My answer may not apply to people outside of the US. The rules vary.
The better question, with regard to going all cash, is how liable are you in the event of compromise?
Are online payment systems "safe" in the sense that they are unlikely to be compromised? No, not really.
But if they are compromised, so what? If you use a major credit card, and your number gets compromised, it's really not that big of a deal. Most all of the liability is on the merchant and the card issuer, not you. The worst case scenario I've dealt with is the card being inactive for a few days. If you stick to using credit online, no debit or ACH, this can pretty much be the worst you have to deal with.
This is one reason bitcoin and other digital currencies have difficulty going mainstream. Sure my hardware bitcoin wallet might be 100x more secure than my credit card, but if it gets compromised, I'm screwed. If my credit card gets compromised, I'm merely inconvenienced.
Rather than going to cash, I recommend people try to:
1) Keep at least two major credit cards open at all times with two different banks. Use one regularly, the other is a backup. 2) Avoid using debit or ACH, especially online. 3) Use a system like Mint so that you can easily monitor activity on your cards. If you see any activity that isn't you, be proactive. 4) Use a service like PayPal whenever possible. A lot of my bills are paid via PayPal. If a card is compromised, expired, whatever, I only have to update one place. Plus it gives me yet another entity to share liability in the event of fraud.
If you do these things, you're liable for virtually nothing, and the security of your payments is less of a concern. Let the credit card companies deal with it.
This is textbook begging the question. To ask a question like this, you have to establish that some special appeal exists, because it is by no means established.
For starters, the claim that Apple products are overpriced is controversial. They tend to not make a low end product, true, but this is regularly debated whenever Apple comes up. Simply stating it as a premise without justification is presupposing an answer.
Second, there are many die hard users for almost every tech brand. They all benefit from tribalism. For every user you describe committed to Apple, there are certainly similar ones for Sony, Microsoft, and even Samsung. Maybe there is no special appeal, maybe this is just a normal phenomenon among tech products, and the speaker is just fixated on Apple and its users.
Further, what does "special appeal?" even mean? If it's put in quotes, it had better have some specific definition. Who are we quoting here? Is better marketing a special appeal? Is more reliability a special appeal? Is a self-contained ecosystem a special appeal? Are brain chips implanted by the Illuminati at the request of Tim Cook a special appeal?
If these people (somehow) win, the precedent could be insane.
Game consoles do this all the time. You update or lose access to all online services, period. If this lawsuit wins, Sony and Microsoft could both be on the hook in a big way. I'm sure many other devices are similar.
I don't think I'm a typical tech consumer, but I think consumers like me are pretty important to Apple's success in the last decade.
I've had pretty much Apple everything for a little over a decade. My Macs are always bought infrequently. I've had four iPhones, three Apple TVs, and two iPads in the time I'm on one Cinema Display. I've had three iPhones in the time I've had my current MacBook Pro. Ten percent of sales, sure.
But here's the deal: I'm about to buy a laptop that isn't a Mac. When I do, I'll probably stop updating all my other Apple products too. I had a Mac first, and even today, I buy all those other things because of how nicely they integrate with a Mac. The Mac anchors all my other Apple products, and frankly, I anchor the tech purchasing decisions of a lot of my friends and family.
As a lawyer, he probably also knows that not all states have such laws. As something of a constitutional authority, he probably also knows that no such laws have ever been enforced, and that if any state ever tries, they will likely be struck down as unconstitutional.
I can't believe this is on the front page. This is the oldest Apple flamewar ever.
I agree, the new MBP is . . . terrible. But the idea that this Oryx "closely matches" the MBP is ridiculous beyond the CPU. They're wildly different. Apologies, but . . . apples and oranges.
The Oryx:
- is made of plastic - weighs about 40% more - has a much lower resolution screen - lacks that touch bar and expensive ARM hardware (which granted, pretty much no one, including me, wants) - lacks any thunderbolt, let alone two separate thunderbolt 3 controllers (the big "pro" feature in the new MBP) - has a smaller battery and way more power hungry components - an SSD that I'm pretty sure is nowhere near as fast - doesn't run OS X
These are the things that jack up the price of the MBP. Whether or not they're a sensible cost proposition is very different from "see, practically the same." Apple screwed up and inflated the price with things people don't want.
It's cool that System76 is getting a lot more attention. I think I'm about to buy a Puri.sm laptop, the disappointing new MBP put me over. But come on, they are not the same. One might make a lot more sense to a lot of people, but the "see I built the same thing for way less money" victory dance is just tired, and embarrassing for the front page of a site that's supposed to have editors.
