Here's the problem. Cameras and computers are now so sophisticated that you can put these systems into public areas and identify every person that walks in view, by name. You just connect the camera to all the government identity databases which already exist (passports, driver licenses, police records, school records) and run a real time facial recognition system on the video feed. With sufficient coverage of public areas you now know the movements of every citizen as they go about their daily life.
Can you see the problems this might cause? Here's just one example I thought of off the top of my head. Flag anyone who goes to hardware stores, mosques, and truck rental businesses. Intercept these people for "questioning". The good part about this system, for aspiring fascists, is that it's so open ended you can use it to crack down on any behavior or activity you happen to find abhorrent today. As long as those people are a sufficiently small minority, and you prime the public with enough fear and hatred beforehand, no one will object. Well, some people will object, but we already know where they live and work...
Our achievements aren't invalidated simply because they require materials that we don't directly grow as part of our body. We are the fastest because we build jets and rockets. We are the strongest because we build bulldozers and forklifts. We are the deadliest predator because we can build rifles, fishing boats, and hydrogen bombs. Our brains, which allow us to build all of those amazing things, are part of our body as much as the cheetahs leg muscles are part of its body. We've externalized and expedited the evolutionary process. Instead of waiting millions of years to evolve adaptations we can develop and build adaptations in our own lifetimes to change the environment and ourselves to suit our needs and whims. We can change the world to the way we want NOW, instead of relying on the slow, blind, unplanned, directionless, process of evolution. The cheetah didn't want to become the fastest sprinter, its ancestors that happened to be faster than their contemporaries just survived and reproduced at a slightly higher rate, passing on the genes which made them marginally faster. Man can say to himself, I want to move faster, and build a bicycle, a car, or a rocket; and he can do it NOW, in his own lifetime.
Even more remarkably, man can teach his fellows whatever tricks he invents. We've created, sometimes with deliberate intent other times through unguided emergent processes, complex systems for encoding symbolic representations of ideas. Man can give these thoughts physical form in various ways; carved in stone, scratched on a wax tablet, preserved in magnetic fields. Man creates vast stores of ideas external to his own mind in libraries and now electronically. The ideas live on after the individual dies and if they are particularly good or useful ideas can last thousands of years. Man doesn't have to rely on good ideas slowly working their way into genetic memory as instinct.
For all these reasons and more we are the most remarkable, the most superlative, species on Earth.
Perfectly reasonable. Myself, I've never seen an advertisement that was legitimately helpful. I'm dubious that there ever could be such a thing because advertising is fundamentally an adversarial relationship between the advertiser and the target of the ad (you): you have money that you want to keep, or get the most value for when you do spend it; they want to give you as little as possible while taking as much of your money as they can. You are fighting each other, you have competing interests. You can see why there's a huge incentive for them to lie, or get as close to lying as they legally can, and emotionally manipulate you in their pursuit of your dollars. I find attempts at such manipulation repugnant, which is probably why I walk around most of the day with a mild nauseated sensation. Still, I'd choose that over the syrupy haze of blissful ignorance.
Google's official ads might be the least intrusive, but their disguised ads are rather pernicious, IMO. For example, every product you are shown when using Google Shopping is a paid product advertisement, every single product. They are ALL ads, and nowhere is this disclosed clearly. They are trying to pass it off as a store like Amazon (which has plenty of hidden ads too, but they at least make a passing nod towards identifying them) but it's more like the yellow pages. You have to pay Google for your product to appear there.
Actually, turning off search history doesn't even do as much as you say. They still use everything you enter into their services, every keystroke, how long you spent looking at a page, when you searched and from where. They use all of that and more to target ads (which many of us never see anyway thanks to Adblock Plus).
Turning off search history hides this data from YOU. They still have it. They still have it associated with your account, and even if you are logged out it's associated with your IP address. Since they know your IP address when you're logged out as well as when you're logged in, ALL your queries are associated with your account if you've ever logged in from that IP. Even "anonymous" users who have no account with Google have shadow profiles associated with their IPs and search patterns. And it's safe to assume given how cheap storage space is that this data is retained forever. I'd be surprised if Google has ever deleted any of their search records since they created the company.
The only way you can be anonymous with Google is to use a proxy while searching. I suggest using TOR when you want your searches to be anonymous, or use Duckduckgo.
