Give them a couple years. After a few more "government is bad" TV spots, and under a republican president, they will try again. Whether they merge today or then doesn't really matter.
They are effectively merged already. They stay away from each other, treating customers like each other's property, and offer comparable services at comparable prices. They aren't in any real competition with each other. I'm not saying that they should merge. Rather, I'm saying that them not merging isn't a quick fix of the underlying issue. Americans need actual choice of providers within a given technology.
Democrat or Republican doesn't matter. Lobbying and who is offered and receives campaign contributions, etc. matter. It's about manipulation, money and power/getting re-elected, plain and simple.
National Republican Congressional Cmte,
John Boehner (R-OH),
National Republican Senatorial Cmte,
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte,
DNC Services Corp,
Democratic Congressional Campaign Cmte,
Ed Markey (D-MA),
Democratic Municipal Officials,
Cory Booker (D-NJ),
Fred Upton (R-MI)
Comcast spent $16,970,000 on lobbying in 2014. They likely lobbied both Reps and Dems.
Those noted who own Comcast shares:
Barber, Ron (D-AZ)
Boehner, John (R-OH)
Cohen, Steve (D-TN)
Collins, Susan M (R-ME)
Cooper, Jim (D-TN)
Dingell, John D (D-MI)
Frankel, Lois J (D-FL)
Frelinghuysen, Rodney (R-NJ)
Hagan, Kay R (D-NC)
Hanna, Richard (R-NY)
Heck, Dennis (D-WA)
Holding, George (R-NC)
Isakson, Johnny (R-GA)
Kelly, Mike (R-PA)
Marchant, Kenny (R-TX)
McCaul, Michael (R-TX)
McDermott, Jim (D-WA)
Pelosi, Nancy (D-CA)
Corporations cannot donate money to campaigns at all, either directly or through PACs. A corporation can have a "captive" PAC whose expenses it can pay (for example, letting it operate out of their corporate offices), but all donations that pass through to a campaigh must come from individuals.
When you hear that "Company X gave money to candidates", what you're really hearing is "people who reported that they work for Company X gave money to candidates."
True, but it was never the end users who were going to be affected by this deal. It was the suppliers and vendors and other service providers who were going to be hurt because there were going to be fewer and fewer clients that they could work with.
Give them some credit. By this they are acknowledging the concept of a proxy. Compared to most, this request does a reasonable job of describing what they have and what they want efficiently. They aren't asking for everyone connected at the time. They aren't asking for 'any and all' records. They are asking for one connection record and are providing reasonable information on their end to facilitate. The diagram is a reasonable and, considering the source, a novel means of conveying the vital data.
The fact that the connection record doesn't exist, or if it does would be virtually useless, should not take away from the reasonableness of the request. "We don't have such records" is a legitimate response.
They know about Tor. Five years ago it was magic to most cops and all prosecutors. Today they have been educated, to some extent by people like me. They acknowledge that the exit node is a proxy. In years past they would have tried sending cops to the door to seize the server, or at least make some allegations.
That's why I do not think that they expect any results here. They expect nothing. They need nothing. They need a non-response to take things to the next step. That step is probably political. They want the bullet point about why criminals are getting away due to VPNs, Tor and other online nasties.
They may expect nothing, but that shouldn't keep them from asking. Lots of crimes that are solved are solved because of a random mistake or oversight. Maybe somebody used a 1-hop route, or something, who knows. They're just doing legwork.
That really brings back memories. That sound means all the phonecalls, parking and standing line is over and you get to actually watch a movie as it was meant to be seen.
The engineering of the "noise" also had a practical purpose. It sweeps by most every frequency, including the entire vocal range. So it was impossible to continue any conversation without noticing that the movie was about to start. The seconds after that sound were always the most quiet of the entire evening.
You mean you get to watch a bunch of forced ads with the volume turned up to eleven and get told what a horrible criminal you are and then maybe you get to see the movie if your ears are still functional.
As someone who teaches young adults (part time, local college) I find this approach unsettling. Being able to work in groups and bounce between topics is all well and good, but I'm running into adults who have trouble reading. I don't mean people with learning troubles. I mean functional, intelligent, adults who cannot get through more than a dozen pages without lapsing into a fog.
When I was at school we were forced to read. Not exercises. Books. Entire books. Not over months. Days. The ability to sit down and focus on a topic for hours is a skill that should not be forgotten.
From the OP:"...easily discoverable knowledge makes classic school subjects seem archaic, slow-paced and inapplicable to daily life."
No it doesn't. It makes them seem all the more important.
I don't teach reading. I teach adults in years 3/4 of a 4-year degree program. They are all literate. That have issues when confronted with large amounts of "dry" text.
Finland wants to move towards skill-based rather than fact-based learning. They want students who know how to find and organize information rather than those who simply know facts. I'm saying that the oldschool skills of reading and remembering apparently useless facts is important. It gives you the necessary reading abilities to handle topics beyond highschool.
