As opposed to "stupid in his ballsack"? Where else can you be stupid besides the head, exactly? Is this "stupid in his head" some newfangled slang you faceplace and twaddler kids use?

Funny, many including myself feel exactly the same way about government. Despite massive failures, ineffciency, gross negligence, and outright harm to the citizenry, government programs continue to grow at rates far exceeding GDP, tax revenue, or inflation. The reasons are many, but the core problem is as P.J. O'Rourke said: "You spend other people's money on other people. And in this case, who gives a shit?"

No, but CS departments are not supposed to be ignoring the real world either. The fact that almost my entire CS degree in the early 1990s was taught via C and Scheme provided me with a good theoretical foundation, which has indeed made me adaptable and served me well over the course of time. But such a focus can made finding that first job quite painful; I was somewhat lucky. When you don't have $LANGUAGE_OF_THE_DAY on your resume, it gets circular-filed before interview, even when you come from a top-15 undergraduate school. It makes me cringe, but I actually find myself doing this circular-filing myself, as my small company cannot absorb the pain and expense of training up a newly minted CS student on the toolchains, languages, and libraries that are actually in use in the business world.

Uhhh.... ever hear of a VPN? Not all military networks are classified. Those that are are air-gapped from the Internet. If the military wasn't using public and commercial networks for unclassified operations, I as a taxpayer would be extremely pissed, as they'd be wasting a shit-ton of money. They already do that well enough (although one can argue they are still the only branch of government that actually accomplishes what it is funded for, regardless of the expense). No need for a gazillion OC-48s running everywhere to exchange unclassified data.

IANAL, but at least in the USA, the fifth amendment protects you against self-incrimination. I do not think you can be compelled to divulge an encryption key if doing so would provide any evidence you committed a crime. Any decent lawyer and/or the ACLU's could probably prevail with this argument in court.

The trick, of course, is that the prosecution will typically give another party who has access to the encrypted data immunity from prosecution, so the 5th amendment does not apply. Then that party can be compelled to decrypt the messages. This makes getting at encrypted emails easy if the prosecution is only after one of the sender or recipient.

From what I can gather, in civil cases, so long as decryption would not provide evidence of a crime on your behalf, you could be compelled by the court to decrypt the data, even if it harms your arguments in the civil case. But if you're willing to risk perjury, you can always testify you forgot the key and likely get away with it.

Quality on Apple hardware is basically shit - it looks pretty, and is designed fairly well (iPhone 4 antenna aside). But the parts and assembly are the same "cheapest China can produce" quality as almost all other consumer electronics. I say this having gone through multiple iPhone 3Gs and 3GSs due to various hardware issues (mostly screens and speakers). I also manage an IT department whose help desk guys are constantly fussing with the hardware on the very few Macs we have. We have had more hardware tickets on the Macs than our HPs in the last two years, despite the fact that we have 15x more HP laptops. Nedless to say, our Mac experiment is over, and this batch is getting replaced with HP/Windows machines during the next upgrade cycle.

So... somebody who has no fucking clue how the real world works? You sit in your little isolated academic ivory tower and cast scorn upon the smart, hardworking, gutsy people who donated the building you work in and pay your salary - because you're too much of a coward to get a real job.

Such information could legitimately be considered trade secrets. Oversubscription ratio is a major component of network design, and increasing that ratio has a significant benefit to the bottom line. If a particular topology, peering design, or technology allows a network to increase oversubscription while providing similar QoS to customers, that is a huge competitive advantage.

As for requiring disclosure of specific metrics, that is something that regulation could mandate. But the reality is a lot more complicated, making such simple labels useless. If a provider has only a 200 Mbps backbone, but extensive private peering in all of their POPs, performance could be better than a provider with a 10 Gbps backbone and peering in only two exchanges. I would suggest that an organization such as Consumer Reports might be a better avenue. They (or anyone else) could offer people an incentive to install some sort of monitoring client that reported such metrics as uptime, thoughput to various networks, etc. for each ISP. BroadbandReports and Speedtest.net already do this to some degree, but the focus on one destination makes it too narrow to be generally useful. Keynote, Gomez, and others provide much more robust metrics and methodologies to the business market.

Mod ^^^^this dude^^^^ up please.

Seriously, all the kiddies here who complain about throttling, not getting 100% of advertised speeds, etc. have never dealt with real Internet transit costs. If you want a specific CIR and uptime SLA, you have to pay, and pay dearly. Note that FiOS, "business class" service from most residential ISPs, the cheap 100 Mbps circuits from Cogent, and the "2 TB/month" from your cheap hosting provider might have at least some form of SLA for uptime if you're lucky. But the CIR for such low-cost services is close to or exactly ZERO, and all throughput is best-effort "up to" a specific link speed.

It isn't just this way in the USA either, but worldwide.

First of all, x264, the best H.264 encoder, has always been open source. There are hardly infinite resources behind that project.

VP8 quality could potentially improve, but probably not by anything close to 50% while still being VP8. Speed will improve a lot, but quality will likely not improve by a huge margin with the current bitstream. As a point of reference, x264 bitrate/quality ratio has improved by only ~15% in the past four years, after leaping ~25% during the first year of its development. VP8 has been around for much more than a year, and has probably already made its big leaps. A similar development path can likely be traced for other AV codecs, such as MP3, MPEG2, etc.

Ubuntu Advantage already includes patent licensing and indemnification from Canonical. They distribute MP3, H.264, and other patented technoliges from their repositories.

Red Hat also has a framework for the inclusion of patented technologies in RHEL..

I'm not saying Canonical and Red Hat include H.264 by default today with their distributions, but they easily can in the future for paying cusotmers. They currently skirt the issue by distributing codecs and other clearly patented stuff from restricted repositories and requiring manual steps to install, but that can change. We're talking a very minor percentage of the video eyeballs using one of these OS in any case.

Your principles impress me. I am sure your laptop/desktop was made by hand by the native peoples of your homeland, and contains no patented technologies. And of course you generate your own electricity, and grow your own food, and spin and weave your own clothing, in order to prevent paying corporations for anything. But how exactly are you connecting to the internet?

Nobody uses AVC baseline except for targeting of old-generation iPhones; everything H.264 usually targets high profile level 4.1. And WebM requires 1.5x the bitrate of the best H.264 High Profile encoders for the same quality.

No, everyone will buy their own, by paying an extra US$.02 when they buy stuff from Microsoft, Red Hat, Oracle, Canonical, Sony, Panasonic and firends. Or it will be subsidized by advertising (as YouTube, the most frequent user of H.264 in the world, does today.)

WebM is technically inferior to H.264 by a wide margin, and it is not yet widely deployed. The toolchain for WebM currently sucks. If Vorbis couldn't beat MP3 in the market while being both free-as-in-beer and techincally better, WebM doesn't stand a chance.