Since most people can't move to where Google Fiber is being deployed they have to wait for it to come to their current location. This might not ever happen. So the ISPs in that area only have to react IF Google announces a move into their market. They don't have to do anything before because they have an absolutely trapped and captive customer base. People can't shop around for ISPs because that would involve changing residence, and few people have the means to relocate on such a whim as internet speeds.
So unless Google announces a country wide deployment, and means it, the ISPs are just going to keep sitting on their hands, claiming customers don't want faster speeds, or that it would simply cost too much to deliver it to them.
Are you kidding me? In virtually every field the Nazis were backwards and intentionally antagonistic to a proper implementation of the scientific method. They rejected Einstein's relativity as "Jewish physics" because of its philosophical implications and the religion of its early researchers. The NSDAP's stance on education was that no subject could be divorced from "racial" truths, hence you had physics replaced with "German physics", biology and anthropology replaced with "Rassenwissenschaft" (racial science), and even maths corrupted with racist, imperialist, overtones.
They were able to pull off some amazing short term work in applied physics and engineering, especially in aerospace and chemistry, but they were handicapped by a worldview that was absolutely hostile to empirical evidenced based research and education. If anything those advancements were in spite of the educational climate, and largely attributed to scientists who were trained in pre-Nazi institutions. If the Germans had won, the next generation of scientists and researchers would have been a dismal lot indeed; muddled, confused, indoctrinated, unable to think critically, and infused with a racist mentality that would poison and retard their ability to make meaningful advancements. After a few generations they'd have nothing but pseudoscientists and mystics.
And don't get me started on the Soviets. Lamarckism, in the form of Lysenkoism, was the official doctrine of the state well into the 20th century.
No one is going to be seeing that money, mark my words. It's a carnival game designed to prevent you from winning. It's not even fundamentally possible for the correct side, the science side, to win because the question is turned upside down. The creationists absolutely know this, which is why it's a very cleverly designed publicity stunt for their cause. No matter the outcome they'll get to trumpet to their followers that they stumped the scientists, while the scientists' explanations will be too subtle and erudite to make sense to the uneducated or those too eager to believe the Bible is literal truth.
Or we can, as a society, reject the notion that non-commercial file sharing should be a crime at all and take back our collective cultural birthright from the parasitic rent-seeking content cartels and their toadies in Congress.
I know that every computer I interact with for a client or friend gets ABP installed with Easylist and Easyprivacy lists. There's never been a problem with these blocking legitimate site functions, and I am 100% sure they've blocked malicious scripts/ads. If I could quickly and adequately explain how to use Noscript they'd get that too, but most users find it too difficult to discern which domains are legitimate and which are trackers/ad domains.
Sorry, but ad agencies have lost all trust. I can't in good conscience allow a client's machine to see ads when there's even a small chance those ads will be malicious and compromise the machine and their personal data (and create more work for me). I can't even be sure that unintrusive text ads won't be eventually subverted or compromised. And when I ask people, just for my own interest, if they want to see text ads, I've never heard a "yes".
I'm convinced that the entire online ad-based economy is a giant bubble, kept inflated by a fictional aether which is the mass delusion of the efficacy of advertisements. There's a saying that half of your advertising budget is wasted, but you can't know which half. Well what if it's closer to 90% wasted and people start to realize that?
Many people don't even see the ads. The ones who do rarely click on them. The ones who do click rarely buy anything. Are those 1/100k people really worth a multi-billion dollar industry? Is it structurally sound to build such a huge sector of our society and economy on such volatile ground? Then there's the "meta" advertising economy built around sucking up all your personal info to make the newest snake-oil, *targeted* ads. Targeted ads which, few see, fewer click, and from which fewer actually end up making a purchases.
I don't see a way around it. The internet is headed for a giant contraction in the sectors that don't actually sell physical products or real services. The only "ad" companies that will survive will be the ones big enough to be able to diversify. Google can probably survive as a hardware and services company, and their masses of information is valuable beyond it's use for advertising. Facebook will probably die in the nest 5-10 because ultimately they don't sell anything but ads and user data (to make ads). Facebook actually scares the hell out of me because they're sitting on all that personal data, which is considered one of the companies assets. When times get tough, and they will, Facebook will be legally obligated to liquify any asset they have to protect their shareholders. As part of their bankruptcy process that information is going to be sold to whoever will buy it; insurance companies, credit bureaus, governments.
