I never understand this type of comment. People don't pay for news so newspapers (which by the way have pay walls) are forced to degrade their service. It seems strange to me. If I have a restaurant and people don't want to pay for my food, making even worse food with worse service doesn't seem a good solution. If I write books and people don't buy them, writing worse books doesn't make my sales better. Why journalists are different? They sell a service for money like all the others, but for some reason they have a special status and it's totally understandable that they respond to bad sales with a worse product. And actually, somehow it's our fault as customers. For some reason we should keep buying newspapers even if we don't think it's worth to save them from themselves.
Using your analogy, if every restaurant in town had a problem where most people wanted to come in and get food for free (and it was an expectation in the industry) and people refused to go in and pay, everyone would be upset they could no longer go out to eat when there were none left. If nobody is interested in paying for their meal, you can't be shocked the ingredient and chef quality drops in turn.
> if every restaurant in town had a problem where most people wanted to come in and get food for free (and it was an expectation in the industry)
Then the industry itself would not be very sustainable, wouldn't it? In that case, I would expect the industry to radically change or to disappear like many other industries whose expectations were made unsustainable by tech progress. For some reason, we're incredibly excited of it happening to coding, music, art, but not to journalism. Journalism must survive in its current form at all costs.
Big tech will slowly enforce "secure browsing" and "secure OS" in a way that will make it impossible to browse the web without a signed executable approved by them. DRM is just a temporary stopgap.
It doesn't have to be that way, you can only push people so far before they riot. History has thousands of instances and many have been very ugly, 1789 and 1917 for instance.
The rioting in Washington a while back had little to do with people not being able to make ends meet. Many civil wars (including the US Civil War) came about for other reasons.
US Civil War was a civil war in name only. For all practical purposes, it was an interstate conflict.
And yes, riots can be caused by other things too - e.g. religious riots. But whatever it is, people have to care a lot about it, enough so to be willing to put their own life and limb on the line. This is not one of those cases.
To be frank, I don't think the general public cares enough. And the other side is always ready to use children safety, foreign hackers and scam prevention as an argument. Nobody will riot over tech people losing the ability to run their own machines with their own software. It already happened to printers and, most importantly, phones. When 95% of normal activities happen on mobile devices anyway, they will come for computers. They'll run a campaign, they'll lobby politics, cartel chip vendors and start introducing small changes in hardware and OS that will make it always a bit more inconvenient running your own software. Until there's nothing left to defend, and the industry will move on.
You're right, it means nothing. But it cuts two ways. These sites are sending me bytes and I choose which bytes I visualize (via an ad blocker). Any expectation the website has about how I consume the content has no meaning and it's entirely their problem.
Hear me out: javascript integrates types as comments (ignored by default) in its standard and engines start to use types as performance / optimization hints. If you mistype, your program runs, but you get worse performance and warnings in console. If you type correctly, your program runs more efficiently. We already have different levels of optimization in V8 or JSC, why can't they use type hints to refine predictions?
If "launched" is the number of attacks one side has launched and "intercepted" is the number of attacks that one side has neutralized, "hit" should be the number of missiles that one side has launched and hit the target? No, apparently it's the number of targets that have been hit on one side. Also, currently the coalition has intercepted a thousand more attacks than Iraq block launched. How can it be? Friendly fire? This thing is incredibly confusing.
Yes, but:
1) Cooperatives inevitably transition into centers of power. If a cooperative becomes powerful enough, it becomes another mini-government that "unpublishes" you if you say something they don't like.
2) Your freedom ends at the ISP boundary; you don't own the cables. If the ISP doesn't like what you publish, they just disrupt, throttle or disconnect your upload link. They probably have the legal right already.
3) Even if you own the wires (or you invent a LoRa mesh stable enough to provide an alternative Internet), the government will disrupt you (or worse) if you say something they don't like. It's very likely the will disrupt you preventively because you could potentially say something they don't like. This is not right wing vs left wing: look at the UK, for example (left-wing government, abysmal freedom of speech on the Internet)
The issue with publishing content has always been censorship. Anyone in power has incentives to apply as much censorship as they can. It's never been a technical problem.
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