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Comment Re:In unrelated news: Average IQ up 5 points in US (Score 0) 275

When the police stop killing 7 year old black girls.
And when the police stop killing blacks at 2x the rate of whites.
And when police stop pulling over blacks at over 5x the rate they pull over whites
And when police stop pulling the white girls in mixed groups aside- calling their parents to come pick them up so there is no arrest warrant AND THEN telling the black girls in the group that "the trash goes in back"
And when judges and juries stop sentencing blacks to longer sentences than other groups for the same offenses...

Then the crap you are trying to sell will be valid.

Can blacks succeed in america? Yes.

Is it MUCH harder than it should be for them because of massive and systemic racism? Absolutely.

Whites do well given unequal schooling, unequal job opportunity, unequal law enforcement, a larger "old boy" network holding a disproportional portion of the plum positions and passing them down to their children, etc. etc.

The days of white privilege are still slowly ending and they will probably continue slowly end for at least another 40 years.

Comment Re:Marketing? (Score 5, Informative) 239

In this specific case, BMG was a separate music company that Sony purchased shortly before the scandal. There wasn't a guy working in a Sony office in Japan who approved the rootkit. It happened nine years ago, it didn't actually act as a backdoor to people getting hacked, and I think it's time for Slashdot to get over it.

Comment Re:Why Apple? (Score 1) 201

Because apple may have problems selling their devices when the public is informed of the horrific abuses (deaths, suicide, maiming, cancer) involved in their pretty products.

When opens users of iphones up to comments from others about how evil their phones are and how could they buy a phone built with such evil methods. And when they are made to think about how evil the build process is- some of them feel uncomfortable.

And because apple builds enough of the devices that it can be identified by reporters unlike many other essentially anonymous unknown products that are less famous.

Comment Re:Yeah, sure, any day now... (Score 1) 65

I think you would agree that if a farmer is 20 miles from any other connection point that no company or municipality should be legally required to run that farmer a line and charge the same price as they do for a line in an urban neighborhood.

If we decide that we want to provide that as the federal government- cool. Tho it would be pretty damn irritating to find we are running subsidized internet out to some wealthy lady's wilderness estate because she put in 10 acres of hay.

There are alternative solutions (like satellite) but they are more expensive. And that's the trade off you get for living away from other people. You can't share services and costs. You don't pay city taxes.

Everything we decide to do is a trade off. Alaskan Fishermen who are maimed and even killed while fishing for us don't get inexpensive high speed internet either. Neither do game wardens living in remote lodges in national parks. And we don't provide any of them the same level of police, fire, and water service either.

It's not a question of saying they do or do not deserve it. It's prioritization of limited resources. Do you run high speed internet to Fred the Farmer for $20,000 or do you pave a street or buy a new fire engine or buy the new police cruiser?

Especially when changes in technology may allow Fred the farmer to have high speed internet for $120 a month in a couple years.

But if we had unlimited resources- sure. Give the farmer's high speed internet with no extra charge for the extra hardware they require.

Comment Re:Does the job still get done? (Score 2) 688

If you can't trade your labor for food and people feel it's immoral to give you food, things will get very bad for a period of time.

Then, like the luddites (who saw they were screwed- requested training on the new machines and didn't get it), most of the losers will starve to death homeless and then 20 years later everyone will refer to them the way we refer to luddites today.

It's a fundamental challenge to capitalism.

In the short term- fewer jobs will mean capital requires even more hours of those who do have jobs and that means even higher unemployment.

Comment Re:Yeah, sure, any day now... (Score 3, Insightful) 65

I.e. if Comcast uses excess profits from everywhere else to provide ridiculously low priced service (aka walmart breaking into a new market until the competition goes out of business).. then Tucows can't win.

I think the lines need to be built by and maintained by one company or by the municipality and the service provided by competition.

There are good and bad points to excluding customers. It's ridiculous to run a 20 mile fiber to one person's house or even a group of five or six houses and charge them the same as everyone else. If they want cable- they should live with the rest of civilization.

OTH, left to their own devices providers will cut "less" profitable customers over "highly profitable" customers. Which doesn't work with something that is basically a public utility.

Comment Re:The Pirate Bay (Score 1) 302

That's not how copyright works and I ask you to disclose that law. Anyway, Guardians of the Galaxy is less than $20 for a DVD, less than an hour's work for most people here, and is the mostly popular thing getting pirated. I seriously doubt you can stretch any law to mean "things have to be really cheap, like maybe just a buck or two, or you can take it without paying."

Comment Re:Silly backwards lobbyists and authorities (Score 2) 251

Piracy promotes ideas, innovation, allows good things to spread

I'd link to pirate bay if it wasn't down...they showed the top downloads and literally every single one was a commercial movie or game or TV show from a major publisher. The exact same sort of thing that is popular without piracy, only now you don't have to pay for that copy of "Guardians of the Galaxy."

Comment Re:Reduced revenues != lost profit (Score 1) 280

The problem is that solar won't start off able to deal with 50 year events like utilities used to be capable of handling. I say used to be because these days they can't any more due to cost savings measures they've taken to increase profits.

For example- land lines used to stay on unless the line was cut down. After our last hurricane, the land lines went off after 6 to 24 hours when the batteries at the local substation ran dry--- these days any new lines are fiber optic (no copper- no power) and old lines are being replace.

Likewise- our electrical power used to be back up within a few days after a hurricane. I'm not sure what has changed but it was 2-3 weeks in many areas. I suspect cost cutting there too- less repair supplies kept on hand (don't want all that stuff sitting around causing inventory taxes), fewer staff retained (enough for normal times but no extra capacity), and less proactive tree cutting.

But hit solar with a 5 day storm- people die-- and a five or even seven day backup will come to be normal.

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