Posts by AdamWill

Re: Smartphones should be inexpensive, disposable commodities

Got an S2 that still works fine on the shelf behind me. There are even still ROM builds for it(!) I lend it out to people who need an emergency phone...

Re: Not much else you can do

"Most people replace after 2 years. (or an iSheep at every new iPhone release)"

Well, *so far* that's been the pattern. But recent numbers indicate it's not any more. As does anecdotal data, around here at least; I still see lots of people using iPhones from around the 6 era, and I see a surprising amount of people using the same old Android phone I use (an LG G3).

The last 2-3 years of phone 'innovation' just hasn't provided much that most people care about: cellphones are getting to be like PCs, where most people just don't get much benefit from getting a brand new one any more. And phones and phone plans have been around long enough that people are starting to get savvier about the costs, and realize that the carrier 'subsidy' is really a loan, not a subsidy, and they really *are* paying full whack for that shiny new phone even if they don't pay much up-front.

Upshot, an awful lot more people getting BYOD plans and keeping their old phones, and a lot of cellphone stores closing...

I personally am very interested to see how this developing dynamic affects the story with regard to battery replacements. It's been received wisdom for the last four or five years that consumers 'don't care' about user-replaceable batteries as they'll just replace the device when (or before) the battery dies. But I suspect that received wisdom isn't going to stand up a lot longer...

Well, yes, it is, but possibly not in the way you think: isn't it interesting that *even someone who saw the hands of Google in the previous NN regulations* thinks the current FCC administration is an utter shitshow?

Re: Judicial review?

At last count there were about 20 state attorneys general lined up to sue the FCC, so apparently at least they think there is.

Re: The clearest example

"Here's one:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-immigration-california/california-allows-college-aid-to-illegal-immigrants-idUSTRE7971SK20111008"

That's a *state* decision. What does that have to do with, as you phrased it, "the last administration"?

"What the heck, here's another, because that's California, after all:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/10/24/cash-strapped-undocumented-immigrants-chicago-flock-free-community-college/794428001/"

That's a *city* decision - the city of Chicago. Again, nothing whatsoever to do with federal policy. In fact, it explicitly makes clear that the affected people weren't eligible for *federal* funds:

"more than one out of five of the 3,015 Star Scholarship winners who enrolled at the city colleges this fall were directed to fill out an alternative to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) because they were ineligible to apply for federal aid"

So no, neither of those links proves that "the last administration" - by which you clearly meant *federal* administration, i.e. Obama's government - did this. The second one, in fact, explicitly states that it didn't.

Re: FCC must not make law,

Also note that the FCC initially introduced NN regulations without using Title II powers *expressly as a sop to the ISPs who didn't want to be regulated under Title II*. At which point the ISPs *sued the FCC*, their argument literally being "you can only impose NN under Title II". In other words...the ISPs literally *dared* the FCC to put them under Title II.

The fact that since then they've been arguing "oh no no no we're not opposed to net neutrality, we're only opposed to Title II!" would be funny if it weren't so astonishingly awful.

Re: Making the Internet Great Again

Let me help you out a bit: there's this bizarre argument that runs approximately like this. Facebook and Google are the ones who *really* have too much power - apparently, in this worldview, there can only ever be precisely *one* problematic concentration of market-distorting power at a time, all the other monopolists have to line up and take a number - and net neutrality isn't, you know, a perfectly sensible framing of the principles on which the internet was built, it's a cunning plot by Facebook and Google to...I dunno, take over the world or something, hands generally start getting waved pretty hard right around this point.

In this view of the world, by heroically refusing to regulate monopoly-abusing ISPs while - well, no, that's about it, actually, that's all they're doing - Pai's FCC is somehow saving the world from Facebook and Google. Apparently if we could go live to Sergey Brin's house right now he'd be crying into the fifth reserve swimming pool, or something.

Re: Sorry to be parochial (or perhaps actually 'cosmopolitan')...

Well there's that, but there's also: the US is one of the biggest sources of and markets for internet services. It's not like only Americans use Netflix or Amazon video, is it? So if America screws up its market conditions sufficiently that it, e.g., heavily discriminates against new market entrants, that affects everyone else too.

Of course, it won't be long before America is done fking everything up so badly it'll be about as relevant to the rest of the world as the UK is today, so there is *that* silver lining.

Re: Steady on, folks.

Well, no, technically it doesn't "take effect", no. But you get one guess as to exactly how enthusiastic Pai's FCC is going to be about enforcing the NN regulation that is still technically on the books.

In other words, if Comcast sets up paid prioritization tomorrow, who do you think is going to do something about it?

