Those optimizers you are fighting with have thousands of man hours of research behind them. For every silly choice they make, they make hundreds or thousands of correct ones.
Except for the fact that you can explicitly contain the potential damage by controlling which accounts can do what. It's not like you have to have one god account with no MFA that has the keys to the city.
Not trying to be snarky, but why on Earth would I mind that my government is trying to prevent a rival government from gaining nuclear capability? World politics are what they are, and they are unavoidable, so my preference is that we do anything necessary to stay in a position of leadership. Would you prefer different if you were us?
This is a good thing even for those outside of San Antonio proper. I was able to upgrade to 1 Gbps on a small-time ISP this weekend, and it's because Google is coming to the large city near me. Competition is a wonderful thing.
In Austin - offered 50mb from Time Warner for $35/mo - then automatically upgraded to 200mb. The fiberhood is coming in a month so yes they're getting generous.
Some parts of San Antonio have had a choice of cable providers for some time now, TWC and the local competitor Grande. If you lived in those areas, service was actually pretty good. I I think I paid $35/month for 50mbps service from Grande when I lived in Olmos Park.
Because, over the long term, a single lion is infinitely more important to the survival of our own species/planet than a single human or even several million of them.
We could kill off nearly every other species on the planet, including many of which we have domesticated and breed for product (bees, cows, etc.) and humans would be just fine.
The only sad thing about a species going extinct is it is one less species for us to study and learn from. It's a drastic loss for science and the only hypothetical loss for people at large is if there was something of value lost (e.g. discovery of a gene that cures a disease that only the now-extinct animal naturally produced)
You can especially kill off most apex predators without issue. Which is why the loss of a lion isn't a big deal.
Now if all producers were to go extinct and the bottom feeders of the food chain(s) such as plankton were to vanish from the Earth? Most, if not all, life as we know it would die from starvation. The animals with the most adaptive and most abundant food sources would live the longest, but eventually they would also run out of food!
A lion isn't a producer nor is it the bottom of the food chain. So a lion dying or lions going extinct really doesn't matter outside of scientific studies.
Please explain. Millions of species have gone extinct over the course of history, yet the world continues on. What is it about the loss of lions that will result in a catastrophe?
I'm not saying that avoiding the extinction of a species is not a noble endeavor, I'm just questioning the impact of not doing so.
That is total bullshit and you know it. This whole culture of self-loathing was cute at the beginning, but it's descended into absolute absurdity. You are patently out of your mind if you actually believe what you wrote. You don't, of course, but what's a little hyperbole when you're posturing for imaginary geek cred points on a website amirite?
> I'll be over here riding out the inevitable with my own file sync, git server, chat server, web server, and making my internet how I want it to be
To me, this is exactly why we're not headed for an internet-solely-comprised-of-walled-gardens scenario. There will be plenty for sure, but the pathways will still be open and we netizens can connect whatever we like with them. This is why I am still excited about it, even after 20 years.
Well, it would revert to the old style "wild west" of the Internet where people who didn't understand the services - mass amounts of lay people - would simply stop using it or stay in sandboxed app/web environments.
Heh, this made me think of it as a sort of "Internet gentrification". A new hip service/site starts getting into the mainstream, the lay people move in, it becomes adapted for the lay people, and what made it hip in the first place moves out and on to other things. Doesn't fit perfectly, but I think it's an interesting way to look at it.
This is something I've noticed for a long time. Many communities have this occurrence.
usenet, 4chan, reddit, world of warcraft, the "internet" itself etc.
Any networked service can fall victim to this pattern. The original community can quickly get displaced and drown in the wake of rushing users and the powers that be will respond to the will of the majority thus betraying it's original intent.
> when the last user of it finally gives up and moves to gmail so they can continue to communicate with their contacts or maybe they give up entirely
Between the title and the quoted, I think you have used up your hyperbole quota for one day.
I guess I don't see the issue. The internet is a large piece of infrastructure on which citizens and companies can publish (almost) anything they want. Lamenting that for-profit ventures have tried to wall off their parts is curious, as I am not sure how that impacts me or my decisions. I don't facebook, I don't tweet, and I could not care less that these things exist. (Not entirely true, but my objections to them would be off-topic.) The world is a very large place, and there will always be people who hang out in the more distant corners of the net, you can go be with like-minded people and talk about the good ole days of (insert bygone era here).
Now if you are lamenting this because you want a piece of the action and the big kids are being bullies, then I suppose my answer isn't going to comfort you any. But for just simple usage, I think this is a tempest in a teapot.
The issue is anyone with a web browser (even ones provided by the ones with walled gardens) can use the HTTP protocol to see hypertext documents. But Facebook users aren't using a public protocol in the Facebook messenger, so they can't easily communicate with Twitter users, who also don't use a public protocol.
It's not the end of the world, but allowing more people to connect more easily is a good thing. The larger issue is that people are less likely to connect once they find their comfortable niche. You don't use Facebook or Twitter but someone who does and would be interested in your thoughts are less likely to stumble across you.
I think there are practical concerns too that push away from openness and towards silos - it isn't just about money.
Open protocols can be slow to improve because of the very nature of their openness - they have dependencies and need to remain interoperable.
Closed protocols can adapt faster because one entity controls the entire thing. In the case of chat XMPP was in the lead for a while, but the mobile situation was terrible - connections were constantly dropped and even though there were clients that supported multiple accounts (Meebo) it was a pretty bad software experience. The current messaging products are not open, but they are better.
This is a shame I think - because it'd be a lot better if the open products were actually better, not just better because they are open.
Maybe the trick is to hack on a better open protocol, but even then it could similarly be outpaced. Maybe the path to this is defining an open 'social' protocol and fixing the internet identity issue at the same time. Maybe keybase.io can do this?
You don't care that gmail seem to randomly mark some not-from-gmail mail as spam? Which leverage Google/Gmail's marketshare to push people away from all other email services?
