Some providers do what imo is a best of both worlds approach here: Every customer has a full fiber run to the PoP, but there they use GPON to save on the active components. The actual fiber is pretty cheap compared to actually bringing it into the ground and that way you retain full flexibility.
That matches my observation on Windows 11. Looking at wireshark while doing the resolution I see the following: Normal queries never use the the suffix. nslookup does, which the resolver answers with NXDOMAIN
Fritz box allows you to capture traffic towards the ISP too and there I never see such a suffix query in either case. So I assume the fritz resolver directly responds to those.
That does not really match the behavior described in the OP but I would be very surprised if the behavior described there wouldn't have lead to a big outcry much earlier.
I recently read the book "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are" by Robert Plomin and it it was quite the eye opener as to how much the nature vs nurture debate seems to have been overtaken by genetic findings.
According to the book genetics seems to be the single biggest factor for a ton of things in our psychology. Including various measures of intelligence and achievement. As a layman the evidence presented seemed quite convincing. The book mostly refers to big studies with thousands of twins. To separate nature and nurture studies can do things like tracking twins given up shortly after birth into two different foster families who never had any contact to their birth parents later (correlated nature), track the development twins in the same family (correlated nurture) and so on.
According to Plomin the effects are huge (especially compared to what usually would be a significant result in a psychology study looking at nurture) and the controversial nature of such findings made the field extremely rigorous to the point where it is hard to imagine these results turning out to be wrong. Apparently it has all been replicated quite a bit by now.
To be honest I found the book quite shocking because it runs counter to so much that is "common knowledge" and "common sense". It basically mostly discards influenceable "nurture" as a defining influence at the population level. Once certain basics are met, relevant environmental influences are mostly too random to control and much of the rest is indirectly caused by "nature". "Nature" basically creates its preferred environment (called "nature of nurture" in the book).
As I am not in the field my ability to verify what the book says is limited. As far as I can tell Plomin is a very well regarded Psychologist and mostly know for his involvement in twin studies. If anyone in the field has better insight on how to evaluate what the book says I would be very interested.
Plomin himself seems to characterize it differently:
Another problem that Plomin encounters with explaining his findings is that people often confuse group and individual differences – or, to put it another way, the distinction between means and variances. Thus, the average height of northern European males has increased by more than 15cm in the past two centuries. That is obviously due to changes in environment. However, the variation in height between northern European males is down to genetics. The same applies to psychological traits.
“The causes of average differences,” he says, “aren’t necessarily related to causes of individual differences. So that’s why you can say heritability can be very high for a trait, but the average differences between groups – ethnic groups, gender – could be entirely environmental; for example, as a result of discrimination. The confusion between means and variances is a fundamental misunderstanding.”
That's what I tried to capture with the "at the population level" restriction. Plomin was quite clear that for the individual all bets are off so sorry if it sounded like the environment couldn't still screw you over (it definitely can). The part about inter-group differences is worth emphasizing and I should have done so.
That did not reduce my surprise about the things stated in the book though. If statements it contains like that after correcting for genetics "the most important environmental factors, such as our families and schools, account for less than 5 percent of the differences between us in our mental health or how well we did at school" and "Genetics accounts for 50 per cent of psychological differences, not just for mental health and school achievement, but for all psychological traits, from personality to mental abilities" are true, then I definitely consider that as going against "common knowledge" and "common sense". Definitely blew my mind.
Thanks for the links. Totally missed that it was discussed here before.
In my mind the even bigger questions is whether it being "cheaper" will stay true once we actually try to scale the use of the technology. As in can we use this to actually produce most of our energy needs and still have the cost benefit?
I'm not an expert on energy production but a study I recently read on this topic for the German "Energiewende" over here did not sound so great [1]. In Germany the renewables we can scale are mostly Wind + PV. However according to the study their seasonal patterns combined with the demand curve seem to make it pretty much impossible to actually expand them meaningfully. Over the year you'll get peak production far outstripping demand (we've already seen negative prices in our markets with current installed capacity) and in the troughs you will need huge production from other energy sources (mostly old coal plants at this point). As these are seasonal patterns this means you would need to store TWh over many months to average that out and make new installed renewable capacity actually useful. The study did some back on the envelope calculations for various options for that but none seemed to come close to achieving that.
If that is true, system wide such nice looking renewable price calculations are preconditioned on a backup structure of conventional plants being on standby to fill in the throughs. As this is highly uneconomical for them the cost for that will still have to be paid by the system. At the same time due to the extreme variability prices will drop to zero during peak times (well...unless you have feed-in tarifs) making cheap production prices still be a loss.
I imagine the calculations might look much more favorable in other locales where demand is better correlated with renewable production but I would be surprised if Germany is the total exception here.
Afaik you can still configure it this way in Pro and higher skews using the group policy editor. And it's not like they didn't try the "asking the user" thing before. It's just that many users will happily keep dismissing any kind of warning that doesn't immediatly make their computer stop working forever. That's just no longer something that's acceptable for a machine connected to the internet.
They do raise this in their discussion part: "Fourth, vaccines are only active while pathogens are inside hosts, but drugs can remain active in environmental reservoirs [89], suggesting that the strength of selection for resistance may differ for drug and vaccine resistance. However, drug resistance readily evolves even in pathogens that lack environmental life stages such as HIV [8]."
You must not be able to prove who you voted for. Otherwise you are still at risk of retaliation, coercion and can sell your vote. For the very same reasons the government must not be able to know who you voted for either.
Secret paper ballots really deserve more credit. The tech might be old but it gets the essential features right.
Never considered the sarcasm and social critique in that movie to be all that subtle. "Would you like to know more?" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faFuaYA-daw). Loved the movie for it.
Could never get over how different the book felt though. No hint of what I liked so much in the movie. Basically the complete inverse message of the movie.
Don't think I've ever seen this kind of "same story, inverse message" between a book and a movie before.
The video feels like comedy to me, but that wasn't what I felt back in the days when the movie came out and I was young. It gave me more of a dystopian feeling.
