It's easy to make fun of the grandstanding by ignorant CongressCritters (redundant), but we need to keep in mind that people vote for them, which is truly scary. Worse, 71 million voters apparently would prefer to live in a country with an authoritarian leader. Even more frightening, there seems to be a substantial part of the population who desire to return to the 1950s, where men were the head-of-household, mom stayed home and baked cake, women were submissive to men, people of color rode in the back of the bus and weren't allowed at the lunch counter in Kresge's, pornography and gay marriage were illegal, there was no Internet, and the greatest threats were Communists in our midst. Trump tapped into that belief, and a significant number of Republican law makers have joined the parade. The recent election will, hopefully, soon be over, but the conspiracy theories, evangelical Christian beliefs, racism, denial of science, etc. were not defeated. By claiming that the election was stolen, Trump has given them even greater credibility.
WISP == faster, more reliable service and lower price!
We live in an "urban interface" area and are the very happy customers of a WISP, XtreamInternet, which replaced unreliable and overpriced CenturyLink DSL service. We get much faster (25mbps) service for less money and it's been totally reliable ever since it was installed. (CenturyLink's program required that we also have a landline bundled with a costly assortment of features for which we had no use. Then they added on some "cost recovery" fees.) Now our former landline numbers route to Google Voice, which saves us from having to answer dozens of robocalls each day.
Word of warning: we previously tried service from two other WISPs, back in the early days of fixed wireless. Both proved unreliable and had horrid customer service. One of the problems we encountered was that they were routing signal over multiple hops, e.g., from one residence to another. That created multiple points of failure due to wind, snow, homeowner not knowing they were a relay point, and localized power failures. In the ensuing years WISP operators have learned a lot and are no longer amateurs. The equipment is also better. We recommend that prospective customers request uptime performance statistics and customer service call volume data before signing a WISP contract. Well-managed companies are proud to share that information.
Too many states have passed into law restrictions on communities developing their own ISP. These were generally the work of AT&T lobbyists who made generous campaign donations to the legislators willing to hamstring their constituents. Removing those restrictions may help extend broadband further. Low-orbit satellite may provide some of the more remote locations with service, but the cost to the end user is high. We managed to get telephone service to almost every residence in the country; we just lack the commitment to do the same with broadband. Unfortunately, the current political divide in this country will undermine any attempt to extend coverage, and that highly-polarized situation is unlikely to change any time soon!
Of course no one is held accountable. The pig-in-chief isn't accountable. Mitch the Bitch covers the pig's ass and all the Republicans (with one or two notable exceptions) kowtow. Anyone who speaks up is swiftly unemployed, replaced by yet another political hack.
The Founders of this country never contemplated that the voters would be stupid enough to elect an narcissist who is too busy worrying about how he looks and how much applause he can attract to bother actually doing his job. He'd rather just wave his middle finger at the taxpayers.
I was in high school when Tom's first record was released. Been a fan ever since and sometimes find myself humming some of his tunes. And some of his lyrics just stick in your head: "Plagiarize, but please to call it research." Thanks for the update.
The complaint, which alleges that Google's monopoly keeps other search engines from entering the market, defeats it own claim:
"Given the internet’s enormous breadth and constant evolution, establishing and
maintaining a commercially viable general search engine is an expensive process. Google’s search index contains hundreds of billions of webpages and is well over 100,000,000 gigabytes in size. Developing a general search index of this scale, as well as viable search algorithms, would require an upfront investment of billions of dollars. The costs for maintaining a scaled general search business can reach hundreds of millions of dollars a year."
As you point out, this is just theater. But one of the things that the current administration has accomplished is to cause a lot of people to distrust science, professional competence, education, and intelligence (real, not claimed). Now they want us to distrust innovation that leads to wild success.
I've been using the Internet since 1993. It was pretty lonely then, and there wasn't much need for a search engine. As sites began popping up a few mediocre search services appeared, but they weren't easy to use. Eventually Yahoo launched and it was better than anything else. But...then Google appeared, and it was far superior. Today we would say that it uses "crowdsourcing" to improve the results, although that term didn't exist in 1998. The real genius of the Google business plan was the intent to sell every word in the dictionary, in every language, multiple times! That turned out to be extremely valuable to advertisers.
