in-orbit and the only way on or off would be a shuttle. There's not enough rocket fuel in the world to lift something that large into orbit from the ground.
Not quickly or easily. Google's been trying to do this for what? Almost a decade now with their Fiber? Every single city and town is an uphill battle to obtain right-of-ways and fight off the incumbents continually filing injunctions and other tactics to slow or block the roll-out.
He thinks he can propagandize his way out of the massive backlash.
He's not even doing that. He's just ignoring the massive backlash and ramming it through anyway because nobody with the power to stop him (ie: congress) care about the public interest either.
Define "elsewhere?" Lets say your local telco pulls this shit.
If you're lucky, you will also have a cable company to switch to. So you do.
They pull the same shit.
OK well lets try satellite. They cost 4x the price. And you get horrid latency.
Oh, and they also pull the same shit.
That's where it stops for something like 70-80% of Americans. There is no other options.
And in many places, you can't even create another option yourself because the incumbents have the local government as well as the courts on lockdown and will block your attempts for years or decades until you've spent all your capital on lawyers and have nothing left to build infrastructure.
Perhaps not, but I fully believe that they will fail to investigate and punish these ISPs even _if_ they promised to not be anti-competitive and then break that promise.
Though I far more expect the "anti-consumer" side of the statement will be the bigger issue for well.. consumers. There's little reason to be anti-competitive when there's no (effective) competition in the first place.
Only works if you have friends, and those friends have free time when you do.
Wikipedia -> Encyclopedia/Library
Just doesn't work at all. Libraries tend to be woefully out of date due to lack of funding, and even if they get a new copy of the Encyclopedia each year, you're always up to a year behind the times. Plus encyclopedia entries are tiny compared to their Wikipedia counterparts (there's only so much space even in a 20 or even 50 volume set,) so there's much information missing and its a total crapshoot whether your local library will have any more detailed books on the topic you're researching. And _then_ you have to deal with the fact that only a few dozen people can use it at one time, maximum (if every person needs a different volume and you have maybe two or three sets.) And it totally kills the most common and arguably most valuable Wikipedia usage -- quick fact checks that turn into massive wiki walks.
Netflix Streaming -> Netflix DVDs
Blockbuster will be re-opening stores too, I'm sure.
Ordering pizza with an app -> Call for delivery
This is the only viable one on the list (and hell a lot of non-chain pizza shops still don't support online ordering anyway, so its something a lot of us already do periodically.)
Pornhub -> Strip club
If you want to watch a girl only taking some clothes off and not getting banged senseless by three dudes with 12 inch cocks while eating out her college roommate. Oh. And in front of a bunch of other people. Porn magazines would be a better alternative but those face the same problems as the Netflix DVD suggestion (and are a lot harder to hide from your wife/mom/whoever than a folder on your computer!)
CNN news -> National Enquirer
Uhhh huh? I'm assuming you're trying to make a joke here.. but TV is still a thing. We could still watch CNN the old fashioned way. And even if we couldn't, I don't think replacing a left-leaning news organization with stories about JonBenet being abducted by Elvis' alien offspring quite works out, even if you're a conservative (in which case, why are you watching CNN anyway? Your confirmation bias broken?)
After the 2020 elections.. we'll likely not have a Republican in the Whitehouse anymore
LOL. Such fantasy. If Trump gets nailed by Mueller (or chokes on his KFC or otherwise is prematurely removed from office) and Pence takes over, then _maybe_ the dems will have a chance in 2020.
If Trump survives until the next election though, there's a very high chance he'll take it again. The dems just don't have the teeth to stop him right now. Bernie Sanders, Justice democrats and other progressives might have a chance but they're getting junk-kicked by their own party's infighting and there's a very good chance they'll fail in the primaries again and we'll get another unlikable dem nominee going up against the Trump hype machine (which his supporters still seem to believe in quite heavily no matter how many times he's caught -- on tape quite often -- just flat out lying to them..)
Of course if Kim Jong-Un decides to follow through with his threats then all bets are off. The start of the first truly nuclear war would change politics not just in the US but likely around the world. A simple one-and-done might not disrupt things too much (other than probably wiping North Korea off the map.) But there's a strong potential for a nuclear launch (especially a US nuclear launch) to trigger a full on nuclear-armed WW3 and depending who gets involved and how the sides fall out, there may not even be a US left by the time all is said and done.
Sure except that: a) Such people have to run for office in the first place in order to vote for them. b) You have to know ahead of time whether they're corrupt or not. c) You also have to know ahead of time whether they're corruptable.
