I want to make a short film / animation where aliens are approaching earth, the only thing we know about the aliens is that they plan to destroy all life and replace it with their own twisted creation. A few minutes of typical story follows, heroes assemble, go to fight, etc. The heroes lose and the ending scene shows that the aliens have succeeded and replaced all the diverse life on Earth with a perfectly manicured lawn that covers the entire planet. A biological wasteland.
America is hosting the world cup next so…yeah literally at this point anything goes. The only way it could be worse is if the literal Nazi regime was back and they were hosting the world cup.
It’s not a solution, but as a mitigation, I’m trying to push the idea of an internet right of way into the public consciousness. Here’s the thesis statement from my write-up:
I propose that if a company wants to grow by allowing open access to its services to the public, then that access should create a legal right of way. Any features that were open to users cannot then be closed off so long as the company remains operational. We need an Internet Rights of Way Act, which enforces digital footpaths. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to create little paths into their sites, only to delete them, forcing guests to pay if they wish to maintain access to the networks that they built, the posts that they wrote, or whatever else it is that they were doing there.
As I explain in the link, rights of way already exist for the physical world, so it’s easily explained to even the less technically inclined, and give us a useful legal framework for how they should work.
I agree but I think it needs to be slightly more practical. Sometimes a line of business just dries up and it would damage the company to try and keep that service going. It wouldn’t make sense to force a company into bankruptcy to keep one line going that few people use anymore.
Earlier today, though, I was thinking about sunsetting guarantees. Companies can and should decommission things when it makes business sense, but the user generated content it has gathered shouldn’t just disappear, and they shouldn’t be allowed to destroy the user experience of things people have bought.
So I would propose rules like:
If a service is being decomissioned or an entry point to that service being shut down, the content available on that service must be made available as a bulk export. Personal data, such as account data, messages, etc should be made available to users individually, while publicly accessible content should be made available publicly.
If a public service is being taken down completely, source code should be made available publicly.
If the service for a device which was physically purchased by consumers is being taken down, an update must be provided to allow users to use a local or alternative backend service. The source code for the service must be released publicly.
If features are being removed from a service which backed a physically purchased device, an update must be offered which allows users to point to a local or alternative service for either all functionality or, at minimum, the removed functionality. Looking at you, Google, keep removing features…
Yeah, as always, the devil is in the details. For now I think that we need a simple and clear articulation of the main idea. In the exceedingly unlikely event that it ever gets traction, I look forward to hammering out the many nuances.
I’d just like to interject for moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
I’ve always liked having personal chats in the servers section. The notifications were much more clear, as the chat would always pop up to the top, and navigating to them was significantly easier as every area for messaging was easily accessible through one motion.
The UI is generally better and separating personal chats isn’t a deal breaker for me, but the new app is buggy in ways that actively impede my daily use, such as search filters not working over the full server in the default search bar, and the structure for dms makes it much harder to go seemlessly between talking in a server and talking with a group of friends in a dm or sending a message to someone. Swiping out of DMs to servers has much more friction, and switching between DMs takes significantly longer and is incredibly glitchy, sometimes trapping text boxes in a different chat, opening the conversation well above where you were actually talking, and many times it simply will get trapped in one dm and I need to restart the app fully to use DMs normally again.
I generally use significantly more DMs than servers, talking with my friends in groups of 3 or individually and having one or two servers for large communities of people. As such, the significantly shittier DM experience on mobile is making me want to use discord significantly less on mobile.
I like knowing where things are. I couldn’t find dms after the update until some told me. I also keep trying to swipe left to see members but that has moved too. I feel like in general everything has become harder to find.
Most optical fiber is 125um of glass with 250um coating. The coating and the jacketing that make up the cable (mostly non-recyclable plastic) are the real problem.
You are right the core of most optical fibers is either 8-9um for singlemode, or 62.5 or 50um for multimode. The cladding, which is also made of glass, surrounds the core and this is almost always 125um. Often there is more than one layer that makes up the cladding glass to help reduce the bend radius before you start to attenuate your signal. You need both the core and the cladding of different refractive indexes to create total internal reflection, which is how fiber optics work over long distances with low loss.
The glass (core + clad) is the only part of the fiber that is really recyclable. Everything else is plastic that is difficult to chemically remove.
There’s a lot of really bad literature out there on fiberoptics, so I don’t really blame anyone for not knowing this stuff. Here’s a pretty good article that sums up how fiberoptics work I pulled off google: ofsoptics.com/…/how-do-communications-fiber-optic…
No, Fiber cables are really cheap. They are basically just glass with some reflective coat.
It is just that the connectors and more importantly the work of attaching those connectors to the cable that makes them expensive. They need to be welded in a dust-free environment, and require lots of skill to get right.
Also, copper cables capable of transmitting high data rates aren’t easily manufactured either. Think of shielding, twisted pairs of wires, etc. And they don’t even contain a lot of copper.
Generally when I hear people discussing fiber the big costs is actually running the cables and terminating and splicing the ends, the actual cable itself is relatively inexpensive from my understanding.
But with regard to stealing cable, you really can’t do much with a fiber cable on the secondary market besides using it for fiber, and you also would probably need to re-terminate it that can be very costly. Compared to copper or other type of metal cables that can be sold very easily for scrap metal. That can be melted down and made into something else or just reused as cable.
Lmaoooo just in time for Thanksgiving dinner. 😆 Good luck to all the lemmings out there who have to deal with conservative family members today/tonight.
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