Bell's actions are all about self-interest, as it is their tendency to do. Another poster has pointed out the various Bell-owned companies, which makes it abundantly clear that their actions have nothing to do with Candian content regulations, and everything to do with trying to control the internet. Just like they're opposing net neutrality with all possible gusto.
I too live in an area which can be thick with visitors. In our case, it was a local resort that would rent scooters to its guests. Combining the effects of too much sun, too much beer, and poor visibility on small, twisty roads, it's inevitable that we'd have a few accidents per year. They stopped right after a guest missed his son's wedding due to getting an ambulance ride to hospital. The scooters did seem to be a menace, being likened by some to wasps. Just zipping around, never know where they're going to pop out of.
Interestingly enough, the same resort transitioned to offering electric-assist bicycles instead. These apply some multiplier to the rider's effort, such as +50%, +100%, or a negative amount to slow down and recharge batteries going down our steep hills. As far as I can tell, they're just people on bikes now, no real hazard at all. I suspect that having to apply at least some modest effort helps focus attention.
I've liked this saying I heard a while back:
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb
While my fairly rural yard is only about 1/3 cleared, I have planted a few (more) fruit trees this spring. They'll never be huge, but will provide more shade, shelter and tasty food. I have no plans to cut fir and hemlock that takes up much of the rest.
I suspect that the overall carbon sink effect will be the combination of two factors:
1. First, you have the overall mass that is converted from atmospheric CO2 into cellulose.
2. Second, there is the time duration for which that mass remains in solid form, so not converted into CO2 or methane.
The result then, is something like mass x time, where the mass is proportional to the volume of wood.
Young trees are dramatically smaller mass; even if they get tall quickly, they'll still be somewhat shorter, and the cross-section will be a tiny fraction of a large tree. An old tree would compare to the mass of many, many smaller trees, probably more than you have growing in the same land surface area. The roots are going to be more developed too, so just that much more efficient at getting the other nutrients it needs.
Now, not only would the large trees store more today, but they'll hold it longer. As an example, I live in an area on the west coast, where there are still some old-growth trees that haven't been logged. An old tree that's fallen, or the stump of one that was cut long ago, are still present after many decades. There is less surface area exposed, and it just takes a hugely long time to rot. When they do, they're often nurse trees, still feeding other young trees that grow right on the old trunks. In other words, some of that is still getting converted into new-growing mass.
Those old trunks hold up better in a forest fire too, keeping much of that carbon from returning to the air. Small trees, or young ones that have branches close to the ground, are much much easier to light than thick trunks. Douglas fir, common in this area, even self-prunes after a while; branches closer to the ground fall off, so a fire is less likely to catch the thin live branches on fire unless it reaches the crown.
If you don't leave some leaky, bug-ridden CMS on the front end of your web site, there is a lot less to exploit. You can probably do it with some plugin or other with Drupal, just like you can with WordPress, Django or whatever. For most people though, you could do well with a static site generator.
If there's no exploitable hole in the base OS or web server, good luck having your way with HTML.
You know those colored bands, known as "rings", in wood? The ones that are created anew year after year? What do you think they're made of?
Now, consider that they'll often be roughly the same thickness on average each year. Each circle is larger than the one before, so it's layering on more circumference all the time. As long as the tree is still alive, it's adding more to the trunk alone.
I'll allow that some trees die fairly soon in human terms, but many do not. Still though, even alders or poplars are bigger each year for their relatively short, fast-growing lifespan.
Yup, ditto for laptops, which are at least historically more fixable. My mid-2012 MBP needed the battery replaced, which required going to a service place that replaced (as a unit) the top case, battery, keyboard and trackpad. Fine, at least I get a less-grungy keyboard, right? Then the charging circuit died on the main board. I *could* have gotten that fixed too, to still have an out-of-warranty, non-upgradeable device with a bunch of stuck pixels on the display.
So I went and bought a Lenovo P50, with a better keyboard, socketed RAM and multiple drive bays. Dual-boots Linux, works like a champ. And it feels like MINE.
