The highest DSL speed from CenturyLink at my house in Denver (in the city itself) is 1.5Mbps and they've been telling me that they'll be bumping up the speeds "soon" for years. They even send me flyers occasionally advertising speeds that they won't sell me.

My recommendation is to sign up for Comcast's business service is you are stuck with them. It's only marginally more expensive than residential service and it doesn't suck nearly as much.

So?

Replace "terrorists" with anything from "transvestite midgets that want to fondle my feet" to "billionaires that want to patronize my painting career" and the statement still has no bearing on your life if you don't ever come into contact with them.

He's not claiming that terrorists don't exist. Only that he has never, and is not likely to ever, interact with one in any meaningful way. Structuring your life around incredibly improbable events is a waste of time. Ordinary citizens who make any changes to their routine in anticipation of a terrorist attack in Canada (or the US or most of the world) are very likely in need of therapy.

What can't kill or otherwise impair the health of people? If we start down that road, Surgeon General's warning labels will become as helpful as Prop 65 warning labels are now.

Some good doctors slip through, though. Mostly where the uncorrelated sets of 'hypercompetitive egomaniacs' and 'good doctors' intersect.

If you're visualizing large or dynamic datasets, a hardware accelerated animation adds all sorts of value. Not everyone can produce meaningful conclusions from screenfuls of cascading text.

That's completely true, but if you're mostly concerned with third party apps phoning home, a local application like Little Snitch works well enough. Using it to get (at least for now) a decent view of how system processes are communicating is just gravy.

The fact that Little Snitch (which uses a kernel module to put itself into the flow of traffic) is capable of blocking OS traffic and sometimes borking system processes in ways that their logs indicate is unexpected shows that, at least for now, Apple probably isn't hiding traffic from it.

From the article:

The following occur with all privacy options enabled -- including disabling analytics (i.e., Diagnostics and Usage Data).

So even though it is presented as opt-out, it apparently isn't actually opt out.

I've noticed the same thing. With all of the "privacy" related options enabled, there is still a great deal of chatting with Apple servers. I'm seeing this with Little Snitch.

That's almost certainly not true because I'm always chiming in on those threads.

I can't find it now (which pisses me off to no end; my search fu is usually better than this), but there was a study published claiming that replacing ads with micropayments would cost users less than a dollar a day. Slashdot subscriptions are cheap. If people knew that they existed (I found out by reading through the FAQ on one boring day) or if they still worked (apparently?), I think that more people would chose to buy them.

That the few deployed ad-free content payment implementations suck doesn't prove that ad-free content payment is an unworkable idea.

No, it doesn't.

Your link only talks about one side of the energy budget. The whole equation takes the energy coming in from Sol into account.

In fact, your own link says, "Despite its geological significance, this heat energy coming from Earth's interior is actually only 0.03% of Earth's total energy budget at the surface, which is dominated by 173,000 TW of incoming solar radiation."

47 TW is less of a considerable amount than 173 PW.

The focus on the very rich is really a focus on people with a vested interest in preserving the status quo. People who have been, or feel like they have been, screwed over by "the system" are less likely to be well behaved cogs in that same system. Also, people who think that they've outsmarted the system by sloughing off their debts are less likely to think that the system is working for them and their interests. It's less about circumstances and more about the mindset of potential recruits.

To elaborate, even (especially?) in the countries where the US government has a direct impact on foreign citizens' lives (drone strikes, etc), the local government kills/imprisons more of its own citizens under questionable circumstances than the US does.

Don't construe my comment as excusing or apologizing for the actions of the US government abroad. I'm only saying that your own government is more of a threat to your life and liberty than any foreign government, if only because of its proximity to you. History certainly bears this out. Don't let an irrational fear of the American bogeyman drive you, with blind trust, into the arms of the devil you know.

The only tangible (and verifiable) difference between Dropbox and SpiderOak is marketing. If, tomorrow, Google or Facebook started making the same security claims that SpiderOak makes now, would you trust them? Don't be so quick to trust unsubstantiated claims just because they're marketed toward your specific hopes and desires.

Out of curiosity, why do you feel this way?

Personally, I'd rather not be spied on at all. But if anyone were to spy on me, I'd prefer it be a foreign government who can't directly affect my life or freedom. Do you really trust your own government so implicitly? What do you think the Americans are going to do to you?

monolithic: (of an organization or system) large, powerful (sic), and intractably indivisible and uniform.

Being composed of different absolutely interdependent binaries is functionally indistinguishable from being a single binary composed of absolutely interdependent functions. It's the intractably indivisibility that makes it monolithic. You can't, for example, use this VT replacement without the rest of systemd. Thus, it's monolithic.

Monolithic (in this case) is the description of an architecture.