I don't disagree with your sentiment.

However, the reason it's legal is that we often give away permission to do so without even knowing it. For example, the slashdot terms of service include:

"By sending, uploading, displaying, posting or transmitting Content to any area of the Sites, you grant us and our subsidiaries, affiliates, agents, employees and designees a worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), assignable, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable right to link to, reproduce, distribute (through multiple tiers), adapt, create derivative works of, publicly perform, publicly display, digitally perform or otherwise use such Content in any media or site now known or hereafter developed. You further hereby grant Company permission to display your logo, trademarks and company name on the Sites and in press and other public releases or filings. Further, by submitting Content to the Company, you acknowledge that you have the authority to grant such rights to the Company."

and:

"Slashdot Media may assign, transfer or sub-license this Agreement without your consent and without notice to you."

The problem is that these terms are often buried in a big legal agreement which itself is buried on a website or something you click through without thinking.

Whether this should be legal or not is one of those things that I'd have a fairly easy time arguing either side of. On one side, part of the bargain you make to use a site like slashdot for free is to see advertisements and have your data scraped. On the other side, I don't think many of us really want our cell companies selling our geolocation data. The question is where should the line be drawn and what should or should not be legal.

Note that in the US we generally have laws that prohibit this type of thing for medical records (HIPAA) but for non-medical records there are few if any protections. I'd argue that there needs to be more protection. I also realize that in order to not have to pay (or in order to pay less) for certain services that those services being able to sell certain datasets derived from my usage of those services is required.

vmotion in proxmox: Click on a VM, click on migrate, select the target node, moves without any downtime. Can't even tell it migrated. On HA: Clustering and quorum is built in. Turn on HA, tell HA which VM's and Containers it will be managing, set rules about where they get moved to in a failure, and let it do it's work.

A 0.04% reduction in fees won't make any meaningful difference to any merchant. If I sell a product for $100, 0.04% equates to 4 cents. On a million dollars it's $400.

Although it's not *literally* nothing, it is so far down in the noise that the chances of it making any difference is close to zero. Just like the actual fee reduction is close to zero.

If they had done something substantial like 0.4%. But not a reduction of 0.04%.

I find that Embedded System programming requires someone with the experience that you would have had from the early days... That is, making things work with way too few resources. Often, the project teams are quite small or one, and the focus is often on making things work. If you've picked up some C along the way, it's even more likely that you're qualified to do the work.

Already Done: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

The concept that the Netflixes or Googles of the world pay for their Internet feed is somewhat inaccurate.

Netflix, Google, Amazon, etc, get a large chunk of their connectivity through peering which is the same way that internet providers exchange traffic. This means that they will either collocate servers at an Internet Exchange Point or will build a datacenter close enough to one to be able to purchase/build dark fiber to it. At the exchange point, often the only fee is a one-time port cost or a miniscule (in the grand scheme of things) ongoing fee.

Netflix in particular has a really good racket going.... They offer appliances which ISP's host *for free* effectively in exchange for the benefit of moving the significant Netflix traffic off of the ISP's upstream and peering connections. See https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fopenconnect.netflix.co... . Note that the only cost to netflix is providing the server.. All of the bandwidth and power to run the server (including filling it from the internet and the feed to the customer) is born by the ISP. From an ISP standpoint it makes financial sense to do so since the incremental cost of hosting the server is most likely less than the cost of upstream circuits consumed by netflix. But, it also puts netflix at a advantage that other smaller companies may not have.

That isn't to say that these providers don't have any connectivity costs, they just are significantly lower than one would assume based on the amount of traffic that they are moving.

Just to add a couple of datapoints to your well-thought out reply:

The Title-II style network neutrality did not do a lot of what network-neutrality proponents seem to think it did. For instance throttling generally was permitted provided it didn't single out one source. In addition, ISP's had a lot of latitude as far as what they could or could not do under the guise of 'reasonable network management'. For instance, an ISP would have been permitted to slow down traffic such as software updates in order to improve performance during peak times for other traffic such as video streaming. This is provided the ISP discloses what they are doing.

As I mentioned in a different comment, one thing the Title-II regulation did do is saddle ISP's with a lot of paperwork and regulatory hurdles, increasing costs. For a carrier like the large companies which dominate the landscape this wasn't a big deal. For those smaller companies trying to bring another option to the mix, this was much more difficult, and could mean the difference between a viable business and bankruptcy. So the Title-II style network neutrality actually helped prevent the breaking of the oligopoly.

This concept is factually wrong, that is, there is no monopoly granted to ISP's. Anyone can go buy a "resellable" INTERNET feed from a carrier like Zayo, Hurricane Electric or Cogent or similar and then build out a local network from that. The cost to do so is relatively low in the grand scheme of things, especially if technologies like unlicensed wireless are used to do so. But the repealed network neutrality rules makes it harder for these small, independent, providers to be able to do so.