There's not much you can do about (a) except hope. (b) is probably a little easier to at least make an educated guess about, providing the candidate had much of any public life prior to running. (c) is something that the candidate themselves may not even realize until they're staring at a bag full of money and having to make a hard choice.
I'm not saying nobody can do it. But at the same time its also not something just anyone can do. But anyone can write a post on the internet though with the slight hope of swaying a stranger's opinion to their side. Sometimes that's all you can do, and its still better than doing literally nothing.
You always had net neutrality. There just wasn't a word for it because it wasn't even something worth questioning prior to the introduction of deep packet inspection and similar content-based discrimination technologies.
Tom Wheeler (who was also a corporate shill, remember!) brought in NN regulations because he saw the direction major ISPs were wanting to take things if left to their own devices. Their goals haven't changed.
I don't blame the ISPs. Its their job to suck up as much money as possible regardless of consequences. I blame the government for being corrupt enough to not only allow them to do so, but straight up pave the way for them. The government is supposed to be working for and protecting citizens, not corporations. Sadly, the opposite seems to be true in the USA these days.
Sure. You can live as a minimum wage farmhand fapping goats for $7.50/hr but if you want to do better than that in the world you're going to need to get online. Otherwise the guy down the road who does things faster is going to beat you to the punch every time.
Just like you can get by without a vehicle (not even public transport) and walk everywhere, but it severely limits your opportunities.
And yes the odd lucky person does manage to find those opportunities and manages to make out well despite their lack of internet (or car) but such people are few and far between. Its definitely not something "anybody" can do.
I've said it before but it always bears reiterating:
Any plan that starts with "we all" or "everybody should" is a non-starter. You will never get enough people to bother.. even the ones who actually care still mostly won't bother if it requires more than a few mouse clicks.
50% of Comcast's customers will not give up the internet. There's no point even discussing it because the chance of it happening is zero, even if it would theoretically work as you state.
"We're killing all our packages >10mbps. No grandfathering." So Netflix for you works just as fast as any other site, but its still slower than the 100mbps line you can get now. But don't worry, if you pay an extra $2/mo you can get Netflix boosted to 100mbps speeds.
Even if they don't drop current packages and just stagnate them instead as technology improves, you're going to end up in a similar situation a decade from now when you theoretically have 1gbps to your door but Comcast will only provide it to you a-la-carte for specific approved services at $2/mo/service and everything else still shuffles along at 2017 speeds.
Its not an illusion. All reports suggest that searches for incest porn are up, and of course because sites tend to use trending type algorithms to at least some degree when making up their suggestions lists, you end up with incest bubbling up as a suggestion.
There has actually been quite articles about the phenomena and most of them tend to favor the "its Game of Throne's fault," if they care to hazard a guess at all for the cause of the shift. Though even before GoT you could start seeing hints of it in mainstream TV.. kind of along the line of how homosexuality was hinted at here and there in 80s and 90s TV before breaking out completely in the 2000s. There was two or three shows I'd noticed at the time that all seemed to include incest plots of some sort but the only one that I can still recall is Nip/Tuck, probably because they made it a multi-episode subplot.
the taboo on incest stems from it generating genetic problems (...,) no other reason
There's a strong chance that its actually engrained in our psychology actually. Check out the Westermarck effect. So even with 100% reliable birth control, there's a good chance that incest would still touch our squick. Its only hypothetical (not really morally cool to test that one in a lab!) and doesn't explain everything (for example, it explains why kids might not have sexual interest in their parents.. but doesn't explain why the parents also tend to not have sexual interest in their children for the most part.)
And as always, keep in mind that there's a significant difference between fantasizing about something and actually doing that thing. I suspect most people who want to watch Jaime and Cersei get it on, or Gal Gadot and whoever her stepbrother is or whatever other pairing.. quite likely have no interest in boning their own siblings ("man I'd nail my sister if she looked like Cersei!".. probably you wouldn't. If she did, you'd likely just not be as interested in Cersei either.)
There are very few oppressive states that bother justifying it when they get rid of inconvenient people. Those people just disappear.
Its the (theoretically) free states that have to come up with reasons and excuses to do things (and those excuses are what fuel the court of public opinion, for the most part.)
The fact that it could be forged suggests that Elcomsoft was either using a woefully underpowered authentication algorithm, or they were just flat out selling snake oil.
Its super easy to create a digital signature system that's effectively unforgeable (well, prior to quantum computing) and has been for many years now.