Every year Google makes thousands of improvements to its search engine. I've compared searches on Google and Bing, and Google wins almost every time.
On the downside, Google has increasingly favored its own sites and generous advertisers, so it requires some effort to sort out the real search results from the "paid" search results. I find that annoying, but I don't consider it illegal.
Along the way Google has used its enormous profits to do what any good business executive would do: expand the business, and its value to users, by either inventing or acquiring services that extended its capabilities or met other customer needs and relied upon Google's enormous compute capabilities. The DOJ never raised an eyebrow!
I'm sure there are some of Google's business practices that may give them a competitive advantage. I would applaud any effort to address those, but attacking the entire company is nonsense. What's being attacked is successful American innovation, which we need to celebrate and preserve.
...but only applies to products purchased with taxpayer dollars
Pretty wimpy attempt that doesn't do much and definitely does nothing about the zillions of silly gizmos already in operation. This is similar to grandstanding "gun control" legislation, which does nothing about the hundreds of millions of firearms already resident in the U.S. Perhaps, someday, we'll be able to elect some Congresscritters who aren't both technologically ignorant and beholden to big corporations. (I also believe in Santa Claus!)
If "the Law is Too Hard to Follow," then why do we have courts? In particular, why do we bother with the FISA court?
Long ago we lost control of our government, which no longer requires the "consent of the governed." Glad I won't be around when we hit this bottom of the slippery slope!
If Esther says "..,the chaos hackers were almost redundant in the ugly world that the two warring parties...", I'm with her. She's easily the smartest person I ever met. What I would add, from my own experience, is that "chaos kills," and that's the real issue. Chaos obscures everyone's ability to perceive accurately, and the consequences can be catastrophic.
"if we genuinely cared about U.S. data privacy and security..."
But...consider how many government agencies benefit from these flaws: FBI, ICE, CIA, NSA, and all the ones whose initials are secret.
Of course, many of our enemies benefit, too. The Russians and the Chinese are probably listening to most of the Congresscritters conversations. They probably gave up listening to the Orange Man because nothing he said made any sense.
With a little effort I suspect one could eavesdrop on some interesting conversations that would lead to some very profitable stock market transactions. Where do I find the instructions for building a ReVoLTE interceptor?
What's really ridiculous is that the Chinese could just buy all that data, and a whole lot more, from any of the aggregators. Hmmm, they probably already do...
With "acting field general" Wolf leading the charge.
Posse comitatus ((18 U.S.C. § 1385) applies to the Army and Air Force and limits the powers of the federal government in the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States. At the time was it was enacted (1878) no one could have imagined that the U.S. would have law enforcement officers equipped (but not trained) like soldiers. It's difficult to imagine now, frightening, and seemingly intended to reinforce a false narrative about "violent anarchists."
There are more than 2,000 telephone companies in the U.S., many of them serving rural areas. These are marginal operations, at best, and they rely heavily on inexpensive equipment. They cannot afford Ericsson or Nokia switches (or the corresponding service contracts). Huawei is their only other choice. Banning Huawei simply drives them to being acquired by the large companies that provide terrible customer service and higher prices. That's just a lesser-known component of Pai's contribution to his Verizon/AT&T/Comcast friends. He is certain to be amply rewarded when he returns to his Verizon job.
Stupidity knows no bounds, but we do need to be concerned about the prevalence of idiocy among those who claim to teach our children, because they are teaching that those in authority are idiots.
I have viewed video of numerous confrontations that occurred during the past several days and one characteristic stood out in every one: protesters were dressed in casual clothes; cops were dressed in battle gear and armed to the teeth. Having been in similar situations, I found my immediate reaction was fear, followed by anger at the imbalance of power.
The imbalance of power is, of course, intentional. No law enforcement officer in his or her right mind would confront an excited crowd without protective gear. And there are generally more protesters than enforcers. There is no reason for the enforcers to be confrontational unless there is an immediate threat to persons or property. However, if the enforcers take any threatening action, the crowd will be ignited, and the battle is joined.
Crowds can often be controlled without firearms and tear gas. Firehoses are quite effective. So are sandwiches and cold drinks!