Re: The clearest example

"example: free college educations to illegal immigrants"

um. This is quite clearly utter and total bullshit. Do you have the slightest shred of factual evidence that this actually happened?

Re: Take Back Control

You...er...know there is an EU regulation mandating net neutrality, right?

Here. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32015R2120&rid=2 . It's Article 3.

Re: Black arm bands for everyone

"A stake was driven through bipartisanship seven years ago."

Christ on a bike, do you actually *believe* this garbage? The Obama FCC ran like...a regulator should. They ran a public comment period, and actually read the comments. They ran public meetings. They listened to ISPs...*and* other tech companies, *and* subject matter experts. They debated their proposals in good faith, and actually modified them (the final NN rules contained several compromises from the initial proposal).

By comparison, Pai decided what he was going to do before he ever got the job, doesn't consult anyone but ISPs, makes *video skits with ISP executives*, trolls anyone who disagrees with him, and explicitly states that his FCC ignores public feedback.

Re: Black arm bands for everyone

Also during that time, there hadn't been a major concentration of ownership of media creation and delivery companies. And the end of that period is *precisely* when ISPs started fucking around with people's traffic - there are many good articles detailing this, if you're actually interested in facts - which is precisely where the whole concept of net neutrality originated: we only had to define it, give it a name and start pushing for it to be public policy *when ISPs started fucking with it*. Before that, there was no need.

Re: I'm sure it's opt in...

On that note, this "shield study" preference appears to have been snuck in as a sub-setting of an *older* setting. There has been a "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" setting for a while; it may have been opt-in at some point but for quite a whole it's been opt-out. I've usually left this checked as I generally figured I trust Mozilla *enough* to let them do some telemetry stuff. But among other things, this debacle caused me to notice that they've snuck in "Allow Firefox to install and run studies" as a *sub-preference* of "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla", which was set to "yes" (checked) by default without ever once explicitly notifying me about it.

This is bad. These "shield studies" are clearly a pretty different thing from telemetry even when they're actual studies and not TV marketing tie-ins, and I don't think it's cricket at all to just go ahead and assume anyone who's okay with telemetry is okay with being used as a feature test guinea pig.

Re: The elephant in the room…

That doesn't quite work, though, because *even in major metropolitan areas* in the US, choice of providers is very limited. This is mainly because the incumbents fight like hell to prevent it being practical for anyone to compete with them; you can go back a couple of years and read the stories about all the wheezes the incumbent ISPs came up with to make it absolutely as difficult as possible for Google Fiber to enter new markets.

Re: Don't you mean $2000/month?

Hell, I'm on the Western Canadian direct equivalent of Comcast (Shaw), and I get 150/15 business service with static IP and no transfer cap for C$126/month. That's less than US$100, I think.

Re: oo! It's Friday and we have a car argument!

Unfortunately we are currently lacking a way to include all the people who were killed in crashes involving insanely dangerous cars in the conversation, but we're working on it.

Re: Facebook issues

See longer reply below, but: I didn't say anything about whether sexuality is inherent or chosen. I said it wasn't a lifestyle. I don't think the two are *remotely* the same question.

There are a bunch of problems with talking about a "gay lifestyle" or whatever - it's extremely trivializing and belittling, it implicitly supports the pernicious idea that all gay people are some sort of mincing lisping limp-wristed stereotype from a 1970s sitcom, it implies that anyone who identifies as anything other than 'straight' is just sort of trying it on and causing trouble, and it similarly suggests that, because it's "just a lifestyle choice", it's acceptable to pressure people to consciously *change* their conception of their sexuality when they themselves are perfectly comfortable with it. That's just for starters.

But I don't equate it directly with the question of whether sexuality is inherent, environmental, cultural, a conscious or unconscious choice or some sort of messy combination of all of the above at all.

Re: Anonymous Coward

"Every gay person i have known, will categorically state that it is not a choice."

I...think you're going slightly too far, there.

Note, I was actually rather careful not to wade into the extremely charged and somewhat toxic debate about whether sexuality is chosen. What I said is that it's not a "lifestyle", because it isn't.

This is not going to go anywhere good, but oh well. I identify as gay, because it's much easier than trying to express anything more complex without getting lynched. But if you gave me a safe space, a beer and half an hour, what I'd actually tell you is that I'm *mostly* attracted to guys, and have been since a very early age (about 10). I don't walk around with a limp wrist, I'm not a hairdresser, I don't have a high-pitched voice or lisp, I don't wiggle my hips all over the damn place when I walk, or any other thing tiresome people like the OP would presumably consider to be indicators of a "gay lifestyle" or whatever.