As with many human problems a technical solution isn't always best. The real underlying issue is that our brains are built according to a fundamentally parallel architecture which isn't very well understood. Your consciousness is something like a "software" trick that gives you the illusion of serial operations. You can focus the spotlight of attention on one thing at a time but you're never really doing that, it's just a simulation. Classical computers are the complete opposite--though in modern times we do now have truly parallel CPUs. It's not just technology that's against you, you're working against the nature of your brain.
Your problem is that you are trying to force your brain to function in a way that it is antithetical to its design on a fundamental level. Doing this for too long causes real and measurable fatigue. If you are finding yourself overstressed from the demand of focusing too intensely on a task you should change your workflow. I would suggest breaking up your time into smaller chunks, maybe of 15-20 minutes so that you are not focused on any one thing for too long. Not every task is amenable to this procedure, so there's going to be time when you simply have to endure.
You can also set achievable goals and have some sort of metric for measuring and verifying them. Write down that you'll answer X number of E-mails or spend 15 minutes doing that twice a day. Write down a schedule and tape it to your computer screen.
You can pirate Windows 7 and even Windows 8 (if you hate yourself) nearly as easily, they'll even validate as fully legitimate copies and access Windows Update perfectly. MS's activation technology has never been more than a slight hinderance for unlicensed users. AFAICT its purpose is to randomly invalidate legal copies so that users will call tech support to keep us from being lonely. Very thoughtful of them, actually.
Your comment about old P4 Dells is spot on. These old, bulky, loud, power hungry, monoliths just don't seem to die.
Supposedly that information is sent to your @comcast.com e-mail account. You can probably count on one hand how many people actually use their ISP-provided e-mail address, so few people are going to see the details of their alleged infractions--by design, I'd say.
What happens when the "lab" is a consumer device the size of a desktop printer?
We'll just ban them? What happens when consumer grade 3D printers are capable of building the parts necessary to make the desktop microbiology lab? We'll just ban them too? I don't want to live in a world where a technology as liberating, powerful, and cheaply available as such a 3D printer exists, but its use is forbidden. That prohibition would eventually have to be enforced through draconian means; house to house searches for machine tools and computer hardware, etc. So to save ourselves from horrific annihilation through a man-made virus we impose on ourselves horrific man-made slavery and oppression.
I also don't want to live in a world where any human with a few thousand/hundred dollars can purchase a device capable of killing millions. Throughout human history the arms race between defense and offense has been fairly neck and neck. It's gotten a lot more lopsided in recent history, since the invention of the gun. If I wanted to kill you, really, really wanted to kill you and didn't care about the consequences to myself after the fact, you're dead. It's just that simple. I can buy a gun, maybe I'll have to wait a few days and pass a background check (and I would pass, clean record) and I'd find you and kill you. I'd probably be arrested, incarcerated/executed, but you'll still be dead. Even a bullet proof vest won't make much of a difference. I could buy a 60 year old Soviet-made carbine that'll defeat any vest commonly used today. Or I'll just get close enough to shoot you in the head.
There's no defensive technology available today, on the personal level or on the national level, capable of defeating a determined opponent who is not rational (this does not mean unintelligent), and does not care about the consequences of their actions, including their own survival.
And guns are toys compared to what is already possible today, though not cheaply possible. What happens when the expensive super-weapons of our time are as cheap as the "toy" weapons we have now? Could humanity survive if everyone can walk around with a nuclear bomb or a deadly virus?
I think I see the problem, actually. Humans just suck at living together when the power to destroy is cheap and ubiquitous. Eventually an individual will be born with a genetic mutation that makes them irrational but with the amoral guile of a sociopath. They'll acquire the latest weapon of their time, and they'll use it; just because they can. It only takes one of such a person if the technology is available to everyone. I have a deep and terrifying fear that this is the reason the universe appears so empty of intelligent life. I'm hoping we just haven't looked hard enough, and that the ashes and fossils of millions of dead races don't liter the cosmos, entombed on long-barren hellscapes once lush as Earth.
In a society so interconnected and interdependent, no one's hard earned money is entirely their own. We all rely on each other in myriad ways. If you really think you're an island of rugged individualism, please go find an actual island to live on and prove it.