I disagree. I'm typing this on a Fedora desktop attached to an Apple Cinema Display. I've had this 27 inch cinema display since whenever they came out six or seven years ago. It's still going strong. If you wanted a large monitor you'll use for a long time, it was a great option. Mine still has great picture, awfully good speakers, a web cam, useful ports, the best laptop connectivity around, and a metal and glass frame that's really nice. It cost around $1000 but considering how long it's lasted and probably will last yet, I have no regrets.
I figure that's the real reason they're getting out. Few people buy them, and they last forever. I think I'm on my fourth iPhone in the time I've owned this monitor, and it will probably outlast my current one..
This is the most vacuous rhetoric I've ever seen here.
With no definition of what would satisfy making the world better and how tech isn't doing it, these words are basically meaningless. I could just as easily ask why aren't the medical, financial, media, or any other field not making the world a better place. Seriously, consider:
"I don't feel that doctors, nurses, administrators, even policy wonks focus on the problems that we need to solve to have a healthy functioning society. It seems like it's mostly about short-term gain and not much about making the world better. That may be just the way the market works.
Is it that there's no profit to be made in solving the most important problems? I'm puzzled by that as I would think that a good solution to an important problem could find some funding from somewhere but maybe government, for example, won't take investment risks in that way?"
Now, medical professionals everywhere, defend yourselves from . . . completely hollow rhetoric.
Seriously, what other form of media changes the minds of 6% of Republicans and 8% of Democrats? I'd bet this is at least as successful as most any other kind of media, and seen far more often.
I'm not sure if it's evidence exactly, but I'm not sure evidence is required. Requiring evidence of someone's intention is almost always impossible. Listening to the opinions and warnings of industry experts is a worthwhile thing to do even if they can't prove someone else's intentions.
The article gives some details as to what got him going here:
"Microsoft has launched new PC Windows features exclusively in UWP, and is effectively telling developers you can use these Windows features only if you submit to the control of our locked-down UWP ecosystem," he wrote in the Guardian at the time. "They're curtailing users' freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers."
If you want PC gaming to survive, make sure you only buy games that have Linux/macOS support.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'm fairly certain it's equally or more important that you actually play them on Mac and Linux?
Valve shares the actual download and usage statistics with publishers, don't they? They need to see users actually playing them on these platforms if we want them to think these platforms are actually contributing to their success.
Setting aside the accuracy/sample bias of a survey like this, they seem to fundamentally misunderstand the business.
How much infrastructure does the average customer on each one actually use? I mean if it's 30 and 31 percent, but the average customer on AWS is using five times the resources, Azure is still much, much, much smaller.
Raise your hand if the thing you wanted most from your next phone was either fewer ports or more dongles.
I didn’t think so. You wanted better battery life, didn’t you? Everyone just wants better battery life."
As the article says, what everyone really wants is more battery life in their phone. Is the best way to increase battery life something other than just making the battery bigger?
As a percentage of the size of the battery, I'd imagine all the empty space taken up by the 3.5 mm jack is quite a lot. Seriously, is there any better way to increase the size of the battery? I'll trade a dongle on my headphones for 15% more battery.
I admit this is sort of off topic, but this story just made me consider: why do I suddenly have ads on/.?
For many years now, I've had no ads with a little message explaining that since I've had a story on the front page, I could browse Slashdot ad free. Did this go away with the last regime change?
The thing is, whether he's a scientist or not, doesn't even matter. It's (at least as far as I can tell from the article) just a straw man she's created to answer a question no one's asked.
It would be like if someone makes a claim, say that smoking causes lung cancer. The person making the claim, we'll call him Dr. Smith, is an MD, but not an oncologist. If I say "Dr. Smith isn't an oncologist, he's no more an oncologist than I am, so you shouldn't believe him" then well, I'd be a goddamn idiot. Dr. Smith is still way more qualified than I am, and Bill Nye is way more qualified than Palin, and it still isn't even really the issue.
The various links seem to define cuckoldry as a father raising a child that isn't his, but the study is measuring children who have a father that don't have the expected father. Common sense tells me that's not the "cuckoldry rate." Fathers can have more than one child, but children can't have more than one father. I mean if 1 in 100 children have this unexpected paternity, if a father has three children, wouldn't it seem likely that he has about a 3% chance of being a cuckold? Maybe the false paternity tends to cluster together such that if one kid isn't biologically the father's, it's likely the siblings are too, but I see no reason to think that.