I also would say I can't absolutely tell you that I was "born gay" or that I "chose to be gay". Honestly they seem like rather weird phrasings of a false dichotomy, to me.

Frankly, I'd say not-entirely-straight people stick to very simple descriptors of sexuality (like "gay") and insist very hard that you're "born gay" (or "born straight") because it's a nice simple and unequivocal position from which you can derive a pretty convincing argument in favour of sexual tolerance. Which obviously is the end goal.

If you got some social scientists into the safe space with me and gave *them* beers too, they'd point out that there are some awkward truths that complicate the nice simple narrative; fr'instance, people are a lot more likely to have sex with another person of the same sex if they're somehow placed in an institution where they *only* encounter other people of the same sex for a long time. Like prison. Or the navy. This is *both* an ugly stereotype *and* demonstrably true, which is a much more subtle thing than you can sensibly debate on twitter without getting your ass flamed into oblivion by both sides of the Morally Certain Brigade. (This is also why health workers, who generally get a pass from demonstrating their Ideological Purity, tend to target health campaigns at groups like "men who have sex with men" - MSM - rather than using terms like 'gay'; they know there are men who have sex with other men and don't consider themselves to be gay. Life is complicated.)

The *problem* with bringing all this up, as a 'gay' person, is that it tends to open lots of doors for the "BURN ALL THE QUEERS" brigade. Which, frankly, in some contexts, is a pretty *good* reason not to bring this stuff up. But since we were going there anyway, hey, I felt like writing about it.

Personally I actually think sexuality is a hell of a lot more fluid than people are at all comfortable thinking about, which is why we invent convenient and comfortable lies and labels to deal with it instead. (I've read about an interesting study/survey people have done with late high school / university students in some places, asking them to place themselves on a *scale* where 1 is 'entirely straight' and 5 is 'entirely gay'; apparently, quite often responses between 1 and 5 are more common than either 1 or 5).

Everyone's a lot more comfortable if I just say I'm gay than if I say "well, I'm almost exclusively attracted to men, and I'm married to one, but I don't find women intrinsically sexually repugnant and I do actually occasionally think one's pretty cute. If I'd been born in 1935 I'd probably have just married a woman and made the best of it cos that would've been easier than the alternative. If all the other men on earth died out tomorrow I'd probably be happier having sex with women than not having sex at all. I quite honestly don't think I can tell you 100% for certain if I was "born this way", whatever "this way" actually is, but it certainly isn't hurting anyone and it's certainly not anyone else's business trying to decide what "way" I am or should be. What's the label for that?"

But no, it's definitely not a bloody "lifestyle", whatever it is.

Re: Facebook issues

I don't think your comment should have resulted in any kind of ban, but it *is* both incorrect and mildly intolerant. Sexuality is not a "lifestyle" and you don't get to "agree" or "disagree" with anyone else's: it's none of your damn business.

Re: Sorry, this is just PR Speak.

"The way you get followers and likes? Well, the easy way is just telling people what they want to hear."

I note that at time of writing this post has 18 upvotes. :P

Re: Still somone else's computer

Sure, it's easy. Just stand up your server and install nextcloud on it. Well, of course, then you should automate the deployment somehow just in case you need to do it again. Then you're gonna have to figure out how to scale it if you have a significant number of users, of course.

Oh, well, and then set up some kinda access control system, of course. No problem, you can just maintain a list in the admin interface by hand. Now who was the person who looked after the list again? We need to add someone new. Why are they on vacation? Sigh. I guess we need some sort of maintenance rota for this thing. Oh, someone *did* remember to take that disgruntled guy we had to fire last month off of the list of folks approved for access? Right? right?

What's that you say, the hard disk in the file sharing server died and now everyone's lost all their data? Well, crap. Now we're bankrupt. For my new company, I guess we'd better think about redundancy and backups for the shared file server...

...okay, now NewCorp has its file server complete with expensive enterprise-level redundant storage, regular scheduled and tested backups, a rock solid access control policy and a team of five to maintain it. Great. Problem solved. Oh crap, now we need to let remote folks access it. Better hire some network admins to figure out all the necessary networking policy. Make sure nothing is exposed to people who don't work for the company. Maybe put it behind a VPN? But then we have to maintain the VPN and everyone hates dealing with access to a VPN. Also, crap, we'd best make sure this server has a solid TLS configuration. And make sure its certificates are kept up to date. And make sure the software is kept secure. What's that you say, Nextcloud is written in PHP and has a record of security vulns as long as your arm just like everything else that's ever been written in PHP? Well, crap.

tl;dr: running servers (file servers, mail servers, web servers, whatever servers) is superficially easy. Doing it in a safe, sustainable, secure way is absolutely not and it very often *is* the best idea to pay someone else who does it at scale to do it for you.

nope.

