A) The rules are already there and need no new legislation. They just need willpower in the agencies involved.

B) Though not as idealistic as his father, Rand has substantial libertarian leanings - and is a major figure in the Liberty Movement. As such his main goals are to downsize the government and free the people

Downsizing the government means you DON'T add new restrictions to "fix" every new manifestation of a political issue. Doing that keeps the government growing. Instead you:
  1) Oppose ANY INCREASE in the government's power and limitations on what people can do.
  2) Look for ways to "solve" problems by REMOVING government power and meddling where possible, or just use the EXISTING powers in the ways they were intended when a "solve by downsizing" isn't feasible.

In theory, the FCC shouldn't need to regulate the internet at all, but because other government has created a wholly fucked up system, I agree that it's necessary at this point for them to step in.

If any branch of government should step into this, it's the FTC and the Justice Department, not the FCC.

Network Neutrality conflates two issues: Traffic management and anticompetitive behavior. Some packets SHOULD be treated differently than others, in order to make diverse services "play well together". (Example: Streaming vs. File Download.)

The problem arises when an ISP uses the tools to penalize the competition to its own company's and partners' services, extort extra fees, and otherwise engage in non-technical nastiness through technical means.

The proper regulatory regimes are antitrust and consumer fraud. These are the province of the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, not the FCC.

The FCC is using this as a power-grab on the Internet, in direct contravention of Congress' authorization. THAT is what Rand Paul is opposing.

CustomerP are generally too cash poor to be good customers. They are going to nickel and dime you for any project that you do for them because they are either too cheap to invest in newer technology or too poor to do so.

Latest statistics indicate that Internet Explorer has less then 15-20% of market share, with versions older then IE 10 being just 2.5% of the market. Looks like IE 6 is under 1% now.

It was similar arguments that massively hampered the adoption of Linux, Netscape/Firefox, .... Too few users, too cheap, expecting too much frree stuff. No money to spend.

It's one of the reasons general adoption took - and is still taking - so long.

It's also one of the reasons that companies that DID support them ended up with an edge on their competition, becoming some of the big-name companies in their markets.

Becoming market-dominant and ubiquitus includes not dropping substantial chunks of customers because you perceive them as "marginal". If you support 90+ percent of the market and your competition supports 70%, you keep getting little extra advantages. The outcome of competition is driven by tiny margins.

Aspartame has problems for some people (like my wife and brother-in-law) and not for others (like me).

Sucralose has problems for some people (like me) and not for others (like my wife).

Seems to me the thing for Pepsi to do is to bring out another formula - with a different name - using Sucralose, put them in the stores side-by-side (they get a LOT of shelf space to play with), and let the customers decide.

Changing the formula of an existing brand strikes me as a stupid move. I suspect Pepsi is about to have it's "New Coke!" moment...

Oh well, Diet Coke is still better anyways.

The radio story where I first heard about this claimed that Coke was considering doing the same to Diet Coke.

The bit you're apparently not grasping is something called a spatial light modulator. ... Couple it with a microwave radar or ultrasound sonar, and you can track individual raindrops and then cast shadows on them.

Then construct an object that appears to the system to be raindrops and you can put an invisible obstacle in the road. B-b

A site may wish to continue using JQuery because some of its clients are using older browsers that don't support the new features that allegedly obsolete JQuery code.

Drop the JQuery code and you drop those customers. Develop future code without it and the pages with the new features won't perform with people using legacy browsers. And so on.

I've seen similar things happen over several generations of web technology. Use care, grasshopper!

1. Why have vaccines and autism rates both grown exponentially in the last 25 years? (no, detection does not come close to answering)

Changes to the definition and protocols for diagnosing it account for the rate changes just fine.

The obvious problem is that we pay them so much more for drug busts than for traffic citations./i?

The problem is that we pay them EXTRA for drug busts: They're allowed to seize property that is "associated" with it (like the car it was in, or the money in the driver's and passengers' pockets, ...), convert the non-cash to cash at an auction, and split the swag among the officers, department, and other branches of government.

That's the same incentive structure that powered the Spanish Inquisition, and look how THAT turned out.

This has been snowballing since the passage of the RICO laws.

I am almost certain I saw this kind of thing in a Radio Shack catalog in the 80's ...

It's as old as infrared LEDs and networking.