I might be reading you incorrectly, but what you appear to be saying is that the ability to "find and organize information" doesn't give you the "necessary reading abilities to handle topics beyond high school". Can you substantiate this claim at all? Are any of your students significantly capable of "skill-based learning" and yet require your particular instruction?
And can you experimentally control for this outside of your own particular students? In other words, can you say that there's no correlation between their ability and your teaching skill?
Well I probably should have said "necessary reading abilities to acquire topics through available means."
They are capable of understanding the topics. They have problems with sitting down and learning the topic through reading vast amounts of text. It is all well and good to have professors or search engines boil things down to bullet points for easy absorption, but some topics (law, literature, medicine, physics, religion, history) require the reading of original text. That text could be 100 years old and cover hundreds of pages. Understanding it sufficiently to discuss and debate with others means spending hours, days, doing nothing but reading. No cooperation, no building teams, just you and a book/screen. The students I see, products of modern highschools, lack that skill.
Maybe everyone should just move out of California. Or perhaps they could all just euthanize themselves? That would save a lot of water. Certainly saving six fish is far for important.
How much water should California spend on golf lessons for children? Or outdoor swimming pools in which nobody every swims?
I can think of much greater wastes of water than trying to save an endangered species. If nothing else it allows one river to continue being an actual river for another year. Come what may, the farmers will still be physically alive next year.
Yup, another linux course that starts with a lesson in IP law. "Windows for dummies" doesn't start with an hour on Microsoft's corporate structure. It's software. The students want to learn how to use it properly. So teach that first. Leave the politics of f/oss for after they are already addicted.
I've seen more than a couple of these courses use the first lessons as a "it's free, so expect rough edges" speech. Again, Windows courses never start by explaining why it might have bugs. Linux works. Linux works well. You don't need to open with excuses.
I, for one, cannot remember any training, workshop or course that didn't have at least half an hour of obvious, blatant corporate agenda crap and here's-why-you-don't-need-any-technology-other-than-this-one. Some of them subtly painted, but generally that. In time, I simply stopped attending any. Whenever my employer needs me to learn something new, I end up suggesting buying me two books on the subject and letting me take three days off to study them. Cheaper and far more efficient.
I don't know what they're covering in the chapter about the Linux foundation, but the second chapter sounds extremely useful to me. A lot of people who come from a Windows or often an OS X background don't really grok:
* That you can -- and should -- chain program together, not rely on the feature set of a single one
* That, when in doubt, you can look at the source of the program if you can read it
* That there are other release models at work other than "One major version ever X years and $osnameUpdate in between", and you need to know what you can expect from each
* That the kernel and various bits of userspace are separately developed and packaged, which has repercussions over what practical systems look like.
Alas, one of the barriers to understanding Linux properly is the vast set of ideological preconceived notions that a lot of students bring to the table - it has definitely been a matter of propaganda that Linux as a community/social movement has had "issues" with intellectual property, and if the student doesn't actually understand these issues - from the perspective of those who have built Linux as a social phenomenon - it can be very difficult to get over the stigma and dogma of the scene.
As a Linux user from day one of Linus' post to the minix-list, I have observed thousands of new Linux users come to the scene, personally. And it is without any question in my mind that the issues over what exactly "free software" means have been one of the biggest barriers to involvement - people think they're breaking the law, or should break the law, or don't have a right to unpack tarballs, or are afraid of looking at the source, or don't think its 'safe' to link to something in /usr/lib, and so on and so forth. Getting this sorted out at the beginning of the course means that the student is prepared for the real knowledge transfer to be gained by having access to the sources for everything.
Its important, if you want to become a power Linux user, to understand your rights and just how much freedom you actually have, and to discard any preconceived/propagandized stigma you have about the subject.
Adblockers do not block ads. They block BANNER ads.
If advertisers want to pitched their products, they should contract with websites for that website to display a relevant, clickable, ad hosted by the website. Such schemes are no different than buying space to paint a poster on a stadium wall. And as adblockers only target ads delivered by third parties, such displays will go untouched.
(Yes, i know adblock allows ad hoc image blocking, but the user will see the ad and must choose to block it every time it is updated.)
Advertisers than want to buy open-ended ad space on websites, that want to display different ads depending on who views the space, who want to track users to better target ads, who want to use "ads" as a Trojan horse for installing tracking cookies ... they can all rot alongside the good people from "windows technical service department" who called me at 4am this morning.
They are effectively merged already. They stay away from each other, treating customers like each other's property, and offer comparable services at comparable prices. They aren't in any real competition with each other. I'm not saying that they should merge. Rather, I'm saying that them not merging isn't a quick fix of the underlying issue. Americans need actual choice of providers within a given technology.