"Electric cars are not a solution, they don't cut emissions as they simply transfer the emissions from the exhaust pipe to the power stations."

Well, no, not really. Even ignoring clean power (where I live, for e.g., 97% of power generation is hydroelectric), power stations can generate the power rather more efficiently than tiny powerplants in cars can, and the emissions can also be controlled more effectively at scale. Not to mention that power plants tend to be placed such that far fewer humans are exposed to their emissions than are exposed to the emissions from vehicle exhausts. Yes, for things like greenhouse gases this doesn't really matter, but for e.g. particulate emissions that cause lung damage, it matters *a lot*.

"Range anxiety, slow charging and so forth are of no use to anyone who is required to travel any reasonable distance in an expected time... I'm sure employers would love to hear how your shiny new environmentally friendly vehicle took you an extra 2hrs to get to the site and begin work.. because you had to charge it up halfway there... Or for those who make multiple visits to multiple clients, often in places with no access to chargers at all.. meaning yet another stop to recharge your vehicle enough to make it to the next needed mini top up."

These are all reasonable reasons why existing electric vehicles aren't suitable for *some* people, sure. I don't think anyone's suggested they are. No-one's telling people who drive their pickup 500 miles a day to replace it with a Nissan Leaf. But lots of people have cars and don't actually drive them hundreds of miles a day, they drive them fifty or fewer miles a day and just about never drive them more than a couple hundred miles. For these people, existing electric cars are already a great option.

"Fuel cells on the other hand ARE a decent and viable solution"

The market doesn't appear to agree with you there, since just about no-one is building them. They have their own issues, which you seem to just ignore entirely in favour of a blanket statement that they're "a decent and viable solution" with exactly no supporting evidence.

"as a short term fix, hybrid cars should be what people are looking to purchase until such a time as govt/business gets of their arse and puts the infrastructure in place to refuel fuel cell vehicles."

This seems weirdly prescriptive. If an all-electric car is suitable to someone's needs, who are you to tell them they "should be...looking to purchase" a hybrid instead? If you are one of the people who drives hundreds of miles a day in such a way that charging an all-electric car is impractical, sure, a hybrid may be a good choice (though they have downsides, being as how you're basically paying for two separate powertrains and the extra maintenance that results from that complexity).

"All electric vehicles are a con and the intention is to convince people to BUY MORE CARS and prop up a floundering economy caused by Labours incompetence and the Tories greed and desire to punish any one who's not rich... and god help you if you are sick or disabled... because they really loathe those types and want to see them suffer more and more each day."

This just seems to be a wild rant that's rather disconnected from reality. Plus...in the rest of your comment you seem (so far as I can make out) to be advocating incentivising the purchase of fuel cell and/or hybrid vehicles instead...so how would that be any different? They're still cars...

Re: Pretty good analysis

"None of this would matter if there wasn't this vertical integration via merger. IMO if you don't like the way it is, that's perhaps worth a look. If content creation and ownership were separate from the pipes that push the content around, there wouldn't be much issue...There'd be no reason for AT&T or Comcast to prefer one content source over another. That's the real source of problems the way I see things."

Welp, good news on that, as Pai is also systematically loosening rules intended to prevent such consolidation of ownership of content and transmission companies!

Re: The "Special" generation

Um. You seem to have forgotten the part where you draw any kind of logical link between your tired, stereotypical "snowflake" argument and your response to this article.

Meanwhile back in the real world, all the empirical data I've seen suggests that younger people are as concerned as, or more concerned than, older people about privacy.

Re: Apologies to hijack this thread...

Yes. It goes in my tennis bag. And now when I'm done playing tennis I can eat a banana, rather than trying to scrape the mushy remnants of one out from under my water bottle.

Re: Same here

Yeah, I have a G3, and have compared it to every significant phone that's come out since and gone 'meh'. The first that actually looks like an unarguable upgrade (aside from the non-replaceable battery, but that seems like a thing that's never coming back :/) is the Oneplus 5T, but even then all I'd really be getting is a bunch more LTE frequencies (which *would* be handy) and a fingerprint sensor. Technically it's "faster", but phones hit that point around the time of the G3 that PCs hit a bit earlier: for most typical usage, you don't actually notice any practical impact from "faster" hardware any more. Still a bit hard to justify dropping $500 on those two things as opposed to $20 on a new battery.