Probably to you I am old, but I have a critical ear for music. I proably know more bands than you youngsters, and bet I play music at least as loud. I have played Drums since age 4 when I received my first Ludwig concert snare, kit since 11 when I received my first Rogers kit, and percussion since it was required for concert and jazz band since age 13. I listen to a variety of music, which in my opinion requires some ability with a musical instrument or real (not synthesized) vocals. I dig progressive rock because it's the most challenging to play (usually) so you will usually find me working on playing Dream Theater, Liquid Tension Experiment, etc.. but I also play a lot of metal for warmup and exercise.

I prefer a band that can perform live as well as they can in the studio, to me that's the mark of great musicians. I don't really have anything against a synthesizer because a great keyboardist integrates that into music. "Everything" being synthesized to me is just not music. It's one person with enough skill to enter some input into a program.

In the true spirit of the Socratic method I should have also added that my question number 1. is not really required to gaining the rational answer to primary question. It does however relate\ directly to the answer I gave in my first post.

The primary question is why anyone would believe that 2 forms of justice can exist simultaneously in the same society? The separation of infrastructure is not necessary in the grand scheme of your claim that certain people should be excluded from justice. Just like accident vs. attack should be no different in seeking justice.

Why do you keep introducing invalid and unrelated arguments? Did I or anyone else claim that a dry cleaner needs a private army? The latter question I can answer, and that answer is "NO". Further, it does not at all relate to the debate. The first question I can only answer with the fact that that you continue to muddy the waters instead of answering the questions I posed earlier. Contrary to your 2nd paragraph, I have never shifted my position even the slightest. I stated that if people are not accountable society fails, and we have seen a massive growth in this exact issue in the US. My position that accountability and liability must exist has never changed in the slightest, in fact my first post explicitly stated that people must be held accountable for their actions, which you argued against.

Stick with the arguments and the Socratic method (reduce the arguments to their lowest form). Prove to me that your argument that politicians and some executives in charge of other people's "things" should not be held accountable for their management of those "things". You are the one claiming that a double standard should exist, not I. As Socrates stated, Justice never changes form. If person A does something just and person B does the same thing, it is also just (and visa versa). It can not be any other way and still be called "Justice".

If you can prove to me that there is a logical reason not to hold politicians and certain executives accountable while they manage other peoples property (including public property), I will concede the debate. If you can not, your belief is simply not rational.

Remove everything you just said and start over with where you were a post ago and answer the questions I posed. These two in particular.
1. Why should the boat (infrastructure) be in the Ocean (attached to the Internet)? As previously stated, "profit" is not an answer.
2. Why should any politician or executive in charge of property they do not own not be held accountable, when everyone else in society is held accountable?

As stated above, if you can not answer those two questions rationally your opinion is not rational. In my last posts, I demonstrated that an attack is no different than an accident in terms of accountability. The difference _may_ be in liability, but that would be for a court to decide. I may not have explicitly stated this, but it should have been obvious enough not to need calling out (I am assuming you read and write English).

Alternatively, if you can prove to me that nobody should ever be held accountable for anything they do with other people's property I will also concede the debate. I seriously doubt you would take that position, as that would indicate advocacy for complete lawlessness. E.G. Someone breaks into your house and rapes everyone inside, then steals everything of value you have no recourse.

Agreed on the ChromeBook.

I'm not sure about making a ChromeBook use dial-up, so the solution is to somehow get a WiFi router on dialup.

I think there used to be WiFi routers that could manage a modem directly, but there isn't much call for them these days so I doubt you can find one.

You could set up a computer with Linux just to manage the dialup, and plug that into the router's WAN port. But maybe you can just customize a router to do what you need:

Buy a router that is well supported by open firmware and has USB ports. Install the open firmware, login as root, then customize the router to do the dialup with a USB modem.

In the past, I have used TomatoUSB with an Asus RT-N16 router (costs about $80 new). It was a pleasure to work with. The router gives you about 24 MB of usable storage using onboard flash memory, but you can trivially plug in a USB flash drive and have gigabytes of storage if you need it. But you can probably set up the needed scripts to manage the modem in the 24 MB space.

There are newer routers with bigger onboard flash if you prefer. I only mention the Asus RT-N16 because I have actually worked with one, and it's very inexpensive. And it has plenty of CPU speed and RAM for this application.

