Which is pretty much how municipal fiber ought to work. 1) City forms wholly owned non-profit 2) City underwrites bonds for fiber optic network

You clearly understand how a muni system could/shoulfd be set up in order to actually work (be viable down the line).

My wife happens to be a counsel for a group of cable/telecoms in California, and she got a call from a USF professor who is on SF's Blue Ribbon Panel that has simply voted on the "idea." This is worlds away from anything approaching a done deal, for one, and secondly, the nature of the "Panel" member's questions show that they have not even gotten as far thinking about Step 1 in your helpful list of the method for setting a utility, like this "proposed" one, up.

I'm rather amazed to see slashdot folks looking at this municipal vaporware as something that has been, or will be put in place. Pipe dreams, people, move along now...

All cities are dependent on complex support services to function, it is incredibly bad strategy to displace the workers who maintain it. Spatial relationships matter, that is what makes cities work. Pushing out the support layer means the city falls apart until budgets rise to cover increased costs from dis-agglomeration and scattering of labor increasing their costs in a vicious circle. The cop-out of blaming local government only works when the companies responsible for the bubble and especially their employees actually pay full and complete taxes, otherwise they only increase the demand on local services without paying for increasing capacity. That means less is available for everyone, if distribution were even. In practice distribution is not remotely even, so this directly means less for everyone else (the older residents), while the new rich few horde everything they can.

Somebody gets it. Thank you.

Okay so you're a know-nothing. Congratulations! Meanwhile, I continue to use my VPN, one of 4 that I rotate through, over the last eight years, with zero interference. Just lucky, I guess,, huh, fuckhead?

you shouldn't put much faith in the claims made by service providers

Depends on the provider. People need to do some research.

It is not rocket science.

Also, people who are up to clearly nasty behavior also need to make sure they don't start logging into their "normal" sites (facebook, banks, anything connected to GOOG...etc.) while using their vpn. "Shared IPs" might mitigate a bit of risk, but the enemy is perfectly capable of connecting a tagged browser with whatever IP their VPN assigns them.

User Error is at the root of... what? 95% of the fuckups? who knows. I've seen a total of one DMCA-related 'warming' or whatever... since Napster days. Like I said, it isn't rocket science but the onus is clearly on the user to play head's up.

Tobacco companies don't want to harm ecigarettes because they cut into their profit. They produce ecigarettes and want to ladle on expensive regulations so only they can afford to produce them, and take the profits themselves.

This

That's the story behind all those phony commercials. Mom 'n pop e-cig people are already going out of business while the tobacco cartel just sits and waits for politicians to screw the whole biz. At which point they're the only ones left.

And, yes, the tobacco companies DO produce the shittiest devices out there.

Should people carry both a Windows laptop and a MacBook to run both Windows apps and macOS apps?

Jeeze, that's been answered since a long time ago. I boot Win7ult on my MacBook Pro in about ten seconds, drag and drop, clipboard-sharing, common VPN... Seriously, we hardly need 2 of anything in the modern world..

...and unsubscribing is an attempt to remove temptation.

This is exactly correct. 40+ years ago I was selling encyclopedias, door-to-door, in western Canada (the BC interior, Alberta "ditto", and the Northwest Territories). I quickly learned the futility of knocking on 100+ doors in an evening, and would cruise the neighborhood, or town, looking for a number of "tells," one of which (my fave) was that little "No peddlers, solicitors, or agents" sticker/sign. Several people I was training one evening were surprised, and asked why I did that, and I told them, "People put those signs up because they're afraid that if a salesman comes to their door they might buy something."

It came in handy, especially given winter climes and the difference between knocking on 100+ doors, and knocking on 3 or 4.

records of actions that people have taken in the past...

Wow. Just... wow.

Strange things happen when you take naive, out-of-touch leftists and then give them huge amounts of money that they didn't really earn in any meaningful way.

Leftists in Silicon Valley? Who are you referring to... the homeless? LOL

Listen up son, most of the owners/investors in Silicon Valley are right-wingers or Libertarians (Sorta the same thing...).

I take it you're from Des Moines, or some other backwater where hasty generalizations blow up in people's faces on a regular basis, yeah?

