Agreed. I live in Oregon, so this concerns me, and not residents of other states.
If Comcast, CenturyStink, Frontier, Charter, and suchlike throw a fit, that affects us, though it's unclear how they will react.
Now coho.net (a small wireless ISP) specifically blocks/bans BitTorrent packets (they say as much on their customer page, so it'll be interesting to see how they respond...)
Probably about as long as Net Neutrality supporters postint the internet should be a public utility, but then think it's OK for YouTube, Google, Facebook and Twitter to ban non-"progressive" users.
If the internet is a public utility, the things people use the internet for are public utilities too.
Not a "progressive", but the Internet is not Google, Facebook, and/or Twitter. HTH.
As parents, one thing you can do to alleviate boredom is to get your kids outside to play when they're younger. To give them a part of keeping up the household (chores specifically), but also include them in the boring crap like teaching them like taxes and to keep a household budget (boring, but IMHO among necessary skills they'll need), to make them watch the news with you and... talk to them about it all along the way. To answer questions. To pay attention to them when they talk, to give advice when asked, and to guide them.
Most importantly, to get your kids off the damn phone/tablet/laptop/desktop and to help prepare them for the real world. This means that as parents, you yourself need to get off the damn phone/tablet/laptop/desktop, and interact with them.
TL;DR - busy kids aren't bored.
(...before my own kids grew up and left home, they regularly did their share of chores, watched me do the taxes, and asked a ton of questions along the way, helped in the garden, helped with building projects around the property, and similar. Even if you live in the city, there's a ton of activity that can be done that ultimately gives them a *huge* boost over their peers when they finally hit the Real World.)
The only reason people are getting wound up about this is because their favourite talking head on the news told them that Facebook – in a roundabout way – helped DRRUUUMMPFF win the election.
Fun bit of trivia: Facebook actually did lend a bit of assistance to the Obama campaign in 2012 , so it's not like ol' Zuck is strolling around wearing a red ball cap these days... Back when word first got out, the media were talking about how modern the Obama campaign was for using the data.
This is actually a part of FB's preview function (where they pop a little description and image onto the FB message right after the link.) It's similar to how most browsers (at least by default) plop a preview image to sites you visited on the default 'home' page when you open a browser.
They could be caching a copy of it, they could be leeching a copy of it, they could be sucking a copy of it up into BigData(tm) and analyzing the shit out of it, or they could just see if there some preview crap they can digest and plop into the message window.
On any phone older than 1-2 generations back (and on most basic entry-level new phones), FB now has had a habit of forcing your mobile browser to a limited-functionality mode (m.basic.facebook.com), and disabling messaging on the browser entirely, even if the browser (e.g. Brave, Chrome) is the latest version and perfectly capable of rendering and using the pages. The only way past it is (for now) requesting Desktop pages. At the bottom of every basic page (or if you attempt to use the Message functions on their pages) they happily tell you that you should install their apps instead.
Guess they really want to shove you into their spyware ecosystem, no?
Query: Do these servers connect directly to the Internet w/o any sort of firewall, DMZ rigging, load balancer, or similar? If not, the odds are fairly low. If so, you got bigger problems than anything Intel does or doesn't do.
...didn't realize Trump worked for Intel's marketing department;)
On a more serious note, the real reason is kinda two-fold:
* The marketing ROI is crap for many of these CPU models, to the point where the goodwill generated is gonna be way too low for the effort required to implement the fixes in them.
* The second reason can be summed up as "...maybe it's time to for you to buy some new gear...", which is still pretty much in Intel's favor (of course there's always going to be folks who get pissy enough about it to buy AMD CPU gear, but I'm betting that since most folks only see these fixes as a hindrance, the number of people going to AMD over this is not much more than statistical noise...)
Nowadays, even out here, at least some assignments require an Internet connection (and for kids who don't have one, I believe they're given alternate homework, or they're stuck with doing their homework at lunch or study hall, etc).