Of course any such system would be easily forged if you both knew the algorithm used and could extract the camera's signing certificate, but I'd like to hope that doing the latter would at least require physical access to the camera (better yet if the cert is completely unextractable and you have to verify pictures by uploading them back to the camera and having it give a yay/nay. Then it would be 100% unforgeable even with physical access, assuming the algo itself is solid.)
Child porn laws, at least for the moment, often can be invoked even when there's no actual child involved if its explicit enough (drawings, older actors pretending to be 18, etc.) The justification for extending child protection laws to cases where there's no child is.. shaky.. but so far its the way things have been going down for the most part with only small leeway for artistic renditions of nude children (mostly determined by the "I know it when I see it" style of rulings.)
There was a case here in Canada not that long ago where a guy was arrested for importing a child sex doll from Japan even though the authorities had zero other reason to suspect or charge the man of child pornography never mind actual child abuse. Obviously that went to court. Not sure what the result was (or if there even is a result yet.)
So basically, child labor laws aren't the biggest problem in this case. Because there's definitely no child labor in the (legitimate) porn business anyway.
I can't see that working.. a) Being at the end of your driveway is basically begging someone to steal it. Even in a high end neighborhood that would be risky if you aren't home to pick it up (and if you were, they could just text you and have you to walk to the car.)
b) Printed? Who has a printer anymore? I mean an actual working one, not that WinXP-era inkjet you've been keeping around "just in case you need to print something" but probably will have dry ink by the time you get around to plugging it in and no driver support past Vista?
Slashdot Mirror
I really hope that was an intentional reference. Because that would make me happy.
While this seems like it can be completely explained by "obvious fanservice," there's actually some interesting history here as well. I don't remember full details (never mind a link:P) but it amounts to panties being a much larger fetish among Japanese men than we (as westerners) would expect, due to the history of how panties were introduced to the country.
Basically, because the Japanese were fairly immodest by western standards -- mixed bathing and all that good stuff -- when we started introducing our values into their country we brought with us both (western-style) modesty -- ie: hide your reproductive bits -- and also panties at around the same time. So the Japanese went through a period where you could go to the bath and see fully naked women basically whenever you wanted, but panties were kept hidden and therefore became the forbidden land while in the west, panties were introduced primarily to be an extra barrier against a woman exposing her naughty bits accidentally.
Of course these days mixed bathing is pretty rare (though not completely gone) and girls in Japan tend to be just as self-conscious of their nakedness as we are, but the history still bears its mark both in art and even in life (that's a large part of why used panties vending machines were a thing until the Japanese government had to specifically ban them.. I mean sure some westerners have a fetish for dirty underwear but nobody here would ever dream of setting up a vending machine to sell such things -- the market simply isn't large enough or concentrated enough to bother.)
Another "interesting" thing to watch is the length of girls' stockings. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... if you want to get an idea of how much time and energy the Japanese put into what we would consider relatively benign crap, simply because of the way they meshed western modesty and other western ideals into their culture over the past few centuries.
For the same reason the future has aliens and hoverboards and alcoholic robots -- the artist thinks its cool. Especially in soft sci-fi where they don't have to (and usually don't bother to) justify their choices.
It seems to me that there's a difference between:
"I'm not going to support my competitor's products"
and
"I don't want a random third party fucking up my business."
If Google was complaining about net neutrality while simultaneously blocking their services from Comcast customers (as a competitor to its Fiber brand) then they would be hypocritical. Fighting with your competitor in an unrelated market is not. At least not by any definition I've ever heard.
Of course words don't mean anything anymore in our current political environment, so who cares how they're used as long as it sounds scary. Covfefe!
too many people have pretty large bandwidth needs
Yes, that's rather the point. If you want to retain your large bandwidth usage then pay extra. Except instead of the current system of paying extra for straight up more bits, you now get to pay an extra $1 for Call of Duty and an extra $4 for Youtube and extra $5 for Netflix and so on and so on. Bittorrent would be just flat out dead since there's no one site you could pay extra for (being as its distributed by design.) Windows Update probably wouldn't be extra for you (Microsoft would be covering it.) Linux updates wouldn't be on the list of available per-site upgrades so you're just stuck downloading those at 10mbps. Don't like it? Go to the competition. Who does the exact same thing. Enjoy!
but since the NN laws never went into place
While that's true, the major ISPs for the most part didn't start really digging into the whole being evil(er) side of things because they were wanting to avoid having to undo it all once the rules actually hit. Basically they were (mostly) running as if the rules were already in place. Anyone who believes they will continue operating like that once the threat of regulation is entirely eliminated is living in some Ayn Rand pipe dream that has no basis in reality. Companies operate in their own interest. That's rarely in line with the public interest.
as technology continues to improve, so will minimum service specs.