The real theft is not copying, but rather copyright itself!

Exactly right.

Copyright and patent protection (both of which have seen their "terms" deepened and lengthened to incredible depths and lengths) are forced on the developing world, right along with the rest of the so-called "first" world, to the detriment of normal, average people, globally. They're one of the chief methods that have been employed, relentlessly, in a successful effort to distribute more and more money toward the 1% from everyone else, again, globally.

This tactic is why cancer drugs, for example, cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, when their "cost" would be a small fraction of that in an actual free market.

In textbook trade theory, if a country has a larger trade surplus for royalties and patent licensing fees, it will have a larger trade deficit in manufactured goods and other areas. (That, courtesy of Dean Baker, in his book, *Rigged*, published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C.)

He goes on: "Of course we have to pay for the research to develop new drugs or any innovation. We also have to compensate creative workers who produce music, movies, and books. But there are efficient alternatives to patents and copyrights, and the efforts by the elites in the United States and other wealthy countries to impose these relics on the developing world is just a mechanism for redistributing income from the world's poor to Pfizer, Microsoft, and Disney. Stronger and longer patent and copyright protection is not a necessary feature of a 21st century economy."

TN is yet-another state full of morons who voted in hordes for you-know-who. Not exactly an indicator of having a grasp of their own best interests, right? Come on... this is what happens when the National Interest is the driver for decades, and the Public Interest (which includes education) is given the old heave-ho. Get used to it if you aren't already...

It's time for Uber to follow the same rules that Taxi companies must follow, or, stop doing business.

As a former taxi driver (who honestly has no dog in this fight, personally) I have to say, "Thank you."

Although nobody is "forced" to drive a cab, for those that choose to do so, it's a tough way to make a living. Uber has been underwritten by a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires in order to operate at a huge loss, for years, in an effort to drive all competitors out of business, at which point Uber will be able to raise rates and dictate to the market, as all monopolies (sanctioned, or not) will do.

This is simply not fair, in the long run, to any of us... drivers or riders.

Sorry for the rant.

Hey! No apology necessary. Thanks for all the info!

Motherboard actually had an interesting article pointing out that VPNs actually aren't all that great for routine browsing

Motherboard.. LOL

They say they got 5% of their normal speed w/PIA... Gee, using an NYC server, how could that happen? /s

I get 85-95% of my cable speed with PIA, and that's while using a crowded Silicon Valley server... Drops to 75% when I use Southampton (UK) for BBC-related. London server would be considerably worse. I think I see a pattern here...

Again... Motherboard? Please.

I cannot imagine why anyone, anywhere, would want to pay for Cable TV if they don't watch sports. I wouldn't, I know that. But unfortunately for me, and fortunately for Comcast in the SF Bay Area, I'm a Giants fan, from way back, and I lived in Montréal for 30 years, and am a huge Habs fan. So, they got me. We pay for Cable (subsidized because my GF is an attorney for an association of cable & telecoms) but I pay an additional amount for a number of months to watch all the home & away games of the Canadiens. It's insane, I know this, and on a number of levels...

I do torrents for all my fave (3 or 4, LOL) network series and films, so, basically, we'd be paying $105/month, plus $44 or so for an additional 5 months, just to watch the Habs, Giants, and Law & Order reruns. Why the torrents? Because I like subtitles, which I re-edit and sync, properly, and can't stand the archaic-looking closed captioning here in the US and Europe.

Cable blows, sports fan or not. we pay for the Cable, which covers the cable co's costs and profit margin, then we get commercials, and these in-program adverts across the bottom of the fucking screen. It's demeaning. I encourage everyone to cut the cord, send a message to these artless, greedy creeps.

When I lived in Quebec I had a pirate digital satellite de-scrambler, and could watch local news, coast-to-coast (nice for a guy like me who was a bit of a nomad, at one time for 20 years) and sports and whatever else i felt like. Think: Live Torrenting! The good old days...

But these days? Absolute robbery.

Oh, and #FuckESPN they're east-coast-centric, and, as everybody knows, loaded down with tiddly-winks and has-beens. Their so-called product is some sick shit... and not the "good" sick, nope.