It counts for something, but not a whole lot. I'm "free" to leave the USA, but only insofar as I am not actively forbidden from leaving. In practice I don't have the freedom to leave any more than a NK citizen has the freedom to leave their country. I certainly enjoy more freedom and comfort while I'm hear, the borders I'm allowed to roam within are vaster, but actually leaving isn't an option even if I am technically "free" to do so. Almost all humans exist in this state. Freedom of movement is largely a matter of philosophical and academic concern since most people lack the material wealth necessary to exercise that freedom to any meaningful degree.
Many people have noticed the same thing you did. This doesn't make sense for the ISPs unless they are getting financial compensation from the content cartels equal to or greater than the amount of money they're going to lose from lost subscribers AND the cost of implementing the system itself, which is not going to be an insignificant amount of money. So the RIAA/MPAA is footing the bill for the system plus whatever extra the ISPs needed to sweeten the pot and make the whole burdensome hassle actually worthwhile. The other reason they might have for implementing it is that they are involved in both content creation and ISP businesses. This is true for Time Warner at least.You can think of it as a conflict of interest, another bullet point for stronger anti-trust laws.
There will be a period of about a year when notices, "strikes", will be sent at a furious pace and then some other obfuscated, encrypted, file sharing system will replace bittorrent. Mega seems poised to fill that niche, but there's room for an encrypted, anonymous, p2p filesharing protocol. There are a few right now but there's never really been a need for them great enough to overcome BT's momentum. The six strikes plan will be that need.
And once you push p2p filesharing that far underground there'll be no technological solution to stop copyright infringement over that protocol short of breaking the fundamental workings of the internet. File sharers will have won, and the content cartels, having shot their last bolt, will wish they had stopped when they were at least not completely powerless. This is a last desperate power grab of a dying business model. We are witnessing the death rattle of copyright as we know it.
You also have to pay for a place to store those things (flat, house, or something), and pay to have energy delivered to that dwelling to run those appliances. You'll also need transportation to and from a grocery store which could be substantially farther away than McDonald's. You're in grinding poverty, remember, so no car. It'll also take you much longer to shop that way, even before you get to start making food. Upfront costs instantly make the "cheaper" solution a non-starter for many people trapped in poverty.
I can leave you with the same idea expressed more colorfully by Terry Pratchett, from Men at Arms,
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.
They're not doing it for free, they operate a very profitable business selling food-like substances to people who are poor either in money or time. They've found that offering "free" wifi generates more additional revenue than the cost of operating the wifi--which they were probably doing anyway so that the store could have an internet connection.
You might want to reassess your definition of poverty then. Cooking food yourself doesn't just involve purchasing ingredients. There is a substantial upfront cost of buying the equipment and infrastructure to turn ingredients into food. At the very least you'll need to heat water and have a surface that can be sterilized and used to cook on. You'll need utensils and pots/pans. The energy required will be either gas or electric which costs money. I suppose you could burn wood but that isn't free either and is illegal/impractical most places.
So that $1 burger costs quite a bit more to cook yourself. If you have no equipment and no access to infrastructure then it's actually cheaper to buy fast food. The "total cost of ownership" of the food you make yourself is deceptive because much of the cost isn't directly related to the superficially cheaper ingredients.
We haven't even touched on the subject of cheap food being almost universally less healthy--even if it provides enough caloric content. Then there are food deserts where healthy food isn't even an option.
And for the "web enabled device" disqualifying you as poor remark; things really have changed that much. It happened so quickly that the older generation who can remember a time before the internet, or before computers, or before cell phones, thinks that owning or accessing those devices is a marker for the middle class and up. It's not anymore. Even the poorest citizens routinely use cellphones. Moreover, they NEED access to those devices/services just to be productive and make any money at all. Access to the internet or at least POTS is so vital that our government (rightly so) has partnered with industry players to make sure free cell phones are available to those who need them.
If you don't have access to a phone, and now the internet, you are effectively barred from participating in the economy. We can't survive that. We can't function if those people are completely dependent on government services to survive. It actually works out better, is less costly, to give away cellphones and internet access so those people can provide for themselves at least more than they were before. The alternative to not providing those things is paying for someone's entire existence, or if you refuse that, paying to lock them up when they inevitably turn to crime just to remain alive.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the problem. Cameras and computers are now so sophisticated that you can put these systems into public areas and identify every person that walks in view, by name. You just connect the camera to all the government identity databases which already exist (passports, driver licenses, police records, school records) and run a real time facial recognition system on the video feed. With sufficient coverage of public areas you now know the movements of every citizen as they go about their daily life.