Datapoint did it with Arcnet in the late '70s: Both infrared office networking patches (though I don't know if those were productized or just experimental) and the "Arclight" building-to-building cross-town infrared link (which had a pair of lenses each about the diameter of a coffee can.).

Arcnet was still a going technology when the first portable ("luggable") computer - the Osborne-1 - came out in '81. (But I don't know if any of them were ever hooked to Arcnet, let alone the office-infrared flavor.) With the machines being desktop devices requiring power, running coax to the desk wasn't a big deal. So I don't think the office I.R. link got much deployment (even if it WAS productized.)

The Arcnet's token-passing logical ring was self-healing, which was a decent match for intermittent connections. When a rainstorm blocked the building-to-building link the net would automatically partition itself into two working nets and when it cleared they'd heal back into one. Similarly, walking between an infrared-linked machine and its hub would cut the machine off only until you walked away and leave the net running (with a quick hiccup) meanwhile.

Asphalt gets worn down by [all sorts of stuff] ...

Like fossil fuels in general, Asphalt is used for road surfaces currently solely because it's overall cheaper (better price-performance) than many alternatives that we know damn well how to use. Restart a crashed civilization without cheap oil and one or more of these other alternatives will be used.

Asphalt is cheap because it's one of the side-effects of oil refining - a product that is valuable enough as a paving material that it's more profitable to sell it as-is than to "crack" it into lighter stuff and boost the fuel output (or other products) by a couple percent.

Mr. Kennedy is not a credible source. You know that, right?

I'm not concerned with whether he's credible. I just responded to the question about where the 3 months bit was coming from. It's poor form to imply people are pulling it out of a dark orifice when it's right there in TFA.

Another thing though that no one else is bringing up; how much tax revenue have they given up for 10 years?

The "lost tax revenue" I could care even less about. Governments habitually operate at a higher tax rate than the peak of the Laffer Curve. (Raising taxes further brings in more in the short term, though it ends up costing more than it brought in later. That's why they go far past the peak rather than zeroing in on it and maximizing the amount they suck out of the people's pockets.) So, on the average, every million dollars they DON'T tax now is MORE than a million dollars they'll eventually get in taxes later, once the transient has worked itself out. It's also SEVERAL million dollars more that people will earn in "generating" that added tax.

What concerns me more is including the wages and jobs LOST thanks to taxing the people to get those millions to spend "promoting" the plan, when comparing it to the pay for the jobs "generated" by the plan.

So workstations on an airgapped network can never get software upgrades?

Or data to be processed?

It can do bursts of computation, memory access, or anything else that varies the amount you wiggle voltages or currents on wires in a way that emits radio waves. You can do it without even trying (which is one way some smartcards exposed private keys ...).

In the days of CRTs that applied especially well: Graphics output could modulate the beam and generate a LOT of radio. (Doing gray scales by making shifting fine patters would be an especially "in your face but you can't see it" approach.) A fast photocell could read it from the light, as well.

Preventing / shielding against things like this is what "Tempest" is about.

I recall, back in the late '60s / early '70s, when I was doing software on a machine at a classified site. It had a music program that worked by wiggling the lines on three console display lamps that were also connected, by three resistors (forming a cheap D2A converter) to a volume control T-pad and a loudspeaker. Turns out it also modulated the memory access and/or other signals - a lot. I had left it playing "moon river" overnight, drove up to the building, and heard it on my A.M. radio.

I realized it would have been trivial to exfiltrate a small amount of data, even on my starving student budget, by emulating an FSK modem and hooking a transistor radio to a battery-powered tape recorder (about the size of a briefcase in those days) left in the trunk of my car. (Not that I'd have needed to, since I could carry mag tapes in and out, but as a "white hat", how could it be done, exercise.)

The security guys figured that out, too. A bit later I got a ping from management: Some guys from Washington had also driven up, noticed the arcade-quality "music", and given them grief about it.

WHERE THE FUCK DOES EVERYONE GET 1/4 OF A YEAR.

From TFA, as quoted in the story post:

The low numbers didn't stop some state officials from defending the initiative. "Given the program was only up and running for basically one quarter of a year," Andrew Kennedy, a senior economic development aide to Governor Cuomo, told Capital New York,

Did you try actually reading it all before posting?