The measure would be better called a false paternity rate or something similar, not a cuckold rate. Or am I missing something obvious?
This is not the first company to try this, what they don't say at least up front, is how tricky this business would be.
According to one in NY, She Taxis only 2% of drivers right now are women.
Will a lot more women flock to this job if they feel it's safer? It seems from a business point of view, these people are really banking on that being true. All law aside, it's an interesting experiment. I mean this dynamic comes up all the time in most conversations about gender disparity. "If we just got rid of all the harassment, there'd be far more women coders" is something I've heard plenty of times before. This is the closest thing to a controlled experiment we're ever going to see.
Um, your own link (the first one) says that bar charts should always start at zero.
"Of course column and bar charts should always have zeroed axes, since that is the only way for the visualization to accurately represent the data. Bar and column charts rely on bars that stretch to zero to accurately mirror the ratios between data points."
The whole premise seems to be accepted pull requests = accepted developers. I mean they say:
"To what extent does gender bias exist among people who judge GitHub pull requests? To answer this question, we approached the problem by examining whether men and women are equally likely to have their pull requests accepted on GitHub, then investigated why differences might exist."
The authors note that women are more likely to submit pull requests that aren't tied to existing open issues. They seem to conclude that this reinforces the idea that women have the best track records, that these requests are the hardest to get accepted.
"Thus, if women more often submit pull requests that address an immediate need and this is enough to improve acceptance rates, we would expect that these same requests are more often linked to issues."
I interpret that totally the other way. The paper equates getting a pull request accepted with being accepted, that's just not how (in my experience) development works. If you submit a patch for some feature add that only you've thought of, and it conflicts with nothing else, it's easy for a maintainer to accept. A patch for a known, open issue is much more likely to have regression considerations, and compete with other patches. If five people all submit a patch for one issue, odds are good at least four of them are going to be rejected. It's kind of like measuring an employee's productivity by how many lines of code they write. Experienced developers see that as largely silly.
I agree with all of that, at least the first part. If you expanded your quote a little bit more, I thought I said as much.
My point was simply that stating that renting is the equivalent to taking on unsecured debt, which seems to be expressing the sentiment that it's always throwing money away, is ridiculous. I'm not claiming anything more than that. You seem to be implying I'm claiming something about one being better than the other overall, and I'm not. Apologies if I'm misinterpreting you, but you seem to be trying to correct me ("Here's the thing . . . ") but I don't see where you disagree with me.
As to the second part, I don't think it would be a crap shoot. Much of the advantages we give buyers in the market only apply to your primary residence. (Such as the exemption from capital gains.) We artificially skew the market towards individual home ownership. It's not just a matter of price correction. If we took them away, it would make a lot less sense for individuals to own. The corrected market would have a lot more investment properties.
From what I can tell, what is meant by "same" is that "both are something poor people do who aren't building wealth." It makes sense if you believe an important way to build wealth is to get a mortgage, stay in one place for a long time, and your residence is a big investment. It's an idea that makes sense if you were raised in a time where everyone believed housing could only go up.
For example, say I have 100k and am looking for a place to live. In one scenario I put 20% down on a 400k home, pay a bunch of closing costs and such. I'm left with a little leftover. I get a mortgage, build equity. Five or ten years alter I need to sell the house, but the value has fallen 20%. I pay more costs to get the place sold, and if I'm lucky, get 80-100k back.
Other scenario. I pay rent approximate to my mortgage. My 100k is invested, pretty conservatively, let's say it does 4% a year. At the end of the five years I have around 120k.
The renter has more money, and a lot more freedom when it comes time to move. This is kind of an oversimplification, but if we stopped subsidizing the first scenario (mortgage interest deduction, capital gains exeptions, etc) there would be even more scenarios where the renter builds a lot more wealth.
Most streaming video these days is over HTTP, divided up into many small chunks sent over HTTP. I'm pretty sure on iOS, even Netflix does Apple's HLS (a protocol, not a service Apple sits in the middle of) which was designed to make exactly this (among other things) work. I believe YouTube and Netflix both do DASH as well, which also makes this work.
What it comes down to is this: Netflix doesn't start "automagically streaming to your new IP address." The video is divided up into many small requests, and your device starts making those requests from a new IP address.
Slashdot Mirror
My answer may not apply to people outside of the US. The rules vary.
The better question, with regard to going all cash, is how liable are you in the event of compromise?
