This is B.S. You are assuming all people are essentially chaotic-neutral, and that an opportunity automatically results in crime. In short, you are BLAMING THE VICTIM.
A more educated response would be to acknowledge that SOME people commit MOST of the crimes. Use this lower-hanging fruit as a mechanism for purging the rotten apples, rather than your approach of blaming society for creating an opportunity.
If you can get away with only answering numbers you already know, that's great for your privacy, but does indicate a rather narrow economic existence. My income, jobs, connections rely on being a little easier to connect with than you are. Too much communication of real value is nearly ephemeral, something you probably won't believe until you start engaging in, and profiting from, it.
I am a Linux people. Many years ago I got a fix into the kernel. But do a quick read through the defensive comments here, the ones where the poster is calling somebody's reasons "crap." Those are all intolerant Linux fans, who won't take the time to listen to real-world issues. For us techies, Linux gives a lot for a little cost. Scripts just run. Less malware when you build it yourself. Full power. Low cost. But for Windows users, that's not the case. They don't want to ever have to understand the computer; it's an appliance. A Roku for web browsing, games and a few applications. It's a phone, but with a keyboard and big screen. And Windows is better at that than Linux. You buy something, it will work for Windows. No issues. A printer... just works. A game... just works. A phone plugs in. Not so easy for Linux. It's actually not a problem with Linux; it could be made nearly that easy. But the responses here are indicative of the underlying problem: Linux fans want to change the users, not the operating environment. While Windows users don't even want to understand that there is one.
The author is not exactly even capable of merit. He's never held what most of us would consider a real job. His Linked In starts, "I'm a political theorist turned freelance writer. I write on political theory, culture, wellness, psychology, relationships, and other topics. "
Very few people believe merit is the only decider of fortune. Clifton uses Bill Gates as an example, so let's look at it... Gates was born to a well-off family (lawyer father), went to a prep school, learned programming early. None of this is "merit", although it was enabled by his father's merit; family looks after it's own.
But then... he wrote software. A lot of it. Starting young. And he did demonstrate merit. High test scores, successful programs. And he worked super-hard.
So did merit alone get him there? Obviously not. But without merit (and effort, an implied part of merit), he also wouldn't have gotten there.
Americans don't believe merit is sufficient. But we do believe it is a factor. As is opportunity.
Sadly, Clifton has demonstrated that while he does have credentials, he entirely lacks merit.
I'm surprised that the normally-intelligent Slashdot readers didn't catch the overt bias and lies of this "study". Some of the more invective-laden responses clearly can't do English or math.
Did you catch this quote from the article? police shootings between 2011 and 2015 were 3.49 times more likely on average to target black individuals compared to white
Umm... gee... check the murder rates. Blacks kill blacks at a rate six times more than whites kill whites. Which means both they kill and they are killed. So the police could be considered as under-performing here. That stat was provided out-of-context, much like the rest of it. For example, the study... what did it say? Basically that areas with better data will have better results. Well, what did you expect?
This isn't a case of bad data making bad results. If nobody was committing a crime, there would be no feedback loop reinforcing the patrols. It's as if the study authors (and lamer Slashdotters) believe that catching criminals is wrong if it's in the wrong area! But no, what did the study consider the problem to be?
the over-patrolling of communities of color
How is this a problem, when those areas still are the higher-crime areas, and when patrols shouldn't bother you if you're not committing a crime?
In fairness (since you did ask), New Zealand has reaped a tourist bonanza from just the Tolkien movies. For a NZD$33 million (USD$27M) per year payoff according to... New Zealand.
Your Minister probably backed down because the accountants showed him the math. Why do you assume the worst?
If part of his expected income is from this, your attempt at shaming him for actions you disapprove of is pure bullying. Apple has no right to first refusal if they won't compensate for the effort.
Just because you want to blackmail him into giving his work for free to Apple doesn't mean that's the ethical choice. As long as he is not DIRECTLY harming others, his disclosures still fall on the ethical side. You, however, fall on the "troll" side.
The trouble is in separating blame between unexpected, anthropogenic climate change and cyclical, natural climate change.
California regularly has had natural drought, unrelated to humans, including the mega-droughts (two decades or longer) 850-1090 and 1140-1320, the latter believed to cause the end of the Pueblos in the south west. (These may have been related to the "Medieval Warm Period" (roughly 950-1250) in Europe and larger global changes.) Any competent climate-historian can tell you that the last 150 years were atypically wet compared to the rest of the last 1400 (fourteen-hundred) years... but us humans have such short lives that they seem normal. California's normal state is drought.