[During the Vietnam War riots I witnessed one police officers remove his helmet, walk half way towards the protesters, and sit down in the middle of the street. It took a while, but soon one protester walked out and sat down opposite that officer. Another officer joined them, and then a few more protesters, and it wasn't long until the only people still screaming were the few that instigated the entire event. They were ignored. I only saw that once, but it's burned into my memory.]
Unfortunately, the government actions at Lafayette Square have now polarized the entire the situation so thoroughly that it's now gone from anger over a senseless murder to anger about a repressive government. If the President were actually to put our armed forces on the streets outside D.C., there's enough anger and pain to result in a revolution.
I would suggest a stronger commitment to a collaborative and cooperative reduction of tension... We've all been hurt by a terrible pandemic; a revolution would make the pandemic seem like a common cold.
With so many complex problems to address, none with easy answers, leave it to the Senate Republicans to focus on a non-problem where they can do some more rich folks a favor and fly under the news cycle radar. Our Federal government seems to fail at every task they are asked to do, quite possibly because Congress (both parties) quit doing their job some years ago, about the time when the Supremes decided Citizens United and the congresscritters no longer needed financial support from the peon citizenry. If the protesters were better educated, they'd be sharpening the guillotines and attacking the people who benefit financially from racial and financial inequality...
On the post: Day After Senator Lindsey Graham Is Credibly Accused Of Trying To Undermine The Election, He Hosts Hearing Attacking Social Media For Undermining Election
Caution Advised!
It's easy to make fun of the grandstanding by ignorant CongressCritters (redundant), but we need to keep in mind that people vote for them, which is truly scary. Worse, 71 million voters apparently would prefer to live in a country with an authoritarian leader. Even more frightening, there seems to be a substantial part of the population who desire to return to the 1950s, where men were the head-of-household, mom stayed home and baked cake, women were submissive to men, people of color rode in the back of the bus and weren't allowed at the lunch counter in Kresge's, pornography and gay marriage were illegal, there was no Internet, and the greatest threats were Communists in our midst. Trump tapped into that belief, and a significant number of Republican law makers have joined the parade. The recent election will, hopefully, soon be over, but the conspiracy theories, evangelical Christian beliefs, racism, denial of science, etc. were not defeated. By claiming that the election was stolen, Trump has given them even greater credibility.
On the post: WISPs Are Helping Communities Stay Connected And Safe During The Crisis... And Beyond
WISP == faster, more reliable service and lower price!
We live in an "urban interface" area and are the very happy customers of a WISP, XtreamInternet, which replaced unreliable and overpriced CenturyLink DSL service. We get much faster (25mbps) service for less money and it's been totally reliable ever since it was installed. (CenturyLink's program required that we also have a landline bundled with a costly assortment of features for which we had no use. Then they added on some "cost recovery" fees.) Now our former landline numbers route to Google Voice, which saves us from having to answer dozens of robocalls each day.
Word of warning: we previously tried service from two other WISPs, back in the early days of fixed wireless. Both proved unreliable and had horrid customer service. One of the problems we encountered was that they were routing signal over multiple hops, e.g., from one residence to another. That created multiple points of failure due to wind, snow, homeowner not knowing they were a relay point, and localized power failures. In the ensuing years WISP operators have learned a lot and are no longer amateurs. The equipment is also better. We recommend that prospective customers request uptime performance statistics and customer service call volume data before signing a WISP contract. Well-managed companies are proud to share that information.
On the post: The Enormous Cost Of Digital Inequality
Too many states have passed into law restrictions on communities developing their own ISP. These were generally the work of AT&T lobbyists who made generous campaign donations to the legislators willing to hamstring their constituents. Removing those restrictions may help extend broadband further. Low-orbit satellite may provide some of the more remote locations with service, but the cost to the end user is high. We managed to get telephone service to almost every residence in the country; we just lack the commitment to do the same with broadband. Unfortunately, the current political divide in this country will undermine any attempt to extend coverage, and that highly-polarized situation is unlikely to change any time soon!
On the post: FCC Ignores The Courts, Finalizes Facts-Optional Repeal Of Net Neutrality
Of course no one is held accountable. The pig-in-chief isn't accountable. Mitch the Bitch covers the pig's ass and all the Republicans (with one or two notable exceptions) kowtow. Anyone who speaks up is swiftly unemployed, replaced by yet another political hack.
