The bufferbloat folks proved that you don't have to have your call quality or gaming experience suffer if someone starts asking for tons of bandwidth. To oversimplify, the mongo download process is forced to compete fairly with the voip call, not just drown it out.

An ISP that doesn't use modern software is at moral hazard. They're tempted to rob Peter to pay Paul, exactly as we see <curses elided/> Telcos doing here.
At the same time, they need to legally use fq_codel and CAKE on their network, to do fair queuing (the fq in fc_codel).

For recent work in fixing bufferbloat within ISPs, see https://libreqos.io/, which I see as QOS done the right way, a way consistent with net neutrality.

And modern music is no exception. Some songwriters have more of a way with words. "Around The World" is one extreme to great effect - it's a neat song. Then there's song verses like:

Dive bar on the East Side, where you at?
Phone lights up my nightstand in the black
Come here, you can meet me in the back
Dark jeans and your Nikes, look at you
Oh damn, never seen that color blue
Just think of the fun things we could do...

You Know Who at her (IMHO) best. The notion that the only good music was performed in the 1970s by men with guitars is, at best, circular reasoning. De-valuing Taytay's music because her music and persona appeal primarily to women is nothing more than misogyny.

...laura

That was 12 years ago. A 12 year out of date critique of a web technology that has had ongoing language updates and two entire rewrites in that interval should be viewed with some suspicion. Also, are you really just citing the title of the article and none of the content?

I'm not even defending PHP here, just questioning lazy kneejerk, "but it sucked once, so now I hate it forever" thinking.

Ask the Germans or the French how to do it; their dubbing of big productions is pretty good. In fact some people commented on how the Star Wars prequels sounded better in German; the movie's actors were unused to doing what amounted to voice acting in front of a green screen. Some of the actors sounded like they were reading lines off a teleprompter. In contrast, the German dubbers do voice acting for a living; they are used to that kind of work.

One risk is that non-discriminatory bandwidth management (eg, the stuff the bufferbloat team does, like fq_codel and CAKE) will not be easy to distinguish from the discriminatory stuff that enables the ISP to demand kickback and/or being paid extra by the provider of the service. That would result in shitty service for everyone and, perversely, more motivation to pay the ISP to work around the rules.

Or they are still in the room but paused the movie for some quiet; for instance to take a phone call or to hear someone calling from another room. What an awesome idea to play loud ads during that time.

I got a pair of real eclipse glasses with my copy of Sky & Telescope's eclipse guide. They don't work very well with my glasses so I'll do the pinhole camera thing for the partial phases.

Loved Dr. Becky's collander.

...laura

Just FYI, the convention in letters to the editor is that when one asks rhetorical questions, the expected answer is "yes" (;-))

My letter to the editor, as published in the Globe and Miil]

Back in the 1990s the nerd community was challenged to make the entire world-wide web safe for children. We introduced the same kind of parental controls that cable television used. Parents could block their kids from visiting all pages with age-unsuitable content.

When I looked, we still had parental controls on phones, chromebooks and web browsers, and the claimed usage was around 81%.

But the new legislation requires the sites at the other end of the network make sure all their customers are of legal age. That's easy to do in the physical world: if you're a bouncer at a strip club, you can tell if a customer is a kid. Across the internet, no-one can even tell if you're a dog, much less a kid. Arguably, the only workable place for age controls is in the physical device that the parent gives to the child.

But that's not what is being asked for. What happened? Do parental controls no longer work? Have people forgotten about them? Or is this something else entirely?

Seizing the assets of the wealthy might pay for UBI... for one year. Then what?

We used to have a similar model, until they did away with the license nonsense and simply started funding public television from general taxes. The 5 people with no TV set complained for a while. But the savings were massive as there was no longer a need for an expensive enforcement agency.

I have a landline. Sort of. But it's not copper. The last mile is fiber that carries my phone and my internet.

...laura

Plus you'll be stuck for 3 hours in a TSA queue.

Maybe. Still, it's nicer to listen to a dreamer than a naysayer, even if the latter is right. I miss the optimism mankind used to have.

Again: the idea is not to convince individual parents, but to change culture. Starting with the schools, perhaps. It won't be just your kid being without a cellphone then, will it? Sometimes it really does take a village...