The above solution is cheaper than using a computer to manage the dialup, and should be bulletproof. Also your relatives are unlikely to mess with it.

P.S. Hmm, I did a quick Google search and there are still routers with dialup support. Here's one for about $150... I've never used one so I don't know how well it works.
http://www.greatarbor.com/products.html#GAC-252

Arghhh.

I have the 19" wheels and have about ~12K miles on them, I think. Will have to pay attention to them this winter. :-(

First winter in my Model S, and the last time I had a read wheel driver car through a winter was 2004-2005. :-)

You seem to be attempting to mangle the meaning of infrastructure. Infrastructure is "foundational", not "not needed" as you seem to be implying with the term "below". Even though the term has a similar root "infra" to "infrared", the use of "infra" is absolutely not the same.

You are trying to claim, falsely I'll add, that some infrastructure is not actually infrastructure. In terms of Infrastructure, there is absolutely no difference. If someone can take out roads then we have an infrastructure problem, we can make the same claim for electricity, water, sewage, communications, etc... There is no difference except that "roads" would be much harder for some management person to create a single point of failure out in the ocean somewhere. In other words, your implication that "critical infrastructure" existed anywhere in my points is absolutely incorrect.

To prove that is incorrect, notice that I don't restrict the argument to just infrastructure. It's commerce as well, where some person/company accepts responsibility for another person's wealth or property (as with the original post and their stock exchange comment). All of these things are the same, and the argument is the same.

When it is not yours, you have no right to put other people's "things" at risk. Public property is no different than private property in this regard. If you take unnecessary risks with other people's "things" you must be held accountable and liable for your actions. As with the former, there is no difference between public and private property in this regard.

Obviously things change if the courts reveal that something completely unexpected happens. The distinction from that statement is that "Liability" can change, but "Accountability" can not or society breaks down (very much like the US has been heading for the last couple decades).

Not only a guy suffering from a midlife crisis, but pretending to play guitar while crappy synthetic sounds blast your ears. That "music" video should come with a disclaimer and warning. "Probably does not contain what you consider music, start with the volume really really low."

I didn't study the rest of the article or person. I simply assume that his self proclaimed titles in other areas match his self proclaimed "musician" title, and are pretty much ego boosting statements with little to no truth. In fairness, I could be wrong but generally the first opinion is correct.

Pretty much like the last BMW 3 Series I bought, in other words.

Seriously. BMWs are great cars to drive, but they nickel and dime you on the options at time of purchase.

We are in a War on Faith, because Faith justifies anything and ISIS takes it to extremes. But in the end they are just a bigger version of Christian-dominated school boards that mess with the teaching of Evolution, or Mormon sponsors of anti-gay-marriage measures, or my Hebrew school teacher, an adult who slapped me as a 12-year-old for some unremembered offense against his faith.

Hm. The covenant of Noah is about two paragraphs before this part (King James Version) which is used for various justifications of slavery and discrimination against all sorts of people because they are said to bear the Curse of Ham. If folks wanted to use the Bible to justify anything ISIS says is justified by God's words in the Koran, they could easily do so.

18 And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.
19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.
20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:
21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.
22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.
23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.
24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.
25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.
26 And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

I fully agree that an attack is not an accident, but you are really not addressing the issue. Lets continue down our Boat and Ocean path using the tried and true Socratic method.

Is a boat required to have necessary gear to run on the Ocean? Yes or No? Realizing that the only proper answer here is "yes" then we to ask whether or not any other prior questions should be asked ahead of this. Low and behold there is a question we should ask ahead of this. "Should the boat be in the ocean to begin with?".

In the case of infrastructure, like the example I responded to, the answer is NO the boat should not be in the our proverbial ocean. There is no reason to have infrastructure sitting in the middle of an ocean. "Infrastructure" means that everyone relies on this, and society can not function without it. (A loose definition I agree, but surely suffices the needs and not incorrect.). That boat should not be a boat at all, but a little fortress with some people guarding it and inspectors making sure that nobody is messing with it.

The only reasons that people can cite for having our proverbial boat out in our proverbial ocean is to increase profits. Profit should be the absolute last consideration in protecting and maintaining infrastructure of any kind. If an executive decides to increase profits by putting this infrastructure out in the middle of the ocean, why should he not be held accountable?

All other forms of business _would_ be held accountable for decisions that caused harm to society (including citizens). That people want to give politicians and large company executives a pass for their bad decisions is quite baffling.

