To provide a different perspective, I had the incredible good fortune to attend a top-tier university. In my four undergraduate years, I got to program four of the five computers on campus: an IBM 7090, a Burroughs B5000, a DEC PDP-1 and a DEC PDP-6. After leaving the university, I spent the next 40 years working in the computer industry. I doubt I would have been able to do that had I attended a lesser institution with no approachable computers. Today computers are everywhere, but I suspect there is some other technology present at the top-tier universities that will be very important in the future.

Also, I got to know and work with some of the most intelligent people in the world. That experience is very humbling: I used to think I was pretty smart—I learned I wasn't. That's a valuable life lesson.

The conventions for line endings are based on history. DEC's operating systems and operating systems descended from them use CRLF because that is what you had to send to an ASR-33 teletype at the end of an output line. UNIX and its descendents use NL, which has the same code as LF, because they were targeted at later printers.

By the way, the VMS record length field was 16 bits, avoiding the limitation of 255 characters in systems which used only 8 bits for the string length.

Actually, an unpunched column on a card was a space. You are right about paper tape.

If your son is picking up chicks in middle school I deduce (a) he is approximately age 12 to 14, (b) you taught him well, and (c) he is not the typical slashdotter.

Actually, I'm not. I was imagining that my PC, including its secure backups, is under my control. If I take a portable computer out into the world, I don't take the backups with me; they stay in my secure location. If I modify files while I am away, there might be a way for them to be sent back home, but if there isn't the data is backed up when I return.

What am I missing?

There is a solution for this class of malware, but it isn't anti-virus. Since cryptolocker only damages user data, the operating system should provide a secure and automatic backup of the user's data. Any time a user's file is changed, the new version is recorded on the backup, with its date. From the user's point of view, the backups are read-only, so malware can't damage them, and the user can retrieve an old version of a file at any time.

There is a lot of good advice here, so let me add a cautionary tale. I used to work for a local government as their “computer guy”. I got a call from a user who was unable to watch some video he had on a thumb drive. As part of diagnosing the problem, I logged in to his computer using my own account, copied the contents of the thumb drive to the hard disk, and played it from there. It turned out that playing the video worked from the hard drive and the rear USB connector, but not from the front. I told him this and closed the call, but didn't delete the video from his hard drive. I noted the call in my log, but didn't mention that the video was pornographic.

Much later, about a year after I my employment had been terminated, I got a call from the town's police. One of the detectives wanted to talk to me, and asked me to drop by the police station. It seems that someone had discovered that this user had been watching porn on his computer, and when they examined his computer they found that same porn on his hard drive, under my name. They gave me the third degree, wanting me to admit that I had been the source of the porm. I suspect they wanted me to be the scapegoat, since I was no longer an employee.

I acted calm, pleasant, truthful and stupid. They told me that I could be in big trouble if I didn't cooperate, and I responded by saying if I lied in order to tell them what they wanted to hear, in the long run I would get confused about what lies I had told, and get caught in a contradiction. Of course, it helped that they all knew me, so I had credibility when it came to being stupid. It also helped that these were small-town cops; I probably wouldn't last five minutes in an NYPD interrogation room.

This happened more than five years ago, and I haven't heard anything about it since.

You must have been using a cluster—the VAX-11/750 only had one CPU. I used a 750 when developing EDT; we called it “MAYTAG”.

I don't think you are taking economic realities into account. I modeled my proposal on the local water company. It costs money to run the fibre past each house. Somebody has to pay for that, and who better than the owners of the houses. Having this source of revenue encourages the utility to run fibre along each street, not just the wealthy neighborhoods. They wouldn't get paid for truly “dark fibre” only for fibre which can be connected to and provide Internet access.

Yes, data communication is a finite resource. It costs money to send a bit reliably across town or around the world—lots of people work hard to make sure the Internet stays up. Who better to pay those costs than the people who want that bit moved?

If parents don't want to monitor their children's (or guests') Internet activity, they can ask the utility to cap their daily data volume to prevent unpleasant surprises. There are other solutions, more difficult technically but not beyond reason. For example, the traffic of children and guests could be marked so that it could be limited in badnwidth and daily volume.

Not necessarily. Even with the disadvantages you cite, the original two US political parties, the Whigs and the Federalists, were toppled. It can happen again. Even without de-throning the Republicans and Democrats, a third party can gather enough support to make the difference in a close contest, and that causes the major parties to give at least lip service to their concerns.

I also vote Libertarian when I can; I am a card-carrying member of the Libertarian party. When I can't, and I'm too lazy to run myself, I do enough research to figure out who is the current office-holder, and vote for his opponent. If he is the only person on the ballot for the position, I leave the line blank.

You've bought in to the lie that there are only two parties. Look beyond the Republicans and Democrats and you might find better bums.

If you do a decent job of structuring the municipal broadband delivery company, you can bias it towards the “better” end of the spectrum. For example, you can require that there be no cross-subsidy between broadband and any other municipal function, and no support from general taxation.

The broadband company would have to support itself through user fees, like the Water District does in my town. You pay a monthly fee if the fibre runs past your house. If you want to connect the fibre to your home, you pay a one-time connection charge, followed by a higher monthly fee plus a charge per bit for incoming and outgoing data. If there is a problem you pay to call Customer Service, and a higher price if the call requires a technician to visit your home. These charges would be refunded if the company decides that the problem is their fault. There would also be a service level agreement, and your costs are reduced to near zero if it isn't met.

In addition, and this is crucial, there must be no legal barrier to someone else running his own fibre, and connecting it to the municipal system. He would pay the municipal system for his connection, of course, and provide his own customer service. That competition, or even the possibility of it, will keep customer service quality high.

Then run for office yourself.

That is exactly what happened to me. I started college never having seen a computer. I hung around the Computation Center, watched the Giant Electronic Brains and got to know the people, which included some of the computer industry's pioneers. I learned to program by auditing classes and writing code for the Stanford Time-Sharing System. The administrator of the AI Project didn't have a pay schedule for an undergraduate, so he had to treat me as a first-year grad student. I did graduate, but not with a CS degree--there was no such thing at the time. I turned my outside-of-class experience into a career.