Californians have piped a huge amount of water in and imposed reverse-desertification through landscaping (adds shade, soil, ability to buffer rain) and irrigation, and yet this anthropogenic regional wetting can't beat the natural swings.
So while PGE may not be adjusting to a swing, and it may be climate change causing it, this is clearly a case where humans aren't in control the climate. Either way, PGE is at fault for somehow not anticipating wildfires in a region that has them regularly.
Automation didn't kill G.M.; it slowed the decline such that the existential threats faced by G.M. seemed manageable.
On the management side, G.M. had competing brands wit their own bureaucracies and managers, fighting each-other for R&D budgets, production resources, marketing dollars and more. It wasn't Buick against Mercury, but rather Buick against Oldsmobile, Chevy and Cadillac. It wasn't Camaro vs Mustang but Camaro vs Firebird.
And it was the union vs the company. Any proposed changes came with significant concessions to the union, or with a strike.
Take the Saturn effort... which was designed to be "clean-sheet" (rather than badge-engineered clones, such as the above-mentioned Camaro/Firebird.) The Union forced GM to cede significant control to the union, even before the factory opened, including:
No time clocks
Permanent Employment (== no layoffs)
According to UAW President Owen Bieber, the union would have veto power over all decisions
Supplier contracts were awarded based on points... which that awarded extra points to unionized suppliers... which were often both higher price and lower quality.
That's what killed G.M. Not automation, but the combined culture of competing accountants and a greedy-and-hostile monopoly for the labor (UAW), both of whom could only act on relatively short timeframes.
I too live in the area - this does not reflect the reality of my cohort in any recent Seattle jobs. I don't believe the survey is accurate, perhaps due to a sampling error. How do you sample for a question like that in a town as judgmental as Seattle?
I used to be a bus rider to my (previous) Seattle job, until politics resulted in Metro cancelling the always-full "express" route from Kirkland to Seattle through some odd accounting (deciding that the one-way express routes were 40% empty by using a phantom empty return trip), to allow them to justify more routes to "underserved" but not as busy routes for people not commuting to a day job.
That's ultimately why Seattle can't do mass transit... or clean up downtown, or reduce crime... every decision is cast in intangible and ever-changing social justice terms, with competing interests and ideologies.
It's considered racist, because it was mostly applied in minority communities (areas with broken windows, graffiti, etc., which tend to be less of a problem in wealthier areas) and the arrested were disproportionately minorities. Google ""broken windows" racist" to have your faith in civilization diminished.
You're victim-blaming. You should be asking, why isn't it legal to attack a thief? Why don't we prosecute and imprison criminals (people who commit crimes), regardless of their background?
It's telling that so many comments refer to the chance that he'll be sued... while the cops don't care about addressing the crime even with the GPS and the camera video of the thief.
1. Slate is for open borders and pretty much every far left cause, only bested by Salon in bias of major outlets. Of course they'll object to anything designed to filter, restrict or vet immigrants. Especially on merit, despite the strict rules Canada has doing precisely that.
Take this sentence opening: Setting aside the proposal’s moral abdication when it comes to the needy. That's not about technology or misuse; the author is advocating specifically for taking in the immigrants least likely to have decent credit scores.
2. This seems more appropriate for reddit than Slashdot. It's not really a nerds- or a tech-focused issue. The focus of the article (other than that our obligation should be to provide unlimited access to those who may become a burden) is that any metrics are wrong because they de-humanize the situation. Which is precisely the point of the metrics, and allows us to handle larger volumes than otherwise, but Slate considers everyone a special case, so metrics are just wrong donchaknow.
All good engineers care about how their products are used, because it's vital to understand the use cases to make a good product.
What a biased and self-serving proclamation! Most "good" engineers want to build cool stuff and get paid to do it. And their idea of cool varies by engineer, but often does not extend to the entire product. Take most open source libraries - they are cool, but don't constrain the product using them.
Being a "good" citizen has almost nothing necessarily in common with being a "good" engineer, especially as "good" is measured differently. Today's good citizen is very different from one a few decades ago, while good engineering is less dependent on society's capricious fads.
In general, corporate leaders have yet to invest the time and resources necessary to fully grasp the unprecedented ways that aging will change the rules of the game.
Management really doesn't have to worry about this yet.
This management will be long gone by the time it matters.
