The issue is that they don't think of a much smaller ISP like Level3 as a peer, and don't want to give them settlement-free peering - they don't peer for free with lots of other ISPs for the same reason.

Level 3 is a tier-1 network, about as big as they come. This isn't big Verizon poo-pooing some little ISP as you seem to think. This is like your local gas station Verizon trying to get Exxon to pay them for the "privilege" of shipping them product their customers have already paid for.

Seriously, is that really what matters now? What an arrogant *****. What really matters is who did it and why. What's the risk for other planes.

In the grand scheme of things, yes those are the things that matter. But unless a U.S. citizen was killed, the U.S. really has no business getting involved in this. It's the same reason the U.S. stations troops in South Korea. Their job isn't to help repel a North Korean invasion. Their job is to die so the U.S. has a reason to get involved.

The plane was a Boeing, so Boeing and possibly the NTSB will be involved in the investigation. But unless another country requests it, the U.S. cannot bring in the FBI or CIA to investigate this unless a U.S. citizen was killed. Given that Russia has already removed the black boxes and purportedly the missile truck used in the attack was secreted to Russian soil, those are the kind of intelligence assets you really want investigating this.

So yes the things you say are most important, but answering them reliably very much hinges on whether or not a U.S. citizen was among those killed.

For most of the existence of mankind and indeed all of mankind's progenitors, having too much food was a rare problem and being hungry all of the time was a fact of life. We are not necessarily well-evolved to handle it. So, no surprise that we eat to repletion and are still hungry. You don't really have any reason to look at it as an illness caused by anything other than too much food.

Maybe MSFT was trying to learn from Xerox, Kodak, and other companies that pioneered technologies and then failed to follow through.

While Xerox deserves full blame for missing opportunities (the mouse, GUI, ethernet, and laser printer were all invented there), Kodak does not. They were always on the forefront of digital imaging. They built the first digital camera in the 1970s, and had a line of digital SLRs in the early 1990s. They knew exactly where the industry was heading, and in fact did most of the early R&D to get us there. The only reason they managed to hang around as long as they did was because they owned most of the patents on digital imaging and were collecting massive royalties.

What led to Kodak's downfall is obvious if you look at the pictures in that wikipedia link. Those are Nikon (and later Canon) bodies with Kodak digital sensors. Kodak was a film company, not a camera company. They weren't in the business of making cameras (aside from some cheap consumer models and disposables). When the industry shifted from film to digital, the companies which ended up on top were companies skilled at making cameras/lenses (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Zeiss, and their arch-rival Fuji which had been busy making decent point and shoots prior to the switch to digital), and companies skilled at making electronics/silicon (Sony, Panasonic, Casio, etc). Kodak thought they could carve a piece of the digital sensor pie for themselves, but rapidly found themselves unable to keep up with companies with decades of expertise manufacturing microprocessors who simply shifted that expertise into manufacturing sensors. In other words, the best business model for making camera sensors turned out not to be knowing how to make camera sensors. It turned out to be knowing how to make microchips.

Remember when the UN complained about Guantanamo Bay? Well, this is similar.

Guantanamo Bay was (and is) a legal black hole. Past U.S. Supreme Court decisions held that not only U.S. Citizens but also foreigners on U.S. soil have Constitutional protection. So housing Taliban prisoners in U.S. prisons would've automatically granted them U.S. Constitutional rights, including the right to a speedy trial, the right to know what they're accused of, and a guarantee of legal counsel. Well guess what? Guantanamo Bay isn't on U.S. soil. It's on land leased from Cuba. Thus it falls outside the jurisdiction of that pesky SCotUS decision, and allowed the U.S. government to detain foreign nationals without following its own Constitution. That's the entire reason Bush chose it for the prison.

Most of the International and UN arguments against Guantanamo rested on International treaties concerning the treatment of prisoners of war. The problem is the preface for almost all those treaties defines combatants as people who don a uniform and wear a distinguishing emblem. The reason they make a big deal about this is to provide an incentive for soldiers to distinguish themselves from non-combatants (civilians), so as to reduce civilian casualties due to misidentification. If your soldiers want all those juicy protections for prisoners of war, they have to wear a uniform and emblems designating them as soldiers thus making it impossible for them to blend in among civilians.