I'd love to see a second source of this information besides Bloomberg and the various tech blogs who are just pointing to the Bloomberg article.
You and me both. Yes, Apple tends to go its own way when it comes to hardware (and often ends up being the 800-lb gorilla-like agent that pushes for changes in the PC/laptop/mobile industries). However, unless Apple's rumored new chip suddenly kicks the crap out of an equivalent-gen Intel chip (without turning a MacBook Pro into a room-heater **), this rumor is likely just that - a rumor.
The rumor checks off a few plausibility benchmarks - Apple preferring to be its own unique thing, its history with PPC chipsets, its history with the ARM chipset (moving towards and then making its own w/o buying someone else's), its Uber-flexibility with Fat/Universal PPC/x86 Binaries......they could totally do it if they wanted to, *if* they managed to come up with something in the back room that can do it (which is quite plausible). Thing is... why would they bother? Mac growth was/is nowhere near as steep as the mobile/ARM-based device growth, and unless the results are a powerful enough leap ahead to beat up Moore's Law and then bang its girlfriend? Not seeing the ROI here.
** Before Apple finally gave up on PPC and went Intel, they were stuck with G4 chips on the laptops because the G5's were frickin' near-nuclear furnaces that required massive cooling to keep healthy - something that a laptop could never provide. Unless PPC radically changed, I'm not seeing them go back to PPC anytime soon.
Kids on a school bus... that's pretty standard stuff, even without a tracker.
Otherwise, said kids will be connected to the school, or researching assignments, or...? It's not like you're going to find farm kids looking up bomb-making materials (they prolly already know how) or soaking in ISIS propaganda.
Finally, the demographic doesn't really lend itself to having much disposable income (rural families don't really have much of that, the kids especially.) Before you say it, unlike suburban/urban kids, yelling at mommy and daddy to buy ${product} isn't really going to get them anywhere, especially with a simpler lifestyle and not as much free time. So that kind of blows away any real useful advertiser data insofar as Google is concerned.
Out here in the sticks (yes, I'm rural), kids routinely spend upwards of an hour or more on the school bus each morning (and afternoon), as their classmates and themselves are picked up from (or dropped off to) their somewhat remote homes. School hours are typically either a bit shorter in response, or that extra time spent on the bus eats into the time kids spend on homework.
May as well let the kids get the homework done before they get home (and/or before they get to school), and as a bonus, the kids won't be eating into the bandwidth caps at home that most Satellite Internet providers impose, which is what most folks in the sticks end up having to use if they want to get online (if there's Internet at all at home, which brings up another point entirely.)
Hint: Nearly all of the US mainline carriers are "evil", as it's on a spectrum. Their primary goal is to extract as much money as they can while providing as little as possible (without angering you enough to jump to a competitor.) This is part of why I use a secondary carrier - I buy my own device, then to with Net10 (or StraightTalk, or similar) - do a bit of research, and you can use the mainline carrier networks without paying the massive mainline carrier price. I pay $45/mo for 4GB data (which is honestly a lot more than I use), and there's no contract, ETF, or similar lock-in bullshit. Yeah, my phone costs me a bit up-front (I buy an unlocked one one-two generations back from bleeding-edge, then keep it for 2-3 years depending), but I'm not paying subsidy (plus massive interest) over a two-year contract. -- As a bonus, I use Verizon's network just fine, get all the speed and coverage benefits, but I don't have to pay $100/mo. or so just for my one phone. Over the past 5 years I've done this, I've most likely saved around $2700 ($3300 minus the $300 for my current phone, bought two years ago and minus the $300 or so for my previous phone), or the price of a quite nice MacBook Pro. -- Mind, if you're a massive data user, this may not work as well for you, and you'll probably want to do an unlimited plan. If you want something to show off (a bleeding-edge latest-greatest device), then you'd have to pay more up-front (but still save quite a few ducats in the process). However, for my somewhat fairly typical use case (maybe 3GB/mo and a phone that does what I want it to - shit, I'm married, who am I supposed to impress with an iPhone X or the latest Samsung Galaxy?) It works out quite nicely.