Can you see the problems this might cause? Here's just one example I thought of off the top of my head. Flag anyone who goes to hardware stores, mosques, and truck rental businesses. Intercept these people for "questioning". The good part about this system, for aspiring fascists, is that it's so open ended you can use it to crack down on any behavior or activity you happen to find abhorrent today. As long as those people are a sufficiently small minority, and you prime the public with enough fear and hatred beforehand, no one will object. Well, some people will object, but we already know where they live and work...
Our achievements aren't invalidated simply because they require materials that we don't directly grow as part of our body. We are the fastest because we build jets and rockets. We are the strongest because we build bulldozers and forklifts. We are the deadliest predator because we can build rifles, fishing boats, and hydrogen bombs. Our brains, which allow us to build all of those amazing things, are part of our body as much as the cheetahs leg muscles are part of its body. We've externalized and expedited the evolutionary process. Instead of waiting millions of years to evolve adaptations we can develop and build adaptations in our own lifetimes to change the environment and ourselves to suit our needs and whims. We can change the world to the way we want NOW, instead of relying on the slow, blind, unplanned, directionless, process of evolution. The cheetah didn't want to become the fastest sprinter, its ancestors that happened to be faster than their contemporaries just survived and reproduced at a slightly higher rate, passing on the genes which made them marginally faster. Man can say to himself, I want to move faster, and build a bicycle, a car, or a rocket; and he can do it NOW, in his own lifetime.
Even more remarkably, man can teach his fellows whatever tricks he invents. We've created, sometimes with deliberate intent other times through unguided emergent processes, complex systems for encoding symbolic representations of ideas. Man can give these thoughts physical form in various ways; carved in stone, scratched on a wax tablet, preserved in magnetic fields. Man creates vast stores of ideas external to his own mind in libraries and now electronically. The ideas live on after the individual dies and if they are particularly good or useful ideas can last thousands of years. Man doesn't have to rely on good ideas slowly working their way into genetic memory as instinct.
For all these reasons and more we are the most remarkable, the most superlative, species on Earth.
Perfectly reasonable. Myself, I've never seen an advertisement that was legitimately helpful. I'm dubious that there ever could be such a thing because advertising is fundamentally an adversarial relationship between the advertiser and the target of the ad (you): you have money that you want to keep, or get the most value for when you do spend it; they want to give you as little as possible while taking as much of your money as they can. You are fighting each other, you have competing interests. You can see why there's a huge incentive for them to lie, or get as close to lying as they legally can, and emotionally manipulate you in their pursuit of your dollars. I find attempts at such manipulation repugnant, which is probably why I walk around most of the day with a mild nauseated sensation. Still, I'd choose that over the syrupy haze of blissful ignorance.
Google's official ads might be the least intrusive, but their disguised ads are rather pernicious, IMO. For example, every product you are shown when using Google Shopping is a paid product advertisement, every single product. They are ALL ads, and nowhere is this disclosed clearly. They are trying to pass it off as a store like Amazon (which has plenty of hidden ads too, but they at least make a passing nod towards identifying them) but it's more like the yellow pages. You have to pay Google for your product to appear there.
Actually, turning off search history doesn't even do as much as you say. They still use everything you enter into their services, every keystroke, how long you spent looking at a page, when you searched and from where. They use all of that and more to target ads (which many of us never see anyway thanks to Adblock Plus).
Turning off search history hides this data from YOU. They still have it. They still have it associated with your account, and even if you are logged out it's associated with your IP address. Since they know your IP address when you're logged out as well as when you're logged in, ALL your queries are associated with your account if you've ever logged in from that IP. Even "anonymous" users who have no account with Google have shadow profiles associated with their IPs and search patterns. And it's safe to assume given how cheap storage space is that this data is retained forever. I'd be surprised if Google has ever deleted any of their search records since they created the company.
The only way you can be anonymous with Google is to use a proxy while searching. I suggest using TOR when you want your searches to be anonymous, or use Duckduckgo.
Since most people can't move to where Google Fiber is being deployed they have to wait for it to come to their current location. This might not ever happen. So the ISPs in that area only have to react IF Google announces a move into their market. They don't have to do anything before because they have an absolutely trapped and captive customer base. People can't shop around for ISPs because that would involve changing residence, and few people have the means to relocate on such a whim as internet speeds.