I don't think I can ever see a news release about Bell Canada that doesn't make me roll my eyes, and wonder how they get any customers at all. Everything they do, or say, screams their status as a pile of anti-consumer twats. They want to be a shitty ISP, a shitty telco, and a shitty content provider. Ever use the CTV streaming app? Dodgy, glitchy, and slower than hunting down a torrent of whatever show you could already legally watch. They're succeeding at suckage in spades, yet people still give them money. You can see why they want this, because of Bell Media.
MTS in Manitoba was pretty good, but I'll watch vicariously as the wall of suck moves in.
The updates may be much smaller, but the end result is still massively bloated. I killed off my Facebook app when I needed space and iOS was telling me that FB was taking up around 400MB. Sure, the innumerable updates are relatively small, but that's of less consequence anyway if not doing updates over a mobile data plan.
Good point. I got bitten, and uninstalled LInkedIn's iOS app after my contacts got uploaded without asking. As in, getting notifications later like "Invite [nickname] to LinkedIn", where [nickname] exists only in my contacts.I can still pull up the site in the phone browser if I'm so inclined, but there is zero value in having its spammy, creepy, intrusive self pestering me. Ditto with Facebook's app. Again, it's useful TO ME to control what info it has and what it does, so I use it from the browser and not their app. It didn't hurt to notice that the space taken up was over 400MB. The app was nicer to use than the browser on the phone, but the bloat and lack of control convinced me otherwise.
I was going to say, there's a great middle ground if you choose to go a little less urban. In my case, our island is like a small town of ~3000, and the small city of ~35000 is a 10 minute ferry ride away. I've got what I usually *need* right here, and it's not really inconvenient to get to most big box stores and the like on the other side.
Larger places are slightly farther away, so I can still go to Costco. In many cases, I make a point of using my local merchants, so that I continue to have their services as an option. I use Amazon too, albeit not Prime. There are some shipping restrictions that like the article says, are not at all transparent, and that is a pain. In some cases, they'll deliver to my local PO, others they insist on my picking up just on the other side of that ferry. Weird, since Canada Post is already going that short bit farther on.
Ditto here. I work for a telecom company that has become quite remote-friendly the past few years. I do spend a lot of time on the phone / laptop, meeting virtually with others across multiple time zones. The difference I find is that the company has adopted it as an approved way of working (depending on role).
I sit on my little coastal island, manager's three TZs away, and things get done. What's not to like?
The knowledge/discipline needed to use GC properly isn't less than learning to use reference counting.
Worse: In a GC language you'll be retyping the exact same boiler plate code over and over gain to workaround the problem. This leads to copy/paste errors, code verbosity that hides other bugs, forgetting to do it, etc.
GC-enabled languages have *less* boilerplate and verbosity for the most part, because that nuisance housekeeping is handled for you. Unless you're stuck coding in Java perhaps. Many other GC-friendly languages are easy to read, write, understand, and trivially within the "good enough" ballpark for most use.
I agree that some knowledge is useful in terms of edge cases, profiling and tuning, but that's a bridge you cross when you need to.
I loved BBSs, used them from 300 baud on up in Winnipeg. They were great for the local scene, but it was the advent of store-and-forward networking that really blew me away. Mail and newsgroups to and from my home system, through a guy working at an ISP (hi Greg!), and off to the world.
By batching up messages together and sending them in a periodic squirt, you didn't need to tie up the phone line for long. Sending email meant storing it in the spool, and it would go out soon enough when the connection next occurred. Now that I live on a coastal island where DSL doesn't reach everywhere, I wonder if this tech is still useful. Ditto for when things go down (tree on the wires, this time of year), would love to see a robust, distributed alternative. Maybe a mesh net?
Of course they had lots of issues still, they're *marketing*. Across all my years' experience in a few companies, I have never seen a group more technically inept than them, except perhaps for sales. Sure, there's an occasional bright light, but the field sure attracts the techno-peasants.
I'm in a company that was acquired by a competitor, where the resulting company was in turn acquired by a much larger, overseas firm. That latter firm knows little I think except the balance sheet, so things are really managed by the CEO of the first acquiring firm. He isn't at all from our field, says the right things, and much of it bullshit. Most of the firm I came with is gone, on their own or when much of it got closed suddenly. So yeah, many of the employees he had would fire him, but it's probably 50-50 on those that are left.