The Founders of this country never contemplated that the voters would be stupid enough to elect an narcissist who is too busy worrying about how he looks and how much applause he can attract to bother actually doing his job. He'd rather just wave his middle finger at the taxpayers.
On the post: Tom Lehrer, Still Awesome, Releases Lyrics Into The Public Domain
Thank you!
I was in high school when Tom's first record was released. Been a fan ever since and sometimes find myself humming some of his tunes. And some of his lyrics just stick in your head: "Plagiarize, but please to call it research." Thanks for the update.
On the post: Bill Barr's Google 'Antitrust Inquiry' Is A Weaponized Farce
Worth reading the complaint
On the post: Bill Barr's Google 'Antitrust Inquiry' Is A Weaponized Farce
Antitrust or Distrust?
As you point out, this is just theater. But one of the things that the current administration has accomplished is to cause a lot of people to distrust science, professional competence, education, and intelligence (real, not claimed). Now they want us to distrust innovation that leads to wild success.
I've been using the Internet since 1993. It was pretty lonely then, and there wasn't much need for a search engine. As sites began popping up a few mediocre search services appeared, but they weren't easy to use. Eventually Yahoo launched and it was better than anything else. But...then Google appeared, and it was far superior. Today we would say that it uses "crowdsourcing" to improve the results, although that term didn't exist in 1998. The real genius of the Google business plan was the intent to sell every word in the dictionary, in every language, multiple times! That turned out to be extremely valuable to advertisers.
Every year Google makes thousands of improvements to its search engine. I've compared searches on Google and Bing, and Google wins almost every time.
On the downside, Google has increasingly favored its own sites and generous advertisers, so it requires some effort to sort out the real search results from the "paid" search results. I find that annoying, but I don't consider it illegal.
Along the way Google has used its enormous profits to do what any good business executive would do: expand the business, and its value to users, by either inventing or acquiring services that extended its capabilities or met other customer needs and relied upon Google's enormous compute capabilities. The DOJ never raised an eyebrow!
I'm sure there are some of Google's business practices that may give them a competitive advantage. I would applaud any effort to address those, but attacking the entire company is nonsense. What's being attacked is successful American innovation, which we need to celebrate and preserve.
On the post: House Passes Bill To Address The Internet Of Broken Things
...but only applies to products purchased with taxpayer dollars
Pretty wimpy attempt that doesn't do much and definitely does nothing about the zillions of silly gizmos already in operation. This is similar to grandstanding "gun control" legislation, which does nothing about the hundreds of millions of firearms already resident in the U.S. Perhaps, someday, we'll be able to elect some Congresscritters who aren't both technologically ignorant and beholden to big corporations. (I also believe in Santa Claus!)
On the post: FISA Court Decides FBI, NSA Surveillance Abuses Should Be Rewarded With Fewer Restrictions On Searching 702 Collections
If "the Law is Too Hard to Follow," then why do we have courts? In particular, why do we bother with the FISA court?
Long ago we lost control of our government, which no longer requires the "consent of the governed." Glad I won't be around when we hit this bottom of the slippery slope!
On the post: We Ran Our Online Election Disinformation Simulation Game And There's Plenty To Be Worried About
If Esther says "..,the chaos hackers were almost redundant in the ugly world that the two warring parties...", I'm with her. She's easily the smartest person I ever met. What I would add, from my own experience, is that "chaos kills," and that's the real issue. Chaos obscures everyone's ability to perceive accurately, and the consequences can be catastrophic.
On the post: VoLTE Flaw Lets A Hacker Spy On Encrypted Communications For A Measly $7,000
"if we genuinely cared about U.S. data privacy and security..."
But...consider how many government agencies benefit from these flaws: FBI, ICE, CIA, NSA, and all the ones whose initials are secret.
Of course, many of our enemies benefit, too. The Russians and the Chinese are probably listening to most of the Congresscritters conversations. They probably gave up listening to the Orange Man because nothing he said made any sense.
With a little effort I suspect one could eavesdrop on some interesting conversations that would lead to some very profitable stock market transactions. Where do I find the instructions for building a ReVoLTE interceptor?
On the post: Trump Issues Ridiculous Executive Orders Banning TikTok And WeChat
What's really ridiculous is that the Chinese could just buy all that data, and a whole lot more, from any of the aggregators. Hmmm, they probably already do...
On the post: DHS Obtained Protesters' Encrypted Messages, Used Them To Craft 'Intelligence' Reports
Lying to the FBI is a crime. Why isn't lying to Congress a crime?
On the post: DHS Goes Full Gestapo In Response To Ongoing Protests In Oregon
A clever end run around posse comitatus...
With "acting field general" Wolf leading the charge.
Posse comitatus ((18 U.S.C. § 1385) applies to the Army and Air Force and limits the powers of the federal government in the use of federal military personnel to enforce domestic policies within the United States. At the time was it was enacted (1878) no one could have imagined that the U.S. would have law enforcement officers equipped (but not trained) like soldiers. It's difficult to imagine now, frightening, and seemingly intended to reinforce a false narrative about "violent anarchists."
On the post: Small ISPs Being Forced To Eat The Costs Of FCC's Huawei Ban
It's not just about ISPs...
There are more than 2,000 telephone companies in the U.S., many of them serving rural areas. These are marginal operations, at best, and they rely heavily on inexpensive equipment. They cannot afford Ericsson or Nokia switches (or the corresponding service contracts). Huawei is their only other choice. Banning Huawei simply drives them to being acquired by the large companies that provide terrible customer service and higher prices. That's just a lesser-known component of Pai's contribution to his Verizon/AT&T/Comcast friends. He is certain to be amply rewarded when he returns to his Verizon job.
On the post: Wisconsin Court Dumps Conviction Of Middle School Kid Who Drew A Picture Of A Bomb
Stupidity knows no bounds, but we do need to be concerned about the prevalence of idiocy among those who claim to teach our children, because they are teaching that those in authority are idiots.
Oops, they seem to be teaching reality.
On the post: Let's Stop Pretending Peaceful Demonstrations Will Fix The System. 'Peace Officers' Don't Give A Shit About Peace.
A slightly different perspective...
I have viewed video of numerous confrontations that occurred during the past several days and one characteristic stood out in every one: protesters were dressed in casual clothes; cops were dressed in battle gear and armed to the teeth. Having been in similar situations, I found my immediate reaction was fear, followed by anger at the imbalance of power.
The imbalance of power is, of course, intentional. No law enforcement officer in his or her right mind would confront an excited crowd without protective gear. And there are generally more protesters than enforcers. There is no reason for the enforcers to be confrontational unless there is an immediate threat to persons or property. However, if the enforcers take any threatening action, the crowd will be ignited, and the battle is joined.
Crowds can often be controlled without firearms and tear gas. Firehoses are quite effective. So are sandwiches and cold drinks!
[During the Vietnam War riots I witnessed one police officers remove his helmet, walk half way towards the protesters, and sit down in the middle of the street. It took a while, but soon one protester walked out and sat down opposite that officer. Another officer joined them, and then a few more protesters, and it wasn't long until the only people still screaming were the few that instigated the entire event. They were ignored. I only saw that once, but it's burned into my memory.]
Unfortunately, the government actions at Lafayette Square have now polarized the entire the situation so thoroughly that it's now gone from anger over a senseless murder to anger about a repressive government. If the President were actually to put our armed forces on the streets outside D.C., there's enough anger and pain to result in a revolution.
I would suggest a stronger commitment to a collaborative and cooperative reduction of tension... We've all been hurt by a terrible pandemic; a revolution would make the pandemic seem like a common cold.
On the post: In The Midst Of A Pandemic And Widespread Unrest, Senate Republicans Think It's Time To Use Copyright To Make The Richest Musicians Richer
With so many complex problems to address, none with easy answers, leave it to the Senate Republicans to focus on a non-problem where they can do some more rich folks a favor and fly under the news cycle radar. Our Federal government seems to fail at every task they are asked to do, quite possibly because Congress (both parties) quit doing their job some years ago, about the time when the Supremes decided Citizens United and the congresscritters no longer needed financial support from the peon citizenry. If the protesters were better educated, they'd be sharpening the guillotines and attacking the people who benefit financially from racial and financial inequality...
On the post: Banks Get Payout From Equifax Hack While Consumers Still Wait For Compensation
FTC == F**k The Consumer
On the post: Let's Talk About 'Neutrality' -- And How Math Works
Re:
And everyone else's comments neutered.
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