Funny, I found Diaspora to be easy to install.. no more difficult than any other "web 2.0" app. It does require something a little more than a simple "webhosting" account: you need to be able to configure Apache or whatever webserver to run the Passenger bits properly, and that's not something I think you can do on a $5 shared-hosting Dreamhost account (that said, it runs fine on Dreamhost VPS: I ran it that way for a while). And Diaspora does have ways of pushing to Facebook and Twitter: any more interaction than just pushing would require Facebook to open up their API, and that isn't happening.

Diaspora's solution is that the "personal information" is housed on a server that you trust (ie. one you run or know personally the administrator of). Nothing marked "private" is typically passed off the home node unless you specifically push it out.

At least in the US a lot of "personal information" can be obtained from public sources. And with Facebook's tendrils into other sites (with things like beacons and such) they can probably get a surprising amount of information from sources you wouldn't expect.

Install Ghostery sometimes and see how many websites you log in to every day have beacons that go to a Facebook-affiliated site.

Yes. ILI Oregon, where it's 0%.

.. to use that on my "broadband" connection at home that's 3 Mb/s down and 384k up.

Can we just stop giving PeTA any attention? They're 100% trolls. The sooner we all ignore them the sooner they go away.

Oregonian here who follows the happenings in our state capital.

IIRC the concern in Salem was institutionalized cheating: that is, a school district turning a blind eye to (or actively encouraging) cheating to improve scores. Without a law, there was no formal way to dictate a universal anti-cheating policy state-wide.

I designed and built a custom CPU in college. And it had to be somewhat Turing complete.

Computer science isn't what it used to be.

I've spent some time doing "computer science".

Computer science IS boring. It's a lot of math and logic and tedium. Once you've gone over Turing's proofs, you either go into Cognitive Science or go full Math Retard (I did the latter) and become one of those boring researchers on campus nobody talks to.

Bandwidth is perhaps cheaper than you suspect.

I worked for a regional ISP that serves about 50.000 subscribers. We had multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections to various peering points, one of which happens to be where Netflix peered with us. Total cost for that peerage: the cost of the extra fiber capacity, plus engineering the peer.

As opposed to housing Netflix servers at our data center. First off, to service that many potential streams might require a few boxes and a not insignificant storage array. We actually did have a similar arrangement with another very large content provider: their stuff took about a half-rack. It then needs to be added to network monitoring, and you need to train your NOC staff what to do when that little red light comes on. And the equipment will fail: the "other content providers" equipment had a MTBF of a couple of months. The hard drives will take a pounding.

And we were small enough that when we asked Netflix to co-locate in our data center for free they actually said "Not interested."

You apparently haven't been to Billings lately.

It has all of the above.

.. or the beating and civil wiretapping lawsuit for the cameras.

My small city of around 200K just had one big wireless player (who also happened to be the cable company) announce they are leaving the market (and selling the spectrum licenses to one of the big guys) and the other three I know of buy their bandwidth from.. well, that same cable company and/or the local telephone company. There's no other place to ultimately buy bandwidth: there are three companies that transport and transit: the big regional telephone company, the local cable company, and Facebook. Everybody else is buying and selling Internet from the big guys.

I can't talk about the health of the small wireless ISPs here, but if you sit down and do the math, they are likely just barely making a profit. This may be why the local cable company has exited the wireless ISP market. (I live in an area with a small urban center surrounded by miles of farms and ranches, the cable company's strategy was to use the wireless to extend their range to these rural subscribers and infill in the few areas their cable network didn't cover). And this small cable company had the first LTE network on in the state, so they had a hell of a head start.

That's pretty much the picture in most places: the little guys are very little and increasingly getting smaller, and the big guys are only getting bigger.

> Indeed, no culture in the history of humanity has done so

[citation needed].

Many tribal cultures in the Americas and Africa not only acknowledged the possibility of non-child-bearing unions, many Tribal American cultures even had words for describing people in it.

.. and that's still a pretty accurate description of the contents.