So unless Google announces a country wide deployment, and means it, the ISPs are just going to keep sitting on their hands, claiming customers don't want faster speeds, or that it would simply cost too much to deliver it to them.
Are you kidding me? In virtually every field the Nazis were backwards and intentionally antagonistic to a proper implementation of the scientific method. They rejected Einstein's relativity as "Jewish physics" because of its philosophical implications and the religion of its early researchers. The NSDAP's stance on education was that no subject could be divorced from "racial" truths, hence you had physics replaced with "German physics", biology and anthropology replaced with "Rassenwissenschaft" (racial science), and even maths corrupted with racist, imperialist, overtones.
They were able to pull off some amazing short term work in applied physics and engineering, especially in aerospace and chemistry, but they were handicapped by a worldview that was absolutely hostile to empirical evidenced based research and education. If anything those advancements were in spite of the educational climate, and largely attributed to scientists who were trained in pre-Nazi institutions. If the Germans had won, the next generation of scientists and researchers would have been a dismal lot indeed; muddled, confused, indoctrinated, unable to think critically, and infused with a racist mentality that would poison and retard their ability to make meaningful advancements. After a few generations they'd have nothing but pseudoscientists and mystics.
And don't get me started on the Soviets. Lamarckism, in the form of Lysenkoism, was the official doctrine of the state well into the 20th century.
No one is going to be seeing that money, mark my words. It's a carnival game designed to prevent you from winning. It's not even fundamentally possible for the correct side, the science side, to win because the question is turned upside down. The creationists absolutely know this, which is why it's a very cleverly designed publicity stunt for their cause. No matter the outcome they'll get to trumpet to their followers that they stumped the scientists, while the scientists' explanations will be too subtle and erudite to make sense to the uneducated or those too eager to believe the Bible is literal truth.
Or we can, as a society, reject the notion that non-commercial file sharing should be a crime at all and take back our collective cultural birthright from the parasitic rent-seeking content cartels and their toadies in Congress.
I know that every computer I interact with for a client or friend gets ABP installed with Easylist and Easyprivacy lists. There's never been a problem with these blocking legitimate site functions, and I am 100% sure they've blocked malicious scripts/ads. If I could quickly and adequately explain how to use Noscript they'd get that too, but most users find it too difficult to discern which domains are legitimate and which are trackers/ad domains.
Sorry, but ad agencies have lost all trust. I can't in good conscience allow a client's machine to see ads when there's even a small chance those ads will be malicious and compromise the machine and their personal data (and create more work for me). I can't even be sure that unintrusive text ads won't be eventually subverted or compromised. And when I ask people, just for my own interest, if they want to see text ads, I've never heard a "yes".
I'm convinced that the entire online ad-based economy is a giant bubble, kept inflated by a fictional aether which is the mass delusion of the efficacy of advertisements. There's a saying that half of your advertising budget is wasted, but you can't know which half. Well what if it's closer to 90% wasted and people start to realize that?
Many people don't even see the ads. The ones who do rarely click on them. The ones who do click rarely buy anything. Are those 1/100k people really worth a multi-billion dollar industry? Is it structurally sound to build such a huge sector of our society and economy on such volatile ground? Then there's the "meta" advertising economy built around sucking up all your personal info to make the newest snake-oil, *targeted* ads. Targeted ads which, few see, fewer click, and from which fewer actually end up making a purchases.
I don't see a way around it. The internet is headed for a giant contraction in the sectors that don't actually sell physical products or real services. The only "ad" companies that will survive will be the ones big enough to be able to diversify. Google can probably survive as a hardware and services company, and their masses of information is valuable beyond it's use for advertising. Facebook will probably die in the nest 5-10 because ultimately they don't sell anything but ads and user data (to make ads). Facebook actually scares the hell out of me because they're sitting on all that personal data, which is considered one of the companies assets. When times get tough, and they will, Facebook will be legally obligated to liquify any asset they have to protect their shareholders. As part of their bankruptcy process that information is going to be sold to whoever will buy it; insurance companies, credit bureaus, governments.
Actually I bet Windows 98SE is too old to be vulnerable.