Heartbleed was/is a critical issue, and easy to exploit to be sure. On the other hand, you had to attack a server to try and find useful bits of information such as the private key for that server. Bad as it is, I'd far prefer that to *plaintext*, in which every knob-puller between you and the server is free to muck with it as much as they want, with no clue that it's going on. With all its warts, even the unpatched servers provide more help than hindrance, should it be used.
ASCII-based plaintext protocols are great for hand-bombing via a terminal, but really have no place in the modern world. Encrypt everything, all the time, and high muckety-mucks have to be specific about which needles they expect you to reveal.
Well, I was thinking more at the service level. Unless it's the HTTPSEverywhere extension I have running, Youtube already is. On a related note, that extension is great. (Support the EFF!) With HTTPS, they only know the host name, not URLs or heaven forbid, content of requests and responses.
Services are increasingly moving towards HTTPS by default, which is awesome. Besides the obvious privacy implications, it prevents these ISP wankers from messing with your content, as it all becomes a sea of bytes (as it should be).
There have been hints of this sort of meddling in the past, when providers started injecting ad banners and other cruft into web responses.
Fuck'em, hard. Just because everyone else is asking for this nonsense does not make it right. Everyone else: Run as much encryption, and Tor nodes, as you can. Drives them bonkers when they can't just fish through plaintext.
If not on the board, answering to the CFO is a good alternative. The CFO ultimately cares about all things that cost money, and should consider things besides uptime. That was a conflict I'd seen before, where security reports to an operations director, who tends to care about little besides 100% uptime.
If "wanton disabling SSLv2" breaks shit, it's shit that needs breaking. Dodgy old crypto protocols are deprecated for a reason, and massive, cheap security lossage is a good example here.
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Bell's actions are all about self-interest, as it is their tendency to do. Another poster has pointed out the various Bell-owned companies, which makes it abundantly clear that their actions have nothing to do with Candian content regulations, and everything to do with trying to control the internet. Just like they're opposing net neutrality with all possible gusto.
Most likely, yes... I also think this will happen. It depends a bit on how positive/strong the Bayer brand actually is.
Maybe they can just decide on a name, one last time. Call it "Final Solution" or something uncontroversial like that.
I too live in an area which can be thick with visitors. In our case, it was a local resort that would rent scooters to its guests. Combining the effects of too much sun, too much beer, and poor visibility on small, twisty roads, it's inevitable that we'd have a few accidents per year. They stopped right after a guest missed his son's wedding due to getting an ambulance ride to hospital. The scooters did seem to be a menace, being likened by some to wasps. Just zipping around, never know where they're going to pop out of.
Interestingly enough, the same resort transitioned to offering electric-assist bicycles instead. These apply some multiplier to the rider's effort, such as +50%, +100%, or a negative amount to slow down and recharge batteries going down our steep hills. As far as I can tell, they're just people on bikes now, no real hazard at all. I suspect that having to apply at least some modest effort helps focus attention.
Excellent info, thanks!
I've liked this saying I heard a while back:
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb
While my fairly rural yard is only about 1/3 cleared, I have planted a few (more) fruit trees this spring. They'll never be huge, but will provide more shade, shelter and tasty food. I have no plans to cut fir and hemlock that takes up much of the rest.
I suspect that the overall carbon sink effect will be the combination of two factors:
1. First, you have the overall mass that is converted from atmospheric CO2 into cellulose.
2. Second, there is the time duration for which that mass remains in solid form, so not converted into CO2 or methane.
The result then, is something like mass x time, where the mass is proportional to the volume of wood.
Young trees are dramatically smaller mass; even if they get tall quickly, they'll still be somewhat shorter, and the cross-section will be a tiny fraction of a large tree. An old tree would compare to the mass of many, many smaller trees, probably more than you have growing in the same land surface area. The roots are going to be more developed too, so just that much more efficient at getting the other nutrients it needs.