Ten years ago, the software industry seemed a bit age-discriminatory, but even that appears to have reduced... for which I thank the participation awards given to fledgling Millenials, as they do seem to lack the confidence to try something that might not work, while expecting a Director or better position inside of two years. (This isn't their fault; I've hired several initially-entitled Millenials, and all but one turned it around within two years... but it does take work.) So as the young worker-pool shrinks and the experienced pool increases, I suspect adaptation will just happen. On a case-by-case basis until it's normal.
Your doctor doesn't need to know your job title, but now it's often required.
You say that as if it were obvious, but the kind of work you do may well be a factor in quickly and accurately diagnosing your condition. Should it be a required field? Maybe, maybe not—but if it's not required then they're less likely to have that information available when it would be genuinely useful.
You hang a lot on that "may well be a factor". The doctor can ask, if for example it seems like a repetitive stress injury. But if I went in with a broken arm from skiing, or a disease just off vacation, or for my annual with no specific complaint, this is just wasteful and probably didn't come up in conversation... so you're advocating for making the system more expensive and time-consuming for a tiny potential advantage that already has a better solution-vector - that the physician ask if it seems appropriate rather than because it's "required."
For many of the "required field" questions I've seen, the question isn't really necessary. The doctor, and many busy people, work on the least amount of information required to get by, rather than the most comprehensive.
A practical example: If we're sending a patient in for an MRI, the analysts could reasonably request knowing whether the patient is a smoker, of what, and when the last smoke was. But this is not information the doctor necessarily cares about, especially if the MRI is not lung related, but often even if it is. The question is whether cancer is there now, not whether the patient smoked yesterday, vs worked in a paint factory or lived in Beijing.
Which brings us to your weak example of the value... and the committee approach the article mentioned. At what point is the cost of that data higher than the benefit. Your tune has been that the physician -should- know all of this, implying both low cost and that you don't care about it. But the time-tax is only indirectly imposed on you, through marginally higher medical costs. It hits the physician heavily, and hits anyone else who gets frustrated by these fields irrelevant to their task. What is the purpose of the software? Improve patient care? Or reduce liability? If, as you suggest, the latter, then you're probably right that a system taking so much time that the doctor can't actually see patients will do the job well. But it compromises other goals to get there.
Love your arrogance. Are you sure you're not a doctor yourself?
The field probably shouldn't be required, and the doctor probably doesn't have the answer and shouldn't be expected to. Yet some clueless yahoo in a meeting wanted it for analytics or because they're a Slashdot poster with an ego, and required it, and the result is annoyed users. Harrumph!
Not just in medical. Jira can be configured to be easy to use... or to be "comprehensive". But when it gets too comprehensive, with too many fields required to do quick stuff, people just stop using it. I've aborted placing orders because they require I create a password, which I'd then have to track (put in my password manager), for what I consider a one-time-ever interaction... and then have odd password requirements on top of it!
Those extra required fields are the biggest problem with computerizing forms. On paper, you can skip them. And they don't need them anyhow. Your doctor doesn't need to know your job title, but now it's often required. Requirements creep - it's not just for PMs anymore!
In many remodels of businesses, they are moving that way. Full-length stalls. We studied that recently in our prep for a remodel. One business we looked atwas going to do that, but it entailed removing the women's lounge - and there was no men's lounge - so the special minority of women outvoted the special minority of transgendered. We also had to consider the need for more space because urinals don't take much space and are high-speed (relatively.)
In the end, we were still considering full-length stalls in a single gender-agnostic space but remodeling the bathrooms fell out of budget due to the costs of moving plumbing, etc. Eventually I suspect the whole issue will vanish because newer construction will do gender-agnostic spaces.
So are you saying everyone paid less than Amazon delivery drivers are justified in committing theft? Or that working for Amazon is worse than not working? Or that all unemployed are thieves? Because that's what it looks like you're saying. That a company that offers you a job, but doesn't force you to accept it, deserves criminal response if you choose to accept it at a lower wage than you'd like.
"Must Carry" was the FCC approach to local channels in the U.S. It gave the cable carriers a mandate that, if the local channel wanted, they could force the cable carrier to carry their channel... at no cost.
Or... if the local channel insisted on being paid - keep in mind that the same channel is on the airwaves for "free", sponsored by advertising - then the cable carriers are not under that compulsion.
Of course the local channels get in battles over the carriage fee, and instead now want a large payment, resulting in regular black-outs during contract negotiations.