As with many human problems a technical solution isn't always best. The real underlying issue is that our brains are built according to a fundamentally parallel architecture which isn't very well understood. Your consciousness is something like a "software" trick that gives you the illusion of serial operations. You can focus the spotlight of attention on one thing at a time but you're never really doing that, it's just a simulation. Classical computers are the complete opposite--though in modern times we do now have truly parallel CPUs. It's not just technology that's against you, you're working against the nature of your brain.
Your problem is that you are trying to force your brain to function in a way that it is antithetical to its design on a fundamental level. Doing this for too long causes real and measurable fatigue. If you are finding yourself overstressed from the demand of focusing too intensely on a task you should change your workflow. I would suggest breaking up your time into smaller chunks, maybe of 15-20 minutes so that you are not focused on any one thing for too long. Not every task is amenable to this procedure, so there's going to be time when you simply have to endure.
You can also set achievable goals and have some sort of metric for measuring and verifying them. Write down that you'll answer X number of E-mails or spend 15 minutes doing that twice a day. Write down a schedule and tape it to your computer screen.
You can pirate Windows 7 and even Windows 8 (if you hate yourself) nearly as easily, they'll even validate as fully legitimate copies and access Windows Update perfectly. MS's activation technology has never been more than a slight hinderance for unlicensed users. AFAICT its purpose is to randomly invalidate legal copies so that users will call tech support to keep us from being lonely. Very thoughtful of them, actually.
Your comment about old P4 Dells is spot on. These old, bulky, loud, power hungry, monoliths just don't seem to die.
Supposedly that information is sent to your @comcast.com e-mail account. You can probably count on one hand how many people actually use their ISP-provided e-mail address, so few people are going to see the details of their alleged infractions--by design, I'd say.
In many regions, there's not even any collusion necessary, as there's only one ISP available for broadband.
What happens when the "lab" is a consumer device the size of a desktop printer?
We'll just ban them? What happens when consumer grade 3D printers are capable of building the parts necessary to make the desktop microbiology lab? We'll just ban them too? I don't want to live in a world where a technology as liberating, powerful, and cheaply available as such a 3D printer exists, but its use is forbidden. That prohibition would eventually have to be enforced through draconian means; house to house searches for machine tools and computer hardware, etc. So to save ourselves from horrific annihilation through a man-made virus we impose on ourselves horrific man-made slavery and oppression.
I also don't want to live in a world where any human with a few thousand/hundred dollars can purchase a device capable of killing millions. Throughout human history the arms race between defense and offense has been fairly neck and neck. It's gotten a lot more lopsided in recent history, since the invention of the gun. If I wanted to kill you, really, really wanted to kill you and didn't care about the consequences to myself after the fact, you're dead. It's just that simple. I can buy a gun, maybe I'll have to wait a few days and pass a background check (and I would pass, clean record) and I'd find you and kill you. I'd probably be arrested, incarcerated/executed, but you'll still be dead. Even a bullet proof vest won't make much of a difference. I could buy a 60 year old Soviet-made carbine that'll defeat any vest commonly used today. Or I'll just get close enough to shoot you in the head.
There's no defensive technology available today, on the personal level or on the national level, capable of defeating a determined opponent who is not rational (this does not mean unintelligent), and does not care about the consequences of their actions, including their own survival.
And guns are toys compared to what is already possible today, though not cheaply possible. What happens when the expensive super-weapons of our time are as cheap as the "toy" weapons we have now? Could humanity survive if everyone can walk around with a nuclear bomb or a deadly virus?
I think I see the problem, actually. Humans just suck at living together when the power to destroy is cheap and ubiquitous. Eventually an individual will be born with a genetic mutation that makes them irrational but with the amoral guile of a sociopath. They'll acquire the latest weapon of their time, and they'll use it; just because they can. It only takes one of such a person if the technology is available to everyone. I have a deep and terrifying fear that this is the reason the universe appears so empty of intelligent life. I'm hoping we just haven't looked hard enough, and that the ashes and fossils of millions of dead races don't liter the cosmos, entombed on long-barren hellscapes once lush as Earth.
Since I don't, I wouldn't expect anyone else to do so either.
You take life itself too seriously. Have you considered that?
In a society so interconnected and interdependent, no one's hard earned money is entirely their own. We all rely on each other in myriad ways. If you really think you're an island of rugged individualism, please go find an actual island to live on and prove it.