Yes, and they want to make sure you (and Google and Netflix and everybody else) pay through the teeth for every single new technology that you want to take advantage of, above and beyond the raw bandwidth fees.
Oh? And which candidate was that in 2016? Do you think Hillary was less corrupt? She would have been less blatant about it, but most federal-level democrats aren't exactly known for keeping their wallets closed either and there just isn't a (useful) third option.
There are uncorrupted (so far) people running for congress in 2018. There's the odd uncorrupted person in congress right now. But not enough of them do much against the overwhelming majority of those that are corrupted.
And I know its difficult to remain uncorrupted. If Exxon Mobile came up offering me more money than I'd otherwise ever see in my entire life, I'm not sure I'd have the balls to say no either. The only way to even approach the problem is to dissociate funding from policy. Cap private donations and kill the whole "SuperPAC" concept that gets around those caps. Provide a basic level of public funding for candidates (would need some oversight I'm aware to stop every dipshit in the county "campaigning" just to get the payout, and whoever does the oversight is another potential place for corruption to sneak in but the point is to allow for candidates that aren't either individually wealthy or already deep in the pockets of some large corporation right from day zero.)
Sure that would bring back more under-the-table bribery but at least that's really illegal and can be stopped when its caught out, unlike the relatively transparent "campaign contribution" bribery we have now that basically means you no longer have any say in what your representatives do if you aren't a multi-millionaire.
And yes there's the whole justice democrat movement going on right now, and I hope they gain success. But it remains to be seen how many of them are able to stay as uncorruptable as they claim once the checks are being waved in front of their faces.
1) OK we could do that, though it would likely have to be nuclear as we don't have any other technology that can bring that level of power online for any extended period of time, especially when refueling is not really simple.
2) I'm sure this would spur lots of innovation, seeing as it would require redefining a lot of what we know about physics.
3) We could do this, though you need a fairly large radius in order to be effective while not spinning people so fast that they get sick. Nobody wants to live in a tilt-a-whirl. We're talking the scale of hundreds of meters or into the kilometer diameter range.
4) We pretty much have this one, though again it needs to be fairly large, especially for food production.
5) We have lots of these already. None of them are especially fast but of course with no friction to slow you down, you can just keep on accelerating until your power source gives out.
I would also throw in a descent and ascent module
You might be able to manage descent with enough parachutes and whatnot to reduce the engine requirements, but ascent is directly contradictory with the size requirements needed for #3 and #4. If we were to build such a thing, it would have to be built in-orbit and the only way on or off would be a shuttle. There's not enough rocket fuel in the world to lift something that large into orbit from the ground.
Not quickly or easily. Google's been trying to do this for what? Almost a decade now with their Fiber? Every single city and town is an uphill battle to obtain right-of-ways and fight off the incumbents continually filing injunctions and other tactics to slow or block the roll-out.
He thinks he can propagandize his way out of the massive backlash.
He's not even doing that. He's just ignoring the massive backlash and ramming it through anyway because nobody with the power to stop him (ie: congress) care about the public interest either.
Define "elsewhere?" Lets say your local telco pulls this shit.
If you're lucky, you will also have a cable company to switch to. So you do.
They pull the same shit.
OK well lets try satellite. They cost 4x the price. And you get horrid latency.
Oh, and they also pull the same shit.
That's where it stops for something like 70-80% of Americans. There is no other options.
And in many places, you can't even create another option yourself because the incumbents have the local government as well as the courts on lockdown and will block your attempts for years or decades until you've spent all your capital on lawyers and have nothing left to build infrastructure.
Perhaps not, but I fully believe that they will fail to investigate and punish these ISPs even _if_ they promised to not be anti-competitive and then break that promise.
Though I far more expect the "anti-consumer" side of the statement will be the bigger issue for well.. consumers. There's little reason to be anti-competitive when there's no (effective) competition in the first place.
Online Games -> LAN Parties
Only works if you have friends, and those friends have free time when you do.
Wikipedia -> Encyclopedia/Library
Just doesn't work at all. Libraries tend to be woefully out of date due to lack of funding, and even if they get a new copy of the Encyclopedia each year, you're always up to a year behind the times. Plus encyclopedia entries are tiny compared to their Wikipedia counterparts (there's only so much space even in a 20 or even 50 volume set,) so there's much information missing and its a total crapshoot whether your local library will have any more detailed books on the topic you're researching.
