>"Switching from Microsoft to Google is like switching from Hitler to Mussolini. Move to Libre Office or the like."
Yeah, really.
But 20 million cells? That seems ridiculous. Why aren't they using a database for something that huge?
Anyway, I had to check... LibreOffice Calc supports more than 1 billion cells from 16,384 columns by 1,048,576 rows. Hope the machine has a lot of RAM if trying to push that
"Dumb company runs its finances on 20-million-cell spreadsheets" is my takeaway from that.
Having sat I don't know how many times in a room waiting to have my government credentials renewed while the government IT on this side of the Pacific was living up to its expectations, I am somewhat relieved to again be reminded that the United States did not invent stupid. But I am somewhat dismayed that we appear to have competition in perfecting it.
> Under the proposed changes, I'll pay per mile. 50 miles per gallon means I'm driving about 42.5 miles a day. So 42.5 miles * $.027 = $1.1475 tax a day. $1.1475 * 365 = $418.8375 a year. So for bothering to drive a hybrid (how dare I!!!) I'll go from $189.873 up to $418.837. $419 / 190 = 221% increase in gas tax.
Meanwhile you're not paying for roughly $2400/yr in gasoline. If you were driving a gasoline vehicle at a typical 30mpg, your 42.5 miles per day would burn about 1.42 gallons which, at a statewide average cost of $4.569/gal, is $6.47 per day, or $2362.55 per year.
Your annual fuel cost savings decreases from $2172.68 to $1943.71.
So did your have a point or are you just bitter your free ride might be slowing down a tiny bit?
> The asshole in the 20mpg tank won't notice a difference
The asshole getting 20mpg is already paying almost ten times what you would be under the proposed tax at $0.228/mi at current state average gas prices, and I disagree that they won't notice that jump ~12%.
> YAY I'm so happy to be green
I should hope so with an extra 2 grand in your pocket every year over the alternative. Also FYI those higher registration fees are there to make up for the gasoline prices you're already not paying, which is nearly double the tax you'd be paying at the pump otherwise.
"They dropped the cover charge and made admittance to the bar free! How DARE they charge more for drinks!"
=Smidge=
>"It can very well be true, though, that one government entity is not allowed to share personal data with another government entity."
It could be. But it also seems ridiculous and incompetent in this case. Both entities already know me, my address. And both know my vehicle, VIN, etc. One just knows an annual odometer reading that the other does not. Not like this is sensitive data or could be abused at that resolution.
I shouldn't assume the worst, but it APPEARS like they want to force people to try and be tracked.
That works when the company is healthy. That is, isn't generating nearly all of its revenue from one customer that responds to schmooze more than cost or performance.
Break up Boeing, break up Lockheed, Northrop Grumman and the rest. The fragments will perhaps find customers other than government to compete for and perhaps grow better the way they did the first time around.
> why vehicle weight doesn't get mentioned in their idea
It's because the difference between 3000 and 4000 lbs is practically negligible. Yeah it's a 4th power relationship, but 3000 to 4000 lbs is about 3x the wear rate and 3 multiplied by practically nothing is still practically nothing.
Not to say I'm against including weight as part of the tax calculation, because it would incentivize people using smaller vehicles which helps in a lot of other ways.
=Smidge=
>"Annoying but actually reasonable"
It is absolutely reasonable in concept. But it might not be in practice. I have zero problem with paying for my actual EV mileage in some tax. My State decided it was going to collect it annually during registration renewal. Also reasonable. But they either charge an "average" mileage of ALL EV drivers (however they determine that), or force me to put an always-on tracking device in my car. And neither is reasonable. And my vehicle manual actually says that such devices should not be used/left in the OBD port.
My State already requires annual inspections. AND THE ODOMETER READING IS COLLECTED at each inspection and entered into a State Police system by the inspector for every vehicle. So they ALREADY KNOW my mileage. Their "average" is an order of magnitude more than I drive.
I Emailed and asked why I am going to be unfairly taxed for way, way, way more mileage than I drive when the data is right there, already being collected by the State. And I refuse to be tracked with a spyware device that sends location and behavior data. The response was "well, we don't have access to that data, it is on a different State system". OMG.
So a concept can be fair and reasonable in many ways, and then be totally unreasonable depending on how it is implemented.
>"EV's are still horrifically cheaper to run than an ICE vehicle by very large margins"
That depends on the gas price, electricity price, and efficiency of the vehicle. ICE will usually lose by a lot. But there are plenty of places where that gap is not "horrific", if the ICE vehicle is very efficient, gas prices are low, and electricity is not.
The summary omits that this is an OPTION, and won't replace other options. I have ZERO devices with 6Ghz (and I doubt I am alone), so it would make no sense to offer only 2.4/6.
What I don't understand is why it can't offer a triple-band hotspot (apparently not an option). Or just a 6Ghz or 5Ghz only option. So you will be forced to choose between 2.4/5 or 2.4/6. But since it is mostly personal use, I guess that is fine.
I do wish there was a power setting also shown and that they chose a low-power mode by default so these devices won't potentially interfere with congested WiFi infrastructure around them. As a personal device probably just giving access to your laptop or tablet right next to it, it should work fine with a low power output.