1) 1-year AppleCare comes standard, so you can take your MBP to the nearest store (or ship it back) and demand a fix or a new one depending on what broke (esp. if the USB-C ports are worn-out.)
2) I don't think Cook claimed to 'care' (could be wrong), it was Zuck who claims to care (which is technically true - he cares greatly that all the data you feed his site be accurate and correct.)
Meanwhile, with FB, your shit's already sold-off to every spammer and his dog, so there's bugger-all you can do about it once you feed it your data and/or use it.
As long as you don't read email (esp. gmail) on the device you shop with, and use that same email addy to get order confirmation on the device you buy with?
when you install everybody's "app" on all your devices. quit doing that, already. it's not worth the dollar-off a shitty coffee.
...and while you're at it, uninstall (or disable if you cannot uninstall) the pre-loaded crap (Facebook app, Amazon app, etc.) Even if you don't log into or even open them, odds are good it's being siphoned, and the information cross-checked against other bits on your phone (email addy, phone #, etc. They may not get a perfect bead on you, but they can get close enough with what they can get; especially Google if that phone runs Android.)
Can we hold coal companies to the same standard...
dafuq?
You do know that the Federal Government held them to that standard already, right? Look up the Krug-Lewis Agreement of 1946. The only thing that gets a coal company out of that is complete insolvency, and even then maybe.
So *yes*, coal companies are actually required to fund their retirement obligations.
FWIW, that tax reform bill did have a reparations incentive for corporations to bring money stashed overseas back to the US. Not perfect by any means, but a good start.
As for the rest, you're going to have to find a Congress willing to start pulling loopholes out of the tax code (good luck finding anyone in either major party with the testicular fortitude to do *that*...) Maybe the Prez' bitching and moaning is trying to stir up sentiment to that end? I dunno... *shrug*.
Seriously - a book about gay dinosaur sex (WTF?), on a site where more and more minors go browsing (so they can bug Mom and Dad to buy them whatever they find) is most likely not something you want turning up in generic results. Remove the silly Dino reference, and the same holds true for any adult vs. generic-audience book.
Couple of thoughts come to mind here...
* Amazon could have done this better (say, similar to Google or Bing's SafeSearch functions, where you have to opt-in before seeing adult material), but it's not a bad start from a parental POV.
* A question - does this change also hold true for non-book products Amazon offers on its site (like sex toys ferinstance)? If so, that is your benchmark as to where Amazon is going with this - whether its a trial balloon with just one type of product (books), an overall push to segregate adult-only from generic stuff, or...?
* Amazon is a private entity - it can organize its wares however it likes.
* No, a private organization self-censoring does not "send us back to Middle Age(sic)". It's government you have to watch out for, for signs like this.
I don't agree with what the dude said, but I do find it interesting that folks tend to have missed a perfect opportunity to admire his speaking about making the rich pay their Fair Share(tm).
I mean, damn... if there was ever a time when the entire left-wing could've gotten together and said " Yeah! Make the evil corporation pay!!! "
Oh well. Mod this post on down for pointing that out, I got karma to burn off *shrug*.
Okay, meanwhile, there's a vast difference between some politician's ramblings, and the issuance of an executive order, a bill (viz. Congress), or regulatory guidance memos.I wonder if anyone out there knows that?
You never know - they may just do it to appease the opposition party. It costs them nothing, won't reveal anything useful (at least not w/o implicating both parties in the process, which neither side will allow to happen), and it allows the opportunity to show off how 'bipartisan' everyone is in the process...
Slashdot Mirror
Even funnier... I wonder if the State of Oregon realizes that VoIP QoS might be considered throttling...
Agreed. I live in Oregon, so this concerns me, and not residents of other states.
If Comcast, CenturyStink, Frontier, Charter, and suchlike throw a fit, that affects us, though it's unclear how they will react.