And _then_ you have to deal with the fact that only a few dozen people can use it at one time, maximum (if every person needs a different volume and you have maybe two or three sets.)
And it totally kills the most common and arguably most valuable Wikipedia usage -- quick fact checks that turn into massive wiki walks.
Netflix Streaming -> Netflix DVDs
Blockbuster will be re-opening stores too, I'm sure.
Ordering pizza with an app -> Call for delivery
This is the only viable one on the list (and hell a lot of non-chain pizza shops still don't support online ordering anyway, so its something a lot of us already do periodically.)
Pornhub -> Strip club
If you want to watch a girl only taking some clothes off and not getting banged senseless by three dudes with 12 inch cocks while eating out her college roommate. Oh. And in front of a bunch of other people. Porn magazines would be a better alternative but those face the same problems as the Netflix DVD suggestion (and are a lot harder to hide from your wife/mom/whoever than a folder on your computer!)
CNN news -> National Enquirer
Uhhh huh? I'm assuming you're trying to make a joke here.. but TV is still a thing. We could still watch CNN the old fashioned way. And even if we couldn't, I don't think replacing a left-leaning news organization with stories about JonBenet being abducted by Elvis' alien offspring quite works out, even if you're a conservative (in which case, why are you watching CNN anyway? Your confirmation bias broken?)
After the 2020 elections .. we'll likely not have a Republican in the Whitehouse anymore
LOL. Such fantasy. If Trump gets nailed by Mueller (or chokes on his KFC or otherwise is prematurely removed from office) and Pence takes over, then _maybe_ the dems will have a chance in 2020.
If Trump survives until the next election though, there's a very high chance he'll take it again. The dems just don't have the teeth to stop him right now. Bernie Sanders, Justice democrats and other progressives might have a chance but they're getting junk-kicked by their own party's infighting and there's a very good chance they'll fail in the primaries again and we'll get another unlikable dem nominee going up against the Trump hype machine (which his supporters still seem to believe in quite heavily no matter how many times he's caught -- on tape quite often -- just flat out lying to them..)
Of course if Kim Jong-Un decides to follow through with his threats then all bets are off. The start of the first truly nuclear war would change politics not just in the US but likely around the world. A simple one-and-done might not disrupt things too much (other than probably wiping North Korea off the map.) But there's a strong potential for a nuclear launch (especially a US nuclear launch) to trigger a full on nuclear-armed WW3 and depending who gets involved and how the sides fall out, there may not even be a US left by the time all is said and done.
Sure except that:
a) Such people have to run for office in the first place in order to vote for them.
b) You have to know ahead of time whether they're corrupt or not.
c) You also have to know ahead of time whether they're corruptable.
There's not much you can do about (a) except hope. (b) is probably a little easier to at least make an educated guess about, providing the candidate had much of any public life prior to running. (c) is something that the candidate themselves may not even realize until they're staring at a bag full of money and having to make a hard choice.
I'm not saying nobody can do it. But at the same time its also not something just anyone can do. But anyone can write a post on the internet though with the slight hope of swaying a stranger's opinion to their side. Sometimes that's all you can do, and its still better than doing literally nothing.
You always had net neutrality. There just wasn't a word for it because it wasn't even something worth questioning prior to the introduction of deep packet inspection and similar content-based discrimination technologies.
Tom Wheeler (who was also a corporate shill, remember!) brought in NN regulations because he saw the direction major ISPs were wanting to take things if left to their own devices. Their goals haven't changed.
I don't blame the ISPs. Its their job to suck up as much money as possible regardless of consequences. I blame the government for being corrupt enough to not only allow them to do so, but straight up pave the way for them. The government is supposed to be working for and protecting citizens, not corporations. Sadly, the opposite seems to be true in the USA these days.
Sure. You can live as a minimum wage farmhand fapping goats for $7.50/hr but if you want to do better than that in the world you're going to need to get online. Otherwise the guy down the road who does things faster is going to beat you to the punch every time.
Just like you can get by without a vehicle (not even public transport) and walk everywhere, but it severely limits your opportunities.
And yes the odd lucky person does manage to find those opportunities and manages to make out well despite their lack of internet (or car) but such people are few and far between. Its definitely not something "anybody" can do.
I've said it before but it always bears reiterating:
Any plan that starts with "we all" or "everybody should" is a non-starter. You will never get enough people to bother.. even the ones who actually care still mostly won't bother if it requires more than a few mouse clicks.