Unfortunately, most if not all the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay never wore a uniform. The people drafting those treaties on the rules of war never really considered what would happen if a fighting force chose not to abide by the uniform requirement. They kinda assumed the protections were a big enough carrot that everyone would do it. This also makes it a bad idea to expand the protection for prisoners in those treaties to cover non-uniformed combatants, like many who are opposed to Guantanamo have naively advocated. If you do that then unless he's got an overdeveloped sense of honor, no soldier in his right mind would ever wear a uniform - it just makes him an easy target. And we'd devolve back to the pre-imperial chaos where wars were fought between two masses of people with no discrimination between combatants and civilians. Thus the Guantanamo prisoners fall through a crack in International law.

This isn't to say the prison at Guantanamo Bay is ok. I've never supported it and have called for it to be shut down since the beginning. I'm just saying both U.S. and International law don't quite cover the situation at Guantanamo (kinda like the guy stuck at an airport for 18 years because of the way International laws regarding entry visas and citizenship work). That makes it completely the opposite of this case, where there are laws protecting privacy in both U.S. (4th Amendment protection against warrantless searches) and UN (Article 12) that would appear to prohibit the NSA blanket surveillence.

Martin,

The last time I had a professional video produced, I paid $5000 for a one-minute commercial, and those were rock-bottom prices from hungry people who wanted it for their own portfolio. I doubt I could get that today. $8000 for the entire conference is really volunteer work on Gary's part.

Someone's got to pay for it. One alternative would be to get a corporate sponsor and give them a keynote, which is what so many conferences do, but that would be abandoning our editorial independence. Having Gary fund his own operation through Kickstarter without burdening the conference is what we're doing. We're really lucky we could get that.

We do charge entry to the convention. We get really nice facilities for the people who actually travel there and for the speakers. Last year's location was subperb. But I don't see why they should actually subsidize the folks who do not attend.

I think TAPR's policy is that the presentations be freely redistributable, but I don't know what they and Gary have discussed. I am one of the speakers and have always made sure that my own talk would be freely redistributable. I wouldn't really want it to be modifiable except for translation and quotes, since it's a work of opinion. Nobody should get the right to modify the video in such a way as to make my opinion seem like it's anything other than what it is.

If I remember correctly, it was 4 video channels last year: tracking on presenter, proscenium, audience, projector.

Yes. I put in $100, and I am asking other people to put in money to sponsor these programs so that everyone, including people who did not put in any money at all, can see them for free. If you look at the 150+ videos, you can see that Gary's pretty good at this (and he brought a really professional-seeming cameraman to Hamvention, too) and the programs are interesting. Even if at least four of them feature yours truly :-) He filmed every one of the talks at the TAPR DCC last year (and has filmed for the past 5 years) and it costs him about $8000 to drive there from North Carolina to Austin, Texas; to bring his equipment and to keep it maintained, to stay in a motel, to run a multi-camera shoot for every talk in the conference, and to get some fair compensation for his time in editing (and he does a really good job at that).

So, forward domain_registration@sony.com to former_employee@sony.com. Let us know how that works out for you.

It works a lot better because if domain registration emails are being sent directly to former_employee@sony.com, then only he knows that domain registrations are being sent to him. There is no record at Sony saying that he was the one getting those emails.

If you instead have it sent to domain_registration@sony.com with a forwarder, when former_employee is fired, the sysadmin can look at the entire list of forwarded addresses, grep for every instance of former_employee, and re-forward them to other employees.

See the difference? With your method, only the former employee knows what emails he was getting that need to be redirected. And if he was fired, he certainly isn't going to cooperate at providing a list. With forwarded email addresses, Sony has a list of all important emails which were going to the former employee.

All this is kinda moot though. In this case with a company the size of Sony, they should've just paid the $1000 or so to register the domain for the next 100 years.

First, if this is 80 meters in diameter, or 40 meters in radius

That's one big-ass sandworm. (Look at the pic - it's not a crater, it's just a hole in the ground.)

Years ago, when static electricity was bad news for computers, I had the idea for a "data processing shoe" that would have a little conductive ribbon that would drag along the floor and ground out static electricity. Such a thing is of course no longer needed, but given the apparent popularity of data breeches these days maybe the concept could be resurrected as a fashion statement.

hoping users will alter their behavior doesn't work. Better technology does.

Unfortunately, no it doesn't. Energy saved from improved efficiency through technology is usually spent on additional uses, rather than reducing your overall energy use.