Now, not only would the large trees store more today, but they'll hold it longer. As an example, I live in an area on the west coast, where there are still some old-growth trees that haven't been logged. An old tree that's fallen, or the stump of one that was cut long ago, are still present after many decades. There is less surface area exposed, and it just takes a hugely long time to rot. When they do, they're often nurse trees, still feeding other young trees that grow right on the old trunks. In other words, some of that is still getting converted into new-growing mass.
Those old trunks hold up better in a forest fire too, keeping much of that carbon from returning to the air. Small trees, or young ones that have branches close to the ground, are much much easier to light than thick trunks. Douglas fir, common in this area, even self-prunes after a while; branches closer to the ground fall off, so a fire is less likely to catch the thin live branches on fire unless it reaches the crown.
If you don't leave some leaky, bug-ridden CMS on the front end of your web site, there is a lot less to exploit.
You can probably do it with some plugin or other with Drupal, just like you can with WordPress, Django or whatever. For most people though, you could do well with a static site generator.
If there's no exploitable hole in the base OS or web server, good luck having your way with HTML.
You know those colored bands, known as "rings", in wood? The ones that are created anew year after year? What do you think they're made of?
Now, consider that they'll often be roughly the same thickness on average each year. Each circle is larger than the one before, so it's layering on more circumference all the time. As long as the tree is still alive, it's adding more to the trunk alone.
I'll allow that some trees die fairly soon in human terms, but many do not. Still though, even alders or poplars are bigger each year for their relatively short, fast-growing lifespan.
Remote-friendly places do exist, TELUS is one decent-sized example. It's a hell of a lot easier if it's part of the company culture.
Yup, ditto for laptops, which are at least historically more fixable. My mid-2012 MBP needed the battery replaced, which required going to a service place that replaced (as a unit) the top case, battery, keyboard and trackpad. Fine, at least I get a less-grungy keyboard, right? Then the charging circuit died on the main board. I *could* have gotten that fixed too, to still have an out-of-warranty, non-upgradeable device with a bunch of stuck pixels on the display.
So I went and bought a Lenovo P50, with a better keyboard, socketed RAM and multiple drive bays. Dual-boots Linux, works like a champ. And it feels like MINE.
To be fair, you can't trust ______ to regulate themselves. Insert whatever you like here.
I don't think I can ever see a news release about Bell Canada that doesn't make me roll my eyes, and wonder how they get any customers at all. Everything they do, or say, screams their status as a pile of anti-consumer twats. They want to be a shitty ISP, a shitty telco, and a shitty content provider. Ever use the CTV streaming app? Dodgy, glitchy, and slower than hunting down a torrent of whatever show you could already legally watch. They're succeeding at suckage in spades, yet people still give them money. You can see why they want this, because of Bell Media.
MTS in Manitoba was pretty good, but I'll watch vicariously as the wall of suck moves in.
The updates may be much smaller, but the end result is still massively bloated. I killed off my Facebook app when I needed space and iOS was telling me that FB was taking up around 400MB. Sure, the innumerable updates are relatively small, but that's of less consequence anyway if not doing updates over a mobile data plan.
Good point. I got bitten, and uninstalled LInkedIn's iOS app after my contacts got uploaded without asking. As in, getting notifications later like "Invite [nickname] to LinkedIn", where [nickname] exists only in my contacts.I can still pull up the site in the phone browser if I'm so inclined, but there is zero value in having its spammy, creepy, intrusive self pestering me.
Ditto with Facebook's app. Again, it's useful TO ME to control what info it has and what it does, so I use it from the browser and not their app. It didn't hurt to notice that the space taken up was over 400MB. The app was nicer to use than the browser on the phone, but the bloat and lack of control convinced me otherwise.
I was going to say, there's a great middle ground if you choose to go a little less urban. In my case, our island is like a small town of ~3000, and the small city of ~35000 is a 10 minute ferry ride away. I've got what I usually *need* right here, and it's not really inconvenient to get to most big box stores and the like on the other side.
Larger places are slightly farther away, so I can still go to Costco. In many cases, I make a point of using my local merchants, so that I continue to have their services as an option. I use Amazon too, albeit not Prime. There are some shipping restrictions that like the article says, are not at all transparent, and that is a pain. In some cases, they'll deliver to my local PO, others they insist on my picking up just on the other side of that ferry. Weird, since Canada Post is already going that short bit farther on.