This EU mandate may result in, essentially, the equivalent of the old Public Access programs. Good local content won't be available, because it costs money and really nobody cares. But mediocre podcasts might be, by artists hungry for free exposure. Netflix will just have to add a local YouTube-like content area.
The stdio library is insufficient for the performance and handling they do. Which is, in fact, non-portable, and that's why Dropbox is (as the OP mentioned) better than Google Drive. Reading comprehension is your friend.
If you were a true Linux advocate, you would volunteer and do the work for them, rather than slamming them for not being willing to pay for a dev on a platform where few people are willing to pay them back. (Again, the article and that whole "reading comprehension" thing.)
Slashdot Mirror
This is B.S. You are assuming all people are essentially chaotic-neutral, and that an opportunity automatically results in crime. In short, you are BLAMING THE VICTIM.
A more educated response would be to acknowledge that SOME people commit MOST of the crimes. Use this lower-hanging fruit as a mechanism for purging the rotten apples, rather than your approach of blaming society for creating an opportunity.
If you can get away with only answering numbers you already know, that's great for your privacy, but does indicate a rather narrow economic existence. My income, jobs, connections rely on being a little easier to connect with than you are. Too much communication of real value is nearly ephemeral, something you probably won't believe until you start engaging in, and profiting from, it.
I am a Linux people. Many years ago I got a fix into the kernel. But do a quick read through the defensive comments here, the ones where the poster is calling somebody's reasons "crap." Those are all intolerant Linux fans, who won't take the time to listen to real-world issues.
For us techies, Linux gives a lot for a little cost. Scripts just run. Less malware when you build it yourself. Full power. Low cost.
But for Windows users, that's not the case. They don't want to ever have to understand the computer; it's an appliance. A Roku for web browsing, games and a few applications. It's a phone, but with a keyboard and big screen. And Windows is better at that than Linux. You buy something, it will work for Windows. No issues. A printer... just works. A game... just works. A phone plugs in. Not so easy for Linux.
It's actually not a problem with Linux; it could be made nearly that easy. But the responses here are indicative of the underlying problem: Linux fans want to change the users, not the operating environment. While Windows users don't even want to understand that there is one.
Very few people believe merit is the only decider of fortune. Clifton uses Bill Gates as an example, so let's look at it... Gates was born to a well-off family (lawyer father), went to a prep school, learned programming early. None of this is "merit", although it was enabled by his father's merit; family looks after it's own.
But then... he wrote software. A lot of it. Starting young. And he did demonstrate merit. High test scores, successful programs. And he worked super-hard.
So did merit alone get him there? Obviously not. But without merit (and effort, an implied part of merit), he also wouldn't have gotten there.
Americans don't believe merit is sufficient. But we do believe it is a factor. As is opportunity.
Sadly, Clifton has demonstrated that while he does have credentials, he entirely lacks merit.
Did you catch this quote from the article? police shootings between 2011 and 2015 were 3.49 times more likely on average to target black individuals compared to white
Umm... gee... check the murder rates. Blacks kill blacks at a rate six times more than whites kill whites. Which means both they kill and they are killed. So the police could be considered as under-performing here. That stat was provided out-of-context, much like the rest of it. For example, the study... what did it say? Basically that areas with better data will have better results. Well, what did you expect?
This isn't a case of bad data making bad results. If nobody was committing a crime, there would be no feedback loop reinforcing the patrols. It's as if the study authors (and lamer Slashdotters) believe that catching criminals is wrong if it's in the wrong area! But no, what did the study consider the problem to be?
the over-patrolling of communities of color
How is this a problem, when those areas still are the higher-crime areas, and when patrols shouldn't bother you if you're not committing a crime?
Your Minister probably backed down because the accountants showed him the math. Why do you assume the worst?
There is no legal or moral argument that supports that line of thinking.
There is no evidence that you know anything about legal or moral arguments, nor that you are an authority on anything.
Just because you want to blackmail him into giving his work for free to Apple doesn't mean that's the ethical choice. As long as he is not DIRECTLY harming others, his disclosures still fall on the ethical side. You, however, fall on the "troll" side.
California regularly has had natural drought, unrelated to humans, including the mega-droughts (two decades or longer) 850-1090 and 1140-1320, the latter believed to cause the end of the Pueblos in the south west. (These may have been related to the "Medieval Warm Period" (roughly 950-1250) in Europe and larger global changes.) Any competent climate-historian can tell you that the last 150 years were atypically wet compared to the rest of the last 1400 (fourteen-hundred) years... but us humans have such short lives that they seem normal. California's normal state is drought.