50% of Comcast's customers will not give up the internet. There's no point even discussing it because the chance of it happening is zero, even if it would theoretically work as you state.
North Korea's looking to help out with the Nuclear Option.
Slowed compared to _what_, precisely?
"We're killing all our packages >10mbps. No grandfathering." So Netflix for you works just as fast as any other site, but its still slower than the 100mbps line you can get now. But don't worry, if you pay an extra $2/mo you can get Netflix boosted to 100mbps speeds.
Even if they don't drop current packages and just stagnate them instead as technology improves, you're going to end up in a similar situation a decade from now when you theoretically have 1gbps to your door but Comcast will only provide it to you a-la-carte for specific approved services at $2/mo/service and everything else still shuffles along at 2017 speeds.
Porn always leads technology.
Followed by video games.
Then the military.
Finally the rest of the world catches on.
(Military may move up the list a bit if the technology has an obvious and immediate application for killing people easier.)
fallen for the illusion
Its not an illusion. All reports suggest that searches for incest porn are up, and of course because sites tend to use trending type algorithms to at least some degree when making up their suggestions lists, you end up with incest bubbling up as a suggestion.
There has actually been quite articles about the phenomena and most of them tend to favor the "its Game of Throne's fault," if they care to hazard a guess at all for the cause of the shift. Though even before GoT you could start seeing hints of it in mainstream TV.. kind of along the line of how homosexuality was hinted at here and there in 80s and 90s TV before breaking out completely in the 2000s. There was two or three shows I'd noticed at the time that all seemed to include incest plots of some sort but the only one that I can still recall is Nip/Tuck, probably because they made it a multi-episode subplot.
the taboo on incest stems from it generating genetic problems (...,) no other reason
There's a strong chance that its actually engrained in our psychology actually. Check out the Westermarck effect. So even with 100% reliable birth control, there's a good chance that incest would still touch our squick. Its only hypothetical (not really morally cool to test that one in a lab!) and doesn't explain everything (for example, it explains why kids might not have sexual interest in their parents.. but doesn't explain why the parents also tend to not have sexual interest in their children for the most part.)
And as always, keep in mind that there's a significant difference between fantasizing about something and actually doing that thing. I suspect most people who want to watch Jaime and Cersei get it on, or Gal Gadot and whoever her stepbrother is or whatever other pairing.. quite likely have no interest in boning their own siblings ("man I'd nail my sister if she looked like Cersei!".. probably you wouldn't. If she did, you'd likely just not be as interested in Cersei either.)
There are very few oppressive states that bother justifying it when they get rid of inconvenient people. Those people just disappear.
Its the (theoretically) free states that have to come up with reasons and excuses to do things (and those excuses are what fuel the court of public opinion, for the most part.)
The fact that it could be forged suggests that Elcomsoft was either using a woefully underpowered authentication algorithm, or they were just flat out selling snake oil.
Its super easy to create a digital signature system that's effectively unforgeable (well, prior to quantum computing) and has been for many years now.
Of course any such system would be easily forged if you both knew the algorithm used and could extract the camera's signing certificate, but I'd like to hope that doing the latter would at least require physical access to the camera (better yet if the cert is completely unextractable and you have to verify pictures by uploading them back to the camera and having it give a yay/nay. Then it would be 100% unforgeable even with physical access, assuming the algo itself is solid.)
(no child labour laws!!!)
Child porn laws, at least for the moment, often can be invoked even when there's no actual child involved if its explicit enough (drawings, older actors pretending to be 18, etc.) The justification for extending child protection laws to cases where there's no child is.. shaky.. but so far its the way things have been going down for the most part with only small leeway for artistic renditions of nude children (mostly determined by the "I know it when I see it" style of rulings.)
There was a case here in Canada not that long ago where a guy was arrested for importing a child sex doll from Japan even though the authorities had zero other reason to suspect or charge the man of child pornography never mind actual child abuse.
Obviously that went to court. Not sure what the result was (or if there even is a result yet.)
So basically, child labor laws aren't the biggest problem in this case. Because there's definitely no child labor in the (legitimate) porn business anyway.
I can't see that working..
a) Being at the end of your driveway is basically begging someone to steal it. Even in a high end neighborhood that would be risky if you aren't home to pick it up (and if you were, they could just text you and have you to walk to the car.)
b) Printed? Who has a printer anymore? I mean an actual working one, not that WinXP-era inkjet you've been keeping around "just in case you need to print something" but probably will have dry ink by the time you get around to plugging it in and no driver support past Vista?