They were taking OTA signals and retransmitting them across the internet for profit without paying the broadcaster a dime.

I could do that myself legally (I do so all the time, recording over the air signals and replaying them later on other devices), so why couldn't I pay someone to put an antenna somewhere for me?

The key was they really did have one antenna per customer, so it was exactly that - an antenna rental.

So why do YOU see anything wrong with that?

It might sound surprising, but there are people who eat both turkey and ham on Thanksgiving. Or even meatballs, salmon and roast beef.

Shocking, I know, that people can eat more than one thing on any given day.

So it will be like launching passengers into space by private companies who completely ignore the 'basic research' governments have funded for the last fifty years.

Let me know how that works out.

I don't have the numbers to prove it but using the Amazon service to find video to watch is horrific. I can only imagine Amazon is paying them for inclusion, because otherwise the numbers cannot be worth recording...

Eh? The C++ standard explicitly forbids "void main()". From the standard:

An implementation shall not predefine the main function. This function shall not be overloaded. It shall have a return type of type int, but otherwise its type is implementation-defined. All implementations shall allow both of the following definitions of main:

int main() { /* ... */ }

and

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { /* ... */ }

It's quite obvious, actually... it's not the default because it doesn't work as well for most people. Verbatim is good when you're searching for fairly specific terms, spelled correctly. If you're asking a more general question, with words that may appear in many variations, or if you don't spell well or are lazy, then the "new" Google works dramatically better.

I think a lot of complaints about Google search today, especially by people who have been around for a while, really boil down to the fact that the old search tricks don't work very well any more. In the early days of search we all learned how to create effective search queries, by picking carefully targeted search terms, combining them in particular ways, omitting any extraneous or "filler" words and lots more that make search queries look very different from natural language. But the search engines (or at least Google) have been changing along with the user base, which is now comprised of almost entirely non-technical people who haven't been using the web for long enough or heavily enough that they learned to compose searches that catered to the engines' weaknesses.

So, today, Google focuses on optimizing for the now-common case of search queries which are most often natural language questions, typed quickly and carelessly. The search engine tries hard to figure out what the user meant, rather than what they said. To those accustomed to being very precise and saying exactly what they mean, this is somewhat infuriating, because they don't want the machine to guess at what they meant, they told it what they meant. For the average user, though, who is more accustomed to dealing with people, who are good at guessing what is meant, the new system works much better.

Personally, I've adapted to the new reality. I tend to type complete sentences for my search queries, framed as questions, including typing the question mark (not because I think it's useful but just because I'm thinking a question sentence, so my fingers emit a question mark). I also don't worry much about typos. I find it works very well, often much better than what I can get with an "old-style" query, with or without "verbatim".

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but on Android, not search. All of the above is just my personal experience plus speculation, not inside information.)

So Amazon outbid Netflix for the Nickelodeon and Nick Jr. content (Dora, Peppa Pig, etc) that my kids love and then stuck it behind special monthly additional service (Freetime unlimited $5/mo without Prime and $3/mo including it). For now I can get the PBS content Netflix, and there are other options for the adventurous watchers that are great.

So this is the future, folks - yes, they'll bid for content, then essentially create another "channel" on their service.

Fractal balkanization, each layer costing the user more (and in the case of Amazon Prime - still not available on my Apple TV so requiring another device).

What's a non-pirating parent to do?

To get a CS degree, he would have had to do a fair degree of programming - but even better is that he understands concepts like O(N) difficulty... it's important to have an understanding that sometimes things are not very possible because of sheep computational needs.

Why is this important to you? Serious question. I don't really have an opinion on it, myself, but it seems to me that all of the arguments against systemd are based on factual errors (e.g., that it's monolithic, and therefore not UNIXy) and inertia, or on defects that are clearly just packaging/configuration bugs. I found Russ Allberry's analysis pretty compelling. Why do you disagree?

I'm really wondering what I'm missing here, because this seems like much ado about nothing, and I haven't been able to get anyone who is really concerned about it to explain why it's really a big problem.

We, the taxpayers, have already paid hundreds of billions to private companies to give us the astoundingly fast broadband speed of 10 Mbps (on average) in this country, two DECADES after these same companies assured us they would get us 45 Mbps by 2010.

There are already enough fees levied on users, for numerous such issues, that money can be moved from area to another if necessary.

Instead of adding more costs to consumers, how about having the companies do this work for free since they failed so miserably the last time we gave them taxpayer money? Considering the sorry state of affairs of broadband in this country, this is the absolute least these folks could do to justify their existence.

Your comment confuses me.

You start by saying that the proposal, that packagers be required to maintain support for systems without systemd, is untenable. Then you point out that Debian should realize that users can code rc-init support for packages if they want to. I agree with all of that: Debian is going systemd, and shouldn't burden package maintainers with supporting non-systemd initialization, and users who don't like that can code rc-init scripts for the packages.

But then you say that Debian should give users the choice. Did you just finish pointing out the users do have the choice, since they can code it themselves if they want, and that the burden for this shouldn't be placed on maintainers?

Also, I think you meant to say "wealth", rather than "dearth" (which means a lack, not an abundance). But maybe you did mean dearth and I'm just not understanding what you're trying to say.

Give it a try. FreeBSD runs Linux binaries just fine. You'll be amazed at how clean and orderly everything is compared to your average Linux Distro. Plus the documentation is top notch.

Electric vehicles need less recharging stations because most people can recharge at home.

You all are not thinking about what happens if EVERY car is electric. Suddenly all apartment dwellers, or people that travel a lot each day need just as many "filling" stations, and because they take so much longer to fill it easily balances out the number of traditional gas stations needed because of terrible charging throughput.