Are online payment systems "safe" in the sense that they are unlikely to be compromised? No, not really.
But if they are compromised, so what? If you use a major credit card, and your number gets compromised, it's really not that big of a deal. Most all of the liability is on the merchant and the card issuer, not you. The worst case scenario I've dealt with is the card being inactive for a few days. If you stick to using credit online, no debit or ACH, this can pretty much be the worst you have to deal with.
This is one reason bitcoin and other digital currencies have difficulty going mainstream. Sure my hardware bitcoin wallet might be 100x more secure than my credit card, but if it gets compromised, I'm screwed. If my credit card gets compromised, I'm merely inconvenienced.
Rather than going to cash, I recommend people try to:
1) Keep at least two major credit cards open at all times with two different banks. Use one regularly, the other is a backup.
2) Avoid using debit or ACH, especially online.
3) Use a system like Mint so that you can easily monitor activity on your cards. If you see any activity that isn't you, be proactive.
4) Use a service like PayPal whenever possible. A lot of my bills are paid via PayPal. If a card is compromised, expired, whatever, I only have to update one place. Plus it gives me yet another entity to share liability in the event of fraud.
If you do these things, you're liable for virtually nothing, and the security of your payments is less of a concern. Let the credit card companies deal with it.
This is textbook begging the question. To ask a question like this, you have to establish that some special appeal exists, because it is by no means established.
For starters, the claim that Apple products are overpriced is controversial. They tend to not make a low end product, true, but this is regularly debated whenever Apple comes up. Simply stating it as a premise without justification is presupposing an answer.
Second, there are many die hard users for almost every tech brand. They all benefit from tribalism. For every user you describe committed to Apple, there are certainly similar ones for Sony, Microsoft, and even Samsung. Maybe there is no special appeal, maybe this is just a normal phenomenon among tech products, and the speaker is just fixated on Apple and its users.
Further, what does "special appeal?" even mean? If it's put in quotes, it had better have some specific definition. Who are we quoting here? Is better marketing a special appeal? Is more reliability a special appeal? Is a self-contained ecosystem a special appeal? Are brain chips implanted by the Illuminati at the request of Tim Cook a special appeal?
If these people (somehow) win, the precedent could be insane.
Game consoles do this all the time. You update or lose access to all online services, period. If this lawsuit wins, Sony and Microsoft could both be on the hook in a big way. I'm sure many other devices are similar.
I don't think I'm a typical tech consumer, but I think consumers like me are pretty important to Apple's success in the last decade.
I've had pretty much Apple everything for a little over a decade. My Macs are always bought infrequently. I've had four iPhones, three Apple TVs, and two iPads in the time I'm on one Cinema Display. I've had three iPhones in the time I've had my current MacBook Pro. Ten percent of sales, sure.
But here's the deal: I'm about to buy a laptop that isn't a Mac. When I do, I'll probably stop updating all my other Apple products too. I had a Mac first, and even today, I buy all those other things because of how nicely they integrate with a Mac. The Mac anchors all my other Apple products, and frankly, I anchor the tech purchasing decisions of a lot of my friends and family.
As a lawyer, he probably also knows that not all states have such laws. As something of a constitutional authority, he probably also knows that no such laws have ever been enforced, and that if any state ever tries, they will likely be struck down as unconstitutional.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... has some info.
I can't believe this is on the front page. This is the oldest Apple flamewar ever.
I agree, the new MBP is . . . terrible. But the idea that this Oryx "closely matches" the MBP is ridiculous beyond the CPU. They're wildly different. Apologies, but . . . apples and oranges.
The Oryx:
- is made of plastic
- weighs about 40% more
- has a much lower resolution screen
- lacks that touch bar and expensive ARM hardware (which granted, pretty much no one, including me, wants)
- lacks any thunderbolt, let alone two separate thunderbolt 3 controllers (the big "pro" feature in the new MBP)
- has a smaller battery and way more power hungry components
- an SSD that I'm pretty sure is nowhere near as fast
- doesn't run OS X
These are the things that jack up the price of the MBP. Whether or not they're a sensible cost proposition is very different from "see, practically the same." Apple screwed up and inflated the price with things people don't want.
It's cool that System76 is getting a lot more attention. I think I'm about to buy a Puri.sm laptop, the disappointing new MBP put me over. But come on, they are not the same. One might make a lot more sense to a lot of people, but the "see I built the same thing for way less money" victory dance is just tired, and embarrassing for the front page of a site that's supposed to have editors.
