You implicitly assume that sites get most of their traffic from any search engine. Plenty of sites don't. Sites get traffic from paid advertising (on ad-supported sites, social networks, physical media, and so on). Sites get traffic because people already know what they need (public services with widely known addresses, for example). Intranet sites obviously don't rely on public search engines. And of course there's old-fashioned word of mouth advertising, and its new high-tech counterparts like hyperlinks on related sites and social media.

Of the commercial projects I currently work on -- and there are several, because I do freelance/consultancy work -- I don't think any gets the majority of its visitors from search engines, and in some cases if Google disappeared tomorrow you'd hardly notice on the bottom line.

Your search engine might be. Apparently the most successful search engine in the world thinks its users want content with good/appropriate presentation more than content that isn't as well/appropriately presented. And they're probably right.

I'd be the first to agree that Google shouldn't get to dictate how the Web works and that sometimes Google or at least some its employees appear to be extremely arrogant in assuming they are every webmaster's #1 priority. The reality is that if you're running a site that doesn't depend primarily on Google for traffic, you can and should implement whatever works best for you and your visitors, regardless of what Google wants or says.

However, if you're relying on Google's service for most/all of your visitors to find your site at all, you have to play by their rules if you want the best treatment from them. This is the basic principle of SEO, and it's as old as search engines themselves.

You want my credit card number? Just convince Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon to have a netflix-exclusive video lovechild. Boom. Done. Don't need to know anything about it. Do this, and I'm sold.

Seems like those nice people did a pretty good job of keeping you away from the drop bears, based on the fact that you still seem to have all your entrails. Be easy for a drop bear to get a fella' as he's staggering back from the bar...

If they're going to be like that about it, how's about setting up a copyright-free car project that you could build down at the local makerspace? You could probably do something on the order of complexity of the Ariel Atom without too much difficulty, and pull in an engine from a local junkyard. If that's what it takes to own your own car in this day and age, the guys the automakers are cock-blocking are more than capable of coming up with the designs.

Ah well as I said, my upload speeds to Youtube are ridiculous. I generate two or three skydiving videos a week and it used to take a couple hours to upload them all to youtube. I'll have to make a video of me uploading a video to Youtube, I guess...

I also had a problem, while on Comcast, where my computer waking up from hibernation would not be able to resolve DNS for several minutes. I'd be able to ping numeric IP addresses including Google's DNS servers, which I'd set the machine to use. But it would be several minutes before I could resolve names. That problem went away completely when I switched off Comcast.

So I'm getting gigabit speeds for $59 a month from an ISP that doesn't have the reputation for fuckery that your ISP probably does. Seems worth it to me.

Yeah, water in 30 years will be where gasoline is today. If it were 50 years ago, the country would just embark on a mega-scale water engineering project to move water between places where there is too much of it to places where there isn't enough of it. Don't see that happening in the current political climate, though. There's some sort of political warming process going on, in which the rhetoric is getting much too heated and causing all potential progress to grind to a halt...

I just picked up municipal fiber in Longmont, Colorado. The company has a page that lists a number of options you could use with their service. I went with the NetGear Nighthawk and am quite pleased with it. Most of the devices in my house are wireless, but I do have a couple of machines plugged into its wired ports and do get ludicrous speed with it. It's a pretty consistent 600 mbps up and down according to speedtest.net, and my one-to-two gigabyte skydiving videos upload to youtube faster than I can type the description of the jump.

I was just watching a video about this the other day. Dude explains that fake like fraudsters also tend to like facebook-promoted content to try to throw the fraud-detection algorithms off. Ultimately either method of promotion makes it harder for him to connect with people who are actually interested in his channel.

Perhaps he can install some astroturf to cover the unsightly bare spot where his lush, vibrant lawn used to live.

Also funnily there have been lawsuits over cloud seeding by people claiming exactly that.

Instead of paying nothing they'll just have to buy a cheap game with a stolen credit card? The monthly subscription fee never seemed to be a problem for the gold farmers in WoW or the isk farmers in Eve Online.

Tis better to be mauled by a single bull than trampled by a herd of sheep.

I've been around bulls and I've been around sheep. The odds of survival aren't what you think.

The same way as before systemd came on the scene (unless your distro has changed things at the same time - and network settings are something distros do seem to like to move around from release to release - but systemd doesn't, as far as I'm aware, touch the DNS settings at all!)

Aah, I remember back in the late 80's and early 90's everyone had a boner for microkernels. IBM even gave it a try, attempting to port OS/2 over to a microkernel so they could run it on Intel and PowerPC platforms. At one point, IBM's strategy was that they were going to build OS/2 around a microkernal and then just run THAT on all their hardware, with multi-user and security features added or removed as needed. Well, very long story, very long, they never could get it to work.

These days you don't see the same hype around microkernals that you did back then. So we should probably warn the HURD team: If your boner for microkernals lasts more than 25 years, you should probably consult a physician.