Now coho.net (a small wireless ISP) specifically blocks/bans BitTorrent packets (they say as much on their customer page, so it'll be interesting to see how they respond...)
Probably about as long as Net Neutrality supporters postint the internet should be a public utility, but then think it's OK for YouTube, Google, Facebook and Twitter to ban non-"progressive" users.
If the internet is a public utility, the things people use the internet for are public utilities too.
Not a "progressive", but the Internet is not Google, Facebook, and/or Twitter. HTH.
Then there's the little fact that China routinely ignores anything the WTO says anyway...
You're partially there.
As parents, one thing you can do to alleviate boredom is to get your kids outside to play when they're younger. To give them a part of keeping up the household (chores specifically), but also include them in the boring crap like teaching them like taxes and to keep a household budget (boring, but IMHO among necessary skills they'll need), to make them watch the news with you and... talk to them about it all along the way. To answer questions. To pay attention to them when they talk, to give advice when asked, and to guide them.
Most importantly, to get your kids off the damn phone/tablet/laptop/desktop and to help prepare them for the real world. This means that as parents, you yourself need to get off the damn phone/tablet/laptop/desktop, and interact with them.
TL;DR - busy kids aren't bored.
(...before my own kids grew up and left home, they regularly did their share of chores, watched me do the taxes, and asked a ton of questions along the way, helped in the garden, helped with building projects around the property, and similar. Even if you live in the city, there's a ton of activity that can be done that ultimately gives them a *huge* boost over their peers when they finally hit the Real World.)
The only reason people are getting wound up about this is because their favourite talking head on the news told them that Facebook – in a roundabout way – helped DRRUUUMMPFF win the election.
Fun bit of trivia: Facebook actually did lend a bit of assistance to the Obama campaign in 2012 , so it's not like ol' Zuck is strolling around wearing a red ball cap these days... Back when word first got out, the media were talking about how modern the Obama campaign was for using the data.
This is actually a part of FB's preview function (where they pop a little description and image onto the FB message right after the link.) It's similar to how most browsers (at least by default) plop a preview image to sites you visited on the default 'home' page when you open a browser.
They could be caching a copy of it, they could be leeching a copy of it, they could be sucking a copy of it up into BigData(tm) and analyzing the shit out of it, or they could just see if there some preview crap they can digest and plop into the message window.
It gets better, actually...
On any phone older than 1-2 generations back (and on most basic entry-level new phones), FB now has had a habit of forcing your mobile browser to a limited-functionality mode (m.basic.facebook.com), and disabling messaging on the browser entirely, even if the browser (e.g. Brave, Chrome) is the latest version and perfectly capable of rendering and using the pages. The only way past it is (for now) requesting Desktop pages. At the bottom of every basic page (or if you attempt to use the Message functions on their pages) they happily tell you that you should install their apps instead.
Guess they really want to shove you into their spyware ecosystem, no?
Query: Do these servers connect directly to the Internet w/o any sort of firewall, DMZ rigging, load balancer, or similar? If not, the odds are fairly low. If so, you got bigger problems than anything Intel does or doesn't do.
...didn't realize Trump worked for Intel's marketing department ;)
On a more serious note, the real reason is kinda two-fold:
* The marketing ROI is crap for many of these CPU models, to the point where the goodwill generated is gonna be way too low for the effort required to implement the fixes in them.
* The second reason can be summed up as "...maybe it's time to for you to buy some new gear...", which is still pretty much in Intel's favor (of course there's always going to be folks who get pissy enough about it to buy AMD CPU gear, but I'm betting that since most folks only see these fixes as a hindrance, the number of people going to AMD over this is not much more than statistical noise...)
Understood, but that still doesn't provide the option to turn it off.
Nowadays, even out here, at least some assignments require an Internet connection (and for kids who don't have one, I believe they're given alternate homework, or they're stuck with doing their homework at lunch or study hall, etc).