Ditto here. I work for a telecom company that has become quite remote-friendly the past few years. I do spend a lot of time on the phone / laptop, meeting virtually with others across multiple time zones. The difference I find is that the company has adopted it as an approved way of working (depending on role).
I sit on my little coastal island, manager's three TZs away, and things get done. What's not to like?
+1
GC creates more problems than it solves.
The knowledge/discipline needed to use GC properly isn't less than learning to use reference counting.
Worse: In a GC language you'll be retyping the exact same boiler plate code over and over gain to workaround the problem. This leads to copy/paste errors, code verbosity that hides other bugs, forgetting to do it, etc.
GC-enabled languages have *less* boilerplate and verbosity for the most part, because that nuisance housekeeping is handled for you. Unless you're stuck coding in Java perhaps. Many other GC-friendly languages are easy to read, write, understand, and trivially within the "good enough" ballpark for most use.
I agree that some knowledge is useful in terms of edge cases, profiling and tuning, but that's a bridge you cross when you need to.
I loved BBSs, used them from 300 baud on up in Winnipeg. They were great for the local scene, but it was the advent of store-and-forward networking that really blew me away. Mail and newsgroups to and from my home system, through a guy working at an ISP (hi Greg!), and off to the world.
By batching up messages together and sending them in a periodic squirt, you didn't need to tie up the phone line for long. Sending email meant storing it in the spool, and it would go out soon enough when the connection next occurred. Now that I live on a coastal island where DSL doesn't reach everywhere, I wonder if this tech is still useful. Ditto for when things go down (tree on the wires, this time of year), would love to see a robust, distributed alternative. Maybe a mesh net?
Of course they had lots of issues still, they're *marketing*. Across all my years' experience in a few companies, I have never seen a group more technically inept than them, except perhaps for sales. Sure, there's an occasional bright light, but the field sure attracts the techno-peasants.
I'm in a company that was acquired by a competitor, where the resulting company was in turn acquired by a much larger, overseas firm. That latter firm knows little I think except the balance sheet, so things are really managed by the CEO of the first acquiring firm. He isn't at all from our field, says the right things, and much of it bullshit. Most of the firm I came with is gone, on their own or when much of it got closed suddenly. So yeah, many of the employees he had would fire him, but it's probably 50-50 on those that are left.
Heartbleed was/is a critical issue, and easy to exploit to be sure. On the other hand, you had to attack a server to try and find useful bits of information such as the private key for that server. Bad as it is, I'd far prefer that to *plaintext*, in which every knob-puller between you and the server is free to muck with it as much as they want, with no clue that it's going on. With all its warts, even the unpatched servers provide more help than hindrance, should it be used.
ASCII-based plaintext protocols are great for hand-bombing via a terminal, but really have no place in the modern world. Encrypt everything, all the time, and high muckety-mucks have to be specific about which needles they expect you to reveal.
Well, I was thinking more at the service level. Unless it's the HTTPSEverywhere extension I have running, Youtube already is. On a related note, that extension is great. (Support the EFF!) With HTTPS, they only know the host name, not URLs or heaven forbid, content of requests and responses.
Services are increasingly moving towards HTTPS by default, which is awesome. Besides the obvious privacy implications, it prevents these ISP wankers from messing with your content, as it all becomes a sea of bytes (as it should be).
There have been hints of this sort of meddling in the past, when providers started injecting ad banners and other cruft into web responses.
Fuck'em, hard. Just because everyone else is asking for this nonsense does not make it right.
Everyone else: Run as much encryption, and Tor nodes, as you can. Drives them bonkers when they can't just fish through plaintext.
If not on the board, answering to the CFO is a good alternative. The CFO ultimately cares about all things that cost money, and should consider things besides uptime. That was a conflict I'd seen before, where security reports to an operations director, who tends to care about little besides 100% uptime.
If "wanton disabling SSLv2" breaks shit, it's shit that needs breaking. Dodgy old crypto protocols are deprecated for a reason, and massive, cheap security lossage is a good example here.