I disagree. I'm typing this on a Fedora desktop attached to an Apple Cinema Display. I've had this 27 inch cinema display since whenever they came out six or seven years ago. It's still going strong. If you wanted a large monitor you'll use for a long time, it was a great option. Mine still has great picture, awfully good speakers, a web cam, useful ports, the best laptop connectivity around, and a metal and glass frame that's really nice. It cost around $1000 but considering how long it's lasted and probably will last yet, I have no regrets.
I figure that's the real reason they're getting out. Few people buy them, and they last forever. I think I'm on my fourth iPhone in the time I've owned this monitor, and it will probably outlast my current one..
This is the most vacuous rhetoric I've ever seen here.
With no definition of what would satisfy making the world better and how tech isn't doing it, these words are basically meaningless. I could just as easily ask why aren't the medical, financial, media, or any other field not making the world a better place. Seriously, consider:
"I don't feel that doctors, nurses, administrators, even policy wonks focus on the problems that we need to solve to have a healthy functioning society. It seems like it's mostly about short-term gain and not much about making the world better. That may be just the way the market works.
Is it that there's no profit to be made in solving the most important problems? I'm puzzled by that as I would think that a good solution to an important problem could find some funding from somewhere but maybe government, for example, won't take investment risks in that way?"
Now, medical professionals everywhere, defend yourselves from . . . completely hollow rhetoric.
huge success.
Seriously, what other form of media changes the minds of 6% of Republicans and 8% of Democrats? I'd bet this is at least as successful as most any other kind of media, and seen far more often.
I'm not sure if it's evidence exactly, but I'm not sure evidence is required. Requiring evidence of someone's intention is almost always impossible. Listening to the opinions and warnings of industry experts is a worthwhile thing to do even if they can't prove someone else's intentions.
The article gives some details as to what got him going here:
"Microsoft has launched new PC Windows features exclusively in UWP, and is effectively telling developers you can use these Windows features only if you submit to the control of our locked-down UWP ecosystem," he wrote in the Guardian at the time. "They're curtailing users' freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers."
If you want PC gaming to survive, make sure you only buy games that have Linux/macOS support.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but I'm fairly certain it's equally or more important that you actually play them on Mac and Linux?
Valve shares the actual download and usage statistics with publishers, don't they? They need to see users actually playing them on these platforms if we want them to think these platforms are actually contributing to their success.
Setting aside the accuracy/sample bias of a survey like this, they seem to fundamentally misunderstand the business.
How much infrastructure does the average customer on each one actually use? I mean if it's 30 and 31 percent, but the average customer on AWS is using five times the resources, Azure is still much, much, much smaller.
"6. No one is asking for this
Raise your hand if the thing you wanted most from your next phone was either fewer ports or more dongles.
I didn’t think so. You wanted better battery life, didn’t you? Everyone just wants better battery life."
As the article says, what everyone really wants is more battery life in their phone. Is the best way to increase battery life something other than just making the battery bigger?
As a percentage of the size of the battery, I'd imagine all the empty space taken up by the 3.5 mm jack is quite a lot. Seriously, is there any better way to increase the size of the battery? I'll trade a dongle on my headphones for 15% more battery.
I admit this is sort of off topic, but this story just made me consider: why do I suddenly have ads on /.?
For many years now, I've had no ads with a little message explaining that since I've had a story on the front page, I could browse Slashdot ad free. Did this go away with the last regime change?
The thing is, whether he's a scientist or not, doesn't even matter. It's (at least as far as I can tell from the article) just a straw man she's created to answer a question no one's asked.
It would be like if someone makes a claim, say that smoking causes lung cancer. The person making the claim, we'll call him Dr. Smith, is an MD, but not an oncologist. If I say "Dr. Smith isn't an oncologist, he's no more an oncologist than I am, so you shouldn't believe him" then well, I'd be a goddamn idiot. Dr. Smith is still way more qualified than I am, and Bill Nye is way more qualified than Palin, and it still isn't even really the issue.
The various links seem to define cuckoldry as a father raising a child that isn't his, but the study is measuring children who have a father that don't have the expected father. Common sense tells me that's not the "cuckoldry rate." Fathers can have more than one child, but children can't have more than one father. I mean if 1 in 100 children have this unexpected paternity, if a father has three children, wouldn't it seem likely that he has about a 3% chance of being a cuckold? Maybe the false paternity tends to cluster together such that if one kid isn't biologically the father's, it's likely the siblings are too, but I see no reason to think that.
The measure would be better called a false paternity rate or something similar, not a cuckold rate. Or am I missing something obvious?
This is not the first company to try this, what they don't say at least up front, is how tricky this business would be.
According to one in NY, She Taxis only 2% of drivers right now are women.
Will a lot more women flock to this job if they feel it's safer? It seems from a business point of view, these people are really banking on that being true. All law aside, it's an interesting experiment. I mean this dynamic comes up all the time in most conversations about gender disparity. "If we just got rid of all the harassment, there'd be far more women coders" is something I've heard plenty of times before. This is the closest thing to a controlled experiment we're ever going to see.
. . . some brilliant agent finally thought to try 123456 on the pass code screen.
Um, your own link (the first one) says that bar charts should always start at zero.
"Of course column and bar charts should always have zeroed axes, since that is the only way for the visualization to accurately represent the data. Bar and column charts rely on bars that stretch to zero to accurately mirror the ratios between data points."
The whole premise seems to be accepted pull requests = accepted developers. I mean they say:
"To what extent does gender bias exist among people who judge GitHub pull requests?
To answer this question, we approached the problem by examining whether men and women are equally likely to have their pull requests accepted on GitHub, then investigated why differences might exist."
The authors note that women are more likely to submit pull requests that aren't tied to existing open issues. They seem to conclude that this reinforces the idea that women have the best track records, that these requests are the hardest to get accepted.
"Thus, if women more often submit pull requests that address an immediate need and this is enough to improve acceptance rates, we would expect that these same requests are more often linked to issues."
I interpret that totally the other way. The paper equates getting a pull request accepted with being accepted, that's just not how (in my experience) development works. If you submit a patch for some feature add that only you've thought of, and it conflicts with nothing else, it's easy for a maintainer to accept. A patch for a known, open issue is much more likely to have regression considerations, and compete with other patches. If five people all submit a patch for one issue, odds are good at least four of them are going to be rejected. It's kind of like measuring an employee's productivity by how many lines of code they write. Experienced developers see that as largely silly.
I agree with all of that, at least the first part. If you expanded your quote a little bit more, I thought I said as much.
My point was simply that stating that renting is the equivalent to taking on unsecured debt, which seems to be expressing the sentiment that it's always throwing money away, is ridiculous. I'm not claiming anything more than that. You seem to be implying I'm claiming something about one being better than the other overall, and I'm not. Apologies if I'm misinterpreting you, but you seem to be trying to correct me ("Here's the thing . . . ") but I don't see where you disagree with me.
As to the second part, I don't think it would be a crap shoot. Much of the advantages we give buyers in the market only apply to your primary residence. (Such as the exemption from capital gains.) We artificially skew the market towards individual home ownership. It's not just a matter of price correction. If we took them away, it would make a lot less sense for individuals to own. The corrected market would have a lot more investment properties.
From what I can tell, what is meant by "same" is that "both are something poor people do who aren't building wealth." It makes sense if you believe an important way to build wealth is to get a mortgage, stay in one place for a long time, and your residence is a big investment. It's an idea that makes sense if you were raised in a time where everyone believed housing could only go up.
For example, say I have 100k and am looking for a place to live. In one scenario I put 20% down on a 400k home, pay a bunch of closing costs and such. I'm left with a little leftover. I get a mortgage, build equity. Five or ten years alter I need to sell the house, but the value has fallen 20%. I pay more costs to get the place sold, and if I'm lucky, get 80-100k back.
Other scenario. I pay rent approximate to my mortgage. My 100k is invested, pretty conservatively, let's say it does 4% a year. At the end of the five years I have around 120k.
The renter has more money, and a lot more freedom when it comes time to move. This is kind of an oversimplification, but if we stopped subsidizing the first scenario (mortgage interest deduction, capital gains exeptions, etc) there would be even more scenarios where the renter builds a lot more wealth.
Even when _there_ are fines involved. I'm not one to correct grammar in comments, but it would be nice to fix the summary.
Most streaming video these days is over HTTP, divided up into many small chunks sent over HTTP. I'm pretty sure on iOS, even Netflix does Apple's HLS (a protocol, not a service Apple sits in the middle of) which was designed to make exactly this (among other things) work. I believe YouTube and Netflix both do DASH as well, which also makes this work.
What it comes down to is this: Netflix doesn't start "automagically streaming to your new IP address." The video is divided up into many small requests, and your device starts making those requests from a new IP address.