I'd love to see a second source of this information besides Bloomberg and the various tech blogs who are just pointing to the Bloomberg article.
You and me both. Yes, Apple tends to go its own way when it comes to hardware (and often ends up being the 800-lb gorilla-like agent that pushes for changes in the PC/laptop/mobile industries). However, unless Apple's rumored new chip suddenly kicks the crap out of an equivalent-gen Intel chip (without turning a MacBook Pro into a room-heater **), this rumor is likely just that - a rumor.
The rumor checks off a few plausibility benchmarks - Apple preferring to be its own unique thing, its history with PPC chipsets, its history with the ARM chipset (moving towards and then making its own w/o buying someone else's), its Uber-flexibility with Fat/Universal PPC/x86 Binaries... ...they could totally do it if they wanted to, *if* they managed to come up with something in the back room that can do it (which is quite plausible). Thing is... why would they bother? Mac growth was/is nowhere near as steep as the mobile/ARM-based device growth, and unless the results are a powerful enough leap ahead to beat up Moore's Law and then bang its girlfriend? Not seeing the ROI here.
** Before Apple finally gave up on PPC and went Intel, they were stuck with G4 chips on the laptops because the G5's were frickin' near-nuclear furnaces that required massive cooling to keep healthy - something that a laptop could never provide. Unless PPC radically changed, I'm not seeing them go back to PPC anytime soon.
Kids on a school bus... that's pretty standard stuff, even without a tracker.
Otherwise, said kids will be connected to the school, or researching assignments, or...? It's not like you're going to find farm kids looking up bomb-making materials (they prolly already know how) or soaking in ISIS propaganda.
Finally, the demographic doesn't really lend itself to having much disposable income (rural families don't really have much of that, the kids especially.) Before you say it, unlike suburban/urban kids, yelling at mommy and daddy to buy ${product} isn't really going to get them anywhere, especially with a simpler lifestyle and not as much free time. So that kind of blows away any real useful advertiser data insofar as Google is concerned.
Okay, campers - put the tinfoil aside.
Out here in the sticks (yes, I'm rural), kids routinely spend upwards of an hour or more on the school bus each morning (and afternoon), as their classmates and themselves are picked up from (or dropped off to) their somewhat remote homes. School hours are typically either a bit shorter in response, or that extra time spent on the bus eats into the time kids spend on homework.
May as well let the kids get the homework done before they get home (and/or before they get to school), and as a bonus, the kids won't be eating into the bandwidth caps at home that most Satellite Internet providers impose, which is what most folks in the sticks end up having to use if they want to get online (if there's Internet at all at home, which brings up another point entirely.)
Hint: Nearly all of the US mainline carriers are "evil", as it's on a spectrum. Their primary goal is to extract as much money as they can while providing as little as possible (without angering you enough to jump to a competitor.) This is part of why I use a secondary carrier - I buy my own device, then to with Net10 (or StraightTalk, or similar) - do a bit of research, and you can use the mainline carrier networks without paying the massive mainline carrier price. I pay $45/mo for 4GB data (which is honestly a lot more than I use), and there's no contract, ETF, or similar lock-in bullshit. Yeah, my phone costs me a bit up-front (I buy an unlocked one one-two generations back from bleeding-edge, then keep it for 2-3 years depending), but I'm not paying subsidy (plus massive interest) over a two-year contract.
--
As a bonus, I use Verizon's network just fine, get all the speed and coverage benefits, but I don't have to pay $100/mo. or so just for my one phone. Over the past 5 years I've done this, I've most likely saved around $2700 ($3300 minus the $300 for my current phone, bought two years ago and minus the $300 or so for my previous phone), or the price of a quite nice MacBook Pro.
--
Mind, if you're a massive data user, this may not work as well for you, and you'll probably want to do an unlimited plan. If you want something to show off (a bleeding-edge latest-greatest device), then you'd have to pay more up-front (but still save quite a few ducats in the process). However, for my somewhat fairly typical use case (maybe 3GB/mo and a phone that does what I want it to - shit, I'm married, who am I supposed to impress with an iPhone X or the latest Samsung Galaxy?) It works out quite nicely.
