Comment Re:Democrats voted (Score 1) 932
Maybe some Dems did hold their nose and vote in the Republican primary. So what? After gerrymandering, this is the only way to exercise a meaningful franchise.
Maybe some Dems did hold their nose and vote in the Republican primary. So what? After gerrymandering, this is the only way to exercise a meaningful franchise.
Is buffer bloat -- the over-buffering many ISPs do in the hopes of giving better last-mile performance, but which actually breaks TCP's internal throttling mechanisms -- part of what is at fault, here?
[Nazi architect and politician] Albert Speer said he regretted most that he grew up with a technical education only, in architecture and engineering. He learned little of the liberal arts and humanities, and nothing of philosophy.
"It was this lopsided education that made it so easy for many of us to fall under the spell of Nazism," he said. "We were technical barbarians, who did a fine job, but never inquired about the purpose, or the ultimate results.
"Weapon Shops of Isher" (A.E.Van Vogt) or the Harry Harrison "Deathworld" novels.
I'm sure she thinks that America has the best health care delivery system in the world, too.
We recently saw the play "Tribes" which deals with much of this. Synopsis:
I have worked on SDS940 computers (dates me, eh?) used in DE's demo -- they were mighty for their time, and ran time-sharing networks, etc.
By the late '70's, a simulator of the SDS940 running on a Dec-10 was faster than the actual 940 hardware.
$700M? $800M? A Beeellion dollars? This mis-attributed number seems to keep going up and up.
$634 million is the sum of all contracts let to CGI over seven years, not the amount expended on the web site.
To amplify, with Gmail, we [non-business] consumers are not Google's customers, we Google's product.
Perhaps Google can make this clearer what we are 'paying' Google in order to get our storage and mail services, but it was never a mystery to me.
--
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have created a damned large process table.
..God rested. And, obviously wanted a cold one, just like those made in His image.
Q.E.D. the universe is laced with booze.
Any other questions Intelligent Design can answer for you?
Thnxbyeseeya.
In recent posts about implementing languages like Clojure over
See Robert Silverberg's "The World Inside", about humanity concentrated in near-wholly self-contained skyscrapers.
Paging Roger Zelazny...
Your hindsight suffers from macular degeneration.
The eagerness for private companies to jump on the Internet to market to end-users is historical fact. Given such demand, why did not private companies create such a secure and accountable internet? Were the benefits not so obvious?
Doing it right takes time, and it usually takes trial-and-error. In most new industries there are quite a few attempts that fail, sometimes because the technology and the market aren't ready yet, sometimes because the because a company doesn't do things right.
The point I was trying to make is all that was too much risk for private companies to undertake at the time or else they would have -- and some did.
There were, and are, privately-managed internets connecting companies (been there, done that, in the late '90's). The free market operated, just not like you expected, because "free marketers" usually fail to take into account that land-lines require laying cable on/in/over public lands, which requires franchise, which requires scale, which led to tiers of service providers and ISPs.
Remember modems? Computers can actually talk on phone lines. Part of the build up of technology is to use what's there. As demand increased the cooperation with government needed for new cable in public and private lands would have come - and it would come when the industry was ready for it.
Heh. My home email address is > 25 years old. I remember modems. That aside, what you describe is exactly what happened, especially the "use what's there" part. Even in the modem age, cable TV was ubiquitous. Who runs one of the largest nation-wide networks these days? Comcast.
As for competing technologies, the ultimate government-sponsored protocol set is the OSI stack. It competed with the US DARPA/University Researchers/Private Company derived technology and lost, now existing mostly as concepts (compare to an 7-Layer Taco Bell burrito -- google it), and impinges on us in the form of LDAP and Microsoft Exchange.
So there was a little bit of competition. What about all the other competitors that never were because they were pre-empted?
It is not the government's fault that private companies have not [yet] come up with something to displace the IP of TCP/IP, as
Remember Atari and Odyssey? They were a little bit of competition too. One was better than the other. Imagine where video games would be if we had decided at that point that we were done, that Atari was the standard for all future video games.
I don't understand your beef. The government funded some technology development, and later put it out there for the private industry to use and expand upon as it would. That is not at all like Europe mandating GSM for wireless, whereas the USA left all the carrier technologies to battle it out in the consumer market. I am sure you approve of the latter, but please recognize the difference between the two cases.
Your hindsight suffers from macular degeneration.
The eagerness for private companies to jump on the Internet to market to end-users is historical fact. Given such demand, why did not private companies create such a secure and accountable internet? Were the benefits not so obvious? There were, and are, privately-managed internets connecting companies (been there, done that, in the late '90's). The free market operated, just not like you expected, because "free marketers" usually fail to take into account that land-lines require laying cable on/in/over public lands, which requires franchise, which requires scale, which led to tiers of service providers and ISPs.
As for competing technologies, the ultimate government-sponsored protocol set is the OSI stack. It competed with the US DARPA/University Researchers/Private Company derived technology and lost, now existing mostly as concepts (compare to an 7-Layer Taco Bell burrito -- google it), and impinges on us in the form of LDAP and Microsoft Exchange.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken
