226 karma · joined October 5, 2011
They quite literally are not, at least not in the US; half the states have right-to-work laws that prohibit this explicitly, and there are likely some protections even in the states that don't have a blanket protection.
Just doing some quick searching - the first numbers that come up when you search for "how many people used the internet in the year 2000" are on the order of 350 million or so. Comparatively, now, in 2023, Reddit alone has some 450 million users. It would seem right now that Tiktok has about three times the number of active users than there were total Internet users 23 years ago.
Additionally, there are literally hundreds of billions of dollars now resting on Chrome remaining the dominant browser.
Short of government intervention (or absolutely monumental fuckup on Google's part somehow), Chrome is here to stay.
well, that's for one very specific and notable reason alone, not because of some shifting moral landscape.
except that any app could do this, and it just happens to be Teams that did.
Interesting how different people have different desires.
It added yet another thing I have to implement, test and maintain through whatever changes they decide to make.
Nothing like adding extra work for every enterprise IT team to make new friends.
There are also some massive security issues with making all https traffic blind that making only the data blind didn't create - like the ability to blackhole known unsafe domains as they appear.
Hold up, your position is that users that prefer something 'easy to use' as opposed to something 'powerful' are immoral? What am I missing here?
Not trying to be snarky here: I don't understand what this conversation looks like. What does it look like? What purpose does it serve, what it's ultimate goal?
If the problem is that the ruthless winner-take-all nature of professional environments is destroying open source, then you need to fix both problems, not one of them. Trying to fix only one won't help.
Perhaps you're thinking of CD Projekt Red, who have actually been fighting exclusives and walled gardens for quite some time.
I am very capable of all of those things and I don't agree.
To install a camera on my porch somewhere, I'd need first to run power to it, which is a difficult proposition that would probably mean I need to hire an electrician to do it right, as I'm not confident at all in my ability to properly do electrical wiring in places where it needs to be properly weatherproofed. And adding electrical to a near-as-makes-no-difference 80 year old house would look pretty hideous. Then, need to set up a server with redundant spinny storage and offsite backup, which, while not being terribly expensive these days, isn't particularly cheap either. And I don't even know how to begin approaching the mobile app notification issue. Doable, I'm sure, but does Blue Iris have notifications and remote access for viewing built in?
Or, alternatively, I paid $160 for a Ring doorbell and installed it in place of my existing doorbell in an hour or so.
I wish I had more control over it, and I _really_ wish they had an open public API. But at the same time, from a time/money investment point of view, getting the Ring was an obvious move.
I agree that it would be nice if the price required active confirmation; it's too easy to choose the wrong thing.
It strikes me as creepy, but I might think differently about them if I needed a discount.
In an ideal world, we would pass a law demanding ISPs provide neutral service. However, this is far from an ideal world, and that will never happen.
In particular, the idea of AI-driven ads to improve targeting to near-as-makes-no-difference perfect levels is rather unnerving. We're at a moment when the influence of companies or governments in social media is still somewhat obvious/trackable, often because it's driven by actual people. Making it better and then making it automated would result in a system where it would be basically impossible to tell the difference between ads and actual people.
The oldest pair of headphones that I own that work is older than my usage of the Internet. The oldest pair of headphones I own that I still use regularly I bought for college - and that was a long time ago.
Assuming that everyone treats their equipment as though it's disposable is frustrating to me. Some of us use our gear for a very long time, and in the case of something as mundane as a 3.5" jack, expect to be able to.
On the contrary; I have Paint.net and GIMP installed, I've experimented with both of them, and I still don't have a tool as quick and easy for marking up a screenshot as Paint is. At that singular task it is superb.
I create a lot of training material, so marking up screenshots is a significant component of my job. This will make my job harder for no good reason.
Distribute industry content with DRM, distribute their own content without, and see what the results are.
Somebody's going to have to perform the experiment to see what the outcome will be. Since Netflix produces tons of content now, they are in an excellent position to try this.
I know that's not an absolutely fair comparison, since I can't take into account parts commonality between models or model years with a Google search, but still - they're not nearly as rare as I expected. Tesla is going to need to work on their repair infrastructure a lot.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/3/14159292/tesla-q4-2016-deli...
[2] http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/mercedes-benz/merc...
[3] http://carsalesbase.com/european-car-sales-data/mercedes-ben...
True.
I have effectively no choice in ISP, and no choice in power company. At what point do I get to vote on seats on my ISP's board, or my power company's?
Yes. They are expensive and deviously good at it. Or, at least they used to be many years ago.
Many years back I worked in a tiny town (1000 people?) four hours from the closest depot and we even got same day service. This cost a king's ransom. But the AS/400 ran most of the business...
I recently replaced my PC router running pfSense with an EdgeRouter X - at ~$50 the power savings alone will probably pay for it in less than a year, and the only thing I can't do with it that I could do with pfSense is create a standalone OpenVPN endpoint - so I'm moving that functionality to a server that was running anyway.
Of course, for iOS, this also means "you can't write apps for our platform."
My phone already indexes all of my podcasts and audiobooks, why wouldn't I want it to play them everywhere?
I know you're not wrong here, but at what point does social responsibility trump profit? Should it?
This is, admittedly, speculation on my part based on personal experience. Here goes. I'm sure you know this, but I'd like to throw it out there.
If I want to see a my regular GP and talk about mental health, I schedule a regular appointment and pay my co-pay for the visit and for any pharmaceuticals he prescribes.
If I want to see a mental health professional, I have to call my insurance company, describe my problem to someone who is not a mental health professional, have them pre-authorize visits (if they will), find an in-network therapist and complete treatment in the maximum 5 authorized visits per issue.
A system like this drives people to antidepressants.
We can break it down quite simply.
- Being an ISP is not a high margin business.
- ISPs, like any other business, are always seeking ways to make more money.
- Charging sites for the privilege of traversing their infrastructure, or charging customers by the sites they load (the "cable TV" model, if you will) is a way to make more money, so ISPs want to do it.
- Consumers don't want to be charged more money for the same bits, and neither do the owners of large sites.
- Consumers have little to no choice of ISP, because being an ISP is very expensive, and as mentioned, it's pretty low profit (in the grand scheme of things.)
Pretty simple, really.
Sure, in an ideal world, we'd just be able to change to an ISP that fits our particular political bent (no traffic shaping/filtering/prioritizing for me, thanks!) but that world does not exist.
The idea, in short, is that free speech (meaning, in this case, unprioritized w/r/t bits) is more important than ISPs ability to make money. That's not the perfect scenario but it is the most acceptable one, given the world in which we live.