At least in your case...
1) 1-year AppleCare comes standard, so you can take your MBP to the nearest store (or ship it back) and demand a fix or a new one depending on what broke (esp. if the USB-C ports are worn-out.)
2) I don't think Cook claimed to 'care' (could be wrong), it was Zuck who claims to care (which is technically true - he cares greatly that all the data you feed his site be accurate and correct.)
Meanwhile, with FB, your shit's already sold-off to every spammer and his dog, so there's bugger-all you can do about it once you feed it your data and/or use it.
As long as you don't read email (esp. gmail) on the device you shop with, and use that same email addy to get order confirmation on the device you buy with?
when you install everybody's "app" on all your devices. quit doing that, already. it's not worth the dollar-off a shitty coffee.
...and while you're at it, uninstall (or disable if you cannot uninstall) the pre-loaded crap (Facebook app, Amazon app, etc.) Even if you don't log into or even open them, odds are good it's being siphoned, and the information cross-checked against other bits on your phone (email addy, phone #, etc. They may not get a perfect bead on you, but they can get close enough with what they can get; especially Google if that phone runs Android.)
Can we hold coal companies to the same standard...
dafuq?
You do know that the Federal Government held them to that standard already, right? Look up the Krug-Lewis Agreement of 1946. The only thing that gets a coal company out of that is complete insolvency, and even then maybe.
So *yes*, coal companies are actually required to fund their retirement obligations.
FWIW, that tax reform bill did have a reparations incentive for corporations to bring money stashed overseas back to the US. Not perfect by any means, but a good start.
As for the rest, you're going to have to find a Congress willing to start pulling loopholes out of the tax code (good luck finding anyone in either major party with the testicular fortitude to do *that*...) Maybe the Prez' bitching and moaning is trying to stir up sentiment to that end? I dunno... *shrug*.
My brain just automatically translates that to read "Amazon women sacrificing erotic authors... "
Sounds delicious. Is this book illustrated, or...?
Umm, asking for a friend.
Not seeing the slippery slope here.
Seriously - a book about gay dinosaur sex (WTF?), on a site where more and more minors go browsing (so they can bug Mom and Dad to buy them whatever they find) is most likely not something you want turning up in generic results. Remove the silly Dino reference, and the same holds true for any adult vs. generic-audience book.
Couple of thoughts come to mind here...
* Amazon could have done this better (say, similar to Google or Bing's SafeSearch functions, where you have to opt-in before seeing adult material), but it's not a bad start from a parental POV.
* A question - does this change also hold true for non-book products Amazon offers on its site (like sex toys ferinstance)? If so, that is your benchmark as to where Amazon is going with this - whether its a trial balloon with just one type of product (books), an overall push to segregate adult-only from generic stuff, or...?
* Amazon is a private entity - it can organize its wares however it likes.
* No, a private organization self-censoring does not "send us back to Middle Age(sic)". It's government you have to watch out for, for signs like this.
I don't agree with what the dude said, but I do find it interesting that folks tend to have missed a perfect opportunity to admire his speaking about making the rich pay their Fair Share(tm).
I mean, damn... if there was ever a time when the entire left-wing could've gotten together and said " Yeah! Make the evil corporation pay!!! "
Oh well. Mod this post on down for pointing that out, I got karma to burn off *shrug*.
Okay, meanwhile, there's a vast difference between some politician's ramblings, and the issuance of an executive order, a bill (viz. Congress), or regulatory guidance memos.I wonder if anyone out there knows that?
You never know - they may just do it to appease the opposition party. It costs them nothing, won't reveal anything useful (at least not w/o implicating both parties in the process, which neither side will allow to happen), and it allows the opportunity to show off how 'bipartisan' everyone is in the process...