All that the repealed Title II-style network neutrality did was increase the amount of paperwork required to be filed with the FCC, increasing the costs for Internet providers to comply with the regulation. This was a tolerable thing for the big providers, but a very bad thing for the smallest of the providers who are desperately trying to compete with the largest carriers (Comcast, etc). The reason is that a company the size of Comcast can afford to pay the couple of full time staff needed to keep up with the record keeping requirements, but a smaller ISP just trying to provide service in a reasonably small area or even a portion of a state generally does not have the resources necessary to keep up with all of the filing requirements - even though that small ISP is generally going to be far less likely to do the 'evil' things that people thing that we need network neutrality for.

Or stated differently: The companies which most needed the regulation were the ones least affected by it.

We need to quit thinking that Internet can only be provided by the Cable company and the Phone company. There are thousands of small providers out there who are proving that it's not only possible for other to provide internet service, but that actually these smaller companies are often able to provide better service at a similar cost.

I would like to see a third option created. Title II is not the right solution. And Title I has no teeth. Congress will need to get involved, and a solution hashed out that both protects network neutrality yet is a far lighter approach than lumping internet providers into Title II.

Actually small, startup ISP's are starting all the time. I regularly interact with providers throughout the US which are less than a year old (I sell products into this space).

Even locally, I'm aware of one which has started within my rather small community within the last couple of years years. There are also two older ones so there are now at least 3 different providers besides the telco and the cable company providing service to the area.

Another trade group which represents a large chunk of them has the other view regarding Title II.

I fully agree with the principles of Network Neutrality - that is, the concept that all traffic should be created equal, and internet providers shouldn't be able to pick winners and losers among the services out there. A cable company who is providing internet service shouldn't be able to block or degrade video from competitors. A telephone company who is an ISP shouldn't be able to block or degrade VoIP providers and so on. Ajit Pai agrees with those principles.

The problem with Title II is that it replaces the free principles that the internet was founded on with overbearing regulations. An example: Let's assume that your neighborhood wasn't adequately served by internet service. You decide to do something about it. You start a small internet provider for your neighborhood, convincing all of your neighbors to invest. You go get an expensive resellable gigabit (or 10 gig) internet feed, and then run fiber from the feed to everyone's homes. Or use wireless technology to distribute it. Everyone is happy, until you realize that you are now an internet provider and have to also jump through the Title II hoops, which include a pile of regulations, and have to hire employees simply to comply with the government mandate.

There are many many small, independent internet providers out there which are feeling the pain of Title II. This isn't pain because of anything they've done wrong. If anything, they all are shining examples of how network neutrality should work. Fortunately, much of the regulatory burden of Title II has been deferred for these providers, and now won't be implemented - but this level of regulation definitely has a much heavier impact on a small internet provider with a handful of employees.

Everyone who is considering their position on this issue really should go read Ajit Pai's disssent on the original passing of the order classifying ISP's under Title II. It's available at on the FCC website. I would encourage everyone to read it to truly understand Commisioner Pai's position.

Basic on an Apple II....and pretty much every other computer at that point. That pretty much was the choice for learning how to program back in the mid-80's.

I also picked up Pascal and C shortly thereafter. C stuck, Pascal didn't. I seem to remember learning COBOL and PL/I at some point, along with a bit of fortran.

I've learned so many languages over the years, that I've lost count. Right now I have active projects going in C, HTML5/Javascript, and Python. It's gotten to the point where another language isn't a big deal: it's more about learning libraries than the language itself.

Java ranks near the top of my list in languages I prefer not to program in if I can avoid it.

So, they can't change the icon color. So, instead, they should just include a flaming phone icon. That should convey it perfectly.

See the PIC18F67J60. I currently sell a product I developed which includes a complete software TCP/IP stack, HTTP server, SNMP server, ICMP client and server, NTP, and and so on which fits in this device which has 128K of flash and 3.808K of ram. 32MB is enormous.

My total code + static web page storage (in a small external flash) is around 196KB. That isn't anywhere near 32MB.

I'm in the process of moving to a PIC32 platform to be able to support HTTPS and IPv6, along with a lot of other functionality that needs to be in the next version of this product. This is still going to have a code size of well under 1MB (and probably more in the 3-400K range). So I'm not sure where people get off with saying that 32MB is "extremely resource constrained".

My opinion about why 'C' is still highly relevant is that there are still many needs for small, tight, code which runs very close to to the metal, and C is ideal for this.

When you look at the output code from a C compiler, it tends to be small and fast, and relatively light on resources. In many cases, with modern compiler optimizations, the resulting code can actually be smaller and faster than all but assembly code written by someone who really knows how to optimize for a specific machine. Almost all embedded development work is done in either C or assembly, and C tends to be faster to write, and portable - so you can move the code to the next project if necessary.

Using any 'modern' object oriented language immediately adds a level of bloat which is generally not acceptable in places where C still shines. These modern programming languages are written for environments where a few extra bytes or a few extra cycles isn't going to cause a problem. When working on a resource-limited platform (aka where you'd kill for a few hundred KB of code space, and more than a few thousand bytes of ram) you're just not going to be able to use a modern language because of the overhead of an object oriented language.

I'd actually predict C is going to grow in the near term, just because of the growth of internet-connected low-resource devices. I actually develop products on a platform which has a complete TCP/IP stack (including web server and SNMP) running in less than 128KB (yes K not M) of memory. These and other similar small platforms are going to be the basis of the 'things' half of the internet of things, all of which are going to have C code at their base.