Californians have piped a huge amount of water in and imposed reverse-desertification through landscaping (adds shade, soil, ability to buffer rain) and irrigation, and yet this anthropogenic regional wetting can't beat the natural swings.
So while PGE may not be adjusting to a swing, and it may be climate change causing it, this is clearly a case where humans aren't in control the climate. Either way, PGE is at fault for somehow not anticipating wildfires in a region that has them regularly.
On the management side, G.M. had competing brands wit their own bureaucracies and managers, fighting each-other for R&D budgets, production resources, marketing dollars and more. It wasn't Buick against Mercury, but rather Buick against Oldsmobile, Chevy and Cadillac. It wasn't Camaro vs Mustang but Camaro vs Firebird.
And it was the union vs the company. Any proposed changes came with significant concessions to the union, or with a strike.
Take the Saturn effort... which was designed to be "clean-sheet" (rather than badge-engineered clones, such as the above-mentioned Camaro/Firebird.) The Union forced GM to cede significant control to the union, even before the factory opened, including:
That's what killed G.M. Not automation, but the combined culture of competing accountants and a greedy-and-hostile monopoly for the labor (UAW), both of whom could only act on relatively short timeframes.
I too live in the area - this does not reflect the reality of my cohort in any recent Seattle jobs. I don't believe the survey is accurate, perhaps due to a sampling error. How do you sample for a question like that in a town as judgmental as Seattle?
I used to be a bus rider to my (previous) Seattle job, until politics resulted in Metro cancelling the always-full "express" route from Kirkland to Seattle through some odd accounting (deciding that the one-way express routes were 40% empty by using a phantom empty return trip), to allow them to justify more routes to "underserved" but not as busy routes for people not commuting to a day job.
That's ultimately why Seattle can't do mass transit... or clean up downtown, or reduce crime... every decision is cast in intangible and ever-changing social justice terms, with competing interests and ideologies.
If they do close them, influencers get annoyed.
And they probably don't have the staff, resources or expertise to tighten them up without breaking anything.
What would you have them do?
It's considered racist, because it was mostly applied in minority communities (areas with broken windows, graffiti, etc., which tend to be less of a problem in wealthier areas) and the arrested were disproportionately minorities. Google ""broken windows" racist" to have your faith in civilization diminished.
It's telling that so many comments refer to the chance that he'll be sued... while the cops don't care about addressing the crime even with the GPS and the camera video of the thief.
1. Slate is for open borders and pretty much every far left cause, only bested by Salon in bias of major outlets. Of course they'll object to anything designed to filter, restrict or vet immigrants. Especially on merit, despite the strict rules Canada has doing precisely that.
Take this sentence opening: Setting aside the proposal’s moral abdication when it comes to the needy. That's not about technology or misuse; the author is advocating specifically for taking in the immigrants least likely to have decent credit scores.
2. This seems more appropriate for reddit than Slashdot. It's not really a nerds- or a tech-focused issue. The focus of the article (other than that our obligation should be to provide unlimited access to those who may become a burden) is that any metrics are wrong because they de-humanize the situation. Which is precisely the point of the metrics, and allows us to handle larger volumes than otherwise, but Slate considers everyone a special case, so metrics are just wrong donchaknow.
Let's not overly politicize /.
All good engineers care about how their products are used, because it's vital to understand the use cases to make a good product.
What a biased and self-serving proclamation! Most "good" engineers want to build cool stuff and get paid to do it. And their idea of cool varies by engineer, but often does not extend to the entire product. Take most open source libraries - they are cool, but don't constrain the product using them.
Being a "good" citizen has almost nothing necessarily in common with being a "good" engineer, especially as "good" is measured differently. Today's good citizen is very different from one a few decades ago, while good engineering is less dependent on society's capricious fads.
According to the BLS, the average employee is at a company less than five years. So...
Ten years ago, the software industry seemed a bit age-discriminatory, but even that appears to have reduced... for which I thank the participation awards given to fledgling Millenials, as they do seem to lack the confidence to try something that might not work, while expecting a Director or better position inside of two years. (This isn't their fault; I've hired several initially-entitled Millenials, and all but one turned it around within two years... but it does take work.) So as the young worker-pool shrinks and the experienced pool increases, I suspect adaptation will just happen. On a case-by-case basis until it's normal.
Your doctor doesn't need to know your job title, but now it's often required.
