It's been subtle. ISP's have used zero rating and throttling to give an advantage to their own businesses (like AT&T waiving data caps for DirectTV customers). It's also been limited because state-level regulations on a handful of places (California, Maine, etc.) as well as the lingering threat of FCC intervention has tempered ISPs nationality.

Trust human nature though: if you give someone a free money knob, they will eventually turn it. Especially when the business is under economic stress.

Net neutrality prohibits content discrimination. Under NN rules, for instance, AT&T couldn't give Disney a fast lane for delivering video while throttling Fox news.

Link if you're interested in learning more: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...

Yeah, I don't know where the *good* Sci-Fi authors went either? ... cry me a river. There are way more good SF books than you can shake a stick at let alone read.

Vernor Vinge just died. Read any of his stuff? Very well written classic SF.

The Expanse series.

The Dune books, not just the first one. Given, Dune is a tad overrated in some regards but the good bits are really good and well worth the read. That goes for the entire Dune series.

What about Cyberpunk, somewhat of a sub-genre of SF? Neal Stephenson, read him? If not you've got some catching up to do. ... William Gibson seems to put out a Cyberpunk novel every odd year and the latest stuff is still as premium as ever.

Cory Doctorov, Orsen Scott Card, Richard Morgan, Michael Weisser ...

If you get bored you can look into lore books. The RPG universe of Shadowrun is your type A Nerd fest but of the 80 novels or so they have the top 5-10 are really good and worth a look, even if you don't care about the franchise. I'm pretty sure other expensive IPs have similar traits. It's quite unlikely that the top 5 novels of the Battletech or Warhammer universe are a complete waste of time. The writers of those books tend to spend years working on the worlds before writing a book on them which does lead to consistency and a baseline of quality.

Bottom line: You likely have vast unexplored areas of SF still to discover. Old and new.

... only because some piece of software doesn't scale. Given, if you're hosts are clobbered with legit requests and you're still relying on uncashed PHP monoliths to handle the load you're being silly and should be let near a live server setup, but there are plenty of examples of perfectly successful large-scale companies built on PHP. Like Facebook for instance. ... Given, they eventually just built Hack which is basically a binary compiler for an updated PHP dialect, but the old saying goes for PHP just as much as for any other quick time to market web technology: If you have a scaling problem you don't really have a problem. And if somebody didn't know what they were doing in the first place it doesn't matter whether they used PHP or something else. It's likely their shitty design that broke their be app. Or bad management. I'd guess the latter.

As a thin server-side web templating layer API to the vast variety of well established tried and true FOSS C libraries that do the grunt work of most of todays computing needs PHP fits the job perfectly and does get it done pretty good too.

... was cancelled last winter and you could almost wade through the Rhine where I live last summer. Right now we just had 0C (freezing threshold) this morning before sunrise but 8 days ago people were walking around in T-Shirts with 28C outside.

Last year the tourists left the Mediterranean because it was too warm. The actual Mediterranean Sea was to warm, with water temperatures reaching 30C and more. Two years ago in summer you'd have 37C after sundown for days on end.

Not fun and bad news for Southern Europe AFAICT.

Outreach: get girls interested in coding. Networking. Support. Imagine you were an expatriate living in Japan... wouldn't having other expats to talk with help you navigate Japanese society better?

This is the logic of genocide... each side able to opine at length about the sins and lies of their enemy while taking precious little responsibility for their own. See also Northern Ireland, Cyprus, etc.

Somewhat off-topic, but anyone remember the "Cocaine" energy drink? They made a quick buck for a few months back in the mid-naughts before legal pressures forced them to switch the name.

You mean that Mars landing that Musk said would happen this year? If NASA wants to get this done by 2040, they need to contact with a firm that will engineer, not just iterate.

60%+ of the webs logic runs on PHP. It may be way less necessary to build massive new systems with any language, be it PHP or anything else. But as a runtime PHP is as popular and required as ever. The top ten of the webs systems run almost exclusively on PHP, all other technologies are dwarfs in comparison.

"We guessed how often intelligent life would form, then we guessed why it would kill itself, then we noticed that we couldn't see anything millions of light years away, then we guessed that it's because of this new technology that we're afraid of, so please enact all sorts of legal restrictions on other people so as to protect our profits^h^h^h^h^h^h^h civilization from an event we've never observed and don't even know to be possible."

You can't make a whole city purely "walkable"... I don't think anyone serious is trying to do that. It's more a matter of degree. Places like London and Tokyo have a shit-ton of cars, but you can live and work there without having to own one. Mass transit is a necessary part of that. It's not the only part of it... you need sidewalks, area grocery stores, parks, etc. If you've never visited such a place, maybe give it a try sometime.

I consider Theo-Fascism the worst type of fascism, because it abandons reason even way earlier than regular fascism. Both have a quasi-religious perversion of government, but at least with regular fascism religion is more of a sideshow. In Theo-Fascist regimes its front and center which turns it evil way faster and harder. On top of that, because its religion at the center, reason has been abandoned at the onset of fascism and not as a final result, making it much harder for a society to turn around or find "justifiable" ways to make life work.

Religious fanatics are the worst and these days its the Islam variants are the most ridiculous, are causing the most damage and are the most dangerous. Somebody needs to off the troika leading that country.

Early April, close to 30ÂC here in Germany. This isn't normal. I'm in western Germany where April weather lasts months. This year it was like a few days, maybe 2 weeks if you're generous. We had weeks of 35ÂC+ last year and the year before I was driving back from Portugal through the Toulouse Area and it was 37Â+ even as the sun was about to set behind the Pyranees. The Mediterranean last year was so warm the tourists stayed away. And we're taking about water temperature. The _water_ was so warm the tourists stayed away. This year's skiing season didn't happen in Germany. .... What we where warned about is happening: Cascading runaway effects of man made climate change are kicking in and we're headed for a new global equilibrium. Let's just hope that that will be survivable for modern civilization.

We are screwed. The chance to avoid that has passed. How hard we are screwed however is still up to us.