Society must acknowledge that sharing of info should be encouraged, and be thankful that technology has made sharing incredibly easy.
I can agree with you on this point, as long as you are not trying to defend piracy as some kind of noble "sharing". But I have to say, judging by the rest of your post, “Sharing of info” is doing a lot of work here. This story is not about someone handing a friend a USB stick with some MP3s. It’s about a guy running a commercial IPTV service, charging 50€ for 3 months or 100€ for 6 months, reselling pay-TV he never paid to license in the first place, and a bunch of hotels/cafés using that to undercut competitors who do pay for legal subscriptions. Calling that “sharing” is like calling a pirate cable company “your generous neighbor.” The tech that makes copying easy doesn’t magically turn commercial theft of service into a noble act of information freedom. A thief is a thief, and there is nothing more ignoble than a thief who commits his crimes in the name of a worthy cause.
Need to work harder on systems that can fairly compensate producers while encouraging sharing, not continue to base compensation on the restriction of sharing.
Sure, we can and should argue about business models -- subscriptions vs. ads vs. public funding, Creative Commons, whatever. But this particular setup already is a compensation system: broadcasters pay for rights, hotels and bars pay for commercial subscriptions, and the revenue chain keeps the content being produced. The IPTV reseller in this story isn’t experimenting with a better system; he’s just inserting himself into the existing one as an unpaid middleman and pocketing the money. That’s not “rethinking compensation,” it’s “I keep the cash and somebody else eats the loss.”
Especially not to the point of outlawing sharing and wasting resources enforcing that and causing still more waste of lives that have to spend ruinously to fight to defend themselves from the legal mess.
Again, nobody outlawed “sharing.” I don't think that word means what you think it means --get a dictionary (your choice!) and look up sharing. Then look up "piracy" in the same dictionary. Not even close, right? Greece passed a law that explicitly targets pirate IPTV networks and end users who knowingly buy access to illegal pay-TV streams, with fines between 750€ and 5,000€ (higher for commercial users, doubled for repeat offenders). That’s not “grandma got sued for emailing a recipe,” it’s “hotels and cafés running their business on stolen feeds while their competitors pay full freight.” Calling enforcement there a “waste of lives” is melodramatic. If you decide to run your business on obviously dodgy 100€-for-6-months “all the premium channels you want” boxes, the legal mess is not an accident; it’s baked into the choice.
One thing that makes this issue most intractable is that the organs who report on it are thoroughly convinced that sharing is contrary to their own interests.
Yeesh. The source is TorrentFreak, not some mainstream media outlet. TorrentFreak has spent years criticizing heavy-handed anti-piracy campaigns and is hardly a house organ of the copyright maximalists. If even TorrentFreak describes this as an IPTV piracy reselling network and talk plainly about “illegal streams” and “commercial exploitation,” maybe the problem isn’t media bias against “sharing,” it’s that this really is just bog-standard commercial piracy.
How is the public to hear unbiased reporting on this matter when no one with a metaphorical megaphone will give one?
Well, look around you. In this thread we literally have: Slashdot summarizing, TorrentFreak reporting (from a pretty pirate-sympathetic angle), and people in the comments arguing about priorities and proportionality. What more do you want? This is exactly what a functioning public debate looks like. You can absolutely criticize copyright law, argue for decriminalizing non-commercial copying, or push for new compensation models. But using “information wants to be free” as a blanket excuse for a commercial IPTV gray-market — especially one used by businesses to gain unfair competition over law-abiding rivals -- just erases the actual victims and pretends there’s no tradeoff at all.
"Einstein's theory of relativity was not based on scientific research."
It was based on solving a maths equation.
(As a mathematician, yes, I could argue that I studied as a school of mathematical sciences inside a university but also...)
There's a big and very obvious difference between "scientific research" and "mathematics".
Nobody was out there putting clocks on satellites trying to work out what the weird time-dilation problems were that they were seeing in every experiment. Instead, the maths was solved and TOLD you to go looking for them because on the face of it they appeared patently ridiculous and incompatible with what we knew of physics at that time.
There is no way to enforce age limits unless you require identification for a login or it is something built into the devices, themselves, that signal it is a minor and in lockdown mode. And since the latter seems to not be happening, the trend is to try and "age-wall login" more and more sites. And that requires ID. And that strips both adults and children of privacy.
I think the parents should be setting the age limits for what minors access, with recommendations made available by various sites and organizations.
This is supposed to be for NON-emergency calls. Not comparable to 911.
The onus should be on the parents and their agents to control and restrict any internet-connected devices that children have access to. Children should not have unrestricted access to the Internet, unless directly supervised by an adult. The end.
There aren't just "some" sites that are a problem. There are millions of them. Trying to control all sites and strip adults of their privacy is not an acceptable way to deal with the problem. A whitelist restrict is needed. It needs to be made socially unacceptable and shocking that a minor has full access to the Internet on any device, or to call/text/media to/from a stranger.
They need to put this energy into helping to make better/newer/easier lock-down tools for devices parents want to give to minors and leave everyone else alone.
"Hello again, Peabody here..." -- Mister Peabody