There's no reason they *should*, but they do unless you correct the test. The problem is in the test code, or in the wrapper that runs the test code. But consider an automated login test on an isolated network with a credentials server that races to come up with the browser that's attempting the login in the test case. If the login happens to start before the login server gets up and stable, then your login fails, and so does your test case, even though it's not a problem with the browser you are nominally testing.

This is/was a pretty common failure case with the ChomeOS build waterfall because Chrome was considered an "upstream" product, and therefore changes in Chrome, when they occurred, could throw off the timing. There wasn't a specific, separate effort to ensure that the test environment was free from timing issues. And since you can't let any test run forever, if you intend to get a result that you can act upon it in an automated way, you get transient failures.

Transient test failures can (sort of) be addressed by repeating failed tests; by the time you attempt to reproduce, the cache is likely warmed up anyway, and the transient failure goes away. Problem solved. Sort of. But what if everyone starts taking that tack? Then you end up with 5 or 6 transient failures, and any one of them is enough to shoot you in the foot on any given retry.

Now add that these are reactive tests: they're intended to avoid the recurrence of a bug which has occurred previously, but is probabilistically unlikely to occur again; when do you retire one of these tests? Do you retire one of these tests?

Consider that you remove a feature, a login methodology, a special URL, or some other facility that used to be there; what do you do with the tests which used to test that code? If you remove them, then your data values are no longer directly comparable with historical data; if you don't remove them, then your test fails. What about the opposite case: what are the historical values, necessarily synthetic, for a new feature? What about for a new feature where the test is not quite correct, or where the test is correct, but the feature is not yet fully stable, or not yet implemented, but instead merely stubbed out?

You see, I think, the problem.

And while in theory your build sheriff or other person, who's under fire to reopen the tree, rather than actually root-causing the problem, doesn't have time to actually determine a root cause. At that point, you're back to fear driven development, because for every half hour you keep the tree closed, you have 120 engineers unable to commit new code that's nor related to fixing the build failure. Conservatively estimate their salary at $120K/year, then their TCO for computers and everything else is probably $240K/year, and for every half hour you don't open the tree back up, that's ~$14K of lost productivity, and then once you open it up, there's another half hour for the next build to be ready, so even if you react immediately, you're costing the company at least $25K one of those bugs pops on you and you don't just say "screw it" and open the tree back up. Have that happen 3X a day on average, and that's $75K lost money per day, so let's call it $19.5M a year in lost productivity.

This very quickly leads to a "We Fear Change" mentality for anyone making commits. At the very least, it leads to a "We Fear Large Change" mentality which won't stop forward progress, but will insure that all forward progress is incremental and evolutionary. The problem then becomes that you never make anything revolutionary because sometimes there's no drunkard's walk from where you are to the new, innovative place you want to get to (eventually). So you don't go there.

The whole "We Fear Large Change" mentality - the anti-innovation mentality - tends to creep in any place you have the Agile/SCRUM coding pattern, where you're trying to do large things in small steps, and it's just not possible to, for example, change an API out from everyone, without committing changes to everyone else at the same time.

You can avoid the problem (somewhat) by adding the new API before taking the old API away. So you end up with things like "stat64" that returns a different structure from "stat", and then when you go and try to kill "stat" after you've changed everywhere to call "stat64" instead, with the new structure, you have to change the "stat" API to be the same as the "stat64" API, and then convert all the call sites back, one by one, until you can then get rid of the "stat64".

That leads to things like Solaris, where the way you endure binary compatibility is "give the hell up; you're never going to kill off the old stat, just live with carrying around two APIs, and pray people use the new one and you can kill off the old one in a decade or so". So you're back to another drunkard's walk of very slow progress, but at least you have the new API out of it.

And maybe someday the formal process around the "We Fear Change" mentality, otherwise known as "The Architectural Board" or "The Change Control Committee" or "Senior VP Bob" will let you finally kill off the old API, but you know, at that point, frankly you don't care, and the threat to get rid of it is just a bug in a bug database somewhere that someone has helpfully marked "NTBF" because you can close "Not To Be Fixed" bugs immediately, and hey, it gets the total number of P2 or P3 bugs down, and that looks good on the team stats.

You said something above... "I am not a writer so can’t speak with authority".

Didn't you mean to say "I am not a writer so can’t write with authority"?

Thanks, enjoy the veal!