Ugh. I pity people who have such a lack of self-respect that that can tolerate living in this kind of dump. If the bed was rotated ninety degrees, they could watch TV lying on their side. But I guess whoever lives here is happy to just settle for imperfection.

Elon Musk.

If the cable coming through the wall is coaxial like the pictire OP posted, that’s exactly what’s happening. New installs will be FTTP and a lot of networks have been upgraded, but there’s still plenty of areas using DOCSIS over coax.

UK here. It’s just not a thing any more. I regularly drive - or am a passenger - on a ~200 mile round trip and insect strikes just don’t happen.

That said, I recently drove from the North of England to the South of France. Almost as soon as we crossed the Channel we were instantly getting insects splattered on the windscreen to the point we had to refill buy some bright pink no-nonsense washer fluid at the next services. So I assume some counties are more responsible than others with their use of pesticides.

I recently drove from the North of England to the South of France. Almost as soon as we crossed the Channel we were instantly getting insects splattered on the windscreen to the point we had to refill buy some bright pink no-nonsense washer fluid at the next services.

…du

You mean my best friend Plank?

They’d get bored after a time and Charles Foster Offdensen would have to step in.

In fairness, he’d vote for me.

Sheēble pārpmpā rpm gek dē parp ¡cheese! flurdle,

Not that I’ve seen and I’d take what Purism say with a grain of salt: they’ve acted like pretty shitty gatekeepers themselves. Nothing they mentioned in the article seems too egregious in truth and they’re exaggerating the scale of it: Play Store app DRM exists already, and the restrictions on browser-downloaded apps they mention can be bypassed (albeit by having to go into settings) and don’t apply to apps installed through other apps stores (F-Droid, etc).

No. Unfortunately, ActivityPub just isn’t geared up for that kind of thing. It’s why BlueSky uses a different federation protocol called AtProtocol which is a lot more demanding than ActivityPub but is specifically intended for Twitter/TikTok style services.

While I’m generally of the opinion that there’s no such thing as a ‘good billionaire’, Gates has, at least, used the bulk of his fortune for some laudable enough endeavours. He’s one of the better ones, but if that’s not damning with faint praise I don’t know what is.

Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum”, or, “I think therefore I am” is a favourite of mine. It’s proof that I exist. Nothing more.

Nollendorfplatz is the main gay village. Easily reached on the U-Bahn. Just saying.

A severe simplification of the history, but: In the 1960s, say, if you lived in a town with shit TV reception the local authorities might set up a really good TV antenna on a nearby hilltop and run a wire through town that everyone could connect their TVs to. This was called Community Antenna TV, or CATV, which later became known as Cable TV. The coaxial cable used for this doesn’t carry signalling like, say, twisted pair; instead, the purpose of coaxial is to provide an enclosed, shielded tunnel for radio signals to propagate along. The signal would fade over time, so repeaters would be added every so often to boost the signal and filter noise.

So, yes, all your neighbours can ‘see’ your data, because you’re all sharing the same coaxial cable, though it’s encrypted between your modem and the cable company’s local headend. Those boosters I mentioned would historically break the Cable network into neighbourhood-sized chunks preventing the modem signal propagating too far, so there would be a local headend within the same segment for your modem to connect to. The bandwidth available is split between all the users in the segment, so having a second coaxial cable coming through the wall would be of limited utility; it’d be easier for your ISP to just allocate more bandwidth to your existing modem.

You mentioned Ethernet, but in most Ethernet networks we use switches that ensure that only the recipient gets to see the packets. In the old days we used hubs, which are more analogous to neighbourhood cable networks in that regard.

How dare you bring nuance, experience and moderation into the conversation.

Seriously, though, I am a firm believer that no tech is inherently bad, though the people who wield it might well be. It’s rare to see a good, responsible use of LLMs but I think this is one of them.

Generally speaking the customer is the one paying for the product. For a commercial TV station, the customer is the advertiser, not the audience. The audience is the product being sold. Like IKEA felling trees to build furniture, or Exxon pumping oil, the TV station makes programmes as part of the product manufacturing process.

Also, this is a reason why public service broadcasters need to be cherished.

Exactly. That’s why it’s so good, and also why the advertisers are trying to confuse people by whining about cookies. This is nothing to do with a specific technology, and entirely about respecting privacy.

As always, it’s not the technology that’s the problem, it’s the grifters running the show. Cookies are great for remembering what’s in a shopping basket, language settings, etc before you sign in and if those were the only kinds of things the sites were using they wouldn’t even need the Cookie banner. Remember the Cookie Banner is nothing to do with Cookies, and everything to do with commercialised mass monitoring.