That's the first I've heard of DDG being a Bing intermediary. Even if they are, what does it matter if my queries are anonymized?
It counts for something, but not a whole lot. I'm "free" to leave the USA, but only insofar as I am not actively forbidden from leaving. In practice I don't have the freedom to leave any more than a NK citizen has the freedom to leave their country. I certainly enjoy more freedom and comfort while I'm hear, the borders I'm allowed to roam within are vaster, but actually leaving isn't an option even if I am technically "free" to do so. Almost all humans exist in this state. Freedom of movement is largely a matter of philosophical and academic concern since most people lack the material wealth necessary to exercise that freedom to any meaningful degree.
Many people have noticed the same thing you did. This doesn't make sense for the ISPs unless they are getting financial compensation from the content cartels equal to or greater than the amount of money they're going to lose from lost subscribers AND the cost of implementing the system itself, which is not going to be an insignificant amount of money. So the RIAA/MPAA is footing the bill for the system plus whatever extra the ISPs needed to sweeten the pot and make the whole burdensome hassle actually worthwhile. The other reason they might have for implementing it is that they are involved in both content creation and ISP businesses. This is true for Time Warner at least.You can think of it as a conflict of interest, another bullet point for stronger anti-trust laws.
There will be a period of about a year when notices, "strikes", will be sent at a furious pace and then some other obfuscated, encrypted, file sharing system will replace bittorrent. Mega seems poised to fill that niche, but there's room for an encrypted, anonymous, p2p filesharing protocol. There are a few right now but there's never really been a need for them great enough to overcome BT's momentum. The six strikes plan will be that need.
And once you push p2p filesharing that far underground there'll be no technological solution to stop copyright infringement over that protocol short of breaking the fundamental workings of the internet. File sharers will have won, and the content cartels, having shot their last bolt, will wish they had stopped when they were at least not completely powerless. This is a last desperate power grab of a dying business model. We are witnessing the death rattle of copyright as we know it.
You also have to pay for a place to store those things (flat, house, or something), and pay to have energy delivered to that dwelling to run those appliances. You'll also need transportation to and from a grocery store which could be substantially farther away than McDonald's. You're in grinding poverty, remember, so no car. It'll also take you much longer to shop that way, even before you get to start making food. Upfront costs instantly make the "cheaper" solution a non-starter for many people trapped in poverty.
I can leave you with the same idea expressed more colorfully by Terry Pratchett, from Men at Arms,
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.
They're not doing it for free, they operate a very profitable business selling food-like substances to people who are poor either in money or time. They've found that offering "free" wifi generates more additional revenue than the cost of operating the wifi--which they were probably doing anyway so that the store could have an internet connection.
You might want to reassess your definition of poverty then. Cooking food yourself doesn't just involve purchasing ingredients. There is a substantial upfront cost of buying the equipment and infrastructure to turn ingredients into food. At the very least you'll need to heat water and have a surface that can be sterilized and used to cook on. You'll need utensils and pots/pans. The energy required will be either gas or electric which costs money. I suppose you could burn wood but that isn't free either and is illegal/impractical most places.
So that $1 burger costs quite a bit more to cook yourself. If you have no equipment and no access to infrastructure then it's actually cheaper to buy fast food. The "total cost of ownership" of the food you make yourself is deceptive because much of the cost isn't directly related to the superficially cheaper ingredients.
We haven't even touched on the subject of cheap food being almost universally less healthy--even if it provides enough caloric content. Then there are food deserts where healthy food isn't even an option.
And for the "web enabled device" disqualifying you as poor remark; things really have changed that much. It happened so quickly that the older generation who can remember a time before the internet, or before computers, or before cell phones, thinks that owning or accessing those devices is a marker for the middle class and up. It's not anymore. Even the poorest citizens routinely use cellphones. Moreover, they NEED access to those devices/services just to be productive and make any money at all. Access to the internet or at least POTS is so vital that our government (rightly so) has partnered with industry players to make sure free cell phones are available to those who need them.
If you don't have access to a phone, and now the internet, you are effectively barred from participating in the economy. We can't survive that. We can't function if those people are completely dependent on government services to survive. It actually works out better, is less costly, to give away cellphones and internet access so those people can provide for themselves at least more than they were before. The alternative to not providing those things is paying for someone's entire existence, or if you refuse that, paying to lock them up when they inevitably turn to crime just to remain alive.