You say that as if it were obvious, but the kind of work you do may well be a factor in quickly and accurately diagnosing your condition. Should it be a required field? Maybe, maybe not—but if it's not required then they're less likely to have that information available when it would be genuinely useful.
You hang a lot on that "may well be a factor". The doctor can ask, if for example it seems like a repetitive stress injury. But if I went in with a broken arm from skiing, or a disease just off vacation, or for my annual with no specific complaint, this is just wasteful and probably didn't come up in conversation... so you're advocating for making the system more expensive and time-consuming for a tiny potential advantage that already has a better solution-vector - that the physician ask if it seems appropriate rather than because it's "required."
For many of the "required field" questions I've seen, the question isn't really necessary. The doctor, and many busy people, work on the least amount of information required to get by, rather than the most comprehensive.
A practical example: If we're sending a patient in for an MRI, the analysts could reasonably request knowing whether the patient is a smoker, of what, and when the last smoke was. But this is not information the doctor necessarily cares about, especially if the MRI is not lung related, but often even if it is. The question is whether cancer is there now, not whether the patient smoked yesterday, vs worked in a paint factory or lived in Beijing.
Which brings us to your weak example of the value... and the committee approach the article mentioned. At what point is the cost of that data higher than the benefit. Your tune has been that the physician -should- know all of this, implying both low cost and that you don't care about it. But the time-tax is only indirectly imposed on you, through marginally higher medical costs. It hits the physician heavily, and hits anyone else who gets frustrated by these fields irrelevant to their task. What is the purpose of the software? Improve patient care? Or reduce liability? If, as you suggest, the latter, then you're probably right that a system taking so much time that the doctor can't actually see patients will do the job well. But it compromises other goals to get there.
Love your arrogance. Are you sure you're not a doctor yourself?
The field probably shouldn't be required, and the doctor probably doesn't have the answer and shouldn't be expected to. Yet some clueless yahoo in a meeting wanted it for analytics or because they're a Slashdot poster with an ego, and required it, and the result is annoyed users. Harrumph!
Not just in medical. Jira can be configured to be easy to use... or to be "comprehensive". But when it gets too comprehensive, with too many fields required to do quick stuff, people just stop using it. I've aborted placing orders because they require I create a password, which I'd then have to track (put in my password manager), for what I consider a one-time-ever interaction... and then have odd password requirements on top of it!
Those extra required fields are the biggest problem with computerizing forms. On paper, you can skip them. And they don't need them anyhow. Your doctor doesn't need to know your job title, but now it's often required. Requirements creep - it's not just for PMs anymore!
In many remodels of businesses, they are moving that way. Full-length stalls. We studied that recently in our prep for a remodel. One business we looked atwas going to do that, but it entailed removing the women's lounge - and there was no men's lounge - so the special minority of women outvoted the special minority of transgendered. We also had to consider the need for more space because urinals don't take much space and are high-speed (relatively.)
In the end, we were still considering full-length stalls in a single gender-agnostic space but remodeling the bathrooms fell out of budget due to the costs of moving plumbing, etc. Eventually I suspect the whole issue will vanish because newer construction will do gender-agnostic spaces.
So are you saying everyone paid less than Amazon delivery drivers are justified in committing theft?
Or that working for Amazon is worse than not working?
Or that all unemployed are thieves?
Because that's what it looks like you're saying. That a company that offers you a job, but doesn't force you to accept it, deserves criminal response if you choose to accept it at a lower wage than you'd like.
"Must Carry" was the FCC approach to local channels in the U.S. It gave the cable carriers a mandate that, if the local channel wanted, they could force the cable carrier to carry their channel... at no cost.
Or... if the local channel insisted on being paid - keep in mind that the same channel is on the airwaves for "free", sponsored by advertising - then the cable carriers are not under that compulsion.
Of course the local channels get in battles over the carriage fee, and instead now want a large payment, resulting in regular black-outs during contract negotiations.
This EU mandate may result in, essentially, the equivalent of the old Public Access programs. Good local content won't be available, because it costs money and really nobody cares. But mediocre podcasts might be, by artists hungry for free exposure. Netflix will just have to add a local YouTube-like content area.
The stdio library is insufficient for the performance and handling they do. Which is, in fact, non-portable, and that's why Dropbox is (as the OP mentioned) better than Google Drive. Reading comprehension is your friend.
If you were a true Linux advocate, you would volunteer and do the work for them, rather than slamming them for not being willing to pay for a dev on a platform where few people are willing to pay them back. (Again, the article and that whole "reading comprehension" thing.)